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[Furtuka]

Also, started Iron-Blooded Orphans instead of immediately continuing on to Bubblegum Crisis 2040 AD.  I...ummm, I hate to say it, but I'm not really impressed.  I mean, I didn't dislike it enough to quit after the first couple episodes (like 00, which turned me off on Gundam for a while), but I just can't seem to get into it at all.  I'm not sure why, either.  It feels kind of...immature, maybe, like it's trying to be something more than it is.  It's a hard feeling to quantify, though, which is particularly vexing for me.

Same. I could probably pinpoint exactly why I didn't like it if I watched the first few episodes again but very likely Furtuka could remind me about what complaints I had, since I remember talking to him about it while I was watching.

It was something about Biscuit's sisters introduction throwing off the tone you expected the show to have, and you were finding it hard to understand Mika's brain-thoughts in regards to immediately eliminating threats. Also the Alaya-Vwhatsitspelled and why having multiple jacks is useful not being explained entirely thoroughly at the beginning was annoying you.

[Parsely]

That's the one! Thanks tuka.

[Cruxador]

Ah, that would explain that.  Sorry; I could only name a few names off the top of my head, such as Gainax, Ghibli, Pierrot, or Bones.

If you're listing those in order of prominence, A1 belongs right in the middle. They've been consistently pumping out solid shows, and had two pretty big names simultaneously last season.

Also I don't really like ... Mari Okada

I'm having this problem with Kiznaiver. And everything she writes really. I guess she's popular with teens?

[Furtuka]

Eh Anohana turned out pretty well I think. I think it's a matter of that her style is best suited just for the more mundane genres.


Subs for episode 4 of Macross Delta are out, and Kawamori's comment about this being a fusion of Macross Plus and Macross 7 is really starting to shine here. That dogfight scene was really intense, and the conflict regarding whether to disable or kill the infected Valkyrie pilots in the name of reducing collateral is intriguing. Also SPACE WAR NOW

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Freyja mentioning that her village tried to marry her off at the age of 14 makes a lot more sense now that we know that Windemerians have a life expectancy of around 30. The fact that its said to be a trade off for their increased physical ability explains how she was able to jump so high in the first episode too.

Also I absolutely love the scene with the declaration of war by Windemere. The way the Draken Valkyries unveiled their true colors and flag and finally transformed to their Battroid forms was chilling (I LOVE HOW DISTINCT THEIR DESIGNS ARE). The fact that Roid referred to the people of NUG as the "Children of the Protoculture" was interesting, especially since with the near human appearance of the Windemerians you would think that they would be counted in that description as well. With that combined with the odd artifact the prince was shown using, it makes me wonder if they have more knowledge of the setting backstory that hasn't been discovered yet. I vaguely remember Kawamori mentioning something about Delta being planned to explore more details about the actual nature of the Protoculture.

[Culise]

It was something about Biscuit's sisters introduction throwing off the tone you expected the show to have, and you were finding it hard to understand Mika's brain-thoughts in regards to immediately eliminating threats. Also the Alaya-Vwhatsitspelled and why having multiple jacks is useful not being explained entirely thoroughly at the beginning was annoying you.

That latter one I actually understood immediately, or at least mentally assumed something that seemed to make sense.  It's possibly a question of bandwidth - if you have an absolute cap on how much signal you can get through one connection, a way around that is to set up multiple connections in parallel.  There are technical reasons why modern computers have mostly dropped parallel connections over anything larger than very short distances (like CPU to cache), but for a futuristic MMI that interfaces with what's essentially a massively parallel network (the human brain), I can see some logic behind it, albeit of a fiction-esque sort.  There is an interesting note in that the idea of Alaya-Vijnana is from a particular Buddhist subsect (the practice of yoga); it's the "inferential cognition" of reflexive awareness and memory that provides the foundation for the other consciousnesses, but I don't expect that to lead anywhere unless it goes full "Zero system" or "Newtype" mode.  Err, scratch that...*until* it goes full Newtype.  This is Gundam, after all.

I think that you've pretty much put your finger on my concerns with your description, though.  I don't hate the characters, but they do feel slightly off in their interactions like an act or...well, as you said, an anime (not surprising, given the medium, but embracing its excesses works only if you go all the way).  It feels fuzzy around the edges in how it handles things like the Mars liberation struggle or the lack of education among the children, like it's not really bringing the impact home, or even really trying to do so.  Maybe I'm just getting old; I'm a bit tired and cynical when it comes to "teen heroes save the day." 

