Choujin Koukousei-tachi wa Isekai demo Yoyuu de Ikinuku you desu!
Here we go. We’ve had some isekai that wasn’t totally bad for one reason or another, but of course that couldn’t last. Choujin Koukousei-tachi wa Isekai demo Yoyuu de Ikinuku you desu, or Choyoyu if you want to be merciful, or High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World if you want spoilers, is so nakedly isekai that I’m actually kind of confused. You see, usually isekai is about some loser that gets transported somewhere where his mediocrity is overwhelmingly powerful. I don’t like it, but I get it. Choyoyu, on the other hand, is about a bunch of kids that are already hax and get transported to another world where they’re even more hax and also elf girls give them tongue kisses. Is this for people who are so emotionally fragile that they don’t even want to be reminded of how much they suck in their isekai power fantasies? Then again this is written by someone who also thinks that politicians (one of the kids is the prime minister of Japan... yeah) are supergeniuses, and that if you max out journalism, you prestige class to ninja. Yes, it is more or less comedic and so bizarre that it almost seems like an attempt at parody again, but lemme check something real quick...
Nah, I’m all out of benefits of the doubt and running low on fucks as well.
Azur Lane
So, Azur Lane then. I could tell you all about how it’s a gijinka thing about World War 2 warships, but then you’d say “isn’t that just Kantai Collection” and yes. Not to mention that Azur Lane seems to be more popular than Kancolle now, so either way this isn’t very surprising. So let’s just go over the differences: Azur Lane isn’t almost entirely Japanese ships, and there’s a three-way fight of Axis vs Allies vs Aliens going on. The upshot of this is that Azur Lane is mostly shipgirl(s) vs shipgirl(s) and not everyone vs mobs. And that’s it for the one difference that matters, apart from that it’s a bit more varied than the Kancolle anime was, but that just gives it an uneven tone that swings between Gochiusa-levels of fluffiness and lesbian twincest aircraft carrier villains hamming it up. Characters? We have several dozens of them, thanks for asking. If you play the game or stalk Danbooru/Pixiv religiously, you might even care about them. The (supremely silly) action is technically alright, but doesn’t reach the level of “impressive”, and of course it’s hard to follow with so many obligatory participants. I’d label this one “fans only” and even for them I’d assume it’s just decent at best.
Null Peta
This is a short about a child genius that misses her (dead?) sister so much she builds a robotic version of her. Several mishaps later and she’s stuck with something that most closely resembles Doraemon if Doraemon was all ara ara and also all mofu mofu (apart from when the spikes come out). As far as wacky children’s adventure comedy shenanigans go, this seems to be fairly agreeable, but where it really shines is how it looks. This season admittedly hasn’t had a real sakuga heavy hitter so far, but Null Peta comes the closest to one since it looks quite dope, especially for a weird random short. 5m/week and nothing too annoying make this one easy enough to follow up on.
Chuubyou Gekihatsu Boy
Here we have the example of an anime where I would admit that it’s pretty good at what it wants to be, but what it wants to be is just intolerable. This appears to be a reverse harem with the theme of all the boys having some shade of chuunibyou (if you gotta ask, you don’t want to know) going. I even like the protagonist girl, she’s likeable and shows a bit of personality when being exasperated at the gang of incredibly annoying idiots surrounding her. But that’s the problem: In particular “Red”, a genki runt with a sentai gimmick, is a show destroyer all on his own. The others aren’t quite as bad as him but I’d still accept maybe one of them per harem at most. It does alright in execution, visuals, timing and so on (DEEN’s “poor man’s SHAFT” team, cf. Meganebu, seems to be seeking a comeback), but you’d have to be embarrassingly thirsty for idiot dick to put up with this shit.
Val x Love
Just to prove that I am an equal-opportunity harem h8r, here’s a non-apparently non-reverse one and yes, it also sucks. Not only is it easily the cheapest looking show so far, it’s also reminiscent of the Conception school of harem setup: If you must know, Val x Love is about an ugly ogre of a dude whose lonely house is suddenly stuffed full of Val(kyrie)s (= 9 Japanese harem archetypes because, you know) by none other than Odin himself between cuts. He then has to fight some monsters by cuddling one of the Vals, which unlocks their super or something. Barebones, uninteresting and crappy looking, this one is a real stinker and should be of interest to nobody.
Fate Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia
It’s the seventh story arc of the hit mobile RPG Fate/grand order! How do I know? Because they talk about how they skipped the previous six ones, presumably because they’re boring. Or more boring, at least. It’s Fate, and I know an embarrassing amount of details about Fate (e.g. enough to know that the Rinclone that appears apropos of nothing is Ishtar), and I’ve even seen First Order (which sucked), but this stuff is impenetrable, yo. This iteration on F/go definitely doesn’t care for people who don’t play the game, rare as they may be, and at best you’re supposed to let the proper nouns wash over you and enjoy the spectacle. It’s just that it’s CloverWorks this time, and while an attempt was made, shit just blows up way gooder over at ufotable. So the spectacle is insufficiently spectacular, and Mash is still insufficiently moe. In the end this does nothing to change my opinion of F/go away from “functionally identical to every insipid homebrew Servant thread on /a/ ca. 2010, also Shiki can kill Servants, discuss″, and I ain’t watching 2 cours of that.
Mairimashita! Iruma-kun
Iruma-kun is a goodhearted boy whose scumbag parents sell him off to some demon, who then transports him to hell and enrolls him in demon school where demons try to step to him. Isekai and battle harem is my first suspicion, but not so fast! It’s not a light novel, and while the general gestalt of this setup might resemble a certain conical helix, this appears to merely be convergent evolution. In other words, it’s just a funny kid’s manga, and it’s not even bad for that. It’s colorful, moves at a decent clip and I was moderately amused by the antics of Midoriyaface trying to dodge the ol’ KILL BY DEMONS. It’s just that I also know that this is very much not for me, and while it’s better than say, eIDLIVE, I don’t think I want to stick around. Props where they are deserved, though.
Winter 2020 already started? This season ended ages ago? You’ve already posted your Top 10 of 2019 and Crunchyroll Anime Awards thoughts? Shuuuuuuuuuut up! If fuckin Kandagawa Jet Girls and Rifle Is Beautiful didn’t delay themselves into a new fucking decade this post’d be out by now, but I really wanted to wait for them and since they’re done now, it’s time for this post. Haha that time of year again is a thing I open some of these posts with right??
Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld
First thing’s first, we’re opening up on the newest season of Sword Art Online. Yep, once again we’re in this position. You know, finishing the first cour of Alicization was a weird one for me, because that was the first time I’d really talked about SAO on this blog, and about the first time I’d really majorly thought about it in like 4 years. Now though, I’m kinda getting used to being here.
