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Web Video / Mother's Basement

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Geoff Thew, self-proclaimed Anime Pope and professional shitbag. Profile picture from his second channel BasementEscape.

Mother's Basement is a YouTube channel led by Canadian vlogger Geoffrey "Geoff" Thew. Here he mostly talks about anime in the form of reviews and analysis. On occasion, he makes videos about other media than anime, such as movies, TV series, and games, although anime stays the most prominent topic. He's also a fan of video games.

His earliest videos on the main channel date back to 2015, starting with a series called "What's in an OP?" Here he breaks down the meaning and layers of anime openings. Later on, he would do a couple of reviews, although most of these were about certain movies, tv-series or games. In early 2016, he did the first Weebcast with Beatrice the Golden Witch (going by Digibro at the time), Best Guy Ever and Subsonic Sparkle, which was hosted by Beatrice. During fall 2016, he would start to feature the series on his main and later on his second channel. The Weebcast is a podcast consisting of multiple anime YouTubers talking about and discussing certain trends within the anime community, most often seasonal anime.

As of May 2020, he has gained over 1 million subscribers.

Mother's Basement contains examples of:

Tropes discussed on Mother's Basement:

  • 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: His "Anime CGI-phobia" video discusses this topic and how the fandom generally reacts to the medium not just being mixed in with 2D hand-drawn animation, but in general in response to its use in the Chainsaw Man adaptation. Not only bringing up recent examples both good and bad, but also older examples including Lensman, Initial D and even Steamboy. While simultaneously also bringing up how American CGI was just as janky back in the 2000s, that even Pixar was behind the times in some respects and praising strides companies like Orange and Sanzigen Animation Studio have ten in improving CG characters in anime. Not to say he doesn't touch up on some genuinely bad examples like Berserk (2016) or EX-ARM, which are often blamed for the skepticism towards CGI anime.
  • Adaptation Decay:
    • In his "Hottest Trash Anime of Summer 2022", Geoff expresses deep disappointment with the anime adaptation of The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer, especially since he considers the original manga the magnum opus of Satoshi Mizukami, one of the best manga storytellers of the 2000s. It's to the point that he gives it a "no trash" rating, merely highlighting it to encourage his audience to read the manga instead lest they get the idea that it is just as bad as the anime, which in his "Worst Anime of 2022" episode ultimately "won" both the "Biggest Disappointment" and "Worst Anime" categories.
    • In ""Overhyped" Anime", Geoff opines that every adaptation will suffer this to some degree as different mediums work to different strengths. In particular, he spends part of the video discussing how the Chainsaw Man anime lost some of the magic of the original due to the structural and pacing changes needed to recreate the same creeping sense of horror and unease the manga achieved.
  • Archive Binge:invoked Geoff admits that he once did this for One Piece, pointing out that he'd been at it for eighteen days and all he accomplished in that time was "inch dangerously closer to becoming a furry..." and he still had a hundred chapters to go.
  • Cerebus Syndrome: Geoff declares that most Shōnen media are actually comedies, arguing that not only are some of Shonen Jump's greatest hits gag manga, but even monumental classics like Dragon Ball are actually comedies disguising themselves as epic tales of action. By being funny however, Geoff argues that the initial lighthearted tone of these kinds of stories is what makes the more dramatic moments hit harder, which is why once the mangaka become confident about their readership's engagement they shift things into a more serious path. Geoff points out a Wham Episode in the aforementioned Dragon Ball where after a few hundred chapters/episodes of fun Jackie Chan-style, humorous fighting, the sudden murder of Krillin comes across as extremely shocking and impactful more than if Dragon Ball was a serious action piece from the beginning.
  • Colbert Bump:invoked
  • Cool, but Stupid: Geoff notes that some of the "Hottest Trash" anime he reviews fall victim to this, though whether the "Cool" outweighs the "Stupid" is very subjective. In particular, he views Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest as a juvenile power fantasy filled to the brim with things author Ryo Shirakome and his readership consider "cool," but are utterly stupid from a different perspective, and it doesn't help that the anime's middling production values are unable to make the action scenes look as cool as they could be.
  • Critical Dissonance:invoked The video on "Overhyped" anime has a lengthy discussion on why this happens:
