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Summer anime, Pt. 2: Whole Lotta New

hey, this post is also available on my ko-fi, so please check it out and consider tipping/donating as this is a labor of love and i just moved to a new apartment. all of my seasonal reviews and end-of-year rankings are on my ko-fi and under my anime reviews tag, mixed in with my occasional musings. thanks!

Well, that took longer than expected.

I knew I'd likely be delayed in getting this out by a move, but getting sick afterwards only pushed this back further. Sorry about that.

I am never watching 20 series in a season ever again. Let's get to work:

New Anime

Bad Girl

I try my best to put something pithy at the start of my reviews, especially the ones that I know are going to alphabetically or numerically lead off a whole crop of them. I like to pretend I’m a marginally thoughtful writer for a minute in order to better dupe people into reading several paragraphs of “yadda yadda sakuga, blah blah Kaguya-sama, hurf durf overuse of adverbs.” Introduce a theme that permeates throughout the work I’m about to review, give it a little context, make you think about how it applies to you and/or the world around you. You know, like an actual critic would.

I got nothing for Bad Girl. I say this from a place of affection: This show is fucking stupid.

Yuu Yuutani is a goody-two-shoes ace student who’s got it bad for her senpai, the pretty, popular disciplinary committee member Atori Mizutori. She’s desperate for any way to gain senpai’s attention, and Yuu notices that the people Atori speaks to at the front gate are usually the ones whose uniforms aren’t up to code, so she cooks up a brilliant plan: If she starts dressing and acting like a delinquent, the pretty girl at the gate is sure to take notice. The problem with this plan is that Yuu is very sheltered, very naive, and VERY stupid. She dyes her hair a little bit and puts binder clips on her ear cartilage to look like piercings. She has no clue how to actually act like a delinquent beyond minor rule-breaking like “don’t eat on the bus.” It’s honestly pretty cute, and luckily for her, Atori-senpai happens to agree.

Acting as tsukkomi for Yuu’s failures of delinquency is her childhood friend Suzu Suzukaze (yes, everyone follows this naming convention), who is constantly agonized by these antics because 1) it’s painful to see anyone you care for act this outwardly stupid and obsessive, and 2) she’s down horrendous for her best friend. It sucks enough for her to see Yuu slobbering over another girl, but adding to Suzu’s consternation is the fact that she seems to have also grabbed Atori’s attention just by proximity (it doesn’t help that Suzu also looks like a delinquent thanks to her natural blonde hair and terminal RBF). Atori is fond of Yuu in the same way one would be inclined to dote on a particularly gregarious puppy, so to her Suzu is an actual normal person she can buddy up to. Suzu, of course, hates this too.

Bad Girl is cute enough and usually good for a couple of laughs, but it’s carried more by its cast than by its premise, which is necessary because it feels like the show forgets its own premise about 70% of the time. Most of Bad Girl’s runtime is Yuu figuring out new and increasingly desperate ways to get Atori’s attention, and only so many of them involve her actually trying to act like, well, [gestures at title]. I’m fine with that in broader strokes, because “a bunch of dumb lesbians who suck” is usually a simple enough recipe for a good time, but this show flounders a bit more than it probably should. While the main trio and narcissistic streamer senpai Rura make for a fun group (I’m usually a sucker for the “everyone here sucks and is an idiot in a different way” trope, and yes, that includes Suzu; having a crush on Yuu counts as a character flaw), I’m not quite as high on Atori’s kindergarten fan club nor her obsessive little sister Mizuka, and I’m not touching the borderline-predatory Kiyoraka with a ten-foot pole. A lot of jokes just don’t land too well, some running gags run out of steam quickly, and the audio director seemed to think the “dying record player” effect is way funnier than it actually is.

Far from the funniest or most compelling thing I watched this season (and even less so in the yuri genre this year), but Bad Girl is a light enough watch that I can’t fault it too much where it falls short. Perfectly fine way to ensure your brain remains turned off on a Saturday morning.

CITY the Animation

I’ve long ago made my peace with the likelihood that Nichijou will never get a second season. The 2011 adaptation of Keiichi Arawi’s absurdist slice-of-life manga is a hugely important anime to me; it’s always going to show up on any 3x3 I make, and I maintain that it is one of the best pieces of television comedy of the 21st Century. It’s also probably never coming back. It wasn’t an especially big moneymaker for Kyoto Animation, and with the amount of talent they regularly exhibit in just about every production, I sadly can’t blame them for not wanting to invest in more.

For another Arawi adaptation to be KyoAni’s first new series since the 2019 arson attack that destroyed much of the studio and killed dozens of its staff is not only a phoenix-like rebirth for the studio, but a natural evolution of what made Nichijou so special. CITY the Animation is a slice-of-life series in its purest form; an anthology of goings-on in a small city inhabited by a bunch of weirdoes and dingdongs. It largely focuses on 20-year-old roommates Nagumo and Niikura, and their neighbor (and occasional roommate) Wako, but quickly branches out to their workplaces and families, then to the other people at said workplaces and their families, and so on. Everyone is interconnected in bizarre but logical ways, and CITY works best when it draws them all together.

