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A Lull in the Sea (Nagi no Asukara) (TV).


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HaruhiToy



Joined: 15 Apr 2008
Posts: 4118
PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 10:53 am Reply with quote
DuskyPredator wrote:
And then that part with Akira.

I have to admit I never thought of doing that to a girl just after she thanked me for something. I remember reading Peter Payne once that he said that grade school kids he encountered were fond of doing that to him. It must be a peculiarly Japanese thing -- I don't recall seeing it in any other culture.
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TsunaReborn!



Joined: 08 Sep 2012
Posts: 4713
Location: Cheltenham UK
PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 6:11 pm Reply with quote
Called Miuna spoiler[being the replacement a while ago... so did many others.] Everything is falling into place... well how I want it too Laughing

Tsumugu showed his maturity once again. He is the kind of friend everyone wants, trustworthy and honest. Bless Chi spoiler[at least she doesn't have to worry about the only one being happy anymore as everyone seems to be falling in love Very Happy ]

I'm not sure what's going to happen to Miuna; I don't think the series will spoiler[leave her trapped there with the Sea God but if they do get her out I have a feeling she will be how Manaka was - not being about to fall in love. At least she would have destroyed those feeling for Hikari. In all serious though I think the pendent will be Miuna's replacement as it mirrors Manaka's feelings which in turn mirror Miuna's.]

Oh Akira, you are adorable as ever!

Can't wait to see the next episode but sat to see it come to an end.
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Chiibi



Joined: 19 Dec 2011
Posts: 4828
PostPosted: Fri Mar 28, 2014 11:02 pm Reply with quote
getchman wrote:
where did Chiibi go? can't imagine she's happy with some current developments


Chiibi was in Japan, buying super-rare Nagi No Asukara goods at a convention, doing Kirino's "AKIHABARAAAAA" scream, taking pictures of Attack on Titan jello-fruits, and laughing at Engrish phrases on clothes like "THOMAS ATE EGG EVERY DAY". Laughing

And nope, I still don't like ChisakixTsumugu no matter how much the show is trying to force me to.

But I was pretty sure before it was revealed, that Manaka spoiler[told the slug her true love was Hikari. It seems that she was attracted to Tsumugu and admired him in a fangirlish kind of way, but she can't imagine life without Hikari beside her after so many years of being with him.] I was surprised that spoiler[she told Tsumugu everything and he kept it a secret. Manaka ran away from Hikari's confession not out of dislike but out of consideration for Chisaki.] *facepalm* THESE CHILDREN....BACK AND FORTH. BACK AND FORTH. GEEZE. I think if they were all stranded somewhere with the option of only one of them being saved, everyone would choose to die together! Not one of these kids thinks about his or herself! It's almost ridiculous!

MIUNA.

Geeze, that was deja-vu. >_> I hope spoiler[Miuna doesn't have to STAY down there. Doesn't the preview show her standing in the water as everyone narrates?]

And then there's Sayu. Sayu has been like my mouthpiece through this whole second arc. No need to scream at the other characters when they do something you don't like; SAYU DOES IT FOR YOU.
Laughing She very well may be one of the absolute best side characters ever written.
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Stark700



Joined: 30 Jan 2012
Posts: 11762
Location: Earth
PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 4:46 pm Reply with quote
Episode 26/Finale:

Decent episode although not the best imo especially with that spoiler[open ended conclusion. I think it's safe to say that Hikari and Manaka's mutual attraction is legit now. As for Sayu...well, there's hope in the future maybe for her considering that there's another boy that might be attracted to her.]

Wow, what a ride. I just noticed the show is over and when I first watched it on TV. The very first few minutes were Manaka in a net and the deep ocean atmosphere from P.A. Works' excellent visual qualities. Still, I'm rating this as very good.

This reminds me to go to the beach this weekend. Good weather here.
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A Mystery



Joined: 10 Oct 2010
Posts: 1886
Location: Netherlands
PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 4:47 pm Reply with quote
Final episode

A spoiler[happy ending]!
I really liked this show. It tended to be overdramatic at times, but generally hit the right notes. Not to mention: while I did get annoyed a little bit by Chisaki, almost all characters developed in a nice way. I also thought that the pacing was done really well.
Now if only someone was spoiler[forward enough to kiss... (Tsumugu, I had my hopes on you boy!) ] (well okay then, spoiler[Akari did kiss her guy] once). I already thought it wasn't going to happen.

