Forum - View topicThe List - 7 Anime for Grown-Up Romantics
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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Natsuyuki Rendezvous was the first anime I thought of when I saw the list. It might not be the most well regarded or remembered show (I personally never finished it), but it's definitely about adult relationships.
Not sure if I'd want Annie from Attack on Titan to be redeemed unless she acknowledges how much she spoiler[seemed to enjoy *torturing* the soldiers she killed. Bertolt and Reiner might be better choices] |
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Clyde_Cash
Posts: 376 |
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Ah! My Goddess: Why the hell doesn't Keiichi have a goddamn backbone?
Also, if humans, gods, and demons all evolved separately, unrelated, each on different worlds, HOW THE fudge ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO INTERBREED? Their physiology shouldn't allow it and yet they all, or at least gods and demons, can interbreed (e.g., Urd)! Then you have the angels. Vertebrate hexapods, and even worse still, feathered mammals. Oh boy. First, I'll address the hybridization issues. Humans, gods, and demons in the Ah! My Goddess world are all conveniently based on the same template but with their own unique modifications such as weird facial markings, funny hair/eye colors, and definitive behavioral disorders. They're all basically the same thing and the fact that they can interbreed suggests they must be closely related subspecies at least within the same genus and thus derived from the same source. But if they all evolved separately, independently, unrelated, each on different planets, their most fundamental physiology should be dramatically different. Hell, Ah! My Goddess isn't even the only offender. Star Wars has humans, Twi'leks, Gungans, whatever Yoda is, etc. Star Trek has humans, Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans, Borg, Ferengi, Cardassians, etc. Dr. Who has humans and Time Lords. RahXephon has humans and Mulians. The World of Narue has humans and Narue's species. Outlaw Star has humans, Ctarl, and other species. Dragon Ball Z has humans, Saiyans, and whatever Frieza, Buu, Mr. Popo, and King Kai are. Eureka Seven has humans and Coralians. The list goes on and on. THEY CANNOT ALL BE UNIQUELY ORIGINAL YET SUPERFICIALLY IDENTICAL, INTERNALLY INCOMPARABLE, AND GENETICALLY COMPATIBLE ALL AT THE SAME GODDAMN TIME! In our biological reality, we can and have had instances of convergent evolution where members of distantly related taxa later play identical roles and adapt accordingly: --Wolves, hyenas, and Tasmanian tigers --Sharks, swordfish, ichthyosaurs, thalattosuchians, mosasaurs, and dolphins --Raccoons and Tasmanian devils --Foxes and Malagasy civets --Temnospondyls, mesosaurs, champsosaurs, crocodilians, spinosaursids, and basal cetaceans (e.g., Pakicetus, Ambulocetus) --Saber-toothed cats, barbourofelids, nimravids, creodonts such as Hyaenodon, Thylacosmilus (a sparassodont), and Permian gorgonopsids --Rodents and multituberculates --Flying squirrels and colugos --Birds, bats, and pterosaurs --Trees, bamboo, tree ferns, and Carboniferous club mosses --Ants and termites --Hooves among cetartiodactyls (sheep, camels, cows, hippos, whales, etc.), perissodactyls (horses, tapirs, rhinos), and paenungulates (hyraxes, manatees, elephants, etc.) --Rhinos, embrithopods, brontotheres, and ceratopsians --Moles, sengis, and golden moles --Shrews, solenodons, tree shrews, opossums, and morganucodonts. But they'll never become the same and can never hybridize. It doesn't matter how much living things look alike on the outside. The physiology determines what it is. The more distantly related they are, the deeper you have to look for similarities. But if they're related at all, then the deeper you look, the more similar they'll be. This branching tree of cousins and common ancestors marches all the way back 3.5 billion years and never deviates. If you trace the common ancestry of, say, chimps and humans back far enough, you'll come to what seem like a pair of similar siblings. If you go back further, tracing the ancestry of all catarrhine primates (Old World monkeys, including apes), you'll come to something which no longer exists and looked like none of the modern forms. What it did have were traits suited to its time and place that had the potential to develop into what those later animals became. Trace the ancestry of all mammals exclusively and you'll come to something built vaguely like a solenodon or echidna (it was neither). Trace the ancestry of all amniotes and you'll come to something like Solenodonsaurus, which is often mistaken for a lizard but isn't even a full amniote in any sense of the word. The