Thanks, but I’ve already read the sequel, and didn’t like it much either.

In fact, pretty much the first thing I did after the shit ending of the anime was to track down the manga in the hope that there was more. But nope - the manga has the same shit ending. But it does have a sequel. But Hanabi doesn’t fare much better in the sequel than she did in the original. Even the slut still gets a better ending than she does.

I’ll get to the winter anime in a bit here.

First, I started last week watching Scum’s Wish, and not to put too fine a point on it, I fucking hated it. I can’t remember the last time I hated an anime this much.

It started out well enough, and I was interested in spite of the fact that the set-up invited drama and heartbreak and a fair bit of unpleasantness.

What I didn’t expect though was that halfway through they were going to just abandon the FMC entirely - one of the few decent human beings in the cast - and completely shift the focus to a gross, nasty slut and the two pathetic cucks vying for her entirely non-existent affection. It didn’t even feel like an actual story - it was more like just a set-up for an NTR doujin series.

The only bare saving grace of the whole thing was that after wasting the second half of the season on the nasty cumbucket and her pathetic simps, it finally returned to Hanabi - the original FMC - long enough to throw her a vaguely hopeful open ending. Though they couldn’t even manage to do that without sticking the bitch in the scene, apparently so she could remind us that she’s a bitch in both the Japanese sense of the word and the American one.

So after that, I really needed a pallete cleanser, and I didn’t even dare gamble on something - it had to be something that I knew would wash the stink of that slut out of my mind. And as it turned out, I didn’t watch one thing, but an episode here and there of lots of things.

Some of the highlights:

Episode 4 of the first season of Sword Art Online - The Black Swordsman. That’s the introduction of Silica and Pina, and it’s just a pleasure from start to finish and one I rewatch often.

The final episode of 86 - brings tears to my eyes every single time. It’s just one of the most touching and beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Episode 1 of Gurren Lagann - it’s solid all the way through, but mostly I watch it for Yoko’s entrance, which is one of the greatest ever.

YuruYuri episode 5 - Ayano goes to Comiket. It’s worth it just to see Chitose discover the world of yuri doujins, but Ayano is especially cute too.

Little Witch Academia OVA 1, which has become my most recent obsession, and at this point I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched it.

And a few other things here and there, plus some of my favorite opening and ending themes.

And now we get to winter anime, since once I’d finally fixed my mood, it was time to catch up on them.

There were three that I watched last season:

Zenshu. - started off strong, as an almost deconstruction of an isekai, and with amusing bits of all sorts of genres mixed in (I never got tired of her mahou shoujo style transformation). It bogged down at about the 1/2 to 2/3 mark, but finished fairly strong. I liked it all in all.

Guild Receptionist - started off a bit slow, other than the sheer awesomeness of Alina kicking boss ass, but built up nicely for a while and looked really promising. But then it sort of floundered for a while, and ended a bit weak. Too much focus on Alina hating overtime and not enough on her coming to terms with her past and her feelings about adventuring and about making herself vulnerable to other people.

Honey Lemon Soda - I thoroughly enjoyed this, and ended up rewatching the entire series. Yes - it’s trite and cliched and sappy, and most of the drama got settled too quickly and easily, but I just don’t care. I liked it.

An awful lot of it is that most anime depictions of social anxiety rely on personality tics and gimmicks to sort of represent it, but never actually depict what it actually feels like. Honey Lemon Soda nailed it with Ishimori though - I couldn’t help but cheer for her, because I recognized so much of what she felt. And the dynamic between her and Miura was unusual but believable and effective - he has just the personality that’s actually best suited for dealing with someone like Ishimori - fundamentally kind but not conciliatory, and relentlessly honest but not cruel.

And at the moment I’m early in Noragami Aragoto. Broadly I can already guess much of what’s going to happen, but a lot of the charm of Noragami is the character interactions, so that’s okay.

The only thing that caught my attention right off was Kowloon Generic Romance. I was interested in the setting, but the manga never managed to really convey it, and hopefully an anime will.

Well… and Shiunji-ke no Kodomotachi, but that’s because it’s from the same mangaka as Rent a Girlfriend and I read the first dozen or so chapters on a whim and it was even more insipid and tedious and awful than I expected. I have no intention of watching it - I just noticed it on the list and was surprised.