I'm hesitating whether to give it a Very Good or Excellent, but for now I'll go with the latter one Wink.
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phia_one



Joined: 15 Jan 2012
Posts: 1654
Location: Pennsylvania
PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 5:53 pm Reply with quote
Final Episode

I'm happy that spoiler[it was open ended since I feel like it made the finale more effective. Change was a big theme of the series and I think that having a concrete ending would have went against the theme.]

EDIT: Changing my rating as well as adding more explanation.

Essentially, my problems with the show match SpasticMinnow's post further down. The set-up of the series was just to add some substance from an otherwise bland 'love and the pain that goes with it' story. This was Decent.


Last edited by phia_one on Fri Apr 04, 2014 9:35 am; edited 1 time in total
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One-Eye



Joined: 08 Mar 2011
Posts: 2260
PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 6:51 pm Reply with quote
The show started off as excellent for me, but got a little too melodramatic in the last few episodes. I don't like what they did with Chisaki's character. I was hoping that she would have matured and came to an understanding on her own. Instead I feel that she regressed. I also wished that they had mined Tsumugu's family situation a little more. His seeming estrangement with his mother was interesting and I felt that there was a lost opportunity for drama there.

I did like that at the end Miuna sort of became spoiler[the hope for the future because she had ena and that also meant that there might be less animosity between the sea and the surface. In one sense she became the bridge between the sea and the surface or perhaps the future. So maybe there will be a little less "They're stealing our women!"]. I loved a lot of the details in the backgrounds like the unfinished bridge and half submerged tracks.

I wish we could have gotten a flash forward to where all these characters might be in another 5 years.

I haven't fully decided yet, but I'm leaning towards rating it Very Good or B+.
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Spastic Minnow
Bargain Hunter
Exempt from Grammar Rules


Joined: 02 May 2006
Posts: 4595
Location: Gainesville, FL
PostPosted: Thu Apr 03, 2014 11:28 pm Reply with quote
Ultimately I just can't recommend it very strongly. It was basically a weak love quadrangle story buoyed by a weak piece of nautical fantasy. Without the sea village, if it were just a teen love story with a group of boys and girls it never could have sustained a 2-cour series.
If it were just about the relationship between an underwater village and the land above, presented with just the details we were given- it would have been clear what utter rubbish the concept was.

Combine the two and the goal was to make the faults less obvious. But to me the fantasy world building was still rubbish and the love-story was still very cheesy, overlong, and underwhelming.

It looked very pretty, it was "pleasant" and it had a happy ending. All things I do like, so it's far from a disaster.

Final rating for me is "decent", the rating I give something that has aspects I like, but too many faults to overlook.
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DuskyPredator



Joined: 10 Mar 2009
Posts: 15433
Location: Brisbane, Australia
PostPosted: Fri Apr 04, 2014 9:18 am Reply with quote
Episode 26 (final)

I see the whole theme now, and it is... Love! In the end it looked like the Sea God spoiler[made a big mistake in the past]. In the past he saw spoiler[her cry while looking towards the surface, feeling it that he was taking her from what she wanted he let her go back to the surface but to protect her he took her love so she would not get hurt] when she went. Eventually his spoiler[longing and pain was too much to bare that he fell apart]. What he did not spoiler[realize was that she was crying that she wanted to go back despite the fact she love the sea, the sea god, and her children, and that she also wanted to stay]. It was only towards the end here with understanding thatspoiler[ love is allowed to be painful, and there is nothing wrong with that that he finally found out the truth about Ojoshi and that she loved him too]. And because of this it looks like the sea god got the spoiler[emotional pick me up that he needed, the will burnt all of the fake Ojoshi because he did not need them anymore, and the sea returned to normal].

It was a great finale, and there was also an added moral that despite everything that might happen, spoiler[nothing is fated, it was only through their own actions that things happened, and because of that miracles can happen]. I think that this was the main reason why the spoiler[Miuna/Hikari/Manaka love triangle was left a little open], Hikari himself recognised how much spoiler[Miuna helped him with her own actions]. The end was more on the spoiler[Manaka side] though, but hey life can change they are only young and all sorts of things can happen. Also some stuff about the love from the spoiler[land and the sea does not need to be exclusive].

