Animation Revelation's Animation Blog

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 Assault Lily Bouquet? Besides the obvious? The battles are mediocre. The animation switches from fun to cheap. None of the characters make any good or even okay first impressions. And the relationship pushing is so blatant that the two lead characters are named Yuyu and Riri.

But some people need a routine, and if that routine is watching the latest version of squeaky-voiced high school girls fight CGI monsters with impractically oversized weapons, then whatever will be will be. But I’m thinking, years from now, or even a season from now, if the first episode wasn’t a fakeout and the rest of the show’s like this, will anyone give it the time of day? When you mention Assault Lily Bouquet to another anime fan in the future, will they remember a thing about the show? Besides the obvious? Maybe it’s all in the name. Even when properly cared for, bouquets only last little over two weeks at most. – Marquis

The Day I Became a God

I spent most of the episode asking why the main character kept humoring the little girl following her around. He had plans and shit, but instead of leaving the girl, he’s like “Okay, this strange girl is calling herself Odin and has a God complex. I will 100% let her follow me much to my apparent annoyance.” And then she reminded me of the other annoying little girl in a Jun Maeda show, and the other annoying little girl, and so on. It’s hard to say anything new about Jun Maeda’s work because you get what you got the last time, except somehow worse. He’s gotten worse with this one. At least Angel Beats and Charlotte had coherent first episodes. This was just noise and obnoxious bickering. It actually makes me want the traditional Key suffering to happen quicker to end everyone’s miseries. – Marquis

Jujutsu Kaisen

This was a fun little ghost show. The pessimist in me wants to say “Oh, another shonen anime revolving around ghosts! Whatever”, but I had a good time regardless. It’s easy to make fun of shonen shows for their formula, but it’s a pretty hard formula to get right. Think of how many series fuck it up in the first few chapters, or the series that screw up so hard they don’t even get an anime adaptation. It’s a harder sell than it looks. Going back to another show Studio Mappa made, God of High School didn’t hit all the right places for me because there was something a little off, like it was using story tropes without actually understanding what those tropes were for. Embracing the cliché can work if you can do it right, or else you get the complete and utter malaise that was Assault Lily Bouquet. Because unlike Bouquet, Jujutsu Kaisen was never boring. It understood what to do and how to do it. It didn’t wow me, but it works. – Marquis

Yashahime

There are ghosts afoot this anime season. Higurashi, Mahouka, a new show from the Hayate the Combat Butler guy, and now it’s come to this. An Inuyasha sequel. Seeing how linked this first episode is with its parent series, the new cast barely appear all that much, I have little doubt where anyone stands on the new series. If you managed to watch the almost 200 episodes of the original show, you’ll watch post-haste. The premiere feels like the show never left and it’s the mid-2000s again. But for the people who grew tired of how monotonous Inuyasha’s story could be, it’s a harder sell. I watched tons of Inuyasha back in the past, not out of love for the show, but simply because I stayed up late at night and it happened to be on at the time. Sure, the characters stood out, and it could be kind of fun at times, but Inuyasha simultaneous felt like a show that never knew where it wanted to go and a show that went in one straight direction against all else.

Which makes Yashahime an anomaly, because it’s the result of what happens after that seemingly endless journey is done. Naraku’s dead. Everybody has kids now. Now what? The actual episode doesn’t say much yet, but it’s hard to shake it off. You can say that about every “now it’s about their kids!” sequel to a long-running anime, but that doubt never ends. Anyway, isn’t it fucked up Kagome couldn’t teach her daughter how to wear shoes? – Marquis

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 and mecha appear. Those familiar sunglasses make a blink and you’ll miss it cameo. The fucking font. Even the girls who made fun of Simon are here. It’s just Gurren Lagann. The problem is, I’ve already watched Gurren Lagann. If I want to watch more Gurren Lagann, I’ll just rewatch that. Or perhaps I’ll rewatch Kill La Kill, or Promare. Or the many other attempts to copy Gurren Lagann.

But even worse, this feels like if Gonzo remade Gurren Lagann. Why would anyone want that? The whole episode seems like it could’ve been cool, except it’s following the wrong characters. I didn’t dislike Natsume, but the show could have gained some much needed momentum if they focused on one of the many other fifty characters this show introduces in the premiere. Sounds like a self-imposed challenge. Make a grand sweeping post-apocalyptic plot, but focus on the cleaners instead of the soldiers. And I’m not against that, but the episode doesn’t execute that well. Instead of proving that side of post-apocalyptic life can be just as interesting, it only convinces me the show’s focusing on the wrong cast. But maybe the second episode will–*watches second episode*–wait, what the fuck? – Marquis

Gibiate

Oh joy, an anime about a pandemic that cripples the world, survivors think it’s all a global conspiracy, and the main character’s trying to find a vaccine. If it weren’t for anime taking months if not years of pre-production, I’d wonder how timely this is meant to be. But then the show rapidly degenerates into insanity about time traveling samurai, and the virus turning people into animals, which would be fine and might turn into something fun, but the animation is awful. This is the most slideshow looking anime I’ve seen in a while, and it’s even more disappointing when seeing the pedigree of the staff. It’s just badly-animated sword fights and plodding exposition, when all of the individual parts could have been their own episode and we could have gotten a smoother ride. What’s this show trying to be? – Marquis

The God of High School

After Tower of God last season, anime decided they wanted to adapt more manhwa. Which would be cool and mean we get to see some new things, except it’s a manhwa tribute to shonen action series like Dragonball Z. That isn’t bad, but it’s almost like if Hollywood started adapting tons of foreign properties but only the ones that strongly resembled Iron Man. A fun aesthetic you don’t usually see in other anime, but the actual story within is something you’ve already seen before time and time again. And it makes these anime clusterfucks less fun if the show I’m talking about turns out to be a retread of something I’ve seen just a year or even a few months ago. Of course, it’s completely unfair to judge a work by its first episode, it’s just that for most anime, the first few episodes are the defining part of the show, particularly in a one-cour show where three episodes is a whole quarter of the story. And if it’s not that, and we’re in for the long haul, you have to wait until episode 20-something out of an expected episode count of over a hundred for an anime to find its groove. And seeing as God of High School wears its influences on its sleeve, I hope it doesn’t take after the worst parts of its predecessors. – Marquis

Misfit of Demon King Academy

Oh boy, here’s another trashy light novel anime with your overpowered main character, and your magic high school, and your supporting characters who never react like normal people would. “Hey, this guy killed and resurrect me 8 times over with a couple words and a snap of his fingers. I’ll keep harassing him like I have any chance at victory.” It’s absolute nonsense that batters you with stupid shit after stupid shit, and there’s not even a hint of irony to any of this. Why yes, our main character Anus Voldemort is the reincarnation of a 2000-year-old demon who still needs to go to high school even though he clearly doesn’t need it. And yeah, he’s a month old and has a teenager’s body during the first episode. And indeed, he has a love interest who doesn’t seem shocked or fazed by any of what’s going on. Does she care that she’s interested in someone who’s technically 2000 years old and a baby at the same time? Heavens no. This is just some guy’s barely incoherent power fantasy that an anime studio for some reason decided to adapt.

And I liked it. Not a single moment of this episode was boring, unlike other power fantasies like Mahouka. It’s horribly stupid that I can’t take seriously whatsoever, but at least it got to the point quicker than most shows of its kind. This main character kills somebody with just his heartbeat. That’s more inspired than yet another MC who uses a magic sword or makes circles that shoot out lasers. I’m sure the show will grow dull and eventually loathsome once it pretends to have a plot and falls into the trappings of other magic high school shows, but for now, it’s a fun conversation piece. – Marquis

Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!

Yet another show that people will posts screencaps and memes of when it airs, but by the time it ends, it’ll already be a distant memory and the closest recollection will be “Hey, remember that show with the big boobs? No, the other one. The other one. The one with the ugly cat. No, the other one with the ugly cat. Yeah, that one. That’s the one”. A show most anime fans will only hear about thanks to tweets and posts from their friends instead of a firsthand watch, and I can’t blame them. Once you get past the gimmick that this guy has an annoying girlfriend, what’s left to say? It’s just so boring. – Marquis

Arte

It’s 16^th 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 be a painter, but she says she can. This goes on until he lets her train because if you read every other “asshole teacher reluctantly accepts a young apprentice” story, you’ve read them all. Presumably more Renaissance painters from history but re-imagined as anime men will show up. Maybe at the end of show, Arte will become a legendary painter with her positive attitude and shining personality. Just don’t read her loosely related real life counterpart Artemisia Gentileschi’s story if you don’t want a sad ending.

There’s plenty of colorful, pretty animation and wonderful scenery in this show, that ultimately produces something no different from a by-the-books, 90s animated movie that tried to ride the Disney Renaissance’s coattails. It’s like a pretty snowglobe but with nothing in it, much like Violet Evergarden a couple years ago. Arte seems like a decent enough show you could show to children, but then I saw it’s an adaptation of a seinen manga so maybe the show won’t stay so inoffensively sweet? Maybe not? From the chapters I’ve skimmed through, it keeps on being this mediocre and safe. But the show looks nice, so you could do worse for background noise. – BloodyMarquis

BNA: Brand New Animal

Dear Studio Trigger,

It’s been a while. Not in the sense that you haven’t been doing anything of note in the past few years, but in that it’s been a few years since I’ve actually been excited about anything you’ve been doing. Space Patrol Luluco was the last time I really had no asterisks attached fun with one of your stuff. Kiznaiver bored me. I never got around to watching Little Witch Academia (sacrilege, I know). Darling in the Franxxx was a mess that I probably enjoyed in all the wrong ways. SSSS.Gridman just didn’t click with me. And people have told me to just ignore Promare, so who knows when I’ll ever watch that. The most hyped I’ve been for a Trigger work in the past four years was when I learned you were doing the opening animations for Indivisible and Shantae 5. Then I heard that you were doing a furry action show. You now have my undivided attention for the Spring 2020 season.

The problem with your productions, at least for me, has always been one with narrative. Your crew rarely fails in the animation department, with every single frame in a show or film often being a gorgeously kinetic drawing, and many scenes making clever use of limited animation to keep the energy high and the budget low. And while that’s delivering the eye candy, the music is close behind to serve as probably the best soundtrack you’ll hear out of a show that given season. But much of your catalogue tends to have underwhelming stories that fail to take advantage of all that talent, often being too bland for what I expect from a production house led by people who made stuff like Gurren Lagann during their Gainax days: a fact that you seem loathe to let us forget, considering how often a certain character design gets reused in your work. BNA: Brand New Animal is thankfully looking to be one of exceptions to that trend, though; a fun and strong story that takes full advantage of your aforementioned strengths, with no Kaminas in sight.

The series instantly grabbed me on concept alone: teenage girl becomes an anthro overnight and ends up as part of an action-filled detective story when she travels to a city filled with fellow beastmen to figure out why the hell she now has a bushy tail. And based on the first episode alone (though six are currently available should you want to fire up your VPN and check out Japanese Netflix), your squad is managing to back that premise up with fantastic execution. From Michiru trying to stealthily leave her hometown and make her way to Anima City, to running from violent specists on her way there, to the lighthearted fun of the city festival, to Shirou delivering a painful beatdown to the mercenaries who ruined the jovial occasion, I was completely invested in everything happening on screen: laughing at all the neat jokes, relishing all the sweet action, and wondering about all the weird abilities our heroine has (90% sure tanukis can’t do half the shit she can pull off). BNA’s first episode was fun in a way I haven’t felt with one of your anime since 2013’s Kill la Kill — which just so happened to be a Nakashima-penned show as well. So just don’t copy that one’s “now there’s aliens” twist, and this will have a good chance of being my favourite anime of the year alongside Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken.

Sincerely,

RacattackForce

Digimon Adventure:

It’s hard to be disappointed. All long-running franchises, especially the ones that primarily exist to sell toys to children, are doomed to repeat themselves. Even more so when you haven’t had a consistent success since the early 2000s. There are some temporary successes, sure. Xros Wars did well enough to earn a sequel, Cyber Sleuth had much better than expected sales to warrant a follow-up, but those don’t hit the amount of attention and money a company wants, they want the attention where you could print money just by showing stock footage of MetalGreymon shooting missiles at somebody. And so they’re brief solutions that keep a brand from lying dormant like the other toy anime shows that had a good run before falling off. But some companies don’t want their properties to die, definitely not for artistic reasons, but so they can keep the money flowing, even if it’s barely a fraction of what they used to make. Then they look at the aging fans who are still following the product years after the fact, and decide the best way to profit is to recycle.