angels. Oh [expletive] boy. Birds and some mammals can have scales on at least part of their bodies because they both derive from a form historically and traditionally referred to as "reptiles". However, MAMMALS CANNOT HAVE [expletive] FEATHERS NOR CAN THEY PRODUCE ANY GENE THAT WOULD PRODUCE FEATHERS! For one, feathers aren't fur. They're both based on two different types of keratin. Mammals have alpha keratin. Sauropsids (turtles, lizards, tuatara, crocodilians, birds) have beta keratin. Mutations can produce scales which superficially look like feathers (e.g., the hockey stick-shaped long scales on Longisquama) but aren't actually feathers. Feathers are a more complex construct than hair, scales, or pycnofibers which developed in a series of sequential stages represented by several successive species. It is a statistical improbability for an exact duplicate of this level of complexity to coincidentally emerge again in mammals. Then you have the structure beneath. A tetrapod skeleton is already incapable of supporting a third set of limbs. You simply cannot have the arms of a dinosaur grow out of the body of a catarrhine monkey, nor a horse. The flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz, the girl in the sky from Air, and winged aliens from Flash Gordon are right out. If we ever found this or any of the other freakish chimeras devised for any myth or movie, it would totally destroy the phylogeny currently attributed to evolution because neither the fossil record nor any organism's genome can account for mammals with two arms, two legs, and two other limbs, but certainly not if they're fully avian wings. TL;DR: Ah! My Goddess has officially joined the list of Anime and Manga Ruined by Science. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11586 |
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I wasn't necessarily "recommending" those titles, they just seemed to fit the criteria.  Junjou Romantica is frustrating (and the same-face syndrome makes it confusing as well), but it's very popular, so I guess as a research item, it's worth watching. I personally enjoy it just for hearing Takahiro Sakurai playing an airhead who's constantly freaking out about everything.
I would recommend Antique Bakery, Mirage of Blaze (you'll need to take notes to keep everyone straight (npi) unless you're a Japanese history buff) and Winter Cicada (and its manga forerunner Haru wo Daiteita, which also has an OVA, and maybe is another adult romance that could have been on the List), and definitely Ai no Kusabi (I prefer the 90's version - Justin liked it too). It's really difficult to find yaoi with healthy relationships though. They tend to get kind of rapey, and the characters tend to be in denial about even being gay (they more fall into the stupid "I'd go gay for him!" trope). :/ @ Lili-Hime: I've seen Noir and Aoi Hana, but didn't consider the former a romance, and the latter was about high school girls. It would never have occurred to me that Candy Boy was about lesbians! I might have to have a look at Devil Lady, which I'd heard of, but never checked out, so I didn't know it had any yuri elements. Thanks for the input!
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Lili-Hime
 Posts: 569 |
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Yeah no clue why it's called candy boy it has no male characters really. Trigger warnings on Devil Lady, full of violence and at one point yuri rape; though it's not very graphic. There's actually... three or four girls in love with the main character Jun if I remember correctly. She does choose one of them too It's very much a Chiaki Konaki work (the writer responsible for Serial Experiments Lain, Hellsing TV, and the Big O). As such expect a lot of WTF moments especially at the end.
This. This is my main problem with yaoi that prevents me from enjoying it. . One I'd reccomend with adult characters is No. 6. Such a great show, so cute. Is there a yaoi recommend thread??
spoiler[Bertholt and Reiner are far worse imho. Saying they didn't enjoy what they did is just projecting on to them. They're pretty much responsible for a quarter of all humanity dying. I've heard people try to sympathize with Bertholt, Reiner and Annie but I frankly don't care WHY they did what they did; they still killed thousands of people to do it. ] |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11586 |
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I think the one anime with adult maybe-lesbians that I can think of would be Sol Bianca: The Legacy (haven't seen the earlier 2 part OVA). The very butch Jan seems to be a lesbian in denial (and defensively homophobic when she encounters a non-stereotypical gay man), as are April and Feb, who are portrayed as just crewmates/friends, but act like an old married couple.
