My daughter is 13, and is getting in to anime, I guess. She’s been binge watching Attack on Titan this week. I know exactly nothing about it because I’m not interested in it, but I’d like to find her some good anime to watch, that isn’t full of the typical borderline porno stuff it seems is popular with G*mers.
Can anyone suggest a couple to get her going? I’d like to do something for her and get a jellyfin server going but dunno what to put on it. What would you suggest for someone getting into anime? Are there services worth paying for? Should I just be sailing the seas?
Asking her she says she likes
No Hero Academia,
Naruto,
Dan Da Dan,
Jojo,
Thanks yall.
ETA - I just gave her the list of stuff suggested so far and she squealed. She says thanks. I appreciate yall. Kiddo is happy then daddo is happy too.
eta2 - I have to go to bed, I was supposed to be asleep an hour or two ago but everyone has given me such a big list to start on that I didn’t want to not tell anyone thanks. Thank yall. I have a chance to give my daughter some media she will like, so I score some points with her for being a good dad, and I have a cheap excuse to sit and do something with her, even if it’s just television entertainment. At some point mom and dad aren’t priorities anymore and I have a chance to bond some more. I appreciate that the most I think.
Yeah, I think I remember the anime being kind of this constant game of “wait, is it criticizing this or just doing it unironically?” and I only conclusively decided that the story was meaning to be critical of a lot of it after reading the LNs. Seeing directly inside the various characters’ heads throughout it recontextualizes it in a way the anime really doesn’t do. I do have to reiterate though that Rudy is way worse to start with and keeps interjecting the most heinous things throughout the entire series albeit with lowering frequency as the story goes on.
Basically my entire perception of the series is based on the entire novel series collectively. Out of those 26 volumes, the anime and manga have adapted 12 so far. So most of the story is with the main cast as adults and Rudy at his least awful, a stretch that the anime won’t start on until the next season.
Rudy is fundamentally a child with memories of a previous childhood where he was a modestly clever kid with what sounds like untreated ADHD, after which he gets traumatized and frozen in place leaving him with the memories of another 30 years of vegetating and gooning until his brain rotted clean through. Early on he’s more heavily influenced and defined by the memories of his previous life and is basically still just the adult __________ (the name is only ever rendered with blank spaces in the text) in a new body, but by the point in the story where he hooks up with Eris he’s more on the side of being Rudy, the teenage son of Paul and Zenith who still has memories and trauma from another life that make him kind of weird because those memories are mostly just like anime and hentai VNs that he references the way Harry Dresden references old movies. Like it’s not quite as clean cut as that, but the separation between the two lives and who he even is gets explored throughout the text in a way that I don’t recall the anime doing (I think it just made the differently-voiced internal monologue clips sparser as it went on), with the culmination of that being at what in the anime is the end of season two where he understands and accepts that he’s Rudy Greyrat instead of __________ and that his family in that world are his real family (this made it into his monologue in the anime IIRC).
Now, is that a good way of handling the concept of age and identity in a reincarnation story and how it relates to what is or is not appropriate? I genuinely don’t know. I do think it works well with the allegory of arrested development from when he was assaulted in his previous life and the theme of having a second chance at life, like he was stuck at ~13 or so until he looped back around and lived past that point again at which point he began growing and developing normally. But yes, basically everything that happens before all the characters are adults is tainted by this issue, though.
IIRC he gets a lot of shit for it in the LNs, people explicitly find it creepy as hell or outright call it heretical, and he also does more of the literally-deifying Roxie thing, in which he literally considers himself the prophet of a cult devoted to her and at times actually tries to preach its doctrines which I think only Julie ever actually goes along with (there’s one of the real glaring problems with the later books: almost everything to do with Julie, which falls in the broader issue of the series backtracking on how it dealt with slavery in general from its correct starting point of “exterminate all slavers and free their victims” to its later weaselly “but a conflict like that would be dangerous” and occasional outright apologia).
He doesn’t. If anything he gets even weirder about literally worshiping her as a literal god after they get married, which is by every indication a sincere belief that his internal monologue affirms. She finds it confusing and weird, everyone else thinks it’s creepy, and he does not stop.
