ShadowStar219
About
Welcome to my profile, to make things easy, I have things hidden by spoiler tags below, whatever part of my profile you're interested, you can check it out there instead of sorting through my ramblings, my favorite shows are at the bottom because I couldn't get the GIFs to go behind spoiler tags.
Rating System:
Spoiler, click to view
Rating System:- 90% of my reasoning for scores I give are purely subjective and just how much I enjoyed the show.
- I rate lots of bad shows highly. For years I seeked out bad shows cause I enjoyed watching them. I'm easy to entertain.
- I'm more lenient, usually, on rating bad shows because I know what I'm getting myself into.
- I try to rate shows within the same genre. I wouldn't compare Death Note to K-on! rating wise, they're completely different. I don't always succeed in maintaning that rule though. Another kind of related thing to this, some animes just have ONE purpose. The easiest examples to use are comedy or ecchi animes. Comedy, they want to make you laugh, obviously. So how much I laugh affects the rating the most. For ecchi, do I need to explain? They just want to throw boobs at your face and call it a day.
- If you're outraged that I rated a show lowly, or one that you hate highly, I try my best to write little notes for every show. Just read that for an insight as to why.
10 - My favorites shows. These shows have stuck with me over the years somehow. They may not be 10/10s objectively or whatever, but these are the shows I come back to the most often.
9 - I enjoyed this show a lot but it just barely missed the mark to be a favorite of mine. If I give a show a 9.5, it's basically up there as one of my favorites but there's just something very small separating it from my clear cut 10s.
8 - 8s are usually just really solid shows and I enjoyed them a lot. If it's a seasonal show I watched as it was airing, I probably looked forward to it each week.
7 - The show is good and I enjoyed it. I don't feel strongly about the show other than the fact that I thought it was good or enjoyable, 7s are usually shows that I would probably feel comfortable recommending to people. Exceptions exist of course as I like garbage.
6 - I still enjoyed it but it really was hit or miss at times. It was fine, but there was a lot of boring episodes/scenes.
5 - 5s are one of two things. A show where I just went yep, that's a show alright and didn't really care about it. Or a show that did nothing wrong but I found REALLY boring (For example, I have Fastest Finger First as a 5/10. I originally had it as a 2/10 because it was THAT boring but again, it didn't really do anything wrong compared to the other shows I have as 2/10s). Basically, either way, I don't care that the show exists, it's whatever.
4 - 4/10s are shows that I didn't enjoy as a whole. They still barely pass by my standards but I was bored for the majority of it or it was on the verge of what I would consider to simply be objectively bad.
3 - It's not good, there wasn't much fun to be had in the anime.
2 - It's horrible, maybe had just one or two things I liked, but the negatives heavily outweigh the positives.
1 - It's just bad. No redeeming factors in this show.
0.5 - Hatsukoi Monster. If a show somehow is as bad as this anime, I will applaud it for all of the wrong reasons.
Manga ratings and a quick note regarding why their scores are different compared to my anime ratings.
Spoiler, click to view
So when it comes to manga, I'm pretty lenient on ranking them. Rather than being stuck watching a poorly paced show or bad animation, I can just read through it very fast or go back easily to make sense of things. I enjoy reading manga way too much for my own good. If I rate a manga anything lower than a 7, honestly, I probably just got lost and didn't understand what was happening, I thought it took too long to get going, or I thought it was far too bland, bland enough that even I couldn't enjoy it.Quick side note, I do not manually track my manga chapter progress. I usually read entire volumes in one sitting so I track that. I only track chapters for series I follow online regularly
If I had to do a quick rating system for manga, here's a general outline of what it would look like.
8-10, I really enjoyed these series and most likely binged them in just a few days.
6-7: Overall, I enjoyed them but some chapters were meh.