So what’s the deal with War of Underworld? Well fuckin, honestly I’m inclined to call it the worst single season of SAO so far. Definitely not worst arc, fuckin leagues ahead of Fairy Dance and Caliber, really the quality’s more comparable to the Aincrad arc, albeit with a pretty different set of strengths and weaknesses that kinda just, add up to the same level of quality I guess. At least for me anyway. But in terms of singular season of SAO, definitely the weakest.
But I should probably make an effort to back that up rather than just kinda say it and not expand. That’s kinda the point of these posts actually. So yeah, War of Underworld. It definitely lives up to the “war” in the title, from about episode 4 or something onwards maybe, the show consists almost entirely of a war between the Human Empire that we saw so much of in Alicization, and the Dark Territory’s armies, comprising of a shit ton of new characters from the until-now-unexplored Dark Territory. And I’ll say that I respect that they are focusing on this war, giving it not just time to breath but time to actually feel like, you know, a war, a drawn out battle with conflict and consequences, thousands dying left and right in battles for the sake of the world. Honestly it is an interesting change of pace from what SAO usually has, and the specific nature of the stakes – that being each side’s opposing plans for Alice and her AI and how that’ll affect Underworld, a character which we do actually kind of care about and a world that could reasonably be destroyed as opposed to whatever the fuck they tried to do in Caliber – makes the war feel like, actually earned I guess is how I’d put it.
Unfortunately, the execution is still often a bit messy. First of all is the fact that despite saying it lives up to the “war” in the title, it kind of, doesn’t feel like it that often. Casualties on either side are so detached and meaningless for the most part, and none of the war tactics employed ever really feel like meaningful decisions, particularly on the Human Empire side. It’s kind of just saying war stuff, talking about flanks and shit, but the actual nature of the fights never once changes or feels impacted in any way by the tactics supposedly employed. It’s a war, we’re told, and the CG crowds of faceless grunts dying lets us know that lots of people are involved, but it mostly feels like war in name only.
Now I said “mostly” and “often” a bit in there because that’s not like an unconditional truth of the season. The Dark Territory armies tend to actually employ tactics in an attempt to gain an edge, generally at the order of the main villain this season, Vecta, (who I’ll just flat say it, fucking sucks) and at the great expense of many of the individual forces in their army. For example, Dark Wizards couldn’t use magic for a spell because Alice depleted all the spatial resources for a way bigger and better move, so Vecta orders the orcs or trolls or like 5 types of goblins or some faction of fantasy creatures to sit there and die so the Dark Wizards have spatial resources to do their move. Unfortunately this barely means anything, but particularly on the Dark Territory side there is actually a feeling of like, the horrors of war, even if it’s not quite a “necessary sacrifice” or anything like that. And I think this is particularly emphasised by a gang called the Pugilists, and their leader whose name I do not fucking remember and I feel bad about because he’s honestly pretty great. They’ve got it pretty rough because Vecta’s kinda just an evil bastard, and like the first Integrity Knight they go up against fucking decimates a huge swath of their army without breaking a sweat, so the leader goes against her, and it’s the first battle against a Dark Territory group that doesn’t just end in some faceless nobody enemy commander getting slaughtered. Which is great because the problem of faceless nobody enemy commanders plagues this season quite a bit, particularly early on where most of the antagonists should be like major figures but they’re just fodder to introduce/reintroduce some Integrity Knights. So it’s cool that this one survives, and since he’s kind of like a hot blooded shounen MC but with the responsibility of an entire army under his command, and he’s actually mature enough to where that’s not like a problem with him, he’s just like automatically the most likeable new character in this season, and though maybe not strictly the best villain or anything, he’s one of SAO’s most likeable villains in general. And then he’s forced through some pretty fucked up shit, tons of his goons die trying to cross a pit with some ropes that Vecta forced as a plan, and just in general he gets so pissed off at Vecta that he fucking rips his eyeball out to break that seal thing and he kinda sorta joins up with our side. He’s not technically fully on their side because of some plot sauce, but it’s more development than many other characters in the show have and more or less a redemption arc, and one that’s fully justified specifically because of the war. So TL;DR sometimes the show can feel like a war and the Pugilist leader is the best character in this season specifically for how the war affects him.
Should be noted that the Integrity Knights do feel like busted overpowered by the way, in fact aside from the Pugilist guy none of the Dark Territory put up any real fight for any of them, and the one time an enemy nearly gets Fanatio of all characters, it’s because of dumb SAO sci-fi bullshit (which there is a lot of this season) and it ends up being one of her faceless knights that dies rather than her herself anyway, so. The Human Empire are never really framed like villains or anything but the odds are so heavily in their favour that I kinda felt bad for the Dark Territory, but then also I didn’t because faceless CG grunts. I don’t know how to describe my thoughts on that, I guess I just wish there were more enemies like Pugilist guy who don’t go down in a single fight, basically just don’t have the war look more like Dynasty Warriors than an actual war.
Instead the stakes tend to come from more personal threats, Vecta’s brother nearly slits Ronie’s throat for example, we do actually have like one or two casualties from Integrity Knights that we know and, uh, well, we just know them is all, some Integrity Knight like runs away for a bit, stuff like that. And then the biggest threat ends up being Vecta directly kidnapping Alice before the show just ends, and I talked about this when I talked about SAO but I’m fine forgiving the abruptness of the ending because blah blah anime production and we know we’re getting more. I should be and I guess am rooting for the heroes, their goal is to not let Underworld be destroyed after all, but I was weirded out by the fact that the stakes felt higher for, mainly Pugilist guy, than it did for anyone on our side.
Back to busted OP though, this season actually sees the introduction of a couple of real world characters to Underworld. Particularly Asuna, though Sinon gets an epic gamer moment in the last episode too, and though they’re unable to show up to Underworld, Lisbeth and the rest of the gang are able to convince the entire ALO playerbase to help out as well so we’ll see them maybe. Already complained about account conversion and the logistics of logging into Underworld before in another post so I ain’t wasting time doing that again. Main point is that Asuna’s here, and it’s nice to have her, but she’s also busted OP. She literally logs in as a goddess, and I think that’s fair enough, main villain did it so let Asuna do it, it’s literally a Deus ex Machina but I’m willing to accept it here because fuck it, but the thing is, they quickly establish a limit on her powers, before breaking it anyway. I can take her being super strong and shit because she’s an experienced melee combatant, whatever, but as a Goddess she can do large scale terrain warping to basically erase armies, which she does a few times when she’s introduced, says she only has about one or two left before she dies of really bad headache, but then proceeds to sort of just keep doing. I appreciate that they put a cap on her because while I’m willing to accept her log in as a Goddess, I’m not willing to accept the implications of that, so them breaking that limit anyway just because is annoying. What else is annoying is that my biggest fear came true, Asuna and Alice got into a fucking bitch fight over Kirito’s cock, and in fact 2 other girls joined in. Urgh, that was insufferable.
