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Would someone be able to explain the appeal of the last exile to me? I remember starting it a long time ago and it not appealing to me so dropped it after a couple episodes. That’s literally all I remember.
 
Phobos said:
Would someone be able to explain the appeal of the last exile to me? I remember starting it a long time ago and it not appealing to me so dropped it after a couple episodes. That’s literally all I remember.
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Well, would someone be able to explain to me the appeal of Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill, Sailor Moon, My Hero Academia, the Big 5 Shonen anime, Idol anime, or CGDCT anime? None of that appeals to me in the least... :p
 
@Phobos
Last Exile is one of the few Steampunk shows out there. It's also having quite a very unique setting. (Though like 80% of that doesn't really come clear until the end. Actually I only really understood it with S2, where it's setting changes and puts S1's setting into a sort of global/galactic? perspective.) The cruelness, meaninglessness of war and finding peace is a topic. The characters were a bit hit and miss for me, but almost all of the recurring ones have more than one dimension. (And the main antagonist is one insane person, but with quite some powerful aura.) Also has a very good soundtrack of Hitomi Kuraishi (Dolce Triade).
The thing with the setting though is, you have to pay quite some attention to the details or you might get lost. There are main characters, but the whole plot is more like pieced together though multiple character issues/angles/roles. It's also pretty heavy on its specific atmosphere, which isn't for everybody I suppose. (The whole colour palette for one fits the setting perfect once you know what it actually is, but it's still not very much my taste.) S2 ist considerably different in... very much to almost everything. Many LE fans rather revile S2. Personally I found it a lot more straight forward than S1 and more pleasant on the first go. It's a pretty nice extension to the universe since it very much expands the setting. (Though the S1 setting never is really show again and almost all of old characters have pretty much just cameos.)
S1 is also one of those "not your typical anime show". There aren't many tropes. S2 however goes and dabbles into some.
 
Girls wIth Guns said:
Well, would someone be able to explain to me the appeal of Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill, Sailor Moon, My Hero Academia, the Big 5 Shonen anime, Idol anime, or CGDCT anime? None of that appeals to me in the least... :p
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Valid point.
Luna said:
@Phobos
Last Exile is one of the few Steampunk shows out there. It's also having quite a very unique setting. (Though like 80% of that doesn't really come clear until the end. Actually I only really understood it with S2, where it's setting changes and puts S1's setting into a sort of global/galactic? perspective.) The cruelness, meaninglessness of war and finding peace is a topic. The characters were a bit hit and miss for me, but almost all of the recurring ones have more than one dimension. (And the main antagonist is one insane person, but with quite some powerful aura.) Also has a very good soundtrack of Hitomi Kuraishi (Dolce Triade).
The thing with the setting though is, you have to pay quite some attention to the details or you might get lost. There are main characters, but the whole plot is more like pieced together though multiple character issues/angles/roles. It's also pretty heavy on its specific atmosphere, which isn't for everybody I suppose. (The whole colour palette for one fits the setting perfect once you know what it actually is, but it's still not very much my taste.) S2 ist considerably different in... very much to almost everything. Many LE fans rather revile S2. Personally I found it a lot more straight forward than S1 and more pleasant on the first go. It's a pretty nice extension to the universe since it very much expands the setting. (Though the S1 setting never is really show again and almost all of old characters have pretty much just cameos.)
S1 is also one of those "not your typical anime show". There aren't many tropes. S2 however goes and dabbles into some.
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thank you for the very detailed reply! Seems like on paper it should be more up my street, quite weird how things like this play out I guess.
 
Azar said:
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
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I was thinking that. It has things to say about abuse of power and war, with shades of grey rather than black and white, unlike other shows with characters screaming at each other and the power creep "oh, did we forget to mention if you do this you can be more powerful" then the same thing happening when the next bad guy shows up, and again and again.
 
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Phobos said:
thank you for the very detailed reply! Seems like on paper it should be more up my street, quite weird how things like this play out I guess.
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I actually didn't really like S1 the first time around. It was one of these "It's good. It does what it sets out to do. But I am not really impressed." sort of things. It got a lot better on retrospect and upon rewatching I found it very much better, too. Still fell like that the setting was not fully ultilized there. It has a lot of history, but not all that terribly much is reveiled, more like just hinted at. Which it probably also must keep it that way, because S1 is also one big mystery box style of show. (Which S2 totally isn't.)
 