I think it’s more she wants to do it and cynically takes advantage of him/is egged on by Sylphie’s grandmother whose name I can’t remember at the moment who is the actual, literal worst person when it comes to rationalizations about sex. Meanwhile he also wants to do it and doesn’t care about anything but his survivor’s guilt, and the rest is just him being extremely codependent with regards to both Sylphie and Roxie literally all of the time. Which is also a later plot point when there’s a timeline split and bad things happen, which should be in the next season. Even at his best, he is not a healthy person.
I have to say I generally agree with you here and dislike his polygamy, although his all-consuming and self-sacrificing obsession and reverence for both Sylphie and Roxie is almost enough to mitigate the harem bullshit. Dude thinks about them the way Enver Hoxha wrote about Stalin.
The fact that both of them are their own characters with agency and goals entirely unrelated to him, and who are both solidly established as extremely competent people who each outshine Rudy in some ways also mitigates it a bit. The way it actively criticizes his impulse to keep them out of the loop and shield them from everything as being wrong on every level is also very good: he’s wrong for infantilizing them and trying to unilaterally protect them, he’s wrong for hiding big important plot stuff from them, and he’s wrong for not relying on or leaning on two of the most competent and intelligent people in the entire story.
Like just to contextualize this: I hate straight romance/relationship stuff on general principle, I especially hate harem slop, and the overall treatment this got is enough to make me say that I think it’s actually almost ok and does stuff pretty well, for all that I still don’t like how straight and centered on a male character it is.
Oddly, going off the text of the novels that come after that point, there is genuinely nothing more to that. I think the stasis bit was just a narrative device to keep her alive and safe but still missing. With her the focus is either her condition (which eventually has a rather wholesome conclusion*), Norn spending time with her mother, or Rudy’s kids spending time with their grandmother.
*spoiler if you actually care about the buildup and resolution of that
She doesn’t have any kind of brain damage or the like, but instead was blessed/cursed with a more extreme version of the psychic thing the Migurd have that’s locked out her other senses and means of communication, leaving her in a dreamlike state built from the surface thoughts and perceptions of the people around her, whom she believes she is talking to and carrying on conversations with. The only person who can perceive what she’s saying is Roxie’s infant daughter who sits and talks with her, but who is too young to articulate this to anyone else until it’s discovered in a different way.
I will say the story is problematic, very uncomfortable in the beginning (you didn’t mention it, but I assume you recognize how fucked his relationship and attitude towards Sylphie was in the first part of season 1? His thoughts about and plans for her are worse and grosser in the text, to the point that Paul, shitbag that he is, gets to be the voice of reason and decency explaining to the reader why Rudy’s relationship with Sylphie is toxic and bad even from his limited PoV that doesn’t get to see just how bad Rudy’s internal state is) and still fraught with issues by the point the anime is at, and it still does a lot of things wrong in the later volumes too, but it does do some things very well and the books are as well written as the anime is animated. Like I can’t unreservedly recommend the series to anyone, but I do still think it ends up being very good despite its myriad issues, and certainly much better than anything like it.
Again, I’m judging it heavily by the little more than half of the story that hasn’t been adapted yet. I think if the books had ended where the anime is currently at it wouldn’t be very good, it being critical of the things it portrays or not. Those later books do overall do things better and have a better tone than the early ones, especially compared to the first couple of novels, but they do also have their own issues and could have done a lot of things better: they raise a lot of good points about big, systemic problems in the world like how the Millisians are a genocidal racial supremacist cult, and then it just doesn’t really do anything with it or resolve any kind of big picture problems, they’re just stuff that’s in the background behind the more immediate overarching plot of the second half of the series.
Oh yeah, the Slyphie stuff is fucked up, I just thought it wasn’t as clear-cut in terms of the text handling it poorly in the view of someone who is being extraordinarily generous. I think your claims about Roxie rely on really concerning reasoning because the dude is still an adult who, on some intellectual and even emotional levels, is way beyond the kids who are his “peers” and I just don’t think him being stunted is a good excuse for him “romancing” a minor for years in order to fuck her when she’s 18. Lastly in terms of what I mentioned, I don’t know what to make of what happens with the mom in the LNs, but in the anime the dynamic of preserving her as someone more gooners would like on promotional material is clear.
