Yeah, I am confused as well, I feel like there was a lot that was left on the cutting room floor. Either that or the author really wanted to skip past all the prelims to get to a more manageable cast of characters. But, it begs the question, if all the important characters that we know make it to the Archimedes and then make it through this first round, then what was the point of them? It just makes the past couple episodes feel like a waste.

Also, Anaak just figured out it was Bam by watching him. Could nobody else up to this point? I feel like Viole’s identity is the worst-kept secret ever at this point.

It’s too late to save this series since it was already axed, but the series that I wish more people had read to keep it alive is Love After World Domination.

Dan Da Dan has been phenomenal so far. That and Orb have been the two shows this season that have really stood out as a clear step above everything else for me. As for waiting for something to finish before diving in, I absolutely do that sometimes. Most recently I did that with the Spice and Wolf remake and The Apothecary Diaries. If I had to pick one that I would be interested in bingeing this season after it wraps up, it would likely be Blue Box.

Yeah, Netflix has been stepping up their anime game. They have gotten on board (mostly) with the weekly release schedule and even agreed to co-license a series like Dragonball Daima so that it also releases on Crunchyroll. I was worried that Crunchyroll was becoming a bit of a monopoly after the Funimation merger, but honestly Netlix is probably putting up a better fight than HiDive right now.

Time for the friend group to get introduced and move things along.

Thanks for the info! I am just going to have to test some things and see how it goes. My wordpress site has quite a number of image galleries, so I’ll probably have to do some experimenting to see how those work.

Pham feels like a cheat code. There are times that Pham just feels like a plot device more than an actual character. Find every piece of furniture and random item that had an explosive spell place on it and move it somewhere outside the castle without anybody noticing? Sure, no problem.

I had kind of forgotten how this father/daughter pair played out in the story, so it was a nice moment to see her come to understand that her father was being courageous when it mattered the most. That picking and choosing your battles was a better strategy for the outcome of protecting those he cared about. @rikka@ani.social

I totally feel you on the screaming into the void sensation. That is basically what this community felt like to me for the first couple weeks. Honestly, if people hadn’t found it and started contributing within a month or two, I was getting burnt out finding and posting enough content to keep things going. That is why I am so incredibly grateful to the people that make posts/comments. Without you guys, I definitely would not been able to find the motivation to keep this thing going.

I am happy that each of the communities has kind of developed their own vibe, and a big part of that is that there are simply a lot of different people in the two communities. It’s always interesting to hear different perspectives on how they engage with the communities, so thanks for sharing!

As for anime, rewatches are definitely on my to-do list. I was kind of planning to run one starting in January if there is interest. My schedule is pretty busy until then. Then again, maybe I could find time to do a one-off movie rewatch or something like that instead of committing to do a whole series (is there a christmas-themed anime movie?).

Another idea that @NineSwords@ani.social and I have tossed around on discord in the past is doing some kind of coordinated re-read of a manga/light novel series. I guess that would be kind of like a rewatch. I just am not sure what a good candidate series for something like that would be. Also, the pace at which the different medium go through the story are very different. 1 LN volume is not equal to 1 manga volume is not equal to 1 anime season. So…open to ideas on that one.

Yeah, unfortunately it is also only really convenient if you are on the ani.social instance. My most wished-for feature in lemmy is some way to link to posts/comments in an instance-agnostic way. Alas…

Hey man, I get it. I especially liked her uniform. The military uniforms in this show were stylish.

Trying to think of what my first anime crush was, I think it was probably Sailor Mercury. This probably has set me up for a lifetime of rooting for blue-haired heroines that will ultimately lose.

That’s true! I hadn’t thought about how silly that was until you pointed it out. Relena has a posse like she is some kind of Villainess.

The username wjs018 was actually given to me by my undergrad university. When I went to university was the first time I actually had an email address (and the first computer I ever owned), so I just had all my usernames just stick with it ever since then. The letters correspond to my initials and I think the 018 was just a random number used to disambiguate people with the same initials.

