Posted on January 1, 2026January 1, 2026 in anime, Other Posts

Ranking Every 2025 Anime (That I Actually Finished) From Worst to Best

“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.

It’s that time of year again, folks. Namely, it’s the end of the year. Or rather, by the time you’re reading this, the start of a new one. Now, the past couple of times I’ve done these, I’ve given the article a big long prelude where I talk about my year and the state of mind I went into the article with and so on and so forth. I haven’t really done that this year. My year sucked! Everyone’s year sucked! My year sucking is not remarkable! Right up to the end, it kind of sucked! Because unlike most years where I give myself a lot of breathing room to do these lists, this time I crammed all of my work into the last three days of the year, a brilliant decision that I am absolutely fucking never going to make again. Seriously, I’m writing this at 9PM on New Year’s Eve! This and the bit at the end are the last thing I’m writing, but still!

Anyway, let’s just move on, and talk about the anime. Despite my struggles with writing this list, they were consistently a high point of my experiences this year, and I do value that.

I completed a good bit fewer than my average in 2025—only an even 20 this time—and spent a lot of time I would’ve spent on watching seasonals I wasn’t really feeling watching older anime instead. I don’t particularly like the idea that I might be slowly turning into one of those “no one makes good anime anymore” people, but I do have to admit that this seems to largely be a better use of my time. As such, a lot of the anime on this list are sequels this time around. I admit that’s a little boring! But it’s not like I actively planned to only follow stuff like that, it’s just how things shook out. The counterweight to that though, is that I didn’t really finish any anime this year I’d call outright terrible. That’s right, for the first time ever, a full list has absolutely zero shows on it I’d say are just straightforwardly don’t-watch-this bad.

There is one I’d call disappointing, though.

And, as you know, this list goes from worst to best. So let’s start there.

#20: MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM GQUUUUUUX

God help me, even with barely any of the series under my belt, I’ve become one of those people who complains about modern Gundam. Thankfully, the problems with GQuuuuuuX (which I’ll be typing with just one U from here on out) don’t require any deep knowledge of the Gundam back catalog to explain and are instead very modern issues with what is at its core a very modern anime. GQuX, very simply, is one of those anime that was clearly initially conceived of with the expectation that it would have many more episodes than it actually got, and when the word came down that they would only be getting a standard single cour, whatever attempts were made to edit this thing down to that format failed. The alternative explanation is just that no episode count would’ve made this story work, which is not exactly a great consolation prize.

The bizarre thing is that, taken moment by moment, GQuX is actually a lot of fun. The main characters have an interesting dynamic, between the relatively privileged dreamer Machu, the displaced and struggling Nyaan, and Shuji who…is a graffiti artist. The initial battle royale-type setup with the Clan Battles is a good time, as is Machu’s initially coming into possession of the titular Gundam in the first place. The series’ interplay with the older Gundam material is also interesting. As would be expected of something that’s working in the so-called Daicon lineage, (specifically helmed here by director Tsurumaki Kazuya), There are a lot of great action setpieces and interesting bits of character work (Nyaan joining up with Zeon makes everything very weird in a compelling way, for example) even when the story is hard to follow. This is good, because “when the story is hard to follow” is most of the time.

I’m not a big believer in a story having to be 100% legible to everyone at all times, but with GQuX there is a real sense of trying to keep way more plotlines than it can reasonably juggle in the air at once. Concepts, plot beats, and people are introduced in one episode and dropped the next. This can be a strength in this kind of series, but GQuX doesn’t really pull it off. The real issue, as it often is, is that none of this stuff comes together in a way that makes any sense, either thematically or just on a more basic level as a story. And while I do maintain that the textual interplay between this and the older Gundam stuff is interesting, it doesn’t exactly help make GQuX more coherent.

If you’re charitable, this makes GQuX a fun but messy watch, like so many anime in this particular tradition—say, Gurren Lagann or something—if you are much less charitable, and given a particularly indefensible decision in the final episode especially I’d blame no one if they were, it comes off as afraid of committing to anything in particular, or, even worse, being willfully regressive. All of this, even the worst of it, might be forgivable in a show that didn’t come with a name that carries a lot of weight and legacy. We all have our problematic faves after all, but GQuX was not lucky enough to be born so unburdened. If it reminds people of the more amateurish end of fanfiction—and I’ve seen that description thrown around a lot for this show—I can’t really blame them. A benefit of actual fanfiction is that if it’s bad, no one really cares, because it’s a medium with a very low bar to entry, and the standards are not particularly high. And at its best, fanfiction is adventurous and freewheeling. Actual anime can be the latter, but despite some honest efforts, GQuX mostly doesn’t manage it, which is a shame, because it clearly really wants to.

In another lifetime, I might’ve been nicer toward GQuX. I still don’t think it’s terrible or anything. It’s nowhere near as bad as the dreck that’s bottomed out the list in previous years, and if we compare it to, say, Love Flops, it’s a masterpiece. Still, I do feel let down by it.

The Daicon Lineage that stretches back to the original Daicon Film shorts, through GAINAX’s most influential work, and continued to permeate throughout the 2010s via that of Studio TRIGGER, was for a very long time one of my favorite schools of anime period. But increasingly, either as a function of the anime in that lineage genuinely getting less focused over time or, hell, maybe just me getting older, I increasingly feel like I’m being scammed out of an actual, meaningful story by pretty cuts of animation and cool directorial tricks. I enjoyed GQuX week to week while it was airing, but if it has a real legacy for me personally, it’s making me wonder just how much I’m willing to put up with for this kind of thing at all. Maybe blaming the anime itself for my own disillusionment is immature or lame, but I feel how I feel, and this is my list at the end of the day. That, more than anything, is why it’s bringing up the rear here.

#19: NECRONOMICO & THE COSMIC HORROR SHOW

When Necronomico premiered, I mentioned that if you can’t swing “good,” “weird” is a good second option to aim for. What I left unsaid there is that this does imply that the thing in question isn’t actually good. Or at least doesn’t start that way. And indeed, I’d say Necronomico was, by its end, more or less fine—and definitely still weird—but it’s no one’s idea of a masterpiece.

Still, that novelty is worth something. There are lots of death game anime, but the specificity of the “streamers as contestants subjected to the will of the Old Gods” setup is pretty unique. The show’s main strengths lie in its willingness to put its cast into wacky, bizarre life-or-death situations and tie those situations to the characters’ lives. This doesn’t make the writing particularly deep, but it does make it hit when we learn about, say, popular girl Kagurazaka Kanna’s abusive childhood, or the entire thing with the teacher character toward the end of the show. It also keeps main character Kurono “Necronomico” Miko consistent and engaging to follow. The best element of the anime, though, is Cthulu, depicted here not as a tentacle-faced octopus behemoth but as a haughty ojou with green skin and big hair. She’s inhabiting the body of Miko’s main squeeze, which gives the two a pretty incredible toxic yuri dynamic in a show that one would not really expect that from. (It isn’t even the only one of those, but I don’t want to spoil the whole series, you know?) Necronomico ends on a bit of a whimper—and hilariously teases a sequel that will almost certainly never happen—but it was a decent time while it lasted, and if someone liked the show a lot more than I do, I would understand.

Is it really better than GQuX? Honestly I’m not sure. I mostly put it above Machu & Friends on this list because while GQuX actively let me down, I never expected much from Necronomico in the first place, and it actually managed to surprise me a few times. Is that fair? Not really, but I’m the one making the list. Next!

#18: YANO-KUN’S ORDINARY DAYS

There are two no-frills het romcoms on the list this year. This is the worse of the two, but it’s still a solid showing for the genre. The premise here is pretty simple, our boy Yano Tsuyoshi frequently gets in cartoonish accidents and injures himself due to what is vaguely referred to by those around him as “a predisposition”. Yoshida Kiyoko, our female lead, sees this and is promptly injured herself. Though in her case, it’s by Cupid’s arrow.

So begins a show laser-targeted at the sort of person who gets the most joy out of a series when they can screencap its main characters and ask “are they stupid?” about them. I sometimes fit this description too, and accordingly I liked my time with Yano-kun. It has a charming and straightforward appeal that is welcome in pretty much any anime season, and I was happy to have it as a weekly series to close out the year. (I watched it with a friend, in fact. It’s good for that.) There really is not a ton to this show, if you vibe with the relatively direct character dynamics, you’ll like it, and if not, you probably won’t. I did, so I think it was pretty good. Simple stuff.

I do, however, deduct a few points for teasing the audience about Yano’s heterochromia and then never showing it to us. Boo!

#17: THIS MONSTER WANTS TO EAT ME

Despite taking place in the dead of summer, there is a bone-deep cold to Watatabe, chilly as a coastal winter on the other end of the year. I think of Watatabe as a sort of warped fairytale, our despondent princess, Hinako, is not saved from her survivor’s guilt and depression by a knight in shining armor. She isn’t saved at all, really. Instead, the wicked (well, “wicked”) mermaid Shiori seizes upon her sadness, and they proceed to make each other worse in some very interesting ways, as revelations about the incident that led to Hinako’s suicidal nature come to light and continually rearrange what we think we know about these characters. Add to the mix Miko, Hinako’s childhood friend who turns out to be holding more than a few secrets herself, and you’ve got a tightly-wound dramatic character dynamic that not much else this year matched. Impressive, especially when you consider how few moving parts there truly are to this story.

The main reason this isn’t higher on the list? Honestly, just that this was one of a number of anime this year that were visibly fighting against a threadbare production. More than anything else, it’s made me want to read the manga. But when the story at the core of this series is such a coldly compelling chunk of frozen unease, that’s hardly a bad thing.

16: A NINJA & AN ASSASSIN UNDER ONE ROOF

A throwback to the earlier days of the studio’s history in some ways, NinKoro is a modern example of one of SHAFT‘s older specialties, unhinged, no-rules comedies, typified by the likes of Pani Poni Dash or And Yet The Town Moves. It wouldn’t be entirely correct to call NinKoro straightforwardly retro, as many of its sensibilities are very modern (it’s very gay, for one thing), but the spirit of a bygone era of comedy anime is in there. Cold-blooded killer Konoha Koga and airhead ninja Satoko Kusagakure make for a classic odd couple. But I think the show’s actual style is best explained by its favorite running gag; whenever a situation needs an extra dash of chaos, a highly overdesigned ninja from Shirobako’s village will show up and attack our main characters, before promptly being subjected to Konoha’s ruthless efficency, landing somewhere between slapstick and black comedy. There’s a beating heart in this thing too, in that Konoha and Satoko’s relationship is genuinely sweet, which puts NinKoro above being a mere novelty.

In fact, it’s enough to make me wonder, at this point, is that spirit I mentioned really so bygone anymore? Recent examples, albeit mostly from other studios, seem to drop about once or twice a year. In fact, it isn’t even the last one on this list.

15: BAD GIRL

Less outright zany than NinKoro, and perhaps more properly a yuri series with a comedy bent, Bad Girl seemed to go rather overlooked when it premiered in July of this year. That’s a bit of a shame, because while it doesn’t have the production polish of some of the other comedies on this list, it’s another simple charmer driven by a straightforward but strong set of character dynamics.

The setup here is even simpler than some of the other comedies here, shy goody two-shoes Yuutani Yuu is tired of being nice, and wants to go apeshit. She tries to accomplish this by becoming “a delinquent”, which in her mind seems to consist mostly of wearing clip-on earrings and a jacket. At the same time, she’s crushing on Mizutori Atori, the class rep, which throws this whole delinquent thing into question. Add in a childhood friend, a streamer girl who craves attention more than anything, and a blue-haired menace who really seems like she’d rather be in Zenkowa or something, and you’ve got a pretty great set of characters that the show puts through their comedic paces. Often, this entails making Yuu the butt of some joke or another, and more than one character compares her to a small animal. The show is also surprisingly horny, and a recurring gag sees Yuu imagined in a sexy dog-girl outfit, but, given the general light goofing-around vibe and the series’ yuri bent, that’s not really a bad thing. It fits the tone.

Honestly, I like Bad Girl and NinKoro about equally. Why did I give this one a higher spot? Because I watched it with my girlfriend, and I think in a way that’s worth more than any tangible merit of the series itself.

14: TURKEY! TIME TO STRIKE

Every once in a while, an anime drops that just defies any easy categorization. If it seems pat to point out that this is true of Turkey! you’ll have to forgive me for stating the obvious. It is worth stating though, Turkey! spends most of its first episode setting the pins for a sort of MyGO!-for-bowling sports drama thing before making a hard swerve into a time travel historical fiction adventure, and I think it speaks to how well the show pulled it off that anyone stuck around after that. Bait-and-switch twists, even those that early, are devilishly hard to get right.

In its contrasts between past and present, Turkey! asks some interesting questions. As is common for time travel narratives, it draws distinction between the value systems of history and those we live with today, culminating in a really impressive turn around the show’s middle. In episode six for example, sweetheart Ichinose Sayuri helps her warrior friend Suguri defend her village from bandits. This, naturally, entails killing them, and there’s a rich vein of drama in how this kind of breaks Sayuri’s brain, as someone from a relatively privileged modern position, who simply isn’t equipped to reconcile that the kind person she’s grown to know over the show’s first third could do that to someone. The way the series attempts to reconcile this is extremely potent within the episode itself, involving the literal and symbolic image of a white flower stained red with blood.

That stretch of the series is probably the show’s peak, and if it never quite hits that high again—although it comes close—it makes up for any deficiencies with sheer over-the-top style. It also never actually stops being about bowling, incorporating the sport as both a peaceful recreation the girls bring with them to the past and as a serious, sometimes deadly serious synecdoche for its characters’ lives and priorities. Despite how different the events of the series are to most other emotionally-tense girls’ drama anime of this type, Turkey! is one of those, despite the time travel conceit and adventure elements. This leads to some great serious moments, but also a lot of delicious camp. Where else this year were you going to get a line like, from the finale, “I don’t care about your damn gods. I care about bowling.”? That’s all-timer material right there. That, as much as the more serious stuff, is the key to the show’s success.

For these reasons and more, Turkey! is a true army of one, and I would be unsurprised to see it become something of a cult classic in the years ahead.

13: RURI ROCKS

The first, but not the last, gorgeous slice of life series on the list, Ruri Rocks is a slow, contemplative anime about finding value in the natural world. The titular Tanigawa Ruri is interested in gemstones, first just because she thinks they’re pretty. Over the course of the series, however, she comes to appreciate minerals and the grasp processes of geologic deep time, guided by her older friend and mentor figure, Arato Nagi. Each episode focuses, by and large, on a mineral or similar material, moving from placer gold to pyrite, sapphires to sea glass, and so on, as both Ruri and by extension ourselves learn about them. After its first few episodes, the show’s world expands, slowly but surely, adding a few additional characters and broadening Ruri’s perspective.

Tellingly, the single best episode of the show is actually about actual mineralogy only in the loosest of terms, where Ruri finds an old crystal radio that once belonged to her late grandfather. This is another of the show’s main ideas; that what we do today can connect us, however fleetingly, to the endless yesterdays before us, whether that time scale is across human lifetimes or across eons. The result is a warm, gorgeous ballad about the forces that shape our world, and the beauty to be found in appreciating them.

I think some people will be surprised that Ruri Rocks isn’t even higher on the list. But honestly? This entry and onward, the list really becomes a total free-for-all. If someone said Ruri Rocks was their favorite anime of the whole year, I’d completely understand. That’s also true for everything above it on the list. (And honestly, if someone said their favorite anime of the year was Turkey! I’d respect the hell out of that, too.)

12: MONO

And hey, why not put both of the gorgeous iyashikei on the list right next to each other? Is it some contrarian impulse that causes me to rank mono as the slightly higher of the two? Maybe. But to be honest, this is another case where I like the shows about equally.

