/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

fas png
(211.04 KB, 393x540)

Yes I do. I got pretty into it starting from the beginning of last year when I watched Little Witch Academia and Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, and from then on watched some other shows seasonally. But I stopped following shows seasonally in the same year because it got too much for me, now I just slowly work through my backlog of current and older shows.
Some of my favourites:
< Azumanga Daioh
< Kiniro Mosaic
< Last Exile
< Made in Abyss
< Welcome to the NHK
< Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou
< Uchouten Kazoku
< Kemono Friends
I tend to read manga when I see the anime first and enjoy it (e.g. Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou) but lately I've been getting into manga without the intermediate anime step.
> rat-adjacent themes
I don't consume anime/manga for that reason so I don't know of any ones specifically like that.

I hope everyone's using this to rank their anime: https://www.gwern.net/Resorter

13184992_f520 jpg
(60.36 KB, 520x390)

Which is the rational choice, anons?

 >>/4632/
Ratio Tile

 >>/4632/
Rei isn't human, and as such can't pass on my superior rationalist genes. Thus, in the absence of a better option (such as Misato), I'll go with Asuka. >>/12170/

tumblr_o5n22jqx5l1v33... jpg
(33.72 KB, 729x552)

 >>/4639/

Misato_Kat... png
(263.08 KB, 471x1000)

 >>/4632/
Both are young, slender, as well as smart and healthy enough to pilot a giant mecha. Either would be a rational choice. However, my dick prefers an alcoholic woman with big anime titties and poor life skills who is past her reproductive prime.

 >>/4639/
> Rei … can't pass on my superior rationalist genes
Is that the case?

 >>/4632/
Asuka is just some human bitch, Rei is a half-clone hybrid avatar of a primordial alien pseudo-goddess. Why the fuck was this ever even a contest.

 >>/4645/
> Is that the case?
Rei's poem makes a reference to a "woman who never bleeds". Many fans have interpreted this woman to be Rei herself, and the fact that she doesn't bleed to mean that she doesn't menstruate, and is therefore incapable of bearing children.
https://wiki.evageeks.org/Theory_and_Analysis:Rei%27s_Monologue

 >>/4645/
They aren't that big.
By the way, you may be interested in the 3-minute short, Osake wa Fuufu ni Natte Kara.

1517906101742 jpg
(117.47 KB, 736x971)

Reccomending Paranoia Agent, Cencoroll and Kids on the Slope. Jin-Roh is also a masterpiece.

 >>/4652/
Asuka has the distinct advantage of having a personality.

 >>/4687/
> advantage

 >>/4687/
I can't put my dick in a personality

 >>/4692/

I also don't see any direct benefit from having your gf be a half-clone hybrid avatar of a primordial alien pseudo-goddess. What does Rei actually have going for her?

 >>/4657/
I like this interpretation.

 >>/4667/
That was cute, perhaps even too cute. Reminded me of another 3-minute series, Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken. In any case, I probably shouldn't pursue this further. It would be a bummer to acquire a fetish for hard-drinking girls.

 >>/4702/
On the off-chance you do manage to impregnate her, the spawn will be literal fuckin' demigods

 >>/4667/

I watched the cocktail show too now, but now I just feel inadequate that my own marriage can't compare.

 >>/4712/
It's your wife who should be feeling inadequate

qb png
(165.44 KB, 740x511)

Madoka Magica is almost rat-adjacent. It deals with wishes and characters who grow a lot more rational about them than they started.

 >>/4733/
Madoka Magica is a good show, but as rat-material it's fucken dumb. After some fucking around with a nonsense "balance of hope and despair", it reveals its central themes are "hurr durr utilitarianism is for aliens" and "love is the strongest force in the universe!"

Relatedly - is it just me or is Alan Moore's Miracleman basically rationalist fanfiction? It even has rescue simulations.

BD_6_Ume_4... jpg
(203.96 KB, 445x1263)

 >>/4734/
The "balance of hope and despair" stuff is pretty dumb, but what I had in mind was Madoka's choice of wish and Homura's munchkinism. They wouldn't be out of place in a rational fanfic. I also don't see the show's "alien utilitarianism" theme as anti-utilitarian. It's deliberately morally ambiguous.

 >>/4735/
I can see where you're coming from, but it's more of a traditional deconstruction of the superhero genre than rational fiction.

I'd probably classify rational fiction as a whole as a subgenre of deconstructive fiction. Both of them exist to shine a light on perceived inadequacies of the source material, but ratfic does it in a very specific way.

 >>/4737/
A story about wishes ending with a "perfect" wish that fixes things for a happy ending is the standard trope. Her particular wish isn't anything special for an example of that trope.

Homura doesn't munchkin anything. She has two or three absurdly powerful abilities, that she uses in the obvious way to use those powers, with which she brute-forces any problem she faces. She has a bit of a learning curve where she starts off pathetically incompetent, but that doesn't make her a hyperrational munchkin type, it makes her a protagonist.

It uses the alien utilitarianism thing to simultaneously point out utilitarianism as obviously right and shit all over it and say humans can't be utilitarians. So, yes, deliberately morally ambiguous, but not in a smart way.

 >>/4740/
You've changed my mind about Homura being a munchkin. You're right, she doesn't qualify.

I disagree that the story says humans can't be utilitarians. One reason I like the show is that I think it does something smarter than that.