While they have hetero relationships, they pine for each other like love-sick puppies when they're apart, and they're the ones who end up together instead of with their male flings. Feb calls April "her sun" and when she leaves the ship, her good-bye is a reversed Tarot card, The Lovers. So there's something there reading between the lines, but alas, nothing overtly stated.
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malvarez1
Posts: 2095 |
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Man, the poll was so hard...so many people I could vote for.
In the end, I just submitted BlackWarGreymon (I mean...I guess you could argue that he was already redeemed, but still) |
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Hyperdrve
 Posts: 276 |
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Yeah it makes sense to note that people usually vote for what they recognize. I guess, as far as these polls are concerned, there's no solution for that. I usually don't vote on these polls except on this one where I added my own option, and there's no way (that I know of) to add your own option without voting. And the part about Attack on Titan gaining so many votes for the best zombie show and it even making its way into the poll in the first place was just silly. |
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browneyes23
Posts: 4 Location: Midwest US |
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Are we limited to TV series?
If not there are multiple Ghibli offerings, from Howel's Moving Castle to Porco Rosso, to The Wind Also Rises. Not anime but definitely romance: Densha Otoku side elements of romance: Hataraki Man, Salaryman Kintaro, Le Chevalier D'eon, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Princess and the Pilot |
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Ali07
 Posts: 3333 Location: Victoria, Australia |
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Well, I think that the last novel volume is going to be released next year in the U.S. Doubt that they're going to be making more anime, but you will be able to see how things go after season 2 and the ending of the whole series if you decide to spend some time and money on the novels. |
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wonderwomanhero
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I was looking at the poll and I noticed someone put Kristoph Gavin from the Phoenix Wright series. That's a video game, not an anime...
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mandisaw
 Posts: 140 |
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The "rape as meet-cute" trope is one of the biggest concerns I tend to have with yaoi series. I only pushed past it for Junjo Romantica because so many folks who know my tastes recommended it (the who's who cast is a plus, too). Gravitation and Level C (IIRC) don't use the trope (though they have their own trigger warnings) so I can recommend those. Fake and Yami no Matsuei were really good too, until the story(ies) took a nosedive. Second the rec for Mirage of Blaze - that's been on my "wish the novels were translated" list for over a decade now. It pushes my history buff, supernatural war, and yaoi fan buttons
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Mohawk52
Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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zensunni
 Posts: 1294 |
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Not to mention that... spoiler[his lack of backbone is actually EXPLAINED in the manga!]
Where exactly is this interbreeding you speak of? To my knowledge there are no human/Goddess children born in the series, or human/Demon for that matter... If you mean Urd, that isn't a major deal. There is nothing that suggests that Goddesses and Demons are from "different worlds", they just have different domains which are closed off from the other. That doesn't mean that they aren't essentially similar species. not to mention... [see below]
OK, The Goddesses and Demons in Ah! My Goddess are actually N-Dimensional beings. The form they take when on Earth is basically an avatar of sorts designed to function in a three-dimensional world. The magic they perform is basically advanced science and, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Fujishima-sensei based much of the world of A!MG on string theory, as it was understood in the mid to late 80s. In a sense, it is actually more science fiction than fantasy. As for the interbreeding issue, there isn't really any reason why beings with as advanced abilities as Belldandy or Hild wouldn't be able to manipulate genetics enough to make a viable hybrid. Of course, in the end, it is a FANTASY series. The suspension of disbelief is pretty much essential to enjoying just about any fantasy, whether it is anime, manga, novel, or live action movie. [BTW, the concept of interbreeding in Star Trek is handled quite easily by the "Progenitors"... spoiler[who were a race of advanced beings who are believed to have seeded planets all around the galaxy with the basic materials needed to evolve bipedal humanoid life.] That is a fairly common concept in Science Fiction, actually... |
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