[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

And you watch it play out and you go "wow, now that's something I don't see everyday -- what the heck just happened?"

That's not what I took from it at all.

You do see this everyday in anime.

A fanservice-dominated anime episode. Heavy incestuous overtones.

Oh wow! How daring! How bold!

How... I've seen this a bazillion places before. How disappointing of the man who wrote the excellent arcs and dialogue of Bakemonogatari.

Yes, the use of a toothbrush was mildly creative (I write "mildly" because it never went anywhere outside of Karen's mouth), but the toothbrush is simply a vehicle for the oldest and most tired anime tropes in the book. Furthermore, the vehicle chosen utterly destroyed my suspension of disbelief. I've been to a Dentist before. Getting your teeth brushed by another person is highly unlikely to have an effect like this, even if you're madly in love with the person doing the brushing.

What's in Nise Episode 8 is all over the place in anime. It's nothing new, and it's nothing fresh, and it's nowhere near worth the insane levels of hype that this is episode is getting, imo.

It's admittedly very well-executed (production values, dialogue) sexual innuendo comedy, but "sexual innuendo comedy" is frankly dime-a-dozen in anime. What the Monogatari series used to be was much more fresh and unique in comparison to that, imo.


The Monogatari series actually used to explore interesting conflicts, ideas, relationship issues, and themes. There was a certain intellectual and thought-provoking heft to it. Aside from a couple conversations involving Kaiki there's been virtually none of this in Nise.

Edit: As an analogy, it reminds me of when a popular band that has a certain style decides all of a sudden to put out an album that has a totally different style or is really weird/experimental, and fans start complaining "what happened to this band? They used to be so good!" And someone asks the band about it, and they just say it's an album they wanted to make. It's the "because we can" principle. They know it might alienate some of their fans, but pleasing those fans wasn't why they did it in the first place. "To thine own self be true," as it were. From the commentary posted above, that seems to be the case here too.

To add on to your analogy, but based on my perspective, it would be as if an once interesting musician decided to sell out by producing easy/breezy pop songs for teenage girls. It would be like if Michael Jackson, at the height of Thriller, teamed up with other genuinely interesting top musicians, to turn into The Backstreet Boys. That's honestly what seeing Bake transition to Nise has been like to me.

Originally Posted by 00Coyote

I think you misunderstood me.

It's not about the characters talking. (to advance the plot)
It's about the characters talking. (to advance the relationships)

Even if we accept your position here (which in and of itself is debatable), there's a problem here.

All of the fanservice scenes of this anime (with the exceptions of the one involving Hitagi) can't go anywhere, hence keeping character relationships in something of a holding pattern as far as romantic/sexual interest is concerned. They're all one big tease, imo. That's a lot of what I often find unsatisfying about them. But then, that's partly why I've never understood the love of sexual fanservice that a fair number of anime fans have - So much of it is a tease that doesn't go anywhere, and will never go anywhere.

And this episode is also almost certainly going to amount to nothing but a big tease (unless Nisio is bolder than I currently think he is, and hence chooses to seriously threaten the Arargi/Hitagi pairing).

What interest this episode could have had for me is drowned out in the knowledge that Araragi is basically already taken (by someone who's liable to kill him or seriously maim him if he breaks her heart) and the Monogatari series won't go so far as to show actual sex scenes on camera.