When Kyubey explains to Madoka his utilitarian "deal" with humanity and how he thinks about it, she can't accept or even fully comprehend it. In every timeline before the final she is idealistic to the end and sincerely wants a true happy ending for everyone. This is demonstrated by her witch form, which twists this desire into an attempt to create a heaven on Earth inside her barrier. In the final timeline things come together to change Madoka's thinking. Realizing that an ideal happy ending for everyone is impossible, she accepts a trade-off that costs her her human existence and does not save other magical girls from a life of fighting. She doesn't wish the Incubators never found Earth, presumably because she doesn't want to save magical girls by depriving humans of civilization. The wish Madoka makes to fix things is not an actually perfect wish, but the best compromise she is able to find. Thus, she herself arrives at a sort of utilitarian thinking.

 >>/4742/
Madoka's wish isn't utilitarian though, if the one you're running over in the trolley problem is yourself then that fits virtue ethics or deontology just as well. She's stepping up to be Magical Girl Jesus, I don't think you can even call that less idealistic.

Anyone else watching le legend of galactic heroes? I'm halfway through it.

[Horrible Subs] Boku... webm
(2.89 MB, 960x720 vp8)

Evangelion kind of disappointed me, especially after I binge read the wiki and learned the backstory. There's so much potential to the setting and the lore, and the direction is ambitious and impressive, but the actual series is hampered by a tired monster-of-the-week format for most of its runtime.

It also fails to provide a coherent explanation for many of its mysteries. There's a sense of madness that pervades the latter half of the series, a growing tension that I don't think was intentional - more a product of the stresses the production team went through. In any case, the plotting and pacing become a confusing mess.

Whenever I think of Eva, I feel a deep sense of… unsastisfaction. I think that the Rebuilds were a huge missed oppurtunity. They had a chance to clean up the plotting and pacing issues while retaining the manic-depressive vibe of the originals, but they failed abysmally on both counts. I'd kill for some alternate universe version where Anno worked with an editor and some kind of continuity expert.

 >>/4807/
Is it actually good? I thought its reputation as a masterpiece was a meme. i.e Long and dull and pretentious, but people could ironically claim it was a masterpiece and that dissenters were just plebs who were too stupid and impatient to grasp its subtleties.

 >>/4813/
It's not that it's a bad show that everyone's pretending is good, but yeah, it is a bit of a meme show when it comes to functioning as a "Watch and appreciate this or you're a pleb" filter. Long is right, the OVA could easily have run for 50-odd episodes rather than 110. However, if someone's favourite genre is this kind of political intrigue stuff then I could see them calling LoGH a masterpiece. Sometimes I end up watching 5 or 10 episodes in a row because I get hooked by a story arc. I wouldn't say the show itself is pretentious, but it's very easy to be pretentious about it.
The space battles and physics assumptions might make you sperg because it's just naval battles but in space.

 >>/4812/
Pretty much all the mysteries are answered if you dig into wikis and weird supplementary material, for what it's worth.

I want to stick my dick in and have my dick pissed on by cute anime girls such as the ones from Kiniro Mosaic. Azumanga Daioh is a better Cute Girls Doing Cute Things show but I just like Kiniro Mosaic more, maybe because I saw it first.

 >>/4826/
Or because they're more of a fuckable hyperstimulus.

1483366614746 jpg
(148.24 KB, 1021x1020)

 >>/4826/
As long as you avoid sexualising the Osaka, you're in the clear, anon.

azu1 png
(431.16 KB, 640x1450)

 >>/4834/
That's not it—I don't quite know how to word it but the Azumanga Daioh girls have more physicality to them than the Kiniro Mosaic girls, i.e. in the former anime it's as if the girls' bodies are always in the back of your mind even while casually watching random scenes, but in the latter it's rare for the anime to put focus on how the girls' bodies look or interact with the world. Perhaps you could say the latter is slightly more of a 'talking heads' show. Pics related, latter three are some exceptions for Kiniro Mosaic that prove the rule. A big reason for this is that slapstick humour is used in Azumanga Daioh a lot, but hardly ever in Kiniro Mosaic. Another is that the Azumanga Daioh girls have a wider range of body types.

Why don't rats seem to like edgy anime? Does /ratanon/ like the edgy stuff?

 >>/4840/
Would you like to reccommend some quality edgy anime?

 >>/4844/
Blame. I'd only recommend the manga, though. Don't watch the anime or at least don't watch it until you've read the manga. OP's image is from Blame.

Older thread:  >>/128/. Polite sage.

Tohsaka_rin png
(867.92 KB, 750x1572)

What does /ratanon/ think of the tsundere archetype in general?

 >>/5481/
Hot

You guys should watch Goblin Slayer. I know y'all have pedestrian rape fetishes.

 >>/5481/
Tsundere girls are popular only bevause they seem more real. They treat the audience's stand-in with contempt (just like real girls), but that's only because they can't express their feelings (unlike real girls, who feel only genuine contempt). 

It's this thin veneer of realism over the typical anime horseshit that gives the tsundere archetype its enduring appeal.

 >>/5484/
What is this beta talk? Tsundere behavior is just the anime equivalent of shit testing.

 >>/5486/
Clue 1: Your progeny actually gets genes from the female
Clue 2: Carnivores are correctly afraid of suicidal prey

Shit testing is amusing

 >>/5487/
> suicidal prey
When does this happen in nature?

 >>/5488/
Disease

 >>/5490/
Are diseases that make prey actively suicidal and not just weak and slow common enough for predators to have defenses against them?

 >>/5491/
The defenses are probably not specific, madness is simply scary and disgusting.