2025.10.21

Hi. It's been a while.

I haven't watched much anime recently for reasons. I'll list the one I watched here:

• Finished a few seasonal shows:
  • Silent Witch. Cute! Likely won't be a season 2, which is a shame.
  • Witch Watch. Surprisingly good. Gigguk compared it with Aho Girl early on, which I thought was a disservice.
  • Hikaru ga Shinda Natsu. Very good. I'll be watching season 2.
  • Yofukashi no Uta season 2. As someone who've finished the manga a long time ago, I had no major complaints about this.
  • Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru ("My Dress-Up Darling") season 2. Cloverworks is honestly quite insane here - this animation has very clearly set a new standard for future shows. It's refreshing to see innovation on how things are expressed.
  • Summer Pockets. Just like I've thought, Maeda Jun's works is better be done in a longer form factor.
• Finished the Suzumiya Haruhi series.
  • Yes, I've sat through the entire Endless 8. I was very close to being driven crazy.
  • The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi is genuinely a great movie. Good thing the series ends on such a high note.
  • I'd argue one can skip The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan entirely unless you really want more after the movie.
• Finished Kanokon. OG ecchi show... not very good. I watched it only because it had this reputation of being widely banned in China; turns out being banned does not necessarily mean it's good. To me, ecchi shows (like this one and Highschool DxD are on a very weird position: their plot tend to be not very interesting because the main selling point is the porn, but if it's anime porn that you want, just go for R18 doujin at this point...
• Finished Tengoku Daimakyou ("Heavenly Delusion"). It's a great show, one of the more satisfactory ones. Walled garden of eden vs. post-apocalyptic world trope... The naming is truly unfortunate: the English name is very cool, the Japanese name is very lame, and both of them had little to do with the plot itself.
• Finished Tenkuu Shinpan ("High-Rise Invasion"). OK premise, OK background setting, sloppy writing (esp. the characters), dialog on the cringier side, rhythm is not very good because the length is awkward - I haven't read the original, but one'd imagine there's only one battle with the main antagonist and one face-off with the secret boss who created the system after the main show ends; this roughly gives about 5 or 6 episodes or 7 or even 8 if you're particularly lazy. This is the kind of length that you want to make a 2-and-a-half-hour long movie instead of a seasonal anime, but now we'll have to deal with the first season, and clearly Netflix is not going to make a season 2 for this.
• Rewatched Hyouka. I thought it's just me having anime fatigue, but it turns out it's just that I've been watching subpar shows.
• Finished the 4th movie of Princess Principal: Crown Handler. Finally! It's been months since I've watched the 3rd one... It's shorter than I've imagined and more of a pivot point than anything. I'm worried if we'd ever see the day of all 6 of them being published.
• Almost finished first season of Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai. Didn't realize it's the same guy who write Imouto sae ireba ii., which I'd argue is a better show.

Man, all of them (other than Hyouka are old... I'd probably rewatch Oregairu after finishing Haganai season 1. Sometimes you do notice things you miss during the first exposure.

2025.9.24

Context: Kakkou no Iinazuke Season 2

I forgot why I enjoyed this show in the first place - maybe I was just happy to see any deviations of the arranged marriage trope from the setup established by Nisekoi (though still somewhat of a solid standard in my opinion), but the ending for this season is very unsatisfactory to me - the logic of the dad's behavioral pattern is hard to explain, and the introduction of this mysterious brother character at this point really seems like it's just the publishing house forcing the author juicing a piece of not-that-juicy-in-the-first-place orange to the point of breaking down and sifting the zest. This big brother character - what the hell is his business here?? Throughout the end I was stuck at this loop of going back and forth between "he exists" and "he doesn't exist the fiancée girl was just mistook the main guy for a big brother", but at the end he showed up so I guess he's real? And why does the rich dad deny his existence? Is it because he somehow found out his sister wasn't really his sister (the main premise of the show was the main guy and the fianceé girl got swapped as babies at the hospital) thus he asked his dad for marriage so the rich dad had to banish him from the family?? Would there ever be a season 3???