If you know Nichijou, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that CITY is just as hilarious, largely thanks to its ensemble cast of freaks. Nagumo and Niikura are always a blast together, often adversarial but only in the ways you can be when you know about someone you care about too well. Wako is unpredictable, enigmatic, and playfully antagonistic, in ways that should sound a lot like Mai Minakami on paper. But if Mai was an incorrigible prankster, Wako is a straight-up terrorist, and I adore her. We frequently see the antics and banter between middle schoolers Matsuri and Eri (usually addressed as Ecchan), two absolute dorks ping-ponging a brain cell back and forth with harebrained schemes in ways only two young teenagers can. You’ve probably already seen the “CHEESEBURGER!” clip. There’s even more with Matsuri’s dad (who is also Nagumo’s boss) and older brother, a mangaka and his editor, Wako’s sleepy younger sister who inadvertently amasses an army of admirers, a mad inventor, a playwright with a company of bizarre animals, a perfidious old landlady, a bizarre young rich woman who kidnaps people just to give them awards, and too many more to count. We’re treated to the highest of hijinks, from a daring tower escape to an inscrutable quiz show to a citywide Wacky Races to a Momotaro rap musical. Even putting the familiar aesthetic aside, CITY is unmistakably Arawi; it has the same familiar sense of non-sequitur and absurdism that made Nichijou so beloved. Nothing makes sense here, and it is brilliant.

It kills me to admit this, because I still view its predecessor as my North Star for high-quality comedy animation, but CITY looks better than Nichijou in just about every respect. And even for all the similarities and familiar Arawi-isms tying the two together, I have never seen anything that looks like CITY. The deliciously vibrant color palette, heavy line weights, and seemingly hand-drawn shading effects lend the show a manga-like, strangely nostalgic look, and the same intricate attention paid to the backgrounds make the world of CITY look just as alive as its inhabitants. To say the setting is a character unto itself is a cliché so old it’s collecting AARP benefits, but the incredible attention to detail really helps the titular CITY (yes, it’s actually called that) truly feel like a living, breathing ecosystem. There’s an unmistakable sense of kineticism to everything; reaction shots are bombastic and over-the-top, and no movements are wasted even when our cast wastes incredible amounts of energy on stuff like chasing a runaway cat, blasting their scooter through the backstreets for a midnight snack, or punching the living shit out of an unidentifiable creature. And that’s just Niikura!

KyoAni’s dedication to the production of CITY and its world is exemplified in the show’s freakishly ambitious fifth episode, which was not only the best episode of anime I saw this year, but I say without exaggeration that it is one of the best episodes of anime I’ve ever seen in my life. Nagumo’s trek to escape the rich lady’s tower is an anthology of insanity in its own right, but KyoAni cranked the dial by placing as many as a half-dozen subsequent stories, seemingly in real time, all on the screen at once, with the focus changing repeatedly. It’s a relentless assault on the senses, compounded further by the repeated switch-ups in animation styles and mixed media, including NES-style pixel art, classical Japanese art, and stop-motion featuring a real-life miniature of the set where the episode largely takes place. The studio produced something like six episodes’ worth of frames just for this one episode, which deserves some kind of award. The final sequence, which sees seemingly the entirety of the titular city gathered on the same lawn, is somewhere between Richard Scarry’s Busytown and Where’s Waldo, perfectly adapting a famous manga spread that didn’t even appear to be possible to animate. I have no clue how any studio could’ve pulled this episode off, but I am eternally grateful that they did.

There is a certain musicality to how CITY presents itself, so it’s no surprise that the show sounds just as delightful as it looks. The score, performed entirely by veteran band Piranhans, leans heavily on the melodica’s versatility, typically lending scenes a trademark sense of childlike mischief or an accordion-like serenity that wouldn’t sound out of place in the European countryside. Often punctuated by jazz-funk guitar and Caribbean and African percussion, the soundtrack makes an obviously Japanese locale like CITY feel like it could be anywhere on Earth. They even got the original “Mambo No. 5” in there! The OP, Furui Riho’s “Hello,” and the ED, TOMOO’s “Lucky,” both balance the whimsy and playfulness of childhood with the melancholy of growing up, in a way that evokes nostalgia for something that may have never actually been there. All of these musical elements working in concert (pun unintentional), both together and along with the visual aesthetic, lend CITY the Animation an unexpected sense of universality that makes it feel like it’s been with you for years, even if you weren’t already familiar with Arawi’s work going in.

Oh my God, and they even made most of the season finale a musical for no good reason. These absolute madmen and -women.

I could seriously go on for ages about this show. CITY the Animation is the best anime of 2025, full stop, and I’ll be shocked if I’m not repeating myself in December. If this show was just its fifth episode, it would still be in the running for AOTY, but a full 13 episodes is an astonishing achievement. This is an instant classic.

Clevatess

I’m at a point where I’ll lap up just about any half-decent non-isekai anime fantasy that’s put in front of me, and as far as I’m concerned, 2025 had been sorely lacking in just that before this season. Hell, I hadn’t seen anything of the sort since last summer’s passable Wistoria (I didn’t watch Secrets of the Silent Witch this season, but I’ll hopefully get my review in for that one at the end of the year). So here comes a gritty dark fantasy, looking like the ‘97 Berserk, with a double-length premiere episode, and I gotta see what this is about.