Admittedly, these first two episodes are fun. It’s refreshing to see Greymon and Garurumon with actual animation instead of the slide-show look they had back in the old days, almost to assure you Toei won’t Super this. It’s not going to be like Tri this time and test your patience. But then the pieces are put together, and it becomes too much like Our War Game for my liking. Our War Game’s a pretty fucking good Digimon piece, but it’s also one of the most overused influences any Digimon media after uses. Even the original director took the short film and remade it into a feature-length movie a decade ago. And then, Omegamon shows up because everyone liked that bit in Our War Game too, despite how much it throws away power scaling and makes every other Digimon after less interesting. In fact, none of the other six have shown up, and Sora, Mimi, and Joe haven’t even had lines. It’s all “Digimon: The Best Hits”, fun to watch, but ignoring everything I liked about Digimon like the character interaction and all the weird concepts the Digital World threw at you.

And yeah, like I said, this show’s just meant to sell merchandise, so Greymon shooting fire at enemies will always take precedence over story and character drama. That’s been the case even in seasons like Tamers. Pretending Digimon should be made for art’s sake is naive. But what made Digimon stand out from all the other kids with monsters anime back in the day, and what keeps people talking about Digimon for twenty years, was that it could mix drama and storytelling with all the toy-shilling and game-hawking well enough that I could enjoy the show without any real desire to buy anything with the word “Digimon” on the cover. But over the years, as the bad installments outnumber the good, the characterizations become chores to watch, the arcs become retreads, and the good seasons appear to be made by freak accident in hindsight, I’ve found I like Digimon more as a concept than its execution. Yet Digimon won’t keep going due to its concepts, but only because fans like seeing Omegamon pop up with a brand new cape. – BloodyMarquis

The Eighth Son? Are You Kidding Me?

Son, I want to inform you about the escalating horrors of reading. One afternoon, in the library, a fucking Gabriel Garcia Marquez book fell on my friend’s head and gave him a fatal seizure. Then the next day, my aunt got a papercut after reading Lily Singh’s memoir and died on the spot. And the after that, I saw a guy choke on a Hop on Pop book. Now the doctors said she had hemophilia, and that my friend had epilepsy and a soft head, and Hop on Pop isn’t food, but I blame reading. I blame the literary devils for cursing my loved ones and that one man into a not-so-early grave. Not a day goes by when I want to enter a Narnes and Boble and burn their precious books, but I don’t know how to light a match because I can’t read. And because your mother won’t let me start fires. But just remember, don’t take a look in a book. LeVar Burton takes adrenochrome anyway, and you know what andrenochrome comes from? Because I don’t, because I can’t read. For the greater good. – Bibble Madibble the Fiftyfibble

Gal & Dino

A drunk girl wakes up to find a dinosaur in her room, who quickly becomes her roommate. Wacky shit happens. The end. Except that was just another short, so here’s another one. And another one. And now it’s live-action. And now it’s all sad. And that one singer from Pop Team Epic appeared and—

This show is one long practical joke on the viewer and I love it. I didn’t realize a show this season about someone living with a muppet dinosaur could be so charming. The bad part is it only starts being charming when it stops being an anime. Not that the animated parts are bad, but the live-action segments are just more endearing. Perhaps it’s the amateur quality of the animation, but when it’s just a live-action guy and his dino, the show feels like I’m reading a newspaper comic written by fun aliens. But when it’s two-dimensional, the show just seems like any other gag anime. Nothing pops until the pencils fall and the cameras turn on. So what I’m saying is skip the first half of the episode, and you’ll be fine. – BloodyMarquis

Gleipnir

My immediate thought before pressing play on the first episode of Gleipnir was that this was going to be the edgiest show of the season. There’s a lot of opportunity for fun in the premise: a teenage boy who gains the ability to turn into a monster, except that monster is basically a superpowered living mascot costume that his sadistic classmate can jump inside and operate like a meat puppet whenever he’s too much of a wuss to actually murder his opponents. The poster and show description suggested that Gleipnir could be schlocky, gory fun in the same vein as Killing Bites (he has pretty sharp fangs, after all), with me even having some hope that I could maybe enjoy it for the reasons the creators hoped. Sadly, neither happened by the time the credits rolled. I came away from the experience unimpressed, and sad that this episode didn’t even grace us with the meat puppet bit of the premise.

All this first episode grants the audience is a lot of build-up and questions. You’ll be wondering what the deal is with the Super Mario star coins, for example. This isn’t a problem on its own, but when the most action-packed moment of your edgy battle anime’s first episode is just someone punching a whole in the wall, you better have some interesting dialogue and character interactions to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, Gleipnir is very lacking in that regard, with half the dialogue being generic lines you’ve probably heard in dozens of other anime over the years, and our main characters being a bland boy who – despite his admittedly justified whining and confusion about his situation – doesn’t care about getting answers to why his life is now like this, and a sadistic girl whose behavior is more aggravating than it is entertaining, despite the fact I should definitely be on the side of the person who the MC nearly raped in his monster form. Then again, the character herself only brings up the sick nature of this up as a brief afterthought, as if the sexual assault was as according to plan as her “attempted suicide.” Her being our resident fanservice girl only makes it worse.

There are definitely pieces of intrigue here that will have others coming back next week to a show that will hopefully be ready by then to start playing with its premise and answering some questions. The entire cold open in particular, what with the glitchy POV and strange gentleman climbing out of a vending machine, serves as the highlight of the episode and an event that, had the rest of the episode been worth a damn, I’d be eager to see explained. But continuing to watch the episode had my interest in the story quickly waning, and by the credits, what had my attention the most was my private question of why the MC took his classmate’s photo blackmail so seriously when his monster form just looks like someone wearing a mascot costume. You’re graduating in a year, man, so just claim you have a fursuit and get on with your life. – RacattackForce

Kakushigoto

From the creator of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei comes another gag series full of Japanese wordplay and contrasts between the innocent and the obscene. An ecchi manga artist must hide his career from his daughter until she turns 18, but this challenge is easier said than done. It’s fun. It’s sweet. It’s crude. I’m fine with it. The show can be pretty funny one second, but the next, it goes back to being fine. The wordplay varies a lot here. There’s some that’s kind of witty as soon as I read the translation, but then there’s calling legendary manga artists “mangoes”. I get what you’re doing, but it’s hard to muster up anything beyond a smile. But I did like the Starbucks joke, so that evens out.

Maybe it’s not my thing, but the show is a little too easy-going. I wish the jokes hit harder, and while I do like the characters, it all seems fine. Even the premise isn’t as ridiculous as it should be. The dad being a complete goofball I get, but I wish they could raise it up a level or two. Perhaps in the next few episodes, the show gains some momentum. But right now, everything needs more oomph to it. I don’t know how to describe it without sounding like a shitty film director, but it needs a little more dimension. I always wished Zetsubou Sensei had more of the chaotic animation and ideas its vibrant openings promised, and the same goes here. – BloodyMarquis

Listeners

You would think taking the Tale of the Pied Piper and setting it in a dystopian future could be cool, but it’s all very malaise in this first episode. When I heard about how there’s no music in the world the characters live in and seeing the oppressive mayor destroy a jukebox just for playing a song, I noticed how thin the text of this show was gonna be. It’s something I could see working better in a series for kids, but not in the tone this show’s going for. I think the intended audience knows that listening to music can be good and anybody telling you not to is an asshole. But this show wants to tell you that fact like a sledgehammer to the face.

It’s not creative in the naming either. The heroes of the story who fight evil are called Players. The monsters who plague Earth are called Earless, even though they all resemble big-eared rats. The main character’s called Echo. There’s no subtlety in any of this episode. It deflates what could have been a decent premise into a blunt instrument. I’m sure the cast are going to meet an alien species called the Tone Deaf and fight an arch-enemy called White Noise. Or better yet, they’ll have to fight the Man and the Establishment. Maybe if the show becomes what the ending credits promise, a mecha show brimming with Prince references, then it will be worth watching. But for now, it’s dull. Especially dull for something that’s come from a writer of shows like Samurai Champloo or Stand Alone Complex. – BloodyMarquis

My Next Life as a Villainess

Alas, here’s yet another isekai video game thingy, except the main character’s a girl living in a dating sim universe this time. But instead of being the love interest all the indistinguishable pretty boys have to swoon, she’s destined to be the villain who suffers death or exile by the end, so as a connoisseur of dating games, she’ll pull out every trick in the book to defy her fate. I’ll admit, this sounds like a much better premise than most other isekais. And I wasn’t looking for an exit door when sitting through this episode, so it already has two comparatively major pluses over something like The Eighth Son, but I can’t say I was wowed or impressed. More passively relieved than anything.

Because while the show sounds interested in fucking around with dating sim tropes, the first episode only plays with them instead of twisting them inside out. We already have anime that subvert stupid romance plots, so much so that it can’t even be called subversive, so maybe it’s time to take it even farther instead of dancing around. Same issue I’ve got with Arte, that we’re uncovering already discovered country. – BloodyMarquis

Second Villainess

You can only see so many isekai come out each season before you start losing your shit and spend half a Discord call screaming about how much you just want the now decade-long long trend to die. This isn’t to say I don’t like any anime from the past decade that follows the current isekai formula of “modern-day Japanese teen gets transported to a fantasy world with magic.” I was alongside everyone else watching Re:Zero and yelling at their screens when Subaru threw away Rem’s love confession like a fucking asshole, I mean, she would die for you and is a million times cuter than Emilia, you bloody moron , but oversaturation has a tendency to make one jaded towards the idea of getting hit with more of that genre, unwilling to parse through the chaff to find anything worthwhile. In that regard, My Next Life as a Villainess isn’t chaff, but isn’t the best quality hay either. It isn’t going to wow anyone, but it uses its premise well enough to to be a pleasant, comfy experience.

The plot is simple enough, with our heroine being someone who was reincarnated not as the protagonist of the world, but an evil rival character. A role that she probably might have embraced if it wasn’t for the fact that following the plot would end with her six feet under. And so hijinks ensue as Catarina tries to make it so she can actually get past her 18th birthday, and in the process, unknowingly takes the protagonist role for herself. Which in this case means accidentally seducing all her friends. I’m a sucker for romantic comedies (my first manga was Karin), and Catarina is already showing herself to be a charming protagonist, with her absent-minded personality and game knowledge combining to form a lovable dunce whose plans come to accidentally succeed as much as they intentionally do. Though there admittedly isn’t a bevy of laugh-out-loud moments, the show has a general easy-going atmosphere, despite the countdown clock aspect of the premise, that I feel comfortable spending half-an-hour each week relaxing in. Phrased another way, this show is cute, makes me smile, and sometimes that’s all I want or need from a piece of entertainment. Plus, I can’t hate a show where an episode ends with an eight-year-old breaking down doors with an axe.

While this show does nothing to stem my rallying cry that the genre should go on ice for a years, Villainess’s simple tweaks like not making the character the in-universe protagonist and shifting the mechanics from JRPG to dating sim are enough to make me feel like there’s still some imagination left in the vast ocean of isekai that we’ve been getting month after month, and makes me hopeful that we’ll soon get other settings and “gameplay” thrown into the mix. Dating sims are fun, but when are we going to get a teen hit by a truck and wake up in a horror world ala Silent Hill? Or a sci-fi universe like Mass Effect? Or the exercise dimension of Wii Fit? – RacattackForce

Shachou, It’s Time For Battle!

