I dunno if you can call Darling in the Franxx "less popular". At least in my circles it seems like a hugely popular work. A lot of people like it but I do consider it a bit of a waifu-trash anime, lol. So I didn't think it was as critically good writing as the other stuff I listed.
Kinznaiver is on the less popular side. As is BNA (Brand New Animal). The Tokusatsu community seems to like the SSSS.(Gridman/Dynazenon) anime, but arguably taking the Gridman name makes them more into Tokusatsu than the anime community anyway.
I had not heard of it until a month or two ago and yeah parts of it were definitely a bit cringe in the classic anime fashion but I liked the story and art style overall.
It's really hard to take an anime seriously when the girls outfits have butt handles. Darling in the Franxx got a lot of attention, but a lot of that was the meme crowd have a field day with it.
Not really everyone watches anime "seriously", you can watch them in a more light-hearted way. I'm a big fun of Kill la Kill really because of how silly and over the top it is, same for the second season of JoJo.
I actually liked KLK, even with the sometimes extreme levels of fanservice. I think the thing that made KLK work for me is how it was both a love letter and at the same time a direct challenge to the cosplay community.
Franxx however tossed me out when the robots are controlled by dry humping teenagers. There's a level of pandering at which I just couldn't take it anymore.
So you whine that Franxx has girl outfits with "butt handles", but then you like Kill la Kill, an anime that is so unapologetically about fan service. Actually funny.
Sorry to intrude into this discussion but... Franxx is a different level than Kill la Kill.
Have you seen the two shows? I know if you've only seen Kill la Kill where the BDSM "Disciplinary Captain" gets power from whipping himself, it sounds like things can't get any more hypersexualized, but somehow Franxx made it more awkward than Kill la Kill ever made it.
A big problem is that the romance / dating aspects of Darling in the Franxx were front and center, so the characters are supposed to have sexual attraction / romantic feelings for each other. So somehow all these sex-jokes just landed differently / in a totally different context than Kill la Kill's more joke-heavy style.
Somehow its different when the characters involved are "seriously" romantically involved with one another. Because now we as the audience are seriously considering the implications of these positions or sex-jokes / whatever.
I think you've expressed it perfectly. Both KLK and Franxx are fanservice heavy, but Franxx made it awkward and uncomfortable to watch. To be fair, there are some parts of KLK that go beyond as well, but they don't appear until later in the series. Franxx put it front and center in the first episode.
Yes but Evangelion is so massive and popular it'd be enough to sustain a studio. Gainax does not have the rights to NGE though. They only produced the original series back in the 90s.
Doesn’t have the staying power of Gundam which has survived postmodernism by producing spin-off shows about people who build Gundam models. (Gee I gotta build that Haro I have sitting around…)
Gundam is usually a recycled stories (teenager ride an ace robot to war) with new toys.
How can Evangelion recycle their stories? Nobody want to see depressed, horny teenager forced to ride a robot so everyone can be turned into orange paste every two years.
Exactly, Evangelion is about the end of the world which can only end once. That may make it poignant but it doesn't have the staying power of Gundam or Macross or Pretty Cure where they can keep telling variations of the same story in different places and times indefinitely. (Funny to think how they weren't sure if they'd finish the first season of Futari Wa Pretty Cure so their budget for writing and direction was zero for a few episodes in the middle that were mostly incomprehensible scenes of people being corrupted, turned into monsters, and walking around doing things Kung Fu masters would do in Dragonball Z until suddenly the show started making sense again... And of course they went on to make another 20+ seasons)
> Exactly, Evangelion is about the end of the world which can only end once. That may make it poignant but it doesn't have the staying power of Gundam or Macross or Pretty Cure where they can keep telling variations of the same story in different places and times indefinitely
Various Gundam series take place across different universes, there is no reason a series based on "the world is ending" can't do the same thing - share thematic elements across different sets of characters.
Heck you could even make each series explore a different element of the human psyche.
IMHO the real issue is Evangelion is such a mind fuck that finding ways to reach that level of WTF is hard, and also the cultural zeitgeist moves on, and I doubt if Evangelion was related today it'd have the same impact. Kind of like how a lot of cyberpunk stuff is still around, but it has to be somewhat re-invented for each decade, because while some of the themes of the original 1980s stuff is still relevant, you can't just cut and paste, today's youth feels a different sense of hopelessness than what was felt in the 80s!
Same thing with 1990s material, super edgy goth cyberpunk vampires don't hit the same in 2024 as they did in 1994.
So finding writing staff that can keep up with making Really Good Stuff decade after decade, and who also want to do rehashes of the same material, may prove hard.
But still, a series of Evangelion universes all focused on different types of trauma would be interesting to see!
>Various Gundam series take place across different universes, there is no reason a series based on "the world is ending" can't do the same thing - share thematic elements across different sets of characters.
NGE has done that plenty. The early works, dating sim games, plastic models, fan fiction, manga, etc have all had 'alternate universe' entries -- which suits the series just fine since that concept is explored even in the original series via Shinji's 'instrumentality scenes'.
Gundam (MSG, in particular) is sort of about the world ending. Colony drop killing billions right off the bat.
Yeah the other spin-offs not related to the UC storyline are definitely more in the "angsty ace pilot teen with completely-overpowered-weapon-as-a-plot-device" category but there's so many of them, who's counting at that point?