Clevatess begins with the human hero Alicia, daughter of a slain swordmaster, setting out with a cadre of fellow heroes to expand the world of man and slay the massive beast creating a de facto border to the south. Alicia and her company are no match for the titular Clevatess, an enormous horned wolflike monster, who makes short work of them and in his annoyance decides to venture out and run roughshod over the kingdom that sent the pesky heroes to their demise. Upon killing the king and destroying the royal palace, Clevatess is stopped in his tracks by a young woman in the rubble holding a baby, pleading with him to spare the child’s life. He humors her, taking the baby back to his domain for reasons even he’s unsure of. Armed with what little knowledge he has about human biology, Clevatess revives Alicia, assuming she should be able to breastfeed the baby seeing as how she’s a woman and all. This is not at all the case, but she does know that a wet nurse would help keep the baby fed until he’s old enough to feed himself. Now backed by a partly-willing protector in the now-unkillable Alicia, Clevatess disguises himself as a young man named Klen and ventures out to find a wet nurse for the child. He soon learns that the baby he’s happened upon is in fact the crown prince of the kingdom he’d just annihilated, so he sees an opportunity to control humanity from his domain in the shadows by raising the child in his image.

That’s a whole lot for a first episode, and there is a mountain of worldbuilding I haven’t even touched upon, but the premiere makes good use of its extended runtime establishing Clevatess’ world and premise. What follows is not quite as grandiose; Klen and Alicia soon run afoul of a group of bandits and have to reassess their new situations before they can return to their grander quest. We learn a bit more about what life is actually like for the kingdom’s rank-and-file, and what a lousy world it is to be a woman in (it’s worth mentioning that sexual assault is never depicted or even named, but it is an implicit threat to many of the series’ women in its first few episodes). We end up learning about the world’s developments in magic just as Clevatess does, the main pair gain a new companion, and they’re on their way. Clevatess largely sags in the middle, but the debut season’s delightfully grisly climax and fascinating setup for future seasons had me salivating for more.

Clevatess may not look the best per se, but the aesthetic is undeniable. I’m absolutely eating up the intentional retro look plenty of contemporary anime like The Elusive Samurai are going for, and Clevatess goes for a similar look. There’s a noisy film grain filter put over the visuals that lend it the look and feel of a late 90s/early 00s OVA, giving the ever-present dark fantasy aesthetic that extra dimension of grit. Even flashbacks are given a gauzy blur effect that make them look like a low-fidelity digital transfer, like some old relic you found on YouTube in 2007. Color grading is largely muted, but holy cow does the blood really pop. The animation isn’t always top-notch, but some smart storyboarding paired with the well-envisioned visual language tie everything together solidly. The music’s a plus as well, with the nu-metal OP by Mayu Maeshima and original ED by Ellie Goulding(!!) really setting the stage in two different directions.

Overall? Pretty darn good show! Probably not something I’d have ordinarily sought out on its own, but there was enough positive buzz around it that I figured it was worth checking out. Clevatess looks like it might be something to invest in for the long haul.

The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity

I’ve made it clear all too many times that there’s little I love more in anime than a nice, sweet, straightforward romance. A cute couple meets, falls in love, and whatever else happens, happens. The Dangers in My Heart, Horimiya, A Sign of Affection, and plenty of others that don’t dawdle or overload the plot with gimmicks or contrived misunderstandings to preserve the status quo are a great balancing act against all of the romcoms and wish-fulfillment slop out there. The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity is just a lovely, pretty show that makes you want to take a bite out of it.

Rintaro is a stolid but intimidating-looking student at his town’s lousy public high school, helping out his parents part-time at the bakery they own. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with bleached-blond hair, earrings, and a narrow gaze, so people tend to avoid him lest they run afoul of this supposed delinquent. One night, while covering for his mom at the patisserie, he sees the tiny Kaoruko going to town on an insane number of desserts, which makes her panic and leave in a huff. She comes back to apologize, but on her way out she forgets her takeaway order, so at his mom’s urging, Rintaro runs out to bring it to her. He finds her being accosted by a pair of good-for-nothings, so he protects her and scares them off. He then finds out the next day that she attends the school next door, Kikyo, a private girls’ high school that fucking hates the Chidori boys. So we’ve got some Romeo and Juliet shit right off the bat.

The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity is just as much a story of managing your own self-worth as it is about two cute high schoolers falling in love. Rintaro immediately reminded me of Kanji from Persona 4, and I could similarly tell from the jump that this was a “looks can be deceiving” type of story. He was judged for his looks, even as a kid, so he has trouble opening up to others, even his friends and family. Where Fragrant Flower stands out among its contemporaries, though, is that people actually TALK TO EACH OTHER! Meeting Kaoruko has made Rintaro want to become a better version of himself, which is a character element I’ve adored in series like DanDaDan and The Dangers in My Heart, and to see him making an active effort to be a better student, friend, and son makes him an eminently easy protagonist to root for.

Kaoruko is just impossibly cute and seemingly perfect, almost obnoxiously so, which I would be cynical about given that the manga is published in a shonen magazine, but she’s such a driving factor of the story and it’s so well-executed that I can let it slide. She’s very naturally disarming and has a way of piercing through the fronts people put up and overcoming their insecurities head-on. Kaoruko’s easygoing kindness has had similar effects on both Rintaro and her best friend Subaru; she’s quickly able to see their finer points and is unafraid to let them know what she thinks of them. Even putting the central romance aside, I was pleasantly surprised by how well this was handled with Subaru; she’s a terrific foil to Rintaro as she puts up a tough front but deals with some pretty intense self-loathing due to also being judged for her looks. Seeing how profoundly Kaoruko has affected her, shortly followed by Rintaro pointing out the exact same positives Kaoruko sees in her, moved me halfway to tears just six episodes in. And just like with Rintaro himself, his school buddies, to whom she’s pretty openly awful at the beginning, are all about openness and honesty, and they’re just as disarming to Subaru as Kaoruko had been since their childhood.