Lazarus looks kind of interesting, but it’s unlikely I’ll watch it while it’s releasing. If it’s anything like the other Mappa action series I’ve seen, it’ll be decent in the long run, but it’ll go through a period at about the 2/3 mark when the story will be going in about ten different directions at once and there will still be enough background secrets left to be revealed that none of it will make much sense, and I’d rather binge my way through that.

So last week started with the rest of the Little Witch Academia series. I rank the first LWA OVA as the best single “episode” of anime I’ve ever seen (and I rewatched it a few more times last week - so over the last two weeks I’ve watched it about a dozen times - and that opinion still holds), so any follow-up couldn’t help but be sort of anticlimactic, and with that in mind, it was fine. It stumbled a bit here and there, and I found Akko’s inexplicable lack of character growth particularly disappointing, but I liked it well enough all in all. And the final episode was excellent (and I suspect part of the problem with the series was that that episode was planned out in advance, so the rest of the series, and especially the last few episodes leading up to it, had to be shaped to accommodate it).

Then I cast about for something just light and silly and preferably short and ended up with Uchuu Patrol Luluco. And only noticed later that it was also Trigger. It’s one of those that doesn’t even bother trying to make sense and just revels in lunacy and nonsense, and it was fine.

Then because Trigger had become somthing of a theme, I poked around a bit and went on to Kiznaiver, which was… okay. It had a fair amount of potential, but the pacing was awkward. It basically spends the first ten episodes or so just heaping on layer after layer of essentially context-less mystery, then stuffs the last two episodes with a flood of reveals and exposition to finally make some sort of sense of all of it.

And over the urge to watch Trigger productions, I wandered into Kuzu no Honkai, which is a tawdry love polygon and a rollercoaster of hope and despair and longing and betrayal, and has been pretty good in a smutty soap opera-ish sort of way.

That was more or less what I expected/hoped for.

And it worked out as I expected/hoped - the whole issue in the first place was that she hit a wall trying to direct a love story, so even beyond saving the world of Perishing, that was the central problem that had to be solved.

And the last scene was nice - predictable in retrospect, but handled well.

All in all, I liked it. The series started off really strong, but then hit a bit of a slog at about the 2/3 mark. The end was nice though and while it might’ve been a bit trite, it was the ending that Natsuko wanted, and that everyone deserved.

Meh.

The drama feels even more unsatisfyingly tacked on than it already did, but it’s pretty easy to see what the broad shape of the last episode is going to be, and it should be an acceptable if not particularly surprising or compelling ending.

It’s a shame this wasn’t better paced. It had a lot of potential in the beginning, and it even could’ve ended pretty much exactly the way it appears it’s going to and still could’ve been much better just by unfolding at a more natural, even pace. But it also could’ve been worse…

Started off the week with the rest of the first season of Queen’s Blade, which was surprisingly good. That’s not to say it was really good by any broad measure - just that it was pleasantly better than it seemed like it had any reason to be. For the staggering amount of fanservice it had, it actually managed to have pretty good characters and some interesting intrigue.

I intended to go on to the second season, since the first season introduces the characters who are going to take part in this battle royale and follows their journeys to the capital city where it’s going to take place, then leaves then there. But I was sort of burnt out on fanservice, so I thought I’d take a break with a movie or a single episode OVA or something. And since I’d heard good things about it and it seemed like a certain palate cleanser, I picked the first OVA of Little Witch Academia.

So I watched that. Then I watched it again. Then I watched it again. Then I watched the second OVA, then I watched the first one a couple more times, then I started the series, with occasional breaks to watch the first OVA again.

By my count, I’ve watched that first OVA eight times now, and I would say that it is quite simply the best single episode of anime I’ve ever seen. It’s 24 minutes of pure, distilled awesome. There isn’t a single wasted frame in the entire thing, and there are so many wonderful moments I couldn’t count them all. And it’s not just big splashy things - there are little bits of brilliance scattered all the way through it.

The second OVA, on the other hand, was disappointingly mediocre. It’s not bad by any means - it’s just sort of… ordinary. The series has been pretty good though, with the only real problem, to me, being that all of Akko’s character development is essentially just temporary. The idea is supposed to be that as she grows and learns, she comes to understand and adopt new things. And she does come to understand them, but only really for exactly as long as it takes for the magic to happen, then she goes back to being pretty much the same Akko she was in episode 1. Still though, it’s good enough, and I especially like the pacing. And Diana’s shaping up to be an especially interesting character.

Other than that, all I’ve watched is the latest episodes of the three series I’ following - Guild Receptionist (sort of floundering), Zenshu (taking a very dark turn but at least the story’s resolving) and Honey Lemon Soda (still tropish but satisfyng.

Pshew.

To its credit, this is all starting to come together. It’s just that what it’s coming together into is very dark.

There was an interesting bit in there. While Natsuko was going through that sort of hallucinatory flashback, with what appeared to be actual memories mixed up with people with their hair over their faces haranguing her, there was one scene where she was on a sidewalk as people walked by, talking about how awful her movie was and what a bomb it was and how overrated she is and so on.

I don’t think those were her memories. They were the director’s.

The story has come together oddly, and unfortunately unsatisfyingly, in this.

Early on, I wasn’t even sure if it was going to have a plot to speak of. It was pretty much a slice of Alina’s life and her trials and tribulations as a guild receptionist who, if all else failed, could one-shot a boss monster just to make the world easier for her to deal with.

Then it started pulling in little bits of a broader plot, with the secret dungeons and dark gods and man in black. Okay - great.

But somehow none of that has really been incorporated into the story. Instead, it’s felt like it’s still a slice of Alina’s life (expanded to include tsundere romance), and it just has some little bits and pieces of a broader story awkwardly stuffed into place here and there. Like nobody is actually focused on that part of it - that they’re just going along with slice of life and gag humor and tsundere romance, then they come to the part of the script that says “insert dark god here” or “trigger encounter with man in black here,” so they just do a scene that meets those requirements and bolt it into place. Then they hastily exposit, or just handwave, whatever gaps exist between the current bit of awkwardly inserted story and the previous bit.

I suspect the broader problem is just trying to stuff too much story into too few episodes, having to cut things to get it all to fit, and doing a relatively poor job of deciding what to cut.

It has accomplished one thing though - it’s reminded me of why I generally don’t watch currently-airing anime.

The thing, to me, that’s best about Isshiki is that she is, for Hachiman, a perfect combination of playful and serious. By one measure, she’s always completely honest with Hachiman, but her honesty is buried under a layer of playful banter and teasing, which actually makes it easier for Hachiman to deal with.

She’s much like Komachi in that respect, and it’s not a coincidence that Isshiki’s and Komachi’s eventual meeting is epic - they instantly recognize each other as kindred spirits.

I assume that what we’re seeing lately is literal filler. They have a background plot going with this mysterious villain who’s spreading rumors of secret quests and apparently trying to get people to confront dark gods, and my guess is that they already have the culmination of all of that planned out, and ended up with two or three episodes they had to fill with something first.

The latest episode does have a bit of character growth, at least as measured on a relative scale (with someone as tsundere as Alina, a little goes a long way). But it’s still mostly biding time.

So Season 2 of Oregairu wasn’t quite the slog I was afraid it was going to be, though not because the characters really improved at all. They were still pretty much all assholes of one sort or another - it’s just that the other characters didn’t get as much screen time, thanks to the VERY welcome addition of Isshiki to the cast. Just having to sit through less of Haruno would’ve been enough all by itself to greatly improve the season overall, but as a bonus, Isshiki actually turned out to be a great character (easily my favorite in the entire series), and a perfect foil/accomplice for Hachiman.

Then I went on to Season 3, which was… okay. It was initially difficult, in part because it was like Hachiman and Yukino and Yui cranked their already frustrating inability to communicate up to 11, but mostly because it put a lot of emphasis on Yukino and Haruno’s mother, who’s one of the most foul, loathsome, manipulative bitches it’s ever been my displeasure to encounter in any medium, and just seeing her on-screen ruined things for me. But once it got that c*** out of the way and Hachiman and Yukino finally started to open up, it was (finally) pleasant. Oddly enough though, the ending sort of suffered IMO by coming together too quickly and easily, particularly after all the time spent tediously building up to it. It was okay all in all, but mostly I was glad it was over.

I wanted an antidote after that, so I deliberately looked for something roughly similar but far more pleasant, and ended up finally watching Zero no Tsukaima, which has been on my TBW pretty much as long as I’ve known Louise existed, which is pretty much ever since I first went online. I expected it to be amusing and enjoyable, but it surprised me by actually being sort of awesome in addition to that. I really enjoyed it, and even more than I’d hoped I would.

Then I bounced around a bit and finally, for I don’t know what reason, ended up with Queen’s Blade, which is one of the most thoroughly bizarre and ridiculous things I’ve seen. It manages to combine cringily brazen fanservice, battle royale, complex political intrigue, genuinely interesting characters, tragedy and gag humor into… something. It’s so exaggerated that it almost seems like it was meant to be a satire, but it stops just short of actually being one. It is definitely… something though.

And as far as current series go, Guild Receptionist is moving a bit too slowly lately, Zenshu is still flailing a bit, but I’m hoping it’s going to do that MAPPA thing where they somehow manage to tie everything together in the end anyway, and I’m still really enjoying Honey Lemon Soda, trite and tropish though it may be.

It’s hilarious that even the guildmaster is intimidated by Alina.

And nice to see Jade actually make a bit of progress. He still has a long way to go, but her heart did actually thaw just a bit, and that’s a first.

So first up for me this week was the rest of Punch Line, which I started last week. It was actually surprisingly good all in all. It started off really cheesy and contrived, and then wandered off into all sorts of seemingly disjointed weirdness, then actually pulled the entire mess together and tied all of up into a neatly complete and satisfying story. It wasn’t great by any means, but it was entertaining enough, and if nothing else impressive just for making some sense of the mess it was in the middle.

Then I (sort of coincidentally) went on to an entirely different one that also turned out to be better than I expected - Sounan desu ka? aka Are You Lost?

It’s a simple tale of four schoolgirls who are marooned on a desert island - an oujosama, a childish athlete, a meek meganekko and a loner who conveniently enough spent large parts of her childhood traveling around and learning how to survive in the wild with her father. The challenges they face are generally relatively minor and things work out relatively easily for them and it’s mostly focused on character interactions and gag humor. And like Punch Line, it’s not great by any means, but it was fine all in all.

Then came the highlight of the week, and one that’s been on my TBW for years - Dimension W. And it was excellent. It’s a fascinating and compelling story with a wide range of interesting characters, and it’s very stylish and visually and musically appealing, but more than anything else, the two leads - Kyo and Mira - have wonderful chemistry. And Kyo drives one of the coolest cars ever - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_2000GT. I just enjoyed everything about it, from start to finish.

Then came another that’s been on my TBW for years - Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai. I mostly enjoyed it but with one notable exception - as it went along, I found myself disliking Yozora more all the time, and by the OVA, I was ready to reach into the screen and just kick the living shit out of her myself. I don’t care what sort of history she has - she’s a foul, loathsome, cruel, vicious bully and she richly deserves every single awful and horrible thing that might ever happen to her in her sorry excuse for a miserable, fucked-up life.

Other than that though, it was okay all in all. 😁

Then, because I apparently hadn’t had enough of dislikable characters, I finally did something I’d been steeling myself to do for a couple of years and dove into the second season of Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru.

The first season has the unique distinction of being the only anime I’ve ever seen that didn’t have one single main character in it that I liked at all. It’s not until you get to Hachiman’s imouto that there’s finally a character who isn’t awful in one way or another.

But I guess, to their sort of credit, though they’re all awful, none of them are as utterly vile as Yozora (though Haruno is close), and that made them sort of tolerable at least. Mostly though I’m just trying to slog through this season because my understanding is that they finally start being actually decent human beings in the third season, and I want to see that.

Great episode - everybody got some character growth.

Lululee overcoming her self-doubt was the obvious original focus of this arc, but it was still nice to see.

Jade showed both determination and creativity, both of which he’s going to need if he’s going to keep up with Alina.

Lowe being unexpectedly badass was particularly great to see.

Ah but the highlight - I’ve been especially waiting for the moment when Alina would finally let her guard down, and it was every bit as awesome as I’d hoped it would be. And she even opened up a bit about Shroud. Of course, neither one lasted long before her tsun kicked back in, but still…

Spent most of my anime time last week on season IV of DanMachi, which was pretty good all in all. It suffered a bit from being adapted from a light novel series, in that it was more a handful of juxtaposed arcs than a single overarching story, but it was nice to see Ryu get a good deal of character development, and Bell is finally starting to feel like an actual hero. There’s very little of the old hesitant, self-doubting Bell left, and good riddance. And it was nice seeing the rest of the (extended) familia succeeding without him - Aisha in particular has turned out to be a great character in her own right, and Haruhime is showing signs of what I assume is eventually going to be extraordinary power.

The only thing that really irritated me about all of that was that they got into the whole situation in the first place because nobody believed Cassandra, even after she had just proven herself by predicting the moss monster basically exactly. And Daphne in particular really needs a swift kick in the ass, because her whole attitude toward Cassandra’s premonitions not only puts the party at risk, but deeply hurts a person she claims as a friend.

Between the two cours of DanMachi IV, I took a bit of a break for Ganbare Douki-chan, which was adorable. I remember when the original was releasing, but it slipped past me initially, so by the time I became aware of it, it was already in the hundreds of chapters (one or two page chapters generally, but still). So it just went on my TBR. But the adaptation did its job - it was a perfect quick and easy break, and it led me to finally read through the original series, which was well worth it.

After DanMachi, I dipped all the way back to one that’s been on my TBW basically from the start, but that I just hadn’t yet taken the time to watch - Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou And the first OVA pair - the 1998 ones - are IMO quite simply some of the finest anime ever produced.

It’s a thing I’ve really been keyed into since watching Eizouken. The details that went into these OVAs - the simple but exquisite animations of a weather vane turning in the wind or ripples breaking across a flat stretch of water or the dappled transition from light to shadow on entering a forest - are just breathtaking. And the little incidental sounds all along the way - the ticking of a cooling engine or the creak of a gate hinge or the quiet roar of a gas flame and the rattle of a percolator lid - are just as wonderful. The whole thing is very obviously a labor of love, and the art of anime at its finest.

The second pair, from 2002, are still quite good by any ordinary standards, but they pale in comparison to the 1998 ones.

And at the moment, I’ve gone back to the search for odd gems and currently watching one I’d somehow never even heard of before called Punch Line (which I assume is a pun in Japanese). It starts with a cheesy concept of a guy who manifests superpowers if he sees a girl’s panties, but then almost immediately leaps past that into a thoroughly bizarre genre mashup meta/deconstruction… thing, alternately goofy, surreal, stylish and inexplicable. At this point (about halfway through), it’s pulling in little bits and pieces of plot from all over the place, but is actually looking like it’s going to tie it all together into… something. And if nothing else, it looks great, in a sort of bold colored, cel-shaded style reminiscent of Redline or Kill la Kill or Idaten Deities.

Excited Alina was adorable.

Beyond that though, things were a bit too murky and possibly contrived. I got a bit of that sense that the writers were following an outline and just filling in blanks - “introduce villain here” or “reveal secret quest here.”

Started off the week with Noragami, which was really pretty good all in all, and I’m not quite clear on why. On paper, it doesn’t seem particularly promising, and there’s nothing that really stands out about it, but it was still good, in a sort of quiet, slow-burn way. I suspect part of it is that the characters are well developed and mesh notably well and the story unfolds at a natural pace - it doesn’t seem particularly forced or contrived. It was just solid if unexceptional.

I wasn’t inspired enough to watch the second season though, and ended up finally tackling DanMachi III. I watched the second season of it a few years ago and was so exhausted that I just couldn’t steel my resolve to watch any more then, mostly because I didn’t want to go through another round of some utterly loathsome villain being utterly loathsome while Bell indulges in another round of being sad and weepy and weak. But I like the series and especially the characters overall, so it had to be done sooner or later.