While the mecha are all cool as heck, definitely felt the OG series and the spinoffs (008th MS Team, 0079: Stardust Memory, Zeta Gundam etc) are the best because they tell different aspects of a larger story.
NGE isn't really about the world ending, it's about the forced ending of humanity as we know it; we're even left to see what the world looks like post-humanity in EoE.
There's also another channel that is in the "I wish I had the time / talent / inspiration to do those things..." Two Expensive Models, One Epic Diorama! https://youtu.be/q7vCFKRHloE
The Gundam model build shows up in my YouTube feed occasionally despite me not looking for them.
Eva is pretty sustainable, just not for Gainax. Studio Khara has been selling Eva merchandise and related materials through brands like Radio EVA for a while.
Gainax just kind of doesn’t have any of the IP anymore, for various reasons.
When I say it could sustain a studio, I just mean revenue from merchandise sales etc... It's such a popular IP there's an entire theme park devoted to it.
I'd say NGE is absolutely more popular than Gundam. I think there's a perfect "target age" to get into NGE, and that age is 13-15 and new generations discover it. Quentin Tarantino once said the same thing about a lot of his old movies.
It's also the oldest anime in that top 50 list, which I think is really indicative of how popular it is. The only other one that's even from the 90s is Cowboy Bepop.
OT, but: I really don't understand why Death Note is so popular. It was an above average first season that went downhill super fast. I gave up on it the first episode after the recap episode (26 if Wikipedia is right), and nothing in my conversations with other people have led me to believe the last dozen or so episodes would change my opinion on it.
MAL's demographics is probably the answer. Anime had a big wave in the 00s, and Death Note, Code Geass, Toradora, FMA and Gintama are all probably beneficiaries of that for higher ratings in MAL than in forums populated by younger or older fans.
That's part of it, but Death Note is, IMO, the worst series that you mention in your comment (Gintama is definitely not my cup of tea, but I can understand the attraction to it by those for whom it is). I ought to be in the target audience for Death Note, and I found it to be mediocre.
Which aspects of postmodernism threaten which aspects of the Gundam franchise? Or are you just alluding to the dominance of digital goods over physical hobbies such as model-building? I'll admit, I don't know where the money comes from. Is it really 80:20 merchandising:media?
I think their point is simply that a Gundam series about building model Gundams is a very postmodern thing (and, perhaps, that the rise of postmodernism has made it harder for a 100% unironic Gundam series to succeed).
Additionally, "Ozempic" (semaglutide) has become the blanket word to describe an entire class of drugs (GLP-1 Agonists) that all kind of do the same thing. Some of which have already been proven in clinical trials to be even more effective than Ozempic (ex. Tirzepatide)
It's like when COVID hit and somehow "Zoom" became the shorthand for online video meetings even though there were (and still are) a ton of options for that functionality on the market.
Just curious, I was filling out my profile and it says Education History required. Normally that means college experience. I only did one year at a local community college. Should I just put that? My cofounder is attending a well respected school though.
Sure why not? If I were you I'd try not to worry too much about what will/won't seem good—what YC is pattern-matching for is usually quite different than what people assume.
This is where I feel both good as a consumer but I understand why companies are so disincentivized to make good products now.
I'm still on my M1 MBP from when they launched in Fall 2021 and I feel like I could use this thing for another several years easy. There's no chance of the average programmer hitting a wall (except maybe people deeply involved in running local LLMs) that requires an upgrade and they pretty much fixed every single issue with their laptops in one shot.
I do see these artificial limitations in their product lineup. For example, you can't get a 1TB SSD in their 16" MBP unless you get the M3 Max as opposed to the M3 Pro which is a $600 upgrade. Vs in their 14" you can get a 1TB at their middle configuration for only a $200 upgrade from their base configuration.
What else can they really do to get people on an upgrade treadmill ala iPhones (another area which has slowed down significantly)? If they let you configure the base models with 32GB of ram and a 1TB SSD there'd be literally nothing else to upgrade.
They already introduced a new color for the conspicuous consumption types (I haven't even seen one of those super dark gray ones in the wild.)
> I do see these artificial limitations in their product lineup. For example, you can't get a 1TB SSD in their 16" MBP unless you get the M3 Max as opposed to the M3 Pro which is a $600 upgrade.
That's odd. I have no trouble clicking the 1TB button when configuring a 16" M3 Pro system, and seeing the price go up by only $200. But I'm also seeing only $400 to upgrade from M3 Pro to M3 Max (assuming both are configured with 36GB of RAM), so maybe you're in a different country with different pricing and options?
This isn't really my experience. My personal blog gets a lot of traffic from Mastodon and my Umami stats show traffic from social networks and search engines for my startup https://pickwick.app
I do have trouble finding where on those platforms it's being shared/talked about though.
As a fellow Daniel, the spelling doesn't deviate much but the diminutives do.
I live in Mexico and it's Dani here and in many Spanish speaking countries. I go by Dan and that form is pretty much never used so it causes a lot of confusion.
The spelling is important so people don't get it wrong when they have to write it down. It can be a bureaucratic nightmare to get this kind of thing fixed sometimes.
For example my birth certificate had a typo in my dad's last name and when I was getting my first ID card I had to go to the notary to get the birth certificate typo fixed before getting the ID card issued. Took half a day of work...
Even their less popular stuff I dig. I just watched Darling in the Franxx and I'm about to start Kiznaiver.