[Parsely]

Yeah with the way anime works you're not going to find much where the leads aren't children.

[SOLDIER First]

Darn those ingrained lolita complexes pedophilia.

[Cruxador]

Yeah with the way anime works you're not going to find much where the leads aren't children.

Joker Game comes to mind this season. They're still pretty young though.

Sometimes characters are officially younger than they're really written or even drawn though. All the main characters in Kabaneri seem like you ought to add five years to their official age.

[Reelya]

Yeah with the way anime works you're not going to find much where the leads aren't children.

It's still a much longer list than Western cartoons, if you discount superheros. Not many "normal adults" in American made ones.

[EnigmaticHat]

Also, started Iron-Blooded Orphans instead of immediately continuing on to Bubblegum Crisis 2040 AD.  I...ummm, I hate to say it, but I'm not really impressed.  I mean, I didn't dislike it enough to quit after the first couple episodes (like 00, which turned me off on Gundam for a while), but I just can't seem to get into it at all.  I'm not sure why, either.  It feels kind of...immature, maybe, like it's trying to be something more than it is.  It's a hard feeling to quantify, though, which is particularly vexing for me.

About 8 episodes in.  My initial impressions were a bit better than that but I know what you mean.  The following description is just the problems I have with the show, not the positives.  I'm actually kind of ok with it, because when it does get interesting its quite nice, but a lot of times it isn't that interesting.

For me, the problem is that the main conflict of the early episodes revolves around the main characters being child soldiers, yet its not realistically portrayed.  More than that, its not seriously portrayed.  Oh sure, its dark, but the main characters don't react to the experience the way real people would and the dynamics of the CGS don't really make sense.  The basic problem that the main characters have with the arrangement is more about being unequal partners in a business.  As there later dialogue reveals, they like being child soldiers, and while the show is a little vague IIRC they willingly signed up.  Their only problem is that they're mistreated and undervalued.  It... doesn't work that well as a serious plotline.

The way the other characters react to the child soldier business also feels inconsistent.  Without spoiling too much, there's a character who is totally ok with killing child soldiers, but much less okay with killing child soldiers who've undergone painful surgery (?) as if that changes something about the overall child soldiers dynamic.  Like he could be okay with child soldiers as long as they're treated well, despite earlier a different character treating the idea of child soldiers as unthinkable.  And then you have a (probably, its hard to tell) adult woman exchanging innuendo laden taunts with children while trying to murder them, and its like... why did we have to go there?  Are you trying to be taken seriously or not?

So the whole child soldier thing didn't work for me.  It came across as simply an especially dark excuse to have a mecha show with child pilots.  And like that's one thing, but then the fact of the matter is that without that issue the show is very slow paced and lacks conflict.  There are a lot of scenes that drift into "why should we care" territory, like clearly they're setting up conflicts for later in the show but that doesn't make them any more interesting to watch.  It gets almost slice of life-esque at times.

[Reelya]

Fair comments, but I'm not sure why a "different character" having a very different viewpoint to someone else is an inconsistency? Sure we could say that the message the show therefore sends is mixed, but we could equally say that they're presenting a situation with a range of valid viewpoints and asking the audience to decide for themselves what's right and wrong. The super-soldier operation had a very high death-rate. Perhaps it has a stigma of young conscripts being forced to undergo the procedure, so therefore that character was particularly sensitive to the issue?

That's the one thing Gundam has always tried to do: it presents the conflict from a number of angles, each character has a different opinion on things. So of course, you're going to see people with incompatible versions of events, different issues that they think are important. Different enemies won't necessarily have the same motivations, belief systems or interpretation of events even compared to others in their own faction.

"Enemies" in Gundam will tend to see their faction as the actual good guys, and the protagonists as evil villains. The obvious comparison is between Gundam and Star Wars, where the villains literally talk about "The power of the Dark Side". i.e. they define themselves by all that is negative, and want to destroy all that is positive. This is very unrealistic. Even the NAZIs didn't define themselves as the "forces of evil".

[EnigmaticHat]

That's fair, and the different characters I'm talking about are

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

a soldier and a space yakuza

so their difference of opinion makes sense.  But on the other hand we've been dropped into what is essentially a new universe (as I understand it, separate even from other Gundum shows) and it would be nice to know what the rules are.  Everyone has a different response to the main character's situation so its hard to tell how normal/bad this situation is considered in-universe.  We don't have enough of a baseline to know why the individual characters' views are special relative to everyone else.