Weird gates fall from the heavens and lead to cool dungeons. Companies form to take advantage of the treasures that can be found. MC is pushed by a childhood friend to take over her dad’s failing one. That’s your plot, but I got distracted by the character designs for the most part. I hate all of them. And I couldn’t focus on the story because I spent the entire runtime complaining to Rynnec and Marquis about how much the designs suck. The main character is the first time in years I’ve gotten confused about the sex of an anime protagonist. The main girl has pressure values in her hair and wears gloves and boots with the ugliest shade of orange. Another girl has electrical plugs attached to her hair and has a dumb heart cutout at the bottom of her shirt to bring attention to her crotch. And the other girl has a stupid headband and a breast harness. I could rewatch the episode and put more effort into this write-up, probably. Give the show some respect. But why bother? The show is as basic as any anime based on a mobile game comes. The bad character designs are the only highlight, as everything else this adaptation tosses at the viewer is painfully unmemorable outside one joke involving the MC having to watch an employee training video, and maybe the running gag of him confusing his childhood friend’s business talk with a romantic confession. But those two things aren’t even as funny as that single line in The 8th Son, Are You Kidding Me where the dad says he doesn’t know how to read. And seeing as I wouldn’t recommend that show, I’m sure as hell not recommending this. – RacattackForce

Tower of God

Last fall, I turned 25. It’s sometimes hard to remember that I’m in my mid-20s. I still live in the same bedroom I’ve had since middle school. I still spend my free time reading fanfiction, playing Nintendo games, and occasionally strumming a guitar. I can, and thanks to the current COVID-19 pandemic regularly do, stay up all night for days in a row with little consequence. Pursuing my Master’s in counseling and doing contract work at a local gallery are the only things that prevent me from being called a NEET, but I still feel that I’m basically an overgrown teenager spinning his wheels whenever things are a bit too dull. But time keeps on slipping, and so reminders frequently pop up to remind me that I’m no longer a high schooler. All those words to say that I think teenagers will absolutely dig Tower of God, but I’m going to have to pass.

Tower of God, adapted from a webcomic I’ve known about in passing due to the teenagers in my church who watch anime religiously, has a bland start. Yes, I start to wake up towards the end of the episode, when the series decides it is done with setup and finally starts to revel in the “every floor is a different challenge” part of its premise, and I have no doubt that it will be enjoyable going forward. But it didn’t leave the best first impression and I couldn’t help but think of it as being a “starter anime” throughout the entire runtime. If I was ten years younger, I would have probably been into much of what  the show will have to offer as the main character climbs his way to the heavens. Probably would have been new and exciting; oh shit, what kind of world is this? Every floor is a brand new challenge like some weird video game! The main character’s sword is actually a hot female spirit? Sweet. And the other girl who gave it to him is a tsundere? I don’t know what that word means, but I like it! But as it is, I view the writing as standard and the characters are too cookie-cutter for me to immediately care about them. So I’m giving this one a pass, though I’ll happily say it’s better than other action shows this season like Listeners or Shachou, Battle no Jikan desu! (not like that’s a low bar with the latter one). – RacattackForce

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 sucks in dreary detail but then showing a magic wall that grants girls idol powers. It’s very YA novel, and not in a “YA novel that transcends generations” way, but “YA novel that seemed profound when you were 16 but turns stupid when you reread it a couple years later”. I don’t even know what the show’s stance on idols is either. They make the idol business look as nebulous as any detractor would, but the series is ultimately part of a multimedia idol franchise in real life. – BloodyMarquis

A Destructive God Sits Next To Me

I was almost fooled by the opening that the show might actually be worth something, but then it turned out to be every other anime about a kid in school who thinks he’s a JRPG character and wacky hijinks ensue from the fantasy/reality clash. Can we stop doing these shows? Please? Chuunibyou was funny, but I don’t want more of that show. Stop making more shows like Chuunibyou. I beg you. I know all the jokes. The kid is going to say he has an evil eye that activates his inner demon or something, but ends up embarrassing himself because magic powers don’t exist in his show. Then another joke about that. And another joke about that. They remind me of the wacky Disney/Nick kidcoms with all the mugging, overacting, and recycled jokes. – BloodyMarquis

ID: Invaded

So Natsu from Fairy Tail wakes up with all of his body parts all over the place like Lego blocks, and he has to solve a murder mystery while figuring out just dimension he’s in, except these cops are watching him the entire time in his virtual reality, while they’re solving their own murder mystery. But then, they start yapping about Johnnie Walker because you can’t make anime these days without gratuitous advertising. Not just that, but you need Johnnie Walker to get yourself through watching the show. But then, power drills. But then, you find out this is just Satoshi Kon’s Paprika but without anything that movie cool or fun to watch, so you turn off the episode and force yourself to formulate the apathetic reaction you just had.

Ei Aoki has the innate talent to take something I should be way into like Re:Creators and Aldnoah, and make them dull or infuriating. Even with his good works like Fate/Zero, you almost have to meet them halfway at first. And his new show proves to be no different. I like the concept. I like seeing detective cases within detective cases like a labyrinth of puzzle boxes, even if few stories like that deliver in the end. But the direction’s somehow too straightforward yet too meandering. Get it? The main character’s cut up into pieces because puzzle pieces are also in hundreds of pieces until you put them together? Isn’t that clever? The show doesn’t sell the ideas so much as slowly churn them out in a production line. You could have the best story in the world, but if the storyteller’s half asleep most of the time, then what’s the point? – BloodyMarquis

In/Spectre

Cripes, that was boring. Even when the girl beats up a yokai with a fire extinguisher, I was bored. Maybe I shouldn’t expect much from an episode that spends most of its time on two characters talking on a bench, but it also wants to be a fantasy battle series on top of philosophical conversations about goats. Except the two don’t mesh so you’re stuck with the cast talking about vapid shit. There was a part in the conversation where the girl insists she’s old enough to date a 22-year-old even though she’s 17 and looks younger, which isn’t even the most awkward thing coming out this season, but indicative of how much these characters have nothing interesting to talk about even though the girl has a pretty weird backstory.

Other reviewers attest this show has witty banter and chemistry, but I didn’t see it. The conversations are all out of nowhere, but not in a funny way, more a weird stream of consciousness choice that goes on while you’re waiting for something to happen. And it’s not Nisioisin dialogue that tries to be obtuse as possible, the talks here were just dull and lifeless. – BloodyMarquis

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Well, here’s the Yuasa show. I’ve always been on the fence on him. I liked Tatami Galaxy, but then there are his other shows like Ping Pong where I have to look away thanks to the artstyle. This show’s no different. I like the background art, and the scene where the cast are designing a ship, but the character designs are not this show’s strong suit. They’re distinctive and give everyone their own signature, but the tall girl with the teeth, Sayaka, is off-putting. They remind me of the character models from the fourth episode of Gurren Lagann. Can’t blame Yuasa this time though because it’s adapted from a manga, but I digress.

This show was kind of sweet. Plenty of other anime have already done stories about aspiring artists trying to make it big, but this series’ premiere seems more interested in the imaginative process behind making art. The shipbuilding scene in particular is more out there than you’d expect from other anime about animators. I’m throwing a foul ball here, but it reminded me of something out of Rugrats whenever the babies made up scenarios in their heads. It sounds stupid to compare a Yuasa series to fucking Rugrats, but that’s where my mind was going when that happened. The first episode had that wide-eyed head in the clouds sensibility, and I can admire that. On the other hand, I wasn’t that impressed by the voice acting. The main girl sounded too, I don’t know, old? She sounded more like Masako Nozawa than a teenager. Everyone else was good, but that voice in particular wasn’t so hot. – BloodyMarquis

Nekopara

Nekopara is the story of anthropomorphic catwomen who work in a Cat Maid Cafe. Its a hard life for them but every night after work they gather at the local scrapyard to dance in the night ball. Once a year, a catgirl will be chosen to go to the “Tengoku Reiya” where they can persue a new and far better line of work, possibly in an office or voice acting. However the forces of evil such as マーカーバヂ, バーストバ・ジョンズ, and ラム・タム・タガー seek the prize as well. And thus a bloody struggle for superemacy begins.

The strange thing about Nekopara is its actually one of those idol shows but everyone’s singing these weird songs by some fake englishman. Also the CGI is notably worse than Aikatsu. I except more from my singing cat idol shows. Hollywood Mew Mew was far better than this.

And now if you excuse me, I have apparently put in the wrong dvd. – Waldorf Q. Banderstack XII

Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story: Magia Record

I remember the first time I watched Madoka Magica just like it was yesterday. I was sitting on the bathroom floor in a Motel 6 in Indianapolis, Indiana on Black Friday, 2012. Having had it shoved down my throat by a certain Bloody Marquis, I questioned what was so great about it. Being a fansubbed copy the animation was terrible (the infamous “Meduca Meguca”) and it just seemed like a regular old shojo. Episode two was no better and as my legs continued to lose blood circulation I begged to be released.

…and then THAT scene happened.

Long story short… I binged the rest of the show two days later after recovering from the SAO tentacle episode that aired that same weekend. …good god I don’t miss doing audio commentaries.

So why am I taking a visit down memory lane instead of talking about Magia Record? Well the reason is simple…there is no point to this show’s existance. Madoka was bold and revolutionary in 2011. It took risks. It surprised you. It compelled you to watch. Magia Record, on the other hand, is just a rehash. We know all the secrets, we know all the tricks. Whereas the original Madoka pulled the rug out from under you and became legendary, there is a set path that seems to be leading to one sort of anticonclusion. Its not fun anymore. Its not entertaining anymore. Its not emotionally impacting anymore. Its just another “dark magical girl show” to add the pile. Another Madoka ripoff. No surprise then that its a cheap cash-in with a mobile phone game. A fitting punnishment. – Lord Dalek

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen

The first thing noticable about Orphen is how bloody cheap it looks. Characters frequently go off-model. Framerates are even lower than normal. Everythings looks flat and undetailed. Its like a 90s anime from the late-90s/early 2000’s. Which is funny when you consider the fact that this is a remake of an anime from the late-90s/early 2000’s…and the older show actually looked better.

It was also a lot funner to watch with a sense of endearing silliness to it that balanced what was kind of a dark revenge fantasy. This? Its just another paint by numbers fantasy shonen. The kind you would normally see as an RPG on the PSX. Which makes sense because there was a video game on, you guessed it, the PS…2. HA! Cike!

Anyway…Orphan its…a show….that exists. Watch the old one. It has Spike Spencer annoying David Mataranga for 48 episodes. Well worth the price of admission. – Lord Dalek

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 cast of US and European naval ships fighting against the Japanese and German fleet. A Japanese anime based on a Chinese mobage where the villains are Imperial Japan. Go figure. Despite a slow start the anime’s first episode picks up at the half way point and goes balls to the walls crazy. Girls fuse with their ships to shoot down aircraft and ride unicorn plushies that shoot out dog fighters to combat a giant nine-tails equipped with cannons summoned by a lesbian siscon foxgirl.

If that doesn’t sell you on the show, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Suffice to say that Azur Lane will be the go-to stupid fun action show in this otherwise dry season, and unlike Fate/Grand Order’s anime, it doesn’t require you to have knowledge of the game’s storyline to enjoy it or watch a boring prologue episode where fuck-all happens to get newcomers up to speed. If you want a simple dumb-fun action show with a bishoujo cast to fill the Symphogear-shaped hole in your heart, then you can certainly do worse than Azur Lane. – CrimsonRynnec

Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered but Overly Cautious

Remember KonoSuba? I thought KonoSuba was okay. But a lot of other people remember KonoSuba, so I guess that show still has plenty of shelf life among anime fandom. And I suppose enough people remembered KonoSuba that they’ll Diet KonoSuba, hence necessitating the creation of Cautious Hero.

I’m glad this show isn’t just following the same steps 90% of other isekai do by focusing on the wacky goddess from the alternate world more than the regular guy who gets thrown into said world, but it appears to be more of a light push than a fierce shove. The show tries to break out of the osmosis, but still finds itself stuck in the regular pattern. I don’t know what it says that even shows that take the piss out of their own genre are becoming played out, but it’s so tiring when even the parodies of the parodies become stale. Even more when the show that predate them cast a heavy shadow impossible to break out of, and you’re only stuck thinking of comparisons rather than unique observations. An anime being self-aware just isn’t impressive anymore, and watching this show try to be the funny light novel adaptation, I only chuckled maybe once. I guess if you really wanted more characters like Aqua in your seasonal anime, give this a try. I don’t know why in all honesty you would want more Aqua, but I’ve seen worse taste. – BloodyMarquis

High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World

The swarm is nigh. Everywhere we go, it’s alternate world this and self-insert fantasy that. No matter what barriers we use, the isekais adapt and break through our defenses. They always take new yet familiar forms all season, every season. Sometimes, it’s not even a truck anymore that starts the conflict. For this specimen in particular, it was a plane. And it wasn’t one Japanese teenager thrown into the void, but seven. The early autopsy showed no case of blunt force trauma or lacerations on the skin but substantial evidence of food poisoning. The texture had a flavor so well-known yet so unwelcome for this kind of show, stuck to my tongue like a cancer on the pancreas, it was, it was… Danganronpa?