As Ruri Rocks is about time, we can, if we want to draw a contrast, say mono is about space. Nominally it’s actually about photography and video, but quite unlike the focused nature of its immediate listmate, mono is charmingly rambling in nature, and is content to devote entire episodes to things wholly unrelated to the hobby club that are technically its protagonists. Over the course of the series, we get individual episodes about ghosts (whose existence is just taken as a given in mono), the tribulations of both the mangaka that the main girls know and a few other ones that she knows, road trips gone awry, and much more. The real focus for much of this is on the beauty of the various landscapes mono gets to show off. I’ve described both Ruri Rocks and this series as iyashikei, but the love of rolling green hills and the like here feels of a piece with the spirit of the genre in an ephemeral, hard-to-place way. It’s pretty enough to double as a tourism ad, which makes some sense given that the original manga comes from the pen of Yuru Camp creator AFRO.

11: SHOSHIMIN: HOW TO BECOME ORDINARY, SEASON 2

Straight couples will literally do this rather than go to therapy.

There are a few returnees on the list this year, but this actually isn’t one of them. Shoshimin Series only made the honorable mentions last year, because I hadn’t actually finished the first season of the anime at the time, so this is its first appearance in a year-end list proper. This is maybe a good thing, if we’re going to pretend that these shows somehow care about their standings at all, because I actually thought the first season was kind of a mixed bag!

The anime’s initial setups of low-stakes mysteries, “solved” by our main duo of Kobato Jougorou and Osanai Yuki, didn’t entirely grab me. But, toward the end of that season, Osanai was fucking kidnapped, and the stakes started being appropriately raised. That largely continues into the second season, as Kobato and Osanai’s unusual relationship continues to evolve. Both of them have compulsive playing-detective-brain and struggle to get on with normal people, meaning that the only person who really understands either of them is the other, but they “break up” early into the season, and the bulk of it is done with them apart. This lets some other characters get a bit of focus, including Urino Takahiko, a member of the school newspaper club who makes a fool of himself trying to solve a local arson case, but largely the series’ main interest remains the psychodrama between and around Kobato and Osanai. Osanai, in fact, is a large part of the reason this series is so high in the first place. She is a treat of a character, a total weirdo with a sweet tooth who constantly feels the need to intellectually challenge other people. She’s a fascinating secondary protagonist, but honestly Kobato is a solid lead as well, and it’s probably to both’s benefit that they stick together at the end of the season. I’m not sure anyone else should be involved in the whole thing they have going on by series’ end.

The series’ direction plays a big part in selling all the mind games here, as well. Often, it takes a hallucinatory, bilocational approach, directly inserting the characters into scenes while they speak that aren’t literal representations of where they are but rather of what they’re discussing. This highly stylized approach to visual conversation is something that I feel anime has been missing a bit, lately, as the whole “Monogatari-esque” / Faust magazine-core genre has declined somewhat in the last decade. In that sense as much as anything else, Shoshimin Series was a breath of fresh air.

My understanding is that the two seasons of the anime form a nearly-complete adaptation of the original light novels. So if we ever get more Shoshimin, it probably won’t be for a while. Still, I am glad to have finished it, and glad to get to put it on the list.

10: TATSUKI FUJIMOTO 17-26

The Chainsaw Man movie is not on this list. I know, I specifically didn’t give Chainsaw Man the gold medal back in 2022 because I expected its eventual followup would be even better. And it was! So me not covering films in these lists is really biting me in the ass here. Nonetheless, Chainsaw Man mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto has found a way to sneak onto the list regardless, thanks to this anthology adapting some of his earlier oneshots.

I did think about excluding Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26 from the list too. It’s not really a TV series as such, given that it’s an anthology of shorts, and the episodes are of varying lengths. But, it was close enough that I chose to include it. If it wasn’t one of the most original anime productions of the year, I might not have bothered, but by simple fact of being an anthology, with 8 different shorts by 8 different teams, it’s worth serious consideration. That structure did make ranking 17-26 on the whole kind of hard, since some episodes—the explosive romcom-action burst of “Shikaku”, the hormonal psychedelia of “Woke-Up-As-A-Girl Syndrome”, the grounded character drama of “Sisters”, probably the best of the lot—are fantastic, whereas others are just so-so, but even the least of these stories is interesting, and really reinforces Fujimoto’s status as a true original. I would love to see more mangaka anthologies like this get anime, or even just for more anime anthologies to exist in general. The format is severely underutilized in the medium, maybe the success of this one will spur some imitators? We can only hope.

9: DAN DA DAN, SEASON 2

Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I have to rate an actual battle shonen series on these lists, I always feel a little silly. Perhaps because the institution stands slightly apart from the rest of the seasonal churn. Nonetheless, there was more Dandadan this year, and like last year’s Dandadan? It was very good. Dandadan‘s strengths have not really changed, fun and novel character dynamics on top of a bed of intense, often outright surreal action pieces. Highlights from this season include a musical exorcism, the introduction of Evil Eye to the cast, and a huge, multi-part kaiju battle to round out the season. All of this is, genuinely, great stuff, but I think on some level, deeper analysis of the how’s and why’s of Dandadan might be best left to people with a lot more shonen head cred than I have. (The sort of people who have a better idea of what “newgen” means in this context than I do, maybe.) I find myself with a dearth of anything new to say about it compared to last year.

But honestly? Maybe that’s not a problem. There’s no issue with consistently hitting your strengths year after year, and if Dandadan wants to keep doing that, and going on and on, I’d welcome it with open arms.

8: TAKOPI’S ORIGINAL SIN

Most of the time, when I write these lists, I’m reaffirming the thoughts I already had on a work. Here, I’m actually going to do a slight bit of course-correction. When Takopi premiered, I, in hindsight foolishly, hemmed and hawed over actually covering it in any depth because it was so grim. This, with even just a few months of hindsight, is obviously stupid. So let me double down on what became my opinion of Takopi around when it ended. The situations portrayed in Takopi are extreme, and the titular space octopus / Doraemon-core kids’ anime escapee is simply not equipped to handle the tangle of abuse, social ostracization, depression, poverty, and tragedy he wanders into. His attempts to help largely make things worse, and the time loop that takes up the bulk of the show’s plot really takes great pains to express this. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” is a stone cliché, but it is so for a reason. You can’t just good vibes your way out of situations this dire.

As much for its affecting story, though, I rank Takopi highly on the basis of its direction. Iino Shinya was largely previously known for his work on the Dr. Stone anime which, no disrespect to that series, is just not playing the same game that this is at all. When Takopi needs to convey dissociation, the entire world of the show will wobble and waver. Overall, it’s just gorgeous, and that it is so in service to this kind of tragedy makes it hit all the harder.

The fact that Takopi isn’t even higher on this list is slightly an olive branch to those who instead find all this drama ridiculous instead of affecting. (I don’t agree, but I do get it. I think stuff like this requires a certain emotional temperament. ie. me being a huge sap, something that is not true of everyone.) But mostly, it’s just a testament to the fact that this year was absurdly stacked with good anime. I was genuinely moved by it, up to actually crying at the finale, and I think it’s going to stick with me for a long while. It makes perfect sense, but it is pretty stark that, faced with the overwhelmingly tragic situations of its protagonists, the only solution that finally works for Takopi is no solution at all. He simply removes himself from the equation, and only then do things begin to work out.

7: MILKY☆SUBWAY: THE GALACTIC LIMITED EXPRESS

Perhaps Takopi‘s polar opposite in terms of tone, Milky Subway is almost certainly the most obscure thing here. Milky Subway is a 3DCG youtube series about a group of convicts who have to figure out what’s going on when the space train that they’re on starts operating by itself. That premise, and the fact that the show takes place in a far off, gee-whiz kind of sci fi future you just don’t see very often anymore, would be enough on its own to set Milky Subway apart. Its real strength is in our main duo, though, the slightly airheaded and a bit whiny (in a cute way) Kujo Chiharu, and her we’ll just say girlfriend Kurusu Makina, a robot girl with a dry sense of humor and a lack of patience for anyone’s nonsense. They’re a blast to follow, and the bizarre situation they find themselves in aboard the train lends itself well to them playing off the rest of the cast as well.

If Milky Subway has a “flaw” (and I don’t really think it is one), it’s that it’s quite short. Each episode is only about three minutes long, and that’s with credits. Still, the result is one of the most unique experiences of the year, one that has as much in common with the broad world of web animation as it does with what I normally cover on this site. It’s also just straight up on Youtube, so if you haven’t seen it, fix that!

6: MY DRESS-UP DARLING, SEASON 2

We’re in the midst of a run of sequels here. You’ll have to pardon that, they’re not gonna let up as we keep climbing the list. Dress-Up Darling returns to us from 2022 and, perhaps surprisingly, is not the last Class of ’22 alum we’ll see here.

More important than its credentials though are that its fundamental strengths are all still intact. It’s still the radiantly warm, charming, easygoing love story of a pair of complete nerds, Gojo and Marin, who bond over cosplay, Marin’s favorite thing in the whole world, essentially. Far from having suffered from the time away, MDUD actually returned to us this year with even more visually sumptuous treats than it had when we last saw it. While there aren’t any more clips from Flower Princess Blaze in this season—the only fictional anime I’ve ever written a review of—there are plenty more where that came from, including a faux-OVA that kicks off the season. In fact, my favorite arc of this season revolves around one of these impressive bits of pastiche. Marin’s enthusiasm for a horror game called Coffin is central to the season’s final stretch. Coffin has a sort of willfuly faux-retro look I associate with the like of itch.io visual novels and such. To see an aesthetic like that in a series like this is really quite something, even moreso when it’s tied to a truly awesome-looking horror cosplay shoot the characters are involved in.

More than just being visually snappy though, Dress-Up Darling also continues to gently prod at the seams of gender expression. Another arc in this season sees Marin engage in some cross-play as part of a contest. New character Amane Himeno, is also a crossplayer (though if one wants to interpret Amane a bit more LGBT-y, I certainly won’t stop you), his whole backstory about dumping his girlfriend when she learned about his hobby and was disgusted by it is one of several ways that MDUD suggests that this kind of gender essentialism is on its way out. Honestly, more than maybe anything else on this list, I really hope it’s right about the world’s vibes. We needed that sunshine in 2025.

5: CALL OF THE NIGHT, SEASON 2

Of the two unexpected returns from 2022 anime on this list, I was actually more surprised by this one, in a way. Dress-Up Darling was popular, so a sequel at some point felt like a sure thing. Call of The Night, though, always felt like it was just outside the popular kids club.

Which only makes sense, Call of The Night sees the vampire as a stand-in for just about any kind of outcast. That’s why Ko, our male lead, fit in so well with Nazuna and the other vampires back in season one. But its second season took a turn for the queer (explicitly so) and, related to that, the dark. A majority of this season focuses on Nazuna’s past, giving us backstory for herself, but also characters like Hondo Kabura, who we met in season one but didn’t really get to know. (Kabura’s episodes, particularly the first, are some of the best of the year full stop.) In these stories, Call of The Night draws direct parallels between vampirism and queerness, adding it to the list of the many, many things that can get a person cut off from normal society. Anko returns here too, also getting a fully fleshed-out series of flashback episodes that frame her former relationship with Nazuna herself, directly in queer terms. All of that explodes in a final act that is as spine-chilling as anything else to air this year, nearly ending in truly dire terms when it seems like Anko is really willing to throw away everything to exterminate the vampires she’s come to hold in such contempt.

The queerness makes the fact that none of these relationships last, and their arguable replacement with Ko’s and Nazuna’s, sit just slightly uneasily. I don’t think it’s a real flaw, but if someone held it against the series I’m not sure I could blame them. Honestly, that unease is maybe the main reason it’s not in the top three. Still, you can’t argue with the effectiveness of something like this. It’s powerful. And, well, in addition to everything else I’ve said. In the last episode of the season, Anko makes a comment that she feels she’s gotten older but hasn’t really grown up. I relate. So hey, points for that, too.

4: THERE’S NO FREAKING WAY I’LL BE YOUR LOVER! UNLESS….

Here we have a show that’s going out of its way to complicate being on the list at all! Literally today, the day I’m writing this, December 31st, the show better known as Watanare, dropped a five-episode coda to its excellent first season. This was originally a theatrical release, so I’m not really counting it for the purposes of this entry. Just know that here—there’s always somewhere where this is true on the list, it seems, even if I wait until the final day of the year—I’m working off incomplete information.

Even so, Watanare was already fantastic just with the 12 episodes it initially aired with. I’d hesitate to describe Watanare as a romcom, although that’s probably the closest fit in terms of strict genre. If it’s anything, it’s a situationship dramedy, a harem series where girl after girl can simply not help falling under the spell of local dangerous pink thing Amaori Renako. Initially confessed to by overbearing rich girl Ouzuka Mai, Renako’s high school life quickly becomes a ball of un-resolvable romantic entanglement. It’s an absolute charm to watch from start to finish, as one never really knows which of Renako’s seemingly endless parade of girlfriends is going to throw things into a tizzy next.

As much as its writing (which is very good, don’t get me wrong), another important aspect of Watanare is its atmosphere. The series has a slightly unreal visual quality, I’ve previously compared it to city pop album covers and, honestly, I can’t really think of any better way to pin it down. It’s achingly romantic but not cloying, embracing all the messiness that comes with relationships and amplifying it until the knob breaks. It’s one of a couple anime where I’m kicking myself for not putting it at the top of the list! But it is what it is, 2025 was a very good year for the medium. Also, the finale’s conclusion remains an all-time way to end your high school romance show. No notes. Muri muri!

3: CITY: THE ANIMATION

Occasionally, an anime comes along that is both extremely good but also simply so good that it becomes a bit difficult to write about. What is there to say about CITY THE ANIMATION? Do you point out that it’s a massive artistic flex from, take your pick, director Ishidate Taichi who pulls off some truly unhinged stuff here, original mangaka Arawi Keiichi who has now had his work adapted into an era-defining comedy anime twice, just Kyoto Animation in general, putting the lie to any idea that they’re out of new ways to make a show just fucking slap from start to finish?

It’s true that this anime’s vast cast, a widescreen portrait of the titular city on the whole as opposed to just one or two residents, makes known a real joie de vivre that is tough to match in any year’s comedy offerings. It’s true that the directorial stuff really is that crazy, the way the show breaks into sectioned-off visual pieces in episode five only to knit itself back together into a quilt at the end of that episode must be seen to be believed. The same is true of the musical in the final episode, the show’s surprising number of silent segments that rely on expressive animation alone, etc. But at some point we’re just listing things about the show that are impressive, not necessarily the things that are good, and there is a distinction there.

So if I had to pin why I rate it so highly on any one thing in particular, it’s simply this: CITY was one of only a handful of things this year that made me optimistic about the future of anime. It was very easy to be cynical this year, for reasons I’m not really going to get deeply into but which I’m sure you can guess at if you follow the medium at all. In its specific mastery of the fundamentals, it’s a masterpiece in a very old-school, craftsmanship-first way, and I would not be surprised if it eventually emerges as the consensus best anime of 2025. It wasn’t my personal favorite, but it came very, very close.

2: UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY

Every year, I do a little thing on social media where I have people try to guess what they think my number one pick is going to be. There were two anime that were highly mentioned this time around, and one of those was Cinderella Gray. In literally any other year, you all would’ve been right.

We’ll get to why you weren’t in a minute, but 2025 was the year I got really into Umamusume. And if I wanted to put this entry at the very top of the list because of that alone, I think I would’ve been justified in doing so. But even if we ignore the entire rest of the series, I think the story of Oguri Cap’s rise to fame is one of the year’s best. Oguri herself is maybe the year’s single best protagonist, a lovable country bumpkin who also happens to be one of the absolute strongest people in her sport.

