Understated Romance and Scifi Anime
Mar. 30th, 2024 11:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrI offered to try and find some romance anime for Cam that are low on over the top Anime Style Humour And Silliness, and ended up adding some scifi too.
And since I've made the list I thought I might as well post it here!
Given
Disaffected teen boy meets sad beautiful boy and the two inspire each other with music. Very good, with emotional complexity and intense feelings.
Skip and Loafer
Really good light hearted story about an ambitious but naive girl from the country and a burned out ex child star boy in her class. They are not together yet by the end of the anime but still have enjoyable arcs.
Horimiya
Ok het highschool rom-com. Very first scene is weird about a teacher being sleazy and then it never comes up again.
A Sign of Affection
A deaf girl meets a nice boy at college. A bit bland but cute.
Recovery of an MMO Junkie
Depressed 30 year old woman spends all day in an MMO, not realising her in-game bff is the cute younger guy she keeps bumping into. Their growing shippiness is complicated by both of them playing characters of the opposite gender. The real world parts are reasonably realistic but it gets over the top for the game world so YMMV. Very cute romance.
Re-Life
The premise of this is silly: a depressed adult man is given the chance to redo his final year of highschool to "restart" his life. But the romance is cute.
Planetes
I watched this a million years ago and any romance was pretty understated, but it's good mundane near future hard scifi about a bunch of space garbage collectors.
I didn't finish:
Chihayafuru:
Really good drama about a bunch of highschoolers playing cards NO TRUST ME IT'S GOOD. I loved the first two seasons but never got around to watching the rest, I hear it does eventually settle the love triangle but it's mostly more of an ensemble drama than romance.
March comes in like a Lion
Depressed teen boy slowly opens up with the help of a family he meets. Perfectly fine and well regarded just didn't grab me.
The Time of Eve:
Near future scifi where humanoid robots are treated as second class citizens. Seems fine but I got bored.
Trigun Stampede:
From what I saw can be pretty over the top but has some cool scifi-wild-west moments. No romance afaict.
Tsuki Ga Kirei
Middle scool romance I hear is very cute if you can get past the show shipping a middle schooler and his teacher (they're side characters and don't get together but I still could not)
Never Watched But I Hear It's Good:
Dennou Coil
Kids encounter some sort of weird scifi thing involved virtual reality.
Space Brothers:
Reasonably realistic story about astronauts
Steins;Gate
Time travel scifi. Based on a game I hear is also good.
I would rec Violet Evergarden since that seems like Cam's jam but I hear the romance/general plot is bittersweet? Which is why I have never watched it either.
And I would add Monster but Cam is already planning on watching it.
EDIT: Haaa, sent the list to Cam and he said the vast majority of it looked too teenage, too bland, or had too many exaggerated expressions, and we decided it would be easier to try and help him find live action dramas to watch instead.
But a friend pointed out I forgot .hack/sign, which probably wouldn't appeal to Cam but might to anyone else reading who's into romantic scifi.
EDIT 2: Having discussed it further with Cam, I have realised I still don't entirely GET what it is he doesn't click with in anime, but there really isn't much point reccing him anime because he finds so much of it unwatchable in a sort of... hard wired "this is physically unpleasant" way.
And since I've made the list I thought I might as well post it here!
Given
Disaffected teen boy meets sad beautiful boy and the two inspire each other with music. Very good, with emotional complexity and intense feelings.
Skip and Loafer
Really good light hearted story about an ambitious but naive girl from the country and a burned out ex child star boy in her class. They are not together yet by the end of the anime but still have enjoyable arcs.
Horimiya
Ok het highschool rom-com. Very first scene is weird about a teacher being sleazy and then it never comes up again.
A Sign of Affection
A deaf girl meets a nice boy at college. A bit bland but cute.
Recovery of an MMO Junkie
Depressed 30 year old woman spends all day in an MMO, not realising her in-game bff is the cute younger guy she keeps bumping into. Their growing shippiness is complicated by both of them playing characters of the opposite gender. The real world parts are reasonably realistic but it gets over the top for the game world so YMMV. Very cute romance.
Re-Life
The premise of this is silly: a depressed adult man is given the chance to redo his final year of highschool to "restart" his life. But the romance is cute.
Planetes
I watched this a million years ago and any romance was pretty understated, but it's good mundane near future hard scifi about a bunch of space garbage collectors.
I didn't finish:
Chihayafuru:
Really good drama about a bunch of highschoolers playing cards NO TRUST ME IT'S GOOD. I loved the first two seasons but never got around to watching the rest, I hear it does eventually settle the love triangle but it's mostly more of an ensemble drama than romance.
March comes in like a Lion
Depressed teen boy slowly opens up with the help of a family he meets. Perfectly fine and well regarded just didn't grab me.
The Time of Eve:
Near future scifi where humanoid robots are treated as second class citizens. Seems fine but I got bored.
Trigun Stampede:
From what I saw can be pretty over the top but has some cool scifi-wild-west moments. No romance afaict.
Tsuki Ga Kirei
Middle scool romance I hear is very cute if you can get past the show shipping a middle schooler and his teacher (they're side characters and don't get together but I still could not)
Never Watched But I Hear It's Good:
Dennou Coil
Kids encounter some sort of weird scifi thing involved virtual reality.
