Anime that sucks but we love anyway

[Sareth]

Ditto. Black Lagoon manga is already budgeted for.

Hee!

[davester65]

I just watched the 1st episode (fan-subbed) of Black Lagoon on youtube. It looks like a fun series. The character Revy (or Levy) reminds me of the way I like to play a female half-elf knife fighter D&D character named Knives that I have. Basically the same personality, but she uses daggers instead of guns.

[Sareth]

Oh! Then you're gonna LURV Shenhua to pieces...

[Itterind]

The theme ending for Revy gives me the chills (though the gonzo bit at the last kinda spoils it).

[Boss Out of Town]

Jeepers, Black Lagoon looks to be from the Hellsing universe: degree of bad-assness measured by the intensity of your sneer, and if you enjoy your violence intensely enough, people can't hit you with automatic weapons fire.

But, Revy's more expressive then Sly Stallone, and has almost as nice an ass.

[Sareth]

It'd be worth the extremely messy and violent death one would recieve just to grab her ass...

Yeah, Black Lagoon is uber violent and sneer filled. But it's such a good... good guilty pleasure.

[davester65]

I just love the look of complete and utter glee that Revy has on her face as she's killing people.

[Boss Out of Town]

I made every attempt to think of really bad anime I like but couldn't come up with one. Too picky, I suppose.

Nightwalker is a good example of a mediocre series that I liked anyway. A so-so plot line about a vampire detective with choppy writing and not that much going on. However, the subplot with the girl secretary who becomes a vampire is actually poignant, better executed than the same subplot in Hellsing, and provides an apt but oddly creepy ending to the series.

This is also a good example of the strange anime trope girls and women are different species. In most anime, girls, even 17 and 18 year-olds, are a head and more shorter than men, have drawn with larger eye-head-body ratios then men or women, and have higher pitched voices and unique mannerisms. Women in anime are as tall as men or a little shorter, have long legs, broad hips, have voices nearly as deep as men, and have more natural facial features then men or girls.

In our world, adolescent females reach most of their adult height by the age of 13 or 14 and most acquire their adult body shape shape by the time they get out of high school. In Anime, girls apparently go through a larval stage and emerge a cocoon just before they get to college, six inches taller.

In the example of Nightwalker, the sixteen year old is supposed to start acting and dressing like an adult as she becomes immortal and starts to live an adult life-style, but it just doesn't work. The artist can't shrink her head and eyes in the middle of the series and she looks like a little kid playing weird dress-up games and doing so badly.

[davester65]

This is also a good example of the strange anime trope girls and women are different species. In most anime, girls, even 17 and 18 year-olds, are a head and more shorter than men, have drawn with larger eye-head-body ratios then men or women, and have higher pitched voices and unique mannerisms.

I remember reading recently that there is getting to be a considerable size difference between adolescent girls and boys in Japan. According to the article boys are encouraged to eat a lot, so Japanese boys have been getting much taller and are in fact now nearly as big as American teenagers on average. Girls on the other hand are encouraged not to eat too much so they will stay thin and petite. This might explain why in anime based around teenagers (Bleach etc. . .) the boys are a good foot taller than the girls even though they are the same age.
As for adult men and women being nearly the same height. That might be explained by the anime trope Japan is inhabited by Scandinavians with Japanese names. If I could remember where I saw the article, I'd link to it.

[zanntos]

It might play into the tropes because adults are either the "sexy profession X", which is when they are the taller type, or the "boring housewife" which actually isn't much taller than the teenage females.

Shakugan no Shana is a fantastic example of this if i recall, Yuuji's mom is about the same size as the highschool girls (maybe a hair taller) but Margery Daw towers over the others as the "sexy" character (granted she isn't Japanese), and Wirhelmina as the middle ground also has a middle height.