Just starting season three of the original Robotech. I watch one in the morning with breakfast. It’s pretty dated but it’s got some good storytelling.

Continuing:

• Rock is a Lady’s Modesty: I’m a broken record at this point but gosh do I love this show. It’s my favorite of the season. I’m hyped to see the full band finally assembled. Tina in particular is a brilliant addition; With the other three girls all possessing varying degrees of deranged over confidence, it’s exciting to see someone who’s the polar opposite thrown into the mix. Oh, and we finally know who the guitar pick belongs to!
• Apothecary Diaries: I love it when Jinshi loses his cool and the facade begins to drop.
• Gundam GQux: Wow, what an episode. Nyaan has felt somewhat sidelined in my opinion so it’s good to see her getting the spotlight for once.

Started:

• Lazarus: The first 4 episodes are finally available in Japanese audio on Max (too lazy to torrent, sorry) so we binged them. I am really loving it so far. The episode at the EDM show / dance club was particularly satisfying. The action feels tight and the music is on point. Oh, and there was a really nice moment of trans rep which was awesome. The one thing I’m watching out for here with the premise is what feels to me like a kind of weird anti-vax angle; however, we don’t really know enough about Dr. Skinner at this stage and I’m thinking there is still room for more nuance than “evil scientist releases miracle drug but oops it actually kills you.”

Grab bag:

• Steins;Gate: This has been on my list for a long time and I had some spare time last week so I checked it out. The first episode really grabbed me. The next two, not so much. The humor isn’t clicking for me at all and the MC is kind of an unlikable asshole. Trying to decide if I want to stick this out to find out what all the fuss is about or not.
• Inuyasha: We thought this would be a fun show to revisit with our 11-year-old. And boy they are so into it. We’re up to episode 28 or so and its been a hoot. I think this show genuinely holds up fairly well for it’s age and genre. The characters are delightful and well realized, the voice cast does a great job, and the drama is juicy. I only caught bits and pieces of it back in the Toonami days so this is my first time actually watching it through.
• Witch from Mercury: Now that I’ve got my spouse on the gundam train (thanks, gqux!) she expressed interest in checking out G-Witch too. We watched the prologue and the first episode. Man that prologue is as heavy as I remember it. Excited to experience this show again.
• Akiba Maid War: We have three episodes left to go. I still think this show is an absolute riot. It does hit you with the ol’ emotional gut punch at a certain point but then goes right back to it’s goofy self. I cannot guess how they are going to wrap things up.
• ZZ Gundam: This is a struggle. I may end up watching the compilation movies instead. Really, I just want to get to Char’s Counterattack and later UC shows.

Started off this week with the rest of Mekacucity Actors, which ended up being mediocre all in all (early on, I didn’t think it’d even manage that). In the later episodes, it mostly set aside the tedious Monogatari-style pop philosophy monologues set against geometric abstract liminal space backdrops and got down to some actual character development and exposition… It wasn’t particularly compelling or even coherent character development and exposition, but at least it was something.

Then, sort of wandering around aimlessly, I happened across a currently-airing series of a genre I’ve never bothered to watch before and what-the-hell gave it a watch, and that’s how I ended up catching up on and following Maebashi Witches. On the surface, it’s just cute and cheery, with pleasantly high quality animation and music and endearing characters and surprising emotional depth, and that might be all it ends up being, which’ll be fine. It’s surprisingly enjoyable just as that. But there’s also some room there for something else. Nothing is quite what it appears to be - they aren’t really “witches” in any recognizable sense, the mascot character who recruited them is revealing himself to be a smooth-talking and dishonest hustler and the deal they’ve made with him keeps getting more complex and its completion further out of reach. I don’t expect anything close to Madoka out of it, but there does seem to be a similar hidden agenda and while Keroppe is no Kyubey, he definitely isnt telling them the entire truth.

In any event, at worst, it’s cute and endearing and pleasant, and I’m enjoying it.