As I've said before the one big problem about harem shows is that someone's going to get hurt no matter what if you attempt to resolve it unless you put polygamy onto the table as a legally (and/or emotionally) viable option. I haven't read the original material (if there is one) but I can imagine the trajectory from there would be to solve the issue about the big brother first and then a consolidation arc where the fiancée girl would be the chosen one and everyone else would hurt but still stick around, which would give us a third season at most (it's not getting a movie). I doubt it'll be as enjoyable from here...

2025.9.22

Context: Infinite Stratos

I must be getting old. I didn't get any sense of accomplishment after finishing it - it almost felt like a chore (not unlike watching ecchi shows...). Like I've said before, you must take the fact that it's released in 2011 into consideration: 2011 is right at the dawn of the transition between eras. That being said, the show is still terribly generic. Is it supposed to be a mecha show or a purely harem show (since it focuses so much on the harem part)? I was somehow stuck in this bizarre situation that I have to ignore the mecha part in order to get even just a little bit of enjoyment out of the rest. "Yasashi" male protagonist who somehow get all the bitches with zero effort and "just being himself" - I suppose things didn't work that way in the past, but they certainly don't work that way now. Could the change of society (and thus the range of the background conversations can exist under) be eroding the possible basis one's required to have in order to accept, understand or even appreciate shows like this? The fact that one of the main girls had the exact same voice actor (w/ the exact same voice) as Seitokai Yakuindomo certainly didn't help either - through her voice I was kept being subtly reminded about how good the latter was...

2025.9.20

• With the look of things I suppose it's unlikely we'd get a season 3 for Yofukashi no Uta (Call of the Night). I don't dislike this - if I remembered correctly, the original manga after this contains a story arc filled with action scene not unlike fighting in a shounen work. I personally don't really like that kind of stuff and the whole Kiku arc might be a bit too long to fit in one season. I suppose this would be a good point to end it.

• I do wish Drama Queen get an anime adoption someday. It would become a cult classic if it did.

• Finished Infinite Stratos season 1. There do be a valid reason for it to rank that low on MAL. One should obviously take the fact that it's out in 2011 into consideration - the lucky pervert part may have been normal in 2011, but by today's standard it's still way too forced and unnecessary - you can't even treat it like you'd treat the extra moldy part of a piece of Roquefort cheese. I have no doubt that Engage Kiss would've been revered as one of the best harem anime - maybe even one of the "deeper" ones (not to say that these kind of fast food level shows ever have any deepness within them) - had it been released 10 years earlier. Since when did the bastard male protagonist come into the scene? Oregairu? Anyway, people nowadays have the pioneers of those to thank.

  It's unlikely things would improve much in season 2 but I will still watch it...

Accidentally Discovered #1 - INK

2025.9.11

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A Few Remarks On "TheAnimeMen"'s Newest Tier List Video

2025.9.9

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2025.9.6

Context: Yuri Kuma Arashi

You know how I claimed that not every show by Ikuhara Kunihiko is filled with metaphors when I talked about Sarazanmai - after completing Yuri Kuma Arashi, a show whose storytelling is so obviously based on metaphors, I start to think the problem of Sarazanmai only exists with its own. The story of Sarazanmai makes sense if you explain everything as supernatural occurences (I take back what I've said about it being the only way of explaining things); the same can't be said about Yuri Kuma Arashi.

If an ordinary person tries, he may finally piece together which things largely correspond to which real-life things: bears are likely to be one's homosexuality, the "transparent storm" is obviously homophobia, to convert from bear to human is to stay in the closet, etc.... or one can assume bears are social outcasts, which would reframe everything into the simple "those who fits in bullying those who don't" narrative we've seen so many times before (albeit this time it's homosexuality-related). Either way, if you have the mapping in mind, the plot is actually simple. The visual, as is with all other Ikuhara shows, is good in a "MSG tastes good" way (homoerotic nudity notwithstanding) since they're not things you'd expect even when it comes to anime; people would find it more approachable because a lot of it are fairy-tale-like (a natural result of the chosen metaphor; unlike in Penguindrum and even Sarazanmai, where they're mostly abstract, since the metaphor in those shows themselves are mostly abstract things). Unfortunately Yuri Kuma Arashi is the third one I've watched from Ikuhara, and his wacky visuals aren't gonna improve the show's quality for me anymore.

