Re: What have you been watching or reading?

On Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:10:29 +0200
Feanor <[email protected]> wrote:

> In the early 2000's, an otaku friend of mine exposed me to Tenchi
> Muyo for the first time (probably on vhs tapes), but I didn't really
> like it. My main memory of the show is: girl character was mean.
> After many a moon, finally tried it again recently. I watched the
> 1993 6 ep OVA. I get it now. It's funny and fanservicey without being
> hentai even though it's pretty nakey. Ryoko is indeed still mean at
> first, but becomes not as bad as I remember. She seems to actually be
> okay and I want to like her. The leaps in anime logic are kinda hard
> to swallow, but the lore has potential outside of it's pulp
> randomness, so I want to try out the actual series some time.

I should give it another go sometime for the sake of re-assessment, but
I wasn't impressed with it the first time. TM strikes me as basically
the first step in the evolution of the "harem comedy" as a shared genre
after Ranma 1/2 established the first full example of the form* - "hey,
*that* was a big hit, what if we try to make lightning strike twice?"

* (Urusei Yatsura laid a lot of the groundwork, but it's a crucial
  distinction that in the "harem comedy" it's primarily the protagonist
  being pursued by the love interests, while in UY it's the other way
  around 99% of the time - and for all that, there's only two instances
  where there's ever any question of Ataru's attentions being requited.)

But as a waypoint in evolutionary history it's a pretty limp lungfish,
or so I recall. Ryoko's shift from psycho space pirate to loyal love
interest is jarring; she's too much of a bastard at first for it to
feel plausible, and way less interesting as a character afterward. It'd
have been both more believable *and* more fun if she'd ended up as more
the "crazy bad-influence girlfriend" type instead. Tenchi himself is
also kind of a bland, passive nonentity (a problem that has plagued the
genre since...well, Tenchi Muyo.)

It's a shame, because there is some genuinely engaging strangeness to
the setting/lore (spaceships that are actually trees or small furry
critters? That's the kind of matter-of-fact kookiness '80s-'90s anime
would toss out like it wasn't even a thing; I *do* miss those days...)

As far as recently watching, been very much enjoying having Ranma back
on the air. The original anime wasn't as seriously in need of a trim-
the-fat edit/remake as UY was, but it's great to see nonetheless =^_^=