Oh, we’re about 1.5k words deep into this Sword Art Online section, and that’s the first time I’ve mentioned Kirito! The main character! Yeah let’s talk about him. For literally this entire season, Kirito’s basically comatose. After his Fluctlight got kinda fried at the ending of Alicization, as well as I like to think a healthy dose of PTSD from his best friend of like 3 years whom he was never apart dying in his arms in the worst fashion imaginable, he’s wheelchair bound, can’t really do much else with any other part of his body, can’t speak, and his ability to understand basic communication is extremely limited. All he’s really got is an attachment to his and Eugeo’s swords, and when Asuna talks to him he’s able to cry and I think say her name? But he doesn’t wake up or anything. Straight up, I really respected this. It’s always cool to have a little break from Kirito and doing it in this specific way is really effective, it makes the consequences of the last season feel genuinely and meaningfully impactful, and though Kirito inevitably will come back properly and probably do his usual Jesus shit, I hope this little experience of his he’s in right now has a lasting impact on the character, because it’s really fucked in the best way possible, and a good way to keep Kirito out of the narrative kinda to let the focus shift to others.
That being said, Kirito being out of the picture makes Alice the de facto protagonist, and honestly, her presence is fairly weak, I think. To be honest she’s about as much of an everyman as Kirito is, except rather than “gamer” for personality it’s “stoic”, except when she’s around Bercouli at which point it’s a bit closer to “pupil”, cause even if he doesn’t strictly teach her in the literal sense, he kind of makes the decisions and gives the answers that Alice needs to hear. I like Alice for sure, I’ll say that much, but I think because she kinda just mops the floor with all the opposition and doesn’t really bounce off of anyone around her in a meaningful way, she doesn’t really develop this season. I mean there’s a bit at the start before all the war where we learn about the status quo pre-war, she’s developed by then, fought back against the remainder of the church who would try to kill Kirito, she has agency in that sense of taking a pre-emptive stance to protect someone, and dealing with fallout in her old hometown that won’t take her back and stuff, hell even re-bonding with her estranged younger sister and stuff. General point is that at the start she’s developing a bit, or rather our understanding of her is, but for most of the show she’s just a soldier in a war that’s really powerful and the only other thing she has going on is, say it with he now, horny for Kirito.
I already said the villains are crap and I already said there’s lots of dumb sci-fi bullshit, so I should squeeze in this little bit to say that we get plenty of cuts to the real world to talk stale exposition with Rath and the gang, almost all of which generally relates to either the boring as shit villains or dumb sci-fi bullshit. Unsurprisingly I think the show could do without that stuff, at least in the quantity it comes in. I don’t recall any entire episodes being devoted to that sort of shit like happened in Alicization, but definitely entire halves at least, and hey maybe full episodes and I’m just misremembering, who knows.
I actually feel like that’s pretty much everything I have to say about the plot? It’s 3 in the morning as I’m writing this section so uh, yeah, but I think that’s all I have to say about this season’s I guess characters and flow of events and all that fun stuff that makes a story a story. It’s mostly just kinda, not brilliant I feel.
Musically, it’s just SAO. More Yuki Kajiura music that does its job perfectly well but I know for a fact she can and has done way better. The OP’s honestly pretty shit, I like Haruka Tomatsu’s voice, she did great in Courage which is probably my second favourite SAO OP, but this one’s really forgettable and sounds bland as hell. ED’s decent though, it’s a bit different than Alicization’s previous EDs, has a slower feel to it, but I enjoyed it enough. Voice acting’s all SAO stuff, you know the drill. Visually, it’s an interesting one, because it looks pretty great actually, specifically it’s very consistent in its quality, and that quality is pretty high, you can expect a lot of solid artwork and action cuts that look nice. But while the consistency was impressive, I was kind of unimpressed anyway? Yeah nice visual fidelity, the graphics were great to quote a gamer, but there aren’t really any like major sakuga moments or anything, and a lot of the attacks are so heavy on special effects to where it feels closer to a fireworks show than actual animation. Compared to, say, the goblin scene in episode 4 or something of Alicization (anyone pissed that that’s my only comparison?) this season’s animation was tame. I’ve mentioned the CG crowdshots a few times so I do quickly wanna say that they’re honestly not that bad. There are times where it’s fucking atrocious, but that’s honestly super rare, and for the most part the worst you’ll see is just recycled animations appearing a lot in the one shot. By and large though the CG crowds are hidden pretty well by good 2D artwork dominating the frame or just smoke and cloud type effects and stuff, they just don’t draw attention to the CG is the point so it’s significantly more bearable here than in a lot of other shows. Overall, the best way to sum up the visuals is that the show mostly looks pretty great, but there are very few to no standout moments visually, and that’s pretty disappointing, but the consistency is still respectable and overall I’d call it a strong season visually.
And then, I think that’s everything, that’s War of Underworld. I’d give it a 4/10 to be honest. It’s better than Caliber, it’s better than Fairy Dance, it’s even with Aincrad, and worse than everything else. Though where Aincrad is an open and shut case of straight mediocrity most of the time, this one’s more of a, I guess bad a lot of the time, but it shoots for the stars really often, and is so close to hitting the mark but, it just always ends up missing. You know what I can say though? This is officially the only SAO season with no sexual assault whatsoever. Thank. Fucking. GOD.
Anyway yeah we’re done.
Houkago Saikoro Club
This is actually the first section I’m writing for this post, I just put SAO first because I wanted to get that out of the way. But yeah, this show. The first of multiple cute girl anime we’ll be seeing in this post, because aside from SAO and one later entry, I only watched cute girl shows, so I want to do all of those in order. Let’s fuckin’ talk about it.
So this show is about cute girls that play analogue games, which encompasses board games, card games, just, physical games in general. And it’s actually pretty great. I’m fairly confident that most people reading this have, at some point in their life, played a board game, and while I don’t think I’ve played a single one of the games this show covers (because it goes beyond deep enough for me to assume the writers have a genuine respect for the medium), the kind of general things that playing board games can do for individuals and different groups of people are explored a lot in this show. Just to get the most obvious out of the way, board games are supposed to be fun, and in a cute girl show, you wanna have fun, so our main cast all get united by the fun of playing board games. But we’ve also got board games to settle disagreements among student council members, or a board game to end a fight between a character and their dad, or board games to give a guy with a crush a chance to bond with that crush, and more. We actually go through quite a few side characters that get these sorts of mini arcs as a result of playing games with our girls and I think that’s really great, plus one of them’s a hot delinquent girl in her 20s and she fuckin kicked ass, loved her.
