Just watched the first 2 episodes of a new anime called Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia and I cannot stress enough how much I fucking love it??? It’s an absolute breath of fresh air. Reminds me of picking up a book and getting a chapter in and realizing you just found the Good Shit.
I know a little bit about Mongolia around that time period, but more focused on what they were doing around China, and less around Persia. The art style is very distinct, and the storytelling is solid as fuck. Might be my favorite of the year if it keeps up like this.
I’ve been getting into anime again recently, and thought I’d share some that I like! These are in no particular order. I gave very short, simplistic descriptions of each show, but I recommend looking them up for full summaries to get a better idea of what they’re about.
1) Cells at Work! (2 seasons, 22 episodes) [Comedy]
Anthropomorphic cells living in a human’s body. Focuses on a red blood cell that frequently encounters a white blood cell during dangerous bodily infestations and illnesses.
2) Kaichou wa Maid-sama! (1 season, 26 episodes) [Comedy, Romance]
Focuses on the female school president of a previously all-male school who directs and rules over them harshly. She secretly works at a maid café, which is discovered by a popular male classmate of hers.
3) Ouran High School Host Club (1 season, 26 episodes) [Comedy, Romance]
Student Haruhi Fujioka stumbles upon a host club in the prestigious Ouran Academy. After accidentally breaking an expensive vase, she must work for the club to pay off her debt.
4) Lost Song (1 season, 12 episodes) [Music, Fantasy]
Rin is a girl from a small village who dreams of singing in the capital city. Her singing has the power to heal any wound. Rin and her brother, Al, journey to the capital when their home is attacked by soldiers hoping to capture Rin. Finis, who also has a magical voice, performs for the royal palace. She falls in love with a soldier named Henry and must hide their relationship from the prince. She and Rin have intersecting destinies and both struggle with the terrible circumstances that life throws at them.
Delinquent Tomoya meets ill Nagisa and they become friends. Along with four other girls, Tomoya decides to help Nagisa revive the school’s drama club. He finds himself helping each girl with their respective problems and learns that life may not be as dull as he once thought.
Homeless Tohru Honda moves in with members of the mysterious Soma family. When she accidentally learns of the family’s curse of them turning into animals when embraced by a member of the opposite sex, she resolves to help them figure out how to lift the curse.
Offered a home by a man being attacked by a dog, Nanami is surprised to find a seemingly abandoned shrine. When she tried to leave, she is confronted by the spirits of the shrine. Tomoe, the fox spirit, leaves angrily when he realizes it is not the land god, Mikage, who has entered their home and that he instead sent a human girl as replacement. Refusing to remain homeless, Nanami decided to serve the shrine and ends up forming a sealed contract with Tomoe when she kisses him.
Tsukimi is an introvert with a love for jellyfish living with other socially isolated women in Tokyo. One day, she meets someone beautiful who looks like a princess and helps her save a jellyfish from a local pet store. The beautiful princess is revealed to actually be a crossdressing man named Kuranosuke. Despite their aversion to men and socializing in general, Kuranosuke resolves to help the women become more confident in themselves.
Follows three sets of meisters and their weapons as they fight demons and witches to obtain the status of Death Scythes. They attend a school founded by Lord Death and learn the best ways to recognize and defeat these evil entities.
10) Yuri on Ice (1 season, 12 episodes) [Sports, Romance]
Figure skater Yuri meets champion skater Victor, who claims he is going to be Yuri’s new mentor. Yuri accepts and goes on a difficult journey of training in the world of competitive ice skating.
Michiru, after becoming a newly formed beastman, travels to Anima City, a safe haven for people like her. After witnessing an explosion during a celebration, she is confronted by detective Shirou Ogami. They team up to pursue the criminals involved with the explosion and discover why Michiru has suddenly started to turn into a Tanuki after being human all her life.
12) Japan Sinks: 2020 (1 season, 10 episodes) [Drama, Sci-fi]
Ayumu and family’s life is turned upside down when an earthquake strikes and obliterates Japan’s structural integrity. The Mutou family must find a way to survive and get out of the country before the entirety of Japan sinks into the ocean.
Gentle yet fierce-looking Ryuji forms an unlikely friendship with sharp-tongued and violent Taiga. They try to help one another confess to their crushes while growing closer along the way.
Izumi confronts the loan sharks who are after money from her father’s run-down theater. She plans to bring the theater back into the spotlight and pay of the debt with the help from an all-male acting troupe.
Chiyo has a crush on her schoolmate, Nozaki, and confesses to him, but he mistakes her as a fan of his manga and gives her an autograph. Saying she wants to be with him, Nozaki invites her to help him with his drawings. Chiyo hopes that by helping Nozaki, he will eventually take notice of her romantic feelings for him.
16) Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku (1 season, 11 episodes) [Romance, Comedy]
Narumi and Hirotaka knew each other when they were younger and end up working in the same office. They decide to start dating, but find that their respective interests make it difficult to create romantic situations.
Amidst working for a ghostwriting agency, past soldier Violet Evergarden learns to reconnect with her feelings while trying to understand the final words her commander left her with.
19) Given (1 season, 11 episodes, 1 film) [Drama, Romance]
Prepared to give up music for good, Ritsuka changes his mind after meeting Mafuyu. He gives Mafuyu guitar lessons in the hopes of making the other boy the lead singer for his band.
20) Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai (1 season, 13 episodes, 1 film) [Drama, Romance, Supernatural]
Sakuta suffers from puberty-syndrome and sees a bunny girl that is invisible to others. When he meets the girl in real life, he realizes she’s going through her own problems and becomes attached to the bunny girl.
