Villainess, Kaguya-sama, and Princess Connect are my favorites so far this season. Need to catch up on Tamayomi.
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I binged all of DoroHeDoro and I really enjoyed it!
Loved that the world seems incredibly deep but it doesn’t stop to try and explain everything about it. I wish more media in general would do that, you can have a really fascinating world without trying to write the entire lore bible into character dialogue.
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A few words about anime I’ve been watching the last few months. All of it was on Netflix; it’s not my intention for this post to be a netflix ad, it’s just the service that happens to be pretty strong on anime content lately.
Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2045: Solid writing that holds up to the other SAC series that I’ve seen. Would describe it as Ghost in Shell on a budget because the characters and background are all CG, and not great CG either.
Drifting Dragons: Was not expecting this to be sky whaling, but that’s exactly what this is. Dragons are whales (that fly). This opens a whole can of ethical worms re: whaling in japan that the anime is not willing at all to address, just skim a bit. The main character literally drools when he sees a dragon (apparently they are delicious).
Can’t help but notice all the dragons are designed to be non-cute, except for a drake baby which looks like a sperm and makes human cooing noises.
Monthly Girls Nozaki-Kun: High School rom-com about a boy who is the creator of a popular shojo manga (YA romance comics), and a girl who is obsessed with him. Some of the jokes hit for me.
Dorohedoro: My favorite of the bunch. A mystery wrapped in a dark fantasy about two connecting worlds: the Hole and the world of the sorcerers. Very fun aesthetic that reminds me of video games like Let it Die, and a gleeful amorality in most of the cast. In a way this is a modern take on the old stories of the Spiritual and Physical world interacting, like the English constantly getting kidnapped or mutilated by Fairies.
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Just finished the first episode of Dorohedoro. I don’t know if it’s grabbed me as much as it seems to have grabbed most people, but that said I’ve really lost my taste for hyperviolent stuff in the past few years. That part of the storytelling absolutely feels like it’s in service of the greater themes of the show as opposed to just edgy violence, though, so it’s not bad or anything it’s just going to take me a while to get over.
Right now I’m going to stick with it because I think the setup for the world is super interesting and really, really love the characters/character designs.
I finished that the other day. Really liked it. Looks great, and has a fun world and all that. I particularly like how everyone lives in this super weird world but they still react with shock whenever weird shit happens. It’s neat. Everyone is surprisingly loveable despite appearances.
One of the delayed releases I’m looking forward to once things are less hectic is the final Evangelion rebuild film. When the podcast did their rewatch/first watch episodes it was interesting to hear how it hit people nowadays (I hadn’t watched the series again since junior high). I saw the third rebuild movie in theaters, and I’m hoping the final one will play in theaters in the US as well. That clip of it that got released a while ago was so intriguing.
I watched the first rebuild film for the first time the other day and it was honestly so disappointing, the shift in tone and structure undermined what I found compelling about Eva and it just went way generic shonen by the end, I don’t think I’m gonna watch the rest.
That said I thought End of Eva was terrible too so I’m possibly just not the audience for extended universe stuff with this show.
Things take a hard left turn with the plot at the end of the second rebuild movie, and the third one is completely off the rails. At this point I just want to see what a non-end of eva conclusion will look like, and the design work in the released teaser was really interesting.
This looks surprisingly good.
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I have no context for TWEWY but that looks real smooth, very cool how they brought the art style into full animated form.
I am hyped for Japan Sinks: 2020 because I am always up for anything made by Masaaki Yuasa.
I don’t think BNA is very good or interesting but I do love how the style sometimes turn straight into Looney Tunes or something. The baseball episode is filled with that stuff. Rare to see what I see as a western influence in anime. Pretty neat for a change.
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Im enjoying BNA, but probably more for style over substance. The Baseball episode was extremely fun. Kill La Kill is my all time favorite and I get alot of the same energy here (for obvious reasons) but spread a little thinner, which is fine.
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Japan Sinks proving again that I can’t really do the Netflix model, neither emotionally nor schedule-y.
I watched the first episode of Food Wars and I’m not sure what I was expecting but it definitely wasn’t that.
It gets slightly less horrible later on, but the series as a whole has a terminal case of Horny Disease.
I thought the first two seasons were a lot of fun and the rest have been horrible. Haven’t been able to finish the fourth season. The plot just becomes too frustrating and there isn’t even nice animation to look at. Although that garbage seems to be resolved in the fourth season so maybe I can have it on in the background to at least pretend I watched it, and then give the fifth seasons another chance.
I’m sick of the premise where the last surviving humans have locked themselves up somewhere and have to fight monsters, but Deca-Dence might be fun. I wouldn’t have watched the second episode if it wasn’t for the end of the first episode, and then I think it delivered on that spin on it. It still might just turn into focusing on boring war stuff eventually. Superficially it reminds me a bit of Kaiba, which I think is the first time I have ever felt about anything.
Yeah I’ll say that even if you weren’t interested in Deca-Dence’s first episode, that you should still check out its second episode since (and only read this if you don’t have interest in the show anyway or have watched the second episode) it turns out to actually be about a capitalist dystopia in which a corporation owns the land of the planet the last of the humans are on, and are using it to run some sort of virtual reality video game that the humans have no idea is going on.
Food Wars : i agree, its agressively horny, like Senran Kagura levels.
Watched FLCL Progressive and Alternative, missed em when they released. Still love the Pillows! I enjoyed them on the level of not caring if anything made sense or not.
The rich fucking off to Mars when it looks like the earth is gonna die in Alternative hurts a bit. used to love the idea of space.exploration , but the last few years all i can think about is the 1% using it to escape and the injustice of it is just about unbearable. Sorry, tangent.
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