Left more in-depth thoughts in the other thread, but I’m giving this premiere a very mixed 3/5 - what would have been an easy 5/5 fumbled with a large focus on sexual assault. I’ll probably watch an episode or two more to see if it rights its course…
This one looks great, but it just isn’t doing it for me. Both of the friends felt fun (would love to see more of them), but the actual leads just didn’t really click for me. It’s a bit hard to get invested in their romance when it feels like I don’t know them very well and they also don’t know each other very well.
It sounded like this was a pretty hotly anticipated show, and I’m glad that it looks like y’all got all the production values you could have dreamed of, but I think I’m going to pass on this one. I give the premiere a 3/5.
This one is really cute! We’ve got some relatably introverted leads and a romcom-style fake marriage, and I’m eager to see these two grow both individually and as a couple. If it can follow through on the genuine romance elements as the season goes on, I think this is going to be a very comfy show. I give the premiere a 4/5.
I’m a bit of an angler (though mostly freshwater drifting/trolling), and they did a pretty good job showing off the hobby - i especially loved the animation on those spinning reels. The fish on the other hand, um… they’re scary. The cgi always looked unnatural next to the hand-drawn characters and the way they moved felt janky. I do not like them.
As for the story, it’s fine? It seems like one of those hobby shows where someone’s problems will get solved by them discovering a love for whatever thing the show is about, which always feels kind of hollow to me and just an excuse for a writer to recruit people into their hobby. This one’s an anime original, so I’ll give it a bit more time to prove itself, but the premiere is a 3/5 from me.
I really liked this one. It’s got some obvious similarities with Gushing Over Magical Girls, an anime that really impressed me but was a bit too much ecchi for me to be able to tolerate, so I was ready for a comfy substitute that I’d have a bit better of a time with. However, this one definitely brings its own charm that makes it more than just a knock-off (on top of its source material coming out first).
I really like the tension between the main character’s desire to see Berry shine in the heat of an intense battle and her sense of justice that is what drew her to the Berry fandom in the first place. Meanwhile, Chrome is a delight to watch (especially as a fan of flamboyant and camp villains), and he rides the line perfectly between being a dumb idiot whose plans succeed on accident and a genius tactician and actor skillfully playing everyone around him into doing exactly what he wants. The action scenes work well, and the artstyle and color palette give it a bright and energetic tone. I’m absolutely on board for this one, 5/5.
P.S. It looks like this is studio Voil’s first anime and the director is also relatively unproven?? This feels way too put together for that to be true, lol.
I’m already not a fan of the villainess isekai genre, but this one felt especially empty to me. I do enjoy characters that have fun acting evil, and our main has that going for her, but I struggled to ever root for her when one of the first things she says was basically “the villainess is right - bullying uppity commoners is good, actually, because they should know their place”, which is a wild position to have in the modern day. I then got a bit distracted when they introduced our romantic lead, who appears to be a good 5 years older than our main. As teenagers this would be creepy enough (if she’s 15 and off to magic school, he’d already be 20), but he starts following her around and staring at her when she is 8 and he is probably 13, which was a HUGE red flag for me that I don’t think I’d be able to get past. It’s so bizarre to me because why not just make them the same age?
I’m getting a bit bogged down in these details, but I think that’s largely because it didn’t seem to have any substance to preoccupy myself with instead. It seems like the main draw for the show is to see her have fun trying to be evil, but that really isn’t enough for me. I give the premiere a 1/5
It’s sad to see stuff end, but honestly I’m glad whenever fiction gets a real ending instead of just dragging out for a million years.
And it looks like the author is planning a new comic about gay bird boys, a topic I somehow keep finding more comics about, lol.
This art is very cute so I went to read the comic and it is also very cute!
And for once it’s some mer content that’s not full of the dreaded (by me) mermaid knees…
I hope it gets a sequel
Good news! Well, maybe good news? It looks like we ultimately don’t know when or what form the new anime will be, but something is in the works.
Hi newcomers! Welcome!! You might see me around in most/all of the discussion threads for a week or two because I’m the sort of unhinged person who watches everything to start off (it gets trimmed down FAST, lol). Since it seemed to work last time, I’m going to continue to not have rikka make posts for stuff I don’t plan on continuing to watch, and instead review them in these threads.
Even with my hectic summer, I managed to finish my shows before fall started, yay! Here’s my thoughts:
What could have been a strong romance anime sort of devolved into one part harem comedy (why??) and one part student council drama (and no parts romance). I really just wanted them to have an almost kiss or some sort of progress, seriously. The student council stuff was sort of interesting, but it kind of overwhelmed the back half of the season. I guess if/when it gets a season 2 I’ll see how I feel at the time. The two mains are really cute together, but I can’t stand a romance in a holding pattern.
Absolutely incredible, start to finish. The character writing was amazing, the dumb little mysteries were a delight (the charlotte episode was a standout for me), and the big plotline at the end both felt like a culmination and delivered on the excellent mystery writing the series had built up so far, but on a larger scale. The leads parting ways could have ruined the season, but instead it felt natural and I’m excited to see what happens next. While I wait, I might have to finally go check out Hyouka.
A cute little anime with big ambitions, but falls a little short. I think it’s cool that it tries to be so cinematic when the story revolves around the film club. The problem is that it’s just so cheesy all of the time, lol. I enjoyed watching it (except the third couple, who I hate together), but I don’t know that I could really recommend it. It’s at least nice to have more gay anime that’s not full of consent issues, though.