Series rating. Story wise I am not too hugely into the whole sea thing, some lapses of logic and stuff can be hard to take seriously. But P.A. Works put some beauty in art here on level with From the New World. I really liked the drama, and I could mostly follow the relationship triangles and feelings. What did I put for FtNW? A "very good", making me consider to give it a step up or not as I believe that it was. I think that I will give it an spoiler[Excellent] as it won me over with characters and drama or relationships.
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phia_one



Joined: 15 Jan 2012
Posts: 1654
Location: Pennsylvania
PostPosted: Fri Apr 04, 2014 9:30 am Reply with quote
Spastic Minnow wrote:
Ultimately I just can't recommend it very strongly. It was basically a weak love quadrangle story buoyed by a weak piece of nautical fantasy. Without the sea village, if it were just a teen love story with a group of boys and girls it never could have sustained a 2-cour series.
If it were just about the relationship between an underwater village and the land above, presented with just the details we were given- it would have been clear what utter rubbish the concept was.

Combine the two and the goal was to make the faults less obvious. But to me the fantasy world building was still rubbish and the love-story was still very cheesy, overlong, and underwhelming.

It looked very pretty, it was "pleasant" and it had a happy ending. All things I do like, so it's far from a disaster.

Final rating for me is "decent", the rating I give something that has aspects I like, but too many faults to overlook.


Hmm... your post is making me think I gave my rating too early, since my complaints about the series pretty much match yours. I'll go fix that.
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Merida



Joined: 21 Feb 2012
Posts: 1945
PostPosted: Fri Apr 04, 2014 9:44 am Reply with quote
This was a fitting ending to a really enjoyable series. I don't even consider it an "open ending", things got wrapped up pretty nicely IMO. Then again, spoiler[i wasn't especially rooting for any pairing (well, except for Tsumugu x Fish, of course!) and waiting for a confession and/or kiss with baited breath...Wink]

Overall i loved this show a lot, especially for its cast that really grew on me and i ended up liking every single character...which is rare (and pretty amazing, spoiler[considering how much i disliked Manaka after the first episode...)]. It also helped that everything looked very pretty and the general mood gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling. Smile

Giving this an Excellent rating.
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Gatherum



Joined: 14 Feb 2012
Posts: 773
Location: Aurora CO
PostPosted: Fri Apr 04, 2014 7:52 pm Reply with quote
My feelings on this one are more or less consistent with that of Spastic Minnow. For a show whose fantasy aspects come up so often, a disproportionate amount of time was spent on the resonance of "feelings" in the ocean. It's surreal, but it feels unremarkable by simple virtue of the typical nature of anime--like it's trying too hard to be "deep" (HA HA GET IT?). That, and there were, quite frankly, too many love polygons occurring simultaneously, and not enough characters with the fortitude to fight and assert. Tsumugu was the only one who approached anything akin to a direct confession without any prodding from someone else, and even then, he was far too stiff and contemplative about it to be believable. The story was essentially a giant smoldering of angst.

Complaints about the love polygons aside, the characters themselves were okay, if unremarkable. Ironically, Manaka herself was probably the most tolerable because she spent most of the series being too innocent and too clumsy to be cognisant of, and factor in to, the aforementioned rollercoaster of angst that plagued everyone else. Her sole motivation during those times was straight friendship, something the series as a whole doesn't seem content with. Miuna, for filling the "rival on the losing side" archetype, was respectably restrained and aware of what was right, being all too bothered by the implications of helping to retrieve Manaka and her ability to feel love, yet contributing to both without hesitation or incident. Tsumugu was level-headed, in spite of my expectations for him (I thought he was one of those insane characters waiting to happen), but essentially felt like Sasuke without the obsession with revenge. Kaname was the guy who tried and failed to be the perceptive and influential kid in the group, and Chisaki was a classic example of a woman trying so hard to be selfless that she ended up being selfish as all fudge. It speaks volumes when you change less over the course of five years than your friends in stasis do. And then there's Hikari...who was so impulsive and overblown much of the time that he ended up being annoying.

