No Good Life

[AironicallyHuman]

No; this isn't a suicide letter to the internet. Don't get excited.

This thread has been created with one purpose: to remove the darkness from the eyes of the ignorant masses, many months before I use my limitless talent as a writer to review what is, quite possibly, the greatest manga of all time.

When one of the few titles worthy of a 10/10 score is still being released (@ 7 / 9) in yankland, and next to no-one has a clue it even exists, it's a big problem. Poor Please Save My Earth received the same treatment, back in the day, and it seems destined that yet another series dealing with the past lives of teenagers trying to get on with their current lives is also going to slip under the radar. No Naruto / smut = ignore, clearly.

I'm not going to do what I normally do and ramble for 20 paragraphs without getting to the point, as well as throwing images in-between the wall of text. Nooooooo. I'm saving myself for that fine day in the future when, hopefully, I 10/10/review the bestest manga Evangelion. But here's a brief summary of the story:

Keidai is a troubled young man. He's always had memories of the days when he was a knight of Pompeii, some 1,900 years earlier. Married to the most desired woman in the land, the best of friends with a trusted comrade, and with a cute little sister - no man could have been happier. However, sadly for Keidai (back then, Sirix, FYI), Pompeii was completely destroyed by a volcanic eruption; everyone dying and poor Sirix not being able to keep his vow to his wife, Serena - leaving her to die all alone, in darkness.

Even more troubling for our most troubled of leads, in his present life as a Japanese high school student, it seems he can't help but encounter reincarnations of people he knew some 1,900 years ago. Whether it's the former S&M, whipping older sister of his love (now a man) or the master he once served, they're all there, in close proximity.

His mother? She's the reincarnation of his little sister, Aria. His father? The playboy rival he fought tooth and nail with for the hand of his beloved Serena. His wannabe girlfriend/best friend? His male best friend from his previous life. His next door neighbor? Naturally, his former wife... who's now a guy. And, of course, it goes without saying that only Keidai happens to remember anything about their time as Italians.

In the hands of another writer, NG Life could very easily have gone in the PSME direction of hard-hitting drama as the present selves of individuals with past lives attempted to avoid repeating the sins of the past. But that isn't NG Life. While the story has made me come close to crying and pulled on my heart-strings during some of the sadder, more moving parts, the intention was clearly for readers to read with a huge grin on their faces. Keidai may have good looks and athletic skills on top, he's also a complete dork. He acts purely on instinct, for the most part, and that means he randomly hugged the male reincarnation of his former wife, crying, when first seeing him, and also did the same to his (now female, previously male) best friend -- her soon realizing he had no dirty thoughts hidden as he began treating her like a guy; openly expressing his liking for her without thinking of how it sounded and, basically, leading everyone to think they're a couple. He also loses himself in thought over being led down the path of homosexuality by his reincarnated wife; making agonized poses on his desk in class and amusing his peers greatly by doing so.

I suppose the most impressive thing about NG Life is the handling of the characters. With the mostly memory-less present selves of the cast being focused on, and their past as Italians only briefly touched upon, I've had no trouble caring about the tender romance that's progressed, bit by bit, between Keidai and his wannabe girlfriend/former male best friend, Serizawa. She's such a lovable heroine, always thinking of Keidai's devotion to his former wife and understanding how hard it is to convince himself she isn't his male best friend anymore. Her ability to read him, as well as others she's close to, highlights her intelligence, and - together with Keidai - she's genuinely funny.

...Bah, I ended up rambling. THIS WILL DO!!!!

NG Life Manga | Anime-Planet

[xelipsis]

I'm not going to do what I normally do and ramble for 20 paragraphs without getting to the point, as well as throwing images in-between the wall of text. Nooooooo. I'm saving myself for that fine day in the future when, hopefully, I 10/10/review the bestest manga Evangelion.

Because you lied to me, I demand a tl;dr version of your post. lol

[AironicallyHuman]

Man, did that bitch ever lie to me when she said something along the lines of, "AP is a wonderful place for intelligent discussion and feedback." More worthwhile activity at my local graveyard. Up to yet, informative sexism chatter is all AP has offered. This is why I shut the door in the faces of door-to-door salesmen--and I'll do the same with saleswomen, in the future.

*sigh*

...Since you asked, I'll sum NG Life up in a paragraph, and I'll even throw in an image I lazily Googled that illustrates part of my rambling. No need to thank me.



NG Life is about a dorky (though good-looking and athletic) guy called Keidai. 1,900 years ago, he lived in Pompeii as a warrior called Sirix, with the most beautiful woman in the land on one side and, on the other, a true broship friend. Sadly, everything ended in misery when a volcanic eruption destroyed Pompeii; killing everyone. Fast-forward 1,900 years into the future and Sirix has been reborn, with all of his memories fully intact, as a Japanese kid. His mother was once his little sister; his father was once his rival in love; his (now male) next-door neighbour was once his wife; and his (now female, in love with him) best friend was once his male best friend. In the No Good Life he finds himself living, Keidai must avoid becoming gay out of love for his former wife and deal with his lovable best friend wanting to enter into a relationship with him--everyone else around him not sharing his memories of tragedy, love, and broship.

