I pulled these from the Viewing Journal thread...
I am shocked, sir. Shocked.
But no, I have heard similar sentiments expressed before from people who read the manga first.
I was shocked myself, to be honest; I'd expected to automatically like an anime adaptation of
Azumanga Daioh. But... I dunno. I guess what with the source material being such a winner, I was expecting something brimming with vitality, but I just found that first episode to be curiously flat and rather lifeless. I mentioned before (earlier in this thread, I think) that I've had this kind of thing happen before with things I've read in manga form first, where I can't help but develop... I don't want to say
preconceptions but certainly ideas about how certain characters would come across.
As you say, ayase, sometimes the version that's your first point of contact with something can't help but become your favourite. I've heard that said about the manga versus the anime of
Death Note (although, in this case, I actually saw the pair of Japanese live-action films first,
then read the manga, so I have a real soft spot for those films) and also of flagship J-horror title
Ring versus its Hollywood remake.
To be fair, though, I
have also had it happen the other way where I've read the manga first but then preferred the anime, so I think that, for me at least, the quality of the adaptation is still the dominant factor.
Maybe a 4-koma would be different, I've never actually read one.
Having said what I just did above, I'd probably find the original manga of
K-On and
Lucky Star kind of odd, being already so familiar with their anime adaptations. Especially
Lucky Star! I really couldn't imagine it without the episode-ending
Lucky Channel segments and the general KyoAni meta-humour.
Comedy in anime does tend to have some long silences, perhaps it's a Japanese thing
This is, yeah. Perhaps this would've been better suited to the Japanese Learning thread, but... this gets me thinking about something in the original
Ghost in the Shell anime. It's the part where Aramaki's Section 9 team are ready to move in on a man they suspect of being the Puppet Master, and where Batou fills Aramaki in on some recent discoveries via intercom. Batou asks Aramaki "How's the Puppet Master looking at
your end?"
Aramaki then pauses to think before answering "Like a puppet himself."
Incredibly, the makers of Manga's dub of the film must have felt that that pause was
too long, because they have the off-screen Batou interject after only a moment with "Chief, are you still there?"
That genuinely annoys me because there is nothing amiss with the timing of the original dialogue whatsoever. Culturally, pauses like that are more of a thing in Japanese conversation, simply because the words and ideas are being given more room to breathe, without feeling the need to fill the space from end to end.