But it was true! Unnaturally gifted high school students thrown into an environment unknown to normalcy. It had to be Danganronpa. But why did this isekai creature have traces of Danganronpa DNA in its system? That organism was too old to beget the bastard offspring otherwise known as knockoffs. And yet, there it lay in the deceased’s body. Due to lack of substantial information, there was no more I could do that night. I walked across my room until the lights of the candle melted into shadows, asking myself “Why? Why was this simple beast born to begin with?” Surely, the presence of elf women and dog people were indications this animal wouldn’t survive the autumn, but it was allowed to live among its damned herd. The legs began to tire and sleep took my senses, yet the dull eyes on the isekai’s corpse stared into my dreams, asking “Please sir. Please buy my blu-rays. I’m a starving boy and blu-rays sales help my adolescent growth.” Perhaps I was the beast making a mockery of this organism, born into a world with no purpose or desire to reach our heavenly father. – BloodyMarquis

No Guns Life

I was actually a little excited for this one, only because the main character had a gun for a head. I’m so tired of all the samey seasonal anime, that a guy who could bullets out of his face was an instant plus. But then I actually watched the show, and while it’s tolerable, it’s not as fun as the premise sounds. When you think “hard-boiled action crime drama where the detective has a gun for head”, you expect wacky Inferno Cop shit to happen except with a budget because Madhouse. Something that turns noir on its head and goes so off the wall it makes Space Dandy look like watching paint dry.

But instead, it’s looks and acts like a regular detective show and the gun for a head appears to be little more than a gimmick to hook you in because the show couldn’t think of anything else. If nothing else, that worked for the trailer and the first few minutes of the show. But once I got used to that, there isn’t anything left to catch my interest. You can only shine the spotlight on the dancing bear for so long before the audience gets bored. The worst part is just as the episode got interesting again, the credits rolled. That old republic serial tactic of putting the cool moments in the very beginning and end, while writing the rest of the fifteen minutes of airtime with dull padding. And if you’re only worth watching for the cliffhangers, then what are you good for? – BloodyMarquis

ORESUKI Are You the Only One Who Loves Me?

Oh, thank God. A show this season that’s not shit. I was fully prepared to throw this show into the trash like the rest. Another wacky high school comedy with a love triangle, oh joy. But then the second half of the show happened, and the main character Joro turned out to be a piece of shit playing mind games on everyone, while becoming target of a game himself. I liked that, even though I know Kaguya-sama did something like that too a couple seasons ago. But unlike Kaguya, I wasn’t pissed off at the lead character. The show knows he’s trash. He’s such an asshole that he almost becomes charming to watch. It’s fun to watch all his romantic endeavors go to shit while the only girl who actually wants to love him is a crazy stalker. It’s great when awful things happen to awful people. And it’s a shame I don’t know what else to say. This show might be junk food, but it’s comfy junk food. – BloodyMarquis

Outburst Dreamer Boys

Remember that show Genshiken? I never finished the whole show, and even though there were other anime like it before like Otaku no Video, I thought it was a little funny that anime became so much its own subculture they made an anime about said subculture. From the episodes I watched, I remember liking how down to earth it was and how much it said was pretty on key with anime fans I knew at the time. Like that quip making fun of incest fans by saying anybody who watches incest hentai’s never had to deal with an actual little sister in their life. But then making anime about anime fans became popular, and we got all that shit like Oreimo. One of the biggest problems when making anime where the main characters are fans of anime is the writer can easily forget the line between the two, leading to the main characters acting like typical anime cliches no different than the show within a show they’re watching. That was what ruined Oreimo and the creator’s next work Eromanga-sensei. They forgot that making the characters no different than the works these characters consume in-universe only leads to a gelatinous mess.

And that problem rose again when watching Outburst Dreamer Boys. Just like Genshiken, it’s about a seemingly normal person getting thrown into a club. But this time, the club members are all insane nerds who act like every stereotype imaginable. One of them’s a tokusatsu nut who keeps calling the girl the Pink Ranger of the club throughout the episode. Even though it’s supposed to be annoying, it crosses that threshold from funny annoying to actually annoying. This show would be much more interesting if it was down to earth instead of a wacky comedy. Because when making an anime about anime, you have to figure out the differences between real world logic and typical dumb anime logic. And if you confuse the two, you only get cardboard cutouts responding to other cardboard cutouts. That’s what you get in this show, and it sucks. – BloodyMarquis

Stand My Heroes: Piece of Truth

Oh look, a show about an investigation unit on the mission to take a bite out of drug crimes. This might sound cool, even if there are two or three other cop shows this season. Wait, why are there so many pretty boys and why do they all look the same except with different hair colors? Why are they introduced like this is a character selection menu? Why are they spending more time eating strawberry shortcake than solving crim—oh. This is a dating sim adaptation, isn’t it? And not even an actual dating sim, but a phone game, right? A Candy Crush-style phone game too according to gameplay videos on YouTube. Okay, I’m out. Not even the fact the main character’s last name is Kujo and she’s working for an organization called STAND is going to reel me in. At least with isekais, they at least come from light novels that have a plot easy to translate into anime. But with phone games, those never work out because you’re stuck trying to adapt a stage of a puzzle game into a narrative. – BloodyMarquis

Stars Align

Golly. Mari Okada doesn’t even have to write an anime this season, and I still feel her presence in this show. I suppose since she’s the second most popular anime screenwriter in the last decade, of course copycats would flourish sooner or later. Success breeds sameness. One hit anime of the year spawns a dozen other bad animes of the season. And of course we were going to get a melodramatic teen drama about * rolls the wheel * tennis. Combine sports anime with a show where teenagers talk about their feelings, and you have a show I was destined to dislike one way or another.

Okay, that’s completely unfair, and this show’s nowhere near as dull as some other shows this season, but there’s a scene near the first episode’s ending that drives home just who this show’s aimed at. When after we’re introduced to the main character and how timid he is, suddenly his deadbeat dad shows up, beats up and kicks him, then steals all his money and leaves. The intended audience is going to think that’s tragic and a horrifying statement on broken families, kind of like the abusive dead mom from Your Life in April. But I thought that was a hilarious bit of unintentional black comedy. The episode up until then was typical mopey teen show, and then it goes up to a hundred with gratuitous child abuse. I feel terrible, but it’s just like that show from last year Magical Girl Site. Even if it was more realistic in this show, that scene just didn’t hit the right emotional beats it should have. – BloodyMarquis

After years and years of begging for at least one Greg Weisman show to get a third season, the control brains gifted fans with a third season of Young Justice. One with higher stakes, with gore and sex you couldn’t get from a Cartoon Network airing. Seemingly cut plot points are rescued from cancellation hell, and you finally got to see what Darkseid was going to do after that cliffhanger from ages back. I could almost call it miraculous, if Young Justice were a good show. Compared to his work on Gargoyles and Spectacular, YJ has always been the Weisman show with the most stumbles for me. So many subplots that were never fully executed, so many characters shoved into the background while less interesting people were given screentime. And as soon as those issues were fixed and the series became watchable and even entertaining, boom, time skip happens, a new cast is thrown onto the already existing cast, and we’re back to step one where we repeat and exacerbate the problems from the previous season. And Outsiders is no exception.

In this season, while the Outsiders as a team show up, the word was used more as a theme. The central seven main characters given the spotlight this season all come from outside backgrounds. Brion and Tara Markov are an exile and a kidnapped victim from their home country. Halo and Forager are refugees from their home worlds. Cyborg is a young man whose normal school life was snatched away from him by cybernetics and occasional mind possession. Beast Boy left heroics for an acting career, then came back. And Black Lightning quit the Justice League. Not a clean thematic connection between our cast, but there’s something to it. The previous heroes have gone through too many missions and heartaches to be a young Justice League anymore, and the show gives new perspectives for some viewers who didn’t grow up with the last two seasons. The problem is complicated yet simple at the same time. I just don’t care about most of the cast.

This is something that was thrown around since the show’s first season. Is it worth keeping up with a character’s arc if they’re unlikable for most of their run? Kon and M’Gann were unbearable to watch back then, but fans insisted they were interesting enough characters that any lack of sympathy would be fixed sooner or later. But it’s season three now, and while they became less annoying this year, they still weren’t interesting. And this new cast isn’t interesting either. Brion spends much of the first half of the season yelling and moping about his sister. Halo spent more time dying than getting a personality. And Forager was just annoying. It’s okay to make an unlikable lead, but not if you make a dull lead. Whenever someone defends a work by saying characters are allowed to be unlikable, they always seem to be defending bad examples of that archetype like the lead character from YIIK. And that’s not to say any characters from this season were that bad, but none of them connect.

Take Brion for example. As I said, he’s not a character who makes the most of his screentime. While his angst is understandable given the circumstances, murdered parents and his kingdom taken away from him, it’s still hard to feel sympathy for him, let alone patience. He does defrost as the show goes on, and becomes a hero on occasion, but because of YJ’s large cast, his development is often sidelined for another character. And by the time he’s allowed to have lines, any good will he’s gained has long since faded away. When his season arc wraps up, and he eventually splits from the team, it’s hard to see the betrayal as heartbreaking as the show wants me to think because there’s so little to Brion beyond his mood swings, his dull romance with Halo, or his often cold relationship with his sister because the show can rarely afford his voice actor and Tara’s to talk to each other. And because of outside elements, he’s not even in full control of himself most of the time. He’s just a chesspiece moving from point A to point B.

Then there’s Violet, a character who takes up more screentime than she should but does little with the scenes she’s given. Her character as a concept is interesting. The corpse of a refugee woman, given new life through New God technology and transformed into an alien walking in human skin. But then she’s never given her own moments to shine. She’s just the character who dies just to show off her healing factor for most of her run, then the writers made her kiss Harper Row for some reason. She’s not so much a character as she is a walking plot device without any sense of real agency. And maybe that’s the point because she started out as a Mother Box, but it doesn’t make for a character I want to see for the entirety of the season. Then the show decides the only better than two dull characters is to make both dull characters date. There’s a very Anakin/Padme sense to their relationship. Brion and Violet have little in common besides being on the same superhero team. Maybe the writers wanted to go for an upper-class/lower-class contrast, with Brion coming from a royal background and the body Violet inhabits previously living life as a refugee servant. But it’s not a moving relationship that gives either character more layers or background. In fact, the romance should have been eliminated in favor of other characters getting screentime.

I think that’s something Justice League Unlimited succeeded in that Young Justice continually falters on. Finding the right characters to spend time on while the previous main characters are on patrol or doing something else. When JLU needed superheroes to focus on instead of the core seven, they picked the Question, Huntress, and Green Arrow, and these characters really stood out by giving a nice contrast to the established Justice League we already knew, challenging their ideals while enforcing a code of honor of their own. Plus, Huntress and Question’s relationship was actually fun to watch. Whereas YJ always seems to pick the wrong cards in their deck. Blue Beetle was a chore to watch in season two, yet he took the majority of the runtime. Same thing with the Outsiders this season. This incarnation of Cyborg is my least favorite. He’s so loud, and his daddy issues envelop any other traits of his. Didn’t help that when the first half of this season ended, Doom Patrol premiered and gave me a Cyborg who was far more interesting and likable while still having troubles with his father like the YJ version. Execution’s obviously a major factor. Maybe if better hands were dealing with Geo-Force and Halo, they would have been much better characters with an endearing and engrossing love story. But that’s the thing. It’s a sea of maybes and what ifs when viewing this show. What if they focused more on the original team? Maybe they could have given Tim Drake some episodes? What could have happened if they loosely adapted a different DC comic than the Outsiders?