While the series more than makes sense in aggregate, I think Cinderella Gray is best thought of as a series of moments. (Any of you who just asked “hype moments?”, you’re the people I’m really writing this entry for.) Picture Oguri and a favorite race will spring to mind, one of her beastly final spurts, or a moment of tension. Or maybe you favor one of the other characters instead, and what comes to the forefront is a flash of white lightning, a victory clinched or lost in an instant, the scowling face of a prior era’s ruler. Cinderella Gray is a series of become verbs. Want. Strive. Struggle. Achieve. If I say that Umamusume as a whole enterprise has achieved an almost talismanic importance to me, I sound like a lunatic, so let me just say instead that it lights something in me that I can’t entirely name. Maybe that’s silly, but it’s the truth. For as goofy as Umamusume’s very premise seems and, honestly, is, it is genuinely inspirational in a way that very few things are. (In fact, I’ve said this before, but it is truly incredible that Oguri Cap is still inspiring people some some 30 years after the end of his career. Sure, it’s in a different form, but how many athletes, human or otherwise, can claim that? It’s a pretty exclusive club, and it’s not one he’ll be leaving any time soon.)

The explosive, world-conquering vibe check aside, it really is a great story, too. One that deals with the temporary nature of all of these things just as it effortlessly embodies the thrill of chasing after them. Future seasons of Cinderella Gray—and there will be future seasons, I’m almost certain—will shift the thematic balance in regards to which it emphasizes, but its first season (in two parts. Confusing!) is a triumphant, star-reaching pulse of a thing. It doesn’t hurt that every one of Oguri’s competitors, from her career-defining rivalry with Tamamo Cross to even cool-as-hell one-offs like Obey Your Master, are great characters in their own right. Added together ,what you have here are the first two chapters of an epic. And in fact, that’s the main reason this isn’t at the top of the list. They are going to make more Cinderella Gray, and—spoiler here—as someone who’s read the manga, I have every reason to believe it’s going to be even better than what we have already. Keep running, Oguri Cap, you’re not at the finish line yet.

So, that’s 19 of 20 anime down. As I said, in any ordinary year, everyone who guessed my #1 pick would be Cinderella Gray would be absolutely right, and I hope I’ve conveyed at least some sense of why that’s so. Unfortunately, 2025 was not an ordinary year. So if you want to feel bad for Cinderella Gray, lament only that it was not born in a different era.

Congratulations to everyone who guessed my #1 pick. By my reckoning, that’s my good friends June, Astro, Persica, and Wolfie.

1: AVE MUJICA -THE DIE IS CAST-

Look. I know, okay?

I am keenly aware of how it looks to have a girl band anime as my show of the year, two years in a row. Back to back girl band dramas! She’s lost it! She should have her anime critic card revoked!

Unfortunately for all of you, there is no license to be an anime blogger. I only write these things because I’m weird enough to want to. So here, at the end of one year and the start of the next, let’s do this whole song and dance one more time.

^{I think there’s a good chance that, at this point, people who read my blog regularly have seen this image of Sakiko more than the people who animated it.}

I tried a few different placements of the top three before settling on this one. I would be lying if I said I was perfectly happy with it, but I made up the format of these posts in the first place, so I feel an obligation to stick to them. There are no ties. If I have to single out what I think is the best anime of the year, of those I watched, there really isn’t any doubt. It’s Ave Mujica, whether you want to call it by its marketing-mandated full English title or not, there just really isn’t any other option. Other anime this year were many things. In many years, being merely a work of deep, healing beauty, or being something inspiring enough to remind me to push forward day by day, would be enough to place at the top. That was the case in 2022 with Healer Girl or, yes, in 2024 with Girls Band Cry, and it was the case this year with Cinderella Gray. Nothing I’m about to say is meant to disparage any of those anime, which are all fantastic in their own right. But, this year was different. This year, the demiurge walked among us. She had blue hair and trauma, and she made it everybody’s problem.

Ave Mujica is, technically, yet another anime on the list that’s a sequel, being the followup to 2023’s BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! MyGO is an excellent series in its own right, and had the subseries stopped there, we would still absolutely be talking about it was one of the best anime of the 2020s. But, MyGO, at the end of the day, was still a band girl anime, the genre label that has emerged for this cluster of anime that deal with young girls processing their pain and sorrow through the power of music. I already went over the basics of MyGO‘s story leading into Ave Mujica during my review-not-a-review of the series, so I won’t repeat myself, but it is worth emphasizing that everything that happened in the first season, as great as it was, was still pretty normal territory for this genre. And then, at the eleventh hour, its final episode turned it into something else.

It does put me in a funny spot, though. More than anything else I’ve ever put this high on the list that I didn’t do literal week-by-week coverage of, I have already written about Ave Mujica extensively. I have arguably written too much about the damn thing. Seriously, it’s a little excessive. But I couldn’t help it! Something about Ave Mujica drove me a little crazy, and maybe that’s a function as much of my own declining mental health as it is anything about the show, but I really do think Ave Mujica is a born classic. The best anime either define their times or embody them, and if there has ever been a better representation of the emotional cement mixer that is the mid-2020s, I’m not aware of it. Under everything, under the arguments about whether this is even really a music anime, under the tedious discourse about its ostensibly “problematic” elements, you have an anime about five people whose teenage emotional fallout, ongoing trauma, and unique neuroses are blown up to first theatrical, and then mythological proportions. It only makes sense that by the end of the season, Sakiko has declared herself a god lording over a walled garden. What else was she going to do?

There’s a further reason, in fact, that I put this at #1, the very real possibility that this all comes crashing down around us, some day very soon. I mentioned in the Cinderella Gray section that I sometimes rate things slightly lower on these lists because I believe they will become even better with subsequent entries. Crucially, I don’t really know if that’s true with Ave Mujica. Everything it’s built up is such a high-wire razor’s-edge balancing act that it feels completely impossible that season three, whatever it will entail, could ever top this. (Spare a thought, also, for Mugendai Mewtype, the other BanG Dream band slated to get an anime in the coming year, who have the unenviable task of following this.) I’ve been wrong before, and I would love to be wrong here, too, but the yawning uncertainty of the future does make me feel like I have to recognize Ave Mujica for what it is now. The dream, remember, is only illusorily eternal. The walled garden only exists until we wake up. Memento mori and all that. Is this the crescendo of this black opera? Do we wait on just the grim conclusion, or somehow, some way, will it find even higher to climb? I don’t know! That uncertainty is a little scary, but it’s also exciting.

So that’s how we close the year, with a screaming, gothic thrash of pain as we rocket toward a cryptic and hazy future. I’ve made a bad habit in the past of trying to directly tie my anime criticism in a given year to my emotional state, but, well, I don’t think a look at this list necessarily needs a genius to interpret. The future will come whether we’re ready for it or not, but, if we’re going down, at least we’re burning in the same fire. That, I think, is perhaps the spirit I’ve taken Ave Mujica (and Ave Mujica) in, and I hope the spirit you’ll take this entry in, as well. And if this all seems rather dramatic to you, well….yeah! It is! I’ve been a lot of things over the course of my ‘career’ as an anime blogger, but I’ve never been a liar. May 2026 be a year where a sunnier best-of pick makes more sense.

And that’s the list. One of the least-stratified I’ve ever done, I think (I truly do think basically anything from Ruri Rocks on up could conceivably be somebody’s anime of the year). As I do every year, I want to thank all of my lovely internet friends, those from the Ave Mujica Scream Zone who were with me every step of the way through experiencing the show itself, my friends from the Witch’s Manor and the other Discord servers related to those two. A big shout out, as well, to my bluesky and tumblr followers, as well as everyone on the Magic Planet Anime Discord. You guys rock, and I wouldn’t be here without you.

As always, consider tossing me a donation if you liked the list. These year-end lists take a lot of effort.

I’ll see you when I see you, anime fans.

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Posted on October 19, 2025 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 16 – “The World’s Best”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

Hello, umadacchi. Your beloved blogger is a bit under the weather this week, but luckily, this particular episode of Cinderella Gray is mostly one of laying groundwork and doing some character introductions. As such, it’s pretty simple to cover.

Plainly, this episode serves to introduce (or reintroduce, in a few cases) Oguri Cap’s competition at the upcoming Japan Cup. The episode is actually structured as such that it largely introduces Oguri’s foreign rivals first—which makes sense, there’s more to cover there—but we’re going to flip that around and talk about her domestic competition to start with. There are just fewer umamusume in this category, and one of them, Tamamo Cross, is essentially the show’s defending champion. Tamtam gets a nice little practice vignette with her trainer, who warns her against pushing herself. A gentle reassurance from someone who cares, or foreshadowing of something greater? We can’t yet say, but it’s good to see Tamamo around, and it also gives us the delightful treat of seeing her with her head ornamentation removed. Cute!

Oguri’s other main competitor from Japan is Gold City, who actually practices with her at Musaka’s behest as they try to build Oguri’s stamina, given that the Japan Cup, at 2400 meters, is longer than any race Oguri’s yet run.

Oguri and Gold City, in a nice change of pace from some of Oguri’s more serious rivalries, hit it off pretty much immediately, and the episode’s penultimate scene is a funny exchange between the two of them wherein Oguri asks Gold how she keeps her hair so nice, leading to a whole bit about shampoo.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the international competition is given a bit more focus. Umamusume doesn’t get the chance to feature horsegirls from anywhere but Japan terribly often, so when they do, they tend to go all out. It is also worth noting that this is another case where the umamusume aren’t named directly after the real racehorses—rights issues, one imagines—and it’s fun to compare whose legally-distinct name is an upgrade and try to imagine how they might have gotten from one name to another.

Easily the most prominent of the umamusume featured here is Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko, based on the real horse Tony Bin], presented as a genuine menace. Enough so to merit an at least passing comparison to Symboli Rudolf (herself the last Japanese horsegirl to win the Japan Cup). She has an impressive record, too, most notably, she’s the most recent Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe champion.

Of the girls introduced here, Bianca is perhaps the most classically in the ‘arrogant rival’ mold. When our good friend the reporter Fuuji, a recurring presence throughout this episode, asks her what she intends to accomplish by running in the Japan Cup, Toni replies nothing. She intends to win, and she will win, and that’s that. Fuuji is impressed by this of course, but there’s the subtle implication of something more complex going on when later, on her own, she contemplates that the upcoming race will be her magnum opus. What that could mean, we don’t yet know, but it’s enough to raise some intrigue about a character who is otherwise a bit broad.

Even more so is the UK’s representative, Moonlight Lunacy [Sekine Akira, based on Moon Madness. I’m honestly not sure how they got away with that one].

She has a refined and elegant design, and some banter with Fuuji reveals that the two have at least some prior history together—she apparently competed in the last Japan Cup, only to come in fifth—and she kicks him for being tactless when he brings up her previous defeat in the race. Still, I’d say she’s firmly the least interesting of the umamusume introduced here.

Contrast, for example, Ellerslie Pride [Tomita Miyu, based on Bonecrusher, easily the biggest name downgrade here], the sole Japan Cup runner from the southern hemisphere and representing the hope of not just her home country New Zealand, but that entire half of the globe in general.

Her somewhat tough appearance (and the straight-up intimidating name of her inspiration) belie a horsegirl who is clearly a little desperate to put her country on the map. She actually visits a shrine as her first order of business in Japan, apparently praying for her own success. (Fuuji bothers her, too, and gets a giant shrine bell dropped on his head for the trouble.)

And of course, there are the Americans. Michelle My Baby [Takagaki Ayahi, based on My Big Boy] is incredibly tall compared to almost every other character we’ve seen in the series so far. We don’t learn terribly much about her—although on a fact-finding mission for Musaka, Belno Light describes her as having the strength of a bulldozer—but when you’re introduced by slam dunking a basketball from across the court, maybe you don’t need much in the way of complicated character motivation.

Which leaves us with one last character to meet. The other American umamusume is an apparently utterly unremarkable racer, no G1 wins, no record of really any note at all, and she’s also rather hard to get ahold of. Fuuji tries to find her but doesn’t succeed. Belno does, though, although one gets the sense it might be because she wanted to be found.

This is how we meet Obey Your Master

^{[Ishigami Shizuka, based on Pay The Butler].}

When Belno finds her, Obey is literally face down, ass in the air, sniffing the grass. Why is she doing this? Who knows! Belno asks her, and her response is that it “smells amazing.” So at first, one might reasonably conclude that Obey is just weird. Weird girls are not new territory for Umamusume—see Gold Ship, a generational cryptid sort of girl, as just one example—but Belno, and indeed Oguri Cap, are not so lucky. Obey seems to immediately cotton on to what Belno is doing (and jokingly calls her “James Bond”). In fact, Obey knows all about Oguri Cap, starting from her career as a regional star in Kasamatsu up to the Fall Tenno Sho where she lost to Tamamo Cross. But actually, Obey even knows who Belno is, and it is with some sense of alarm that Belno Light processes that the last girl she’s been sent to find is not normal.

We can just say it. Obey is a freak. I fucking love her, she is one of my favorite charcters from Cinderella Gray in general, but she is an odd, odd character. The combination of everything we see here; her wild eccentricity, the star-shaped pupils, her encyclopedic knowledge of the competition, and of course the episode’s instantly-infamous final scene where she dances alone in the dark, Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross’ race playing on her television and her rivals’ photos plastered all over her walls, brings to mind nothing less specific than Kurokawa Akane from Oshi no Ko. In fact, despite some obvious differences, she comes off as an outright interpolation of the character into a radically different context. I can’t prove that the inspiration actually worked that way—if it did, mangaka Kuzumi Taiyou would have to have been pretty quick on the draw, as Cinderella Gray and OnK started serializing around the same time—so if that reference point seems improbable to you, we can also just say that Obey comes off as a bit serial killer-y in, especially, that final sequence. This is, of course, fantastic, and it implicitly suggests that the true showdown in the Japan Cup will not be between Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and—as one could be fooled into thinking from the start of this episode—Toni Bianca, but between those two and Obey.

Obey explicitly identifies Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap as her “enemies” for the Japan Cup. And they both, it seems, will have to be careful to not be her next victim.

Posted on October 12, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Deep Space Wolves at The Door in GNOSIA

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Everyone who knows anything about GNOSIA has made essentially the same joke about it. Finally, an Among Us anime! It’s the kind of essentially-obligatory reference that can quickly get old, but, honestly, in the case of GNOSIA it’s not really a bad place to start in terms of describing the thing. And the series itself directly invokes Among Us‘ public-domain, lycanthropic predecessor werewolf.

GNOSIA is set aboard a space ship en route from one planet to another. On the planet they departed from, they were attacked by something called a gnosia, and now the gnosia is one of the people on board. What’s a gnosia? How does it spread from one person to another? We don’t really know that, yet! Things are kept in deliberately broad terms in this first episode. From what little we do know, it seems like some kind of virus that….turns people into? Replaces them with? Alien shapeshifters. Again! It’s all a bit vague.

But that’s part of the point, as it turns out. Because our viewpoint character is Yuri [Anzai Chika], an amnesiac freshly woken from suspended animation by Setsu [Hasegawa Ikumi], a non-binary soldier who seems to be the unofficial semi-leader of the proceedings. Setsu explains the entire wolf-among-us situation to Yuri, and Yuri’s drafted into the process of voting on which of the crew will be placed back into suspended animation. There are a few key points to absorb here, and the bulk of the episode is devoted to fleshing these out.

Here’s what we—along with Yuri—learn over the course of the first episode. One, this voting-out-the-impostor situation is mandatory, because the ship’s controlling AI, LeVi, will enable the self-destruct sequence if the passengers don’t attempt to get rid of the gnosia themselves. Two, the ship periodically jumps into hyperspace. Humans can’t stay awake during these jumps, but the gnosia can, giving them an opportunity to attack. Three, the fact that one person is placed back into cold sleep “per round” means that if the gnosia isn’t caught by a certain point, it will be down to just one human and the gnosia, at which point the human “loses.”