3-5: Just boring. It had it's moments but I was most likely lost in the story/action and just need to reread it (Such as Blade of the Immortal or I Am a Hero, both fine series, I genuinely just got lost somewhere along the way and didn't understand what was happening)
1-2: Never have had a manga this low and probably never will. But if I did, it would be out of morbid curiosity of how bad it could get
Dropped Shows:
Spoiler, click to view
- I try to write notes for every show I drop to explain why. - The reasoning for why I drop shows is completely random. Even if I enjoy a show, there can be a week of it's airtime that I don't feel like watching it and then I'll just never go back to it. Or in some cases, I start watching a show while I'm doing something else just as background noise and then just never finish it. - A big reason for why I drop shows is I watch too many at a time. Often times, I'll watch an episode of a show and just forget to put in on my watching list and then never go back to it and then randomly remember it a while later. - People typically use a 3 episode rule. I'm in 2 boats. I watch one episode and just drop it there. Or I get to roughly episodes 6-8 and drop them there. For the latter, usually I had some hope that it would get good but it just didn't.Below are my favorite 10 shows. I would love to get the entire thing into a spoiler tag to make it neater but for some reason, it won't. I guess cause it's text with GIFs and the spoiler tag can't do both at the same time? So here's a wall of text with my favorite shows. Also, small note, my top 3 are solidly that. My top 3. 4-10 really, I could swap them around a bit here and there, especially spots like 8-10, I could remove them and replace them with another anime, there's just so many to choose from, so don't take the rankings so literally. Any honorable mentions, just scroll down a bit more (or click at the top there on my profile where it says favorites) to where Anilist lists whatever shows a user has favorited, you can see the rest of my favorites that are on the cusp on being in my top 10 there.
At the time of writing this, I haven't even seen season 2. I have never had a show hit me so hard and have such a relatable cast of characters. Every character serves a purpose of some kind, there is no wasted scenes in this show. The animation is beautiful, Shaft did an excellent job and the author proved that they understand depression/anxiety super well. The only negative I can think of for this show and it's a nitpick is that the shogi matches drag on at times which is really only a problem because I don't understand how Shogi is played.
Update: So I started March Comes in like a Lion season 2 on 10/9/21. Today is 10/4/22 and I just finished it. It took me essentially a year to finish this series. I just didn't want it to end. Genuinely, far and away, this is the best show I have ever seen. People talk about certain animes changing their lives, I never felt like any anime had touched me in a way that I could say it genuinely affected my life... that was until this show as well as what's next on my list which I watched only a few months after March Comes in Like a Lion, I got hit by the ol' one two.
Arguably my favorite manga. This adaptation just ended today as I write this and it just blew me away. Cloverworks skipped a few things here and there which is to be expected, but for everything they skipped, they more than made up for. They kept Marin and Gojo's relationship as wholesome as it was in the manga, Gojo's development is still there in the anime, the comedy is still there, etc... I now understand the joy that manga reader's have when their favorite series gets turned into an anime, and a successful one at that. Everything that made me love the manga just got brought to life. A lot of people will say that this show isn't that deep, I would agree but the things it does hit on such as Gojo's anxiety, it hits home hard. Then you have Marin being well... herself which to me is the kind of person I aspire to be so to me, Marin was an inspirational character.
Black Lagoon is just pure fun. The fact it doesn't have an end goal or an overarching story and each arc is kind of it's own but still connected to previous ones loosely makes it very easy to watch. If you feel like turning your brain off, you can just enjoy the great action sequences which this show has plenty of. If you want to analyze the characters, theres tons of room to do so, each character is fleshed out a ton and all offer something to the series. There's very little wasted potential in this show, basically everything had a point or fits somewhere. It also has Balalaika, in the GIF above, arguably my favorite anime character of all time.
Alright, potential recency bias. I was a manga reader before the anime came out though so I've always known I've loved this series. It just has such a flow to it where everything just goes together, the characters make sense, and while things seem insignificant in the moment, they come back later to bloom into something larger. There are very few things that miss the mark in this series, I think the only issue is that you have all these competent highly educated nobles but the peasant girl is like the only one able to figure out anything so bit of a mary sue situation but MaoMao is the star of the show and is so likeable that I just don't care.
I absolutely love this show. It has everything I could want from a slice of life that isn't just moe blob. Fun cast of characters with their own problems that aren't too deep/intricate and it develops them smoothly (mainly Nijika and Bocchi), amazing comedy (and I usually hate comedy anime), and finally the music... I love every song in this show. The OP, the EDs, the songs they play in the concerts, every single one. Also, the visual creativity of this show is just astounding. I applaud Cloverworks for the clear love and passion they put into adapting this 4 koma manga. This show experiments with more styles in just 12 episodes than most shows do with several seasons. I much prefer this sort of animation to anything like Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, etc... Of course they have stellar animation too but Bocchi's is just SO entertaining to watch as it shifts from joke to joke. The tl;dr here is that Bocchi is a one of a kind anime. It really is. I've seen 530, and counting, anime and I would be hard pressed to name another show with as much creativity in it while executing such a simple premise.
