nyan

Silly awards time! (I missed this last season because I was recovering from bronchitis—mea culpa.)

• Worst subtitles award: Snowball Earth. Rendering incoherent noises (including incoherent monster noises) as “Bach!” because there’s a plosive at the beginning has got to be a new low. I presume an LLM went rogue.
• Worst name localization award: Yuusha no Rokkotsu de, whose localized name I steadfastly refuse to use.
• Most interesting animation award: Also Yuusha no Rokkotsu de—I can’t now remember how many different styles they ran through.
• Most unusual character design choices: Nippon Sangoku. The only other series I can think of that’s even remotely comparable is Hyouge Mono, although that had less beard stubble and more odd historical Japanese hairstyles.
• Best dragon award: Himekishi no Barbaroi Yome, narrowly edging out The Beginning After the End due to at least one decently original design. (Reincarnated as a Slime, on the other hand, actually managed to tweak my bad-CGI-dragon meter at one point).
• Most ridiculously melodramatic: Shunkashuutou Daikousha. I’m pretty good at suspension of disbelief, usually, but that phone call was just too much.
• Unexpectedly fun award: Nigetsuri. I almost skipped this altogether, and went in not expecting much, but I enjoyed spending time with Mimi.
• Most edible protagonist: Niwatori Fighter, naturally. (I’m still in awe of how they managed to embed this in a season that—between Yuusha no Rokkotsu de and everyone’s favourite vending machine—made martial artist chickens fighting kaijuu look positively normal.)

Grimgar is quite an intersting choice—older, obscure, downbeat single-cours isekai. Maybe the listmaker read the LNs?

I’d add The Twelve Kingdoms, and possibly The Slayers and Kyo Kara Maoh! to this (there’s plenty in both to explore, but both sometimes drop something silly for purely comedic purposes, like the vegetarian sharks).

Definitely an Ignobel Prize contender.

What do you mean by this? Not enough light on Japanese’s atrocities ?

Might have been that (as far as I can recall, the characters were never in the correct place at the correct time to see most of the evilest stuff), might have been just that the original mangaka was trying for a more nuanced view of the war and so didn’t depict the higher-level Japanese officers as monsters. To be honest, I don’t remember exactly—most of that discussion took place around the time the series first came out.

Might not be quite what you want, but I’ll throw in a rec for Zipang: A modern (well, modern twenty years ago) Japanese SDF patrol boat is thrown back in time to the Battle of Midway in World War II. They’re eventually forced to take sides whether they want to or not, with the additional issue that their weapons are advanced enough to take out anything on the ocean during that time period, even as they’re trying very hard not to change history. (This series has two problems: first, it has a case of Unfinished Manga Syndrome and so ends in the middle of the story, and second, it wasn’t negative enough on Japan’s behaviour during the war for some non-Japanese audiences.)

There are also some less-regarded mecha shows like Argento Soma that might fit.

Stuff I’ll likely continue from previous seasons:

• Stuck in Meetings Reincarnated as a Slime
• Mushoku Tensei
• Ascendance of a Bookworm
• Re: Zero
• Clevatess
• Old Country Bumpkin to Master Swordsman
• Lord of Mysteries (probably just OAVs—ODVs?—rather than a full season)
• Mao
• Hell Mode
• Drops of God (no idea why I’m still watching this, but I am)
• Daemons of the Shadow Realm (if I catch up with it)

I’ll probably hold off on Tanya the Evil and Skeleton Knight until I can re-watch the first seasons, since I recall little about the first and nothing about the second.

New shows whose descriptions caught my attention:

• Jaadugar
• Sparks of Tomorrow
• World is Dancing
• Though I Am an Inept Villainess
• Black Torch
• Victoria of Many Faces
• Red River
• Recommendation from Mr. Iwamoto
• The Cat and the Dragon (actually, it’s just the title that caught my eye on this one, since I haven’t seen a description yet)
• I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day
• Thunder 3 (I have no idea why and may not even get this far down the list)

If I have any space left in my schedule after all that, it’ll probably be filled by random fantasy/isekai/villainess series. Possibly including Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects, because the source material is . . . okay. Not brilliant, but okay.