If all of this sounds very video game-y, that’s because GNOSIA is a relatively rare anime that’s actually adapted from a video game, in this case originally a Vita title that’s been ported several times over the years. (Hilariously, dating from 2019, it actually predates Among Us‘ explosion in popularity.) Usually, when an anime is said to feel “gamey” that’s a bad thing. But, for the second time this season, I’m going to suggest that something that’s usually a negative is not necessarily one. The gaminess lets us, the viewers, feel involved as Yuri learns about the setting and the cast of characters.

Speaking of, in addition to Yuri and Setsu themselves, the first episode also introduces a quiet, reserved woman named Jina [Seto Asami], a blunt enby who’s so straightforward that it’s to their own detriment who goes by Racio [Nanami Hiroki], and a flirtatious, charming, deeply suspicious, and radioactively hot woman with the somewhat cryptic moniker of SQ [Kitou Akari].

I have my favorites already, but in general this is a really strong group of characters, enough so that I didn’t want any of them to be the gnosia. (Another way my own point of view sympathized with Yuri. As they, naïve to the world, want to trust everyone here equally.) Of course, after two rounds of voting, we learn that, nonetheless, one of them is.

The second round ends with Yuri and SQ, who’s managed to sway Yuri to her side of things, locking Setsu in cold storage, after having lost Racio to the previous round and Jina to a gnosia attack during a hyperjump. This turns out to be the wrong decision, as SQ—the one who’s been acting very suspicious the entire episode—is, in fact, the gnosia. The good news for Yuri is that now that they’re equipped with knowledge of how the gnosia operates, they can do a better job next time around. But, ah, SQ attacks and kills them, right, since she’s the gnosia? So how could there be a “next time” for Yuri?

Well, before entering cryosleep, Setsu hands Yuri a mysterious cube which promptly breaks when Yuri tries handling it. This, they explain, will let them go beyond death.

Yes, on top of its main premise, GNOSIA is also a time loop anime. This takes things from merely interesting to absolutely fascinating. Introducing as it does two interlocking rings of mystery that must somehow be related, each of which raises more questions about the other than it answers. There’s a lot to like here, and with the anime slated for a full two cours there’s a lot of time for it to bend and twist our expectations in myriad ways. All this in mind, it might be the season’s easiest recommend, I could see almost any anime fan getting something out of this.

I should mention at least in passing that the show looks and sounds good, too. In particular, there are some really great cuts of SQ emoting in the premiere here that make me very optimistic about how much fun this show is going to be long-term, and the cold, sealed-off atmosphere of the ship itself is hard to beat.

Posted on October 10, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The All-Consuming Love of THIS MONSTER WANTS TO EAT ME

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

“Until the day that beautiful monster grants my wish with her own two hands….”

The first thing is the pacing, and the second is the sound design. I’m late to this one, I know, but upon watching the first two episodes of This Monster Wants To Eat Me, the latest in a growing number of decent-to-great yuri adaptations from up and down this year, those were the two elements that stuck out to me the most. Normally, when one brings up an anime’s pacing, it’s to complain. It is all too easy to fuck up the sequencing of events when adapting a manga to animation; by rearranging them illogically, by sticking so close to the source material that you sap the life out of the thing (the more common of those two scenarios these days), or simply by pacing them wrong. Events that are snappy on paper aren’t necessarily so in motion, timing is a key consideration when it comes to picking an approach for adapting this material.

Keep all this in mind as I say, usually, when an anime feels slow, that’s said as a bad thing. Especially if it was based on a manga. Watatabe—as This Monster is more commonly known—proves that it’s not necessarily so. This is an anime that creeps, lurches, and crawls. What it lacks in traditional production polish it more than compensates with in deploying its sense of timing and its audio to create atmosphere. Despite being set in the dead of summer, this is an anime that most makes sense as a Fall series. Mermaids should get to trick or treat, too.

As for what this is all actually about? Well, our main character, Hinako [Ueda Reina], is depressed. We don’t have the details yet, but it seems that she lost her family to some tragic accident some time ago. She wants to die, but she either doesn’t want to or can’t bring herself to end her own life, so she spends a lot of time gazing into the sea and waiting for her time to come. Early in the first episode she runs into a mysterious girl, Shiori [Ishikawa Yui], who warns her that leaning over the railing by the coast isn’t safe. She could fall in, after all! Nonetheless, when she returns to the same spot to do more or less exactly that later that day, strands of thick, dark hair creep out of the water like animate seaweed. Our heroine is thus attacked by an iso-onna, who drags her into the water to consume her.

In its way, this isn’t so bad, Hinako thinks. Sure, it was out of the blue, but this is what she’s been looking for, isn’t it? And nothing, not even the attempts of her best friend (the rowdy Yashiro Miko, played by Fairouz Ai), has really helped. But, in an even more surprising turn of events, the girl from earlier intervenes, sprouting fishscales and a long, sickle-wicked claw to drive the water ghost away.

This isn’t anything as simple as a rescue, though. Shiori wants to eat Hinako, too. She’s just not quite tender enough, yet. So begins a particular flavor of twisted love story.

These first two episodes, especially the second, largely take us through the paces of Hinako’s daily life, and how it changes in the presence of Shiori. Hinako technically never straight up says she’s infatuated with Shiori, but lines like the one quoted at the top of this article make it pretty clear how she feels. The dynamic Watatabe is building here is an interesting one. Hinako wants Shiori to kill and eat her. Shiori is explicitly interested in keeping Hinako alive until her flavor reaches its peak. She explicitly compares Hinako to livestock, in fact.

The important bit here is that Shiori is going to eat her eventually, but not right now. This actually bothers Hinako, not because she’s afraid or repulsed, but because if she’s going to be eaten she’d really rather it be soon. Despite the grim tone and the slow, creaking nature of the storytelling, there’s also an almost bratty overtone to the whole thing, as though Hinako is a needy submissive and Shiori, her domme, is teasingly avoiding giving her what she wants most.

This is, of course, the point. Watatabe’s premise is a take on the whole “domestic girlfriend” fantasy—found more often in heteroromantic romance manga, but it can be seen in yuri as well—wherein a depressed character is lifted to life and warmth by someone who insists on taking care of them. (There is in fact an entire style of romance manga and light novels built on this premise. If you’ve ever seen anything tagged “Rehabilitation” on Anilist or MyAnimeList, that’s what that means.) The roles of the nurturer and romantic partner are rolled into one in these scenarios, and Watatabe‘s playful skewering of them involves giving the caretaker/partner character an explicitly malicious overtone. Remember, within the world of the story itself this isn’t actually a metaphor: Shiori literally wants to kill Hinako and eat her, head to toe. But Hinako, depressed and longing to be reunited with her family, either figuratively in death or literally in the hereafter, is fine with that, and in fact wants that. In its way, Watatabe‘s story is quite a wicked little thing.

I don’t think it would work nearly so well without the audio component. The music here is straightforward but devastatingly effective, an arsenal of simple piano and string pieces that hammer home the oppressive summer that Hinako has been living for so long, and remind us that there is a final, sharp end to her relationship with Shiori. The voice acting here is excellent, too. Ishikawa Yui lends a breathy, ethereal tone to Shiori that really sells the idea of her as some otherworldly creature. She can also make Shiori sound forceful, which is helpful when the character needs to project ferocity (as at the end of the first episode), or make clear to Hinako that she doesn’t get to make all of her own decisions anymore (as at the end of the second). Ueda Reina makes Hinako sound exactly the right amount of withdrawn and closed-off. For an example, visually speaking, her daydreams about ocean life intruding into her everyday existence are reasonably effective but hardly flashy. It’s really the flat, deep-sighing tone of voice Ueda brings to the role that ties it all together.

Having the aural advantage is good. The elephant in the room here is that the show doesn’t look fantastic. It doesn’t look bad, I wouldn’t say—although its frequent use of frame-blending pushes things—but it’s definitely a shoestring production and looks the part, and doesn’t hit the visual heights of, say, the best episodes of the similarly-abbreviated Watanare. (Although that had its lesser moments, too.) Similarly, the actual shot composition is effective but largely unspectacular except for a few particularly striking moments. None of this is all that surprising for a low-resource anime at this stage in the medium’s history, but it is at least worth knowing going into it, and if it pushes people toward the manga instead, I don’t think that’s necessarily such a bad thing, even if they are missing out on the lovely sound design here. It is, in any case, a minor weakness. Or at least it is if I’m the one being asked.

The second episode ends set against the interesting love triangle building between Hinako, Shiori, and Miko, who spends much of the episode being jealous of the mysterious relationship that Hinako and Shiori seem to have suddenly developed.

She, in fact, asks Hinako to a festival. Hinako turns her down—it would seem that the accident that caused the deaths of her family is somehow related to this very same festival—but Shiori, not content to let her prized pig simply sit and girlrot, forces her to go. We don’t know how that’s going to work out for either of them, yet. (Or for Miko, for that matter.) But I certainly plan on tuning in to find out.

Posted on September 22, 2025September 22, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [9/22/25]

The Weekly Orbit is a (sometimes) weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume at least some familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hi folks, I missed last week, and as I alluded to the week before that, I’m experiencing a bit of end-of-season burnout. Still, I wanted to try to get an at least mostly complete Weekly Orbit to you today. We have some season finales and a few less permanent things. I hope you enjoy.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of The Night – Season 2, Episode 12 (Finale)

A really sweet sendoff for Call of The Night, here.

I really like that we’re not just abandoning Anko as a character now that her arc is “over,” and I will be honest, while it’s not for nearly as grandiose reasons, her comments about feeling like you’ve gotten older but not really grown up, and about wasting the last decade of her life, really hit home very hard for me. Not to be dramatic, but as I’ve sometimes discussed elsewhere on this site I sometimes feel the same way due to my disabilities. Accordingly, I think this is maybe the most I’ve ever liked the character.

As for Nazuna and Ko, I am happy to see their relationship developing as it has. Ending the season by cutting to black on the chomp (because bites are their private thing, now, you see) followed by the “Call of The Night” needle drop was just brilliantly classy. Good episode, good season, good show.

Dandadan – Season 2, Episode 12 (Season Finale)

Another example of that with Dandadan here. A great finale from what’s just been a pretty consistently great season of a great show. A robot vs. kaiju showdown just makes sense as a way to end an arc for something as rambunctious as Dandadan. I particularly like how the robot goes from very toku-esque (and a bit goofy looking) to a very Daicon-y thing with a flaming head by the end of the battle. And of course we end on the introduction of another new character to the anime, who I am excited to get more spotlight next time around.

Admittedly! The upcoming arc is maybe my least favorite of the manga? It’s….an odd one, to say the least. But it has its high points, too, so I’m sure Dandadan will be reliable with delivering bangers for many seasons to come.

My Dress-Up Darling – Season 2, Episode 12 (Season Finale)

And bringing up the third spot on the tic tac toe board, Dress-Up Darling also delivers a lovely end to a lovely season. I don’t have a ton to say about the finale, I’m happy that the two character arcs here resolved the way they did though. I think Akira actually just being a huge lesbian is a pretty unsurprising plot twist, but I was still really delighted with how they handled it. The Coffin cosplay scenes were also really great, I think this is easily the most blood I’ve ever seen in a gentle romcom!

Overall just a fantastic season of television. I’m hoping the third season, should they make more, isn’t too far off. We’ll see!

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 12 (Series Finale)

This was the first full-length TV anime of the season to end, at least as far as stuff I was watching. My verdict? This was fine! Not great, not awful. It was fine.

When the show started I said something to the effect of, if you can’t pull off “good,” “weird” is a solid second thing to aim for. I think maybe more than I expected, Necronomico is a great example of that. This is a show that has much less to say than it thinks it does, has generally messy and unfocused characterization, and its core conceits are all just generally kind of stupid. But it was largely entertaining week to week just off of novelty and audacity, and I think that’s worth something. This is a truly textbook Seasonal Anime, capital S, capital A. I cannot imagine anyone remembering this aired by this time next year, except maybe because of the ChatGPT subs controversy when the first episode dropped.

About the final episode, I can’t say I have a ton to comment on. I will say that I think any finale in which the main character gets to pilot her girlfriend, grown to kaiju size for the sake of a fighting game match, is an at least solid finale. I also like that, perhaps intentionally but perhaps not, the game Nyarlathotep—sorry, Tick Tock Man—comes up with seems kind of shitty. Everyone loves fighting games where you have to button mash so hard your fingers bleed, right? I also really appreciated the gag where Miko somehow magics up a proper fight stick after being frustrated with the gamepad. Also the symbol sealing thing felt like a missed opportunity to incorporate the Yellow Sign into the show. That would’ve been a fun gag.

The epilogue was honestly a little much. I appreciated seeing Miko reunited with her girlfriend, and the hints that Cthulu might still be in there (and a similar hint with Gua’s host streamer) are fun and tantalizing if they ever decide they want to follow this show up. (Frankly, it seems very unlikely that this show did well enough to warrant that, but I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong. I think the actual IP is owned by Cygames, so maybe they don’t care about that.) But I really had no desire to see most of the other characters again; the mangaka, the actress, etc. are just not memorable and I think if we really felt the need to establish that they were still alive, a simple montage of a couple seconds, tops, would’ve sufficed just fine. I’m also a little mad they never killed Eita, he really seemed like he was asking for it and if they do make more of this, I simply refuse to buy into any attempted redemption arc. Try harder, man.

In any case, yeah, that’s Necronomico. A solidly decent show that I will probably think about only very occasionally for the remainder of my life. Hardly the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but definitely in the bottom third or so of anime I’ve seen this year. I really liked Cthulu, and that’s probably the most credit I can give it.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 12

I know I’m overusing the word here, but this is another lovely episode from Ruri. Here, Ruri comes across an old crystal radio owned by her grandfather while snooping around her attic. This is a bit of a shift for the show in that this episode is as much about radio as it is about mineralogy, but I think it ties the two fields together very nicely. In addition to exploring the overlap between these fields, this is also the first time Aoi (Ruri’s gyaru-looking friend from school) gets to be much of a character, which is also nice.

I also think that the scene at the end, where Ruri finally gets the radio working again out near a shrine, is a very nice summation of the “point” of Ruri Rocks as an overall work.

What we do today can connect us, however fleetingly, to the endless yesterdays before us, whether that time scale is across human lifetimes or across aeons.

On a more grounded level, it is also nice to see Ruri working through her insecurities: after saying in last week’s episode that what she doesn’t isn’t research because that’s something only “smart people” do, she here opts to take geology as an elective at school. I should also commend the use of the ending theme as diagetic music. That was brilliant.

Turkey! Time to Strike – Episode 11

Have you ever played bowling with your life on the line?

This is truly just a delightful show. I think something that’s largely gone unsaid about it is that despite the very different literal events than most other anime in this broad girls’ drama genre, it is fundamentally wired the same way. The characters have similar arcs and the bonds between them are not unlike what we would have in a much more traditional show in this genre. The main difference is in the stakes, which are outright fatal here as opposed to the much lower ones present in what would otherwise be Turkey‘s peers.

A decade ago—to the month, in fact—SCHOOL-LIVE!, Gakkou Gurashi as it’s also known, pulled off a similar trick. That anime similarly borrows language from outright horror material to obfuscate the fact that it is, fundamentally, still a story about friendship and caring for the people close to you. The difference, of course, is that in most anime where girls compete in sports tournaments, their lives are not literally at stake if they lose.

The latter is what leads to Turkey’s second biggest tonal pivot, coming in behind only the initial switchup in the first episode. Just when things seem like they might be resolved a bit too conveniently by all of our heroes getting strikes in this tournament that the enemy feudal lord has agreed to, he changes the rules and puts them at a marked disadvantage, betraying their trust and any notion that he’s someone that could be seen as respectable.