I alluded to this when I covered My Dress-Up Darling’s second season, but CloverWorks has been on an absolute heater these past few years. For the studio to consistently churn out high-quality anime like this, Horimiya, Bocchi, Spy x Family, The Elusive Samurai, and others, year after year (let alone season; I can’t believe they put this out at the same time as MDUD and the new Rascal Does Not Dream entry), is laudable, and it’s now a studio whose output I’m almost universally invested in. It also calls into question what the fuck went wrong with shows like Persona 5 the Animation, Wonder Egg Priority, and The Promised Neverland, but I digress; those were years ago anyway. The studio imbued Fragrant Flower with similarly high production values; the show looks and sounds absolutely terrific. I particularly love that although it’s a shonen romance, the adaptation still carries some visual flairs that would look right at home in a shoujo. Meaningful expressions and internal emotional beats are given the same level of gravity you’d expect in a doki-doki girls’ romance story, with plenty of lens flares, light blooms, and watercolor splotches to match. Even the OP has Tatsuya Kitani’s best romantic song for an anime since Jujutsu Kaisen’s second season, and I’m only like 15% joking.

At the time of writing this, The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity is still airing weekly on Netflix, because they’re morons, but I’ve been able to watch the season in its entirety through… other means. If you’ve been following it, stick it out, because this was an absolute delight.

Gachiakuta

I’m honestly still not too sure what to make of Gachiakuta just yet. This was the summer season’s big battle shonen debut alongside Tougen Anki (no thanks), and like any decent battle shonen, the first cour required a lot of team-building and table-setting before it really got going. The characters, aesthetic, and power system were plenty to pique my interest, though. This is one to watch for the long haul.

Rudo loves trash. He’s an orphan living in the slums of an otherwise seemingly idyllic society called the Sphere, which offloads its refuse to the backstreets where he lives with his adoptive father figure, Regto. In trash, Rudo sees limitless possibility; trinkets and doodads that weren’t loved to their full potential could still have plenty of life and use in them. He’s making do despite his weird hobby, bad temper, and lack of friends, but everything turns upside down when Regto is murdered and Rudo is forced to take the blame. As punishment, he’s cast out to the one place even lower than the slums: The Pit, the enormous toxic landfill below the Sphere, where he’s left for dead. He’s attacked by an enormous monster seemingly made from sentient trash, and he is saved by the enigmatic Enjin, who takes him in. Enjin and Rudo both have the powers of a Giver, a user of an item called a Vital Instrument that only they are able to wield to its full power. Enjin has Rudo join his group, the Cleaners, made up of Givers who protect the surface from these trash beasts, on the condition that Rudo one day returns to the Sphere to get his revenge.

Gachiakuta takes its time getting any real traction, but it has a terrific sense of itself from the jump. It revels in its grungy trash-punk aesthetic; everything has an earth-toned color grade to it that really makes it look like something you found at the bottom of the dumpster. Characters are all bug eyes and Studio Bones’ hallmark heavy line weights, and they look great in action. They’re also terrifically diverse, which is always a welcome sight in anime, and the soundtrack is widely varied to match. Heck of a cast, too; the main Givers are voiced by the likes of Katsuyuki Konishi (Kamina in Gurren Lagann), Yoshitsugu Matsuoka (Vash in Trigun Stampede), and Yumiri Hanamori (Nadeshiko in Yuru Camp), and a character towards the end of the first cour has Kana Hanazawa sounding the most deranged I’ve heard her since Jujutsu Kaisen 0. I’m really looking forward to getting to know them better.

Rudo’s an interesting protagonist to build the series around. There’s a balance somewhere between his anger issues and his attachment to the things others throw away, and I can see the crux of his character development involving finding who he really is between the two. I do appreciate the animistic idea that discarded objects contain souls of their own just from having been used, and Rudo’s unique power as a Giver to wield those souls has boundless room for a creative use of the power system. For a while, he really does just seem to be an angry teenager who gains powers that can change the world, which we’ve seen plenty of times in series like this, but an interesting wrinkle comes into play towards the end of the debut cour: It turns out that Rudo’s rage, even when it’s justified, is potentially far more destructive than helpful. This is a far more interesting conceit to me than the 5000th self-insert “guy got wronged by the hero’s party and takes his revenge with his OP powers” isekai out there, and I can appreciate a high-profile series aimed at young men saying explicitly that even with supernatural powers and main character syndrome, a young man’s anger can be a way bigger problem than it can be a solution.

I haven’t come back to Gachiakuta’s second cour while this roundup’s been in limbo, but I’m looking forward to seeing more. The first 13 episodes went by in a flash, and I’ve been enjoying my time with the Cleaners so far. I’ve seen my share of garbage anime over the years, but this trash is a gem.

Ruri Rocks

Iyashikei in anime is largely intended as a means of escapism; a way to look at some lovely place that isn’t your boring job or classroom and imagine yourself there instead. I’ve largely found that some of the best ones are not only educational but motivational; the kinds that will not only teach you something new but encourage you to go check it out for yourself instead of just sitting around and imagining a life out there. Afro’s series, Yuru Camp and last season’s mono, are both terrific examples; both presenting as Cute Girls Doing Cute Things series but always providing tips on how to better enjoy your life outside your own home.