So all that stuff is key to the show going a long way to being a great time, but a cute girl show still lives and dies on the shoulders of its cute girls. And yeah, they’re all great too! Miki’s our main character, and she’s the kind of shy and reserved type, but also obviously super nice and the one time she has to be remotely mean she literally can’t bring herself to do it, and I liked her a lot! Maybe my favourite character? Board games are a fitting way for her type of character to open up to others I feel, but what’s great is that while they bring her closer to her friends and give her an easier time with others, she still only grows at like, a fairly gradual rate, so she doesn’t feel like she’s immediately gone from introvert to extrovert because she played, I dunno some German game one time. Aya’s her first friend, and she’s the genki girl. There’s not much more to her than that, she’s a trope that’s played really straight, but I also really liked her! Maybe me favourite character? The way she’s written, how she engages in the games and acts and reacts in any given situation, you can generally tell exactly what she’s going to do, but she’s such an infectiously energetic character and I liked her a lot more than I expected to. Then there’s Midori, the board game expert that introduces us to this brand new world. And she’s also a delight! Maybe my favourite character? She’s the kind of more serious, straight man of the group, but also the boardgame otaku that’s the most passionate about it, and she also has the most solidly defined arc of everyone, wanting to create a board game and initially failing because she kind of wanted it to be a project she made purely on her own, which is like a completely fucking fair mentality for a young designer to have, but through the power of friendship and stuff she learns to be a better designer. It’s a neat little arc and I’m glad she had it. The show does start off with these 3 girls, but there’s no such thing as a cute girl show with less than 4 girls, so we’re introduced to another – Emmy – who Midori kinda repeats her arc with but that’s because Emmy also wants to be a game author and she’s from Germany too so it’s kinda justified that Midori would be more afraid of showing her game to her. That retread of her earlier arc was fine though, and Emmy herself is great. Not my favourite character, but I liked her a lot. She’s kind of like all three girls combined, game otaku, genki, and polite, but also German, and her seiyuu gives her like a weird accent that does make her sound slightly more foreign than the typical foreign cute girl so I respect that. She’s a nice addition to the cast in all. So really, all 4 are great, their friendship feels genuine and appropriately earned, and with a nice supporting cast to boot, the show’s got pretty great characters all around.
Visuals are also pretty good. It’s appropriately adorable, but also, it doesn’t really look like any other cute girl anime I can think of. The art style isn’t anything especially striking I’d say, but it’s also not something I’ve seen many others do. I do like it, and I love the designs of the girls too. The show kind of goes for a more pretty look than a cute one, almost. It doesn’t really go as far as beautiful, but like the shape of the faces and the way the hair’s shaded gives it kind of a shoujo vibe, while still being moeblobs. I’m a fan. Music’s fairly typical slice of life fair, compliments all the scenes quite well, I wouldn’t call the OP or ED all that great but they’re serviceable, oddly more of a rock tone than you might expect to hear in a cute girl show. And of course, voice acting’s great, everyone, but especially Aya and Emmy, sound super adorable all of the time.
And with that, I think I’ve said basically everything I wanna say about the show. It’s a really solid cute girl show that, like many of the genre’s best, you could get a fun time watching it all in one sitting, or maybe you wanna pop an episode on every so often just for the hell of it. 7/10. Would recommend.
Rifle Is Beautiful
So in some ways, Houkago Saikoro Club is technically a sports show, the sports being all the board games and stuff. And like I just said, that show was great. So in direct contrast with that, we’ve got another cute girls do sports show, but this one fucking sucks really badly.
Rifle Is Beautiful, as its name suggests, is a show about rifle shooting. A sport in which you stand a good few meters away from a target and shoot at it with a rifle, 60 shots in 45 minutes, and are scored accordingly. It’s a very boring sport to watch and the characters in this show know that, they remind you of the fact that it’s considered boring in universe as well pretty much every episode. In that sense, this show is actually very true to life, because like the sport it revolves around, this show is boring as fuck. I respect that it revolves around the sports narrative, they have aspirations to go to the Olympics that they try to follow through on, they go to nationals, practice games with other schools, there’s some sort of shooting match pretty much every single episode, but if you take a boring sport and have it be performed by boring girls, what can you expect other than a boring show?
See, the girls in this show suck really badly. They’re all exact stock templates for characters that you’ve seen before, with not a single unique trait to make them stand out, and the fact that they do rifle shooting means basically nothing for any of their characters. MC’s the dumb idiot friendly girl, her childhood friend is just, a nice person, and mistakable for any background character, there’s a tsundere, and then there’s the deadpan quiet one. That’s it, that’s their entire character, none of them have any more than that going on ever, none of them are remotely enjoyable, every single joke they ever do, you’ve seen before (like the only thing this show did that was new to me was have MC be totally flat unless she takes her shirt off at which point her breasts become comically large), they overexplain all of their jokes with intrusive textboxes for some reason, and perhaps most offensively is that, for a cute girl show, these girls are ugly as hell.
Rifle Is Beautiful, contrary to what its name suggests, is one of the worst looking TV anime I’ve ever seen. The character designs are atrocious, every single character is so off model all the time, especially in the faces, that I can’t imagine they even had model sheets. The animation from start to finish is basically non-existent, and for some fucking reason the rifles and hands are all CG? Like they never have the rifles appear in any angles that’d be difficult to draw, and they’re pretty simple in general, so I have no idea why they didn’t just, fucking draw them, rather than have really ugly CG that clashes horrendously with the also ugly 2D visuals. The backgrounds are lame, art’s lame, animation’s lame, and the fact is that this isn’t a case of like, oh the first episode looked good but it fell off a bit, nah the entire show somehow looks repulsive for its full duration. It also sounds like shit, with a ton of insert songs that try really hard and completely fail to make the rifle shooting at all fun, a lame OP and ED, and even the voice work is some of the worst I’ve heard in a cute girl show, they managed to make every single main character just not sound good, and then weirdly all of the minor characters (of which there are dozens named) sound like, pretty much fine? So that was weird.
Show’s just a fuckin horrible time from start to finish where the only really positive thing you can say about it is “they tried”. But it was so poorly produced that we got a recap episode like 5 episodes in and the last episode was delayed about 3 weeks or something, which is why this post is as late as it is. And while it’d be easy to just dismiss this as a really horrible cute girl show, what makes this show actually painful for me is that it’s a show by Studio 3Hz. One of my favourite studios responsible for a ton of anime I really like and that look fucking amazing. What the hell went wrong here for them to produce this? Make 3Hz great again. As for this show, 2/10, only salvageable aspects are some of the minor character girls, namely Akira Shinonome and this one girl that has like actual abs, being okay.
Null Peta
Next is an ONA where cute girls do, or no, one cute girl does comedy things with her robot recreation of her sister who died, at least until closer to the end of the show where it becomes action, and then a bit of mystery, and then existentialism, and then cute girls do cute things for our ending. And it was decent.
