Anime

Been slammed with work this past week, but I managed to keep up with most of the seasonal shows I have been watching this season.

• Orb: On the Movements of the Earth - This continues to be my favorite seasonal show of the Fall. I also saw that we are likely to get a complete adaptation of the source since this is running for 25 episodes. I am looking forward to more.
• Dan Da Dan - This show continues to be an absolute delight. You never know what is going to happen week to week. The gorgeous animation has been a feast for the eyes as well.
• Loner Life Isekai - This has managed to keep my interest so far. It doesn't reinvent the isekai wheel at all, but the characters are likeable enough. Also, I have realized I don't remember as much of the beginning of this story as I thought.
• Negative Positive Angler - Lots of potential in this series, but it is taking things slow. I really hope that this one pays off.
• 365 Days to the Wedding - Super cute episode this past week. I hope we see more of Claudia going forward and that she wasn't just introduced this episode to never appear again.
• Villainess Who Goes Down in History - I wonder what the MC's definition of a villainess is ~~sometimes~~ all the time. Of what I have been watching, this is probably the one most on the chopping block. It has its humorous moments though, so I am hoping that they come more frequently after the time skip of this past episode.
• Appraisal Isekai Season 2 - This series continues to simply be a competently executed isekai with a fairly straightforward premise. This is far from the only isekai to have an appraisal theme (this series is specifically skill appraisal). However, it proves that you don't need some kind of novel gimmick, but just some well-written characters put in interesting situations.
• Tower of God Season 2 - What can I say about this series other than that I am still watching in spite of the studio's best efforts. I really like the characters in this show, but the plot has been a bit confusing recently, and the animation has been quite poor. So, I am hoping that they can at least deliver on some fun character moments.

Meta note: Next week's thread is going to be the best OP/ED thread for the season. So, start thinking about it!

My new season has sort of settled in. I think I've cut down to things I'm pretty likely to finish, and I've decided on the anime I'll be showing to my friends (every season I pick out around 6 for them and they choose 3 of them to watch together). The tasting menu this time is 365 Days to the Wedding, Acro Trip, Dan Da Dan, How I Attended an All-Guys Mixer, Let This Grieving Soul Retire, and Yakuza Fiance, with a bonus option to rewatch Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, since the new season (this winter) is coming out after five years and we don't remember what happened, lol. I'll also be recommending Orb: On the Movements of the Earth, which, like Chainsaw Man before it, would absolutely be on the agenda if I had the stomach for it, but I'm much too squeamish.

I'm also personally following Nina the Starry Bride and The Do-Over Damsel Conquers the Dragon Emperor for some shoujo trash, and Ranma 1/2 for some tsundere nostalgia.

Meanwhile, my friends and I finally finished our shows from last season! Here are my thoughts:

Since Makeine ended and nothing caught my attention this season, I'm back to browsing and binging the past, and just finished up one of the best series I've watched in a long time - Heike Monogatari.

I just happened to come across it on a stack and thought it looked interesting, so I watched the first episode and was immediately hooked. It wasn't until I saw the Science SARU logo in the closing credits that I realized it was Yuasa (though in retrospect, I probably should have from Biwa's character design).

The art design is astonishing - a perfect fit for a Japanese historical epic - with backgrounds that look like tapestries and foreground details that look like woodblock prints. It's easily one of the most visually satisfying anime I've ever seen.

The story and characters are sort of underdeveloped, as should be expected from trying to condense a sprawling historical epic into 11 anime episodes, but it doesn't feel incomplete. It's as if all of the missing content from the much larger and more detailed original epic are spread so evenly throughout the adaptation that everything that's there fits neatly together and manages to tell the story anyway.

And the way it's framed - having the narrator of an epic story of a clan brought down by their own arrogance and cruelty that was popularized by biwa singers be a biwa singer who started off with every reason to hate the Heike but who slowly came to love them in spite of their significant flaws - is brilliant. Biwa is perfectly placed to witness the story as it unfolds, and perfectly suited to recognize both their flaws and their virtues, and the inevitability of their fall.

I don't know how popular it was with westerners when it was released, so I don't know if I'm just stating the obvious, but my impression is that it's one of those that's not so much underrated as underappreciated - that it's well regarded by those who have watched it, but that that's fewer people than it deserves. Thus this post.

So, I ran across an article on ANN here about relative popularity of Summer 2024 shows between the US market and Japan. It's a really good read, and I recommend you check it out along with the analysis that goes with it. I thought it would be interesting to mark on the graphs that he makes what shows I watched and if they fell on the "more popular in Japan" side of the line or the "more popular in the US" side of the line.

I have marked up this image to have a green dot for any show that I watched last season:

So, it looks like, of the shows he charted, I watched 4 that were more popular in the US and 3 that were more popular in Japan.

He did this analysis for the Spring 2024 season as well. I went ahead and marked up a graph for that season below:

So, for the Spring season, I was 5-2 Japan-US. An interesting bit about the Spring season that he wrote about is that Demon Slayer was so popular in the US that it is way, way off the chart to the right.

Anyway, I don't really have any conclusions from this or anything, just thought it was interesting and felt like if I went through the trouble of opening Illustrator to mark up an image, I might as well share it somewhere, so the general discussion thread seemed appropriate.

Ao No Miburo - Boring first episode. The main character's powers of observation are interesting, but the pacing was plodding. The art wasn't great either. A solid meh.

Watched GUNDAM: Requiem for Vengeance and enjoyed it. The messaging behind the show is very typical Gundam (i.e. war is bad).

The animation style (?) isn't like the usual anime style which is a nice change of pace. It makes it look like a live action show.

I finished watching Uzumaki this week.

It wasn't bad, loyal to the source material, but even when I read the manga, I felt it was too much, at times verging on a dark, ridiculous sort of comedy.

Still, it was interesting, like Junji Ito's stuff generally is and a decent show to watch for October.

Watched Spy X Family: Code White the other night, and was very pleasantly surprised. I wasn't expecting much, and went in mostly blind other than knowing it wasn't based on manga content.

Animation looked great, and for a plotline that centered around the family going out for dessert, it turned out to be a very compelling story. It fit in perfectly with the regular anime/manga, and you could watch it wherever you're at in the series without being lost or it feeling out of place. All 3 MCs got a good amount of story time as well, and a lot of side characters had appearances, so it's not just an Anya story or Loid, etc.

If you haven't seen it, but enjoy the show, give it a watch. It was a lot of fun!

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Bleach: TYBW
2. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Dan Da Dan

Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.

Bleach continues its dominance of the AC chart. Meanwhile it is a two-horse race for the reddit karma top spot between Dan Da Dan and Re:Zero. I was happy to see Orb break into the top 10 after an outstanding episode 3 even after two shows premiered in the top 10 (SLF and Daima).