Ruri Rocks, as its subtitle Introduction to Mineralogy suggests, takes the scientific approach to exploring the world around you. The titular Ruri Tanigawa, a bratty high schooler who loves shiny accessories, is denied an advance on her allowance to buy a crystal necklace, so she ventures out to forage for some crystals for herself. While in the woods, she runs into the warhammer-toting grad student, Nagi Arato, doing some mining of her own. Always happy to teach, Nagi helps Ruri find quartz crystals, and with Ruri’s curiosity piqued, they soon move on to garnet, gold, and sapphire. Ruri’s a little prone to information overload, so she’d much rather just learn how to get there, but Nagi is all about the journey and the lessons learned along the way, complete with adorable chibi explainers. Soon along for the ride are Nagi’s nerdy underclasswoman Yoko Imari and Ruri’s reserved classmate Shoko, and we have ourselves a band of Cute Girls.

A major throughline in this series is that with unlimited curiosity comes unlimited discovery. To study the earth itself is to study history; everything in the world has a reason for being there. Tectonic and volcanic events leave behind countless curiosities, but so do industrial runoff and good old-fashioned litter. Nature is a force unto itself, and it can create beauty even from its own destruction. Curiosity can be just as powerful a force, and with the right mindset, you can continue to learn new things forever. This line of thinking is what makes Nagi such an asset (heh) for Ruri to have in her life; she knows exactly how to push Ruri’s curiosity in ways that lead her to discover new things on her own, and as the series goes on you can see Ruri thinking and acting more like a researcher in her own right. She starts perceiving dead ends as mere obstacles, and this really shows towards the final third of the season where Nagi largely falls to the margins and Ruri becomes the one to pull Shoko along to new veins of discovery. Speaking of whom, Shoko’s addition to the cast exemplifies a major throughline in the second half: Niche interests are made better by sharing them with like-minded people, even if people on the outside don’t get it. Though she was often questioned and looked down on for her interest in minerals, even by her own parents, Shoko found the right people and even a possible career path with our heroines. And in Shoko, Ruri has found someone her own age to help make a future in mineralogy seem like more than just a passing fancy.

As you’d expect of Studio Bind, Ruri Rocks looks exceptional. Whereas this past winter’s Flower and Asura shared much of its aesthetic and character design with Bind’s bedrock production, Mushoku Tensei, there appears to be much more of Onimai’s animation ethic in Ruri Rocks (at least from what I can tell; I haven’t seen Onimai and don’t really plan to). Character models are loose and bouncy (take the double entendre how you will; I’ll get to it in a minute) in frequently cartoony ways that contrast wonderfully with the photorealistic, gorgeously lit backdrops they venture into. It’s not often I actively notice lighting effects in anime, but they are truly spectacular in this show; the sparkle of various mineral deposits is one thing, but I was frequently taken aback by seeing the way light seeped into the gaps in a canopy of trees or refracted through a water bottle. Combined with the studio’s best environment art ever (and if you’ve seen Mushoku Tensei, you’ll know I’m really saying something here), Ruri Rocks has really helped set Bind apart as a prestige studio.

Although I’d already had a pretty full plate with this season, I’d decided to pull the trigger and pick up Ruri Rocks for two reasons: 1) the aforementioned animation and aesthetic, and 2) Nagi. I know what I’m about, man. It’s one thing that an anime has a hot lady in it, there’s plenty of those; you know an anime is on some real pervert shit when it can animate a conservatively-clothed woman and still make her obnoxiously sexy. Chainsaw Man and Kowloon Generic Romance did this perfectly too. Nagi is clearly a favorite of the staff; there’s a lot of attention paid to her bouncy bits and backside both in modeling and animation (the poor buttons on her shirts are holding on for dear life). There was a whole over-animated segment where Imari and the girls play dress-up with her, for fuck’s sake. I still tend to roll my eyes and go “okay, man” at most fanservice shots in anime (there were some stray shots of the high schoolers that still made me do so), but I’m starting to gauge a production’s animation quality by how well the perverts on staff get to shine, and boy did they get to show out for Ruri Rocks.

So you come to Ruri Rocks for something neat to look at, be it the titular rocks or the rockin’ tits, and you leave having learned a few things. The scientific process can be a grind, but learning stuff is cool as hell. So are boobs. Golden Boy taught us that, and who the hell are you to deny Golden Boy?

See You Tomorrow at the Food Court

One of the larger detriments to growing up in the 21st Century, at least in the US, is the decline of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg dubbed “third spaces,” particularly for teenagers. Third spaces, public and communal spaces for socializing away from home and work/school, are kind of a necessity for adolescents; enrichment away from home and school is a good way to keep bored teens from getting themselves in trouble. Even if they’re gonna be on their phones all the time, at least they’re physically around one another instead of being holed up and getting radicalized on Discord.

I’m not going to act like malls are an absolute public good, but they can function as a perfectly fine third space for teenagers, especially ones who otherwise wouldn’t normally see one another on a daily basis, which brings us to our subject matter. See You Tomorrow at the Food Court is a short series of vignettes surrounding middle school buddies Wada and Yamamoto, who now attend different high schools and convene at the local mall food court every day after school just to shoot the shit. And shoot the shit they do, covering a wide swath of topics from gacha games to annoying classmates and siblings to spicy food to YouTubers to boobs. Sometimes they agree, more often than not they bicker, sometimes they fully get into fights and make up. Like teenage girls do.