So as stated the show begins as a comedy, and for the first like 7 or 8 episodes it’s kind of just that. The comedy’s not that funny, it’s kind of just Peta being weird and acting like it’s normal while Null overreacts to the entire thing, but there were enough jokes I hadn’t heard in there combined with the fact that Null is honestly super cute to where I still managed to watch the show easily enough. Plus like, episodes are only like 6 minutes long, so even though the comedy wasn’t that entertaining it was at least short enough to where I never got tired watching it week to week.
But then yeah, as we approach the end it becomes this weird action show where some like, idk slime/virus type enemies just kinda take over the world and we spend two episodes fighting against them and it was impossible to care about the world or the enemies but I guess it looked pretty good? For action sequences in what was otherwise just a cute girl comedy they were fairly solid, but that was like the only saving grace of this mini-arc since it was probably the worst part of the show for me.
And then after that, Peta disappears, which I don’t really mind since she annoys me, and then we’re in that little mystery and existentialism bit I mentioned which ended up being my favourite bit of the show. It kind of starts off with Null questioning a lot of the details about the world around her, the abundance of weird signs, the total absence of people, the fact that she can’t die, and some other stuff. The design of the world and attention drawn to it gave this bit of the show an almost Studio Shaft type feeling that I really liked, and between Null’s questioning about the world as well as the fact that, yeah, she can’t die, plus obviously the world design, the show had a really nice sort of surreal horror vibe to it, which I actually really liked. Cute girls wandering a desolate world and questioning the nature of existence really appeals to me if Girls’ Last Tour is anything to go by. Now the revelations that happen as a result of this are fairly lame, Null realises that her sister didn’t die in a car accident, she herself did, and now she’s in a coma and this is all basically a coma dream, and then when she does wake up, the final episode has her sister reveal that that coma dream was a digital environment she made just so she could keep in contact with Null in the coma dream? That’s weird, I didn’t really get it, it doesn’t explain the viruses to me nor where Peta actually disappears to for a bit, and just overall the ending felt kind of like a copout that was a weak excuse to end a narrative they didn’t know what to do with. Which is a shame because it really was doing well, I’ve said before it’s the best part of the show and I wish it occupied more than the 2-ish episodes it does.
So that’s my thoughts on the show from start to finish, it’s an okay comedy, an okay action, a great existential and surrealist horror piece, and then a weak ending. I either wish those first 2 things were way better or that 3rd thing occupied way more of the show. But the whole thing it still quite cute, Null really is adorable, and again episodes are only 6 minutes long. From start to finish the show’s barely over an hour and because I was watching it weekly it was super duper easy to digest without getting bored. I’d give it a 5/10 and say that you should watch it if you want to.
Watashi, Nouryoku wa Heikinchi de tte Itta yo ne!
Now we’ve got cute girls do isekai fantasy party, is anyone mad that I did this “cute girls do x” joke in my last Season in Review?
Anyway, this long ass light novel title, henceforth just Noukin, is a show about a girl, Mile, who gets truck-kun’d into a basic isekai setting, wishes for quote “average abilities”, and because it’s an isekai, that means she gets abilities that are the average of the weakest and strongest creatures in this world, hence she’s an overpowered isekai protagonist. Yep, it’s that again. Except since it’s more of a cute girl show, with Mile recruiting a party of 3 other cute girls, I wanted to watch it anyway, because while I don’t really care for isekai, I sure do love cute girls, evidently.
So the show’s a comedy, and for the most part, yeah, it’s decently funny. You’ve got the usual comedy that comes with Mile being so powerful that she surprises everyone around her, and she also trains her party members so they end up pretty damn strong as well and now “cute girls look weak but surprise everyone by being not that” is their collective gimmick. Individual character wise there’s Mile obviously, an otaku that makes a shit ton of references so that was neat. There’s Reina, the tsundere, she’s like if Megumin, Kyoko Sakura, and Nico Yazawa fused into a single entity. I quite liked her, she’s probably the most developed character of the bunch but I’ll talk more about that in a bit. She and Mile are pettankos, whereas our next girl, Pauline, has big tits, so there’s some “comedy” they sometimes use. Pauline’s also the one that looks sweet and stuff but is maybe a sadist. Last is Mavis, who’s boyish and not quite as in on the jokes as the rest. They’re all fine. Even if they’re all pretty tropey and nothing you’ve not seen before, they’ve got decent chemistry as a group and since Mile inducts them into weebhood, despite them not knowing what anime is, they all get to be super goofy and generally funny enough to where you’ll enjoy watching the show and not want to claw your eyes out. Plus like, they’re cute, the designs are really nice, Mile and Reina especially.
Where it gets awkward is that this show’s actually not always a full cute girl comedy. Very early on we get like a mini-arc about protecting some travelling merchants, and it turns into a really serious backstory and morals type thing with Reina, who attempts to kill some attacking bandits because of her really edgy backstory about her entire family being murdered and then her adoptive family being murdered as well. And the arc’s a decent source of development for Reina, she gets to learn to sort of have faith in her friends’ abilities to not be fucking murdered, as well as the usual bullshit “don’t kill or you’re just as bad” type thing. It’s a fine enough story on its own but it kinda comes out of nowhere, and if the show wholly committed to this new edginess I wouldn’t actually mind, but it still puts some comedy in which now gives us tonal whiplash, and once it’s all over they return to pure comedy and all I felt was “well what was the point of that?”. And they kinda do that again albeit a bit less whiplashy with Pauline and Mavis’ families, the former not getting much development beyond “oh protect my family” and the latter getting a “stand up to my dad” arc. These arcs are too serious for no reason in a comedy that doesn’t need to waste its time on this. They do it one more time in the last episode by making us fight some Elder Dragons that knock Mile’s shit out, and suddenly we’re all dark and stakes again, but they overcome it with the power of friendship, all tension is erased because Mile gets up and then basically gives us “the dragons caught her off guard is all”, and then Mile has a fake emotional sendoff that has no place in the show other than to I guess reaffirm the group’s friendship.
I mean the TL;DR is that it’s a comedy for 100% of its runtime, but an edgy serious almost grimdark isekai for about 30% of that runtime, but during the edgy stuff the comedy’s still there and it’s now inappropriate, and just as a whole the show feels pretty confused about what it wants to be. And enough of the episodes are the kind of bad edgy stuff to where the show has a bunch of episodes that just straight up aren’t all that fun to watch.
As said, show does look good, animation’s decent, artwork’s decent, love Mile and Reina’s designs, the others’ designs are pretty solid, really did not like the look or sound of Nano-chan, the talking animal companion only Mile can see that adds nothing to the comedy and only exists for weird exposition, blah blah blah. Soundtrack does its job while being completely forgettable, sans the OP which is a nice fun cute girl bop type thing I enjoyed. And then the voice acting’s nice, Mile and Reina in particular sound adorable, thank god for Azumi Waki and the legendary Sora Tokui respectively for those ones.