Don't get me wrong, i like the journey the main characters are undergoing, I just think there's a tone conflict related to it.  The writing is at its best when its about them trying to find a place in a universe that basically doesn't give a shit about them.  It stumbles and falls when its about moral ambiguity because the writing isn't complex enough to support it.  For example, about a third of the characters with any plot impact thus far have been cowardly, ugly bureaucrats of some description.  Basically holding a giant sign saying "I am a villain and nothing I say should be trusted or taken seriously".

[Parsely]

Yeah with the way anime works you're not going to find much where the leads aren't children.

It's still a much longer list than Western cartoons, if you discount superheros. Not many "normal adults" in American made ones.

Non-superhero Western cartoons with adult lead characters: Metalocalypse, King of the Hill, The Simpsons, Rick and Morty, Mike Tyson Mysteries, Venture Bros., Boondocks, Black Dynamite, Sealab 2021, Space Ghost, Superjail, Samurai Jack, Clone Wars, Bob's Burgers.

After thinking pretty hard I came up with a similar number of anime with adult leads: Black Lagoon, Blue Gender, Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Fullmetal Alchemist (if I'm counting Boondocks I'll count this too), Ghost in the Shell, Jin Roh, Bubblegum Crisis, Lupin III, Space Dandy, Trigun.

[itisnotlogical]

I Can't Understand What My Husband is Saying, Psycho-Pass, Fist of the North Star, Attack on Titan (debatably IIRC), Black Jack, Rurouni Kenshin, Hellsing and Hellsing Ultimate... wow this is harder than I thought.

If we count DBZ as a separate series from the rest of Dragon Ball, then it counts too, although that varies as characters grow up and are born and time-travel around in the various sagas and time skips.

[Reelya]

Well you have ~14 American ones listed. Plus I could add a few more, bringing that to about 20.

20 Josei-type animes with adult MCs:
Nana, Ristarante Paradiso, Bartender, Antique, Nodame Cantabile, Honey and Clover, Skip Beat, Kuragehime, Paradise Kiss, Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, Natsuyuki Rendezvous, Saraiya Goyou, Barakamon, Hataraki Man, Golden Time, Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii, Akatsuki no Yona, Toshokan Sensou, Arakawa Under the Bridge, Usagi Drop.

20 more anime shows with adult leads:
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Hellsing Ultimate, Ergo Proxy, Gangsta, Mushishi, Paranoia Agent, Tatami Galaxy, Death Parade, One Punch Man, The Big O, Welcome to the NHK, Area 88, Uchuu Senkan Yamato, Mononoke, Baccano!, Spice and Wolf, Detroit Metal City, Kuuchuu Buranko, Steins;Gate, Psycho-Pass.

Another 20:
Sidonia no Kishi, Genshiken, Excel Saga, Kemonozume, Kikou Souseiki Mospeada, RideBack, Kurozuka, Maoyuu Maou Yuusha, Cuticle Tantei Inaba, Yondemasu yo Azazel-san, Suisei no Gargantia, Noragami, Gate, Overlord, Dimension W, Log Horizon, Darker than Black, Uchuu Kyoudai, Rowdy Sumo Matsutaro, Fist of the North Star

20 more things (including some OVAs and a couple of edge-cases):
Macross (since almost all protags are of military age), Petshop of Horrors, Ashita no Joe, Black Jack, Wolf's Rain, Planetes, Dominion Tank Police, Gunsmith Cats, MD Geist, Mad Bull 34, Genocyber, Onikirimaru, California_Crisis, Berserk, Claymore, Golden Boy, Onikirimaru, The cockpit, Hajime no Ippo, JoJo's Bizzare Adventure.

EDIT: I could probably squeeze out another 20 with some more effort. Why not go for 100? Although I've listed some much more terrible shows here than the above ones:

Ah My Goddess (college-age male), Sekirei (also college-age male), Love Hina (college-age male), Votoms, Gundam (enough installments count here), kara no kyoukai (most films are post-school age), Viper's Creed, Active Raid, Rail Wars, Plastic Memories, Black Bullet (there are lolis, but the MC is adult), Divergence Eve, Shirobako, Ojisan to Marshmallow, I can't understand What My Husband is Saying (thx itisnotlogical), Hen Zemi, Inferno Cop, Ninja Slayer, Kagewani, Sushi Police.

Well, I managed to think up 100 shows where the MC is college-age or older (at least for the bulk of the show in a few cases). I kinda doubt this list is even close to exhaustive.