See You Tomorrow at the Food Court is pretty much just an extended manzai act, and your enjoyment of it will hinge entirely on the co-leads, because there’s not much else going on. Fortunately, they’re great. They both play against type; Wada is a put-together Yamato nadeshiko-type with a horrible temper and shitty grades, while Yamamoto is a sleepy-eyed gyaru who’s constantly looking at her phone, but she’s usually studying kanji and English to get ahead in class. This usually sets Wada up as the boke in their impromptu routines, with Yamamoto as the tsukkomi, typically deadpanning back at her antics. There’s really not much more to it than that, but it’s a good time.

In a word, See You Tomorrow at the Food Court is fine. The ever-present product placement can get a little obnoxious, but it’s nothing that actively ruins the show. It’s a short series at just six episodes, and it never feels like it’s wanting for more. It succeeds at everything it presents, even if it’s not much to begin with. Not much actually, like, happens, but Wada and Yamamoto are a blast together. If you like these two, and I’m sure you will, there are worse ways to spend a couple hours.

The Summer Hikaru Died

One of 2025’s most anticipated manga adaptations lived up to expectations and gave us an instant hit. The Summer Hikaru Died is a gorgeous, unnerving exploration of one of the truest horrors known to mankind: Self-discovery in a small town.

Shortly after going missing in the mountains near his backwater town, peppy goofball Hikaru came back in one piece. His best friend, the gloomy Yoshiki, is able to sniff out pretty quickly that this isn’t the Hikaru he grew up with; this one Came Back Wrong. Yoshiki knows Hikaru well enough to know that this thing isn’t even Hikaru, and it reveals itself to be some shapeless mass, iridescent and spreading like an oil spill. But it’s able to replicate Hikaru so well, both in look and outward personality, that Yoshiki finds some cold comfort in having something resembling his dead friend around. Whether he keeps “Hikaru” around as a favor to this seemingly lost, childlike entity or out of his own selfish desire, Yoshiki isn’t entirely sure.

There is no shortage of threats pervading the town of Kubitachi, not the least of which being whatever the hell “Hikaru” actually is. There is some resemblance to “Nonuki-sama,” the mountain’s vengeful guardian spirit of legend, in no small part because “Hikaru” is prone to losing control and lashing out at Yoshiki and his friends. He’s some non-euclidean, almost liquid mass beneath his guise, and it gets harder for him to remain “Hikaru.” He has no memory of his existence before bodysnatching Hikaru, and is childlike in his understanding of the concepts of violence, retaliation, and even death. “Hikaru” doesn’t understand at first that he even can hurt Yoshiki, but becomes miserable after finding out that he did. Worse yet, his very presence among society seems to be a magnet for wayward spirits, including malevolent ones, and whatever imprint he’s left on Yoshiki has magnetized him as well. Throw in a roaming exorcist of sorts working for some mysterious company, and danger could be lurking just about anywhere.

The Summer Hikaru Died does a magnificent job of establishing its atmosphere as something oppressive and unsettling in the ways only the best works of horror can. Horror manga is notoriously difficult to adapt to the screen, as I alluded to in my review of last year’s disastrous Uzumaki anime, but Hikaru’s setting is a major element of what makes it succeed. Sunlight is harsh, the din of chirring cicadas is deafening, and you can practically feel the weight of the humid summer air. It reads as a sort of Japanese southern gothic fiction, in a way, where its characters are borne down upon by an unholy combination of social expectations, arcane traditions, small-town poverty, and an environment that is hostile to human life in more ways than just the climate. Shit can go very wrong, very quickly, and the sense of creeping dread both underscores and undercuts the much more internal struggles that both Yoshiki and “Hikaru” are undergoing.

Yes, The Summer Hikaru Died is as much a work of queer art as it is a horror story, though creator Mokumokuren has publicly bristled at people who blithely categorize it as yaoi. It’s plain as day that Yoshiki’s feelings for Hikaru, the real one, were far more than platonic, and “Hikaru” is more prone to acting on the latent feelings and impulses he left behind. There is a casual intimacy between them now, not the least of which involving “Hikaru” allowing Yoshiki to explore his not-entirely-human body, stolen away in private spaces like empty classrooms and bedrooms. The image of Yoshiki reaching elbow-deep into the inhuman crevasse in “Hikaru’s” chest is potent and indelible, as is “Hikaru” breaking off and handing Yoshiki his own xiphoid process as a peace offering. In “Hikaru,” Yoshiki sees something out of place and looking for somewhere to call home, and in Yoshiki, “Hikaru” sees home. What’s shared between them is intoxicating, alien, and dangerous, both between them and in light of what it exposes them to. Plenty of fiction involving inhuman sapient life, at least as far back as Shelley’s Frankenstein, shines a spotlight on mankind’s own capacity for monstrousness, but even next to “Hikaru,” and almost certainly because of him, Yoshiki considers himself the monster, the one who doesn’t belong.

Of course, if you’ve seen or read The Summer Hikaru Died, you’ll know that this isn’t a particularly deep reading on my part. They pretty much say all of this explicitly.

