nyan

Silly awards time!

• Most Disappointing: This one’s a tie. First up, Buchigire Reijou wa Houfuku wo Chikaimashita/A Livid Lady’s Guide etc. I dropped this abruptly mid-season when the main character decided that taking out innocent third parties as part of her revenge was apparently just fine and didn’t deserve even a moment of guilt. Secondly, Rakudai Kenja/Talentless Sage. After a surprisingly good opening episode (considering the hackneyed premise), this one proceeded to gradually drop the ball as it acquired a harem trope, then descended into utterly unnecessary torture-porn for an episode and a half to emphasise that one of the antagonists was a really really really bad person, m’kay? The sheer amount of material suggests disturbing proclivities on the part of the original author. To add insult to injury, the antagonist whose evils they spent so much time lovingly detailing was a total pushover the MC spent less than five minutes trashing afterwards.
• Most Motion-Sickness Inducing: The Exiled Heavy Knight etc. I mean, it’s GoHands—enough said.
• Best Use of a School Setting: Clevatess . . . because it largely ignores that it’s a school setting that the characters have been sent to infiltrate. There’s no time wasted on school cultural festivals or on the characters panicking because one of the other students asks them an innocent question.
• Most Pleasant Surprise: Sayonara Lara. I almost didn’t watch this one, because I was afraid it would get bogged down in literal fish-out-of-water comedy (which doesn’t interest me), but it managed to maintain its tone despite that aspect.
• Worst Visual Effect: Thunder Three. This is a rather odd show, quite a bit darker than the first episode would lead you to expect. However, the halo of halftone dots around the main characters irritated me beyond measure. It was somehow even worse than the disjointed artwork styles of the runner-up, Exiled Heavy Knight.
• Mascot That’s Most Likely To Eat Your Face: Thunder Three again. It actually has two (arguably three) animal mascots. The bulldog is fine in both versions, but the alien winged mouse critter looks highly suspicious to me. I think it’s the way it always has its tongue sticking out. Anyway, I keep expecting it to eat someone.
• Most Obnoxious Protagonist: Dogulwang/Tomb Raider King. He isn’t really evil or anything, just snarky and exasperating in a way that makes you want to slap him sometimes.
• Best Dragon: Neko to Ryuu/The Cat and the Dragon. Of course.

I know, right? I tried one ep and bounced right off, but I’ve encountered people who praise it to the skies. I suppose it’s one of those shows that gets described as “highly polarizing”.

If I wanted to pick one game/sports/mundane competition anime for a list like this, I probably would have gone with Chihayafuru, but the list-maker doesn’t seem interested in shoujo.

Kimetsu no Yaiba is pretty, but it has no depth. The items on the list seem to at least be trying for soem depth, although it’s arguable whether they all succeed. The list-maker didn’t include Jujutsu Kaisen either, which is another widely-praised show with similar problems.

Grave of the Fireflies is kind of the wrecking-ball version of this. Powerful, not subtle, and leaves you utterly devastated.

(Runner-up for me might be Gurren Lagann.)

Less repeated footage, but it feels like more repeated plot.

I’d much rather have the right outcome (= not executing an elementary-school-aged kid for being the kind of ignorant idiot kids that age often are) for the wrong reason than the wrong outcome for the right reason (in this case, enforcing a law uniformly regardless of the identity of the accused—does that even constitute a “right” reason if the law itself is unjust?)

That’s totally aside from the fact that they still need his mana and therefore can’t afford to kill him. Enforcing the law uniformly might lead to a bunch of other, completely innocent people being hurt because they’ve destroyed a resource. In the real world, that’s the kind of thing that tends to get sentences commuted.

I agree that he was underpunished, but execution seems a bit harsh—he is only a kid, and they need his mana (and no one else’s kid could have been in that position anyway, because of the requirements to open the tower door). Disinheriting him completely and permanently would have been about right, I think. There’s no way he would ever make a competent archduke anyway, with his credulous personality. He surely must have been warned about other nobles’ kids, and didn’t listen.

Suggesting another avenue of research she can pursue might keep her treading water. “Yeah, so, something recently demonstrated to me that time travel using magic may be possible—maybe we can send you back to the exact moment you ended up here and shove you through the world-wall in the opposite direction while there’s a hole there?” It barely even matters if it makes sense, so long as it gives her a straw to grasp at.

“Yeah, we should try talking first,” pretty much sums up Rimuru’s philosophy in a nutshell.

I think the idea is that Isaac actually loves his son, but is really awful at showing it because he’s bought into all this nonsense about how a noble should behave. Plus, he has a temper. He flew off the handle and disowned Elymas because he was disappointed and felt his hand was being forced because the head of his house “had” to be a swordsman or related class, and he probably went off to cry in private afterwards—or so the writer(s) would like us to believe.

