Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Having Fun with Deadpool's Fourth Wall-Breaking Manga
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Dr. Wily
Posts: 384 |
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Big same. I mean I know it's partially my own fault for getting spoiled on stuff since I follow this and other entertainment news sites, but I love when a show (or book or game or whatever) has an early twist. I think the last one I saw that genuinely got me was, as you guys mentioned, the Scott Pilgrim show. I stayed up wayyyy too late trying to marathon it because I was hooked. These days unless you deliberately avoid reading news articles about them and don't watch trailers, practically any spoiler gets blown immediately. I think it's just another consequence of the internet age and spoiler culture. I mean people do still get fooled by marketing, but if you look up movies with trailers that fooled people (which I did) about what a movie would be like, the vast majority of modern/recent ones aren't deliberate misleads but just the marketing team being really bad at their jobs. Funny story to loop it all back to Deadpool, apparently Ryan Reynolds really wanted to do the thing Viz did with the Deadpool manga (well not exactly the same, but close) with Deadpool & Wolverine, making a whole-ass fake movie poster and advertising campaign for an intentionally bad movie that would only be revealed as D&W like 5 minutes in. |
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LR.Skyrabbit
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Good thing I routinely skip the intro paragraphs before these conversation pieces - otherwise the 'Good kids watch the discussed anime legally
 !' disclaimer would have spoiled the scope of this disguised article.
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Cho_Desu
 Posts: 242 |
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Talentless Nana is probably the one time a fake-out first episode/chapter has truly worked for me, and by the end of that first episode I was completely hooked. I also agree though that it tells a story that goes into progressively more interesting directions (with the anime stopping just before the series practically makes a 180 plot-wise—and in a way that makes sense). In other words, it's a story that pulls off a "trick" more than once, and in increasingly more engaging ways from arc to arc.
Incidentally, each of my friends who checked out the anime after I recommended it were also taken by surprise from the first-episode twist. Some liked it, and some did not. But that's how it goes for stories that take a big risk. I perhaps value being surprised by a story than most, when so many feel rote and by-the-numbers to me. |
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Shay Guy
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I have… complicated feelings about The Executioner and Her Way of Life. Or rather, the discourse around it, because I haven’t actually seen it. I’ve been thinking maybe I should, if only so I’m qualified to have an opinion on the actual work. And because what I’ve heard about the worldbuilding sounds like it could be good inspiration for my own writing.
But the discourse gets uncomfortable for me, and I suppose this is as good a starting point as any:
The thing is, as y’all and your fellow critics have assured me, those generally aren’t good. I find myself drawn to isekai partly because it interests me intellectually, but also because of the same base cravings that draw a lot of other people in. Because as a cishet dude with a lot of “loser” traits, there’s a lot of the archetypical isekai narrative that connects with me. The desire for escape in general, the desire for friendship, romance, sex. The desire to be significant, to accomplish things of value, to be valuable, to find a space where you’re valued and wanted. Little things like the desire to be able to see clear progress toward your goals and have a clear sense of your own capabilities (which is of course what underlies the rightly-maligned status menus). Even, like… expanding to otaku fiction as a whole, you know how so many harem protagonists are just totally oblivious to all these girls being into them? I’ve made fun of those too, but the psychological root of not being able to believe you could be desired is one I can absolutely relate to. So every now and then I end up looking through isekai manga and webnovels on my phone, but it tends to be a frustrating experience, because so many of them are essentially slop, and the worlds and characters are too unconvincing to be satisfying even as fantasies (and that’s putting aside how many spite-fueled narratives there are, which isn’t remotely what I crave). Even when I get hooked on one bit of wish-fulfillment for a while, it feels like eating a whole bag of potato chips. Even the better stories like Re:Zero tend to be frustrating for one reason or another; I’m not sure I’ve read any that I’d put on par with, say, Lois McMaster Bujold’s books. Well, maybe that’s too high a bar. I dunno, did The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic hold up? I kept hearing good things, at least early on, but I never checked it out when I had a CR subscription. Anyway. The Executioner and Her Way of Life is on HIDIVE, and I’ll be finishing BokuYaba S2 on my next treadmill walk, so