“Even if it makes me puke blood…”

“You said your inner thoughts out loud.” 😅

Poor Jade…

Another nice episode for this oddly compelling series.

In a way, I think this actually does a better job of communicating the story and the themes and especially the characters than any of the more vivid and interesting series I’ve seen cover more or less the same ground. It’s just simple and heartfelt and earnest, and to its credit. Much like Uka herself.

The only real issue I might take with it is that it rushes through to settling conflicts too quickly and easily. Like in this one, Serina opened up to Uka too quickly, reacted to her entourage’s bullying too forcefully and too quickly, and they made up with her, and then with Uka, too easily and too quickly. In the real world, those sorts of dramas and shifting alliances and grudges and reconciliations would be long and drawn-out and messy.

But they wouldn’t fit in a half hour anime episode, and they are done well anyway, all things considered, so that’s okay.

I wonder what the backstory’s going to be berween Kai and Serina…

Well, first then, of the ones that I’m watching, the only ones that really stand out to me are the OP and ED for Guild Receptionist (which switched places two episodes back). The current OP is gorgeous and the ED is adorable. Of the ones I browsed for the thread, the only ones that really stood out to me were the Apothecary Diaries OP, which is excellent, and the Aquarion: Myth of Emotions ED, which is awful.

So I started off the past week with the rest of An Explosion on This Wonderful World - Megumin’s KonoSuba spin-off - and loved everything about it. It’s just solid - good animation, voice acting and music, engaging characters, interesting stories, and laugh-out-loud funny.

Megumin, or more precisely her hat, regularly reminds me of an obscure one that’s been on my TBW list for years – Majimoji Rurumo, so I finally sat down to watch it, and it was mostly disappointing. Rurumo herself is a decent character, and the tropish Disciplinary Committee chief/tsundere childhood friend is at least better than might be expected, and… that’s about it. Most notably, the MMC is not only one of those intensely annoying harem protagonists who’s mostly in perpetual cringey horndog overdrive except when the plot demands that he set it aside entirely and become preternaturally noble, generous and wise for exactly as long as it takes to settle the current crisis, but is easily the worst version of that I’ve ever seen.

Then I knocked around for a bit, catching up with the current season series I was watching and adding another one, and bouncing off of a few things.

Honey Lemon Soda is still unremarkable but satisfying, and that’s fine. It doesn’t really need to be more than that. And Guild Receptionist is still on track to be awesome. And I caught up with Zenshu, which is… I don’t know. It started off great - the genre mix of an isekai animator with a mahou shoujo transformation scene was brilliant and the animation in particular has been stellar. But then the story did an abrupt faceplant in the last episode and didn’t really recover much in the most recent one. It’s possible that it’s just in a bit of a slog as it sets up drama to come, but it’s also possible that it just went sideways and isn’t going to recover. We’ll see…

Then, in what I thought was a stroke of brilliance, I remembered a series that’s been on my TBW for over a decade, and is generally considered something of a cult classic - Arakawa Under the Bridge But here I am, two days later and seven episodes in, and I’m pretty sure I’ve dropped it. I just have no interest in watching it any more.

The basic concept is great and the cast is great, with one glaring exception - Rec/Kou is just as much of an insufferable and stupidly pig-headed jackass as he was the first moment he appeared. Even after all the time he’s spent on the riverbank and all the experiences he’s had, his character growth remains at zero. And I just can’t tolerate him any longer.

Not sure what’s next…

Interesting episode.

It gives me hope after the unsatisfying conclusion to last week’s episode. I was hoping that that ass-pull that supposedly resolved the last crisis was going to be treated as an unsatisfying ass-pull in-universe, and though they didn’t address that one specifically, that was the broad concept in this episode. Basically, Natsuko was coasting on hubris and unwarranted confidence (not coincidentally just like she apparently was in the real world), and now it’s blowing up in her face.

And Justice looks to be an interesting addition.

Looking forward to the next episode

Yeah - there’s none of that “honor demands that a warrior seek out and defeat the strongest challenger” jazz. She’s just righteously pissed off and makes no secret of that fact.

That was pretty damned awesome. There’s just something really gratifying about seeing Alina curbstomp an enemy. And even in the midst of all of that, I laughed when they thanked her and she went all tsundere.

And Jade, who could’ve been bogged down in cliche, is turning out to be a surprisingly interesting and amusing character. It’s great watching the way he and Alina interact.

And it looks like the next episode is going to focus on Lululee, and I’m looking forward to that.

This series is proving to be a gem.

I caught up on this series last night and absolutely loved it… right up until this episode.

It started off well enough, and it still shared one of the greatest strengths of the series - astonishing art. But the resolution of the crisis of the week wasn’t exciting or funny or even particularly interesting. It was just cheesy and forced and unsatisfying.

I do see a glimmer of hope though - with as self-aware and meta as this series has been, it’s possible that that cheesy solution is going to have consequences somewhere down the line - that it’s going to be recognized as an unsatisfying ass-pull in-universe, and have to be fixed or ret-conned or something like that.