You know what I love? Anime that are just unashamed of what they are and roll with the punches. Highschool of the Dead is exactly that. If you've heard of this anime, it's quite famous for a variety of reasons. Mainly it's fan service and the infamous scene of a sniper bullet going between one of the main girls' boobs as she's dodging. HOTD is unapologetic about how ridiculous it is. But it really is more than it's raunchy fan service. It's not often you get to see such a grounded and brutal depiction of an ongoing fresh apocalypse. The world of HOTD is unforgiving, seemingly everyone around the main cast succumbs eventually. There's still a feeling of tension present in each episode despite them throwing boobs and panties in your face all the time. It's unironically fascinating at how they managed to balance these elements to create this story. This show simply put is fun. I love going back and rewatching it, it's just a blast.
This one is a bit difficult for me to explain. I don't particularly think it's story or characters are incredible nor is it's animation. But something about this anime has always captivated me and I have gone back and rewatched it a few times. Despite understanding it's flaws, I'm not saying it's bad by any means but it is by no means amazing either, I just love this anime. It has always just flowed well to me. I guess the biggest reason I may like it is probably it's romance. Stella and Ikki waste no time. They understand their feelings for one another fairly quick and progress from there. Then you have the fights and again, outside of a key few moments, the animation is fairly average most of the time. But I think the concepts of them were always cool to me, how Ikki is the weakest in the traditional sense but has mastered one specific art that lets him temporarily break his limits and it's more about him finding that opening to activate his ability. I really think that I just see a ton of potential in this show but it got shafted out of a season 2 while an inferior identical clone cough The Asterisk War cough got the season 2 instead. This show has so much more to offer but who knows if we'll get to see it animated. I still love it anyway.
Cute girls doing cute things. A genre as old as time in the world of anime. New Game is such an enjoyable watch. The cast are so fun and bounce off each other so well. The story is extremely simple leading to a relaxing experience and season 2 delves more into some more "serious" topics but still keeps it light hearted. There's not much else to say about this show, we all know what these kind of shows are like. Not much happens typically, how good they are is entirely dependent on their characters and New Game has such a colorful cast.
Incredible coming of age romance. Ichikawa and Yamada's relationship is one of the best written dynamics I've seen in a while. Ichikawa going from his edgy reclusive self that fantasizes about murdering Yamada to opening up and working through his own insecurities while Yamada takes a step out of her world and comfort zone to be with the awkward, to be blunt, loser of the class just screams generic and male fantasy crap. But it's done so well. The audience and characters are never forced into these weird situations that romance shows like to do where characters are forced to come to terms with their feelings and their entire dynamic changes from there. The Dangers in my Heart is a gradual climb there until it slowly boils over and they can't deny their feelings anymore and then it becomes a waiting game of okay, when will they confess? And luckily, you don't have to wait that long.
I did not expect to enjoy this anime so much. This is how you write a romance show though. Characters that develop for their own sake and not because the ultimate goal is that they need to be in a relationship. It's a fairly simple plot but it works really well. It also helps that because it's a yuri romance, it can focus on different aspects a normal romance can't. And also, unlike other Yuri shows, it doesn't play that up a ton either. Lots of yuri shows shove it in your face that it's two girls. It's hard for me to describe this show cause it's a simple romance, but in this current climate of anime where everything needs a big twist, rom coms are everywhere, etc... it's just nice to see such a simple premise executed so well. Also I have a special attachment to it. It was both my first manga and series I bought on bluray. Funny story about the bluray. I attended Otakon 2022. I don't buy blurays ever. I just don't. I specifically said to my friend at Otakon that even if I saw my favorites, I would not buy them. Then he randomly found Bloom into You Collectors Edition, normally a $150 purchase, and since it's not produced anymore, $200 scalped everywhere... for $115. I had to.