To be honest, I began to lose interest by the halfway point, but to its credit, it was rekindled by the disastrous turn of the first Ofunehiki. At that point, I felt like shit was getting somewhat real. And then, there was the passage of time, allowing for certain changes to occur. The execution of those changes notwithstanding, they do sow curiosity in the viewer. In the end, it's a fairly straightforward adolescent love story as anime goes, but keeps things alive with one or two key curveball events. The sea/surface dichotomy still feels arbitrary in the face of its primary themes, with almost all events for which the sea was critical essentially being metaphors for things that can happen in a typical slice-of-life world ("sacrificing" one of two competing people in a love triangle, feeling resonance, &c.). It's a bit stupid that all of that emotional building occurred and we are not offered so much as a kiss from any of the new pairings, implied or otherwise--not only that, but the issue of the Hikari/Manaka/Miuna triangle may as well have simply been dropped for lack of available screen time. But then, lack of capitalisation seems to be a trend in anime recently. :/

I'd call it decent. Worth seeing if you've time to kill.
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HaruhiToy



Joined: 15 Apr 2008
Posts: 4118
PostPosted: Fri Apr 04, 2014 8:35 pm Reply with quote
I was going to wait longer before posting because I have been quite enjoying all post-final-episode reviews everyone is posting. For example:
Gatherum wrote:
It speaks volumes when you change less over the course of five years than your friends in stasis do.

This earns my reward for most pithy. Nail-head meet hammer.
Quote:
And then there's Hikari...who was so impulsive and overyblown much of the time that he ended up being annoying.

The odd thing is mid series Hikari seemed to have outgrown that, and then sometime after hibernation his character time seems to have regressed. His thoughtful side just disappeared too easily too many times.

And that is actually what I think happened to the whole series overall. Up to the events of the hibernation they were really rocking -- I felt we were looking at Masterpiece anime. I think it was more than me that felt that way. Then in the last 8 or so episodes they seemed to lose steam. And at the end here a lot of the reviews are more downbeat than not in spite of at least one Excellent.

Nonetheless my vote is Excellent as well, even though I pretty much agree with all the criticisms in the last page of posts. The reason is that I just really like the weird, illogical world they built in the background. I posted many times about why it made no sense but in spite of that the characters lived in that world and made it live in spite of its impossibility. And if you are going thane a fantasy like that make it a beautiful fantasy. That's what they did.

What I also liked is that we saw two tribes -- the surface and the sea dwellers -- that had their prejudices and problems with each other yet somehow managed to get along. Possibly what went wrong with the second half is that the sea people were MIA.
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TsunaReborn!



Joined: 08 Sep 2012
Posts: 4713
Location: Cheltenham UK
PostPosted: Sat Apr 05, 2014 4:13 pm Reply with quote
I really enjoyed the final episode I thought it tied itself up well especially with the direction it had taken leading up to the final few episodes. I like the fact that most of the relationships were left spoiler[open ended as it leaves the view to decide what they would like to happen, though it was heavily inferred that Hii and Manaka were/would be getting together. ] Also it leaves open the possibility of OVA to show where they are in the future.

Earlier on in the series I rated it as a masterpiece and I don't think I will change that as for me I really did enjoy the series especially the characters. I felt many strong emotions watching Nagi and for me that is what I want from a series. I will have to consider whether it remains in my top 10 as the series did weaken slightly after the time skip especially as the focus seemed to shift more towards Miuna; I like Miuna but she took away some of the focus from Chisaki and Kaname who were two of the "original" five from before the time skip.
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Chiibi



Joined: 19 Dec 2011
Posts: 4828
PostPosted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 10:29 pm Reply with quote
I thought it was a really nice finale. It left me wanting more...but it didn't piss me off. lol

Yay for spoiler[ not killing anyone.] I thought Hikari spoiler[crying over Miuna was precious; "HOW CAN YOU LOVE A JERK LIKE ME are you STUPID!?" LOL] Don't you love it when characters admit their faults? And all the events that followed after that were great. The family reunion was great. The feels and friendships between Manaka and Miuna were great. The loving looks Manaka and Hikari exchanged were great. (I wish there was a kiss or hug though) BUT MANAKA AND TSUMUGU'S LAST INTERACTION WAS THE GREATEST OF ALL. AND AKIRA JOINED IN.

I will forever ship them. If someone wrote a doujin of an alternate story route where Manaka and Chisaki switched places, I'd read the hell out of that.....I mean, think how INTERESTING that would be!! Everything would be different!!

Anyway, this is definitely one to go on my shelf. NIS, please do your thing.
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