Think that’s about everything I want to say about this show. If you wanna see a cute girl fantasy then it’s a decent time, though tbh I’d honestly recommend you check out Endro instead, it’s a bit more baby-ish in that nothing bad happens ever, but that also means it has a more consistent tone and while I’d say I like the character designs themselves less, it definitely has a much cuter aesthetic as a whole, and tbh I might even say it’s funnier, relies less on references for its humour after all. But yeah, Noukin. I’d give it a 5/10.
Kandagawa Jet Girls
And lastly for cute girl shows, we have cute girls do jet skiing. Except actually it’s not jet skiing but like this fake sport called jet racing where 2 people get on a jet ski and race another pair and one person’s the driver while the other is a shooter and the latter uses their gun to try and sort of disable the opponent and then hopefully your pair can win the race.
And it’s eh.
First thing’s first is that that premise, combined with the fact that there’s an abundance of massivelt-titted girls all in wetsuits that break away as they get shot sure uh, sure makes for an interesting video game idea, huh? Because this is actually like a multimedia thing and this anime ties into a game, and it’s all done by the Senran Kagura guys which should give you an idea of the uh, aesthetic, this show goes for. That being overwhelming horniness for 12 episodes straight. And if there’s any sport that you’re gonna make overwhelmingly horny I think a watersport is a solid choice, and the specific mechanics of this fake watersport are mostly believable enough for me to have a fun-ish time with it. Now a lot of the girls seem to play it really poorly, everyone getting numerous opportune moments to shoot at their opponents and just, basically never doing that until it’s actually a bad idea to shoot at them, and the ridiculously inconsistent ammunition in any given weapon also damages the tension a lot, so I mean in general it’s hard to be that invested in the competitive aspect of the show since everyone seems braindead, but like, eh, shill your ecchi game, who cares if the characters are bad at it. It’s mostly 1 team vs another team but in the last episode all 6 teams get to go against each other and that was honestly fairly enjoyable, so like, yeah.
About the teams, this show’s cast is comprised of 6 teams of 2 girls each, for a total of 12 girls, but actually, it’s more accurate to say most of the teams are comprised of 2 identical clones, so there’s way less personalities total. The 2 gyaru girls are exactly the same as each other, and their personalities are that they’re gyarus, the 2 American weeaboo girls are exactly the same (Emily Orange best girl anyway though bc Ai Fairouz voices her and she’s great) and their personalities are that they’re American weeaboo girls, the 2 idol girls are exactly the same (their tits are the least gigantic which makes them the hottest pair) and guess what their personality is, and then the remaining girls do actually have the most differences in each pair but it’s still sort of just, the two serious experts at the sport, some other pair of posh elegant Japanese types but one of them’s a delinquent when they race but that means nothing, and the two main characters, one of whom is the genki excitable type and the other more quiet and reserved, though they still go through the exact same arcs as each other of trying to be their own Jet Racers and not copy familial figures that also did Jet Racing. It’s a pretty large cast but having the pairs be basically identical means you only need for a single character and just split the lines between a pair of two – effectively halving the writing process, ain’t that neat? It does also mean the cast feels smaller than it actually is, which I guess isn’t really a terrible thing? Simple fact is I at least remembered every character, even if I remembered like 2 of their names, by the end of it, so they must’ve done something right there.
So the sport’s okay but kinda dumb, the characters are all kinda dumb but decently enjoyable, so let’s talk visuals. You’d want a show that’s horny 24/7 to be hot. It basically never is. Like Rifle Is Beautiful, the artwork is really ugly from start to finish, and I’m not convinced they had model sheets, especially for the main girl. The only time the artwork ever looks good, let alone hot, is very specifically when nipples are visible, and like a midriff shot or two maybe idk. This isn’t a case of like, “oh I saw a nipple and it completely clouded my judgement” type thing by the way, they really did just put more effort into the entire shot when a nipple’s in frame, so that was really weird. The Jet Races look really terrible, and make excessive use of also really horrible CG with jank as hell animations. Moreover the environmental art is especially disgusting, so like, the real background, the river they’re racing on, and the jet skis on the river, literally never look like they coexist in harmony, they’re all equally terrible in completely different ways that just makes it hell to look at.
Sound stuff is eh, voice acting’s decent enough for the most part, again shoutout to Ai Fairouz on Emily Orange, her Engrish is just the best, and then the soundtrack, it’s really repetitive, like they only had like 5 songs or something. OP and ED are skippable garbage but like the one or two songs they use during the races give them a nice energy, which is complemented well by the commentators’ enthused uh, commentary. Even if they’re prone to overexplaining really basic things I did enjoy that we got commentary at all so that was neat.
Overall, despite most of the things I just said being mixed to negative, I did actually kind of enjoy this show. In so far as, fairly early on when my initial wave of repulse over the visuals stopped bothering me as much, and when I realised that all the characters are the same and have very basic personalities so were hard to really “forget”, I was kinda just having fun with it, like, even though it’s bad, it’s not bad enough to where I wish I didn’t watch it, and unlike Rifle Is Beautiful which has the shame of being made by a studio I love releasing a product I hate, Jet Girls is sort of just a bit of a goofy show that I don’t have that strong an opinion on. I’d give it a 3/10 tbh.
Anime of the Season – Beastars
And so we’re done with cute girls, and onto the last show I watched this season. And if you’ve read any of my episode coverage this season, or my Top 10 Anime of 2019 that came out before this post did, you’d have known this was coming in as my favourite anime of Fall 2019. That’s right, it’s time to talk about the furry anime.
Beastars is a pretty simple show to explain the basics of. Take Zootopia, or any story about anthropomorphic carnivores and herbivores living in a society for that matter, and just kind of, make it edgy. Well, that’s not entirely true. Rather you take that premise and decide to use it to explore everything. Beastars is here to tell a story about high school love in that carnivores and herbivores setting and just see what happens if that setting has literally no narrative safeties whatsoever, if that society was literally a real thing, how would it look? And the execution is fucking god tier.
