Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka?

The design and animation work seems to be much more comfortable with the humans than the monsters. Which is... really worrying for this series

Edited by Hylarn on Aug 8th 2018 at 4:37:36 AM

Oof... Any thoughts on when will it be released?

x5 The other characters are sorta spoilery so I can see why they didn't put them there.

LN spoilers I guess: Sophia, for example, has a slightly bigger role in Shun's story with her showing up much earlier helping Hugo (or Yuugo, which is how the fan translators rendered it) keep Shun's group from fleeing the capital after the king's assassination. To fit with her villainess bit, she plays a slightly more active role during the earlier parts of the attack on the elf village, taunting both Shun and Hugo. This also means that she can't be brought up in character introductions without spoiling the fall of the Analeit kingdom. Well, unless you give barebones information ("She's a powerful vampire.") in which case what's the point?

x2 It seems they're using lots of CGI for the monsters for some reason. Maybe it's because of the various monster swarms that show up, so they decided to just use CGI for all the monsters to make them all match...? I'm kind of annoyed that Alaba is so obviously CGI though.

EDIT: It seems that some people are speculating that Kumoko is voiced by Yuuki Aoi.

Edited by HanabiraKage on Aug 8th 2018 at 8:03:06 PM

Wow, that CG looks... not great. Nor am I a fan of the weird spider-with-nose design; I don't really care that it's what the LN used, the design from the manga looks much better.

I don't really care about her design either way, but I am concerned about the large amount of CGI.

That said, it's really only horrible on Alaba. The rest of it seems to be within tolerable limits, though Kumoko's going to be on-screen for like 90% of the show and she appears to be partially CGI so it might start grating after a bit.

It was interesting to look at the LN art and realize that the manga redesigned pretty much everything. This is very rare! But something I have to say I approve of in this case. Don't really like most of the original designs

I do have to say that I get annoyed whenever anime uses 2d for humans and cgi for monsters ._. Mostly because its the monster designs I want to see in beautiful 2d art.

But yeah, have to say manga design is much better, it does good job of spider being expressive without human eyes and that weird moomin shaped head on spider looks weird

Kumoko looks bad, Alaba looks terrible. And what's with the color choices used for him? Earth dragons should not be bright blue. Kumoko's voice is meh.

So yeah not looking hopeful.

It's all based on the LN art. Alaba (and all the other earth dragons) is also neon blue in the LN.

I'm guessing I'm the only one here who prefers our protagonist's light novel design to her manga design then?

That aside, with the exception of some of the CGI I don't really have a problem with what I saw in that video. Voice is different from what I expected but that's not a bad thing.

Just because the LN also colored him wrong is no excuse!

Gasp! Gyurie is actually doing something! Bets on him chickening out and withdrawing again?

But I wouldn't mind him getting killed off for real. This story does a fantastic job of making the heroic characters unlikable without compromising their morals.

Edited by Arha on Aug 9th 2018 at 12:11:21 PM

It's a bit of a shame that she's not only completely terrible at speaking but that it never occurs to her to respond to violence with anything but more violence. This fight really comes across as entirely unnecessary and mostly the result of Gyurie being something of an idiot who believes D way too easily even when he knows he shouldn't.

Oh well. Actually, I've been kind of wondering if the author walked back on the idea that Shiraori's plan is less dangerous to mankind than the alternative. I guess we'll see after the fight when we learn what she handed over to sensei.

^^^ tbh I don't really know what her LN design looks like. The web novel indicates that she went from black to super black and then white but was otherwise really vague when it came to describing her.

Edited by Arha on Aug 12th 2018 at 12:05:39 PM

So I missed the new chapter of the manga being out. I guess they're not being cagey about things that weren't revealed for aaaaages in the web novel. And I don't really like the differences in Kumoko's character here. The hate filled rampage was a bit jarring but I think it was kind of necessary to establish Ariel and to help distance her from her earlier benevolence into more of a Chaotic Neutral figure.