Speaking of other Ikuhara-ism features, I never particularly enjoyed the kind of rhythm where you stuff nearly every single metaphor you're going to use for the whole show within the first 3 episodes without implicitly explaining them with actual plot, it's really confusing for new viewers who haven't experienced this level of metaphor throughput (honestly where could you find this level of metaphor throughput other than Ikuhara's works?) and very disorienting even for people who've had the preparation of mind. I don't remember I've ever had this much trouble understanding w/ Penguindrum - maybe it's because the mapping of the metaphors in Yuri Kuma Arashi is much clearer, which probably ironically allowed and invited much more thinking.

2025.9.5

Context: Rakuen Tsuihou (Expelled from Paradise)

Rakuen Tsuihou is actually a good show. I have no big criticisms to say about it. I'd recommend it as "the first anime" for people if they like science fiction.

2025.9.2

Context: Megami no Café Terrace

I was slightly disappointed. Maybe it's because recent seasons has been slice-of-life heavy, I went in blind thinking it would be a slice-of-life show, but as it turns out it's a harem show just like Grisaia (albeit with less janky rhythm and less substance in story). I don't know why this got 7+/10 when Occultic;Nine got less that on MAL. The lucky pervert trope felt overused and way too forced at points, some of the character designs and writings are - to be honest - not very palatable, especially for those who didn't grow up with older similar shows. The first season came out in 2023 - 2023! Rare to see old era writing in modern shows.

But I'll give it one thing - it refuses to resolve the harem. One of the biggest pain point of harem shows for me is that no matter how you write your story it always sucks to look at in the end, because when it comes to the stage of "pick one", someone's going to get hurt despite not doing anything wrong; but Megami no Café Terrace avoids resolution like avoiding plague - it's almost as if the creators were going like "huh? Which one? I just want some harem action, how the hell would I know", and that's a stance I can respect.

2025.8.31

• Tsuki to Laika to Nosferatu is good. It's definitely one of the rarer ones of these modern days - a simple, complete (instead of slices-of-life), slightly engaging feel-good story, with no heavy "tragedy points", a moderate amount of development, and a mildly tsundere main girl (Unlike those "classical" tsundere where the tsun often develops into literal violence towards the male protagonist in the end, here the tsun part is really, really mild! Surprisingly refreshing...). The story stayed within the theme of space exploration and somehow didn't end with a romance (cliché), which I appreciates a lot. I think 2020~2022 are the years of Vtubers not only for me (I was a Nijisanji EN fan and you all know how that went down) but also for a lot of people, so in my impressions this has never been as popular as it should, which is a shame - smaller shame than Princess Principal, but a shame nonetheless.
• Occultic;Nine is very good. I don't know why it's so low on MyAnimeList, but everyone who's seen more than 20 shows should've already notice MAL's ratings sometimes are just as ridiculous as Pitchfork's, only with it being crowdsourced and thus being able to be argued as "less evil". I's a good story, but there's too much dialogue. Is it because it's trying to stuff too much story within 12 episodes? Steins;Gate got 24 after all... If netflix were to make a live action show out of the same story they can obviously stretch that into 3 seasons with quadruple the runtime...

2025.8.29

Context: Sarazanmai

I don't know who planted the idea in me that everything Ikuhara Kunihiko has made is filled with metaphor. That might be the case for his other shows, but after watching Sarazanmai in its entirety I can assure you that you won't get any true enjoyment if you analyze every single thing in it as one. Rather than metaphors, you should see them as merely supernatural occurences; and try not to think of the lessons it wants to teach you, since it's much better to simply assume such a lesson doesn't exist (and even if it exists - which I'd say it does, since this is pretty explicit in the show - it's at a much more shallow level than a lot of people's lives). With that mindset in place, one can still enjoy the story, even if it's cliché till the point of somehow giving me zero surprises. I was pretty uncomfortable the entire time due to the homoeroticism; this is not because it's about boys being gay, I just don't enjoy things being this explicit. Would I recommend it to other people? Probably not, fujoshis already have markets of good stuff made for them anyway.

Disclaimer: If you're the kind of people who would delegate thinking to ChatGPT, you'd probably think that what I've said is borderline homophobic. This is a misconception. I hold the old liberal view of "all love is love", and I see the so-called "queerness" as nothing different from other synthesis of common human nature - to me, the concept is simply existing things reframed for this label-heavy economy. People who follow my previous comments would know I have issues with hetero ecchi shows as well.