Or I guess it’s possible that a series that had been notably good just face-planted for some reason…

That moment when Ishimori caught herself standing there with her middle school album and suddenly realized what she was doing and started to think that there’s no way anyone could actually be interested in it, so just quietly slunk away - that especially spoke to me. I know exactly how that feels.

I think part of what impresses me about this is that it captures the reality of social anxiety in a way that more exaggerated and stylized depictions - like Bocchi the Rock - never can.

So I get caught up in all of her little victories. They are little, in the grand scheme of things, but they’re also huge in a way. Though even she hasn’t fully realized that yet.

Started off last week with the rest of Scrapped Princess (2003), which was excellent. It has everything - an intriguing story, great characters, fascinating worldbuilding, humor, action, intrigue, drama, tragedy, redemption… And quality animation and music to boot. It was just a pleasure from start to finish.

And then, of all things, I followed it up with one that was even better, and from a somewhat unexpected quarter. Eizouken ni wa Te wo Dasu na / Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (2020).

It was directed by Yuasa, which is a huge point in its favor IMO - he consistently impresses me. But at the same time, it’s an anime about anime, which is a niche genre that I find to be mostly tedious and self-absorbed, so even with Yuasa at the helm, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot. But I was so, so wrong. It’s glorious, and immediately jumped high onto my all-time favorites list…

One thing is that it mostly skips past the drudgery and workaday world of making anime - the part that most series focus on, IMO to their detriment. Instead, it gets all of that out of the way right off the bat by bringing together a main cast of three who are perfectly suited for their respective roles of director, animation lead and producer, then puts them in a wonderfully run down studio with every tool they might need just sitting there waiting for them. They do of course face problems, but they’re generally more abstract, with the biggest recurring one being that they just can’t stop creating - every idea leads to another idea, every one of which they want to draw.

And that really sets the tone for the anime - what it is is a celebration - a love letter to anime, and further to imagination and creativity and the thrill and fulfillment of visualizing something and striving to communicate it, then watching as an audience gets it, with all the impact you hoped for.

And a wonderful thing about it is that all the while that the characters are coming up with ideas and animating them, trying to capture movement and mood and interesting design, the anime itself, in the background so to speak, is casually throwing in its own wonderful animations. There’s a constant stream of just little riffs scattered here and there - a transitional scene or a bit of background movement or some camera work - that are astonishing, and apparently the same thing the anime is depicting - people creating interesting imagery just for the joy of it.

And even with all of that, the characters manage to be engaging, there’s a satisfying amount of growth and it’s even laugh out loud funny. Even the OP is awesome. What more could I want?

It was almost a relief to follow that up with something… not good. If nothing else, it gave my smile muscles a chance to rest.

Duan Nao / Die Now is Chinese, and… well … it shows. It’s very derivative and tropish. The biggest problem with it though is that it introduced what could’ve been an interesting story in spite of the tropishness, and dropped all sorts of hints to apparent multiple layers of mystery… then ended. With another… oh… 30 or 40 episodes, it could’ve been good. Maybe.

So after that I was in the mood for a sure thing, so I’m watching Megumin’s KonoSuba spin-off - An Explosion on This Wonderful World (2023) and laughing my ass off.

Oh, and along the way, and uncharacteristically, I’m following not one but two different current series - Honey Lemon Soda and I May Be a Guild Receptionist, But. Honey Lemon Soda is okay - most notable so far for being pretty good in spite of being very tropish. Guild Receptionist is great though, and with the latest bit of character background, looks like it could turn out to be really special.

First, I’ve been meaning to mention that the ED is just the cutest thing I’ve seen in months, so seeing it switched to the opening was kind of neat.

Ashita no Watashi ni Sachi Are

The episode was interesting. I wasn’t sure if this was even going to have a plot of any note - with the right cast, it likely could’ve worked as gag/slice of life and I would’ve been fine with that. But it’s looking like it is going to have a plot, and it could be interesting.

And the implications of that flashback also go some way toward explaining the other theme - what had been the OP - and the reason why the two were switched. All of that imagery of what appears to be Alina as a well-established adventurer, beautiful though it is, didn’t quite fit with the notion that all she ever wanted to be was a receptionist. With what we know now though…

Perfect Day

Looking forward to the next episode.

Just got around to this one and I’m actually liking it quite a lot. It’s pretty much just stupid fun, but it’s at least a newish spin on an otherwise mostly unexplored corner of the genre, and it has some great lol moments. And I’m curious to see where it’s headed.

Hmm… I might have to give this a shot.

I generally don’t watch manga adaptations, since I’m almost always disappointed by them. But I’ve tried to read this manga a few times, and I keep bouncing off of it. I just find the enormous contrast between the public and private versions of the sisters to be too extreme and jarring to be believable, or even reasonable. It’s almost as if there are six different girls, or as if the scenes with the sisters in their public personas are fantasy sequences.