maybe I’ll check it out. I think the key thing I’d want to determine from that first episode would be how we’re supposed to feel about Mitsuki, and by extension his death. Are we supposed to see Menou as an antihero, someone doing awful-but-necessary things to kids who don’t deserve it for the greater good? That seems like the dramatically compelling way to go about it, but then you’d want to write him as someone the audience could actually get invested in, and would be willing to follow the story of. What I’ve seen instead is people describing him as intentionally generic (and therefore, implicitly, his death is of no loss). And they don’t talk about the death like it was something horrific that got them deeply interested in Menou’s story. Rather, while I’m not comfortable hunting for specific quotes, the general reaction from people who liked the show kinda came across as… “I really like that the cishet dude dies horribly. More shows should have cishet dudes die horribly.” And yeah, it’s an awkward subject, but there’s a gendered aspect to all this. I still sometimes think about a tweet I saw years ago that said, “Every fandom group I've been in, the same has held true: the higher percentage of cishet white boys, the more the community sucks. The lower, the better it is.” I’m really sensitive to the idea of myself, or people like me in general, as an unwanted contaminant (probably the thing I find most relatable about Kyotaro Ichikawa). And… well, I’ve had some uncomfortable feelings about the yuri media I’ve seen, which often seems to go out of its way to remove male characters from the picture entirely. (I haven’t read or watched Bloom Into You – I know it has Seiji Maki, who seems to be well-liked, but apparently he’s also aromantic, and therefore “safe”? It makes me wonder if it’s possible for a straight male character to play a similarly positive supporting role in that kind of story, as a friend or family member. Maybe Akira’s brother in Sweet Blue Flowers, judging from the character profiles on MAL.) Maybe you’ll say it’s not about him being a guy but a generic guy, and this is where I’ll admit that I’m not really fond of the “Potato-kun” slang. For one thing, again, it’s a gendered term for an issue that comes up in a good number of female webnovel protagonists too – I’ll take William G. Maryblood over *looks up name* Yuna from Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear any day. But also, in real life, there are no uninteresting people, just uninteresting characterization. The problem with the protagonists of the slop I criticized isn’t that they’re dislikable in themselves, like the horror movie character you’re rooting for the monster to eat (e.g., the psychiatrist in Cat People), or Harlan, the man who commits an Ankh-Morpork suicide in Thelma & Louise. The problem there is just lazy writing that doesn’t sell the illusion of a real person. And that doesn’t become good writing, even good “heel” writing, just because you say Mitsuki’s characterization is half-assed on purpose. In Doki Doki Literature Club, it has a function, because the PC is explicitly an empty shell with no personality; I haven’t heard anything about the isekai process in Virgin Road doing anything like that to Lost Ones (though of course I don’t know about any post-ep1 twists). So if someone’s enthusiastic about a “Potato-kun” dying, it kinda sounds like saying his death is something to cheer for because he hasn’t been given solid characterization – and therefore, that such a (male) character starts out in a default state of worthlessness until the writer convinces you otherwise. There’s also what Nick says about Menou “playing up the love interest role”, which is similar to what I recall from the first manga chapter of Talentless Nana, and… one of the big focuses of my social anxiety is the idea of people who are nice to me secretly despising me, and only putting up with me because they have to. I still have trauma over some of the times people have dropped their masks and shown me what they really thought. So you’ll forgive me if that’s not a selling point either. …Well, that sure ended up being almost 1200 words of babble, mostly in stupidly long paragraphs. Sorry if it didn’t make sense to anyone but me. If you wanna screencap it and dunk on me for Twitter clout, I’d prefer you didn’t, but I can’t stop you. |
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2412 |
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FishLion
 Posts: 266 |
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I don't think that isn't necessarily how it has to be seen. Stories deal in concepts, not actual people. Potato-kun clearly doesn't represent a real person, they are meant to represent the idea of a boring and generic protagonist. You can be very cruel to Potato-kun to show disdain for these types of boring protagonists while clearly not feeling every generic man should be murdered. In a way, it isn't all that different from Deadpool driving through the protag of the pretend manga that it pretends to be for shock, it is a conceptual murder where you are killing the boring story concept, not so that Deadpool can show how much he hates men who star in romcoms personally. If people are excited about Potato-kun dying because he's generic, it is because the boring protagonist that dominates this type of media has been removed from the story