Then I sort of bulldozed my way through Sora no Otoshimono Forte, which I’ve been idly threatening to watch for years now, but I expected it to be similar to the first season, which is to say little bits of brilliance scattered here and there among lots of tedious and cringey trash, which is pretty much exactly what it was. Tomoki spent about 90% of the series super deformed and doing that “Kek kek kek” laugh while the rest of the cast just played their assigned one-note roles, but it wasn’t all bad, and the handful of serious moments were actually pretty good. So about what I expected.

Then I capped the week off with a real gem - Planetarian, which was absolutely glorious. It’s heart-warming and beautiful and tragic and uplifting and somber and deeply, deeply moving, and it made me smile and tear up at the same time and I loved it. I ended up watching both the series - Chiisana Hoshi no Yume and the movie/sequel - Hoshi no Hito, which tells a condensed version of the series plus some additional content after the events of the series. They’re both worth it.

And I already grabbed a Yumemi screenshot that’s my new wallpaper.

I have just completed Beastars final season (part 1) and it is just as good as the previous seasons.

The antagonist reminds me of the Joker. Now that I think about it, Legoshi gives off Batman vibes.

As with before, my nitpick has to do with the classification of animals. It still annoys me to see the anteater grouped together with herbivores whereas the hippo got lumped in with carnivores.

Also, omnivores as a category was ignored, with omnivorous animals getting thrown into one of the herbivore / carnivore faction for the sake of the narrative.

Otherwise, the characters, storytelling, fight scenes, etc are peak as usual, so it’s a 10 / 10.

Unfortunately, it seems that we don’t have a release date for part 2 just yet.

P.S. Juno’s love interests don’t deserve her. I hope she won’t go down the route of a losing heroine.

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Sword of the Demon Hunter
2. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Apothecary Diaries

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

Sword of the Demon Hunter comes out of nowhere to top the chart on AC this week. This season continues to be a weak one in terms of the reddit karma with the total falling below 14k this week and only the top three entries having more than 1k karma. I have been more than satisfied this season, but I am just one person after all.

I continue on my quest to listen to bad Anime while I work; This week I listened to chaos;head and it was delightfully terrible. It was basically an audio novel, everything was expressed in dialog, I especially love the long pseudo science exposition dumps:

The final fight was also funny in how anticlimactic it was. I noticed it’s based on a visual novel or something and tried listening to chaos;child what seemed to be an adaptation of an alternative route but I could not do it a second time. Then tried Heavenly Delusion and that one seemed good, so I’m putting it on hold to watch while paying attention next.

Currently looking for another bad Anime to listen to

I have been doing a lot of traveling this past week, so my ability to watch anime has been sporadic. Despite that, I managed to catch up on some shows:

• Ninja and Assassin - Fantastic episode this past week. This was the story I was waiting to see adapted from the manga and the anime delivered 110%. This show has been such fantastic dark comedy.
• Apothecary Diaries - Fantastic couple of episodes that I just caught up on. It’s nice to see people other than Maomao do the mystery solving.
• Evil Lord Isekai - This series is so stupid, and I say that affectionately. I binged a couple episodes to get caught up and I can’t recommend this series to everybody. However, if your brain has been steeped in enough trashy isekai like mine, you might find this one enjoyable.
• Too-Perfect Saint - Heading into the climax of this arc and I am still enjoying this adaptation.
• Rock is a Lady’s Modesty - I have really enjoyed this show a lot. If you like music anime, this has been a fun one.

I have fallen behind on two shows that I really want to keep up with. The first of which is Gundam GQuuuuuux. I have been managing to keep up with making the episode threads for !gundam@ani.social, but am now a couple episodes behind. The other show that I am really going to try to catch up on is Apocalypse Hotel. I have loved this show so far, but have yet to watch the most recent episode. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it has been just the right mix of silly and melancholy for me.

I’m really enjoying Lazarus rn, I think mostly because it’s a fresh take on Cowboy Bepop. It’s certainly not as good as CB, but the fight scenes and gun play are great.

Also, Bonobo (/watch?v=4Kc_U7mruec) made all the music for it, which is amazing as always.