As the season went on, the series appeared to be more interested in creating its own version of Teen Titans than the Outsiders. Despite never saying the words outright, Beast Boy and Cyborg become more prominent characters, they’re part of a team who live in a giant tower, and Deathstroke ascends from a lieutenant into a main villain. It’s almost as if the writers grew bored with the Outsiders aspect, and wanted to focus on an entirely different group of teen superheroes even before the season ended. I can only assume, but characters who were Outsiders in the comics like Katana and Metamorpho cameoed early on in the season, indicating there was something in store for them. But then it didn’t. And this iteration of the Outsiders has more Titans, with Geo-Force being the only member to be an Outsider in the comics. For one reason or another, the writers forget to add Halo and instead left her in the old Young Justice team even though it’s mostly a remnant with few active members at this point.

This isn’t a new problem with the show. Invasion previously played with the idea of introducing a modern incarnation of the Hanna-Barbera Superfriends with Static in place of Black Vulcan, but only half of them stay on board once the third season starts, and Static gets little beyond a partnership with Black Lightning that’s only shown through silent background scenes. Young Justice has no clear focus. If you watched that season two cliffhanger all those years ago with Darkseid, you might have thought that would be the big plot, but instead you get a loose adaptation of Judas Contract and the largest presence of any of Darkseid’s forces is Granny Goodness showing up. So much yet so little occurs in the series because there are a hundred plots, and they’re all in line waiting. And that could work. Plenty of HBO shows are nothing but swarms of plotlines struggling to enter a narrow door. But Young Justice leaves the fat in. Fat that makes Jackie Aprile Jr and Ziggy Sobotka look like welcome figures. They leave in fluff scenes that would have been acceptable and even entertaining in a show with little going on, but become aggravating because they’re in the way of dozens of other plot threads I would rather watch. Yeah, that one Scooby-Doo tribute was cute, but was that really needed when you still have other storylines that have yet to be touched on in multiple episodes? Will it take a whole season for them to do anything with Beast Boy confronting Queen Bee over his mother’s death? Or Damian Wayne existing thanks to something that happened between time skips. I feel like I’m always playing a waiting game while watching this show. I’m waiting for this plot thread I’m interested in to get remembered while the show continues to focus on things I couldn’t care less about like M’Gann’s guidance counselor gig or Violet and Forager going to school. When you’re a series that takes its time producing episodes, Outsiders was first announced three years ago and I assume the next season will come out three years from now, you have to do everything you can to refine your product as much as possible. You can’t afford slow pacing when your series is already slow to come out. Or else you get a dawdling ride that spends so much time on detours that you completely forget the main goal in mind, like Samurai Jack’s final season.

Because as much as the series like to spend time on other characters, the final showdown will ultimately boil down to Dick Grayson’s team versus Vandal Savage’s Light. Maybe Greg Weisman will take a page from Grant Morrison’s Batman run and let Dick inherit the cowl, and he leads his incarnation of the League to fight Vandal’s forces. Or potentially he’ll do something subversive and kill off either character before they can have their go at a final chess game. But that’s the problem. I’m waiting to see if anything will happen. An entire season goes by, yet neither side has advanced far enough to reach that path. While Vandal’s spotlight episode this season was actually pretty good, it still felt like a gem in the rough compared to how underdeveloped the main villains are in Outsiders. Deathstroke does little beyond playing Terra’s string, Lex is only around to be an allegory for a certain political figure, Granny Goodness is portrayed with a refreshing Professor Umbridge vibe before becoming yet another generic mustache twirling villain, and the rest are just there. One of Greg Weisman’s strengths as a writer is turning villains into people with their own desires, weaknesses, loves, and hates. But that’s sorely lacking for most of this season. Here, they’re just evil villains hatching evil plans within evil plans. Even their ultimate plan to turn Earth into a galactic empire rings hollow. Yeah, it sounds like a goal that could benefit humanity and makes the Light seem less evil and more ambitious, but I don’t buy it. Making humanity a greater empire seldom gives the common man a better life. Otherwise, trickle-down economics would actually work. You think Amazon employees get more money whenever Jeff Bezos adds another billion to his bank account? Emperors who speak of altruism and good faith always rest on the skulls of peasants. I’ve seen people cheer on Vandal because they think his conquering games are fun, but I can only imagine it being entertaining if he were as prominent in the series as Reinhard von Lohengramm was in Legend of Galactic Heroes, instead of an antagonist who spends much time in the shadows. And I have to repeat myself, but you’re just waiting for something to happen between his forces and Dick’s like there’s a Cold War going on. Because it’s not like the League will ever kill a villain.

Whether superheroes should kill their villains is one of the biggest questions when going through long-running comics. Obviously, the real reason Batman never kill the Joker is because the Joker’s popular, and popularity is immortality in DC/Marvel superhero comics. Plenty of writers over the years grapple with that problem because the Joker’s a mass murderer and one more day of life with him means countless deaths in Gotham. Some like Tim Burton avoid the issue outright and let Batman murder his villains. Others like Timm and Nolan present an alternative situation where Batman won’t directly kill the Joker, but they won’t go out of their way to save them or let a proxy character murder them such as Terry in Return of the Joker. Other writers argue the reason Batman shouldn’t kill the Joker is because beyond all his darkness, he still believes in the best of people, and there’s genuinely a part of him that knows the Joker can do better. And then you have the pragmatic approach that Batman won’t kill because it would violate his privileges as a vigilante, and the cops would have to arrest him. But whatever the case, that “not killing” rule applies heavily in Young Justice, almost frustratingly so. There’s no John Constantine or Tommy Monaghan around to play wild card among the heroes. Almost every superhero is strictly anti-killing no matter what, and when Brion kills in the finale, it’s viewed as unforgivable by all of his teammates despite the circumstances. Killing is bad no matter what. Lying to your friends is bad no matter what. And I’m left wondering what’s the endgame in Dick’s mind. Does he just hope to imprison the entire Light in the Phantom Zone or some secret prison when this is all done? When you’re one superhero who refuses to kill, that’s understandable. But when you’re leading a huge team in a secret war with another massive force, and you absolutely expect zero fatalities, it’s harder to swallow. It’s such a simple dichotomy even though the series now aims at a TV-14 demographic than a TV Y7. Yeah, it’s the same approach the Marvel Netflix shows did with Matt Murdock and Luke Cage. But it was also a little annoying there. Sure, Matt. Let Bullseye live. Let the sociopath who needs decades of therapy to even pretend to be a human being but quickly devolves into an insane murderer once he gets unhinged live. But the difference there was I really liked Daredevil, and understood Matt’s reasons for not killing even if I didn’t agree, while Young Justice is frustrating. Not good enough to like, but too fascinating to drop.

Even with all of its flaws, Young Justice is still the most interesting superhero cartoon series in the last few years. It’s fascinating to see the show illustrate or foul-up its themes and ideas. Despite this article’s length, I think I’ve only scratched the almost intimidatingly large surface of this show, for better and for worse. And that’s especially prevalent this season where they dealt with heavy topics like human trafficking and domestic abuse. There’s a whole episode dedicated to Harper Row’s abusive dad, and it even ends with a hotline for domestic violence. The Outsiders as a brand isn’t new to the topic of social issues. A 2004 arc in the comics featured the team partnering up with John Walsh from America’s Most Wanted to stop a child trafficking ring. And like a fictional superhero team crossing over with a real life human being to discuss modern day slavery, it all feels kinda weird instead of empowering when implemented in the show. The heart’s in the right place, for sure, but it never fits when a fantastical universe where even young adults have reality warping powers deal with political issues plaguing the youth in real life. Like in Harry Potter when he became the victim of a huge disinformation campaign, and nobody bothered to use Truth Serum on him to dispel any lies. It’s hard to discuss or portray a troubling issue in a superhero universe for that reason. Because the comic book universes aren’t our universe. And whenever a superhero universe like the DCU or Earth-616 tries to mirror our universe, it almost always feels awkward no matter how well-executed. And in Young Justice, painting metahuman trafficking as a serious issue only makes the heroes look like idiots because they rarely use superheroes known for mind-reading or teleportation to get the job done. M’Gann’s a mind reader and a shapeshifter, the best skills any recon agent could have. But she’s mostly stuck doing guidance counselor work instead of utilizing her skills on the field.

It’s similar to the Oracle problem DC had until the New 52, where Barbara Gordon was still in her wheelchair even though medical science was so advanced in the DC universe that disembodied brains could regain the ability to walk. Oracle’s story in comics such as Birds of Prey was meant to be a good message to readers regarding wheelchair users, but made no sense in-universe despite attempts to explain it. And eventually, DC let Barbara walk again despite controversy over the change. That’s the problem with discussing real life problems in an unrealistic universe. Do you want to teach audiences something they could use in their daily lives at the cost of limiting the potential strangeness in your worldbuilding? Because DC isn’t hard sci-fi or hard fantasy. It’s outlandishly weird when viewed under the right light. Batman can be off unwiring a bomb while Mogo the Green Lantern watches over a solar system, as Destiny of the Endless writes it all in his book. Even though I admire Young Justice for being a show about the entire DC universe, the show just doesn’t seem to understand the realm it portrays.

P.S. Can we get less mind control plots in season 4? We’ve gotten so many last season with Cyborg getting his mind compromised, or Halo getting brainwashed, or Brion getting mind controlled. Not to mention the Justice League getting brainwashed yet again. And the Anti-Life Equation. It’s overdone. Between the mind control and the endless plans, characters are given so little actions of their own free will. And it becomes irritatingly repetitive.

Picture yourself like this: You’re a new kid in school. The unwanted misfit of the class. No one there really likes you because you don’t act like anyone else, while your teacher spouts nonsense meaning nothing to your ears. The rest of the world is happy, naive, and wants you to smile no matter what you feel. Meanwhile, the higher-ups you’re trying to impress? They only see you as a never-ending nuisance. A pest trying too hard to impress and too little to better themselves. But that doesn’t reach your mind. You’re the train who never stops. And one day, you’ll please your superiors and become the toast of the town, whether they like it or not.

It’s hard not to see Zim’s life mirror his show’s relationship with Nickelodeon. The little black sheep of Nicktoons that never went away even after a decade of cancellation, until someone at Nick finally threw a bone and gave Jhonen Vasquez another chance. Of course, Zim as a character never had a cult following pushing him on in-universe. Even before Enter the Florpus was announced, Invader Zim is still as much of a conversation piece as it was fifteen years ago, sometimes with a louder fandom than Nick shows that were or are still active at the time. Yes, it led to the series becoming derided as a “lol so randumb” series aimed at Hot Topic shoppers, but that’s an over-generalization of the show. Sure, you can focus on all the GIR parts and view the show as nothing but meaningless chatter. But cartoons like that don’t get revivals after fifteen years. They don’t get their own conventions or their voice actors still reciting old lines to this day.

Because Invader Zim is more than just Dib trying to reveal Zim’s true nature, Gaz getting mad at Dib for interrupting her games, or GIR doing something stupid. There are at least a couple major themes the show brings up, and the movie capitalizes on. The problems of consumerism and skepticism. Zim’s had a lot of fun mocking consumerist culture. The idea kids have to sell chocolate bars and help major corporation sell their candy, or pizzerias with such fattening excuses for good even their mascot becomes a dying wreck. Even from the first episode, we’re presented with an ice cream truck telling its patrons their existence is meaningless without ice cream. And to Zim’s Irken eyes, these goofy children’s characters and brand deals look like demons from his worst nightmares. The Earth’s already been conquered, not by aliens, but by corporations. It’s easier to make a species submit when you give them snacks and goodies in return. As the episode Tak the Hideous New Girl mentions, there’s no real difference between a corporate venture and world conquest.