I'm begging you guys to watch/read all saints street. It's a Chinese donghua with short episodes (actually adapted from a webcomic) about this demon kid (he's actually college age I think. At least 18) going to live in the human world and his daily life with his other supernatural roommates. I've only watched two seasons of it, but I fully intend to read the webcomic soon because it already became one of my favourite things ever. There is actually also kind of a horizontal plot (I guess i can spoil it because they tell you in the very first scene but Neil, the mc, basically has inside himself the demon king that everyone believes will destroy the world), but what matters is that the characters and their dynamics are amazing. There are all the demon/angel ships you could ever want, and when it seemed they were going to introduce a love triangle between the mc, his love interest and her school friend, they solved it a la call me maybe (a canonical lgbtq+ character? IN MY DONGHUA???) (before I get your hopes too high I want to point out tough that he's a very minor character, BUT many of the main characters are kind of subtle-y fruity as well) (I'm looking at you Nick, and Lynn) (seriously the closet is glass).
Also, there is a vampire gamer guy who wears shirts with sentences like "I'm dead inside" and spends all of his night streaming on twitch (or its supernatural equivalent idk). And! I'm not sure of this since i'm watching the italian version on crunchyroll, but I think it's available FOR FREE on YouTube with English subs!
This show sould be making numbers on Tumblr, why is it so criminally underrated.
The story focuses on Frieren, a thousand-year-old Elf at the end of a big adventure and on the verge of the party splitting up.
So many high fantasy stories have elves as sidekick character so it doesn't really engage in how time passes. But in Frieren the show actively engages in the question, how does an immortal who goes the Slow Way (Doctor Who TM) perceive time?
Frieren starts where most story ends, after the party defeats the Demon King and the party splits up. They're celebrated for defeating the Demon King and his armies, ushering an era of peace but before the Hero party split up they watch a meteor shower. Frieren promised the party that she will show them a better place to watch when the next meteor shower occurs, which is 50 years after.
Frieren, Himmel, Heiten, Eisen spent a decade together on a quest to defeat the Demon King but for Frieren it's just a fraction of her life. 1/100th of her life, as she would tell Eisen, the dwarf vanguard of the party.
(Himmel, Heiten and Eisen watch as Frieren go off her adventure).
And then she disappeared from their life for 50 years, while she goes around the central lands collecting spells and going on solitary adventures. She returns a week before the meteor shower and is surprised how much Himmel has aged.
The party reunites to travel to the location where Frieren said had was the best place to watch the meteor shower. Himmel thanks Frieren because he had his last adventure as a retired hero.
The next scene is Himmel's funeral. And some people in the crowd note how Frieren seems emotionless and is heartless. I absolutely love when both Eisen and Heiten take the heat off of Frieren.
But its when Himmel's coffin is getting buried that it all hits Frieren and she begins to realize she would never see Himmel again, nor does she know about him as much as she wished.
Frieren know wishes to get to know Humanity. We find out later in the series that Frieren was more or less a shut-in before the Hero party recruited her.
One of the reasons why I love the show is how big a part regret plays in the show and how we get to experience the world as Freiren experienced it, letting decades slip by like its mere minutes. How the contributions of her master, Flamme and her hero party group influenced progress and history. Especially, how mythologizing a person she once knew into a legend washed who they really were as a person.
Freiren decides to retrace her steps and goes on another adventure, to go to Ende and speak to people she lost again. She starts this new adventure with Fern, Heiten's ward whom he saved and Stark, Eisen's warrior apprentice.
And that's just the beginning of the journey.
The big part why I love this show is how it's very character-centric and prioritizes relationships between the main characters. The show and manga could go 2-3 episodes on them just going on a journey, take the time to fix a broken horse cart and the story is still compelling.
I love how the mangaka and the anime director recognizes that we enjoy watching characters just hang out.
But, also, it's not just about characters because Frieren's worldbuilding is fascinating. Frieren gets to live in the world she and her friends create but also, experience the consequences of Himmel's death in the larger world, because Himmel apparently served as a deterrent for other demons to cause mayhem.
After he died a lot of demons started causing trouble again, seemingly forgetting or not realizing Frieren is still around. Frieren is the BIGGEST hater of demons.
She is savage. She open sourced Zoltrakk, a killing spell a demon created to Humanity and then modified it to specifically brutally destroy demons.
And then brought back Qual, the demon who created it from the sealing spell only to inform him she made it possible that Zoltrakk was now just 'an ordinary offensive' spell that can be defended against.
Immediately after, Friened exterminated Qual with his own spell. The DISRESPECT.
As we find out later in the series, this is actually the mildest savagery Frieren accords the demons.
Another reason why I love Freiren the show and character is she's badass but also that's not all Freiren is or the othe women in the show.
I love Demon Slayer but one of the things I found frustrating is how Nezuko barely has an internal life and I get it, I guess because she became a demon. It was still frustrating but this is why Freiren stood out.
It's such a rich world, with a richer cast of characters who had fantastic character development.
I finished the OAV Key the Metal Idol recently, and it was really nice!
small résumé below the cut
It's about a robot girl from the countryside who needs to make 30,000 friends to become human. She'll move to Tokyo and try to become an idol to reach her goal but she'll face many enemies and learn many things about the reason of her existence.
I first watched it because I found magnificent screenshots of the OAV online, and because I love medias with robotgirls, and it really wasn't a letdown at all: the visuals are absolutely STUNNING (I spent my time taking screenshots, because it's always really beautiful in every way possible lol).
Maybe because it's an OAV, there's no real censorship I guess, so there are violent scenes and some adult themes involved. I really liked it though, because it's always very relatable, relevant and touching (in my opinion). I'm really glad that I was able to find this beautiful, interesting and touching anime! (you can find it online!)
a few (non-spoiling) pictures of Key the Metal Idol, directed and written by Hiroaki Satō, released in 1994 - 1997 by Studio Pierrot.