I would also like to say that there’s a problem in your reasoning as you present it, which is that you’re using information that was cut out in the process of making the anime adaptation to interpret the anime, when none of that stuff, none of that extra criticism and recharacterization, actually exists or will ever exist within the anime (obviously the stuff later in the plot might, but that’s not really adequate). imo it makes much more sense to conclude that the LNs are duly critical but the adaptation transforms the work into frequently-uncritical gooner shit, like a parody that is adapted into being played straight. Like I think that happened with Forrest Gump, the book being a satire and the movie being played straight, or some of the later Robocop works not preserving the original work’s intended message.
I just want to say before I jump into these last few points that I’ve wanted to tear this story apart and talk about it like this ever since I finished it, so even if we’re disagreeing on some points I don’t mean to be argumentative or anything, this is just stuff that’s been burning a hole in my mind because I couldn’t stop analyzing and criticizing the series both while and after reading it. Overall I agree with everything else you’ve posted in this thread although I really regret unspoilering the Made in Abyss thing about Bondrewd because I’d managed to block out the specific details in the two years since my Made in Abyss is the worst thing ever made post and just remembered it as being very bad.
Also I just woke up and took my ADHD meds, so I kind of got carried away breaking the story apart and examining it here, sorry about that.
Sorry, I should have phrased it better. Tonally I meant something like “I know this didn’t make the cut of points to raise, but I bet you saw this too right?” To elaborate slightly on the differences between the anime and the novel: the text doesn’t whitewash Rudy’s (or really ________'s, because “Rudy” doesn’t really exist as a distinct person yet) relationship with/intentions for Sylphie the way the anime does, which I think is handling it better than the anime because it makes it completely unambiguously clear that what Rudy thinks and wants is repulsive and toxic which is why Paul conspires to separate them.
Roxie’s the middle aged teacher who’s older than both of Rudy’s lives put together. Her relationship with him is problematic in exactly the opposite direction: her own insecurities aside she’s an experienced power figure who was both his teacher and therapist, she takes advantage of him when he’s isolated and melting down with survivor’s guilt over what a complete failure he’s been, and he’s extremely/completely codependent on her to the point that if, say, there were a hypothetical alternate timeline where she died because some jerk who’s Rudy’s narrative and thematic foil conspired to see her dead, he’d be left nonfunctional and never recover beyond being a bitter, violent husk who’s so reprehensible that his perspective and actions would disgust even real timeline Rudy.
Eris’s relationship with Rudy is unhealthy and problematic for a lot of reasons (in fact it’s a pretty close parallel to why Rudy’s relationship with Roxie is problematic, just with the places inverted), but I don’t think it’s as clear cut as just taking ___________'s age and adding it to Rudy’s. Maybe if this sort of memory/ego-intact reincarnation were real that would be a good rule of thumb for determining what’s appropriate for a reincarnated person (although that raises issues in the opposite direction as well).
Rudy has more wherewithal than a literal child, but when he starts working as her tutor he’s stuck in a very weird place of being physically a child, emotionally and socially a young teenager (so still ahead of her in that regard, although he stays there as she does not which I’ll come back to in a second), and intellectually a severely depressed and brainrotted adult who can kind of scrape together lesson plans and interact with the other teachers[1] maturely. Over the next five years the last bit increasingly breaks down and melts into who he is becoming and the things he is learning as he actually has to grow up and see the world as a real, living world instead of thinking of it as an anime he’s watching or a game he’s playing. Especially when he’s trailing after Rudjerd he’s not exactly regressing but replacing whatever malformed adult ego and experiences he had left over from this world with the sort of socialization and maturation that’s typical of someone growing up in that world. In some regards he’s actively stunted and behind the curve there, because his old ego got in the way of him learning and internalizing all the things that people like Sylphie and Eris were seeing and learning as they grew up, leaving them ahead of him in the context of their world.