Then there’s the problem of skepticism. Being a skeptic isn’t bad by itself. It’s good to question things and doubt the theories you’ve been given. But when there’s an absolute issue at hand, and you’re still thinking it’s all fake despite the evidence surrounding you, then you have a problem. While skepticism can be used to question traditional ideas and the old guard, it can also be used to discredit new ideas and make futurists sound like quacks. Despite all the indications Zim is an alien or at least malicious, nobody but Dib cares. And when Dib tries to present his findings to everyone, they laugh in his face and think he’s crazy. Obviously, Dib isn’t the best at expressing his message, and it’s often his instigating that proves to be his downfall, but even so, everyone else doubts his word. There might be a hundred instances of Zim being an alien, but there’s not a hundred and one, so all the kids in Skool sit happily and ignore the green kid next to them. That can be easily painted as more of the show’s cynicism, but skepticism has been used as a shield in real life. Many people don’t want to admit or believe things like their country conquering other countries, the company they’re working for deforesting wildlife, or even someone they know being a serial pervert because that’s not their problem at the moment. It’s not affecting them right now, so why bother sacrificing the comfort of a normal life. Confronting said issue would only lead to another Pandora’s Box of anxieties and fears many people just aren’t comfortable exploring, so they would rather sit by and pretend nothing’s happening. Play games and party all night, because the monster outside your door hasn’t knocked yet.

And that’s where Enter the Florpus unwraps its plot. After countless failed plans, Zim uses the power of brand loyalty and marketing tactics heavily reminiscent of Apple to conquer the world. While no matter what Dib can do, his father just won’t believe in aliens even when stuck in a space prison. Zim embraces the evil of consumerism, while Dib struggles to fight the evil of skepticism. The comforting brand logo telling you everything’s going to be all right wants to end your world, but you don’t want to get out of your chair because the kid telling you the world will end sounds like a nutjob. It’s only when confronting these societal problems Zim finally gets what he wanted all along, and Dib at last gets his family’s love. But of course, this only happens because Dib lets his neurosis get the better of him. Beyond his conspiracy theories and freelance investigations, Dib wants to be loved. And that need for affection is what makes him let his guard down and give Zim the upper hand. The endless cat and mouse game almost nobody else cared about for most of the show is out in the open, and both players get to embrace what their inner desires. Zim gets to play alien conqueror. Dib gets to be Earth’s savior.

A difference to what the previous Nickelodeon revival did. Rocko’s Modern Life: Static Cling also played with the troubles of big corporations, but those issues were too much in the background to affect the story. Instead, it’s all a big message about accepting change. But that’s the thing. In Static Cling, Rocko watches the universe change around him. But in Enter the Florpus, Dib and Zim are agents of change and actively warp their world. While Rocko’s taught to accept change in a life that’s advanced past him, Dib and Zim push it forward and make the world fit them instead of try to make themselves fit in their world. That’s not to say that’s a better message. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists in the world like Dib who absolutely shouldn’t try to change the world in their own image. But it’s a more interesting idea than just going with the flow.

That’s what makes Enter the Florpus the most entertaining of the revivals we’ve gotten from Nickelodeon lately. Not just an encapsulation of the show’s themes, but just all that payoff. Characters you wanted to see for years get their just desserts suffer the consequences. Familial bonds finally get strengthen. Characters who spent years in the dumps finally have a victory under their notch. There’s going to be some fans who wonder where was Tak, the Resisty, or some other character who showed up once but has a huge following in fanfic, but for once, Invader Zim’s wrapped up in a bow.

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 story. But this time, he gets to eat giant wolves and bears. Raw. And he has the magic power to turn a bunch of rocks into a super gun. This is all portrayed completely seriously with a stupidly grim tone that can be compared to those Linkin Park AMVs of Disney Channel cartoons, all packaged in awful animation and a confusing non-linear plot. Reviews from other sites decry this show as one of the worst adaptations this season, making the excess of other fantasy anime this season look wholesome by comparison.

I actually had fun with this. Sure, this anime is stupid and has no redeeming unironic quality to give, but looking at it compared to shows like King’s Game or that Ulysses Joan of Arc and the Alchemist Knight series, it sits comfortably alongside those in the so bad it’s good collection. Every scene is oozing with incompetence, but it’s almost charming how many wrong turns this show is taking. Maybe it’s delirium from watching so much schlock this season, but I would happily watch more funny garbage like this than boring garbage. God knows how many bad anime this year have fallen under the latter category. – BloodyMarquis

Demon Lord, Retry!

Oh, look. Another isekai. Another isekai about an otaku. Another isekai about an otaku who becomes a stone cold, overpowered badass. Another isekai about an otaku who becomes a stone cold, overpowered badass with an underage girlfriend.

“But he’s an administrator who looks like a member of the yakuza this time.”

I don’t care. I don’t even care that he looks like Sakyo from Yu Yu Hakusho. It’s still going to be the same fucking thing as all the others. Being an administrator means nothing if he needs to gain skill points. Why do you even need to gain skill points when you’re the admin? And furthermore, who names their kid “Aku”? Why does she know how to read when she’s a peasant? Why does she have fancy clothes when all her neighboring villagers treat her like shit and make her work with shit? Why does the animation look like it’s from 2002? Why any of this? I didn’t even like Overlord. Why would I want shitty knockoff Overlord?

I guess it’s not offensively bad, but that’s worse. If you’re going to make an awful isekai, at least have fun with it. Don’t be boring like Demon Lord, Retry. If you’re going to crash and burn, do it with finesse. And the worst part? The studio making this show? This is their second ever anime. Their first show was some train show from last year I don’t remember at all. What’s the point of building a new studio if you’re just going to make the same shit every other tired anime studio does? – BloodyMarquis

Dr. Stone

Dr. Stone is the story of a supergenius with a napa cabbage for a head, and a brainless hunk of hotblooded man muscle. Both men fighting for survival after the most random apocalypse ever either ruined their lives or gave them new meaning. Sounds like the perfect setup for a fun buddy comedy, but no, its this season’s regurgitated battle shonen du jour. The kind of show that probably binges well when you have a dozen episodes to watch but really starts to wear out its welcome after week 5 of fuck all happening. You know, that kind of overpadded slowburn garbage that reddit demands to see on Toonami and then proceed to not watch because lets face it, its fucking boring.

Speaking of fucking boring, lets talk about this episode. Every human being alive (as well as birds for some reason) was turned to stone because…reasons. Over 3000 years later, literal human-leek hybrid Senku and happy fisted Philistine Taiju have somehow managed to escape their stone prisons through either sheer willpower or some sort of molecular acid. After getting drunk on wine, they spend the next several months trying to distill said acid into a form that can be easily replicated thus saving what survives of humanity, now that all traces of civilization have crumbled to dust. And….that’s where the episode ends. Its a load of nothing. Oh don’t worry, its gonna turn into a shitty ass version of Samurai Shodown judging from the title sequence but that’s not obvious from this dull slog of an episode.

You know, I’m probably being too rough on Dr. Stone. I mean this was your first shonen, you’d be easily hooked and want to come back next week begging for more. But me? I’ve had my fill of shows where Yugioh rejects club each other on the head until one side drops dead or the audience dies instead. Now if you excuse me I have to watch a show about hot firemen because this season is doomed already. – Lord Dalek

Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?

Hey, what if we remade Sword Art Online, but Kirito’s mom was still alive and jumped into the game with him? And she was actually better at the game than he is even though she knows nothing about gaming? All while dual wielding and doing all the cool shit Kirito would have done?

Unlike Arifureta, this was genuinely funny, and came from the mind of someone who was as sick of isekais as I was. Not a single cliché from that genre is taken seriously. The mockery’s not as thorough as I would like it to be, but when looking at how straight-faced the others are this season, I can take it. I like Masato’s relationship of lack thereof with his mom. It’s so refreshing watching a dynamic like this, instead of yet another fucking show where the main character is thrown into another world with his little sister or childhood friend. Now it’s a mom who keeps embarrassing him all the time.

Now I know this show will turn into fanservice schlock soon. It’s destined to be. But it doesn’t care. It doesn’t give a shit about the rules or the world because it knows you’ve seen this world hundreds of times before in other shows. Kind of like hearing a drunk guy regale you with how he would write and direct an isekai anime. A stupid time, but a fun one. – BloodyMarquis

Fire Force

I remember when Soul Eater was a big deal in the anime community. The kind of show almost everyone was watching and talking about. But then it ended, and we got that Soul Eater Not show. Then the fandom faded out, leaving only a handful of people demanding a Soul Eater Brotherhood or some other continuation of the franchise. Now I remember kind of liking the show when it first aired, but looking back, all I recall enjoying were the openings and endings. The actual show was too style and little substance, but unlike Jojo, the style couldn’t compensate and become the substance. And all I’m left with are unmemorable characters and a plot that peters out by the end, even in the manga.

So when I watched Fire Force, a show from the same creator, I recognized all the warning signs. The same catchy opening I’m going to listen to for weeks. The same boring characters with cool designs. The same fight scenes that rely so much on looking cool they become silly instead. One of the characters shoots bullets into a fire zombie even though nothing indicates it working. I’m not a fire fighter, but I’m pretty sure shooting a fire doesn’t make it better. Why doesn’t the nun have a F.L.U.D.D. backpack so she can spray holy water at their enemies? It’s a show where I’m stuck asking “Why don’t they do this?” instead of staying focused at all the action scenes. Instead, we have to take “fight fire with fire” to its ultimate conclusion.

And I hate Shinra’s smile. Despite the psychological reasoning they gave for his facial tic, I see right through it and know the author just wanted to draw the same slasher smile protagonist he did with Soul Eater. Just put on a mask if you’re so embarrassed at your lack of a poker face. But like I said, the show looks cool, it sounds cool, a shame the writing’s a wet dishrag.

Oh yeah, I noticed all the non-Japanese names in the opening credits. Guess Funimation is really invested in this. Maybe they thought “Hey, this manga’s made by the Soul Eater guy, and it’s about guys with superpowers doing hero things like My Hero Academia. We can make money off of this.” It definitely feels like something made in response to My Hero Academia. And Fire Force started publication over a year after MHA did, so there might have been enough wiggle room to follow the trend there. – BloodyMarquis

Isekai Cheat Magician

Nothing apparently matters anymore. What seemed like the end of a long battle with isekai light novels and their many, many anime adaptations was nothing more than a false promise and a dirty trick. Now all publishing companies like Dengeki Bunko need to do is insert random words and plots into a super computer and out pops a fully illustrated volume 1 in a 15 volume series. We’re past mad libs at this point. Everything we have seen has happened before, and will happen again. Hence this show might be Isekai Cheat Magician, but it could also be Wiseman’s Grandchild, or Is it Wrong To Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon, or Gate, or Sword Art, or Konosuba, or Grimgar, or any fucking isekai from the last decade. Its gotten to the point that I actually miss Infinite Stratos-clone Battle School shows…wait…no…that’s just the Stockholm Syndrome rearing its ugly head again.

SO ANYWAY…the plot…such as it is: Taichi and Rin are high school students who are summoned by the Princess of the same stock walled fantasy land that every isekai seems to take place in these days. And since this show runs on El-Hazard logic without the quality of writing, they’re given godmode stats and abilities right out of the box. Because cheat codes! Get it?!? Iskai CHEAT Magician?!?! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

AHAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAHHAAAAHHHHHAAAAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Yeah who the hell cares. – Lord Dalek

To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts

By the year 1862, the war between the states had ground to a stalemate. With little to no progress made in the meantime and a major election looming, the president of the union was forced to take drastic actions. The Union needed manpower and fast. The cause of the conflict would not suffice. A simple despute over territory reclaimation did not entice interest for the war weary Union. They would have to use what they had on hand. But they would have to make them stronger.

And so…the President made a deal with the devil. He created ..monsters.

The Union’s best scientist was charged with blending man with ancient beast. Where once long ago these would be called chimeras, now they had a new name: Incarnates. Hastily a group of test subjects was assembled to receive the treatment and in 1863, they were ready for deployment. A new kind of battle regiment even the Confederacy could not withstand. It was to be their high tide.

“What is it fateful woman, so blear, hardly human?
Why wag your head with turban bound, yellow, red and green?
Are the things so strange and marvelous you see or have seen?”

—Walt Whitman

Unfortunately this project had a curse attached to it. The monsters began to over take the man. They lost all control of themselves and began to go berzerk. However by that point it was already too late in the war to matter. The Union had throughly crushed the Confederacy. Taking back their stolen prize, the government decided that, for the good of society, these monsters had to be destroyed. And so they were rounded up and disposed of. As the last one fell, only a single sound could be heard. That of hands clapping three times. They were the final casualties of the Civil War – Burnman Ken

Oh yeah this is supposed to be about anime again wasn’t it?