This season may end up . . . somewhat oversubscribed for me. 😅

I’ll second Chihayafuru, and add Hikaru no Go (different game, very shounen anime, still manages a surprisingly good emotional payoff if you stick with the show long enough).

I’m going to add a couple of more dubious ones: Princess Tutu, to the extent that it’s about ballet and not fairytales. And the old series Ayatsuri Sakon, which is primarily a mystery series, but often uses backdrops that relate strongly to Japanese culture (mostly bunraku, since the main character is an apprentice bunraku puppeteer, but there’s also one arc that deals heavily with Noh theatre)—to be honest, those were more interesting than the whodunnit bits.

Well, he lost his memory and started manifesting this stuff after they found him unconscious in the library, so that was likely the key event. Assuming Gluttony was already in the tower, she could have done just about anything to him while he was out cold. Alternatively, this could have been set up as far back as the previous season, and when Subaru got knocked out by reading a book, it provided a chink in his psyche that allowed the setup to bear fruit, so to speak.

The other possibility is that it had something to do with everyone’s favourite chopstick samurai.

With this being two consecutive cours, it might be a while before we get the answer.

In general, the insurgents seem to be really bad shots.

(Also, how long can you be on a phone call apparently without noticing that the other side is under fire and maybe Now Is Really Not The Time?)

For what it’s worth, I vaguely remember reading part of the original webnovel at Wuxiaworld (many many years ago when the site was a lot less trouble to use), and I dropped it after about a hundred chapters. If I recall correctly and don’t have it confused with something else they started translating at around the same time, it’s a Korean VRMMO novel of no particular distinction, and yeah, a power fantasy.

You’d need a pretty big factory to produce one of that size. 🤔

Of course. Surely you didn’t expect them to make it all the way to the moon and do everything they need to do there in the next ~4 episodes! We’re going to have to wait a bit longer to find out who the guy behind the curtain (with the medusa collection) is.

If I recall correctly, the source manga had (has?) a rather irregular publication schedule, so they were probably waiting to have enough material.

Hikaru no Go. Shounen, yes. Competition, yes. Action? Even less than a cooking anime.

Sounds kinda fishy? :rimshot:

Seriously, though, I don’t think we’ve yet had an instance of cross-gender reincarnation in this. Whether that’s just coincidence, or it’s an actual law of the world, I don’t know.

Even the main character now thinks there are too many meetings. 😅

Unfortunately, human beings really can be that heartless (see: all of human history to date). We’re very good at convincing ourselves that people who don’t meet some arbitrary standard are less than human. It all depends on how dark they want to take this.

Just what did you do this time?

We’re unlikely to find out until he recovers his memory, alas, and that’s going to take several episodes (at a guess).

A lot of people hate winter, so I could imagine people hating on someone who’s able to summon it.

The most likely general reason seems like it would be internal power struggles, though. We’ve already seen the ones at the Spring village, and they probably exist elsewhere as well. Don’t like the current Envoy or their factional relationships? Kill them and take another spin at the roulette wheel. Maybe it’ll come out in your favour this time.

Well, yeah, that goes without saying. Also, he was wearing a dog mascot costume when he died in the first ep.

That was the thought that also crossed my mind. The happy-go-lucky personality seems like a perfect match.

So the entire episode was essentially one meeting. 😅

I feel like they skipped over a couple of notches in ramping up the violence here. Granted, it was never an entirely nonviolent show, but . . .

I wonder how long they can keep coming up with different artwork/animation styles for each world.

The humour didn’t work for me, and the male lead was obnoxious. I’ll be dropping this one.

Three meetings, mostly informal, this time.

We could turn that into a drinking game.

I didn’t think this season was going to produce anything more batshit than Niwatori Fighter. Evidently I was wrong . . .

I am falling, I am fading

The big streaming platforms probably get pretty much all of the casual watchers, who favour dubs, but have to split the more hardcore fans who favour subs with the high seas. That’s going to skew the stats a bit.

She was going so fast that I couldn’t identify all the works that she mentioned past the weaksauce trademark protection . . . 😅 Not surprising, I guess, given that some of them were pretty obscure. (Aura Battler Dunbine? Seriously?)