Either I did, or I would have. One of my favorites.
I think that was you, and others joined in. Or vice versa. I think we were discussing the excellent volleyball anime when it came up.
Teiman
5992
Spy x Family is the only thing I am watching from this season. Not saying is the only good thing, but is the only watchable thing I know. I guess I will later discover there where a really good one I ignored, maybe in 2 or 3 years.
This is the way.
It’s better to watch stuff once it’s already finished. But I feel like I waited long enough with Spy x Family. I was in the middle of episode 9 this morning, and I got a notification that the season finale is this weekend. So I’ll reach the final episode right around when it airs.
My adult daughter and I have been watching Trapped in a Dating Sim and enjoying it. I read the light novels so was bound to watch it and my daughter feels it is interesting. YMMV
I was a bit bored with Rise of the Shield Hero in Season 2 at the start, to be honest. They try for some weird emotional moments that I didn’t find emotional at all. There’s so much crying! Here, the party meets a new person, knowing when they meet her that she has to be killed (it’s the first thing she tells them about herself) and now they can’t bear to see her die, oh, it’s so sad! Pfft, come on, this isn’t the Shield Hero we know from Season 1.
Anyway, gladly, that doesn’t last long because the season kind of resets the whole adventure. New world, starting from level 1 again, it becomes interesting again! Yay! I’ve got 3 more episodes to go this season (including one that will air next week). I’m guessing this is one of those mid-season break things, but who knows. Overall, after the reset, I enjoyed this season.
Teiman
5996
just watched this, because …why not?, the serie excuses his own low production values, but had his share of cool moments or almost self-aware moments. I trough was cool.
Spy X Family is very good, but I still think the anime is just moving as little too slow for its own good. If somebody wanted to watch it, I’d probably recommend waiting for the second cour to be released and watch it all at once. I don’t need every episode to be action-packed, and the slice-of-life stuff is the point, but it can be a little disappointing how little happens (even from like a character moments perspective) in each episode.
I also watched Dress Up Darling, which is very sweet and also very, very horny. One thing that’s I do appreciate is that Gojo is, well, actually horny as a character? Like not as a comic relief creep-o, or blood shoot out of nose peeping tom, but closer to horny the way an actual high school boy is. Its a nice change from the kind weird collision of fanservice and weirdly sexless main characters that we often see in anime. I do think that Dress Up Darling does a lot of things really well, and I see where its popularity comes from. The leering fanservice is there for cheap thrills to get people in the door, but there’s more to it than that. It’s not revolutionary, but its very good in an 80s sex-comedy kind of way, but like, a lot more heartfelt. It’s also kind of a nice spin on the wild girl / boring boy romance trend in that there’s no tsundere games at all. She’s straight up states that super into Gojo, and is just kind of unsure about how to go about making it happen.
Birdie Wing is good, although it’s not quite the balls-to-the-wall crazytown fest that some people have made it out to be. It’s a relatively straight forward “wild anime version of a sport” although it does do a big insane reveal every 2-3 episodes at the beginning, it kind of trails off eventually. Still a lot of fun though, and it uses music in just an excellent way that kind of makes me think of Kill La Kill’s excellent use of musical stings. In general, it feels pretty aware of this and puts the music up front pretty often (like, it does the thing where the end credits music creeps into the last scene a bunch). It builds some nice relationships around the edges of the wacky golf hijinx.
This clip is pretty representative of the show in general.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hrn85BaSgI
It’s also surprisingly very un-horny.
I also went back and watched a few episodes of Mieruko-Chan (Mieruko Can See It), which I meant to watch a while ago but forgot and it finally moved from Funimation to Crunchyroll. It’s thoroughly okay. Its a slice-of-life show about a girl who can see horrible ghosts, but has to pretend she can’t because if they realize she can see them, they’ll attack her. It’s pretty slight, and the horror comic ghosts probably worked better in manga form. The ghosts all have some implied back-story from their particular grotesqueries, and it feels like the mange might have done a bit more with that. It’s…pretty horny also.
I got to the episode of Jobless Reincarnation where he meets Geese, who is a “monkey man” in the light novel. In the anime, he’s just a guy. And yet, characters still claim in the anime that he has a monkey face, even though he looks nothing like a monkey. I don’t get it. When I was reading the light novel, and everyone always commented that he had a monkey face and that he looked like a monkey, in a fantasy world where people routinely look like cats and other animals, I thought, you know, that he would look like a literal monkey, and that’s always how I pictured him. So bizarre.
I got to S1E21 - Turning point 2 of Jobless Reincarnation, which is the point in the story where I was reading the light novel and I knew I couldn’t stop until the end of the story. That moment really stuck with me all the way to the end. And it turns out the anime version really did a great job of recreating it.
I really like how fast the anime is moving. They cover a lot of story sometimes in just the opening credits, where they usually have a nice montage of what’s been happening, and are able to skip over lots of unimportant things really quickly. So they’re doing a good job of compressing a story that was way too long, and editing it down to a much more reasonable length.
“Summit of the Gods” on Netflix is amazing… that is all.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit this because of the ridiculous name, but I’m seriously hooked on “How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom”. As “Shield Hero” got more and more ridiculous, this one is a nice contrast, where a hero is summoned to another world where a demon army is invading civilization, and he basically just does bureaucratic reforms and logistics to improve the situation. There’s just something very relaxing about that.
Not nearly as good as season one. The story/writing was all over the damned place.
I’ve always appreciated My Hero Academia for those reasons.
New trailer for the new Shinkai movie
Watching Vinland Saga and just finished the first season. I think I mostly like it. Don’t love the character of Thorfinn (at least at this point), but it feels like things will be changing with him soon. Askeladd ended up being a fairly fascinating character.
I’d like to be more excited for that, but considering I didn’t like Weathering With You at all, I’m not expecting much. Also, the female protagonist reminds me way too much of MItsuha from Your Name. This trailer (along with the whole of Weathering With You) makes me feel like Makoto Shinkai is currently stuck trying to make as many variations of Your Name as he can, to try and repeat its success. And I think in the process he lost some of what made 5 Centimeters Per Second so special to me. But oh well, maybe I’m wrong! I hope I am. It certainly looks beautiful, so there’s that.
I enjoyed it, too. It’s crazy, but there are actually two versions of the English dub. One on Netflix, and a different one on HiDive. The season two trailer looks promising.
Have any of you checked out a Youtube series called KYOTO VIDEO? The creator produces well researched deep-dives into a wide range of anime productions from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s and as someone who’s largely ignorant of the medium, his informative videos have helped me track down some interesting OVAs that I would’ve never seen otherwise like Take the X Train, an idiosyncratic tribute to the music of Duke Ellington funded by Konami (yes, that Konami) which I ended up loving!
I watched Season 1 over the last few days. I found it hilarious. The best joke of the first season was when the new housemate packs the devil his lunch, and his co-worker, who has a crush on him, wants to see the bento box that was packed for him.
Great first season.
I should stop now and wait for the 2nd season to finish before starting it. But it is tempting to jump right into the 2nd season.
Sturgil Simpson’s ~40m long “Sound and Fury” falls deep into ‘the heck did I just watch’ territory, but somehow was just the thing.