Anyway, he wasn’t the one who wanted that confrontation—he originally asked the butler to take care of it, remember? Malice was the one who pushed for him to come down hard on Elymas. It isn’t clear whether he went along with that to please her because she’s now his heir and they have to work together, or for some more emotional reason that he would never admit.

My guess would be that Crunchyroll doesn’t have the streaming rights, then (maybe it went to Amazon or Netflix?)

Escaflowne: Wouldn’t work quite as well without Hitomi’s decision at the end of which world she really belongs in.

The Twelve Kingdoms: Portions of the plot wouldn’t work without the bit with new arrivals not understanding the language and culture.

(Basically, if it predated the coining of the term “isekai” and has stood the test of time well enough that people still remember it, it’s probably good.)

There are also some shows whose plot depends on being able to invert part of the trope, like Eminence in Shadow, or, for the dark and serious version, Shokei Shoujo no Virgin Road/The Executioner and Her Way of Life (although I think that one was too tragic and unfinished for most people’s tastes).

I’ll nominate Shadows House, although it certainly isn’t a traditional mystery.

The Cockpit might be of interest (if you can find it—I’m not sure there’s any current streaming license). Zipang, too. There are probably others I’m forgetting about.

Also funny is that Elm sets a condition that should he win

Actually, he never said “win”. He said “come to respect my strength” or something along those lines, which is somewhat weaker—all he has to do is convince Isaac that Heavy Knight isn’t actually a trash class. A draw would be sufficient for that. (Of course, he’ll win anyway, I’m sure.)

I’d forgotten just how many times he’d died by evisceration or by jumping/falling off of stuff.

So . . . kind of the Japanese equivalent of bronies? 😅

For real fun, consider Saiyuki, which moved from a shounen magazine in its initial run to a josei magazine for later material. So which is it, really?

The manga is serialized in Weekly Shounen Sunday, apparently, so it qualifies even by the most technical definition of shounen.

Ferdinand has long since figured out that the easiest way to deal with a teary Myne is to make her mad . . .

In addition to what everyone else has already said: because unless you’re making an Initial D sequel, the cars are usually not all that important. Studios want to save their budget for the important stuff, so they aim for “barely adequate” on the cars and move on. (Honestly? I notice the horses more.)

So they finally made it out of that dungeon. Took them long enough.

Also, Kami no Shizuku/Drops of God has now been to the Matterhorn, California’s Napa Valley, Adelaide in Australia (with a brief labeled shot of Ayers Rock for extra), and what I think was Uyghur territory in China.

A couple of very random locations otherwise unmarked:

The early episodes of Vinland Saga take place in Iceland, making it, I think, the only anime set there to date. I can’t remember whether they ever give a town name or not.

While most of the series takes place in London, England, one of the Moriarty the Patriot OAVs is set in Bath.

The sheer number of individual anime where the characters have visited (and usually trashed—it was almost a running joke back in the 1990s) the Tokyo Tower boggles the mind, so you should probably mark it with a large star.

I didn’t finish watching it, but there was another trash isekai about a guy becoming an evil boss from a video game he played (A Wild Last Boss Appears) and there was a bit of that going on with the personality of the real character he’s inhabiting slowly overtaking his own. Although at least for what I saw, they didn’t really do much more with that either.

Things in that one aren’t quite as they seem, from what I understand, with a few things being revealed toward the end of the first season (second one starts in October), and I think I also read some relevant spoilers dropped here. Maou-sama, Retry! is another one with pretty much the same plotline, where it’s also pretty clear that there’s Something Going On in the background.

There’s been no indication of that kind of thing so far in Overlord, though, as far as I know. There seems to be no reason for Ains being dumped into his game persona, and no sign of anyone who might be responsible.

I’m hard-dropping that one after the last couple of episodes. Killing innocents on purpose and without remorse to get revenge on a third party is just Not Acceptable.

I find Overlord a lot less disturbing, possibly because Ains himself isn’t directly responsible for a lot of the most heinous stuff (his servants tend to be a lot nastier than he is, and seldom tell him exactly what they’re doing), and possibly because most of the people he ends up killing aren’t total innocents and are usually given a chance to fight back. (Plus, we have no idea what being stuck in a lich’s body does to the human psyche, so he has at least that much excuse for the evil he does do outright and knowingly.) And it was obvious from the beginning that Overlord wasn’t taking place in a nice world.

Buchigire Reijou, on the other hand, started out in a much lighter register, as typical villainness stuff where most of the nastiness is social and political and what combat there is doesn’t get particularly gory, and then the protagonist suddenly went full Kingdoms of Ruin on everyone’s asses without even nearly enough buildup to justify it. It just doesn’t work.

Really? More than “Paranoid Android”? Or does Spotify not have the rights to stream that one? (Or I suppose that it’s possible that bôa has a massive non-anime fandom that I’ve never heard about.)

Lodoss has also been done twice. The second one was less good, in my opinion.

Berserk has two anime incarnations already. It shouldn’t be touched again until the manga either ends or stops. Pick something that’s complete in the source material but not the anime instead.