vengefully and not some animus against generic men in general. It isn't that men are worthless and worthy of murder until characterized, it's that they are acting as a stand-in for stories where they are given free reign and importance despite their lack of virtue, talent, charisma, or even decency. People should phrase it better than "more cishet dudes should die horribly," but anyone who wants a whole group of people to actually die horribly should seek help. The same logic can be applied in yuri, if you are sick of being fed nonstop men-sexually-harassing-women-shenanigans by anime and you want yuri that kills off these creepy men or a slice of life that sidelines the more innocent but constant flirting of straight men so that you can focus on the girls it can be cathartic. It doesn't mean men deserve to die for being creepy or you want a world without men, it just means you want to focus on ideas and characters that more mainstream stories typically don't. I get if your take is different and you disagree, but I did want to point out a reading that does not demonize men in general. It is much more relevant in an artistic way than a "real feelings about men" way, otherwise you could say enjoying anything in the horror genre would indicate a desire for murder. Also, as far as fandom, I would also be suspicious of a mostly cishet, white fandom. Not because I feel there is anything inherently "contaminating" as you put it, but rather because if you can walk into a large fandom space and not find a single person of color or queer person it could be a sign that you aren't welcome. It isn't always the case, I'm sure the majority are welcoming, but I would also bet the fandoms that are toxic do have mostly cishet white dude because they have made it clear others aren't welcome and have made an effort to keep people out. |
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 1440 |
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Honestly, it's really frustrating to see the same topic get rehashed from when Executioner premiered, including lengthy assumptions about it made by folks who haven't actually watched even the first episode.
For one, it's clear within the context of the story that Menou killing the fake-out protagonist isn't some gleeful revenge or rejection of male protagonists. The driving lore of the story is that "Lost Ones" (read: isekai protagonists) are always granted powerful and dangerous abilities, and are continuously being used by people in power as essentially WMDs, and can pose apocalypse-level threats if their powers get out of control - which happens often because they're being wielded by teenagers. Menou, as her job, has killed numerous Lost Ones, male and female, regardless of their personality. Furthermore, she not only mourns the people she kills, but assures them that they are not to blame. She views them as victims of her own world's corruption, and takes their lives only because she feels it's necessary, while also taking on missions to prevent such summonings. The only reason the Fake Out guy is male is because the story is pulling an intentional bait-and-switch. 99% of isekai leads are guys, and the cultural conception of Narou-based isekai is that of a bland guy - with some possible resentment issues over being bullied or ostracized in his past life - being granted incredible powers, and having everything explained to him by a local girl who inevitably becomes his love interest. The premiere has multiple moments to touch on typical tropes - like the guy theorizing that he could use his otherworldly knowledge to strike it rich by introducing mayonnaise (why is it always mayo?) only to learn some other Lost One did that centuries ago. It is purposefully presenting a highly typical kind of character for this kind of story, while peppering in slight hints that something is off, so that when Menou kills him it's a surprise, and causes a shift in the narrative as we learn who she is and why she does what she does. If we come off as elated over this turn of events, it's only because of how much of a relief it is to get a story that is immediately more interested and complex than 95% of isekai adaptations, not because the dead person is a guy. (If you hadn't noticed, both Chris and I are men, and demographically in the exact strike zone for a typical male power fantasy.) I've also seen more than enough female-led isekai that were just as boring and generic as the male-lead ones that just starring a girl isn't enough to get me interested. |
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MagicianMan
Posts: 126 |
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The Executioner and Her Way of Life has nothing to do with emasculating men. It's a story about an assassin trying (and failing) to find a way around her target's immortality while also trying (and failing) to not develop feelings for her. She's also tasked with handling the fallout of the disasters lost ones cause with their "cheat powers", intentionally or not. The show never treats Menou's job as something to be celebrated, regardless of whether her targets are actually malicious (the antagonist of the anime's last arc is one of the most legitimately horrifying opponents I've seen in an isekai) or just innocent people put in a situation they didn't ask for with a power they can't control (like the dude in the first episode).