Azar said:
@Girls wIth Guns Do like any shonen anime? Surely you must like at least 1 of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Hunter x Hunter 2011 or JoJo's Bizarre Adventure?
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Yeah, I liked both Full Metal Alchemist and Brotherhood, maybe FMA more so than Brotherhood. I own both the UE Gate collection from AL and the Funi CE briefcase set for FMA, and I have both of Funi's FMA:B Blu-ray sets - the original 5-volume release and the later 2 Volume Release. Plus, all the FMA movies and OVAs and such. But no, I don't care for HxH or Jojo. What irritates me the most are the battle-type shonen like the Big 5; I just want to rip my hair out when I try to watch even a single episode of DBZ, Bleach or Naruto, with all the never-ending power-ups and/or the eternal taunting back and forth over the course of a single fight spanning 3 episodes... :rolleyes: Why anyone would enjoy something like that is the real mystery to me... o_O

As for Last Exile, it was the first full anime series I ever watched, and I immediately fell in love with it - and I also love the OP. It and the second series I ever watched, Blood+, were basically responsible for getting me hooked on anime 6 years ago when I was already over 50 years old. Unlike many other Last Exile fans though, I thoroughly enjoyed Fam: The Silver Wing, even though it is quite different from the first series - and I feel it is absolutely necessary to watch both series back-to-back to get and understand the full story of the Exile Universe, basically like Luna just said.
 
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Girls wIth Guns said:
But no, I don't care for HxH
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I don't know what you tried of HxH, but I read the manga and watched both the old and the new anime. They are pretty diffrent in flavour, despite having (more or less) basically the same plot. (Aside from plot progress obviously). The old anime is directed by Furuhashi (Kenshin OVAs, Gundam Origin) and it totally makes a diffrence. The Manga is also a thing of itself. It's like a big buffet with all kinds of things served, where each dish could be its own show. (Which actually happens. Liar Game and Toriko are all about things that were also there as one little adventure in HxH.) And each adaption emphasised on some sort of dish more. The old anime (sans Greed Island) has a much more mature tone, while the newer one is more child-cartoonish in style.
I'm not much of a HxH fan myself, the but old anime is worth a try just for Furihashi's directing and the manga for seeing just how it does just about another very diffrent thing with each arc. I really don't like the 2011 anime much at all, though. It lessened those parts of the buffet I appreciated in favor of exactly those I didn't particularly like.

or Jojo. What irritates me the most are the battle-type shonen like the Big 5; I just want to rip my hair out when I try to watch even a single episode of DBZ, Bleach or Naruto, with all the never-ending power-ups and/or the eternal taunting back and forth over the course of a single fight spanning 3 episodes... :rolleyes: Why anyone would enjoy something like that is the real mystery to me... o_O
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Wait for moment. But Naruto isn't just Naruto either. Just look at this:
(It a ton better if you know the backstory.)
Naruto the anime has tons of problems, but occasionally you get these absolutely georgeous pieces, which are pure eyecandy. There is also the whole end fight of the shows two protagonists which isn't just a sequence but a couple of shole episodes, where studio pierrot went all out and you start to wonder just how great this show would be if they had the resources to put as much effort into the whole show. (Obviously never going to happen, but I prefer a bunch of episodes totoally discardably in favor of some great ones instead of mediocre ones across the board.)
Naruto the Manga suffers a bit less than the anime, still has it's problems especially after half time and Naruto the boy is absurdly annoying, but it still has its very strong moments.
I would recommend checking out Boruto. It's about as completely diffrent to Naruto as the second LE season is to its first, but makes up for a great extention in a similiar way and it would seem to me it's slowly fixing up what Naruto every just hinted at, but never went around to properly do. What's more, Boruto is catered at two audiences at the same time, one of which are the aged Naruto fans, who mostly went to become fathers themselves by now and the newer generation of current times, which the evolved setting represently pretty nicely. Also Boruto is not even 10% as obnoxious as Naruto was as a child. And you can start without having necessarily have watched all those Naruto episodes, though it definitely increases enjoyment to understand all the backgrounds. I didn't finished Naruto when I started, I had only read half of the manga, but then I went back and read it in one go did some cherry picking on the anime's best moments.

Bleach is all about the rule of cool. The author even says so himself, he wants to draw cool stuff and everything else is somewhow shoestrung around that (and at some point went from decent to down the drain.) Jojo is also very much all about being cool, but going about it in a diffrent sort of aesthehic and technique. Seems like you either like that or you don't. (I don't like Jojo for my part.)

I think you really need to have watched Shonen stuff in general at the right age at the right time, to be hooked on it and later feast onto all the nostalgia. So if you say you are already over 50 you might have long since missed the boat for it already. (Though there are of course
Shonens who offer more.) I was watching DB, when I was some 12 years old and found it decent enough with some cool ideas. (I still think Bulma's casule gadgets are something I'd really would like to have in reality) and DBZ's beginning did appeal to me when I was reading the manga at age 13 or something. Then I didn't get around it for some years and when I looked later it wasn't interesting at all anymore and I doubt at this point there is much of a chance it ever will. Also DB and DBZ was revolutionary for its time. Nowadays you have a ton of titles one to even three generations after which took what made DB/Z special and do it their own way with sometimes more tastier flavours. (Naruto for one.) But just as is with most things, the one who came first comes around to one is the "original" and everything else later doesn't feel as fresh.
(Speaking of that, DBZ could be accused of being a rip of of Saint Seiya, too. Only that Seiya probably is only known in the west in France and Italy.)


Also, some other hammer agrument: Knowing all that shonen stuff maxes out your Gintama enjoyment, once you got into that one. (Or Bakuman.)
 
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