Maybe if I just let it wash over me as an anime, it’ll work.

Awesome clarification - thanks.

Looks to be pretty standard cute girls doing cute things. Between the art style and the setting, it most made me think of GochiUsa with a bit of Kin-iro Mosaic thrown in.

Though that word “lily” leaps right out, since that’s almost certainly a ham-handed localization of “yuri.”

I guess we’ll find out eventually…

You’re conflating two entirely different debates.

Yes - there has been some debate around western publishers overly aggressively “localizing” manga and/or changing details to not just make things more understandable to western readers, but deliberately altering social /political content to accord with their own views. The two broad positions in that debate are to continue to depend on western publishers and their translations, or to keep translation in-house - under the supervision of the Japanese publishers.

This debate starts from the position that translation will be kept in-house, and concerns how it will be done - whether by human translators or AI. The publishers want to use AI for one and only one reason - because it would be cheaper. The JAT’s position is that machine translation is so vastly inferior that it will not work, and that human translators must be used.

As is always the case, all publishers need to do is look at the scanlation community to see how things will or will not work, since the scanlators are already doing, for free, what the publishers hope to do for profit. Whatever problems exist and whatever solutions there are to those problems, the scanlators have already discovered.

And if they would only do that, they would discover, for instance, that MTL, presented as a finished product on its own, is so blatantly crappy that it’s essentislly universally derided, with the only split being between the people who might grudgingly tolerate it in a specific case and the people who reject it outright.

There’s no need for the JAT to argue that case when vivid proof that they’re right already exists in virtually every comment section of every machine translated manga.

But instead, the publishers consistently make choices that any halfway decent scanlator could tell them are going to fail to appeal to the fans, which choices then - surprise surprise - fail to appeal to the fans.

I read through the first two volumes of the manga yesterday - through chapter 13 - then went back and reread the first volume, since I unsurprisingly could make no sense of it at all the first time through. That was all my brain could take.

I should get through quite a bit more today, since I have a feel for what’s happening now. And I’m absolutely enjoying it - thanks for the heads-up.

Wow…

Sort of peripheral to your point, but…

Heavenly Delusion was new to me, so I looked it up and discovered the original manga is by Ishiguro Masakazu, the author of one of my all time favorites, SoreMachi. I don’t know how I didn’t know that this existed, but I’m all over it now.

SoreMachi is a sort of breezy SOL with bits of weirdness tucked around the edges and an absolutely stellar cast of characters. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with the weirdness front and center.

Anyway - Kemurikusa is indeed broadly similar to Usuzumi no Hate, but with the significant difference that the characters themselves know next to nothing about the world - aside from what they’ve gleaned in the time they’ve lived there, it’s as alien and inexplicable to them as it is to us. Actually, in some ways, it’s even more alien to them. We can recognize that they live in a derelict railroad car and travel through city ruins, but to them, it’s just a box with round things that they found and the world is just a place of open spaces and enclosed spaces.

But now I’m off to binge the Heavenly Delusion (Tengoku Daimakyo) manga.

So last week I yet again rewatched an unusual favorite - one that I rewatch fairly often, but have never seen discussed anywhere - Kemurikusa.

It was obviously made on a limited budget, and Wakaba is sort of tedious and annoying with his non-stop chatter about how interesting everything is, but still, there’s just something about that series that really speaks to me.

A lot of it’s the world. It’s so bleak and such an odd combination of familiar and alien. And it’s so well presented.

Mysterious settings are tough to do well. If they’re too alien or too inconsistent, then they just end up weird and inexplicable, but if they’re too familiar and logical, then it’s too easy to figure out what they’re all about and they lose that sense of alienness. The world of Kemurikusa is neatly balanced - it’s thoroughly bizarre underneath the familiar trappings, but it always feels as if there is some underlying logic and order to it, even though we don’t know what it is. Obviously at this point, I know its secrets, but I can still feel that sense of slowly unfolding mystery - that there is a logical explanation for all of it, just out of my grasp.

And a lot of it’s the characters (except for the most part Wakaba). They’re all anime archetypes, but… well, let’s just say that even that is part of the underlying logic of that world. There are in-universe reasons why they’re each who and what they are. And they are all appealing in their own ways.

And the story ultimately is very compelling. It retains most of its mystery right up until the final secrets are revealed, and then all the pieces fall into place.

I’d really like to see this get a remake some day. I like it already, but I can just imagine what it could be with a bigger budget and another episode or two (the last bit before the climax in particular was obviously rushed).

Anyway… I enjoyed it as much as I always do, and just wanted to say something about it…

I’ve watched Spirited Away more times than I can count.

It’s a great movie overall, but I really watch it just to see specific scenes - Chihiro going headlong down the stairs and crashing into the wall, Sen’s face underwater, Lynn calling her a dope, the soot balls bringing out her shoes and especially the train seeming to float on the water. That last is a visual treat to rival 5 Centimeters per Second.

I’ve never seen it on the big screen. That would be nice.