    Here's another thing to keep in perspective when considering the hype around an artwork: The perspectives of critics are inevitably skewed by the nature of our work. The amount of different and obscure media that we expose ourselves to and the research we do into what goes into the things we love inevitably colors how we view them. I have always loved Cowboy Bebop, but, like I said at the top, I love it even more knowing just how much of a miracle it really was in the context of 90s TV anime production and having watched literally hundreds of other shows to which I can now compare the strengths, weaknesses and novel elements of its writing, direction and animation. By the same token, as someone who's had lots of time to read lots of comics and manga, the innovative, ingenious experimentation in Chainsaw Man's paneling and page layouts stands out to me, whereas a casual manga enjoyer is probably just gonna think it looks real cool. I, like pretty much any serious critic, am inherently biased toward overappreciating stuff with lots of minute technical details that I can spend hours thinking about or genuinely new ideas and imagery that expand my perspective on art, and to underappreciating the simple, accessible, familiar, fun things that so many people enjoy, so what grabs me about a given work isn't necessarily gonna grab most of you, and that goes both ways. And, of course, there's a whole spectrum of media interest and taste levels between casual fan and professional critic that leads to a lot of hardcore anime viewers feeling a similar disconnect between what they love and what broadly appeals to the biggest audiences. Sometimes we get lucky and those factors converge like they mostly did with Chainsaw Man, especially the manga, but most times they really, really don't.
  • Cut Short: This is deeply analyzed in his "Cancelled Shonen Jump Manga" episode. He goes over a handful of short-lived manga from Shonen Jump and discusses his thoughts on why they were cancelled so early on, while taking into account the magazine's own policies regarding which content it greenlights and cuts off, as well as how the authors choose to wrap up the story when they know they will not be able to fully tell it. In the second half of the video, he also points out that some manga are cut short simply because they're not very good, singling out Hi-Fi Cluster and Tokyo Shinobi Squad as examples of manga that are so bad, he doesn't even understand why they were greenlit for serialization to begin with.
  • Draco in Leather Pantsinvoked: In his roast of Rent-A-Girlfriend, Geoff finds himself unironically rooting for Mami Nanami, nominally the Big Bad of the series, what with her fleshed-out characterization standing in stark contrast to his annoyance over the lack of Character Development (or backtracking from one) by protagonist Kazuya Kinoshita, as well as the comparatively shallow characterizations of Chizuru Mizuhara, Ruka Sarashina, and Sumi Sakurasawa.
    "All of her [i.e., Mami's] villain behavior only counts as 'villain behavior' if you believe Kazuya Kinoshita deserves to be happy. And I absolutely, categorically do not."
  • Dueling Works:invoked Discussed in "Cancelled Shonen Jump Manga". Geoff points out that Shonen Jump not only wants all their manga series to be hits, but also for them to be hits in various different areas and niches, which makes them more likely to cancel manga that encroach on the niches of their other serialized manga. He continues by giving examples, such Ayashimon and Phantom Seer, which, despite their strengths, were both cancelled quickly due to encroaching on the "Japanese Mythology action" niche that was dominated by Demon Slayer and later Jujutsu Kaisen. He also points out that the lack of adventure manga in Shonen Jump is likely because they would be competing with One Piece, one of the magazine's flagship titles.
  • Easily Forgiven: In this roast of The Seven Deadly Sins, Geoff expresses quite a lot of anger that Gowther continually gets to use his mind wiping powers to toy with the other Sins and people in general for his own amusement, including at one point using it convince a woman they're in a relationship with it heavily implied he had sex with her under this condition, in other words rape, along with tossing her brother out into the street since he didn't need him and the plot and characters always letting it slide as if it's just a quirk. Yet somehow, the other characters always react to Gowther putting on a dress or a skirt as if that's crossing the line.
  • invokedEscapist Character:
    • In Geoff's roast of The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar, he notes how the protagonist Yuuto isn't so much a character as he is a cipher for the audience to indulge in wish fulfilment; he's transported to a fantasy world where he quickly gathers a harem of attractive girls who all fall for him almost immediately, is constantly talked up by said girls as being incredibly nice, smart and hard-working, and is easily able to win battles by applying his historical knowledge of battle strategy that he looks up on his magically-powered smartphone.
