Like many franchises, To Love ru's anime decided not to adapt the manga but just do random zany things for an entire 26 episodes. Wasting endless budget, effort and time on crap that the original genius artist didn't think up, but just some random dudes at some random studio, who were never known for being genius artists and even if they were, should not be working with other people's characters, which they won't understand as well and so naturally can't create as good a story about.
The same happened to Rewrite, Negima and so many other series. Entire seasons of filler totally wasted which, if harnessed, could have adapted the entire series perfectly. The same budget, same seiyuu, everything, if they had only faithfully followed the source.
Usually in these cases I throw out the whole series, but To Love ru recovered and started adapting the manga faithfully from season 2 on. Which means I should try to have as much of this great anime as I can represented in my rankings. And in fact, there were four episodes that close enough mirrored the manga in the original season -- eps 1, 6, 11 and the first half of 17. There's no reason why these innocent episodes should be axed alongside the filler. Actually, as the introductions of Lala and Yami, they're kinda important to not be axed. This also gives me an excuse to own the amazing original opening of To Love ru which was wasted on the stupid filler season.
I'm re-reading the manga at least up until where the anime starts covering the material faithfully and it's really charming. To Love ru is a love comedy, with lots of sweet endearing moments, it would be a great manga even without the nudity.
Uma Musume continues to pull away from the pack with its amazing episode yesterday. When this is all over it's going to shoot up the rankings. Idoly Pride, meanwhile, is just barely good enough to deserve to be ranked at all. I still think it's better than what it replaced, Ika Musume, but not much else. Sadly I could see Idoly Pride being replaced even by Kumo desu ga, which is slated to have twice as many episodes and thus double the opportunity to appeal itself by the end of the spring season. Idoly Pride is very pretty, but the heart transplant plot is really belabored and clunky. Personalities are not transferable via heart transplant. That's anti-scientific. Personalities exist in the brain. They just do. Get over it and stop pretending the heart is anything but a pump and valve.
There are people right now, alive, with personalities, without hearts. They have machines which do the work for them and no biological heart at all. This shouldn't be up for debate anymore. Ghosts are much more believable than this stupid trope that keeps popping up in anime after anime.
Meanwhile I finally finished reading Sufficiently Advanced Magic. (I like to finish what I start.) I wouldn't recommend it, but I did find it interesting that the author's acknowledgements were the exact same stuff that inspires me -- Final Fantasy, anime, roleplaying, etc. It's a small world after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment