Well, we finally met the tanuki family. I liked it all in all, and now Yachiyo has an assistant, and I assume the whole family is going to stick around. And Yachiyo passed a second mission - I’m assuming there’s an overarching plot involving those.

Interesting that this episode was set 50 years after the last one.

I’ve been resisting wjs018’s predictions of mood whiplash in this series just because I’d rather it not, but then they went ahead and threw a mostly implied bit in with the human ship, then made it explicit in the post-credits scene. Ah well.

The OP is still oddly clunky, but it still makes me smile anyway.

I love ARIA. To me, it’s the perfect iyashikei - it’s just beautiful snd calm, and Akari’s entire purpose in life is to share happiness. And Alicia is the archetype ara ara onee-san.

The only series I’m following so far this season is Apocalypse Hotel. Last week’s episode was fine all in all, but it did an odd thing. They showed the OP for the first time, and it was uncomfortably dissonant - both downbeat and off-key, and ultimately sort of dirge-like. But it was disconcerting enough that it has to have neen deliberate, and it sort of fits, because at the point we picked up the story, both the hotel and the MC have just about run their course, and have just at this late stage found a glimmer of hope. So I suspect that as their fortunes improve, the OP is going to evolve to reflect it. Or at least I hope so, since that would be awesome, and without something like that, the OP will just remain inexplicably awkward.

As far as day-to-day viewing goes, I started off the week with season 1 of Baka to Test. It was fine but sort of oddly dull. I’m not quite sure how it managed that, since all of the individual parts seem like they should add up to more than that. The setup’s interesting and the characters are relatively well developed and the art style is intriguing and it’s consistently funny, but it still somehow manages to be sort of drab all in all. The subs were sort of meta-amusing though - very much “localized,” and by era as well as place.

Then after a bit of wandering, I watched Saekano Or more precisely, I watched half of Saekano, then dropped it. It was strange - the “boring girlfriend” of the title was the only engaging character in the whole cast. She’s intriguing and distinctive and very much her own character, while all of the rest are just awkward conglomerations of tropes that aren’t even internally coherent. I never got a sense of any of them as distinct, recognizable individuals - they were just sort of blank ciphers assigned some combination of stereotypes - and their actions never seemed to spin off from their characters, but to just be whatever was necessary to move the plot along. And most notably, the qualities and actions assigned to the MMC tended to be tedious, insufferable and obnoxious, in addition to arbitrary, which is most of what led me to drop it.

Then I ended up on something only sort of anime-adjacent - Pantheon - which was excellent and highly recommended, but not technically anime, so I guess I’ll leave it at that.

Madoka.

As I just noted in another response, I immediately heard the OP as an overly earnest and depression-prone robot a century out from human contact letting go, to the best of her very limited ability. I thought it was brilliant.

ETA: The more I think sbout it, there are two notable things about that OP - the song was both down tempo and off-key, and a number of her dance moves actually required a partner.

How awesome would it be if, by the end of the season, the song was sweet and light and she had a partner?

I loved the OP.

What I heard, clear as a bell, was an overly earnest and depression-prone robot who’'s one of the few remaining who hasn’t ended up on the scrap heap, and is gamely and determinedly keeping a luxury hotel not only running but luxurious a century after humanity left the planet letting go, just a little bit, with a song that’s more upbeat than she is. For now.

Okay - first off, the OP is wonderful.

The episode itself was sort of odd, but in a promising way - it touched on a number of apparent mysteries, but didn’t reveal much of anything. It’s a slow pace, but if the series remains mostly slice of life with mystery, that’ll be fine.

Still haven’t met the Tanuki family, though they’re heavily featured in both the OP and the ED.

I don’t normally watch currently airing anime - I’d rather binge completed series - but last season I ended up getting sucked into not just one or two, but three of them - Zenshu, Guild Receptionist and Honey Lemon Soda. Now that they’re over though, I planned on going back to not watching current series.

But then last week I happened on a mention of Apocalypse Hotel and read the synopsis… and couldn’t resist. And it was excellent from start to finish, so that’s at least one series I’m going to be following.

Beyond that, I finished up Shinsekai Yori aka From the New World. I’ve bounced off the LN a number of times, so decided ro give the anime a chance, and even it took a while to get going. But it turned out quite good all in all. It’s not an easy watch - not only is it relatively complex and slow-moving - it doesn’t pull any punches. But it was worth it.

But after that, I was drained both mentally and emotionally and wanted something comfy and pleasant, so after a bit of thought, I decided it was time to rewatch Makeine, and it was just as terrific as it was the first time around. It’s just solidly above average in pretty much everything, and Anna is still one of my all-time favorite characters.

Then I bounced around for a bit and ended up watching one that had sort of lurked at the edge of my awareness for years - Aquarion EVOL And that’s one of the most fascinatingly awful series I’ve ever seen.

I actually tried to drop it a few times, but it kept drawing me back in. It was bad, but in mesmerizing ways. It’s a constant barrage of hot blood and pointless drama and insipid pseudo-philosophy and clumsy innuendo and chuuni and giant hams, all forced into a combination of gratingly awkward teen love and sex allegory and super robot model kit advertising. Most of the characters aren’t even characters really - they’re plot devices with legs and hasty backstories, each just reciting whatever collection of tropes is going to move the plot along to the next phase on the way to the hot-blooded, pointlessly dramatic, insipidly pseudo-philosophical chuuni and giant ham conclusion. It was just so bad, but so gloriously and unapologetically over-the-top about it that it sort of worked anyway.

And now I’m casting about for the next thing, without even any clear preferences in mind - just wandering around clicking things and seeing if they hook me.

Mm… yeah. You’ll like it. I have no doubt of that.

I loved everything about that.

This was a great week for old anime.

I started off with the rest of Noragami Aragoto, which was very good. Noragami in general has been a pleasant surprise - it doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention, but it’s really quite good, in a sort of low-key, just-all-around-good sense. This season had two main arcs, and both of them were interesting and well-executed (which was especially satisfying for the first one, which dealt with a central drama that had been lurking in the background since the start, and about which we’d already gotten enough hints that there weren’t many surprises left).

Then I bounced around for a bit before ending up on Oda Nobuna no Yabou. I was in the mood for cute girls doing something, and like the protagonist, have spent far too much time playing Nobunaga’s Ambition, so Cute Girls Doing the Warring States it was. And while I expected it to be cute and stylish and sort of goofy, I didn’t expect it to be… well, sort of epic really. Granted that Sengoku is literally an epic tale, I still figured the cute girls thing would keep it light. And while there was a certain amount of expected charming silliness and fanservice, mostly it was surprisingly dramatic and engaging. And the addition of a character who already knew the entire history and was determined to stop this Oda from making the same mistakes the other did led to some intriguing changes in the story. All in all, it was just very pleasant and enjoyable.

Then after bouncing around a bit more, I ended up diving into a series I’d been idly threatening to watch for a few years - Shinsekai Yori aka From the New World. I got a copy of the first volume of the LN years ago and have bounced off of it half a dozen times or so, so I figured I’d give the anime a chance. And even the anime takes a bit to get going, but once it hit its stride, it just sucked me in. It’s very good, and with impressive art design and music, in addition to the expected good story. I’ve watched 21 episodes in just two days, and will certainly watch the last four episodes later today.

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.