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: 2024-04-03 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)