Assault Lily Bouquet Yet another battle school anime, except this time the girls call themselves Lilies and the monsters are called the Huge. Huge what? How should I know? Euphemisms aside, I don’t know how some anime fans can do it, talking about shows that tread through the same formula and the same thing season in and season out. I’m sure every anime season is always someone’s first, but for longtime fans, what do they get out of shows like…

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Deca-Dence So here’s a show with some nice world-building, a lot of attention to detail, and something grander clearly in the works. But it doesn’t connect together, and I just sat there thinking this show should be blowing me away but isn’t for some reason. Then I realized, “Wait! I’ve seen this first episode before over a decade ago.” Post-apocalyptic world. Main character’s stuck in a bottom of the barrel job. Her mentor is played by Katsuyuki Konishi. Giant monsters…

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Arte It’s 16th Century Italy. A noble teenage girl wants to be artist. Her name is Arte because she likes art. But her mother tells her she can’t be an artist because she is woman, and must marry man. Art does not want to marry man, so she runs away and cuts her hair, because Mulan did it in that one movie called Mulan. Art becomes apprentice to a vague approximation of Leonardo Da Vinci. Leo tells her she can’t…

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22/7 I don’t know what to make of a first episode where a girl with crippling depression forced out of her job has to join an idol group to have her emotional needs met. It’s almost like someone taped the scripts to two completely different shows together. One minute, she’s off on a rant about adults and their lies. The next, a scene all about gorillas. 22/7 really tries to have it both ways by portraying how much teenage life…

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Azur Lane Azur Lane is a mobage featuring WWII-era ships anthropomorphized into cute girls with giant guns and cannons strapped onto them. “Wait a minute Hellrider, isn’t this just Kancolle?” And you’d be correct, dear reader.  Not one to be outdone by glorious Nippon, China has decided to go in on that gacha money and release their own equivalent to the WWII mobage, but with the added benefit of something resembling actual gameplay. Unlike Kancolle this anime follows an ensemble…

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Hey, folks. Sorry to distract you from this write-up, but if you want to donate to Kyoto Animation and help them in their time of need, you can give money to their GoFundMe created by Sentai Filmworks, or buy cels from KyoAni’s site. Any amount helps. Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest This is yet another stupid isekai churned out because that’s the ticket every studio wants to buy. The main character is one more self-insert with a ridiculously chuuni…

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Carole & Tuesday I’ve been watching David Simon’s Treme recently, and while I liked it, it’s easy to agree with the consensus that it’s nowhere near as good as The Wire. Because where The Wire was a tense, calculating drama about the neverending War on Drugs, Treme was often too relaxed. There were crimes and life-threatening issues going on, but they were often placed on the backburner while Simon would prefer to focus on New Orleans music. That didn’t mean…

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Boogiepop Never Laughs Oh hey. Boogiepop. I recognize that name. Boogiepop Phantom’s one of those shows people have heard of and can sometimes recognize, but few have actually watched. And of course, that applies to me. I watched the first two episodes of the old series recently, and it made no sense. Something about a guy eating bugs and running like a madman. The kind of show that expects you to rewatch several times to get the cues, but doesn’t…

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As an Asian-American, Orientalism has been a difficult topic to grapple with. Because the word has been used in many different ways in recent internet discourse, inadvertently resulting in vague explanations. Literature professor Edward Said originally popularized the term to mean representations of Asian and Middle Eastern cultures that presented them as “the other”, something to fetishize or view as more an exotic theme park than its own society. But that leads to the question as to what problems there…

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La Bizzare Aventura di GioGio Cinco Parte: Vento Aureo Its the Giorno show! Hoooray! The bastard son of Dio Brando/Jonathan Joestar is alive and well and driving cabs in Naples. But most importantly… he tastes like A LIAR! Of course when you’re being tongued by by a man in white Gucci pretty much anything tastes like a liar. In other news, Koichi is back!…because Josuke was obviously too busy beating up delinquents who disssed his haircut, and Yukako still wants…

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