    • He also gives props to I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too because it is so blatant in the sheer amount of wish fulfillment it gives to its protagonist, who's clearly meant to be a stand-in for the series' target audience. Yuuya is a fat, unattractive nerd who is unfairly maligned by everyone in the world and comes across magic powers left behind by his deceased grandfather; the use of said powers turns him muscular and handsome overnight, getting the chance to go to a prestigious school where he is extremely popular and sought-after and get two girls in the real world (the rich daughter of the school's director and a model) competing over him, along with more girls in the other world falling for him as well. The series also consistently showcases situations where he does something impressive in public and gets the reaction of "Everyone clapped".
      Geoff: I honestly don't know if I've ever seen an Isekai this nakedly self-indulgent that wasn't hentai.
  • Excuse Plot:invoked Discussed with regards to Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). The human side of the story is obviously written to tie together the monster fights and overall feels like it was built using a checklist of various critic-bait ideas. The result pleases neither viewers, who just want to watch the fights, or critics, who recognize it as poorly done.
  • Expy:
    • Combined with invokedOlder Than They Think. Geoff points out how Alice Zuberg/Synthesis Thirty appears to be just another Saber clone as a blonde, sword-wielding waifu. He then notes that the original Alicization web novels were written around the same time Fate/stay night had released, meaning Alice isn't a Saber clone, but one of the first Saber clones.
    • In his roast of The Rising of the Shield Hero, he lampshades how Ren Amaki, the Sword Hero, is very obviously based on Kirito from Sword Art Online, saying that Ren's character is "one giant Kirito subtweet".
  • Fanservice: Geoff usually makes note of the sex jokes and objectification of women common in anime but has expressed a willingness to let it slide since he understands that none of it comes from an intentional desire to hurt anybody.
  • Flat Character: His primary criticism of Hand Shakers is that all the characters are nothing more than a single quirky character trait being given human form, comparing it to Edward Elric being stripped of almost all his personality traits except his Berserk Button about his height. It's to the point where he considers the best written character to be the one whose tendency to throw out a Hurricane of Aphorisms turns out to be forcing this trait on herself.
  • Franchise Zombie:invoked In "Let Goku Die", Geoff discusses how franchises can reach this state, primarily through the combination of a change-adverse audience and enough money for the creators, or their successors, to keep it going.
  • Gateway Series:invoked In his video where he points out the positives of Sword Art Online, he explains that, as divisive as the series can get, even its strongest detractors (such as himself) begrudgingly admit that the anime adaptation (or at least the first half of its first season) is what got many people into anime in the first place.
  • Ham and Cheese:invoked In Dragonball Evolution, Chow Yun-fat gives an extremely lively and physical performance as Master Roshi that makes him one of the more expressive characters in a cast full of Dull Surprise. However, Geoff deconstructs this a bit by pointing out that by juxtaposing such a Large Ham against bland performances, Roshi comes across more as an insane lunatic than a fun Eccentric Mentor. And Geoff is saying all this within the context that Chow Yun-fat is not necessarily a bad actor in the film.
  • Hard-to-Adapt Work:invoked Gibiate's art direction was based on concept art from renowned illustrator and character designer Yoshitaka Amano, whose art is so detailed and distinct that it is near impossible to translate to animation while keeping his style intact; as a result, the characters in Gibiate look like pale imitations of Amano's original designs, often looking stiff and awkward when animated or standing still. Geoff even cites Hiromu Arakawa's adaptation of The Heroic Legend of Arslan, the original of which Amano had provided the illustrations, as evidence of the necessity of streamlining when doing adaptations, as Arakawa significantly simplified Amano's designs for the manga and the anime adaptation. As such, with the difficulty of adapting Amano's art to animation being such a known quantity, he gives Gibiate no slack for failing to meet a challenge they created for themselves by choosing Amano as the character designer.
  • Hype Backlashinvoked: Discussed in his ""Overhyped" Anime" episode. The issue Geoff notes is that fans build up towering reputations for their favorite anime which they can never live up to. He uses The Mona Lisa as an example to compare, contrasting its legendary reputation as the greatest painting in history versus the reality of an impressive but hardly perfect work. Geoff admits he himself is guilty of this, with his own praise of Chainsaw Man based on its manga creating expectations its anime adaptation could never hope to meet.