It's a Yuri story with predominantly female cast, so, if you're not interested in that, it probably won't be for you. That's ok. People other than you can have shows that cater to them, and you are also allowed to not be interested in those shows and move on. You don't need to feel like you missed out or feel personally attacked that one good show chose to brutally subvert your specific power fantasy. Last edited by MagicianMan on Sat Aug 24, 2024 7:22 am; edited 7 times in total |
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2484 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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Guys, you are going to love the upcoming English-language release of the Kimi ga Nozomu Eien visual novel, better known in English from the title of its anime adaptation, Rumbling Hearts. As its EN webpage thoroughly illustrates, it’s a story of sweet, innocent high school romance. It’s just the thing to calm your restless soul, and if you’re looking for something to really peg your interest, I recommend pursuing the green-haired girl. |
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a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Posts: 551 Location: Poland |
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I think you should, if you have complicated feelings about it, because most of it was complete bullshit from the side of dectractors, since as already mentioned first episode clearly showed isekaied kids as victims, with MC explicitly telling the guy as she killed him "You're not to blame. I'm the murderer here, and you're the victim.". We also learn that she became orphan due to another, this time female isekaied teen losing control over her power, and that girl is also shown as a victim, reinforcing the theme. All this in first episode. People getting angry over this series were in the wrong, and showed unpleasant side to the whole community in their defensiveness. As for reviewers, one of them also mentioned his dislike of My Hero Academia as reason why he enjoyed the Nana's murder streak, in similar way. Yet somehow no one had a problem with Nana's murders of kids with legally distinct Quirks, or even people who cheered her on, though admittedly I only saw that kind of cheering on ANN. People just sometimes vocally and exaggeratedly dislike some types of stories, especially if their genre also get popular while bringing lot of badly written stories on the wave of the fad. Look at typical super-negative reactions to NTR storylines, which is also recently popular genre with a lot of badly written stories, just like Narou genres. EDIT: I'd even say that "Executioner..." is actually nicer to the isekaied teens than several other stories I've read, making most of them unwilling dangers and victims, compared to stuff like Failure Frame or Instant Death, where bus of kids gets isekaied and most of them turn into sociopathic monsters with their powers, or "No longer allowed in Another World" which also has a theme of isekaied characters horribly abusing their powers, or not yet adopted into anime "The Serial Killer Descends Into Another World", where isekaied serial killer gets charged by goddess with murdering isekai heroes turned into overpowered edgy villains. The whole theme of "isekaied characters are actually dangers to their new world" is becoming quite common for several years already, so I don't know why Executioner got singled out. Seems to me that people were prejudiced against it because it was yuri, so they created the "man-hating lesbian MC" narrative. As "Potato-kun" from isekai, many people also dislike tsunderes (if they mostly encountered the violent ones in their fiction), or bland indecisive harem romcom MCs. IMHO there just are some annoying tropes in fiction, and some of theme are character tropes. With regards to yuri media and lack of guys, while I agree some of them are that way, and it sometimes feels unrealistic to me, the one that has gone the most is AFAIK "Gushing over magical girls..." which doesn't have single male character, even crowds of spectators watching the fights are all women when you look closely, yet I haven't seen single guy complaining about feeling excluded by that manga or its anime adaptation, so I don't know if that's such a big problem. Many shonen manga, like delinquent ones, have at most one or two girls in the cast, who barely do anything anyway, its all about bromance, yet Tokyo Revengers is very popular with female readers. Last edited by a_Bear_in_Bearcave on Sat Aug 24, 2024 10:30 am; edited 5 times in total |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4631 Location: New York |
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While it’s not a manga example, a pretty good comic book example of a fakeout intro occurred as recently as last year with the book Void Rivals, which was advertised as another creator-owned book from Robert Kirkman, the guy who made Invincible and The Walking Dead. He was just finishing up another creator owned book called Fire Power (essentially his indie take on the Iron Fist mythos) and promoted the book as a space opera.
Then the middle of the book occurs, and while it’s been spoiled to high heaven by repeated printings with new covers, the first issue has the two protagonists spoiler[find a spaceship that’s revealed to be Jetfire. As in the Transformer. It’s then followed by a short essay at the end of the book indicating Void Rivals was the first of a shared universe including them, the Transformers, and GI Joe.] I feel like comics and manga are one of the only mediums where you can still pull off these kinds of fake outs, because of the smaller audience and less cooks in the kitchen, so to speak. You don’t have to coordinate with several ad agencies and actors doing promotional tours, so these things can sneak in. And when done right, they get attention. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11616 |
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Does Ga-Rei Zero fit the topic? The twist at the end of the first ep was not so much a switch in what the show would be about, but rather who it would be about.
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