Like I said, the script is weak. The direction is just adjusted to the new script. The actresses portrayed it the way the script seemed to go, which means the nuances change considerably.

The Japanese version has constant direction during recordings and Nakatani Nio herself was present during many recordings to give direction. This is not a luxury the English dub had.

last edited at Jan 10, 2020 2:04PM

^Or we just see that the artist tagged it NTR on her Pixiv.

j/w but how old are you? i mean, maybe for kids just figuring things out TODAY it's just as you say, but--and not to sound old or anything--when i was still in middle school/highschool things definitely weren't this way. back then yes porn was tabboo. and when i was in middle school if you wanted to see anything pornographic on the computer you'd have to wait an hr just for one picture to show up lol. after waiting an hr just to connect online. hell even in HS scanlations were still becoming something new. i had been used to translations that were getting posted online, like reading play scripts, and was absolutely blown away when i first discovered that you could SEE A WHOLE MANGA ONLINE. and saying saying asians seeing other naked women isn't uncommon is making YOUR own stereotype. not ALL of them visit bath houses. which is i assume largely where they would see other non family member naked women. and it's becoming even less common as time goes on.

Uhm... sounds like you grew up on the early 90s or something. I'm sorry, are we not talking about current times? This manga takes place in the present and she is in her early 20s. That means she was born at the end of 90s and grew up in the early odds. By the time she was old enough to care about porn, the internet was far enough to make that easily available.
And even the manga aside, everyone who is in their early 20s right now is in the same boat, so I think my view is pretty justified...

Japan has strong skinship culture, India is extremely open about this stuff, I hear similar things about Malaysia and Indonesia. I'm not saying every region is the same, but overall the cultures in Asia are far more open to such things than the Western ones. Of course there is Eastern Europe where nudity is also seen as less of a taboo in quite a few countries, so it's just going to be more rather than less.

and saying you could figure out your gay just from watching tv is silly. the way you react to something on tv and someone right there is completely different. WAY too easy to pass someone you've only seen on the telly as a simple admiration. it's like...liking a dog cause it's cute, but you don't want to fuck it. hell if it was that easy i woulda figured it out when i was like 6, cause i was WAY more into xena than i knew lol. all i knew was i really really liked the show and liked her, i didn't know WHY.

Well good thing I didn't say that then. I quite clearly stated that one experiences an episode of attraction - not figure out ones sexuality. This was never about realizing that one is gay. I don't know what to tell you, that is literally what I said.
And my example of someone figuring it out through comics is just a fact. There is a link a few pages back. Everyone has a different trigger moment.

all in all, we don't really know the time frame the author wants this manga to be, or even if they put much effort other than "modern." because all that old timey sounding situations i grew up in? really wasn't that long ago, i'm only 33. we don't know what her family life was like growing up, what kind of schools she went to, to have missed the signs as she grew up. so saying it's not realistic for her not to know already is being ignorant. i mean i doubt the author even thought beyond that they just wanted their character to have not known yet. i just don't think saying she should have is silly.

It is far more out of the ordinary to assume this manga for no reason whatsoever takes place 2 decades ago. Especially because she owns a Smartphone.
Seriously, I think most of your rebuttal is based on the fact that you didn't properly read what I said. I said it is unlikely. How can I possibly impart this any more clearly than I did in my previous post?

last edited at Jan 10, 2020 2:22PM

Well whichever you prefer, I think nobody with a hint of sanity left could deny that this scene was beyond amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGXqx3O9kCQ
Minako Kotobuki can make me feel things with just a whisper that people acting their heart out can't in an entire speech.

This scene as well as the song insert during the sports festival marathon and a few other tiny aspects are even better than in the manga to me. That's exactly the kind of thing this medium benefits from the most.

If that was Tia Ballard's best performance I don't want to hear her worst one. Blegh.

Yeah, YMMV. It sounded quite different from many of her previous gigs and I loved it. She's more often used for calm, and timid, sweet young women (cf. ex. Sakura Quest), which she does well, but didn't make such an impression on me with.

To be fair, I have my own bias here as well. I actually think Yuuki Takada as Yuu (despite the funny name overlap) was also not the best choice for her. I've grown used to her quickly, but I think neither actress protrayed Yuu the way I expected her to sound when I read the manga. Oftentimes the anime completely overwrites my impression or I grow to like it, but in this rare case I just don't think either did her real justice.

Though Takada still performed a lot better overall...

Almost all English dubs pre-2010 are horrible. Don't pretend otherwise.

