Random manga chatter

[Merc]

Been reading Dorohedoro.

It's a seinen manga about a crapsack world where humans get experimented by magicians regularly as they try to master their magic. The main character is one such victim (supposedly), a guy named Kaiman who has lost his memory and had his head transformed into that of a lizard. He finds and kills magicians, particularly trying to find the one that cursed him, as killing that magician would release the curse on him.

That's how the manga starts anyway. Then it just veers way off the left field with a lot of insanity and we find out there's much more to Kaiman, his partner, the magicians, the devils, and everything in between.

There's about 125 chapters translated so far.

[KLSymph]

The World God Only Knows is now finished.

[thepanda]

With the release of chapter 30 Extra is no longer doing Maoyuu Maou Yuusha.

Here's hoping whoever they passed it off to keeps up the quality.

[Dracos]

Aye :)

Go Yuusha.

[Dracos]

Some decent, if cluttered new chapters of One Piece and Toriko this week.  It's hard to tell who is fighting what as they're a bit all over the place in One Piece, but it looks like at least some face smashing will happen soon.

Bleach is a complete garbage pile, as usual, and haven't looked at Naruto.

[Arakawa]

Bleach is a complete garbage pile, as usual, and haven't looked at Naruto.

I'll have to ask you sometime what the deal is with Bleach, as I've somehow become curious, but not curious enough to wade through 3212314 chapters only to determine it is, in fact, a garbage pile.

Naruto I have an inkling of the problems. Author and audience disagree on who is most important character, creepy mask guy stuff, and what did Sakura learn/do to get counted as super-nin?

[Dracos]

Last I looked at Naruto, they were about to deliver "Teamwork from these three" as the answer to the unstoppable super nin Madara who has long since demonstrated the ability to take on all superpowered opponents simultaneously.  Sakura is even more behind as both the other two have gotten another level of Super Ninja recently, and Naruto is literally Ninja Jesus, able to out-heal Sakura with people who are effectively dead.

Bleach has long since lost any semblance of a foundation to tell its story upon.  It's primarily been focused on the elite fighting force of the afterlife being just sort of incompetent patsies against their increasingly nonsense opposition: Super powered humans from somewhere that seem to have just spun off of super powered human at some point.  They've long past some impression of acting human as we have folks who get cut apart and spray their blood everywhere as their way of killing people, teleporting mouth molds, imaginations based enemies, emotion crippling attacks...

Any sense that their power frameworks arise from some centralized environment is pretty lost in the noise that is basically people just showing up and delivering bullshit, while the good guys repeatedly act as morons (Let's kill off our own strong folks ahead of time, we have this incredibly effective super training but we only are using it on a few people).

One can discuss which arc folks lose interest in, since the series makes massive style changes throughout, but the current one is basically "blah, blah blah, new person who only showed up a few minutes ago handing people their asses, blah blah, soul reaper showing off mystical technique that won't do anything."

[thepanda]

Is Ichigo still being the most useless shounen protagonist ever? He's been on a losing spree since the end of the rescue Rukia arc. I stopped reading at the end of that one arc where they never bother to explain why the villains do what they do. Execution, I think?

Edit: Wait, I did read up to that thing in the basement with Kenpachi and Unohana. Has he won a fight since that point?

[Dracos]

Ichigo has not had a fight since that point.  Or rather, I don't think he has?  I'm not sure if him losing to the nameless swords (and by proxy also to Renji) came before or after that point, and he's since gotten another silly powerup he hasn't shown off yet.

Kenpachi barely won a fight, and then immediately lost the follow up so he or someone else could then show ridiculous bullshit.

So you could say he's losing by not being on camera at all for like twenty chapters?

[Dracos]

I'm gonna yammer more on Yuusha.  It is cute and everyone should read the amazing story of Hero and Demon Queen introducing Republic to the land of demons.  It stars heroes that stand easily above the shoddy crew that Fate/Stay Night offers :P

[Dracos]

If folks haven't read any History's Strongest Disciple lately, it's almost worth taking a look at the last 10-12 chapters for an example of maximum stupidity.  The heroes cannot win, they're outnumbered over 2 to 1 everywhere, overpowered, and then...  The villains decide it is dishonorable to kill them in this way and switch sides~.  Giant breast shots constantly.  Whining and shock over the notion of it being dishonorable.  More giant breast shots on sunsets.

I'm not sure whether or not it completely eclipses Bleach and naruto for stupid.  It is absolutely a "We wrote ourselves into a corner with having the guys who end fights by killing have an overwhelming setup against the 'good guys'".

[Empyrean]

Latest chapter of Naruto was pretty comical. Sakura's like, "I'm gonna be useful now!" and immediately gets shanked while doing precisely zero damage. Not to mention getting outclassed in the one thing she sort of had going for her by Ninja Jesus. Soooo useless. It's like they pull her off of the sidelines just long enough to get owned, and then back she goes. She doesn't even have enough credibility to invoke the Worf effect.

Maoyuu is still my favorite ongoing manga. I can't say enough good things about it. Just read it if you haven't yet.

I came across All You Need is Kill recently. It's a groundhog day plot starting the day before the protagonist is deployed into a crapsack war against alien monsters. Every day he dies. So he decides to make the best of it and grind his way to becoming a superhuman god of war, to see if maybe he can live out the day. It's pretty cool so far. The movie "Edge of Tomorrow" is based on the same light novel.

[Dracos]

Well, it's also a misuse of the Worf effect, since they're almost certainly trying it.  The whole concept is to demonstrate threat and competence while doing the minimal amount of screentime and damage.  Blasting Kakashi is a worf effect (and he gets constantly owned for just that effect).  Wiping out konoha or single handedly owning all five Kage is just normal crushing the protagonists.

Sakura can't demonstrate any additional competence for the bad guy, so she's just being fodder.  Albeit, they do the same thing for Tsunade.  Generally, female ninjas do terribly in canon.

[Merc]

And by generally, you mean they pretty much always do terribly! =p

The only time a female ninja has given a good showing was Sakura+Chijo vs Sasori... which most people thought was unrealistic for Sakura to pull off, even in a 2:1 fight and after training with Tsunade for three years. And after that she went right back to incompetent too.

You could make an argument for Temari giving good showings as a kunoichi, except the two times she did, it was against Tenten and Tayuya. Two other kunoichis, both of whose abilities had critical weaknesses to wind attacks. And Tenten didn't even get an on-screen beatdown.

[Dracos]

Now, really, he's not that bad.  I mean just as you said Rukia did have that one big win against her past, and I'm pretty sure she killed a mook at some point.  Not all women in his manga are merely over-emotional victims or Support entities, save when beating other women like that Yoruchi versus Sui-Feng fight.

:3

*is terrible*