  • Indecisive Parody: When discussing My Sister, My Writer as his absolute worst anime of 2018, one of Geoff's biggest critiques is that the show often makes overtures towards being a parody of light novel cliches (e.g., hypercompetent Little Sister Heroine who's in love with her older brother, rampant fanservice, references to otaku culture, indulgent Wish-Fulfillment, etc.), but for the most part, those elements aren't any sillier than the sort of things audiences would see in most other light novel-based anime and still seems to be written with fans of those cliches in mind. For instance, its fanservice, though framed a little more comically than the norm, is still clearly intended to be sexy, and comedic fanservice is hardly atypical in anime (being a joke doesn't stop people from being turned on by it).
  • Jerkass Dissonanceinvoked: Geoff theorized about the reasons Aqua, Megumin, and Darkness are generally well-liked despite their often unpleasant personalities. He eventually concludes that this is not only because of their comically exaggerated antics, but also because their personalities are genuine, which creates a sense of them being comfortable around the audience and the audience feeling familiar with them. That, and possibly because of their attractive designs.
  • Just Here for Godzilla:invoked As Geoff notes with regards to Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), most of the audience is there just to watch the kaiju duke it out. The parts of the film that don't involve those fights are largely tuned out.
  • Late Export for You: He noted that Your Name took a year after its Japanese release to reach Canadian theaters, but Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale took only a month. Given Geoff's dislike of the Sword Art Online franchise, he was rather miffed about it.invoked
  • Let's See YOU Do Better!: The main motivation behind his Fix Fic of SAO. Geoff also goes ahead to pick this stock No, You response apart by pointing out how creating and criticizing art are two completely different beasts and, realistically, he cannot hope to possibly go through with the challenge completely since producing anime is an expensive and demanding workload.
  • Makes Just as Much Sense in Context:
    • Invoked in the intro to "An Actual Cult Made THE CRAZIEST ANIME!!!", where Geoff shows an out-of-context clip of the ghost of Helen Keller introducing herself to one of the protagonists of one of said cult's anime films:
      Geoff: If you didn't catch the first of these videos, you might be feeling slightly confused right now, possibly even disoriented. I want to reassure you that, as little sense as that probably made to you, it made exactly as much sense to anyone who's already been briefed on stockbroker-turned-reborn super space Buddha Ryuho Okawa a.k.a. El Cantare and his kooky, anime-producing crossover fanfic religion.
    • In "Shonen Power Systems Explained", Geoff explains on the first viewing of Chainsaw Man, a fight's outcome may make no sense. However, after immersing yourself in the lore and learning more about the devils and the powers they provide, the outcomes still make no sense.
  • Merchandise-Driven: Hand Shakers has an egregious case of Product Placement where a real life Japan-exclusive card game is significant to a character's powerset and a story arc involving him. Geoff goes further to discuss the hurdles and effort needed to be able to make this work (even playing the Yu-Gi-Oh! theme to make his point known) and points out how this in-story advertisement grinds the show to a complete halt that doesn't make any logical sense In-Universe.
  • Not Blood Siblings: Geoff makes note of this trope when it appears to excuse Brother–Sister Incest and makes it clear he does not accept it as such. Regardless of the blood relationship, the two involved were raised as siblings and should view each other as such, full stop. That said, he has no issues with Kiruko and Maru, despite Kiruko treating their relationship as Like Brother and Sister and Maru calling her "sis".
  • Opinion Myopia: invoked Played for Laughs in Waifu Wars - Public Service Announcement where the narrator tells you how you can figure out who's the enemy: anybody who doesn't agree with his (read:the narrator's) opinions.
  • Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: In general, one of Geoff's biggest gripes with some anime are their tendency to use sexual assault as cheap fanservice bait.
    • One of his biggest points of contention against Sword Art Online is what he feels to be its rather tactless usage of sexual assault as cheap Kick the Dog moments as opposed to actual plot/character advancement. One of the few positive points he gives to the Alicization arc is its usage of sexual assault to actually drive the plot forward, but even that he considers mitigated by the fact that not only is it presented in a somewhat comedic manner (intentional or not is unknown) initially, but it creates a giant Plot Hole in its Worldbuilding as a result.
    • Also discussed in his video on the infamous gang-rape scene in Goblin Slayer. Among his criticisms is the fact that the scene seems to only exist just to establish that goblins are evil and that the anime sexualizes what should be a horrific moment. He feels that the scene does little but scare off people from what, in his opinion, is a fun dark fantasy.
    • While discussing his fascination for "big dumb battle royale anime," he notes the distressing frequency of such series' Action Girls having sexual assault as part of their backstory.
