New season!
“86” is a very typical anime. I’m going to call it derivative. Let’s see: sci-fi, wartime, utopia that is really a dystopia, mech vehicles used in war (spiders, not bipedals, though), a bit of fanservice, and a setup for future rebellion against the government by our plucky group of soldiers. I don’t think I will continue with it.
Shadows House is a fantasy mystery series, although for now it has been slow, there isn’t a lot of hooks and instead it has been almost slice-of-lifeish. I guess that will change in future episodes. It deals with some kind of shadow people that live in a huge house and their servants, the ‘live puppets’ which for us, are just normal regular humans.
Vivy Fluorite Eye’s Song is a bit weird. It’s the new anime done by WIT, and it’s scifi work about AI robot designed as a singer (she worked in a amusement park or similar), which suddenly it’s mixed in the plot of the Terminator series. A AI drone coming from 100 years into the future comes to her to make it avoid a future where the robots arise against humanity, so he sends her to intervene in key moments of history. For now, it’s more average than anything, for example the last episode it had a standalone story about another AI robot and her twin which is supposed to be dramatic but it was pretty meh.
Fumetsu no Anata e, or depending on the translation ‘To You, Immortal’ or ‘To Your Eternity’, had an intriguing start, about some kind of alien lifeform or drone coming to Earth, and learning what life here is about, by shapeshifting to replicate another lifeform that he finds dead, and continuing with their lives. If the first episode is a hint of things to come, the series has going to have a tragic flair. Still, the first episode was more a prologue than anything.
Mars Red has an intriguing urban fantasy historical setting (think Japan in 1930s but with vampires!), following a military unit specialized in the capture or killing of vampires, and it has a nice layer artistic flair in the story and direction. For example, the first episode had an actress interpreting Salomé who turned crazy when converted to vampire, the second had a bit of tragic lovers story that I liked it.
Thunderbolt Fantasy is perhaps the best I’m watching right now. It’s pure fantasy entertainment, in a wuxia setting, done with puppets. It has a very nice mix of classic adventure feel but with a novel (for me) setting and with a very good work in the writing department: character motivations, banter, plotting, etc.
In addition, I’m watching Invincible (see other thread).