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23 Replies to “The Tatami Galaxy: Incredibly Clever, Somewhat Enjoyable”

  1. Never thought I’d see the day when you didn’t love a clever anime. You like Death Note and Liar Game way more than anyone else I’ve read.

    • I’m a bit surprised as well. The best explanation I can come up with is that I see the cleverness of Tatami Galaxy as a side dish to a story I didn’t care for. While each episode has several very clever moments, five seconds later you’re back to a story about some guy I don’t like being a pussy.

      • Having watched the anime in full, I’ll have to agree with you here. Endless Eight plus endless style still equals endlessly average.

  2. I’ll take bland art over “Artistic Ugly” any day of the week. That’s the same reason I gave up on Kemonozume. A few minutes of that shit and I couldn’t take it any more.

    • Some artists/directors/whoever is responsible for this stuff (I know practically nothing about how anime is made) seem to think that nobody will find a story creative if its art isn’t also creative. With that said, Kemonozume is actually a great show overall.

    • It’s acceptable so long as the plot is superficially coherent. Once characters start doing things for the sake of depth that make no practical sense, you’re left with shallow depth a la Kaiba.

  3. Considering that this show is sub only and the main character talks incredibly fast resulting in subs that flash across the screen I expect that the recovery of your eyes will take quite a bit longer than if you hadn’t watched this…

    I actually bought this anime (it’s available in Australia but not America ahahahahaha) but haven’t watched it yet. I have to go and look at your ratings scheme again to see if one plus means any Baka-Raptor approval or not, to see if I wasted my money.

  4. Your “Artistic” Ugly link doesn’t actually define what you mean. =(

    The main character talking too fast was actually what suckered me in. Seriously.

    I saw the show on hulu and took a look at it. I stuck around till the end because he speaks too damn quickly that it really accentuated his cynicism. Being a cynical bum myself I couldn’t help but commiserate. By the end I found out the show was a stylized Groundhog day and I stuck around till the end of the series. Although with all the repetition it probably took me about a year to complete.

  5. better than entangling… I dunno, I got nothing. It was hard to read because of the speed, but I’m a sucker for cleverness and if Akashi was ugly then I guess I like ugly. Not to mention it was pretty damn funny at times, so as tempting as it is to hold Michael liking it against Tatami, I can’t.

  6. Hail to the only blogger who ever gave me an awesome bad book!

    Hail Baka-Raptor!

    I didn’t see this until it appeared on my links, so thanks for watching. Glad you liked it! hahahahaha

  7. I was typing and then the screen closed. Damn.

    Anyway, in all seriousness, I loved TG not merely because of its cleverness, but also because of its heart. I felt for Watashi because I had that same cowardice until I took it upon myself to act despite failure. Somehow, I thought that his realization that life will never be that ideal that you paint it was coincident with what happened in my life. In the end, one simply has to take what life offers and make the most out of it, which he had eventually done. And the different circles aren’t just mere reiterations – they’re actually different permutations of the choice that he made in that specific episode. I loved Watashi’s catharsis, because I honestly used the anime to simply dare and risk myself, just like he did at the end.

    What also endears the series to me is my fondness for avant-garde storytelling. My favorite film after all is The Killing, and one of my recent favorites is Inception. My favorite novels include The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, so a convoluted story that is beautifully resolved (for the most part) is really intriguing to me. Steins;Gate was a great anime but I didn’t feel it was as complicated or as clairvoyant as TG, although I like both series a lot.

    Anyway, thanks for the heads-up. I’m eternally grateful to the person who sent me Opal Mehta. While I don’t have time to look around for books and whatnot, I won’t forget to send you something equally interesting. 🙂

  8. TG is clever the same way as producing water by taking ice cubes out of your fridge and melting them is clever. it’s simple, and we all knew it since age 10. whilst our protagonist figured it out in college – congrats. i think captain obvious wrote the script – his biggest achievement yet, imho. i mean you get to frickin point after 12 episodes.

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