How were more people not watching this one?? This was a fantastic show, with some shocking and (mostly) earned twists, that delivers a story better than its source material could. It nails both the little character moments and the broader mysteries, and hints toward future plotlines I’m very sad we may never see in anime form, if this is as unpopular as it looks. Seriously, go watch it if you like imperial court dramas.
My friends and I watched this together (one of us had seen it before and insisted), and after hearing many, many recommendations for it, I sort of expected to be more wowed by it. IDK, I wasn’t ever really attached to any of the characters and it felt like the mysteries weren’t really built up in a way where you’d have that satisfying “oh, if I’d paid more attention I could have figured that out!” moment. The most invested I ever got was the few episodes where I thought Kakihana was about to be killed, but they deprived me of even that small joy, lol. I also felt like some of the twists at the end - Odokawa’s brain damage in particular - ultimately didn’t really matter to the story and felt like a twist for twist’s sake. But I think a biggest problems I had are that I’m both a slow reader and a hater of manzai-style comedy, so to me the dialogue was hard to follow and dull - I found out too late that the anime actually has a dub, which I think would have solved one of those problems, but I’m not sure if it would have fully fixed the show for me. I know a lot of people really like this show, and I’m glad y’all have something you really enjoy, but ultimately I don’t think it’s as good as people build it up to be.
My friends and I are still working through their three picks for this season (otokonoko, dahlia, and elusive samurai) because we run a couple weeks late, but i expect high scores on two of those (sorry dahlia, lol) when we finally finish them.
This one is a great example of why I don’t read descriptions or watch previews, because the dumb twist got me, lol. I was pretty convinced I was in for some bland edgy video game adventuring slop, but the bait and switch actually pulled me in quite a bit. I’m not sold on it quite yet, but the character writing reminded me of Eminence in Shadow, an all-time favorite of mine that also had a bit of a slow start, so I’m hopeful at least. The second half of the episode had some good comedy beats and our cast seems to be filling up with weirdos, so I can see it being a very solid show if it finds its feet. But, ultimately, the premiere promised more than it delivered, so we’ll have to see. I’ll give it another episode or two at the very least. 3/5
Wow is this main character unlikable, which for a show with only one central character is a pretty major blunder. He claims that he’s making himself OP, but like, buddy, you’re just relying on the secretly OP skills and items that you scoffed at and then got forced on you. None of this is due to your efforts. There were times where it felt like the story was hinting toward an unreliable narrator (like how the different cliques at school are drawn a little differently, as if he’s making divisions that don’t really exist), but ultimately the anime feels too earnest for me to have any real hope of the story turning that way (if anyone is familiar with the source material, please correct me if I’m wrong!)
Ultimately it’s fine for what it is, which is a popcorn isekai anime with no substance backing it up. I can see someone enjoying it, but only after exhausting other, better options. I give the premiere a 2/5.
I’m confused. It looks like it’s available for streaming everywhere right now, but it just hasn’t broadcast on TV yet (I think).
The summer’s been a bit busy, so I’ve unfortunately fallen off some of the stuff that I meant to watch and fallen behind on the rest, but I think things are actually settling down now.
For our weekly anime time, my friends ended up picking:
As for my own shows, I had to make some cuts and I’m still a bit behind on it all, but I’m watching:
As always, I’m going into the season as blind as possible, though I am tentatively hyped for Ranma 1/2.
Also, I’m not sure if this counts as the new season (or as anime, since it was sort of a slideshow), but here’s my thoughts on the first(?) fall show:
It only escaped the extreme creepiness of its premise by being painfully dull in all aspects. I’m not one to complain too much about animation quality (I’m watching Dahlia In Bloom this season), but the writing and direction were the things that really dragged it down. I could barely force myself through it (I have my pride as a Watcher of Every Anime, even if it’s meaningless), and it didn’t get even a single nose exhale out of me, let alone a laugh. The one good thing I have to say is that J.C.Staff know how to make pretty people and the ninja guy is definitely pretty. 1/5
I am under no circumstances saying you can’t criticize art or say that the writing was bad or whatever you seem to think my position is.
Writers can and do get fired for not doing the job they were hired for and rarely get to lead the creative process (and usually if they do they’re like, writer/director, or a big name). All I’m trying to say is that a worker can do a good job within the bounds they’re given and still have the result be terrible because the bounds were terrible.
You seem to be giving a LOT of agency to writers for the stories they tell. Some stories are going to be something writers worked hard on wanted to write, and in those cases ya they should be blamed for the resulting flaws, but many times they are constrained by the instructions they’re given.
To go back to the metaphor, did the worker decide that the stuff you need goes out of your reach or are they putting it where they were told to?
“Just following orders” absolutely does excuse bad writing as long as it’s not harmful. I wouldn’t get mad at a writer of a thing a studio ruined just like I wouldn’t get mad at a grocery store worker for rearranging the shelves for the fifth week in a row. Just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean doing a stupid and pointless job makes them a bad person. If the writing is racist or whatever, sure, they’re complicit, but writers have to eat and it’s not morally wrong to write a boring script if that’s what your boss is asking you for.
The problem is, nazi is a political ideology, but Russian is a nationality and ethnicity. I agree with your point about gay nazis, but would you say the same thing about gay germans?
It definitely reads like an ai hallucination, lol
I barely remember Slow Loop at all (cgdct is very much not my genre) but I’d guess they don’t have a ton in common beyond being about fishing.