Silly awards time!

• Most pointless character introduction: Lord of Mysteries. Added a named character, after some build-up, at the end of an episode (was it 9 or 10?) and then never mentioned him again. I guess that was when they decided to drop anything that they didn’t absolutely need to reach the stopping point they’d intended. Well, it wasn’t like they were going to adapt all 1400+ chapters of the webnovel anyway.

• Most over-the-top cat care advice: Nyaight of the Living Cat. No, your cat will not develop a complex if you laugh at them after a pratfall. Really.

• Best Dragon Award: Water Magician . . . but the only competition was Clevatess, which didn’t include much dragon screen-time.

• Scatology award: Gachiakuta. If you’ve seen that “fight” scene, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I would have been happier if they’d left that out, to be honest. Runner up would be Dr. Stone, but it had a much better reason for it.

• Cognitive dissonance award: Clevatess. This may just be a me thing, but I seem to expect fantasy grimdark to use more realistic character designs than this does. Took me a little while to adapt.

• Most unexpectedly entertaining: Probably Onmyo Kaiten Re-birth Verse. It wasn’t spectacularly good, but I went into it expecting utter clichéd shounen schlock, and it actually managed to surprise me by flipping everything on its head for a second time near the end. Plot held together, setting was a bit silly but overall consistent, characters were unoriginal but, again, consistent. So it went from an expected D to a C.

• Most disappointing returning series: the vending machine. It wasn’t horrible, but while the first season was better than it should have been given the premise, the second was not.

• Worst translation device: Nyaight of the Living Cat again. I honestly don’t know how the human characters were able to make any sense out of that mishmash of action movie quotes a lot of the time. Poor Jones would have been better off pointing to letters on a ouija board.

• Most in need of another season ASAP: Kaijuu 8-gou. C’mon, guys, you can’t just leave us hanging in the early phases of the boss fight!

• Most not in need of another season: Tate no Yuusha. Which, of course, means we’re going to have one.