    • Likewise, neither is Geoff a fan of Double Standard Rape: Female on Male. This is among the reasons the first season of Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time ranked as the fourth worst anime of 2020, and its second a special mention in his "Worst Anime of 2022" episode. Furthermore, in his roast of Maburaho, Geoff is visibly uncomfortable with scenes where Kuriko is trying to force herself on Kazuki.
  • Relationship Writing Fumbleinvoked: An inverted take on this trope is brought up in his video about Dragon's Dogma, where he notes that he can't tell if Yang and Leni, the two characters of the week in "Sloth", are supposed to be lovers, friends or even siblings. He eventually concludes that Yang is "in a very vague sense, some form of Leni's man".
  • Revision: One of the reasons Geoff feels Bleach is so unique is that it rarely ever retcons the story, but instead uses the Unreliable Expositor as a way of ensuring that later developments don't outright contradict earlier events in the story, since the person speaking either doesn't know the full story, or does, but doesn't reveal the truth for various reasons. This lets the story add new twists or reveals without feeling like it came out of no where, but he does admit that this can cause things to fly over the viewers head, since it might come across as a retcon.
  • Rule of Cool: Discussed in regards to Hi-Fi Cluster. He understands that it's OK, especially as far as shonen manga goes, for things to perhaps not make a ton of sense in exchange for them being really cool concepts and contributing for making cool fights, setpieces, and stories. However, it can't really make barcodes something cool, despite how much it skips around in the explanation of the power system. He contrasts this with Stands from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, which are "sexy anime robot ghosts" that are also pretty vaguely explained, but still have memorable and outlandish designs and are used for incredible fights.
  • The Scrappy:invoked
    • In his "What's in a Scene? — How SAO Became the Worst Anime Ever" video, Geoff heavily dislikes Yui because in his opinion, she was responsible for setting up the downfall of the show for him, since the scene of her "death" caused such massive amounts of Fridge Logic and an Ass Pullinvoked from Kirito to save her that the series ultimately went downhill and never recovered from. In a way, Yui, at least for Geoff, ended up being something of a Franchise Killer in terms of his ability to enjoy it, and for said reason, he heavily dislikes her character.
    • While he thinks male harem protagonists are generally among the worst kinds of main characters, what with their flat personalities designed for audience insertion and not much else, in his roast of Rent-A-Girlfriend Geoff in particular piles on Kazuya Kinoshita for his inability to undergo Character Development (or, worse, backtracking from one), compulsive lying, borderline manipulative behavior, and masturbating and/or having an erection whenever he imagines the girls in risque positions, especially whenever he imagines them having sex with other guys, as if to encapsulate on the fanbase being aroused by the female characters' attractive designs (which Geoff notes is the only thing driving the series' financial success). It has gotten to the point that Geoff unironically roots for Mami Nanami, the nominal Big Bad of the series (see invoked"Draco in Leather Pants", above).
  • Second Season Downfall:
    • Discussed in "How DARLING in the FRANXX Wrecked its Worldbuilding", and the follow up video; "DARLING in the FRANXX — What the HFIL Happened!?". The second season of the series went so drastically into a different genre for several of its run-time, then shifted to explaining as much about the setting as possible, before becoming a copy of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Any good will people had towards the series effectively died after the second half of the series started, and the ending basically trampled any hope for a good conclusion.
    • Discussed again in "I Hate The Promised Neverland Season 2". After finding the first season to be one of his favorite works in the genre, the second season failed on nearly every level. The studio rushed to adapt the remaining manga chapters, which ruined the plot, atmosphere, and characterization which made the first season great. Geoff has since refused to acknowledge the second season even existed and claims the show was cancelled after the first.
  • "Seinfeld" Is Unfunnyinvoked:
    • In "The Roast of Maburaho", Geoff notes that while Maburaho may have been a relatively fresh take on the Harem Genre when it first came out in the early 2000s, it now pales in comparison to later anime that were able to improve on what it did in the years since then, especially when a few years later Girls Bravo outdid it.
    • In "The BEST Anime of Fall 2022 - Ones To Watch", Geoff warns that some jokes in the 2022 anime adaptation of Urusei Yatsura may seem like standard anime clichés. However, that's because the original manga created those jokes during the 70s and 80s, and they're so funny that other series are still copying them decades later.
  • Show, Don't Tell:
    • A point of high praise Geoff had for DARLING in the FRANXX... a point which he angrily took back as the show decayed and it ruins its Worldbuilding mystique by having an Info Dump episode.
