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Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

  Long ago, manga aspired to be like Dragon Ball Z: graphically iconic, with a story more coherent than it probably needed to be. Now there's the ADHD-addled Dragon-Ball-Z-inspired One Piece, a manga for the Twitter age if there ever was one.

Pop culture was best when you, the reader of this sentence, were 12: http://i46.tinypic.com/1625ims.gif

I remember watching DBZ after school, and while it is certainly "graphically iconic", there is no legitimate way to claim it has a coherent plot. It seems like the author is remembering his Saturday morning cartoons through some rose-tinted cokebottles.

I won't even touch "Anime is terrible. It used to be okay."

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Correct or not, your post reminded me of a recent Jon Stewart (Daily Show) deconstruction of Glenn Beck's and Sean Hannity's rant about how great "America used to be". The idea was that your own country is ALWAYS great TO YOU when you're 12.... BECAUSE YOU'RE 12!

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-january-5-2010/even-be...

I would like to check out some manga to see what it's like. I almost posted a request for manga recommendations on a LibraryThing manga forum, but I decided against it. I tried writing up a description of what I was looking for, but it devolved into rejection of a bunch of anime stereotypes:

- No ordinary schmoes who turn out to have amazing supernatural powers.

- Nothing that revolves around a series of contests with enemies of escalating power.

- No robots or exoskeletons.

- It would be nice if the central character was an adult. An adult whose love interest is not an adolescent.

- While I'm on that topic, nothing that will make people think I'm a pervert if they catch me reading it.

So, while I was wroting this up, I started checking out the lists of mangas that had been previously recommended in the forum, and I started to feel like I was shitting all over everything they loved, so I decided not to post my request. People talk quite a lot about manga being a serious art form for adults. Am I missing something?

The problem with forums about anime or manga is that they self-select for people who have been rejected from every other community. A solid science-fiction or horror story can find discussion in the appropriate forums, but nobody normal is interested in some high-school student's harem of magical girls.

Here are some manga / anime recommendations. Some have not been licensed for distribution in the US, or have been only partially released here, so you will need to hunt a bit for fansubs. I watch only the animated adaptations, as they're easier to hide, but feel free to order the original manga versions if you don't feel ashamed about reading comic books. Not all are adaptations -- the movies, and a few television series, are original animations.

- Monster < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_%28manga%29 >

- Planetes < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes >

- Mushishi < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushishi >

- Mononoke < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononoke_%28TV_series%29 >

- Tokyo Godfathers < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Godfathers >

If you're willing to relax your standards a bit, there are many outstanding series aimed at younger viewers.

- Denno Coil < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil >

- Yokohama Shopping Trip < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokohama_Kaidashi_Kik%C5%8D >

- Kino's Journey < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino%27s_Journey >

- Cromartie High School < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromartie_High_School >

- My Neighbor Totoro < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Neighbor_Totoro > , or almost anything else by Studio Ghibli < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_Ghibli >

- The Girl Who Leapt Through Time < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Leapt_Through_Time >

- Yotsuba&! < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotsuba&! >

Very interesting suggestions, thanks! I'll certainly check out Monster and maybe some of the others. It's interesting that sci-fi and fantasy still predominate (and a couple of your suggestions do actually involve robots.) Personally, I have no problem with genre fiction, but I'm partial to mysteries (of the protagonist-solves-the-crime variety) and historical adventures (such as the Horatio Hornblower novels.) Do you have any suggestions along those lines?

P.S. I just added "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" to my Netflix queue, and Netflix suggested something called "Xxxholic" for me. Well... I won't prejudge, but that kind of thing certainly doesn't help dispel stereotypes.

xxxHoLic is, ironically, not porn or even racy. (Never read, but know the fact offhand.)

"Robot" is an awfully broad category; none of my suggestions involve the giant, piloted, super-powered robots. Monster is very good, but at 72 episodes, is unusually long for a mature series. You may want to look at Tokyo Godfathers or Planetes first, to see if your interests match mine.

"xxxHolic" is a weird Japan-glish word; you can read it as "____-aholic". I've not seen the series and can't recommend either way, but from the Wikipedia article it looks like something you'd not enjoy.

Online recommendation engines seem to break when dealing with Japan-related topics; I don't know why, but it could be that some people will watch anything if it's 1) animated 2) from Japan, so the engines build false associations between wildly different works. This happens in music also -- I once listened to an orchestral re-imagining of some soundtrack by the Tokyo Philharmonic, and now Last.FM won't stop recommending awful j-pop.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is quite good. All in all, you've got a pretty "traditional" list, though I've only seen about half. * adds to list *

My personal all-time favorite, though, goes to The Twelve Kingdoms. http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=26

I've recently seen "Beyond the Clouds", which was also very good: http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=469

> - Kino's Journey < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kino%27s_Journey >

The anime version of Kino's Journey is probably my favourite anime.

If you read one manga, read Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki. Yes, that's the same Miyazaki who is the famous animation director. It's after midnight and I'm not feeling particularly eloquent, but it will be worth your while.

Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaä_of_the_Valley_of_the_W...

I'd make the same point I would to someone griping about all the psychics, aliens, vampires, and wizards in the paperback books they've tried out:

Well, that's the geek media.

Worse, it's the young-geek media - most of that stuff is marketed to teenage guys. Admittedly, it's really hard to find anything else in the US because young geeks have been the primary source of demand for Japanese animation and comics. We mostly get the Bleaches and the Hellsings and whatnot.

It's as if the rest of the world only got SF and Fantasy movies out of Hollywood. There's stuff to love there, to be sure, but it's a necessarily limited sampling.

I would heartily recommend you Distant Neighborhood (Haruka na Machi e) by Jiro Taniguchi

Actually most of the books by Jiro Taniguchi are really good, they are mostly simple touching story that give a good glimpse of japanese culture and the relationship between people.

http://www.amazon.com/DISTANT-NEIGHBORHOOD-Jiro-Taniguchi/dp...

http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Neighborhood-2-Jiro-Taniguchi/...

Reading the article I felt that just like how he is comparing current Anime to DBZ (what he remembers) is the same way he is comparing his current feeling towards Japanese culture to what he thought it would be.

It feels like reality has settled in and his daily life has some deeper rooted problems than the stickers being placed on the barcode a certain a way.

Regardless he gives a view of the culture that you don't often hear about.

I was in college when it hit over here. Couldn't make head nor tails of it. It seemed like crap to me.

Then again, I used to watch TMNT after school and to this day will maintain that it was actually quite funny, even though someone older than me will, with some justification, villify that as well.

Some of this article was worth reading. The complaints about how things used to be better, however, were not.

What are you talking about? They have, e.g., 30 eps in a row of goku fighting frieza. it's an extremely slow plot, but every episode follows after the next. (except after a saga ends, then they just do a time skip to the next big fight)

Man does this bring back memories from back when I was still a young hackling... Watching in eager anticipation what will happen next. For four straight episodes it was Goku with his hands in the air constipating, and somehow I loved every minute of it.

constipating

That is not a word that should ever exist... yet I cannot imagine a better description.

I think this is the comment I've laughed hardest at out of every comment I've read on YC.

"Constipating" xD So awesomely descriptive. I'll be chuckling about this for quite a while (earning crazy-looks from random passers-by)!

While I wouldn't call DBZ's plot unique, it wasn't bad.

You might have experienced a bad, emasculated version which was aired in America, stripped down to nothing but fight scenes and completely devoid of anything involving adult life. That version really sucked.

No love for "Shikabane Hime" ? What is wrong with this guy?!

I was looking for something to watch - I'll try Shikabane Hime then :) (not the author btw)

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