If you want to set 2010 as the mark, go ahead. I couldn't think of a good English dub from 2000-2006 at all, before Black Lagoon (2007, oh if only Tabitha St. Germain still did anime) and Spice and Wolf (2009, which I don't think has aged as well, just rewatched it last month). Before that I'd call Cowboy Bebop (1999) the benchmark dub.

Little anecdote: earlier this week I hopped into the first episode of The Slayers (1995) on Funimation. Man, that's some retro stuff. It looks, sounds and feels like a cheap homebrew VHS recording of an episode that once aired on TV, and the script and voice acting are about as cringe-inducing as you'd expect.

Bebop is a once in a decade miracle dub where everything came together incredibly well. You will barely find anyone who is not a diehard dub hater that denies it was good. It is not representative of its time, nor of the genere overall.

Spice & Wolf holds up phenomanally... Though I guess I haven watched the English version in years. The Japanese dub at the very least is still as amazing as it was back then. Spice & Wolf deserved a season 3, 4, 5 ,6 and whatever else it needs to catch up to the novels. Such a shame that Japan has shit taste.

last edited at Jan 10, 2020 12:13PM

@BD
Curiously, the way Japanese Seiyu sound often rubs me the wrong way, so I generally find anime more palatable in English. And since it's not my native tongue either, many English dubs (at least those made after 2006 as well as a select few from before that - the quality has improved massively since the 90s) don't feel as bad to me as German dubs generally do.
Bloom into You I found a particularly well acted dub and I much preferred the voices of Tia Ballard (Yuu, probably her best performance to date), Luci Christian (Touko), Shanae'a Moore (Sayaka) and Clint Bickham (Maki) over the Japanese version.

As we already established last time we "discussed" this topic, you just got used to one side of the equation. Because you are biased towards English dubs after mostly only listening to them (and understanding them), the Japanese dubs seem outlandish to you. You can't pick up the ways their voices work or how well acted they are because of too little exposure. I'll just flat out say it, the Japanese cast is more experienced in the field and far more talented. They also don't have to work with shoddy scripts.

If that was Tia Ballard's best performance I don't want to hear her worst one. Blegh.
The way Minako Kotobuki legitimately gave me goosebumps during some scenes in the anime is a testament to her skill. I liked Luci just fine, but she does not have the capacity for that kind of nuanced acting (yet).

Almost all English dubs pre-2010 are horrible. Don't pretend otherwise. There are a few exceptions, but that's about it. The first real upwards trend I noticed was with Spice & Wolf and Steins;Gate . Starting from around 2011 they actually started trying and got more VAs that were actually familiar with the media in.

Zormau, I’d rather smash my thumb with a hammer than listen to the English dub of an anime.

Dunno, the Konosuba dub is not that bad.

I think any reasonable person knows that there are good English dubs out there. They are far and few inbetween, but they exist. Whether they are not as good, but enjoyable nontheless (Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon) or just as good in a different way (Spice & Wolf). But because it is such a rarity, it is a risk that you shouldn't take on your first viewing of any series.

Unlike Blastaar I don't think the voices are such a big issue these days per se (there are very talented voice actors in the dubbing scene now which are just as skilled as the average Japanese seiyuu), but rather the scripts. I just can't stand many of the changes that are made to the source material. With each interpretation of something the original message gets muddled. There are some foreign dubs that base their translation on the English dub, making it a 3rd degree translation... ugh.

YagaKimi fell victim to the later for sure, as the voices are not bad (I dont like Yuu's, but that's just me).

last edited at Jan 10, 2020 10:21AM

BugDevil posted:

I can hardly stand cringe

I'm not fan of it as well. I couldn't finish WataMote anime because of that. My first impression of MC wasn't that good with how ridiculous she was behaving. Her first having a nosebleed and then breaking a arm, really strained my suspension of disbelief and made me question how realistic really this anime wants to be, but then characters grow on me and ultimately I finished it liking it. I find the idol girl MC is crushing on really cute.

Yeah the nosebleed part made me seriously stop the video for a moment, something I almost never do. So awkward.
The second half of the episode was way funnier and you can tell that Maina is definitely interested in our ridiculous MC. And as this show acknowledges guys exist, their attraction feels even more validated than the usual all girls idol shows.

@Zormau If I have to use a VPN to watch something in my own country, the publisher clearly didn't want me to see it, so I have no incentive to support them. I buy the licensed manga faithfully as it comes out and if the blue-rays ever come over here with subs, I will buy those too. Everything else is a travesty and shows how useless streaming services can be.