Space Brothers:
Reasonably realistic story about astronauts
Steins;Gate
Time travel scifi. Based on a game I hear is also good.
I would rec Violet Evergarden since that seems like Cam's jam but I hear the romance/general plot is bittersweet? Which is why I have never watched it either.
And I would add Monster but Cam is already planning on watching it.
EDIT: Haaa, sent the list to Cam and he said the vast majority of it looked too teenage, too bland, or had too many exaggerated expressions, and we decided it would be easier to try and help him find live action dramas to watch instead.
But a friend pointed out I forgot .hack/sign, which probably wouldn't appeal to Cam but might to anyone else reading who's into romantic scifi.
EDIT 2: Having discussed it further with Cam, I have realised I still don't entirely GET what it is he doesn't click with in anime, but there really isn't much point reccing him anime because he finds so much of it unwatchable in a sort of... hard wired "this is physically unpleasant" way.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-30 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 10:17 am (UTC)In the end we decided anime is just not for him, but it does look like a very interesting show.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-31 02:31 pm (UTC)I swear to god this is how every paragraph or sentence about reccing Chihayafuru to others starts sdlakfjdas I got into it through ProZD (voice actor including anime voice actor) who has it in his top 3 anime (that might since have changed). And even when he recced it he was like 'NO TRUST ME IT'S GOOD' dsalkfkjads
I really liked Violet Evergarden but I also cried EVERY SINGLE EPISODE and not happy crying either. I didn't even get as far as the romance arc, the entire first season is 'I am hopelessly plodding on through life even though I have been abandoned by the love of my life which is Understandable because I am not real like all these other people around me' and they lean into that REALLY hard.
I should watch further ahead but like, it got paaaainful.
I'll see if I can think of anything else that Cam might like, but Rakugo might be something to consider! Historical Japanese drama about the drama of rakugo through multiple generations of Japan - the first episode is a bit campy, Cam should really wait until after the second to make a judgement. But no chibis (from memory), no OTT (comparatively). It does have some tragic elements. And of course following characters through multiple generations does mean some of those characters eventually die. But imho it's critically acclaimed for good reasons.
There are romantic elements (including very strong homoeroticism as the writer of the manga also wrote BL, though Rakugo never was), including a love triangle which may or may not be a deal breaker. But it's not a Chihayafuru love triangle, it's 'a very ace-coded (or extremely repressed) disabled man and the woman (who is also a sex worker/geisha) who is into him and his best friend who he's low-key in love with who really likes the woman and at some point they both have sex with her at different times for different reasons and ace-coded man ends up raising the child of his best friend and that woman and feels extremely complicated about it.' It feels less soap opera-ey to me and more 'actually yeah I can see how this happened in a culture with almost no communication, repression, and it being generally very emasculating for men to have disabilities at the time.'
The show is actually mostly through the eyes of characters who are in their 20s / 30s / 50s / etc. Though there are some parts with child protags. Tbh he might not like it at all, it's definitely not a romance. One of the reasons it doesn't have exaggerated expressions is because a lot of it is quite tragic. Wanting a romance without the exaggerated expressions means basically not wanting anime or something animated from Japan. That's very cultural.
I would recommend Twelve Kingdoms / Juuni Kokki - it was never finished, unfortunately, but there are definitely romantic storylines (light) and it's high fantasy / epic fantasy / early isekai. From memory there's almost no chibification of over-exaggeration, and it holds up given it was made like 30~ years ago. It is however a teenager protagonist T.T There's so many recs I'd make that have teenage protags, like No. 6 as well.
Live action might be best tbh. The exaggerated expressions etc. is cultural, so not liking it is a rejection of most anime at its cultural basis re: the language/s it uses to define itself. And that exaggeration to a degree *also* exists in the live action, but definitely not to the same degree, which might make it more palatable. I remember not liking it initially but I got over it personally through research (i.e. it's a cultural language that we aren't taught, that shows or demonstrates strong emotion or a significant lightening of a scene through chibi / exaggeration as obvious cues to tonally shift through a moment or change the gravity of a moment, which is why extremely serious anime also has these moments. And that's why it's so extremely common in romance/s, where lightening is really important. It can feel really severe to us, because we don't use the same visual language in our visual storytelling (we have other visual language sets we employ instead, that folks from Japan and other countries sometimes hate or dislike because they're not used to them.)
What about Kdramas instead?
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Date: 2024-04-03 10:15 am (UTC)Haha yeah I was thinking of both that specific ProZD skit, and of how you'd described Violet Evergarden to me in the past. And 12 Kingdoms is so good!
Yeah, I did eventually decide that anime is just not going to work for Cam, and he has happily found some kdramas he jives with. He can deal with a lot of cultural storytelling differences in principle, but anime in particular just doesn't seem like it is for him.
Meanwhile, Rakugo seems like a very good show from what I saw, and while it wouldn't work for Cam because it's anime*, *I'm honestly not sure how he'd feel about it if it wasn't. It's an interesting hypothetical to consider, I'm still figuring out the shape of his taste even after all this time.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-03 10:38 am (UTC)