I am pretty damn sure this is all a fakeout, of course. The finale will end with our heroines battered but not beaten, and they will tearfully depart to their own time. (There is always a second throw, recall.) But if I’m wrong, that’s actually even more interesting, so barring some generational last-episode fumble, I am still deeply interested in what Turkey will do in its last moments.

I mentioned Gakkou Gurashi. That anime is a classic, and I don’t think Turkey! is quite that good, but it’s definitely one of the more interesting things to air this year. I don’t think it’s out of the question to say it’s one of the better ones, too.

Posted on September 8, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [9/08/25]

Hello there, anime fans. I’m struggling with a bit of the ol’ burnout on my end, but I think I’ve managed to put together a pretty nice column for you this week regardless. Hopefully you agree. 🙂

Anime – Seasonal

Call of The Night – Season 2, Episode 10

I don’t know when, exactly, during this episode it became clear to me that Anko might be trying to commit suicide-by-vampire, but it hit me like a brick when that turned out to actually, genuinely be the case.

I really think this show’s second season has proven to be just incredible in a way I don’t think I would’ve predicted at the end of the first, even accounting for the fact that I liked the first season a lot. The intense emotion on display all throughout this episode, Nazuna and Anko’s horribly painful divorced yuri, Ko getting caught in the right place and saving Anko’s life, and then in the wrong place at the end of the episode when her gun goes off as she’s trying to kill herself….man, I don’t really know what to say here beyond this is a really exceptional series. I think my favorite of the many little touches across this episode was Nazuna ripping up playground equipment when she starts really trying to stop Anko. Playground equipment, you see, as a symbol of innocence, destroyed because neither of them can ever go back to it. Honestly, just brutal, what an episode.

Dandadan – Season 2, Episode 10

Last week we had a fight, and then comedy. This week, we have comedy, and then a fight. Simple!

This is the episode where we’re first introduced to Sakata Kinta [Fujiwara Daichi], although I don’t think we get his name here. His introduction as a weird nerd—an even weirder nerd than Okarun, in fact, by a mile—who makes inappropriate dirty jokes because he thinks it helps him seem cool is a bit of a slow start in terms of actual characterization, but I have to admit it is genuinely pretty funny. The first half of the episode also has a Tom & Jerry sort of quality to it where Momo and Okarun are looking for each other at school and keep missing each other, eventually literally running into each other and prompting Kinta’s surprise that Okarun is “popular with the ladies.” (Presented as Kinta getting the wrong idea in-fiction, but he’s not really wrong, given that both Momo and Aira are interested in him.)

Naturally Kinta gets dragged into a battle with the supernatural when the “gold ball ghost” that was mentioned last week turns out to actually be an invisible monster using high technology to shield itself from sight. Our heroes seem to defeat it (even Kinta makes a small contribution), but it rises again, growing gigantic and promising a full-on kaiju battle next week. I have to give it up not just to all of this show’s usual strengths here but also the music, the kaiju theme sounds like a drum n bass remix of the Godzilla motif. Lovely stuff.

My Dress-Up Darling- Season 2, Episodes 9 & 10

For all my complaining about the slight hit Dress-Up Darling took with that diet episode a couple weeks back, it returns here with two of its best episodes maybe ever. This is what I get for complaining and, hey, full credit, I couldn’t be happier. Two main things happen over the course of this arc. Let’s talk about the less consequential and funnier one first.

First of all, this arc involves Marin’s friend group prepping to do a group cosplay of some characters from a horror visual novel called Coffin. Unlike the series’ usual formula, the dramatic push and pull here doesn’t come from Gojo having to make an outfit. Marin’s buying a simple off-the-shelf number this time, but Gojo is still going to be involved in setting up the cosplay, so he wants to learn more about this visual novel regardless. He visits Marin plays the game at her place, and of all of the various style emulations that Dress-Up Darling has engaged with over the course of its run, this is some of the most impressive. We get scenes from the VN rendered in tastefully faux-retro, dithered pixel art. As Gojo plays, it goes from being a fairly straightforward slice of life thing to being an absolutely brutal psychological horror story about killer nuns and familial abuse. (And from what we see of it, Coffin really is a pull-no-punches kind of game. It’s easily the sort of thing you could imagine grabbing off of itch.io. And, perhaps, end up regretting that you didn’t read the trigger warnings, depending on how squeamish you are.)

Gojo being Gojo, he doesn’t see this coming at all, and to paraphrase his own words, gets a bit hyperempathetic about it. Worse, he doesn’t actually have Marin with him for the majority of his playthrough to bounce off of. He’s also hopped up on energy drinks, because, surprise, the trains back home are out of service and his whole hanging out with Marin has turned into an impromptu sleepover.

Why is Marin asleep? Well, when she sees our boy buying the energy drinks, they happen to be right next to an aisle of what I’ll politely call supplements and gets the wrong idea. So she spends most of the night anxious that Gojo is trying to make a move on her, even as she also kind of looks forward to it, her head spinning with ideas about how they’re going to do all of the “important stuff”—handholding, kissing, and yes, sex—in one night. It’s a little rare for an anime to have noticeably good body language animation, but the way the show focuses on her eyes, dialed into tight, beady little pupils, and toes, twiddling and scrunching up into little balls of anxiety, is really something. It also noticeably never feels even a little bit salacious, since in this context, Dress-Up Darling—never afraid to be horny when it wants to be, and I must stress that that’s fine in its own right—wants you to appreciate Marin as a person with her own thoughts and feelings, not as something to ogle.

After eating some instant ramen, Marin calms down, sharing an adorable story about how her and her dad used to share the very same kind of ramen while watching movies together late at night. In fact, she gets so comfortable while talking about this that she actually falls asleep, and Gojo puts her to bed, leading to his own odyssey with the visual novel above. (It feels like a pointed contrast that Marin, a well-adjusted and happy girl over all, shares a warm and positive anecdote about her father. The protagonist of Coffin, by contrast, is horribly abused by hers.)

With the clarity of morning, Marin beats herself up a little bit about getting so anxious—and so excited—over a simple misunderstanding. She wonders if Gojo actually likes her in that way at all, and in doing so she imagines him rejecting her, which shakes her so badly that she actually starts crying. Her anxieties are dispelled though upon visiting Gojo at his house a day or two later. Gojo, ever-considerate, sometimes overly so, actually tries to turn her away at first. Not because he doesn’t actually want her there, but because he made fried fish for dinner, and isn’t sure if she should be having that, given her stated dieting goals. Marin is moved enough that she just decides today is a cheat day, and she enjoys dinner with her crush.

Still, she can’t actually work up the nerve to outright ask him out. She tries to, but eventually scales the request back to just asking to come back tomorrow. (He says yes, of course.) On a late-night train, the warmth from their time spent together crystallizes into determination, and she promises herself that after the Coffin group photoshoot, she’s going to ask him out, come what may.

I admit I’ve never been super concerned about the overarching “plot” of Dress-Up Darling. It’s always pretty clear in this kind of thing that the leads are going to get together eventually, it’s just a question of if it’ll take the whole series or only part of it. Still, it’s really exciting to see actual progress being made on that front. Even if it’s a feint in the immediate short-term, the character development here speaks volumes. Marin herself, pondering her and Gojo’s relationship, points out that teasing him used to be easy, but now that she’s actually worried he might reject her, she can’t bring herself to do it anymore.

There are complicating factors; one of the other people involved in the group cosplay—Akira, who were introduced to just a few episodes ago, a mysterious and somewhat reserved girl who primarily cosplays her own characters (awesome, it must be said)—doesn’t like Marin for some unstated reason. This, along with Sajuna’s return to the series and her own reluctant involvement with the Coffin shoot, promises to throw at least one, maybe several, wrenches into this whole business. Still, I’m really looking forward to how this arc resolves, there are a lot of parts in motion here, and I am so fascinated to see how they intersect.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 10

You can say a lot about Necronomico, much of which is not exactly flattering, but damn if it isn’t memorable.

There are two main plot threads in this episode; Kanna contending with Ghatanothoa’s game for her—a supernatural raising sim based on her own life—and Kei being played like a fiddle by Cthugua.

In the case of the latter, I don’t think it’s even explained to us what Gua’s “game” actually is, but she spends her entire half of the episode alternately insulting Kei and calling her a pretty doll, while at the same time making her drink sake until she’s so drunk she can’t see straight. Eventually, this culminates in the two of them kissing and burning to death together in Gua’s palace. I’ll be honest, I have no idea where exactly this came from, but as far as tragic (and commendably strange) yuri goes, it’s pretty good.

Kanna’s half of the episode is a bit more thematically meaty, in that Ghatanothoa’s game is directly based on her own, very sad life, and to discover its true ending (and thus win it) she eventually figures out that she has to make no decisions at all.

“You can’t really change the past” is, as Kanna herself angrily points out, exactly the kind of obnoxious and overdone theme that someone like Ghatanothoa would gravitate towards putting in a game like this, with its presentation of that theme equally so. Despite his bloviating about how all of human art and culture is meaningless, Ghatanothoa is essentially portrayed as a parasocial fanboy, in fact, complete with calling Kanna his “oshi”, and his amateurish-at-best command of visual novel writing reflects this. I commend the show for not taking the easy way out of saying that Kanna’s suffering is what gives her life meaning, but it is a little hard to swallow that this leads to another mutual kill. I get why it has to be set up that way; so Miko and Cthulu can hinge the fate of the world on their final confrontation, but it doesn’t really square with what we’re shown here.

And, well, all of this has to put up with the fact that this episode has some of the worst boarding in a show that, even at its best, has not exactly looked fantastic. Still, the end is in sight by now, so I am interested to see if they stick the landing. My personal theory is that this show doesn’t actually have the stones to commit to a bittersweet ending and we’re going to get everyone revived at the last minute somehow. The still-hanging plot thread of Kanna being “favored by Azatoth” would provide the perfect off ramp.

Oh, and no Eita this episode is notable, if only because it means he will inevitably be back next week.

Turkey! Time to Strike – Episode 9

Fundamentally, right, the whole “bowling” motif in this show, it’s a gimmick, right? Or it at least seems like it should be one. You could write a very similar story to this without that aspect of it at all, and people have. But, more than just a way to stand out from the pack, the way the series uses the sport to actually emphasize the communal nature of play as an idea is like….forgive me for not finding a better way to say this, it’s just not something you really expect from a random seasonal anime. Which is absurd, right? Because every anime was a random seasonal anime at some point. There’s not actually a distinction. But it nonetheless manages to surprise me every time one of these shows actually turns out to be this good.

So, you have this episode. A thwarted—thank god—double suicide and winding, beautiful conversation about what it means to mean something to someone, how people put themselves on the line for those they truly care about.

And of course, there’s how the episode ends, with a thundercloud rolling in, the promise of home on the horizon. Will our heroines actually leave? After this episode, I think it’s very up in the air. It’s clear that the two halves of our cast care for each other a lot, but there are still three episodes to go, so there’s plenty of time for interesting developments.

Oh, and can I say? Starting the episode by immediately catching the viewer off-foot with the altered OP sequence? Brilliant.

Other

Ano Hi no Kanojotachi: day09 Miu Takigawa

It has been five years since early lockdown-era idol anime 22/7 tried, and failed, to reinvent its genre.

22/7 the idol group, though, have ticked on. They still exist, and have persisted through a variety of lineup changes, a notably rocky history that has resulted in multiple changes in direction for their sound and, admittedly, given them more of a fanbase than you might assume if you don’t follow idol stuff very closely. Takigawa Miu, the group’s center, was one of two remaining original members. As you can glean from the existence of this short, she has now left. “Graduated,” as it is somewhat-euphemistically referred to among idol fans.

This short is ostensibly a sendoff. It’s not actually even narratively related to the 22/7 TV series (it has more in common with, and is presented as, an episode of the 2018 slice of life shorts that were created early in the lifespan of the project), but it marks the end of something, so it’s still significant, as both a point to reflect on what 22/7 was and is and what its existence can tell us in general about the circles of art and media it is a part of.

Miu’s vocal performances—both voice acting and singing—were provided by Saijou Nagomi. (She technically reprises the role here, but doesn’t speak, contributing only a few soft sobs at one point. These could easily have been provided by a fill-in or pulled from archive audio, but I’m choosing to assume some amount of professionalism here.) Five years is a long time in the entertainment industry, and watching this short, and its quiet melancholy, I cannot help but wonder how she must’ve felt to have it playing behind her during her farewell concert, as that is the context for which it was originally produced.

It is worth noting that Miu is Ms. Saijou’s only voice acting credit of any note, and if she’s ever released any other music, I was not able to find it by doing a cursory search. Still, a glance at her Twitter page indicates she was keeping it professional up until her very last day in the group. There is lots of talk over there of cherishing every moment she spent with her fans and so on. As of the time of this writing, the most recent post is a handful of images from the farewell concert. Some digging reveals she intends to largely make the transition to behind-the-camera work as a photographer.

The short itself largely portrays Miu in transit; first coming home on a bus, and then, after quietly crying to herself in bed, going somewhere that looks an awful lot like a college or new school of some other sort, in what is either a dream sequence or a flash-forward. It’s definitely playing into these sorts of thoughts; where is she going from here? Is she happy? Does she have regrets? On some level, all of that is as much an emotional manipulation as any of the more obvious work done by any number of more traditional idol anime—before or since—that 22/7 sought to join the ranks of and perhaps surpass. (And we have to give credit to Wonder Egg Priority director Wakabayashi Shin that this is imbued with such emotion in the first place. The short has no dialogue, as mentioned.) Still, it’s overall a surprisingly moving piece of work, and one that feels ever so slightly out of step with where the medium’s sensibilities currently are, with its vibrant and shiny lighting that feels so tied to the visual aesthetics of the last decade as opposed to this one. I said it’s a long time in the entertainment industry, but honestly, five years is a long time for anyone. The short is a potent, if brief, reminder of this.

The last scene of the short shows us Miu, on a bus, looking back at the camera. We don’t know where she’s going, but she is going. It’s hard not to feel happy for her. And as strange as it may be to say, that shot, as it fades out for the final time, is probably the most 22/7 has ever affected me. Perhaps tellingly, it did it without “subverting”, “reinventing”, or “deconstructing” anything.

And that’ll be all for this particular week. As always, I ask that if you enjoyed what you’ve read here (or just enjoy my site in general), you consider a donation to my Ko-Fi page, it helps immensely, and helps keep the site up and running.

For this week’s Bonus Image, please enjoy the title screen of Coffin, perfectly evocative of the evolving title screens of RPGMaker games and indie visual novels of both the past and present.

Posted on September 1, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [9/01/25]

Hey there, friends! Another pretty light week this week, but one in which I’ve got some interesting stuff outside of the usual Seasonal Anime bracket to share as well. Enjoy.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of the Night – Episode 9

Bear with me here. I’ve always found the co-opting of the “arcs” system that shonen anime fans tend to use a little frustrating. Admittedly, I don’t know if this is actually true, but my impression at least has always been that things are sliced up into arcs as a fan-led convention. So when an anime’s English marketing actually refers to something as an “arc,” I roll my eyes a little. All storylines are arcs when you get down to it, so what are we saying here, right?

Well, Call of the Night makes the argument that this part of its story should be called The Halloween Arc because it takes place entirely on Halloween. You know what? Fair enough. I’ll let them have this one.

This is all tangential of course to the fact that this is probably the best Call of the Night has been since its return. (If it’s not, its main competition is episode four. Throughout its second season, Call of The Night has proven to be surprisingly adept at tragic yuri. I would love Kotoyama to attempt a full series in the genre at some point.) Anko springs her plan into motion on the night of a Halloween festival, but we’re still in the dark about what that plan actually is. Thus, most of Anko’s actions throughout this episode—and we see enough of them that she’s basically the second protagonist here—seem engineered to make you, the viewer, wonder what in the utter fuck she’s trying to accomplish. This is more entertaining than it may sound on paper.