[sothis]

Man, did that bitch ever lie to me when she said something along the lines of, "AP is a wonderful place for intelligent discussion and feedback." More worthwhile activity at my local graveyard. Up to yet, informative sexism chatter is all AP has offered. This is why I shut the door in the faces of door-to-door salesmen--and I'll do the same with saleswomen, in the future.

so far pretty much every paragraph i've seen of yours in prof comments or forum posts has consisted of one or two of the following:

-AP sucks and/or i'm only here till i get sick of it
-i'm so awesome (and awesome)

if you know a reason why anyone here should desire trying to engage you in intelligent discussion, please do let me know.

[AironicallyHuman]

Isn't it kind of natural to be led into believing I'm awesome when some reviewing person from AP pestered me into joining -- offering to be my personal editor? I'm a level-headed guy and modest, normally, but her harassment made me lose sight of myself. Blame this all on 'V'.

In all seriousness, your response is why I'm going to take myself, along with my (large) banana, and return to my homeland. I don't care what people think of me. What I care about, and why I came here, is to occasionally share my views and maybe turn a few heads towards the unknown. That's why I bothered posting this thread here--think of it as a trial run. But what happened? Not a lot.

I could take no Blassreiter discussion resulting from my rambling, without structure. Heck, I could take even my more thoughtful FB rambling not getting commented on when it's so old. But no conversation resulting from reviewing Innocent Venus, too? That made me cry manly tears. I had to prevent myself from attempting to slit my wrists with my credit card(s).

The website? Nice enough. The forum/membership? Too few people, leading to members only typing to others they've known for awhile. Not my cup of tea.

I dislike people too much to survive in a pond. The sea calls for me, and I must go. Farewell.

[sothis]

re: forum, for sure it's not super highly trafficed. there are around 400,000 people that come to the main site every month. the forum? maybe a few thousand. given the lack of integration with the main site (as vbulletin integration is just an ungodly nightmare and we dont have the devs/funds to build a custom solution yet), i've never been surprised that the forum isn't more trafficed.

if the sole reason you're here is forum discussion, i totally agree, might not be the best solution. i dont know how the site was presented to you, but imo the worth of being here as a contributor is a LOT stronger in a few other areas than forum discussions:

1. synopses - we only put up things that someone personally writes and are edited. no other anime site focuses on this level of quality. when someone submits a good synopsis (which generally is just a small set of people who are also good writers). while you won't see floods of people saying 'wow thats an awesome synop!', the fact that hundreds of thousands of people appreciate them daily is a pretty big deal to me. mega sites like bakabt use our anime synops 95% of the time due to the quality, so AP has to be doing something right.

2. reviews. not only the community reviews (which aren't posted in the forum), especially the site reviews, which is probably what vivi approached you about. if you google/bing/whatever 'anime reviews', AP is always one of the top results. each review doesn't necessarily get a huge amount of replies, but they are heavily viewed and considered to be reputable, professional and definitely editorial (as opposed to fanboy fodder) by the public. due to this there's a very high quality bar that applicants have to reach to be able to join the fray, but once a person crosses that bar they become a very influential person to the same set of 100s of ks of anime/manga fans.

3. recommendations. as AP started out as a recommendation database 10 years ago, and given the recs are moderated, they are also highly reputable. if a person wants to make a splash, adding recommendations is another good way to go, as people use them daily and frequently.

i'm not trying to convince you to stay or leave, just pointing out the areas of the site that AP *does* excel at, and/or have the best opportunities for influencing. if you wanted to give your opinions to the masses and have them widely read/appreciated/etc, i dont think forum posts are the way to go. you're right that mal and other sites do have more trafficed forum communities. i wish it were different here, but given the technical issues with getting it working, it wont happen immediately.

[thepgo]

ehm, how to put it... actually you gained my interest, and I think I'll read that manga soon, it seems nice from your description.
But what I didn't like about your topic/attitude, is that I can't tell wheter:
- You made this topic solely on purpose of telling us how AP sucks, and made a random review as a background so it wouldn't look like pure rant
- You actually made this topic to convince us to look into that manga, but got lost somewhere in the sea of your own awesomness.
Next time post two separate topics, one with a review, and another one with your awesomness. That would be a shame that someone could miss manga that you wanted to show just because he tl;dr'ed after two paragraphs of worthless 'omg what a douche' shit.

[AironicallyHuman]

What was so bad about the start of the opening post? I did my usual light-trolling with the "ignorant" inclusion and referred to myself as talented as a writer in an attempt at mocking myself that people often misunderstand, sure, but it wasn't as if I spent more time typing about myself than NG Life. And I never attacked AP in the OP; only in the second post in a (somewhat successful) attempt at getting another reader. When I'm not creating a full-on review, I play around because life would be dull, otherwise.