CygamesPictures has established itself as a heavy hitter in no time at all. Last year’s Bang Brave Bang Bravern was a bombastic, balls-to-the-wall spectacle of absurdity, and the previous season’s gorgeous and hilarious Apocalypse Hotel has shaken out as one of this year’s best. (I’ve heard Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray, based on the parent company’s big moneymaker, is also terrific, but I’m hesitant to even touch that franchise lest you never hear from me again.) For the studio’s first manga adaptation to be this exceptional bodes well for the eventual Kagurabachi anime, because it’s clearly willing to invest talent and resources into releasing as well-polished a product as it can. The Summer Hikaru Died exhibits the same sense of cinematic grunginess as Chainsaw Man’s debut season as well as Heavenly Delusion; the gorgeous character modeling, lighting, shading, and environmental design go to great lengths to further amplify and contextualize the eerie and unreal Other always creeping in from the margins. The ever-present uncanniness is further underscored by bizarre dissonance, analog imagery, and even real-life photography (including the now-famous raw chicken photo) to blur the lines of reality and instantly make this one of the most successful horror anime adaptations out there. The Summer Hikaru Died may not necessarily scare you, but it will certainly burrow beneath your skin.

There’s something intoxicating about the danger of wrapping yourself up in something that could readily kill you, and don’t the monsterfuckers know it. Eerie, haunting, and awash in queer subtext, The Summer Hikaru Died is one of this year’s best. It’s very likely to make its mark on you as well.

Takopi’s Original Sin

(SERIOUS CONTENT WARNING for suicide, child abuse/neglect, and bullying)

It’s unfortunately impossible to provide necessary content warnings for this series without effectively giving the game away, but it’s also the only humane way to present it at all. Takopi’s Original Sin is not an easy watch, but it is a rewarding one. It’s a fable for our time in the worst ways possible, one that stares you directly in the face and dares you not to blink. It is grungy, gorgeous, upsetting, and uplifting.

Hailing from the Planet Happy, an adorable little pink octopus-like creature has arrived in Japan to bring joy. The first person he meets, the 11 year old Shizuka, could really use it. She’s disaffected, carrying around a ratty backpack, and effectively lives alone with her dog while her mom is out doing God knows what. She’s constantly being bullied at school by the popular Marina, who rags on her for being poor and calls her a drain on the country’s resources. The alien (whom she’s named Takopi due to the fact that he’s a tako, octopus, and constantly punctuates sentences with “pi!”), who has no point of reference for conflict, thinks they’re just friends having a tiff, so he has a solution in the form of one of his magical devices: An unbreakable ribbon that, when tied to each person’s pinky, will resolve any issues between them forever. Shizuka declines. One day, looking dirtier than ever and carrying an unworn dog collar, Shizuka decides to borrow the ribbon, confirming that it’s unbreakable, and hangs herself with it. Confused and devastated, Takopi uses another one of his devices to rewind time and try to prevent this from ever happening again.

Though his attempts at preventing Marina’s bullying through advance knowledge of her tactics seem useful for Shizuka at first, Takopi’s efforts continue to backfire horribly as Marina becomes increasingly enraged and takes her anger out on both of them, until Takopi hits a point of no return from which he can no longer rewind. With the help of some shapeshifting and manipulation of a boy in Shizuka’s class, the two are able to move on, but we begin to learn more about Marina’s life and that there may have been more than met the eye with her situation. Nobody is perfectly innocent here, but nobody is truly evil, either. All we have are broken children trying to make sense of lives that have been severely deprived in one fashion or another.

Takopi’s Original Sin, in a word, is lurid. That was the word that kept coming to mind as I watched it; the series is unflinching in depicting the nasty realities of bullying, poverty, physical and psychological abuse, suicide, addiction, and even just being a kid watching your parents fighting. The animation is faithful to mangaka Taizan 5’s loose art style; characters are drawn with scribbly, almost brittle-looking outlines and details that only look more scuffed-up and breakable as their emotions run higher, like the artist couldn’t control their pen. It’s not uniformly brutal; if anything, it’s as black as black comedy can get. Takopi is farcical, overtly droll, and exhibits a keen sense of comedic timing, but rarely in a way that elicits actual laughter, if ever. If anything, the comedic framing only enhances the potency of the gut punches. I have watched dozens upon dozens upon dozens of anime since roughly this time in 2022, and I think this was the most intentionally upsetting thing I watched since that year’s Cyberpunk Edgerunners. Certainly since Devilman Crybaby.

There are a lot of different ways to read Takopi. The cynical read is that it’s all trauma porn, another dark series painted with a cutesy brush to lure in unsuspecting viewers and ruin their day. The easy read is the old saw that “hurt people hurt people,” and that is certainly true: These are all children in desperate need of normalcy, and having been denied those things by the people who should have provided, they seek it out in their own destructive, maladaptive ways. Failing that, they seek justice. There are loftier angles to take, like a theological one in which Takopi himself is an angel. Myself, I see Takopi as an embodiment of toxic positivity and the harmful naivete of saying “well maybe the answer is somewhere in the middle.” And while that’s certainly an element of the story, I think that what Takopi is is less important than what he both observes and fosters: Humanity’s infinite capacity for both cruelty and kindness.

Yes, hurt people do hurt people, but paradoxically (and crucially), hurt people need people. Especially when they’re kids. This is where I feel that Takopi’s ending, while it may come across as a deus ex machina ass-pull to some, ultimately succeeds in its message: There is no magical turnkey solution that can untangle a gnarled heap of abuse, neglect, and bullying. Just talking it out isn’t always the solution, but there is no single MacGuffin that can fix it. Humanity cannot afford to wait for a god or alien to bail us out; only we can save ourselves and one another. Common ground is what brings us together, and to abuse another cliche, misery does indeed love company. Magic cannot overcome human cruelty; only humanity can. Hell is other people, but so is heaven, and I think that’s something we need to remind ourselves at this point in human history.