It’s been established that a vampire’s main weakness is memorabilia from their human days. With most of the vampiric side of the cast having gone out of their way to dispose of those, Anko begins enacting a strange plan where she actually shoots two of the vampires—Niko and Seri—in full public view. (The public in question, being about as smart as any fictional audience, assume a movie is being filmed Or Something.) They recover, of course. You can’t kill a vampire with something as simple as a revolver. But the provocation has had its intended effect, and by episode’s end Anko is running from Seri’s boyfriend (Takkun, also a vampire) and the rest of the vampires. We end on a confrontation in her and Nazuna’s old classroom, where the two reunite and stare each other down.

It’s a hell of a cliffhanger, and it promises even better things ahead, but what I really need to emphasize here is just how wildly entertaining Anko is during all this? I was a bit slower to warm to the character than a lot of people in my age bracket, but she’s an utter riot here. Sure, she’s the antagonist, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be silly with it. Particular highlights include threatening to shoot some random guy after he hits on a girl half is age only to reveal that that gun is actually just a gun-shaped cigarette lighter, and a sequence near the end of the episode where she just runs like hell after tossing Takkun into a trashcan.

CITY THE ANIMATION – Episode 8

I think I should mention that I’ve been watching the dub of CITY. That’s very relevant in this episode because it ends with a musical number! And to my (pleasant) surprise they actually dubbed it! That’s not always a given in anime dubs.

Now, the number itself was some kind of bizarre Hamilton-meets-Japanese folk tales-meets The Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week” kind of thing, but it’s the thought that counts.

Oh yeah and the rest of the episode was pretty funny, too. The “Bon Jovi” joke in the band names segment got me so hard that I had to pause the video to collect myself. Episode nine is pretty great, too, for the record! I’m hitting my limit for how much writing I can do about anime in a given week here, I think (this is the last bit of writing I’m doing other than the closer before this article goes up), but episode nine is a giant, wacky race. In the vein of something like….well, Wacky Races. The episode sprinkles in some backstory for the characters we’ve gotten to know over CITY’s run and is pretty sweet in addition to the usual humor as a result. This is especially true of our goofball schoolgirl lesbians Matsuri and Eri, who, soon to be parted, enter the race to make some final memories together and end up winning the whole thing. It’s cute!

Dandadan – Episode 9

Despite an absolutely fireworks fight scene at the start of it, episode nine is mostly a slower and more comedic break between the previous and upcoming arcs of Dandadan. This makes sense, and a decision to slow down a little and focus on the series’ character strengths is a good one on the heels of so much fighting.

That’s not to say this episode is devoid of important developments, though. Having finally become strong enough to take him on, Okarun manages to convince Evil Eye to not constantly attempt to slaughter all humans in his vicinity. Instead, the two of them will fight once a week. Like gentlemen. (More or less.) This paves the way for Jiji to return to school, which sets up the often hilarious second half of the episode, wherein Evil Eye emerges at school and Jiji’s classmates have to wonder why he’s suddenly talking about butchering all who stand before him, and why he suddenly looks so goth. It’s basically just one joke iterated upon for several minutes, but it’s a pretty good joke.

in between these things, Mantisian and some of his friends—including the Minecraft Steve-esque Mr. Ludris—rebuild the Ayase household’s home, with the help of an alien wonder-material called nanoskin. While this seems like just a cute way to wave away the whole “no longer having a house” situation that Momo and her grandmother would otherwise be in, it’s actually about to be rather important as a plot device. In the interest of not spoiling the rest of this season, I’ll say no more on that, but overall, yeah, this was a very fun episode. I’m excited to see where we head next.

Necronomico and The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 9

As I assumed would be the case last week, Episode eight of Necronomico sets us up with what seems to be the structure we’ll be working with for the remainder of the series.

Our four remaining heroes have to tackle the four Old Ones, and they end up splitting up and doing each trial alone. This means that the first half of this episode is actually a focus story about Hastur on the villains’ side, and, on the heroes’ side, Sano Seishirou. Given that the latter’s characterization so far has amounted to a pedophile joke about 5 episodes ago, which even the show itself seems to have forgotten about, this is a good chance to give him some actual characterization.

And you know what? He acquits himself pretty nicely here. Hastur’s game is in of itself not terribly interesting, being essentially the card game War with a smaller deck and some extra steps, but it’s nice to see Seishirou actually fit into the “heroic teacher that goes down fighting” archetype, even as Hastur taunts him all the while. (The drawling, low growl that Okitsu Kazuyuki delivers for how Hastur mockingly calls Seishirou “senseeiii” is one of the best pieces of voice acting in this whole show so far.)

The card game does manage to have some legitimate emotional stakes, especially when Hastur conjures up mental recreations of Seishirou’s family for the final hand. Pretty impressive considering that it just boils down to a coin flip, essentially, but Seishirou ekes out a win by psychoanalyzing his opponent and is free to be reunited with his family.

Except he isn’t, because SURPRISE! HE DOESN’T ACTUALLY HAVE A FAMILY!

In the sort of beautifully brick-stupid twist you only get in this kind of show, it is revealed that Seishirou’s family, who we only met a few minutes prior, are in fact completely imaginary! Surprise! It’s the most hilariously awful system rep of all time!

Suffice to say, I think this is so dumb that it kind of comes back out the other side and becomes funny. How can you hate dialogue like this?

Others will feel differently I’m sure, and Seishirou’s victory over Hastur is pyrrhic anyway: he collapses and dies shortly after Hastur’s disposed of, leaving the remining three Old Ones (and possibly also Tick Tock Man? I wouldn’t put that past this show) for the anime’s final few episodes.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 9

Another complete delight from the slice-of-substrate anime this week. This marks a return to what we might call Ruri Rocks’ usual formula, but the expressiveness of the animation is at an all-time high here, and there are a lot of gorgeous moments throughout the episode. I’m particularly fond of Ruri’s dream of infinite fields of opal and how it eventually reflects itself in reality toward the end of the episode. This is also another episode that deals with a manmade object—this time a massive dam—and its impact on mineralogy, which is a theme the show seems to want to return to again and again. I admit I find it pretty compelling stuff, so I can’t complain. Also, Nagi tries on a bunch of different outfits in this episode and looks gorgeous in all of them, god bless.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episode 8

I really enjoy that Satsuki’s evil plan to break Mai’s spirit consists of….telling an embarrassingly sweet story, so she’ll be distracted, so she can headshot her in a video game. Truly, a woman after my own heart (and of course the evil chiptune music makes a return to compliment it).

I find myself short on actual commentary for Watanare, which is a little frustrating because it’s honestly an absolutely fascinating show. In this episode we have a series of amusingly janky Red vs. Blue-ass 3DCGI segments, of our characters playing this video game they’ve agreed to compete at, juxtaposed against sincere emotional stakes, which are themselves complicated by the series’ overall messiness. (A term I normally hate and try to avoid, but I really can’t think of a better adjective to describe the relationships on display here.) If someone handed you just the script for this episode, you might think it was some kind of very bizarre sports anime, given how well the game and the emotional development are woven together.

Turkey! – Episode 8

Turkey has juggled an impressive amount of moods and tones over the course of its run thus far. Episode eight largely sits on the “quiet melancholy” end of the spectrum, before a sudden swerve—a fakeout, I am guessing—into horror at the episode’s end.

This isn’t my favorite episode of the series, and what we learn here is not anything we couldn’t have guessed from context. Still, the reveal of Mai’s backstory is well done, and I like the way everyone is connecting with their feudal counterparts. Also, I’m not sure what it was, but Nanase’s line about liking (or at least acclimating to) living in the past because she “feels useful” there really hit me. There is something immensely sad about that.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Key The Metal Idol – Episodes 3 & 4

The main thing that has interested me about this show so far is its sheer, overwhelming atmosphere. That’s still true; there’s a real hypnagogic feeling to much of the plot. Key—who may not really be a robot after all? It’s still unclear—suddenly develops psychic powers, which she seems to unintentionally use to kill an idol singer (herself a remote-controlled PPOR android) mid-concert. The sleazy gravure idol manager from episode one hangs on to the lip of a rooftop for dear life. A tech CEO protests that robots don’t need self-awareness, damn it! All the while picking apart the gears of his own robotic “son.” These strange and haunting images, combined with the forceful sheets of pulsing, heavy synthesizer, give the entire thing the energy of a jumbled-up nightmare. I know people compare these two all the time, but it really does feel quite similar to Serial Experiments Lain. The emotional beats are arranged very differently, though, and in general Key the Metal Idol, at least so far, feels in some sense more raw and primitive. Time will tell if that impression holds.

22/7 – Ano Hi no Kanojotachi: day09: Miu Takigawa – Short

It has been five years since early lockdown-era idol anime 22/7 tried, and failed, to reinvent its genre.

22/7 the idol group, though, have ticked on. They still exist, and have persisted through a variety of lineup changes, a notably rocky history that has resulted in a lot of changes in direction for their sound and, admittedly, given them more of a fanbase than you might assume if you don’t follow idol stuff very closely. Takigawa Miu, the group’s center, was one of two remaining original members. She has now left. “Graduated,” as it is somewhat-euphemistically referred to among idol fans.

This short is ostensibly a sendoff. It’s not even narratively related to the 22/7 TV series (it has more in common with, and is presented as, an episode of the 2018 slice of life shorts that were created in the early lifespan of the projects), but it marks the end of something, so it’s still significant, as both a point to reflect on what 22/7 was and is and what its existence can tell us in general about the circles of art and media it is a part of.

The short itself, portrays Miu in transit; first coming home on a bus, and then, after quietly crying to herself in bed, going somewhere that looks an awful lot like a college or new school of some other sort, in what is either a dream sequence or a flash-forward. It’s definitely playing into these sorts of thoughts; where is she going from here? Is she happy? Does she have regrets? On some level, all of that is as much an emotional manipulation as any of the more obvious work done by any number of more traditional idol anime—before or since—that 22/7 sought to surpass. (And we have to give credit to Wonder Egg Priority director Wakabayashi Shin that this is imbued with such emotion in the first place. The short has no dialogue, as mentioned.) Still, it’s overall a surprisingly moving piece of work, and one that feels ever so slightly out of step with where the medium’s sensibilities currently are, with its vibrant and shiny lighting that feels so tied to the visual aesthetics of the last decade as opposed to this one. I said it’s a long time in the entertainment industry, but honestly, five years is a long time for anyone. The short is a potent, if brief, reminder of this.

The last scene of the short shows us Miu, on a bus, looking back at the camera. We don’t know where she’s going, but she is going. It’s hard not to feel happy for her. And as strange as it may be to say, that shot, as it fades out for the final time, is probably the most 22/7 has ever affected me. Perhaps tellingly, it did it without subverting, reinventing, or deconstructing anything.

Manga

Dear Flowers That Bloom in Days of Yore – Chapters 1-10

I think, in a world where there are already a lot of yuri manga doing this, there is a danger that the whole “subversively playing with Class S tropes” setup would start to feel hoary and cliched in its own right. This has not happened broadly, and it certainly hasn’t happened with Dear Flowers That Bloom in Days of Yore. Protagonist Kasumi begins a letter writing relationship with an anonymous “onee-sama” after discovering a note from her in a copy of foundational Class S text Hana Monogatari. In doing so Kasumi and her “onee-sama”, who she eventually meets in person, discovering her to actually be an older middle-schooler named Haruyo. The two wrap themselves in these roles, roles that are heavier, bigger, and older than either of them. Heavier, bigger, and older, but not necessarily more real. And that tension is threatening to tear Kasumi apart.

Were the manga merely playing with Class S tropes, I would think it was clever but not terribly ambitious. Where it clearly excels is in its ability to use this framework to subtly but definitively expose Kasumi’s own internalized homophobia. Something happened to her. We don’t yet know what, but we know it involved a now deceased friend. In the most recent chapters, Kasumi has met another girl who also met her own “special one” through a letter slipped into the copy of Hana Monogatari. I won’t spoil the specifics, but the most recent chapter seems to certainly imply that the girls who meet via this method are doomed to tragedy. The book, in other words, is cursed. Literally or metaphorically? Who knows? The distinction isn’t relevant except for fiddly questions of what genres this manga technically belongs to.

I have gone this whole writeup without mentioning that mangaka Igarashi Jun is….honestly a very rare talent in terms of presentation. Aside from being an absolute master of chiaroscuro—simple but striking contrasts of solid lights and darks recur throughout the manga. You would think this would be very common in a medium that’s solidly black and white, but it really isn’t.—they also employ, admittedly sparsely, a number of paneling techniques I just really don’t see in manga very often. They’re also an expert at conveying mood through visual metaphor; before meeting Haruyo, Kasumi imagines her as a thorned rose bush in the shape of a woman. When the two sink their most firmly into their roles, the scene is wintry and amberlike; beautiful but remote. I think one could recommend this manga alone on the strength of the fact that it’s clearly written by a master of their form, but the subtle and resonant details of the storytelling shouldn’t go unappreciated either.

That’ll be all for today’s column. Have a pleasant week, friends.

Posted on August 25, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/25/25]

Hi folks, bit of a light week here, and also one with not very many pictures. Hopefully that’s fine, I’ve been going through it a little bit.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of The Night – Season 2, Episode 8

Call of The Night does not go full horror anime very often, but when it does….brr.

So, yeah, Kyouko Mejiro is Anko. We could probably have seen this coming, but this episode confirms it in a tragic, delirious fever dream of blood and violence. I honestly have very little to say here, other than to remark that this episode absolutely excelled at imparting just how tragic Kyouko and Nazuna’s falling out was. I also suspect that there’s more to Kyouko’s father suddenly becoming a blood-starved vampire than we were shown here. After all, how exactly he was turned is a bit up in the air.

Dandadan – Season 2, Episode 8

I don’t think I remember the fight featured throughout the bulk of episode eight here being as memorable as this in the manga.

Which is strange, because when considered on its own terms, it’s pretty unique even for Dandadan. What we have here is a strength-building throwdown against a cadre of ghosts, taking the form of classical musicians. Primarily, this fight serves to do two things; give Aira something to do in this storyline, since she’s been absent for much of season two so far, and, more importantly, build and her and Okarun’s sense of “rhythm” to make them better fighters.

The show accomplishes this in a delightfully literal way with the ghost musicians, and I have to say that the chalk-white look really works well for the surreality of this episode. At about the halfway mark, the ghost of Beethoven summons a quartet of singing giants, who break into “Ode to Joy”, one of the ancestral bangers of western music, and it was around then that I realized I was watching another casual triumph in an anime absolutely stuffed with them.

If you want pure hype, though, next week is looking to top even this, as Okarun finishes this episode by promising to use his newfound strength to throw down with Evil Eye. Predictably—though not in an unwelcome way—we end things on a cliffhanger.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 8

If we want to say that Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show has a main flaw, and I think we probably do, I would say it’s that it has a poor command of its own strengths.

What the show is good at: putting its characters into wacky (and life-threatening) situations, basic and broad character writing, effectively tying the death games’ stakes to the lives of its characters.

What Necronomico is not good at: social commentary, more complex character writing, anything with immediate (that is to say, visible to us) stakes outside the lives of its own characters.

This is a problem, because episode eight is mostly about the latter group of things. We zoom out here, taking a broad view of the world as seen in Necronomico. Our main heroines go on a TV show and the series attempts to recontextualize its own past writing, shaming its audience by having a sleazeball TV exec character refer to Kanna as a marketable tragic heroine. The problem there is that “marketable tragic heroine” is pretty much exactly what Kanna is. Her more complex traits—relatively speaking—mostly consist of being a bit rude sometimes. She’s not a perfect angel, but that’s hardly an actual character flaw. Puzzlingly, Necronomico seems to think it is.