Yeah, over-possessiveness is too often depicted positively in manga and it can bother me. Here they manage to still do the trope while simultaneously calling out that it is pretty toxic.

Yes! I have a bit of a confession to make. I added the functionality to rikka to create the pinned post where she lists all the recent episode discussion threads because I am often a couple days late watching an episode, and I was having trouble finding old threads. So, I made it purely to help me go back into threads from a couple days ago to make a comment. I figured, if I was having trouble with it, other people probably were too.

Lol, Wu Fei is certainly one of the least likeable of the main set of pilots. I remember liking Duo a lot though, and Trowa wasn’t bad despite his swept bangs look.

I am in my late 30’s, so we aren’t too far off there. I also appreciate how the smaller size means that I don’t need to race to read chapters. I often will read a chapter a couple days after it comes out and then go to the post that somebody else made where we can have a dialog. It’s similar for the anime episodes as well, where I can go back into a thread a couple days later and still have a conversation. The speed at which huge communities like the subreddits move can be too fast for me to keep up with.

One year of manga in the books. It has been a trip! Thank you to everybody here for their contributions here. This community has been a joy to be a part of and I don’t remember ever having to step in and swing the moderator hammer around (unlike those naughty anime folks). If you all promise not to tell the anime folks, I have a bit of a confession to make:

Cue the flashback sequence…

When the defederation and blanket content removals happened on the ml instance last year, I was worried that anime/manga content on lemmy was going to be smothered and killed before it ever got a chance to reach enough of a critical mass to maintain its activity. At that time, I was way more into manga than anime and I didn’t want to be forced back onto reddit to talk about it. So, I hatched a plan…

I tried to kickstart the anime community. That might sound strange, but my thinking was that there are way more people out there likely to be watching anime than reading manga. So, if I could get them to consolidate mostly in one place, it would be easier to drag the manga-reading people from that community into the manga-specific community. One thing I find interesting is that the anime and manga communities here on ani.social have roughly the same proportion of active members as the anime and manga subreddits (~3:1 anime:manga). So, there you have it, my main motivation for facilitating anime discussion at the time was to actually talk about manga.

End the flashback sequence…

Thanks for keeping that a secret from all the anime folks! Overall, I think the plan largely worked, but I was also surprised at how many people are active here in the manga community that don’t seem to be active in the anime community. So, thank you to everybody that made the move from the ml community to this one!

There are two other people I want to thank specifically. First is hitagi, who keeps this instance running and has dealt with some serious infrastructure challenges this past year, including an intercontinental migration. The other person I want to thank is the community’s resident villainess, Kadath. She has been gracious enough to bear the dreaded M next to her name and act as a moderator. Thanks to both of you in particular!

There are plenty of other people to thank, especially the “power users” that do most of the actual chapter posting. Thank you all for the contributions you have made to this community. Also, thanks for helping me find some great series to read!

Here is to another year of great manga!

Finally, I will make a similar offer to the anime general thread this week of doing a mini-AMA in this thread for any questions people might have (manga-related or otherwise).

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Re:Zero
2. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Dan Da Dan

Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.

It’s been a whole year of posting in this community! It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. It feels like just yesterday that I created this account after the drama surrounding the defederation from the ml instance.

Something that I mentioned briefly in the post up above, but wanted to call out once more, is that hitagi might not be nearly as visible as I am in this community, but they actually do a lot behind the scenes to keep things running. In addition to everything involved with the infrastructure of running the instance, I was just looking through the reports I have received, and roughly half of them were resolved by hitagi prior to my ever seeing them. It also works out nicely that the two of us live on basically opposite sides of the globe, meaning that we have pretty good time zone coverage. So, even if they aren’t posting as much as I am (I mean, who is really?), hitagi has been a vital part of keeping things running smoothly here.

As a sort of unofficial celebration of the anniversary, I am happy to do a kind of mini-AMA in this thread if people have any questions for me that are on their mind (either anime-related or not).