I fell asleep. – Lord Dalek

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 Treme should have been more focused on drugs and murder, but topics like that are just more engaging than long discussions about the dying jazz industry and post-Katrina life.

And I say all of that because Carole & Tuesday shares that lack of engagement Treme had. It’s well animated and the characters are likable enough, but that’s just it. The show’s only likable enough. Something I could put on air while spending time with other things, but not a series I could glue my eyes on. I had the same problem with Watanabe’s previous show Kids on the Slope. It was a fine anime, but I wasn’t invested enough to think it was anything more than an alright show. I know this paints me as some kind of simpleton who only wants Watanabe to work on violent fare and make another Cowboy Bebop again, and maybe that would interest me more than another anime about aspiring musicians, but I wish the show could get me as interested in the music industry as Watanabe clearly is here. It’s a good first episode, but I wish it could have been a great first episode. – BloodyMarquis

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

There always comes a time for anime fans when they watch the first episode of a show, and recognize patterns and cliches, so much so that they detract from whatever enjoyment you could get. Like how many Hollywood movies fit into the typical hero’s journey plot, seeing anime repeat actions and themes you saw from many previous shows can leave you dejected after a while. And maybe, that’s okay. Some shows aren’t meant for seasoned viewers. They’re meant for anime newcomers. Middle school kids who already watched plenty of Pokemon and they’re more than ready to leap into a Shonen Jump series, which Kimetsu No Yaiba is.

It’s very easy to be pessimistic towards shonen anime, almost unfairly so even. For every My Hero Academia and Attack on Titan that surprise readers and viewers right off the gate, there are always plenty of other shows that leave no first impression. This was one of those shows. Every twist and plot detail is already known minutes before they happen. Loving family who gets horribly murdered? Called it. Edgy swordsman with a hidden heart of gold? Called it. Main character has to join some secret organization in the hopes of curing his younger sibling? Called it. I wasn’t exactly expecting a puzzle piece story that wouldn’t hold my hand, but at least throw one sucker punch at me. Don’t just remind me of other anime I watched. I already saw Grave of the Fireflies/Fullmetal Alchemist/Seraph of the End/whatever else the creator cribbed to make these first chapters.

But like I said, I’m sure kids who want to watch a seasonal anime for the first time will get their kicks from this show. It has blood, action, drama, everything a twelve-year-old would get excited about when watching a Japanese cartoon. And maybe if you like these kinds of shows no matter your age, it will suit your fancy. – BloodyMarquis

Fairy Gone

I don’t know why people are trashing this premiere. I thought it was an ambitious start to a Pokemon season by razing Sinnoh to the ground and giving us a bloody fight between Gardevoir and Zoroark. Don’t know why the green Eevee was there, but Game Freak’s gotta sell toys one way or another, right?

But real talk, this show’s another one of those stories that pump the first episode with tons of worldbuilding, but none of it’s expressed in an artistic or unique way and instead shoveled down our throats while an occasional uninspired fight scene happens in the corner. A guided tour of exposition that hopes you’re too distracted to complain. And that’s a shame from the guy who directed Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Drifters. You would expect a tour de force that takes all this shit about fairies and supernatural mafia and make it look cool. But instead, I got bored and made Pokemon jokes a third way into the episode. – BloodyMarquis

Fruits Basket (2019)

The original Fruits Basket is one of the most beloved shows of the early-2000s anime boom. Despite never airing on a widely available televsion service in this country, it became such a big WOM hit on home video that the then-fledgling Funimation Entertaiment began to change direction from what had been nothing but Dragonball and into far more varied, nuanced, and professional product (it also helps to note that Fruits Basket benifited from what is widely considered Funi’s first “good dub”). To put it mildly, if it wasn’t for Fruits Basket, Funi probably would have died in the 2007 crash instead of becoming Big Anime. That’s one hell of a legacy.

Naturally of course, I’ve never actually watched it.

Obviously I have my reasons. When I was in high school (aka: when this show was coming out in the first place), I didn’t buy anime on dvd for reasons of accessibility (ah for the good ol days when you had to drive 90 miles to find a B&M that actually stocked this stuff at THIRTY FUCKING DOLLARS FOR THREE EPISODES); I had a 56k dialup modem (yeah I’m THAT old!); and oh yeah…never aired on something I got (WTF is ColoursTV?). Soooo yeah I have no nostalgia whatsoever for Furuba. The generation that does was starting their HS Anime Clubs when I was in college and too busy trying to not flunk out to care.

This brings us to the remake, here to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the original manga and apparently do a better job of adapting the manga. The reults…are harmless. Just harmless. This is still Fruits Basket, a watered down version of Ranma ½ with all the sex comedy stripped out and a million times more bishounen. If thats what you want then terrific. For someone like me well…. thank god its out of my system, not sure what I was missing 18 years ago. Now I can watch the inevitable remake of that one Clamp show with the robot girl! It’ll just be like the good ol days of me being bored waiting for Piro Gallagher to churn out another shitty chapter of Megato—oh god now I’ve nostalgia’d myself. Happy now? HAPPY?!?! – Lord Dalek

The Helpful Fox Senko-San

So this is the show Mother’s Basement threw a fit over.

He thought it was going to be some sort of creepy lolicon shit.

Its not.

Its just fucking boring.

What a gyp. – Lord Dalek

Isekai Quartet

Hey guys! You remember Falcom Gakuen? That silly show where the Ys and Trails characters found themselves acting rediculous yet surprisingly in-character in high school? Well this is is that again. But instead of Adol and Dark Fact getting tossed in cells by Lloyd and Tio…we get characters from series I absolutely loath…plus Re:Zero for no apparent reason. Its only 12 minutes long and I could care less. Background noise. – Lord Dalek

Sarazanmai

Yeah, another Ikuhara show. You got your camp, your homosexuality, your posing, your repetitive yet stylistic animation, your budding teenage sexuality that isn’t quite what it seems, your challenges to gender norms, your reminder that Ikuhara really liked Rose of Versailles, your eventual incest, your mythological references that look really weird without context, your critiques of Japanese society that make no sense if you’re not Japanese, and your animal mascots. If this is your first Ikuhara anime, you won’t have a fucking clue what you’re watching, but once you watch his work, you see a pattern in his weirdness. You know what to expect, even if you’re still confused. He’s become predictably surreal. So while Sarazanmai is so different from other anime this season, it looks and feels the same as every other series made by Ikuhara. If you liked Penguindrum, you’ll like this show. And if you thought Yuri Bear Storm was stupid, then you’ll think this show is just as stupid.

Or at least that was my reaction. Sarazanmai was really fucking stupid, but I thought it was fun. Didn’t think it was the “challenging narrative that touches upon the capitalist Amazon hegemony” that other reviewers seem to think it is, but it was more interesting than watching yet another isekai. – BloodyMarquis

We Never Learn: Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai

Didn’t we just have Quintessential Quintuplets last season? And now we have it again? Fine.

You know the drill. Loser MC suddenly becomes a tutor to girls who are stupid. Like “round peg in square hole” stupid. But they’re geniuses in the fields they don’t want to be in. A prodigy in advanced calculus doesn’t know how to liberal arts. A wiz at literature can’t figure out math. They’ve found their special skill, but it’s not the one they want. What to do? And even worse, the MC has the hots for both of them! What a wacky series of events we got here, friends! Maybe he’ll meet a girl who knows quantum physics but doesn’t know how to tie her shoes. Or a girl who’s figured out how to solve climate change but is trying and failing to be a piano player instead. Maybe—oh, next episode is about a swimmer who’s bad at school. That’s boring. You lost me, show. – BloodyMarquis

Wise Man’s Grandchild

If one were to fill a room with monkeys, give them typewriters, and task them to produce an isekai light novel/anime, it would probably resemble Wise Man’s Grandchild. Wait…scratch that…it would LITERALLY resemble Wise Man’s Grandchild. This is basically light novel 101, the same shit we’ve now seen a million times before and are bound to see a million times again, because lets face it, there is no god anymore.

Whelp lets go down the list… Salaryman gets hit by a truck? CHECK! Salaryman gets reincarnated as a precocious orphan in magic land? CHECK! Reincarnated Salary kid is super magician? CHECK! Reincarnated Salary kid needs to got magic school to battle or some shit? DOUBLE CHECK AND MATE MOTHER FUCKAH! Congratulations Silver Link you have made every single show from 2013 AGAIN! All we need is another firey pink haired tsundare and the bases are clea—GRAND SLAM!

Wise Man’s Grandchild is ultimately typical forgettable lazy ass dreck. The kind of shit I fail to find myself being able to write more than five sentences about because who cares. This is anime now. Endless regurgitation. Par for the course in another spring of blah. – Lord Dalek

YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound Of This World

So apparently, the visual novel this is adapted from was one of the big entries in the medium that inspired tons of other visual novels. Something I guess is admirable in the mid 90s when it came out, but doesn’t show now several decades out of its creation. Maybe it should be uplifting that harem dating sims from all eras can be brought to anime no matter how old they are. Perhaps even that obscure eroge you found and masturbated to back in middle school can finds its way to an adaptation. But does it make for a good show? Of course not.

The thing about adapting decades-old manga or video games into anime is that you have to figure out how to make things fresh. Take the Jojo’s anime. In order to make the series stand out, especially when series it had influenced had anime decades earlier, David Production had to work hard to emphasize the style and tighten the pacing of the original manga. Transform panels into animation with vivid colors and an electrifying soundtrack. And thanks to their efforts, a whole new generation of Jojo fans rose from the ground. But if you don’t put in the effort to make an old work seem new, and expect praise just for showing up, you get YU-NO. Ecchi jokes you were sick of back in 2004 are presented here like they never went out of style. Narrative tricks you saw in other VN adaptations like Steins;Gate are executed here but clunkier and with no charismatic lead to carry it. And unlike Jojo, nothing about the execution has that new car smell. You could dull the quality a little, tell someone this was some old anime that aired back to back with Maburaho and Elfen Lied on the Anime Network over a decade ago, and they wouldn’t question you at all. Like an old stand-up comedian from the 80s resurfaces to tell the same old jokes and expects his new audience to laugh regardless of context, YU-NO never makes a claim for why it should exist in the here and now.

Funny, when the director/writer of the anime is treating this like it’s his passion project. – BloodyMarquis

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 give you the patience to watch it the first time as it is. And as other shows of its kind like Lain still have existing fandoms and in fact find newcomers, Boogiepop as a show sat gathering dust. Until now.

Boogiepop Never Laughs, a completely different adaptation that focuses on a whole other part of the maxiseries, is interesting if only to see how much it adheres to modern anime trends. In contrast to what a hard watch the first show was, this definitely attempts to be a little more accessible than the old show. Instead of an opening right out of Taxicab Confessions, it’s just Myth & Roid doing the usual Myth & Roid song you heard from Re:Zero and Tanya. The scenery’s brighter and the background elements, while still surreal, are more “typical seasonal anime” surreal than “I just woke up at 3 AM, turned on the TV, and what the fuck am I watching” surreal. That’s not to say this anime grips you by the first second. It’s still just as confusing and non-linear, and everyone besides Boogiepop warrants little interest. Sure, weird shit happens. But what’s the point if I don’t care about anybody?

And as unappealing as the old show was, at least that had a style. Looking like any other anime doesn’t do the new Boogiepop favors. No interesting shots worth looking at, or pieces of animation that will get posted on Sakugabooru or some image board. By the time I’m on the second episode and cannibalism happens, I’m bored. And a show like this shouldn’t bore me. Maybe this will turn out like Bunny Girl Senpai, another show that I never got yet everyone else apparently loved. But as it is, it’s the kind of show that almost begs you to go play with your phone instead of watch the show. Even if you don’t have a phone, the show will spawn one on your behalf so you can distract yourself from all the meandering conversations. You’re probably going to hear a lot of “If you don’t understand Boogiepop, you’re a brainlet” posts in regards to this show, but I don’t care. This show’s dull. I got more fun out of Occultic;Nine a couple years ago, and that show made even less sense. – BloodyMarquis

Dororo

It’s time to get our Tezuka on. This time with Dororo, about a young man named Hyakkimaru cursed from birth without any of his five senses, limbs, or even skin, and his quest to slay demons in order to reclaim his physical humanity. But the world he lives in is just as dismembered and afflicted with pain. Famine invades feudal Japan. Thieves steal from other thieves in a vicious cycle of attrition. The era of the samurai is nothing but death and despair except for the naive and noble, and even attempting to bring civility to these wartorn lands requires a deal with the devil.