First of all I really don’t want to understate just how real this society manages to feel, cause while this entire show’s really great from start to finish I think the actual society and the impact it has on the characters in it is the most interesting thing about the show. If carnivores and herbivores are supposed to coexist then you sure wouldn’t want the former eating the latter, and that’s true here, but if carnivores also have instinctual desires then people will find a way to meet those desires. Hence this show has a black market, one where you might find a herbivore selling his fingers for tens of thousands of [CURRENCY] a pop. Or how about the Lion Mafia, who operate so shadily that people don’t say their names for fear of their own lives, and whenever they might kidnap a herbivore to savour their delicious meat, that herbivore may as well be considered missing forever. Even actual politics as presented to the general public, the mayor’s a lion, but those are big and scary, so this mayor has had plastic surgery and dental replacements plus wears his hair in a ponytail to appear as nonthreatening as possible, and he doesn’t want word about the Lion Mafia to get out else the good image he crafted for himself might be lost. I don’t wanna be the guy that praises stuff for being “mature” since that can easily come across as pretentious but like, this show has such a mature approach to the society it portrays that it surprises you with just how incredibly interesting the carnivore and herbivore setting is. It also still does the more expected things with that type of society by the way, smaller animals keep to the sides of corridors so as to not be stood on and they have their own little smaller doors too, and then because the society isn’t just “carnivores instinctively bad and herbivores good” we’ve got stuff like the nocturnal carnivores using their cool night vision to protect herbivores in the event of a blackout and stuff. As much as this show wants to explore the bad side of this society, it’s not so grimdark edgy as to pretend there’s nothing good about it either.
The majority of characters being in high school works really well here, I think that transitional period in everyone’s life where they’re figuring out who they are and their place in society is immediately more interesting when the society being portrayed is what it is.
The depiction of this society alone is brilliant but as stated, the impact it has on the characters is also super interesting, so yeah it’s obviously important to have good characters, and this show definitely has those in fucking spades. The main character we follow is Legoshi, a grey wolf, and immediately it’s great that our main character is a carnivore, cause this show explores carnivores and herbivores in more or less equal depth but these sorts of works tend to depict carnivores as the “more problematic” group, so it’s nice having someone in that group to really root for straight out the gate. That’s not to suggest he’s some straight-laced hero or anything though, in fact one of the first things he does is attack an herbivore and nearly eat her, and like he manages to suppress himself but damn that’s a hell of an introduction. And then his main arc is actually related to falling in love with that girl, a giant predator like him who doesn’t know what it means to be a predator falling in love with his prey, what does that mean? Is he confusing love for lust because he’s got carnivorous instincts? Or has society led him to believe that, but actually, his feelings of love are genuine? What about the people around him, what do they think? Like the very ambitious also grey wolf girl Juno, who longs for Legoshi? She obviously wants to pressure him into going out with her, they’re both strong grey wolves, it’s what society wants. This sort of high school drama you’d see anywhere that I usually don’t care about becomes so much more interesting when you remember that, yeah, society here’s weird, and the response to a love between two “fundamentally incompatible” people being so negative parallels what I’ll broadly describe as “queer” relationships (“queer” here not just meaning LGBT+ relationships, but any type of relationship society has or had looked down on, eg mix-raced relationships) being stigmatised too. Legoshi really struggles with his identity, because yeah high school’s weird for everyone and society’s expectations can do a lot to confuse you. He’s just very incredibly written is the point. Still talking about carnivores, the aforementioned Juno’s presence contributes a lot to the narrative, she strives to be the next Beastar (haha show title!) which is some big actually really important and meaningful title awarded to people based on some sorts of merit and the way her ambitions contribute to her actions, but also how they make her an obstacle for Legoshi, Legoshi and Haru’s relationship, and Louis all at the same time, without feeling like an arbitrary contrivance just to have someone play “antagonist” is fucking amazing. And then, Bill, a tiger with like one episode where he’s a major character, he likewise manages to sort of be compared and contrasted with Legoshi through being sort of, his own embodiment of the ideal carnivore, an ideal that Legoshi has to like consider and later oppose. Bill has like an episode of screentime where he drinks rabbit blood (which is treated kind of like an adrenaline drug) and takes the lead role in a stage play where mid-fucking play a “staged” fight between him and Legoshi goes way too fucking far and they’re like actually tearing each other apart while they get extremely fucking mad at each other for their opposed ideologies about carnivores. And what’s great is that Legoshi doesn’t actually have an ideal here, I just said that for the sake of the sentence, Legoshi isn’t fighting for what a carnivore is, he’s fighting for what he absolutely wants a carnivore to not be, and then he sort of starts discovering what one is on his own with this fight being a factor. And Bill and this fight contribute so much to that journey of Legoshi’s, all the while Bill’s interesting because hey remember when I said it’s easy for herbivores in these types of stories to act like carnivores are the problematic ones? Yeah well Bill fucking hates that, he hates having to suppress himself to keep up societal standards, he just wants to be able to be himself at the expense of others, and that’s an extremely fucking interesting motivation! IRL that parallels some pretty fucked up shit, you see like incels and school shooters with that sort of mentality, it’s not a good one at all, but within the boundaries of this fictionalised animal society it’s fascinating to see unfold.
And then we get the herbivores, of which there are perhaps less that are interesting, but they’re definitely not to be dismissed. The main herbivore we see is Haru, the rabbit girl Legoshi falls in love with. First thing I want to say about her is that I really respect that she’s a slut. What I mean by that is that “slut” characters in high school stories tend to be called that despite either being a virgin or having only had sex with like, one person, and maybe one time. But nah Haru fucks, quite a lot, and I respect that that’s not something this show’s afraid to touch on. It has a couple of sex scenes actually. And then the specifics of why she fucks as revealed by her backstory are, unsurprisingly, really interesting and easy to understand. She’s so small and pitiable, everyone’s always nice to her because they sort of look down on her, she’s like 3 feet tall. She likes to fuck because it’s the only time people don’t look down on her as this weak little animal, they treat her evenly. I think that’s a fucking brilliant reason to have your character literally fuck like a rabbit lol. And then when she meets and gets to know Legoshi is where the bulk of her screentime lies. She likes Legoshi, she sees him as a friend, but when she picks up on his feelings of love for her, that’s when she becomes, confused? Afraid? Because she genuinely likes him, but fucking society again! She’s constantly living in fear of death or disappearance at every moment, the latter of which turns out to be a rational fucking fear because of that Lion Mafia by the way, and even if she likes this big ass wolf guy, isn’t he a real danger to her? Maybe he’ll cave into his instincts and eat her, maybe she’ll cave into her own body’s instinct and be eaten by him, what does society think about this tiny little rabbit girl dating a giant wolf? Argh, it’s so great! Also I love that she has agency by the way, she’s not necessarily the most secure person but she’s confident in her choices so even though she’s literally damsel’d and has to be rescued by Legoshi, it’s not like she’s his trophy to be won, he gives her the choice of where to go from there, he’s not demanding they be together, he wants a chance to confess his love and let Haru decide from there. It’s nice. Haru’s a really good girl. And then the one other big interesting herbivore we get to follow is Louis, a deer that fucking, god where do I start. He’s the lead performer of the drama club and something of a celebrity, that wants to be the next Beastar and is in good with the mayor as well. Dude’s got huge fucking ambitions and the willpower to back it up, in fact he actually breaks up the fight between Legoshi and Bill with his words and acting alone, all the while not breaking character, not letting the audience pick up on the true nature of the fight, and with a broken ankle at the same time to boot! The main thing he doesn’t have is the body to back up his ambitions and willpower, because he’s a deer. He’s genuinely strong but Juno, Legoshi, Bill, he can’t physically hold his own against any of them, and if the plan to lynch him went through without Legoshi’s interruption (oh yeah that fucking happens!) there’d be nothing he could do. He’s only really safe because of what society looks like right now and what Legoshi does for him, but fuck me if their dynamic isn’t all sorts of complicated. Louis has this clear deep hatred for Legoshi, which is returned 10,000 fold when Haru is kidnapped and literally because of his ambitions to become the Beastar, and some advice from the mayor, Louis can’t do anything about it, and because he’s not doing anything about it Legoshi just squares the fuck up and punches him in the fucking best most gratifying fight scene this year, my god. I actually wish we saw more of Louis, because after Haru’s kidnapped he actually sort of goes off the deep end, shoots the Lion Mafia Don in the head (cool scene btw, make up for his lack of physical strength with weapons of society) and then tells the remaining lions to “leave nothing but [his] horns”. And then we never see him again. It’s an unexpected and kind of unsatisfying end to his character, so I hope season 2 can maybe see him return, because we don’t actually get confirmation that he’s been eaten or anything and there’s another good guy in there with him who we don’t see after the raid, so maybe he could save Louis? Speaking of that good guy, he’s a somewhat more minor herbivore character that’s super interesting in his own right. He’s a giant panda who takes in Legoshi briefly when he’s gotten lost and afraid in the black market, and the dude shows Legoshi what can happen to carnivores that act on their instinct. We see animals that have lost fur from the stress, self-harmed to the extreme, and some that have eaten their own limbs for a taste of meat. It’s so fucked and we don’t learn a lot about this panda but it’s impossible to not be interested in him, just because you can see how a society like the one in the show would mold him into the doctor he is, and he’s enough of a badass to where he joined Legoshi on that rescue mission to the Lion Mafia HQ I just mentioned which is just, fucking cool as hell.
