This makes me feel better about my own inability to make it through GetBackers, though I think my reasons were for the most part shallower than yours. Even in the anime version, though, I found myself wondering about the way Kazuki was drawn. He seemed, as you say, to be more like a flat-chested woman than like a man, or even like a boy; it made me wonder what the show was doing, and why. Now I have at least a glimmer of the answer.
But really, I think what defeated me in the end about GetBackers was the fighting. All right, it might also be that I failed to love Ban and Gingi. Still, there were background characters I might have become sufficiently interested in to go forward with if it hadn't been for all the time when, from my admittedly ignorant perspective, nothing was happening on the screen/page. I sometimes think that there must be a set of aesthetic conventions, or cultural background, that's a basic toolkit for understanding what's really going on in these sequences, and that I'm bored by them purely because I don't have that knowledge: in effect, what I get is long sequences in a language I don't understand and for which I can't get useful subtitles. But I don't know where to look for that background, or how to even phrase an intelligible question about it, so I continue to be lost.
Which I whine about here only because I've seen references to D.Grey-man all over, and in many ways it sounds like something I'd like. Only, if you can't follow the fighting, and there's a sufficient amount of it for ability to read and appreciate it is important, what hope is there for me?
no subject
Date: 26 Jan 2012 05:01 pm (UTC)But really, I think what defeated me in the end about GetBackers was the fighting. All right, it might also be that I failed to love Ban and Gingi. Still, there were background characters I might have become sufficiently interested in to go forward with if it hadn't been for all the time when, from my admittedly ignorant perspective, nothing was happening on the screen/page. I sometimes think that there must be a set of aesthetic conventions, or cultural background, that's a basic toolkit for understanding what's really going on in these sequences, and that I'm bored by them purely because I don't have that knowledge: in effect, what I get is long sequences in a language I don't understand and for which I can't get useful subtitles. But I don't know where to look for that background, or how to even phrase an intelligible question about it, so I continue to be lost.
Which I whine about here only because I've seen references to D.Grey-man all over, and in many ways it sounds like something I'd like. Only, if you can't follow the fighting, and there's a sufficient amount of it for ability to read and appreciate it is important, what hope is there for me?