So this was a happy surprise. After how unimpressive that Young Black Jack show was a few years back, it’s cool to see a Tezuka adaptation spread its wings and show how terrifying yet atmospheric Tezuka’s world can be. The fight between Hyakkimaru and the swamp demon has some amazing visuals and should hook on the fence viewers on that alone. And yeah, the “fight all 12 demons in order to reclaim your humanity” plot might sound too basic and remind you of Katanagatari, Jackie Chan Adventures, or the 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo, but that’s what you get when watching anime adapted from an over fifty-year-old manga. And in some ways, a manga from the 60s has more foresight on the world and society than most anime do now.

Of course, as an old story, it’s not subtle. A priest speaks an entire paragraph’s worth of lamentations after getting slain by his lord. Lightning strikes a Buddha statue right after said lord promises to give demons whatever he has. It’s very in your face about its messages, something all of Tezuka’s works share yet most modern adaptations often refuse to water down. And sometimes it works like in Pluto, but then there are works that are too reverential to Tezuka’s original work and refuse to make the adaptation its own thing or figure out how to apply Tezuka’s themes and messages in a modern storytelling context, and instead just churn out some mediocre anime that happens to have the words “Black Jack” or “Astro Boy” attached to the title. And I sincerely hope Dororo’s the former. Don’t let me down, MAPPA. – BloodyMarquis

Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen

Once in a while, you come across a show that you know that you probably would have dug as a kid or a teenager, but just holds no real interest to you as you are now. Maybe it’s the genre or the way the work is written, but either way, you can acknowledge that this is something that you could have liked if you were ten years younger. That’s the feeling I got when watching Kaguya-sama. The feeling that if I was a teenager in his high school’s anime club, I would be completely in love with this show. The series follows two high-schoolers who are head-over-heels in love but absolutely refuse to be the first one to say it. The first segment of the premiere episode involves the two doing insane mental gymnastics to make the other person admit that an invitation to the movies is, in fact, a date. And the second segment breaks away from romance a bit to have a misunderstanding about lunches, with high-class heiress Kaguya being unable to admit to wanting to try some of Miyuki’s lunch, with the latter interpreting the glares he and their ditzy friend Chika are getting as disdain for lower-class food. Yeah, I would have found this fun as a teenager, right up there with Chibi Vampire or Maid Sama. But I’m not 15-year-old Rac in anime club, so as much as I can admit this show is good and can enjoy it to a degree, it just isn’t for me.

I’m not in the mindset where I can completely enjoy “will they or won’t they” high-school romance stories like this anymore without the annoyance that comes from years of reading and watching similar stories. Knowing that it will take a million years for two characters to even admit their feelings for each other isn’t fun anymore, it’s a slog. I still love romance stories to death (I read way too much shipping fanfiction than is healthy), but tuning into a new episode of a show for another week of “oh no, here’s another misunderstanding that will prevent these two from getting together” just isn’t something I enjoy all that much in the media I consume these days. We need a lot more romantic comedies where the main couple is already together early on, and not in a constant state of “will they get together” until the final episode. So despite me seeing the fun to be had in continuing to watch Kaguya-sama, I don’t see myself tuning in week after week for a new episode; I’m a bit too burned out on this sort of romance plot. I can say this though: the OP is a total banger. Would almost watch the show regularly for that alone. – RacattackForce

Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka

Oh great, ANOTHER edge-lord magical girl show. What the hell is this? 2011? Nah 2011 would be actual quality made by SHAFT and Ye Olde Urobutcher. This is 2019 and Asuka was made by the smut merchants at Liden Films and written by the guy who wrote Psycho-Pass who WASN’T The Urobutcher. With talent like that, if you were expecting a cheap crass goreathon thats far less clever than it thinks it is then the hype is real as that’s exactly what was delivered: a shit show.

So basically Asuka is “What if… magical girls but they really were child soldiers?” And before you say “Wasn’t that the plot of Strike Witches?” …well yeah, it was, but that’s not important. What IS important is PTSD SUFFERING!!!!1 Our heroic group of five (originally nine) magical girls were given powers originally to fight a race of killer multicolored teddy bears and amusement park mascots. So brutal was the war that the title character can no longer stand near a costumed balloon vendor without imagining it literally biting the head of a little girl clean off. Such is the show that is Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka.

As for the episode itself? Well its just boring and ugly. It ranges from a badly drawn slice of life/sports anime to a surprisingly badly animated (wow look at all them panning shots over still frames!) action show that goes all in on the thrash metal butt rock and all out on common sense or decency. If 2019 deserved any on anime in particular it may be this dumpster fire. — Lord Dalek

The Price of Smiles

In the now seven years since I was roped into doing these Clusterfuck entries, not once have I come across a show so mediocre and forgettable as The Price of Smiles. NOT. ONCE. Watching it was like sitting in the waiting room of a dentist’s office with a dead cell phone battery and nothing to read but old issues of Cosmo and Prevention. You await the pain of how bad this show is probably going to get but you’re so bored that you never feel it. Its not good, its not terrible, its just…it.

There is a story here but its so unfocused that its hard to get a handle on what this show is supposed to be about. In fact I do not appear to be alone with this problem as the synopsis sent to Crunchyroll by Tatsunoko was just as vague. I guess its supposed to be some sort of Prince and the Pauper style story but that wasn’t obvious until the end credits. Hell this episode ultimately had little to nothing to do with the actual plot of the series other than to introduce our bubble headed Princess MC and how clueless she is to the state of her world, but only in the last 20 seconds because that’s how Tatsunoko rolls! Mirite? Wut Wut.

So an average forgettable show featuring a twin tail who seems to have escaped from a Precure show huh and a plot that was ultimately not even bothered with until the last 15 seconds greaaat. This is why reviewing original IPs is a pain. At least with a Light Novel adaptation you can read the spoilers and not be bored waiting for something to happen. Another year, another winter season. =/ – Lord Dalek

The Promised Neverland

In case you’ve been hungering for some anime child brutality after how long it’s taking to make season two of Made in Abyss, has this season got a pleasant gift for you. Coming from Shonen Jump of all places, The Promised Neverland is an interesting anomaly among other titles there. Main character’s a girl, setting is more focused on horror than battles, only planned to run a dozen volumes just like Death Note, adaptation is airing on Noitamina instead of some primetime slot next to Naruto. I want to ask why Shonen Jump picked this series to publish. They’ve published oddities before, but I’m curious what made them look at this and go “Yes, little Japanese boys will love Promised Neverland!”

You remember how Darling in the Franxx opened on a premise where all these parentless children were raised by a couple caretakers, raised and educated with little knowledge as to what’s really going on in their civilization, but then sent to a great unknown where they face something horrible? This show’s kind of like that, except without all the doggy-style trainwrecks that occurred. Instead, it seems to focus on the allegory of Japan raising its children for a cutthroat society. The kids in this show are expected to go through academic tests that look meaningless to the audience, the ones who don’t do well are thrown away to an early doom, and the ultimate prize for the smartest of the bunch is knowing they’re essentially raised to be cattle for monsters to devour. If that’s the intended message, it only furthers my confusion as to why Shonen Jump published it. “Hey, kids! Did you love setting sail with Luffy and playing ninja with Boruto? How about you run away with Emma and find out adults want to sell you for monster chow?!”

But this was a pretty good premiere. Only real gripe is the character designs giving everybody scrunched-up tiny faces, so their mouth is where their nose should be. Other than that, it’s got my attention. – BloodyMarquis

The Rising of The Shield Hero

Good god what the fuck happened to isekai? In the last year we’ve had slavery! (Desumachi, How Not to Summon a Demon Lord), actual rape! (Goblin Slayer and SAO), creepy incest harems! (Master of Ragnarok), over the top random out of place gore! (Goblin Slayer and SAO….again!), and, out of nowhere, a completely harmless and rather cute comedy that’s actually watchable! (Tensura). In short, 2018 isekai was the worst thing ever! One can only hope 2019 can’t get any wor–

A NEW CHALLENGER ENTERS.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Rising of the Shield Hero, the latest entry in the race to the bottom that is isekai. Want rape? We got it! Want slavery? We got it! Want an over reliance on RPG mechanics that even Tensura was guilty of for not subverting? Oh baby, we got it! I mean it says right here on the box! I’m just looking forward to ripping this a new one!

*opens box*

*finds nothing in the box*

Yeah this is the biggest dud I’ve seen in a while. I desperately wanted to feel a level of face contorting disgust and sheer horror as to what I was watching but it just. never. came. Instead we are left with the most average isekai to ever average. Oh don’t get me wrong, this show is terrible. But its a disappointing terrible that never amounts to anything other than ho hum. So yeah, congratulations Ragnarok you are still the worst isekai I’ve seen since 2015, the check for $516.32 is in the mail. – Lord Dalek

Watashi ni Tenshi ga Maiorita!

Wait, is Uchi no Maid ga Uzasugiru a two-cour show? Guys, I thought we didn’t– wait, this is a different pastel-coloured, light-hearted comedy about a female pedophile lusting after elementary school girls? Y’all sure? Oh, this one has her trying to build a harem of little girls? Okay, cool. Nah, I’m fine. The fact that the pedo shows are breeding doesn’t unnerve me whatsoever.

With begrudging acceptance that this may just be the new trend in anime, Wataten! is this season’s feel-good anime about pedophila. Our heroine is Miyako, a socially-awkward college student who finds herself falling in love at first sight with her little sister’s best friend Hana. Hana, fully aware that her best friend’s older sister is thirsty for pre-pubescent puss, rather than call the cops or at least refuse to visit her friend’s house ever again, decides that she can put up with the leering, drooling, and stench of arousal so long as she can get desserts out of the deal. Meanwhile, little sister Hinata is wondering why her awesome big sis is now doting so much on her new friend and is anxious to get a piece of that affection, so there’s your incest thrown into the mix if you choose to view that bit of plot as such. Hijinks ensue.

Perhaps I’m taking this too seriously. It’s not like lolicon is anything new in anime, so why get annoyed by it now? So ignoring that grossness and steamrolling past the premise, what does Wataten give us? Really good-looking french toast that made me hungry. That’s about it. I don’t know if it’s the show itself, or me just being unable to let go of the premise to let myself relax, but Wataten comes across as a weak comedy filled with jokes done much better in other shows that don’t require you to sit through a woman thinking about how she’s going to make a little girl undress for her amusement. And also done better in other shows that do make you sit through that. It’s not necessarily a bad comedy, just a painfully average one that, if I’m being honest, had all of its jokes executed much better in last season’s pedophile program (the maid one, not the historical fiction one); from the adult character’s love of cosplay to the little girl character figuring that good food might be worth putting up with the MC’s creepy behavior. If it was more interesting or well-written, then I’d be willing to recommend it in a Kodomo no Jikan “it’s uncomfortable and goes to some weirdly melodramatic places” way. Or if it was poorly produced, then I’d be able to recommend it in the same way as last season’s beautiful trainwreck My Sister, My Writer. But I can’t think of anything this show does interestingly enough that I can actually recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already enjoy stuff like this. At least UzaMaid leaned in more on the dark comedy surrounding the idea of your dad hiring a maid that wants to bang you. In contrast, it feels like Wataten is attempting to paint a 20-year-old lusting after a 10-year-old as an adorable romance, which I just can’t get behind. Next show, please. – RacattackForce

W’z

…

…They made a sequel to Hand Shakers.

THEY

MADE

A

SEQUEL

TO

HAAAAND SHAAAAKERS!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

RRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

GGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!@!@!@~121223!!

!!!!!!!!@#$!@$!@!%%!!!!!!!! – The Otaku Critic