    • A consistent criticism towards SAO is its tendency to have boring and long Info Dumps mostly with characters sitting in a cafe and talking.
  • Slow Life Fantasy: In his "Types of Isekai Anime" video, two of the possible categories he proposed ("Hangout Isekai" and "Karoshisekai") are specifically centered on this genre.note 
  • Strictly Formula: In "The Roast of Maburaho", Geoff notes how said series doesn't have a plot so much as a rigid formula around a harem comedy setup, with several plot and character points being repeated with superficial variances across different episodes. While he acknowledges that many classic Western cartoons (such as Looney Tunes) similarly stick to formulas, those cartoons at least know how to change things up just enough to stay interesting. Maburaho, on the other hand, isn't creative enough with its formula to make it stand out from other harem comedies.
  • Stylistic Suck:
    • Geoff thinks the Off-Model animation of several parts of KonoSuba are actually one of its strongest points because they help enhance its comedic tone. He also believes such animation is deliberate on the part of director Takaomi Kanasaki, given that in his other major work, Princess Connect! Re:Dive, the characters are drawn more consistently so as to emphasize cuteness.
    • For the December 2022 episode on Bocchi the Rock!, Geoff claims that one of its strong points is the deliberately wonky animation of Hitori's comical nervous breakdowns, as if to reflect her easily compromised mental state.
    • Geoff concludes that the animation of KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World is so gloriously bad in so many different ways that the studio must have realized they couldn't afford to do the material justice. Instead they turned the entire thing into a giant shitpost by leaning into the bad art.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plotinvoked:
    • One of the reasons Geoff hates the Fairy Dance arc of Sword Art Online was that the story never even remotely addressed Nobuyuki Sugou's plan to create mind-control technology using 300 kidnapped SAO survivors (including Asuna). In Geoff's eyes, it was simply used as a way to raise the stakes, but never actually mattered since the plot point itself had no usage at all. Another important plot point he discusses being wasted was how Kirito himself points out that Asuna is as strong as he is, if not potentially more, and argues that the story really seems to suggest a fight between the two will happen, but never actually does. In his "Fixing Alfheim: the WORST part of SAO" Fix Fic, he addresses these by combining both plot points by having a mind-controlled Asuna fight Kirito.
    • He notes that the gothic horror setting of Assassin's Pride, where it's Always Night and people constantly live in fear of Tim Burton-esque monsters, has the potential for some interesting stories. Unfortunately, the story itself tends to focus more on harem antics in a Wizarding School instead.
    • Much of his disdain for High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World amounts to disappointment over the series' failure to exploit the potential of its premise of seven Japanese teenage prodigies reforming a fascist kingdom in a fantasy world. He points out that their idea of a democratic government being copied from that of modern Japan is both unimaginative and carrying a rather ugly implication that said system is perfect. There's also the fact that despite having an ensemble cast, functionally the only characters with any agency are Tsukasa Mikogami and Masato Sanada (who are, of course, two of the only three boys of the group), reducing the group's four girls into resembling a typical agency-free Battle Harem who frequently defer to Tsukasa and Masato for major decisions, as well as heaping particular dislike on stage magician Prince Akatsuki (the other boy of the group), both for his obnoxiousness and the series' failure to give a rational explanation for his impossible feats in a world where magic is commonplace, making him functionally no different from a standard fantasy mage.
  • Troubled Productioninvoked:
  • Uncertain Audienceinvoked:
    • In regards to Sword Art Online, Geoff argues that while it is, in tone and substance, essentially a Saturday morning cartoon, it doesn't seem fully aware of that, and tries to delve into darker subject matter for no other reason than edginess, singling out a trend in the story to incorporate sexual assault whenever it needs something dark to happen and it is never handled well.
    • In regards to Time Paradox Ghost Writer and The Hunters Guild: Red Hood, he argues that a likely reason why these manga were both cancelled early on is because they both tackle themes that are too mature for a magazine primarily aimed at middle- and high-school-aged boys:
      • The former focuses on publishing manga in the very same magazine it ran in as a plot point, but it also involves a lot of discussion and themes regarding failed professional expectations, issues in the manga industry, Grey-and-Gray Morality in its main plot premise, the trials creatives go through to live off their work, etc. While these are pertinent and interesting themes, they still seem too ambitious for the manga's primary audience, which are likely to not have any experience or interest on these topics.