And this one followed that same pattern, so it reached the point at which he was just schlepping around with his head hanging, tearfully going, “Boku wa… Boku wa…” and I wanted to reach in the screen and kick his ass, but it… somehow it wasn’t quite so bad this time. I think he didn’t collapse quite as much and recovered a bit more quickly and surely, and potentially the ever-expanding cast served both to help him and to spread the focus of the story out a bit. However it was, while it was still irritating and I still wanted to kick his ass in the middle of it all, it wasn’t as frustrating and exhausting as season II. And it did seem to make some pretty good progress on the overarching story of Orario and the gods and the dungeon and the point of it all.

Then I knocked around for a bit and bounced off a few things and caught up with the current series I’m following (Honey Lemon Soda, which is still charming and satisfying if unexceptional, Guild Receptionist, which is still on track to be awesome, and Zenshu, which seems to be pulling out of its recent nosedive), then ended up, to my own surprise, starting DanMachi IV. I’ve just started it, but it already feels better than the past seasons. I suspect it wasn’t an accident that it started out with Bell leveling up, plus the focus is much more spread out than it was in the past, since he’s now surrounded by a substantial, diverse and interesting party. Hopefully it’ll hold together…

Ooh… that was a big episode.

First, the flashback served almost as a reboot, which the series really needed IMO. And it did just what I said last week I thought the series needed - it brought some specifics of Natsuko’s problems into focus, and established some context for addressing them in the world of A Tale of Perishing.

Second, the tale of her rise to stardom was great, and I especially liked the meta of using exaggerated art to convey it. It’s a technique that Eizouken actually did better, but still…

And third, we now know who the hawk (or whatever bird of prey that’s meant to be) represents - there was a very brief flash of that same hairdo during her flashback/dream.

I was worried about this series for a bit there, but it looks like it’s going to get interesting again…

Just a nice, solid episode - backstory details, character growth, a few more clues to the mystery and Alina being oh-so-Alina.

Started off the week in grand style. I generally prefer to gamble on lesser known series, hoping for an unexpected gem, so I tend to leave known quantities languishing, content that I’ll get around to them sooner or later. But I was in the mood for a sure thing, so I jumped all the way to the top and watched Sousou no Frieren. And yeah - it definitely deserves its reputation. It’s excellent, and in all respects. The only minor criticism I might have is that the whole mage test arc drug on a bit long, but it introduced (and satisfyingly fleshed out) a whole bunch of interesting and compelling characters, so it was worth it in the long run anyway.

After that, I had two criteria for whatever was next - it had to be another sure thing, and it had to be entirely unchallenging, since I was a bit emotionally drained from Frieren. And I ended up re-(re-re-re-)watching Tenchi Universe. Actually, I just watched the first half dozen or so episodes, until the entire cast had been introduced. It was more of a nostalgia trip than anything else, so once I’d seen Ryouko and Aeka in an epic shouting match, Mihoshi being supernaturally incompetent, Sasami quietly being far and away the best girl, Washuu praising herself, and Kiyone gamely suffering, it’d served its purposes.

Then after a bit of thought, I watched one of the handful of Ghiblis I still hadn’t seen - Omoide no Marnie And unsurprisingly, it was very Ghibli - charming, bittersweet, sort of creepy but mostly comfy, very pretty and ultimately heartwarming.

Then I finally felt adventurous again, and after a bit of wandering, ended up with Mayoiga aka The Lost Village. Partly I thought it looked sort of interesting, but mostly I was intrigued by the wide range of opinions on it - even the people who loved it or hated it couldn’t seem to agree on why, or even really what it was all about in the first place.

I didn’t have any particular issues with it overall. The story seemed pretty straightforward really - neither opaque nor multilayered. It’s broadly allegorical, but it’s more that it’s also allegorical. Mostly it’s just straightforward. The characters were mostly exaggerated archetypes, but I didn’t mind that, since it laid the foundation for what was to come without having to develop each character separately (since in the long run, the most important thing is that they’re all broken in some way). And the ending did more or less tie everything together, though it hand-waved a lot of details.

And honestly, it’s not even close to the dumbest suspense/horror anime I’ve seen.

And along the way, I kept up with the three series I’m following this season (a new record for me - I usually don’t follow any and instead binge them at some point in the future). Honey Lemon Soda is still satisfying-if-unexceptional, Guild Receptionist is still on track to be great and Zenshu seems to have leveled out after its recent nosedive, and hopefully it’s going to head back to fulfilling its notable potential.