I’m glad I watched Takopi’s Original Sin, but I’m just as glad that it was only six episodes long. It’s one of 2025’s best anime, easily, but it’s a rough ride. I can’t recommend it easily without stressing the content warnings repeatedly. Would I ever watch it again? Ask me again in a year.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…

Welp, I hoodwinked myself into watching another harem anime. I was suckered in by a yuri tag and a title I’d recognized, but it turns out that There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… (which I will henceforth be calling by its Japanese abbreviation, Watanare) is another romcom about a weak-willed dork who is inexplicably surrounded by a bunch of girls who wanna get busy. Except this time, said dork is also a girl! Despite plenty of early shenanigans, though, I found myself surprisingly invested in the character dynamics and had an easy Best Girl choice. They got me again.

After an early adolescence of introvertedness and self-isolation, high school first-year Renako has decided to turn over a new leaf and put herself out there. She’s succeeded at inserting herself into a friend group with some of the prettiest and most popular girls in her grade, but at the cost of her own limited social battery. She’s having trouble keeping up with group-wide conversations, and before long needs to recuse herself in order to recover. One day at lunch, Mai, the school’s first-year idol and the friend group’s de facto leader, notices this and follows Renako up to the roof to make sure she’s comfortable, and finds her leaning against the railing. Fearing that Renako is about to do something drastic, Mai rushes to her aid, only to spook her into falling off the roof, with Mai giving chase. They both land safely on a tree branch, and Renako finally opens up to Mai, admitting that she’s intimidated by her new friend group and is struggling to keep up appearances. Mai appreciates getting to know Renako like this and sharing in a moment of vulnerability.

So she confesses to Renako the very next day.

Renako is, understandably, blindsided by this development. The prettiest girl in her school, a literal model, is in love with her? Right when she just started getting comfortable even being around people? And come on, she’s not even into girls like that! Kinda! Maybe? She’d much rather be friends either way. Rather than be dejected, Mai strikes a deal with her: They can give both the friends thing and the girlfriends thing a try, on alternating days, in attempts to convince the other their own way is right. Complicating matters are the rest of the friend group: The ice-cold, calculating Satsuki, who is openly in love with Mai and starts showing Renako more attention out of spite, the gentle, sisterly Ajisai, whom Renako adores and who may also reciprocate, and the genki, carefree Kaho, who’s… there (her story arc is yet to come in the impending movie). Renako has a lot of feelings she needs to sort out every which way.

So yes, this is very much a yuri harem anime, and it is a messy one. Not on the production front at all, mind you; Watanare looks and sounds pretty great. I mostly just mean Mai. She is confident and driven to get what she wants, but she was clearly a spoiled child and has rarely been told “no” throughout her life, so she is more than a little pushy with Renako and blasé about her boundaries, which can approach uncomfortable territory. The more drastically Mai acts out, it gets harder to view her as anything but this series’ antagonist, and I’m not sure whether that’s the actual intention. Renako is capable of putting her foot down, but her introverted nature leads to her acting more like a standard harem protagonist and getting whisked away on her love interests’ flights of fancy. She’ll also just slip and grab a boob sometimes, as is the hallmark of the genre.

What makes Renako more interesting than her harem protag status would suggest, though, is that there’s a major disconnect between how she sees herself versus where others see her. While Renako thinks she’s just some remora that attached herself to the popular kids, her friends adore her, her classmates think she’s genuinely interesting, and her little sister’s friends think she’s cool as shit. This has been a common thread in a few of the high school anime I’ve reviewed this season, namely My Dress-Up Darling and Fragrant Flower; it’s difficult to take stock of yourself when you have a low self-image to begin with. But Renako isn’t the only one keeping up appearances; everyone in her orbit has expectations among their families and classmates that they need to maintain, and watching these girls square those fronts with their own desires and vulnerabilities is where Watanare really sings. Ajisai’s story arc near the end of the season was particularly heartbreaking; she’s a habitual people-pleaser, and though she is genuinely as caring as she acts, she’s also the oldest of three and is desperate to be selfish, just once, and Renako is the first person to ever indulge her. It’s easy to see why these girls like Renako, even if she doesn’t (and it can seem a little contrived at times).

Watanare is a messy one at times and can dip into the uncomfortable, but not enough to put me off the show. Let’s be real here, all romantic and sexual impulses are messy and uncomfortable when you’re a teenager, especially when your very sexuality is in question. Mai’s antics can be a little much at times, and she does push boundaries, but the show is just careful enough to make it clear when she’s crossed lines. I sat with it for a bit and I think this sort of thing just comes with the territory; they’re not the same thing, but I’d be a hypocrite if I lauded The Summer Hikaru Died for exploring queer experimentation with bodies and boundaries in the abstract while tut-tutting Watanare for doing the same thing in more concrete ways. I was also never a queer teenage girl and probably never will be, so it’s really not my place to say.

This was available weekly for free on YouTube via Remow’s It’s Anime channel, and it was mostly a success, which was a welcome respite from Crunchyroll’s constant bullshit (there were some weird subtitling choices, though, like changing Satsuki’s name to “Satuki” or Mai’s last name Ozuka to “Ouduka”). Last I checked, quite a bit if not all of it is still up there! I did question my time with Watanare for its first half, but the second really begins cooking with its character work and has me interested in where it’s going from here. The debut season certainly didn’t end where I expected it to. I’m hoping it continues down the path I’m hoping for, but I know there’s no freaking way.

Unless…

i also watched this

Nukitashi the Animation

We don’t need to talk about it.

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