nyan

A quick skim indicates that they’re talking about heavily-cut nonstandard localizations and some kids’ series that weren’t any good the first time around. None of these are classic or groundbreaking (there was kids’ anime on North American network TV before them), they’re just old.

This is something of a mixed bag so far.

They spend more than 75% of the first episode setting up the main character’s generic Japanese household and school, something which could (and should) have been done in less than half that time, since it seems like a lot of it isn’t going to be relevant.

Then right at the end, things start to get more interesting and it looks like we might end up with a human-resistance-fighting-aliens story, which was not quite what I expected from the teaser blurb, but could be entertaining. Or not. With the protagonists being so young, it’s hard to tell what age group they’re trying to pitch this to, and that may end up affecting how good this ends up being more than anything internal to the story.

None of the characters grabbed me, so given how oversubscribed this season is for me already, this is probably a drop.

Only about a dozen more premieres to cover before I’m caught up, tra-la-la . . .

See you guys in like 4 years!

Nah, the entire series is only around 500 hours of footage. Plus maybe another 50-60 for the movies and various spin-offs.

Sexist garbage. Worst thing I’ve seen so far this season. Apparently in this show’s universe, a woman has value only if she’s a man’s demon’s appendage. Hard drop.

It used to be more common to keep the source style. My guess is that it’s 25% what’s easiest to draw and 75% branding (that is, whether non-Japanese exec-suite types can tell that it’s anime).

According to livechart.me, this is supposed to start airing in October. Still being made by Studio Pierrot. Other sites might have more information.

Well, yeah, it’s supposed to run through to December. Two consecutive cours.

An interesting study in contrasts: the realistic aftermath of civil war, combined with some almost Warner Bros.-esque slapstick and a sketchily-drawn dance sequence meant (I assume) to emphasise the dancer’s movement over their appearance. Worth following just to see if they can continue pulling this off.

Okay, so. The artwork and animation aren’t tremendous—in fact, I’d go so far as to describe them as “simple” and “old-fashioned”. They could have aired this in the late 1990s and it would have fit right in. The visuals’ redeeming quality is the amount of effort they put into the expressions on the faces of the various non-human characters.

The story so far . . . is more fairytale-like than I was expecting, and also oddly touching. I’ll be continuing with this one for another couple of episodes, I think. At least it isn’t another isekai.

I essentially just marathoned the first season of Gaikotsu Kishi-sama, AKA Skeleton Knight in Another World, over the course of a week or so, to see if it was worth watching the second season (not really; it’s generic reincarnated-as-overpowered-game-character isekai except when they’re making sure we know how eeeeeeevil the bad guys are 'cause they rape, torture, and enslave underaged elven girls, which would explain why I didn’t remember it). I’ll probably do Youjo Senki next for the same reason, but hopefully a better result.

Prior to that, I watched Ayatsuri Sakon, which I’d only seen parts of before, while I was down with bronchitis in March. The fact that I liked both the OP and ED on that one made me feel kind of old, because that hardly ever happens with more recent shows.

And I think it was Suisei no Gargantia that I marathoned this past Christmas.

Ryuumon may value his country’s survival and stability over taking down the Tairas. He strikes me as the type who only dabbles in politics because he’s been promoted to the level where he’s forced to, and if he’s studied history at all, he’d know that civil war is a game where everyone loses, especially when you’ve got aggressive enemies just outside your borders.

Oddly enough they didn’t cover what happened to the Taira snot nosed brat.

My bet is that if they make another cours, he’s going to turn up again, but he was probably just recuperating during the timeframe of the epilogue (interlogue?) Hopefully he’ll have developed a habit of carrying a handkerchief if we do see him again.

I’d have picked “Blue” (the final ED) rather than “Tank!”, but at that point it’s just a matter of taste.

Let’s see here—of the songs on the list, I remember four, although I must have heard three of the others at least once. There’s not just recency bias, but most-popular-series bias. Of course, if someone asked me to make a similar list, most of it would be stuff hardly anyone else remembers.

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. 😅