Houseki no Kuni (Land of the Lustrous)
 

http://i.imgur.com/NGH1sJy.jpg

Plot Summary/Premise
Source
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news...-anime/.115869

Land of the Lustrous (Hōseki no Kuni)
 

The July issue of Kodansha's Afternoon magazine is announcing on May 25 that a television anime adaptation of Haruko Ichikawa's Land of the Lustrous (Hōseki no Kuni) manga has been green-lit.


http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news...-anime/.115869

Official site is up now with key visual. Studio will be Orange and coming for Fall 2017.

http://i.imgur.com/MtF69yb.jpg

http://land-of-the-lustrous.com/

Anime preview/teaser:

New preview

OP song preview

Sentai licensed it.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.cc/news/...stream/.121942

Hmm... well, all things considered i thought that was a promising first episode. Phos comes off an incorrigible brat (as is appropriate) and the character interactions were fun. The walk animations are a bit stilted at times, but the frame-rate on the CG wasn't terrible. I liked the sound design- such as how their footsteps in the buildings all sound like stone-on-stone.

Phos seems a bit more bratty than I remember him being at the start(but it has been a while), still very entertaining introduction and some amazing use of cg. The gems really benefit from it.

I honestly kinda liked it. It has a very distinctive visual style with its character designs compared to the other Fall shows. Might take a little time to get use to but I already accept it.

It also has an interesting world setting with the gems and stuff. Storytelling wise, I'll give it a chance since it's just the first episode although I can't say I'm too impressed on that at the moment.

This was pretty nice for a first episode, if a bit too heavy on the exposition. The visuals were a bit stiff as it still is the case with CG but otherwise they were pretty nice.

It was funny to see the subtitles bending backwards and twisting into pretzels to avoid using gendered pronouns, though. (I don't get why they can't just follow the original dialog, after all that is what the characters use for themselves...)

anime very interesting, I really liked CG.

No explicitly gendered pronouns are used in the Japanese and the question of whether the characters' speech patterns alone provide sufficient justification to assign genders to them is a debate that continues to rage on the manga forums and one we probably don't need here. :heh:

At any rate, any use of gendered pronouns would just be a convenience for the audience as the concept of gender is explicitly unknown among the gems. Maybe it's worthy convenience, maybe it's not, but the localizers have made their decision so we can't do anything about it.

Even if you discount "boku", "ore" and "kare" are fairly explicitly gendered as masculine in the standard Japanese register that is used in the story, plus from what I remember in the manga they also use "niisan" and whatnot. This doesn't mean that the characters actually are male or whatever, obviously. But this is what the writer chose (in a language where it's very easy to discard this sort of stuff), and I think it's a bit presumptuous to try and get around it even at the risk of sounding silly, just to drive home a point that the anime will most likely make explicit on its own, anyway. (Not to mention that by making the characters use "them" and whatnot the translation implies that they do have a concept of gender and are actively aware that it doesn't apply to them.)

Anyway, it's neither here nor there, just something I found weird.

I'd forgotten about the use of the familials. The use of gendered versions of things like "niisan," etc. is actually less easy to discard in Japanese, as like in English they have no reasonably common non-gendered equivalent for those that may not also impute other things. The same is true of "kare," as any of the non-gendered versions would generally either be too rude, too formal or too distant for the situation. Anyhow, point taken; the fact that the author chose to use masculine pronouns when a choice was necessary is lost in this localization (though the fact that the author chose just one and stuck with it makes total logical sense, as the characters would have no need for two, and of the two masculine pronouns span a broader range in terms of individual "voice" options.) Maybe they thought that for the western audience it would better to head off any assumptions early, as the point about them being unaware of gender might not actually come up until somewhere in the middle of the season. <shrug>

I really dug it. The visuals tend to bounce between being pretty stiff in some scenes and surprisingly compelling to look at in others, but I like their overall distinctiveness. Figuring out what to adapt into 3D and why is kind of difficult for an anime, but this medium is perfect for conveying every gem-related characteristic, even down to things like sound design. It's obvious that most of the work was put into various characters' hair and Cinnabar's poison, which paid off because both are lovely to look at. (The Moon People are also quite pretty.)

Plot-wise, it's a little info dump-y right now. But I don't find it offensive yet. I actually like that Phos is so fiery, albeit a bit annoyingly stubborn and dense. I was initially afraid they'd have more of a delicate wallflower sort of personality when I read the premise to this, but their fragile physique contrasts nicely with their spunky disposition. I'm curious to see how their relationship with Cinnabar develops.

Western audiences may also look at the art and mentally assign "female" to those characters and then take the further step and think "harem" title as the priest is definitely male. So I think it's good to get the gender issue out of the way first.

Or if they'd chosen to convey the masculine pronouns in the English, then viewers might assume they're all male. With the hair, some of the clothing designs and some later things taken into account, folks might then think "cross-dresser harem"- not that there's necessarily anything wrong with such things, but it might limit the appeal to a more specialized audience. :heh:

Limiting its audience is not something that this show needs. Over the last couple days it's felt like almost nobody has watched it (at least in the English-speaking internet/blogosphere), compared to the other weekend premiers. :upset:

It has nothing for people who want a harem of any sort. It's not a fanservice series at all. The manga has existed for a long time and garnered it's own following, it was never a mainstream series with wide appeal. The characters aren't "biologically" male or female, they are gemstones carved into the likeness of people. They just happen to usually refer to each other as brother or use male pronouns. If such a concept it hard for an anime watcher to process or if they need to pigeon hole it into "crossdressing harem" just for that it wasn't meant for them anyway.

Plus this is only taking the western fanbase into consideration, the anime is getting promoted in magazines like Pash which mostly has spreads of male character only series so I don't think they mind "limiting" the audience since the manga already has it's fans.