My condolences for having the Eng dub be your first experience with YagaKimi once again (not even the manga you poor thing). Such a waste.

last edited at Jan 10, 2020 9:12AM

^I did mean for the serialization. Although I can see why it might not be enough for Weekly Shounen Champion​.

The magazine is irrelevant. I think we already successfully explained why this is incredibly hard to pull off. Read the previous page. Such a small and intimate focus is hard to pull off for a serialization with more pages and a higher amount of chapters.

Even vapid 4koma manga that go nowhere have a lot more going on. They at the very least introduce more characters, shift focus occasionally and go for more extreme events. That means the current method is not sustainable unless the author can adjust to that challenge properly. The only thing that is similar that comes to mind right now is Hino-san no baka . That one is extremely intimate with almost no outside interference and managed to stay that way for a very long time. But the events were more extraordinary than the setting or characters.

last edited at Jan 10, 2020 8:53AM

but right now a cute little friendship to romantic build up seemed to be as far as the series wanted to go.

Nothing wrong with keeping it this way.

Yes, that is why this is good. We are talking about a serialisation though, which cannot work on the same parameters.

Reimu always tops. Even when she is on the bottom, she is a power bottom.

^ I know that I'm internally conflicted as to whether this series is worth reading, and I cherrypick which posts are worth reading in this thread based on how short they are, lol.

Thanks for that enlightening revelation BV. I think I'll start cherrypicking which posts to read based on how much BV is in them.

last edited at Jan 10, 2020 6:01PM

Oshi ga Budoukan Ittekuretara Shinu adapation is very good. And gay.

I can hardly stand cringe, so this first episode made me suffer a lot, but I think it has potential. It's at least kind of realistic on how idol fans actually are and it has enough gay subtext to keep me hooked.

Nobody's been discussing whether this series is worth reading.

Yeah, hard to see how it's not just the same joke OR maybe it becomes stupid convoluted misunderstandings. I mean, Mashiro can't ever discover that Kokosaki can actually read minds, right? Or the whole thing falls apart.

I believe that having a story with a mute girl protagonist/deuteragonist in itself has a lot of potential. A story with a mindreading girl has a lot of potential too. Mixing them should thus multiply the two, but it somehow doesn't feel that way.

Probably because of the way these chapters were handled, it feels incredibly intimate and limited to these two girls, which is a death sentence for long running formats. To make a full fledged series, more side-characters will have to be introduced and the special attributes of both girls will have to be challenged in more exciting/imaginative situations.

It's not impossible at all, but right now a cute little friendship to romantic build up seemed to be as far as the series wanted to go.

last edited at Jan 10, 2020 6:16AM

^I mean, you kinda already answered yourself. Homura thinks this look is the real her. Sorry if by "too fake" you thought I meant she didnt need the glasses originally. I just believe that her old look never suited her and was clearly something she just kept from her old self.

last edited at Jan 10, 2020 6:10AM

^The picture came separate from the doujin. The artist used it later.
And just to point it out, this site doesn't reject futa. There are some futa images and doujins. We have yaoi on this site for crying out loud.

Why did she "why is my heart beating this way?" at the end when she's clearly shown mega-crushing on the coworker earlier?

Because she doesn't realize she is crushing on her.

Such a specific power... I guess it can kinda be abused, but it's not a perfect science to tell who would act in what way based on affection points alone. Someone who doesnt care about her might still be nice to strangers nontheless etc.

I know I should comment on the density of that neutron star in human form, but I always care more about powers and how to use them.

I somehow knew tsundere-chan is blonde. It just seemed to fit.
Not sure if this concept can actually carry a full series. These short 4 page chapters are one thing, chapters that need to go into the double digits for tankubons... sounds tough.

last edited at Jan 9, 2020 5:32PM

Friends, it is really not that hard to find sensible anime streaming sites for recent anime. Get Adblock and 90% of pop-ups on the more sensible sites disappear. If you had just asked I could have linked it for you (and then deleted the link).

I suggested the tsundere tag now. They can't reject all of us (they probably can).

^Tag suggestion link is there right after the discussion forum link.

I cant believe I never realized that. I always assumed it was the source button.

I love how everyone can tell Kokosaki is a tsundere and not like some Shoujo protagonist's immature boy love interest.
Joking aside, can we get a feature to suggest tags for manga too? I think right now it's just on images.

last edited at Jan 9, 2020 8:12AM