Similarly, the attempt to drag and drop Eita into the role of a cult leader is just baffling. I’m not going to say it’s unrealistic—the rise of Elon Musk has proven that people will bleed and die even for the dorkiest and least charismatic leaders possible as long as they give them suitable permission to enact violence—but it’s not necessarily super compelling. He remains a dead spot in the series’ cast.

And there’s not really a lot that happens in this episode other than these two things? Sure, getting a proper introduction to our Vatican witch hunter type character, Joe, is nice, but beyond that it’s all setup. Thankfully, the final game seems suitably deranged, as our cast have been dropped in a freezing wasteland—Kadath, in fact—and have to somehow take down the four main Old God antagonists on their own. So I am hoping this episode is more of a speedbump than a sign that the show’s final third is going to suck. At bare minimum, I hope we at least get to see Cthulu show off at some point during this game, as she was mostly absent from this episode.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 8

We continue the theme of artificial minerals in this week’s Ruri Rocks. To be honest, most of this episode didn’t capture my imagination terribly much despite being perfectly fine, but I liked the scenes in the factory at the end. Ruri’s concern over whether she’s “allowed” to like Zincite reminds me, funnily enough, of some similar thoughts I’ve had about, say, Detroit agate.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episode 7

I’m not entirely sure what to think of this plot development, but the scene with Mai and Satsuki fighting over Renako is pretty great. I have to give a special nod to the, I’m not even sure what to call it, evil Super Nintendo music? It plays when Satsuki shows Mai the photo of her and Renako kissing. A great scene in an episode I thought was merely pretty good, which when the last several have been great is a slight step down.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Dominion Tank Police (OVA)

Well, this was just a bit puzzling. An interesting thing about these old OVAs is that they’re often baffling in ways that, on the surface, seem completely different from how a contemporary anime would be baffling, but taken in a broader view you end up with a lot of the same root causes.

For Dominion Tank Police, that’s basic incoherence. I can only guess here, but I think the two story arcs adapted for this four part OVA must be from quite far apart in the original manga, since that’s the only way I can think to account for this thing’s bizarre tone. We start with an extremely politically-charged argument between a mayor and a police chief about the role of police in society, wherein the chief advocates using nukes on criminals(!!), and from there it seems like the series is attempting to sort of hamfistedly parody buddy cop narratives. But this reading doesn’t really survive contact with episode two, which seems to take the cops’ side.

We ditch all this entirely for the second part of the series, consisting of episodes three and four, which exchange the over-the-top comedy action of the first half for something slower and more philosophical. I wouldn’t say the change in tone works to the show’s favor exactly, but it makes a kind of half-sense in the moment, even if it does leave almost the entire cast feeling like they’ve been replaced with different characters halfway through. I particularly like the weird explorations into conceptual sci fi toward the end; artificial humans, a winged environmental fairy named Greenpeace, blunt and unsubtle musings on the nature of man. Will any of this be elaborated upon to feel “satisfying” in the conventional sense? No, and given the, to put it lightly, troubling political sympathies of the series, I can’t cleanly recommend Dominion Tank Police. But I admit it’s entertaining on a moment to moment basis in a stoner-flick kind of way, and I appreciate that about it. Again, not something I’d show to just anyone, but it has its charms. Charms helped along, admittedly, by the across-the-board strong visual presentation. A sakuga-head watching this would find enough to enthuse over to keep their attention, and even if that’s not your specific focus, the show is sharply directed throughout and has a great use of strong color; lots of dark navy blues and purples, burnt oranges, and fluorescent blues and reds. (Like a police siren, you see.)

Even aside from everything else I’ve outlined here, the catgirl criminals are an excellent pair of characters (and so fashionable!) and the show’s music is unimpeachable.

Manga

Big Love From Ultra Deep Space – Chapters 1-5

This….is okay!

Only five chapters in, it’s hard to make many claims about Big Love From Ultra Deep Space. The manga is about an alien princesses being betrothed to an ordinary (if gloomy) high school girl. So far, my main takeaways are that the character designs are all lovely, and tonally it’s pretty cute, with a lot of nice domestic scenes between our leads as the princess settles into her life on Earth.

It does however try to tackle some more serious subject matter, too, with the pair’s classmates initially harboring some suspicion of the princess, the lead girl having a troubled past, and so on. Unfortunately the handling of these aspects has so far been a bit contrived. There’s definitely still time for the manga to improve in this regard, and the fifth and most recent chapter is definitely a bit better than the previous four, so it may be a case of the mangaka—Ashidaka Woz, no relation to Scott The, presumably—finding their narrative legs.

If the manga has a central theme, it’s this:

There’s something really beautiful in the sentiment expressed here, the idea that just inherently, we often need others to see the best parts of ourselves. That people mean different things to different other people. I think if it pursues this core theme, Deep Space could really put together something special.

As is, it’s mostly cute and not a lot else, but we’ll see how it develops as time goes on. If nothing else, the art is beautiful, so it’s not hard to recommend off the back of that alone.

Posted on August 11, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [8/11/25]

The Weekly Orbit is a (sometimes) weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

A much lighter lineup this week, but there’s a real doozy down in that “Non-Seasonal” section to make up for the comparatively slower seasonal episodes here. I hope you enjoy reading, and have a lovely week.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of the Night – Season 2, Episode 6

Call of the Night presents a much goofier episode this week than most of what it’s been laying down recently. That’s just fine, a breather after the fairly intense arc that just ended is welcome. Love Green [Sugita Tomokazu], the otaku vampire introduced here, is a fun if slightly one-note character, and he and Midori, who returns here for the first time in a while, do indeed make a cute pair. On top of this, there are some fun visual gags. I particularly like Nazuna’s desire to impersonate an extremely dated otaku stereotype (that L.G. happens to fit, in part).

It’s interesting to note that even here, in a much less serious episode than the show’s recent norm, we do get a few bits that seem designed to spur on some real thinking. Kabura tells Nazuna that her parents are no longer alive at the start of the episode. Later, in a much sillier scene, we are reminded through L.G.’s antics that a vampire’s memory is highly fallible. This seems important, I’d say.

CITY THE ANIMATION – Episode 6

Episode six marks a return to the standard for CITY. For the most part, this sees the show operating in its usual mode of discrete, gag-focused “chapters” as composing the bulk of the episode. There are some real highlights here, especially in the soccer team sketch, but also a few less-great gags that are more light chuckles than hearty guffaws. Not a serious problem, but something to keep tabs on.

The end of the episode is the real standout, though. In it, the series gains a true plot development, in that the schoolgirl Eri is moving away to England, taking her from her synchronized dumbass lesbian bestie Matsuri. Most of that sketch is silly too, but the simple reveal that Matsuri’s shenanigans during it are just her masking that she’s sad about her friend leaving is good stuff. An endpoint high note to an otherwise fairly median episode.

My Dress-Up Darling – Season 2, Episode 6

Gojo locking in to do Marin’s makeup—with an audience!—is a really nice scene to end this arc on. Marin’s great as “Rei-sama” too, she absolutely serves in the outfit Gojo made for her, winning the pageant and bringing this particular part of the story to a close.

I also really enjoy the end scene where Marin really wants to take some pictures in a photobooth with Gojo but gets sabotaged by the many, many friends she and Gojo have made since the start of the series crowding along too. It’s extremely cute! I love these two.

Gachiakuta – Episode 5

I have very little to say here, this week. There’s a cool fight scene between Zanka and a pair of bandits here that takes up the back third or so of this episode, so that’s quite nice. The bandits have solid designs, and I like the senior bandit’s ability to create and control mud automata. Other than that, this was an oddly slow episode by Gachiakuta‘s standards and I don’t think I really like that about it. This series is simply not good enough at emotional moments to get me super onboard for them.

I’m also not sure I like what we seem to be doing with the other villain here, but I’m going to keep mum about that until they actually properly reveal him next week.

Kamitsubaki City Under Construction – Episodes 4 & 5

The past two weeks have seen future hard Anime Music Quiz round Kamitsubaki City Under Construction continue to be wildly disappointing, albeit in distinct ways.

In the middle of episode four (actually the fifth episode, because this show’s episode count began at episode zero), one scene stands out in the midst of everything else going on. Koko gets a nice, quiet scene with her familiar—“familier” per the show’s spelling—Kugel as the two of them get some udon while talking about the events that have transpired over the course of the series so far. (Or what passes for “events” in a show this scrambled, anyway.) It’s downbeat, moody, and effective. The second it ends, the show goes back to being a chaotic nightmare whorl of proper nouns, leaden exposition, and aura farming (dig the familiers just hanging out on a crane). Kugel’s betrayal and subsequent death in episode five undercuts most of this, despite being largely more coherent overall. For once, the show slows down enough to actually make narrative sense for a majority of the episode. Which is impressive, given that we’ve gotten time travel (or parallel worlds? One or the other) involved. When the plot doesn’t make literal sense, it can cobble together a kind of sleepwalking nightmare logic, made of images of hapless citizens exploding into blood and literal witch hunts. This episode is impressively gory all around, actually, which hey, that’s something.

Let’s keep the praise tempered, though, because having traded away “incoherent” for “maudlin”, the ending of episode five sees Kugel kill himself in one of the most shamelessly cliché scenes I’ve seen in recent memory. We end on a song again, as Koko cries over his dead body. The show having lost what little emotional charge it had, this feels more hollow than ever. I’m not sure what’s keeping me motivated to watch this show at this point, and I would be unsurprised if it doesn’t return here next week.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 6

If I can reveal something that was probably already obvious to most of the people who read these, I mainly watch this show for Cthulu. Cthulu is a great villain, but this is actually the first episode where we’ve gotten to see her do much, and I appreciate that about episode six a lot.

The conceit of this episode is that the Great Old Ones take a day off in temporary semi-human bodies to kick around Japan and see what Earth is like. Most of these diversions aren’t too interesting. Gua’s in fact actively annoyed me. Several times while she’s taking Kei on a foodie tour she whips out the old “we are to humans as humans are to ants” chestnut, which is a lot less convincing coming from the eldritch terror in the first place. Even more so when the Old God in question is chowing down on udon or whatever. Cthulu’s though is great, because she chooses to spend her day off hanging out with and also tormenting Miko. Why?

Because she has a crush on her.

Yeah, really!

Now Cthulu’s not stupid, so she openly wonders whether these are her own yearnings or those of the body she’s possessing—Miko’s relationship with Mayu is referred to in textually romantic terms here, stripping any remaining ambiguity that may have remained about that—but she doesn’t really seem to care! In fact, because Cthulu is, you know, evil, she seems to take a lot of delight in the fact that Miko is attracted to her despite hating her guts. This reaches its apex when she forces a kiss on Miko. Miko is obviously very distraught by this, which just winds Cthulu up more! She’s the fucking worst! I love her!

This season was hardly lacking in yuri, but more of it from a place as relatively unexpected as a death game anime is always nice. Doubly so when it’s this toxic.

Some other stuff happens in this episode too—Eita defects to the Old Gods’ side for whatever good that’ll do him, as if anyone could care—but none of it matters nearly as much to me as Cthulu’s gleeful tormenting of her new pet.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 6

A lovely episode from Ruri Rocks this week concludes what I’m going to loosely term the sapphire arc. (Is two episodes an arc? I’ll say so.) In addition to all of the show’s usual strengths in showcasing the effectiveness of hard work and the scientific method, this episode also incorporates some really interesting stuff about the mythology of sapphires. Particularly, how—per the episode anyway, I haven’t double checked this but I have no reason to assume it’s not true—in some parts of Japan, sapphires were once taken to be the bones of dragons.

It’s interesting stuff. It’s also nicely tied in with the actual location of the episode, which is near a dragon shrine. I’d be remiss to mention that on top of all of that, it’s also nicely serendipitous with some of the other things I’ve been watching and reading this week. Scroll down to the “Non-Seasonal” section for more on that.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episode 4

I’m a bit behind on Watanare here (I’m waiting on fansubs. With bated breath, because I am to understand episode five is a doozy), but I like where its head is at right now. Renako and Mai make up in characteristically messy fashion, and the pool scene toward the end of this episode is one of the best bits of vibrant emotional work to come from any anime this year.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Land of the Lustrous

It feels strange to call anime that’s not even yet a decade old a classic, but Houseki no Kuni has very much stood an already-impressive test of time¹, and as I found out after finally crossing it off my plan-to-watch list this week, that’s for very good reason.

A lot could be said about Houseki no Kuni‘s story—I’m particularly fond of the way main protagonist Phos, by the end of the anime, has started to become an amalgam of everyone they looked up to—but I’m actually more interested in the look of the series here. The anime opts to translate the shadow-heavy and stark visual style of the manga into something hypnagogic and hazy, defined by the bone-white architecture of the compound the Lustrous call their home, the pearlescent mirror-shards that they shatter into when harmed, and the frightful fractals their Lunarian adversaries spring from. Zoom in anywhere across this anime’s twelve episodes and you’ll see something like this; the warm but curiously lifeless sea of its first half, the Caspar Friedrich ice floes of the winter arc, the yawning night that hangs above the beaches Cinnabar patrols alone. These are the qualities that have seen it persist over the past eight years, the same that will ensure it persists for many more.

Yet, that very same misty atmosphere also means that Houseki no Kuni is unique among its ostensible peers and descendants. There are other aspects to its presentation as well, of course; the series has a curiously loose, sometimes loping directorial style. It locks in for the dizzying, David vs. Goliath action sequences and knows when to freeze a good shot in place for an emotional conversation, make no mistake, but many of its more incidental shots have a candidness to them that, at least to my knowledge, has yet to really be replicated. A candidness that carries all the way to the anime’s end. The final episode, after a climactic emotional confrontation between Phos and Cinnabar, ends the morning after, mid-sentence and mid-thought, leaving a million disquieting images and unanswered questions in the air. It disappears like a dream under the morning Sun. An elegant and triumphant form all its own, its incompleteness nonetheless casts a shadow. Like it was bigger than our own imaginations could sustain. Like it was never there at all.

It was, of course. The manga ran for another seven years after the anime concluded, and the TV series adapts only 30-some of its 108 chapters. Houseki no Kuni must truly win some kind of award for “anime that the most people want a longshot second season of,” but there’s no indication Studio Orange, or really anyone else, are in any particular hurry to make one. Having since read the rest of the manga, I can say only that capturing its atmosphere, its emotional highs and lows, and especially the most abstract parts of its final chapters, would be an incredible challenge. Still, these are hypotheticals, and it’s all too easy to let what-ifs distract from the artistry that’s actually there. Any comment about the anime’s incompleteness ignores one key fact, one that any collector natural gemstones would know: sometimes the flawed specimen is the most beautiful one.

That’s all for this week. As I always say, if you can afford it, a donation to my Ko-Fi page is always immensely welcome.

As for the all-important Bonus Image, I don’t usually do this, but we’re going to make this week’s picture something from the Non-Seasonal section. Please look at Phos, dignified and proud under the acidic moon. And do look closely, because barring a miracle, we won’t see them in this column again.

^{If you know….you know.}

^{1: That’s not to say it was the only heavy hitter to air in Fall of 2017, of course. Girls’ Last Tour, another anime people have been begging for a second season of since it finished, aired that same season. Also of note to me, personally, from that same season, is the ever-underrated Anime-Gataris.}

Posted on July 27, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [7/26/25]

The Weekly Orbit is a (sometimes) weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hi folks! It’s probably late at night for most of you as I post this, but I wanted to get one out this week, so I was willing to put it up outside my usual posting hours. Weirdly, the late hour sorta works, here. We’ve got a buffet of somewhat darker episodes this week, with only a few exceptions. Do enjoy.

Takopi’s Original Sin – Episodes 4 & 5

I haven’t written about Takopi’s Original Sin basically at all since it started airing, and I think part of that is a desire to not pass any judgment on something like this until I fully understand where it’s going. But it’s worth breaking that silence to say; this might be the best-animated episode of any show this year. There is some steep competition in that regard, but the way the visuals wobble out to convey Naoki’s dissociative state throughout much of episode four is really something else.