Edited by Arha on Sep 2nd 2018 at 1:44:55 PM

Ariel gets very established in vol 4 of the LN, which is coming up soonish in the manga, so that's not really a big problem.

Edited by HanabiraKage on Sep 3rd 2018 at 10:02:38 PM

The long hiatus sucks. Or did RTD drop it?

Anyway, I'm going to make a character page, I think. I'm planning to have Kumoko and Shiraori entries be separate unless someone disagrees.

Hiatus. The author takes some breaks here and there. He's probably pretty busy with volume 10 and (probably) helping out the anime production right now.

Edited by HanabiraKage on Oct 7th 2018 at 10:58:43 PM

Something occurred to me last night when I was trying to get to sleep. Namely, it's actually impossible for Shun to defeat Shiraori as he is now through violence. He's way below her in power and within the System she can't be matched. Then there's also the fact that trying to attack her would doom the planet thanks to the hero against god powerup, but not only would this be a defeat in itself but Shiraori still wouldn't die because there's not enough energy to kill her plus all her nasty little backup plans. And given how willing he is to use Kindness his Divine Area has to be expanding quite slowly, so ditching the title by becoming a god would be difficult. And assuming level 100 is another way to evolve into a god, he's still not terribly likely to reach that either since that would cause an unprecedented level of mass murder, which is really OOC.

So given all that I'm curious as to how he's going to win and whether Shiro will survive it. Because I don't doubt that he'll win. But my ideas for how the series might end range from depressing (Shiro flat out dies) to weird, like Shiro and Shun dating after somehow patching about their differences after punching D in the face when she turns out to be the true final boss. Or Shiro becoming the new guardian god of the planet, or losing her godhood and taking Wakaba Hiiro's place. Which all feel cracky to me.

Edited by Arha on Oct 10th 2018 at 12:06:42 PM

New manga chapter. Really don't like how it's spoiling stuff you weren't supposed to know for years.

Decided to pick up the light novels cause I want money to go to the author or at least to show interest in the series over here. I hope they're translated better than Hataraku was.

Also hm. Guess there's not really much interest in this series considering how dominated the thread is by my posts lately, occasionally several in a row. There's long gaps between them so I don't consider it double posting but still.

Edited by Arha on Oct 18th 2018 at 11:15:16 AM

To be honest, I feel like there isn't really much for me to contribute, is the thing. I'm behind on the manga, which is apparently presenting a very limited view of the information we should have, so...

For a second I didn't know what you meant by limited but I suppose you mean cutting out all the Shun chapters. I guess pretty soon we'll be seeing a some chapters briefly going over him reincarnating. Or maybe they'll flat out drop showing the Shun perspective on what the demon army does in the future? That wouldn't be a smart idea but the manga already isn't being very smart from my perspective.

I'd post more but I'm following the light novels and I haven't gotten to the third yet. Once the anime comes out I'll be a lot more active.

x4 From what I've heard, the L Ns have very inconsistent translations. Like you might have a certain skill translated one way, then translated an entirely different way two sentences later.

Shoot. Well, whatever, at least this way I have indirectly given the author some amount of money, probably.

Reads better than Hataraku so far, but the protagonist seems a little less quirky and it seems like she's getting a heroism upgrade. Or monster downgrade, perhaps.

Oh, huh, the egg actually hatches in the first novel. The manga is way past that point. Why are you ruining everything, manga?

Edited by Arha on Oct 22nd 2018 at 10:35:15 AM

Okay, so, non spoiler summary of the light novels: They're okay to good. The source material is strong and the translation is generally alright, though it does get inconsistent sometimes and I've noticed a few minor errors. It's got one really big flaw that kind of undermines the whole thing, though, which is that Kumoko is just not amoral/evil enough. I recognize that this is a really weird complaint coming from me given my hatred of grimdark, but there's not enough gratuitous violence.

There's less spoiling of later reveals than in the manga, which I appreciate.