It's just my personality to be sarcastic and not easy to read, is all. AP is a nice enough site, just not active enough to do it for me when I already hang around two forums. I was looking for a venue for decent discussion since MAL has too many spamming idiots for my taste and found a forum with too few users; users comfy with those already here. That's all.

Let's put it this way: AP is too nice for me. It might have worked out had I gone down the reviewing path, as opposed to posting on the forum, but there are too few titles worthy of serious, 10-20 paragraph, structured reviews. NG Life is one, for sure, but AP doesn't do pro manga reviews, iirc, and it isn't finished in English until next year.

...In any event, I hope - through arseholism or my fabled ability as a writer - at least one person starts and loves NG Life. Then, this pointless drama will have served a purpose.

Another pretty NG Life picture:



Goodbye.

[sothis]

so actually,

G Life is one, for sure, but AP doesn't do pro manga reviews, iirc, and it isn't finished in English until next year.

it's my #1 desire to get a professional manga review section up. literally the only reason it's not up yet is because i want:

1. a decent first set of them; it will look embarassing if there's only 20 'official' reviews up - ie, you click a letter, and there's like 1 review or 0. at the moment we do have a few of the site reviewers doing manga reviews, and i think have about 30 or so that are finished and up on the site (currently in community review format until the pro section goes up). id ideally like more than that but it's getting to the tipping point

2. even more so than #1, i want to get a few reviewers onboard who LOVE manga and would do a lot of manga reviews. even people who mostly just choose to do manga reviews would be great, as then we'd get a steady stream.

there's a bit of a chicken and egg problem with the manga section on AP. i added the manga database and recommendations only in the last ~8 months, after 9 years of being solely anime. we still only put up synops if they are hand written for example, and only since then have manga reviews been possible. there's an issue in that people don't think AP has enough manga content so they dont stick around to use it, but unless people stick around to use it (or contribute to it), there wont be a lot of content. yanno?

it's the same issue with finding site reviewer staff to write manga reviews. i'm sure if we had some dedicated people for it, it would be easier to attract others. the quality bar is already so freaking high that it's tough to get anyone to come through, but if there's no semi dedicated manga reviewers, it's hard to be that first person to say 'oh cool, i want to review for them'. we can easily say 'look, your reviews would be extremely reputable here unlike being one of a zillion community reviews on another site', yet i can understand why people might be skeptical manga-wise given we haven't brought that sort of talent onboard yet for non anime.

so yeah - just wanted to point out that the pro manga reviews thing, i TOTALLY want to happen. just requires the right people coming onboard and the code gets done/put up very quickly. as simple as that ^_^


[EDIT]

one additional note i want to make for posterity is that while yes, reviews are structured in the pro section, they also dont have to be 20 paragraphs. there are some reviewers on staff who do generally write very long reviews (not overly long, but definitely long), such as vivisqueen, patches, etc.

as long as analysis is made and points are covered, that's not a requirement, it's a choice. for example, while kira moved on recently to focus on her own blog, check out her review of sleeping with hinako: http://www.anime-planet.com/reviews/a744.html

given it's a one episode ova the length makes sense. if it was a 50 episode series, maybe could use more in some of the sections. still, with manga, the same sort of thing would apply. if it's a one shot, that would be a fucking stretch to get that much content in there, and it would be ridiculous to expect it. even 1 vol would be difficult to have more than maybe 2-3 paras for story and less for the other sections. the content, not the length, is what matters. [edit 2 THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID]

[AironicallyHuman]

You're nothing if not dedicated to typing about your site - I'll give you that. Unlike with Vivian, I actually read through your paragraphs and, once again, felt compelled to type one more message.

Since I don't want to post reviews on MAL when my ratings reverse, there's no way to get feedback, I declared my last review to be my last review, and Swedish women are out to get me, I'll make you a deal: when I'm done with NG Life, I'll type up a review, send it to my editor and see what happens. If it's liked/deemed helpful, then I'll continue typing semi-regular manga reviews for AP. If it isn't, I'll kill myself, but don't worry about that.

And, yes: I'm well aware you have no paragraph count requirement. But a review isn't a proper review in my eyes unless it's detailed, and when I like something, I type A LOT about the characters/story.

As for structure, I wasn't referring to AP's forced structuring so much as the kind required in my head so it's focused/not a mess. If I go with the forum variety of reviews and just type whatever comes into my head, there's a chance only I'll comprehend it. And so, more time/effort is required before finger meets keyboard. And more time after finishing to see if the length can be shortened.

Now, I go, for reals. Hopefully this has taught Vivian a valuable lesson about offering her body in return for AP reviewing -- it doesn't always go in the direction you want it. (All I wanted was NG Life love...)

Goodbye.