Narratively, I’m slightly less sure of what we’re doing, but the series has been good enough so far that everything I’m about to say should be taken as, at absolute most, a minor qualm. I think you can put the three kids that star in this story on a scale as to how obvious it is that the show wants you to sympathize with them: Marina was the least sympathetic, an incredibly vicious bully whose outbursts were explained by the revelation that she was physically abused at home. Her being perhaps the “worst” (I use the term very loosely) of these kids made her death all the more shocking. It’s not punishment vested on a bad person, it’s an absolutely tragic end to a very unhappy child whose life was defined by abuse, which she was the victim of but also the further perpetrator of. Naoki is the most overtly sympathetic, being subject to harsh psychological abuse by his own mother for much of his life and having few of the more “unpleasant” qualities of the other two. Shizuka, our protagonist, is somewhere between these two poles, and that’s where I’m scratching my head slightly because the specific way she’s between those extremes feels like something I’m not entirely clicking with. (Saying all this, I must again clarify that I am referring to ‘sympathetic’ as in the way that the narrative presents these characters to us. Personally speaking, I sympathize with all of them, because they’re young kids trapped in absolutely awful situations. But I digress….)

Naoki is talked into being an accomplice to covering up Marina’s murder because Shizuka basically charms him. Now, in of itself I think the beat of Naoki falling for Shizuka and this informing his actions is fine. But the degree to which Shizuka leans into it and actively leads him on just strikes me as kind of odd. To be clear, I don’t think this is “problematic” or whatever, I think what the series is trying to do is make a point about how people tend to take after their parents (in particular, bad mothers, respectively neglectful, psychologically abusive, and physically abusive, are a shared commonality between Shizuka, Naoki, and Marina respectively. Naoki’s brother even compares him to his mom explicitly). The framing is what feels a little odd to me, which I imagine is a problem unique to the anime, with the cartoon gunshot sounds accompanying Naoki’s gaga heart eyes probably being the most over the top example. (Although to be honest, now that I’ve laid it out here, I think I’ve actually talked myself out of having a problem with it. But it does still feel like the anime is trying a little too hard to shock us with how “bad” Shizuka is, maybe that’s just in my own imagination.)

On another note, Naoki’s brother is handled in a really interesting way throughout this episode. The bit where he comfortingly pats Naoki’s head and it’s portrayed as this bright, cheerful bit of magic is another example of the show’s visuals being over the top, but in a way I really appreciate.

Episode five, meanwhile, is another swerve and once again takes things in a somewhat different direction. I’m using this space to both jot down some thoughts on episode five itself—which, this is the rare thing that’s exclusive to this column, I’m not pulling from my tumblr here—but also to bounce off of this reblog addition to what I wrote above on the previous episode by tumblr user angyo. Angyo puts forward that the reason behind the way the show treats Shizuka is that we are to understand Shizuka and Marina as being two sides of the same coin. People in what are, at the end of the day, actually quite similar situations, being driven to life-or-death extremes by respectively Shizuka’s need to see Chappy again (even though he is probably dead) and Marina’s need for approval from her mother. (“Cornered raccoon rules”, as angyo put it, a turn of phrase good enough that I’m stealing it.) And I do think this is directly relevant to episode five, because what the gradual darkening of Shizuka’s character—what I took for an attempt to shock the audience just two paragraphs back—is actually an attempt to underscore how easily these characters could switch places. It is very easy to imagine, for example, a situation where Takopi encountered Naoki or Marina first upon arriving to Earth and this entire narrative is framed differently, with Marina as the most overtly sympathetic of the cast and Shizuka as the “bad guy.”

In fact, you don’t have to imagine this at all, because that’s exactly what episode five is. Shizuka and Takopi make it to Tokyo only to find that Shizuka’s father has since started a new life with some other woman and now has two other kids. Any hope that her father might entertain the idea of helping Shizuka is dashed when one of his other children asks him who this strange girl is, and he shuts the door on her. Backed into a corner yet again, she takes it out on Takopi, bashing him with a rock hard enough to induce forgotten memories to rise to the surface. He remembers something—wait a second, he actually has been to Earth before.

In a previous timeline, Takopi met Marina first. Thus, the anime’s fifth episode is a rough perspective flip of its first. Takopi—not yet known by that name—befriends Marina, more or less, and helps her navigate life from ages ten to sixteen or so. Shizuka is actually barely present in this version of events. Instead, we focus on how here as in the timelines we’ve already seen, Marina’s youth is defined by the abuse of her mother, and there’s a heartbreaking bit where Takopi, again totally innocent, observes that Marina must smack him around so often because her mother does the same to her. It’s these moments where Takopi’s Original Sin is most devestated, not where things reach an elevated fever pitch, but when Takopi makes a simple observation that any child could.

As things seem like they might finally be getting a bit better for Marina, Shizuka reenters the picture at a crucial moment. She (inadvertently? I’d like to think so) steals Naoki, here Marina’s boyfriend, from her. This leads to a terribly sad series of events that culminates in Marina finally snapping under her mother’s abuse, killing her and, it seems clear, eventually herself. Takopi knows what he must do to prevent this; he has to kill Shizuka, and he’ll use the time machine on his home planet to do it.

Forcing his way to the machine, he is reverted to mental childhood himself by the mysterious mother figure of his home planet, and by the time he returns to Earth we’re back at the start of episode one, and he’s forgotten about Shizuka and Marina entirely.

The strongest parallel here is thus that despite Takopi’s best intentions, he has demonstrably led both of this show’s protagonists to bad places, and eventually their deaths. The show’s present timeline, which we return to at the end of the episode, gives him a chance to potentially fix all of that, but it’s difficult to imagine him succeeding for the same reason that Takopi is, despite everything, still ultimately sympathetic. He’s basically a child himself in his current state, he has a simplistic understanding of the world, which is why his most sophisticated attempts at problem solving in the entire show so far boiled down to “kill Shizuka” and “try to help Shizuka cover up that she killed Marina.” Episode five ends with the unexpected return of Naoki to the main timeline, and between him coming back and Takopi’s memories resurfacing it’s hard to say where all of this will eventually end, but any show that makes its viewership turn over character dynamics this thoroughly is doing something right. Just one week out from its finale, it remains one of the season’s most compelling.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episode 3

I like to give a show credit when it manages to completely throw me off. I do see how we got here Watanare‘s first episode, but it’s definitely still not a direction I expected the show to take when I watched its premiere.

There’s a lot of things I could talk about here but I’m a little uninterested in attempting to make some grand proclamation about what this narrative development “means.” Because I’m sure tons of people are already doing that and, to be honest, I do not really need my fiction to be a morality fable, so I don’t have strong opinions on where they’re going to take this. I’m fine with anything as long as it’s interesting.

I actually wanna talk about the backgrounds, mostly.

I’m hitting the limits of my artistic vocabulary here, because I don’t know what about them makes them look this way, but a good amount of the backgrounds in this series have a very flat and fake look to them. These are spaces meant to emphasize their own artificiality, and it hits a height in this episode that I was worried we wouldn’t see again after the premiere.

This isn’t a bad thing, It’s clearly deliberate and is meant to convey a sense of alienation. It’s also a very subtle inflection, and it’s one of my favorite things about the show. It’s most obvious with Mai’s room in Paris-

-and the suburb Renako lives in.

But notably, Renako’s room itself takes on this quality during the night after the incident at the end of this episode, which I think is a great way of quickly and subtly conveying her anxiety and confusion.

I’m unwilling to contribute to the discourse (in both the literal and euphemistic sense of that term) around the show beyond this, at least so far, but it’s definitely established itself as quietly being one of the season’s more interesting anime. I salute that.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 4

I need an anti-favorite characters list on Anilist so I can put Eita on it. I get characters like this are supposed to be annoying and hateable so they can die late in the show for catharsis, but the dude is seriously just aggravating as shit. Also, I feel like there’s a version of this same character in every show like this so he’s not even particularly interesting or novel. Maybe my perception is skewed since I haven’t actually seen that many of these, but yeah.

Anyway, other than his being generally grating as fuck and the weird “on-screen chat commentary” gimmick, this is actually probably the best episode of the show so far. It’s also the best-looking since the premiere, a good sign for a show that would be lost without some visual oomph. I was a little worried we were already running out of ideas for death game setups with the second one, but the escape-room-with-the-directions premise the Old Gods field here is pretty solid. More importantly, the actual environment of Hotel Reversal, as it’s called, is really good, I love all the oranges and greens and the generally very zany vibe of the hotel itself. It makes it feel like a real escape room game despite the high stakes. We lose a few people this episode too, and it’s no big loss because they’re among the less interesting characters. My bet is that the teacher is the next person to die, but we’ll see.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 3

I’m really delighted by the decision to expand the show’s world a bit here. The anime’s first two episodes were nearly devoid of anything but Ruri and Nagi’s mineral expeditions. Here we meet one of Ruri’s colleagues, Imari Youko [Miyamoto Yume], and since we’ve roped a third person into this setup, the scope of the show expands too.

The entire iron mine trip is lovely, but obviously the bit at the end with the Flourite vein is the episode’s apex. We have an actual cliffhanger of sorts at the end and I really cannot wait to see what else this show has in store. The next episode of this show will likely have aired already by the time you read this, I’m sure that one will be lovely too.

It is also worth restating that Nagi remains just devastatingly hot. Anime woman of the year, I won’t apologize.

Call of the Night – Season 2, Episode 4

Well, this episode hit me like a ton of bricks.

Overall, Call of the Night has been improving steadily since it came back. (In fact, I’m starting to think the premiere was the weak link.) As such, there’s a lot to like in this episode; visually it’s an array of achingly lonesome liminal spaces, hospital rooms so dreary you can practically smell them, and dramatic, frightful closeups. The same borrowed horror language that the show used in its first episodes.

There’s all the show’s usual strengths writing-wise, including some great banter between Ko and Nazuna. But what really takes this episode to another level is its second half, where we learn the backstory of the character Honda Kabura [Itou Shizuka], a long-time supporting member of the cast and one of Nazuna’s fellow vampires. I don’t want to relitigate all the specifics, but the gist is that Kabura was, as a human, sickly, frequently in and out of hospitals. What we see of her friend group paints them as pretty unsupportive and shitty people, and in fact, her nurse tells her this outright.

Her nurse is, or at least appears to have been, Nazuna. But she’s not called Nazuna, as this person refers to herself as Haru. So either Nazuna went by a different name back then—it would track, given her almost total amnesia as to her earlier life established in last week’s episode—or there’s something else going on here and this is a relative or somesuch. Either way, Haru seems to be just about the only person Kabura really had in her life, so when things reach a breaking point, Haru is the person there for her. This all has an extremely strong gay overtone—more than that, really, since when Haru is running down a list of things that she hates and which have been imposed upon her, she includes men—and when it inevitably comes time for Haru to turn Kabura into a vampire, Call of the Night actually brings back its season one opening theme, drawing a direct line from what happened to Kabura in her own past and what happened to Ko at the beginning of this story.

Their specific situations are different. Ko’s problems seem to be mostly mental and social. Kabura’s to at least some extent are physical. But the effect is the same; these two are societal outcasts. When one of Kabura’s shitty friends visits her in the hospital, she ends up snapping at her. She hits the nail on the head though—these people really do look down on the sick and the unwell, those of us who walk slow or don’t socialize. When Haru offers to turn Kabura, she phrases it not as inviting her to vampirism but as inviting her to the opportunity to live a full life with actual meaning. “Do you want to be able to run?” asks the vampire. The girl who can only walk slow does not need to even speak her answer, for the vampire already knows it.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

The Epic of Zektbach

Well, this was quite a goofy thing.

Essentially, what we have here is a highly compressed attempt at a heroic epic about a character named Shamshir. Shamshir saves her country from an invasion, but her fellow soldiers are entranced by her “dance”—her fighting style—and eventually start committing murders, which Shamshir herself is blamed for.

This doesn’t really go anywhere despite a small handful of interesting ideas—we see things from Shamshir’s and also the murderers’ perspective a few times and they seem to see their targets as masses of binary code and chemical formulas—and the OVA unceremoniously peters out after Shamshir gives in to her bloodlust and murders her entire city, seemingly including her childhood friends.

Apparently, this is one facet of a larger franchise connected to a bunch of concept music, some small booklets, and a now-defunct website, so maybe this makes more sense in context (the series’ somehow still online Fandom wiki boldly claims the series has “gnostic themes”) but as an OVA it’s pretty bad. Not helping is the fact that it looks like absolute mud; almost everything is a shade of brown or red with occasional grays. The resulting visual effect is a bit like if a show had a sub-Attack on Titan color palette on Arifureta‘s visual budget. Still, there’s a charm to the specific kind of bad on display here, not so much so that this is worth seeking out, but I at least had a good time poking fun at it with my friend Josh, who I have now promoted to main-body-of-the-article status, I suppose. (Hi Josh.)

Josh and I started watching old OVAs together recently after having the brilliant decision to knock out famously bad anticlassic Garzey’s Wing together—if you see more OVAs here in the future you can thank them—and they in fact found one of the music videos that comprises the bulk of the remainder of the Zektbach franchise. It is way, way better than the OVA, and also has a much nicer art style. It lacks much of a narrative given that it’s, you know, a 2-minute music video, but it’s much more worth watching than the OVA, I think. I’ve embedded it below.

Puppet Princess

This, on the other hand, was just an absolute slap from start to finish.

These OVA centered around some kind of odd conceit from back in the day aren’t always as great as the general concept makes them sound. But this one and its puppet fighting gimmick really are just as much fun as the idea promises. Obviously, there are a lot of really excellent action sequences here, mostly revolving around our protagonist Rangiku’s [Uechi Aki] array of fighting puppets and the large box she keeps them in. But it really can’t be overstated how absolutely great this thing looks in general, the direction is razor-sharp and in particular the more horror-leaning scenes really pop. (As a side note, basically everyone suddenly gains individually-drawn teeth and bulging eyeballs when they’re going through terrible things. The former in particular means this probably has the most teeth-per-minute of any anime I’ve ever seen. Just something to think about!)

Also present is a master ninja / illusionist named Manajiri [Wakamoto Norio. Yes, really!] who serves as a sort of secondary dynamic. They have a solid dynamic. Although sullying it somewhat is that there’s a decidedly uncomfortable and unfortunately very of its time bit where he tries to grope Rangiku while she’s cleaning herself in a waterfall, although he does at least back off, which is more than can be said about many characters who’ve been placed in similar situations. It’s a little unfortunate since Manajiri is otherwise a pretty great character in his own right.

Rangiku’s puppets are easily my favorite thing about the OVA overall, though, she cycles through a couple of them over its 40-odd minute runtime and while the best is probably the large red samurai she uses for the first and last battle, they’re all great. Naturally, they become the tools of vengeance used to kill the man who murdered her father. Between the beats of the vengeance plot, there’s also some interesting (and harrowing!) stuff in here about how badly her father treated her in favor of the puppets. You can thus extract an interesting thematic line about a man in power favoring literal dolls over the human women in his life, but the OVA only has so much time to explore this. My only real complaint, in fact, other than the waterfall scene, is that I actually wouldn’t have minded watching a lot more of this. I think you could pretty easily extend this to a full series.

And interestingly, it almost sort of did? Puppet Princess itself never got a TV anime, but one of the mangaka’s other projects, Karakuri Circus, did, nearly twenty years later. It features a similar overall premise, which may be enough to finally get me to check Karakuri Circus out after having had it on my plan to watch….since it was new, I believe. There’s a lot of interesting anime out there! For better or worse.

That’s all for this week!

It’s been a long time since I did one of these, but on your way out the door why don’t you take a Bonus Screencap along with you? This time of Nazuna in her nurse getup from the Call of the Night midcard for this week.

The Magic Planet

Tag: Manga

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