Eris is, well, an extremely violent aristocratic faildaughter who’s heavily internalized the lessons her family taught her about society and the world (which are bad) as well as the ones Ghislaine taught her (which are less bad, but still not good). She’s also actively being groomed by her parents towards a unilaterally-arranged marriage with Rudy that her father wants to force to happen. I don’t think the anime actually revealed the extent of that, instead just implying that she’d been coerced (she was) into going to Rudy’s bedroom on his birthday and not really exploring what was going on in her head (she very much did not want to be there) or why she came back (she felt obligated to fulfill the social role that was imposed on her). By the point of the displacement incident she’s more emotionally mature than Rudy and has an ego that it terms of matching the world they live in and its societies is more developed than Rudy’s, but she also has a heavily idealized image of Rudy as someone who is smarter than her (which is admittedly true, Rudy’s an absolute nerd who’s tried to learn everything he can just because he enjoys learning new things[2], and Eris is a martial arts prodigy who struggles with more abstract things), more mature than her (he’s not, he genuinely does not have the same context for how fucked things are because he thinks he’s the protagonist in a shonen story and things will just work out), and who’s reliable (he’s not, but he is trying very hard to not completely fuck up and let everyone down).
So her fixation on him is not good, it is absolutely toxic and problematic, but it’s also very one-sided and the power dynamics when they do hook up are really messy and bad in both directions. She has a completely unrealistic idea of him on which she is emotionally dependent, but from the other side he’s been keeping her at arms length and just trying to see her back to her family whom he doesn’t want to be involved with further. She took the trauma of the displacement incident in stride and was emotionally prepared for the worst, while he had genuinely thought everything would just work out and is traumatized by seeing the extent of the calamity and realizing almost everyone he ever knew is actually gone forever. She has institutional authority and social status over him even with the deaths of her immediate family, while he is effectively an orphan (despite his parents still being alive, they’re both entirely absent) with no social structure left other than her. She is socially and legally an adult whereas he is very much not, regardless of what his internal identity may or may not be at that point.
The whole scene is very much not good for a lot of reasons, and I’m not going to claim the text (let alone the anime) did a good job of really articulating all the ways it was bad and problematic for both of them. Should Rudy have kept turning her down in line with the conscience he actually managed to develop along the way, even when she pressured him? Sure, but it’s still understandable why he’s not mature enough to do that. Is literally every single aspect of their relationship unhealthy and completely fucked for both of them? Also yes. I just don’t agree that it fits into the model of grooming because that’s predicated on like institutional, social, and legal inequality and a difference in life experience and capability for personal agency that just isn’t there in the story.
Now subsequently, did the author make a good call by taking away Rudy’s dick and making Eris run away to play samurai with a buff catgirl for the next 8 years? Definitely. Confiscating Rudy’s dick privileges until further notice is one of the best things the first half of the series did and I will only begrudgingly admit that he did ultimately earn the right to have them back.
You’re gonna hate this, but the anime actually aged her up visually. She’s like 18/19 (and Paul’s 21/22 IIRC) at the start of the story. _________ thinks of Rudy’s parents as still being kids early on in the first novel. Zenith and Lilia (who’s IIRC two years older than her) both just get rendered as a vague late 20s-early 30s or so in the art and stay that way for the next 16+ years. The stasis bit means Zenith is ~28 instead of ~34, but she’s rendered as looking the same as Lilia who’s ~36 by that point. The art in the LNs also shows Zenith as more like late 30s after the whole incident.
[I hit the text limit, I’ll continue later. I don’t disagree with the rest of your post but I do want to respond to it too.]
Tangential to that, can I say I loved the series’s treatment of language and language learning? Rudy’s earnest interest in learning more languages that started at that point in the story was so narratively unnecessary but such a great bit of worldbuilding and characterization and as a language nerd I really appreciated it. ↩︎
side note: I mentioned ADHD before, but he absolutely reads as someone with ADHD with the way he goes between enthusiastic obsession with anything new and unfamiliar and bouts of stagnation where he doesn’t want to follow up on it. ↩︎
No need to apologize, I can appreciate wanting to discuss a work with someone and jumping on the chance to. I’ll wait for you to write the rest of what you’d like to before I respond to avoid having reply chains in parallel. I don’t have a quarter as much to say as you do, though.
