Back to Dogsmic's Profile Dogsmic's Profile

Mashle is a bit of a weird one for two reasons - one being that, unlike most shonen manga, it basically only gets better as it goes on and figures out what it wants to be, and two, despite its popularity, barely anyone online seems to know anything about it. Everyone describes it as "Harry Potter but with Saitama from One Punch Man", but that description only really applies for the first 20 or so chapters. What starts out as an aggressively unfunny "comedy" manga about a "funny guy who always wins because haha wouldn't that be so funny" becomes a surprisingly solid (if a ... bit typical) shonen series with a strong but very distinctly *not* unbeatable main character, a consistently engaging side cast, and a great power system that offers consistently interesting and unique abilities for its varied cast. It takes a while for the series to gain the confidence to fully take itself seriously, but once it does, it's a great time.

The brief online hype surrounding Mashle when the anime (and especially season 2) started is one of the most bizarre and disappointing things I've seen happen to a series like this in a while. If you picture it like one of those iceberg images, the very tip was just season 2's opening. Slightly below that, you had the braindead video essays praising it for "subverting shonen tropes and saying fuck you to the power system because it's funnier that way" from people who very clearly never got past the first 6 episodes. Then, just below the surface of the water, you had the actual show, which seemingly no one watched past season 1, and right down at the bottom you had the monumental task of... actually reading the manga. It's a shame, because what I believe to be Mashle's weakest aspects are the ones you always see emphasized and praised online, and its best arc, the Eclipse arc right at the end, is one that seemingly nobody has ever read.

TLDR, very good series, not amazing or anything but well worth a read if you like good shonen. Anyone who describes it as "One Punch Man but in Harry Potter" very blatantly has no idea what they're on about, don't listen to them.

Utter shite. People love to defend this one by saying it's "not trying to be unique, it's just the fundamentals", but the problem is that it doesn't do the fundamentals well either. Now, granted, I only got 12 episodes in, so maybe it magically gets better later on, but my main problem with this one was that the characters just aren't interesting. Tanjiro has no real personality beyond being "nice" (I'm not against typical good-guy hero types, I just need them to have more personality than a concrete slab), Nezuko is the least bad but also really just "sometimes silly, sometimes grrrr scary hissss", and ... Zenitsu is so goddamn annoying he finally convinced me to put the show down because I couldn't tolerate his incessant screaming and whining. Add to that a power system that basically comes down to flashy visual effects on a sword with no real difference between any of them, and you have a show I'm honestly shocked anyone can tolerate watching.

Demon Slayer is not a "basic but still solid shonen", it is a *bad* basic shonen. I'm not opposed to basic shonen at all, I actually quite like it; I like MHA, I think Tougen Anki is criminally underrated, and I think most people who try to criticize Fairy Tail really just don't get the point of that show. I say all this to establish that, if Demon Slayer was as "basic but solid" as everyone says it is, I would be the target audience, and I would most likely end up loving it. The problem is that, for a good shonen series, good characters are absolutely indispensable, and you don't necessarily *need* a good power system, but it can go a long way in elevating an otherwise only okayish series. Demon Slayer has neither of these things, and fails to be at all interesting in any other way.

The only reason I even gave it as much as a 3/10 is because the animation is admittedly fantastic and the series does have some interesting visual concepts - the Taisho-era setting is a unique idea, some of the character designs are actually quite good, and I personally love the design of the Infinity Castle. That said, as a story, on a pure writing level, I genuinely don't believe there's even a shred of value here. Genuinely not one single redeeming quality, abysmal series.

Fairy Tail is a great series people love to complain about because it's not what they personally want it to be. It's a fun, light-hearted show about a silly magic guild ending up in silly magic situations they have to battle their way out of using the aforementioned silly magic with a bit of the power of friendship sprinkled in for good measure. At the end of the day, what makes this show great is its characters, and they're nearly all excellent. They're interesting, have great designs, and they all bounce off each other really well, making this one of the most consistently funny anime ... I've watched in a long time.

The main things people like to complain about with this one are the fanservice and the lack of stakes. Fanservice is... fair enough, I suppose, it never struck me as quite that excessive but if you find a show being obviously and unsubtly horny for its cast off-putting I can see how it'd hinder your enjoyment of this one. The "there's not enough stakes because no one dies" one is kind of just incomprehensible, though. It's true, character deaths aren't really much of a thing in this one, but that's the whole point. Fairy Tail is meant to be a fun, easy time, if you were constantly worrying Natsu or Erza were about to die every time they got into a fight it'd ruin the light-hearted adventure vibes. It's fine if you want the life-or-death Jujutsu Kaisen battles, but not everything has to be that, Fairy Tail isn't meant to be that serious.

TLDR, if you want some light fun adventure stuff with great characters, you'll love this one, but if you want something more serious and/or you find fanservice off-putting you probably won't. I love this show personally, but it's not for everyone, and that's fine.

This one is really weird. For an anime trying to cram a 185-chapter manga into 24 episodes, it spends a lot of its time just making up random filler episodes and doing its own thing (the last 4 episodes are entirely just fanfiction that takes place after what they adapted of the manga ending), and the manga had already ended by the time this show started, so it's not like they had an excuse. For what it is, it's honestly quite good, and actually does a small handful of things better than the manga, but it misses so much of what made the manga great ... I find it hard to recommend.

My recommendation would be, read the manga, then if you end up loving it as much as I did, watch this one after, it's at least a fun curiosity and for the most part they're entirely different stories that happen to feature the same characters. At the very least, watch episode 10 in particular, it's by far my favourite thing to come out of this adaptation. At the end of the day, both series are a fun and enjoyable experience with some great characters, so it's hard to go wrong either way, the manga simply does a better job of actually exploring the ideas it sets up, compared to the anime which is just sort of weird and does its own thing.