Anime • Page 197

I’d like to recommend Heavenly Delusion to everyone. When you look it up on Hulu, search Tengoku-Daimakyo. Only two episodes so far and it’s already the best anime of the spring season. The animation is gorgeous and the plot and twists keep me wanting more. For fans of The Last of Us and Promised Neverland…I think.

 

I’m planning on watching it, gona let some episodes build so I can binge but I’m excited.

that and Skip & Loafer are on my list for the season

 

First ep of the Swordsmith Village arc was a great watch last night. Mostly just set up but still just happy for Demon Slayer to be back. The animation quality was gorgeous.

Also enjoyed the first two eps of Hell's Paradise a ton.

The Mashle premier was fun but somewhat underwhelming for me. I'll stick with it though. I'm excited to see more goofy shit.

 

Mashle is just absurdity. It does get better, but it will get repetitive after a while haha

 

What’s everyone’s thoughts on Made In Abyss S2? I’m finally starting it (yes I know I’m late)

 

Still watching Spider, just saw what might be my favorite scene of the show so far.

Kumoko, newly freed from the dungeon, happens across a carriage under attack and decides to actually do a good deed and save their lives.

Upon doing so, she uses Appraisal on the baby of the group and learns the baby is actually a vampire with a very Japanese name, which makes Kumoko suspect the baby is another reincarnation, and Kumoko becomes very jealous.

Cut to the rescued family looking in what I can only describe as dubious confusion as a giant spider freaks out and rolls around on the ground in frustration while silently cursing the universe before running off into the forest in tears.

 

Started up Trigun Stampede for the first time and it's quite interesting. The original anime is a classic but I like the new take a lot. It's a little less cartoony in tone but it fits considering the 3D animation, which is beautiful by the way. I also couldn't help but give the English version a go because if it's one genre English versions tend to get right with anime, it's the Western genre. And goodness gracious, Johnny Yong Bosch is as good if not better than he was in the original. I initially questioned the decision to bring him back since this was a brand new take, but some times the easiest decision is the right one. He was born to play that role.

 

This reminds me I haven’t started season two yet. I want to rewatch season one first since it’s been a whole, but…it was emotionally draining lol.

 

THE KING IS BACK

 

This is one of the most interesting isakeis I’ve seen. Can’t wait for season two.

 

Watched the first episode of Oshi No Ko, extremely good so far.

 

It looks good, but I don’t want to get HIDIVE just for one show.

 

Suzume (Makoto Shinkai, April 12, 2023) • forum.chorus.fm

 

Starts off a little slow, but it's so gripping and emotionally devastating. I enjoyed season 2 far more than I did season 1.

 

So I'm two episodes away from finishing So I'm A Spider, So What?, and my thoughts on it are all over the place.

Ultimately I'm enjoying it, but I think it's not sure what kind of anime it wants to be, and it tries to do too much with too little. It's dividing its time between storylines and in so doing, fails to serve both as well as it could.

Kumoko, the titular reincarnation-as-a-spider, is treated like the main character, except almost everything she does has no clear bearing on what's happening everywhere else in the anime, and that's partially because her storyline is actually a flashback, while the bits focusing on the other reincarnated students take place in the present, and never the twain shall meet, at least not in these 24 episodes.

It feels very disconnected. I said this earlier, but I'm not really a fan of following one character for a long amount of time without someone else for them to bounce off of, and having three other Kumokos is not really a solution to the problem. Kumoko's rise to prominence is interesting sometimes, but other times it just feels boring, especially when it follows a DBZ-style approach of "Kumoko faces powerful enemy, Kumoko gets more skills, Kumoko defeats enemy." It does pick up some once she gets outside and starts getting regarded as a divine beast, but that's very late in this run.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the present day reincarnates are trapped in a typical isekai, but it's more entertaining seeing their various personalities bounce off of each other than following Spider-Monologue. Unfortunately, because the anime divides so much time between them and Kumoko, they don't get to be fleshed out nearly as well as they could've been if the show had just focused on them.

It basically feels like Kumoko's arc is stretched to the point of breaking, but the others' arc is extremely condensed and rushed.

I can think of a few ways this could have been improved. One approach is to maybe just condense Kumoko's arc a bit more and make them more clear as flashbacks. I understand wanting to have the mystery of who Kumoko is and how she ties into the current story. I just don't know if she needs to be the focus to make that work.

Another way to go about it is to just focus on the present storyline. That doesn't mean ditching Kumoko's flashbacks and arc entirely, but just thread it better as a mystery during the course of the current events instead of making it a disconnected storyline fighting for space.

Anyway, after this I'll probably watch something a little more brain-dead, AKA To Love-Ru.

 

New chainsaw man chapter is an all-timer

 

Just started watching Hell’s Paradise, slightly reminds me of Bleach. Not massively into the story just yet but I’ll keep going.

 

Coachella fest allows artists to design trash cans and whoever did this is so real

 

Finally got around to finishing Tomo-Chan is a Girl. Second half of the season is really strong. It ends in a good place and I don’t know if the manga goes beyond that but wouldn’t mind another season. Really liked every character

 

Been watching the first season of To Love Ru and I have a lot of thoughts about it, but the one that keeps coming back to the surface is how weird it is that apparently almost all of this whole season is original to the anime, which makes me wonder if that's why it's so bizarrely inconsistent.

Like, the biggest example I can think of is how the show starts out with Yuki wanting to keep Lala's status as an alien a secret from everyone, but then no one really brings this up again until more than halfway through the season, when suddenly everyone finds out. By this time so many weird things have happened that everyone's more relieved than surprised.

 

Okay, just when I thought this couldn't get more bonkers, a cat-like alien delivers itself in a giant package to Yuki and Lala's school because it's a hitman after Lala's life, except after a brief fight it starts going into contractions because it's pregnant, and after taking it to the infirmary, the cast leaves Yuki's dumb friend behind to deliver the baby, and this is just the start of the episode. WTF.

 

And now episode 20 is a show-within-a-show episode which has none of the main cast at all, which is confounding because if the show is mostly anime-original anyway, why even have an episode like this? What's the point?

 

Okay, I give To Love Ru some credit. This whole time we've never met Yuki's parents, and now he's responsible for the fate of the Earth.

So I wondered, what do his parents think about this? And just now I watched a scene where Yuki's sister shows him a fax from their dad and a text from their mom.

Granted, they just said "Take responsibility" and "Do your best" respectively, but at least the writers didn't ignore the question.

 

This is such a funny gag.

 

Okay, so here's another weird one. I'm on the OVAs now, leading into the second season, Motto To Love Ru, and it's bad enough for the first season they faffed about with a lot of weird anime-original content, but then on the OVAs, they suddenly decided they wanted to be further along in the manga, so they skip whole plot developments to get there.

Like suddenly ghost girl has a body, there's this plant girl thing, and the rich girl is in love with the space cadet. But instead of skipping all of that to adapt something bigger, they spend a whole OVA on a beach episode that is 75% fan service music video and 25% Yuki being turned into a dog. Like, holy fuck, the decisions made by the writing staff are wild.