[continuing from where I left off; I got dragged off right after starting this]
Ultimately it’s a matter of 5-6 years difference for a character who’s already close to 30. There’s so little material difference there, especially with how the art kind of flattens age ranges weirdly and handles characters inconsistently anyways. IIRC the art of Rudy in his 20s has him still looking younger than Paul did in the very beginning. I don’t know how the anime is going to handle Zenith going forwards, but in the books after that point she’s always just this sort of quasi-senile grandmother who’s non-verbal but still capable of doing day to day tasks with some supervision, and people are worried about her but don’t know what to do, and that’s the sum total of her presence in the story until like book 20 or so.
I know you assume the worst of it there, but I do genuinely think there isn’t anything deeper than a simple plot device to avoid having to justify the whole rescue story further[1], except maybe the author seeing a good opportunity to further explore the whole concept of “blessed/cursed children” which end up being a major plot point with regards to what is even going on with the story.
That’s a fair point. Losing the revulsion and self-crit from Rudy’s inner monologue really does make the anime come across as way more ambiguous, for all that it keeps following along and reaching the same plot points and conclusions as the novels. Even in the text it is not always clear what is being presented uncritically vs being something that is clearly wrong: a lot of the driving drama comes from Rudy being wrong about stuff and the PoV is stuck firmly in his head most of the time so there’s no real refutation of it until the plot demonstrates it as wrong and he has to reflect on it and criticize himself. There are also issues where his inner monologue does clearly identify something as wrong and harmful, and then he just doesn’t act on it: Lilia grooming and verbally abusing Aisha to try to impose a specific subservient social role on her gets called out multiple times but apart from not engaging it with it and instead encouraging Aisha to just make her own decisions, he never actually confronts Lilia about it and eventually she just sort of stops on her own and Aisha ends up being her own person with agency and goals unrelated to Rudy and which he’s generally unaware of anyways.
So yeah, I will agree to an extent that the anime did not go far enough in differentiating “Rudy does an anime sex pest cliche, which is bad actually because this is supposed to be a real living world and not a cliche anime world so it’s a crime instead of a funny little thing, you should hate him as if he’d done it in real life because even he hates himself for this shit” from “this is an anime and Rudy does anime sex pest cliches on screen for your entertainment, like every other anime does”, and even the novels didn’t always go far enough and didn’t always differentiate between Rudy’s brainworms wriggling and being awful and an actual authorial endorsement of an idea very well. I just don’t agree that’s enough to condemn it outright, though: it is still the same story, missteps, omissions, and small changes aside, and it’s ultimately going towards the same state of Rudy having self-critted and healthy-socializationed his way into being a somewhat decent person who respects others but has big blindspots and isn’t particularly proactive in addressing problems systemic or otherwise, and also towards all the really wild plot nonsense that should kick off with the next season.
Like I love the story’s worldbuilding, all the effort that went into trying to make it feel diegetically real and vibrant and internally consistent, I like the overarching themes of redemption and personal growth that come to explicitly pro-social conclusions, I like that despite having a harem slop core it makes a point of respecting its female characters as characters who exist in their own right and have their own personal agency even if it could have still done more of that, this might be double dipping on the redemption point but I really cannot stress enough how much I like the transformation of Rudy from the literal worst guy ever into an empathetic and respectful person who centers the needs of others for all that he’s still brainrotted and gross at times, I love how weird the overall plot ends up being and how it explicitly ties back into the themes of empathy and respect for and reliance on others, and I am relieved that it never just randomly threw in homophobic or transphobic caricatures which is an absurdly low bar to clear that still filters out so many series. I do feel like these things do (in the books) or will (in the anime) outweigh the bad stuff and the borderline stuff even in the anime, for all that I really don’t know if the anime can legitimately stand on its own right now.
Funny aside, for as much as the author really likes exploring the worldbuilding of dungeons as like a sort of quasi-living monster of their own and likes talking about them and how they work, they only get used in full for that one specific plotline. They show up a few more times and characters talk about them semi-regularly, but there isn’t another earnest dungeon crawl like that one ever again. ↩︎