      • The same can be said about latter, with a dark fantasy story building up to a twisty meta-fiction narrative through slow burn, and Geoff further states that even the manga's way of handling fanservice was too mature for its audience, eschewing gratuitous nudity and Stripperiffic designs for the allure of Grimm's fully clothed but very voluptous body; there's also the Amazonian Beauty Debonaire Diamond, who's introduced right after her.
  • Unfortunate Implicationsinvoked: In his criticism of Platinum End, Geoff talks about writer Tsugumi Ohba's history of "Stay in the Kitchen" overtones to his writing of female characters. While he passingly mentions that Bakuman。 also had a weird scene where Ohba's Author Avatar talks about women who are really successful in life are those that "know their place", in Platinum End, he specifically points out how, out of the god candidates, male characters that survived get to be self-actualized and accomplished, while the female characters that survived simply get to be married to them.
  • Unintentionally Unsympatheticinvoked: Geoff's biggest problem with Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time is that he doesn't feel bad for the titular Peter Grill's plight—being hounded by an Unwanted Harem of Cute Monster Girls who want him to give them strong children—because he frequently ends up having sex with them despite already being engaged to his childhood sweetheart Luvelia. While the writing aims to make the audience feel sorry for Peter and not all of the mishaps he gets into are his fault (for example, he points out that one of the girls flat-out rapes Peter yet is somehow treated as part of the harem afterward), the fact that he constantly makes the same mistakes that lead to him repeatedly cheating on Luvelia still greatly lessens Geoff's enjoyment of the series.
  • Unreliable Expositor: Geoff argues that this is both a strength and a weakness of Bleach, whose power systems and worldbuilding are not explained in a straightforward manner, with exposition being initially made by characters who don't wholly understand those very concepts, and later, when characters that do have the necessary knowledge are introduced, neither are they likely to explain it in a better way for the audience, because most of them are arrogant Mad Scientists with a penchant for either not explaining at all or doing so to lord their knowledge over others, the sole exception to this rule being an eccentric man that is just bad at explaining. While Geoff thinks this is a very naturalistic and clever approach to exposition that also builds characters and rewards keen audiences, he also understands that this has led to others accusing Bleach of shallow worldbuilding and introducing powerups out of nowhere, when in reality these already have subtle foreshadowings. And because Bleach is published in Shonen Jump, which is geared more towards middle- and high-school-aged boys (who are not expected to be cerebral), to say nothing of the anime adaptation being pack full of filler, it's unlikely most people would even realize there was something they should have realized that the story hadn't told them, let alone catch those subtle details. He even compares it to something akin to a Souls like way of telling the story, which can both make it exciting, but also extremely difficult to actually make something from it.
  • A Wizard Did It: Geoff has a fascination for phantom thieves and stage magic, so it frustrates him when a bad anime extensively featuring such characters and premises never explain how said characters pull off the tricks they do, leading to implications (or just outright shows) that it's literally just magic rather than cool smoke and mirrors. For this reason he dislikes Prince Akatsuki, the resident stage magician in High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World (already his absolute worst anime of 2019), apart from his obnoxious behavior, as well as citing Hatena Illusion as the second-worst anime of 2020.
  • YouTuber Apology Parody: In this video, Geoff tearfully apologies for leaving Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun out of his best anime of 2019 video.
I'm Geoff Thew, professional shitbag, signing out from my mother's basement.

 
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Infinity Train

Geoff describes how Infinity Train was such a massive victim of the purging of animated content at the hands of Warner Bros. Discovery, describing how its content is irrecoverably lost, its physical media stopped printing, and even its creator encouraging piracy.

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Screwed by the Network

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Infinity Train

Geoff describes how Infinity Train was such a massive victim of the purging of animated content at the hands of Warner Bros. Discovery, describing how its content is irrecoverably lost, its physical media stopped printing, and even its creator encouraging piracy.

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4.98 (47 votes)

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