So yeah we’ve got crazy interesting characters in a crazy interesting society, and the dynamics between the two different groups of characters and the way in which they interact with their society and are affected because of it are just fucking, jaw-droppingly well-written.
Do need to mention some negatives though, and I guess I’d say the biggest problem with the show then is, aside from Louis’ unfinished arc, is that the show can feel, I guess kind of unfittingly shounen at times? Namely the Lion Mafia raid actually, it’s a pretty fun rescue mission to watch with some good action animation, it reminded me of Streets of Rage since I watched the Streets of Rage 4 trailer like the day before, but it is still a scene where a high schooler with no real fighting experience beyond being a wolf and those are pretty strong effectively solos an entire Mafia force, with only a panda with a crossbow to help, but then their opponents are all lions and have guns but just, never use them. And then when Legoshi goes up against the mob boss he genuinely gives us an “I’m sorry, Haru-chan” and I couldn’t help but laugh, fuckin “master, please forgive me” bullshit. And then whenever that happens we get like a slow-mo shot of Legoshi like, quivering around as this sort of glowing orange representation of I guess carnivore instincts flies through his nervous system. It’s a cool visual but it makes him seem like a shounen MC with fuckin superpowers and I wasn’t that big a fan. But like, that’s actually it. That’s all I’ve really for problems, one of which is a possible mystery the second season might resolve and the other of which like, isn’t really a big deal and only really affects one episode. Other than that the show’s just fucking great.
This is gonna feel weird to say but this is definitely the season’s best looking show as well. Yeah, the 3D CG show. The models are really high quality though and move really well, the majority of animation’s really smooth and pretty to watch. Some like background characters are kinda stilted but not even any more so than is the norm in 2D shows, let alone those that use 3D crowd shots and shit. The backgrounds and environments are all really nice and they throw in some 2D animation here and there that looks good with the 3D too, plus one thing in particular the show’s decently fond of is segments with really stylised animation. In the first episode there’s a murder scene in a school theatre where everything is entirely black except from all the outlines, which are this sort of glowing blue (might’ve been red) and it looks beautiful. In the ??th episode there’s a sort of internal monologue Haru has, or it might be when she’s fucking Louis, that looks like this really pretty watercolour painting in motion, it was gorgeous. And then for Louis’ backstory scene we’ve got this sort of paper cutout abstract scene that looks like Gekidan Inu Curry stuff albeit a bit easier to visually digest. Show just looks really great from start to finish, it’s a great example of the strengths 3D animation can have when done right. Sounds great too, the voice acting, Legoshi’s especially, is really well acted and I particularly like how his own thoughts are recorded, they’ve got this sort of echo-ish feel to them (I don’t know what sound design is so idk how to describe it) that sort of gives the feeling of knowing what Legoshi sounds like to himself as well as what he sounds like to others, it’s done really well. Music does its job incredibly well, the OP fucking slaps and the stop motion visuals in it are brilliant too, the show’s just a really pretty and polished production from start to finish, I was never bored looking at or listening to it.
And uh, that’s Beastars. I said “society” a lot in this section, (24 times says Word) which is funny because haha we live in a society haha Joker (2019) but for real this show is fucking brilliant, one of the best and most polished stories I’ve seen put to TV. It has an interesting theme that it explores in greater detail than many of its contemporaries and the way in which every single detail of the narrative shapes and informs everything else is genuinely genius. I very strongly recommend you watch this if you haven’t already, it’s a fucking marvellous piece of work and I’m extremely hyped for season 2.
9/10.
I thought about 10, I really did, on a rewatch I might even give it a 10, and I’ll for sure rewatch this, but as it is now I’m feeling 9.
Girl of the Season – Miki Takekasa
I’m sure Haru seemed like the obvious choice based on all the praise I had for Beastars, but I ain’t no furry, Miki meanwhile is a cute and extremely moe anime girl and I really like those. Like I said, Miki just sort of has surprisingly nice development throughout Houkago Saikoro Club, and the way in which she’s able to open up a bit and grow more confident through the interactions she has with others thanks to the board games, it’s done really well, and with a gradual enough pace + reaffirmation of her arc in the last episode to where she doesn’t feel like a fundamentally different person. Plus she’s just, she’s really nice, there’s an episode where it’s raining so they can’t go to the beach and the girls see a little boy who’s really upset that he can’t go play so Miki like scouts him and teams up with him in a board game and argh it was really sweet I really liked it. And she’s also just, really really cute. She looks a lot like Sayaka Miki so I initially had a bit of whiplash seeing her aesthetic moe clash with her personality moe, but upon watching the show more I’m able to accept those two elements working well together. This show has really good girls and narrowing it down to just the one was difficult, but hey I’ll always be a sucker for quiet girls, so Miki has to win.
Boy of the Season – Legoshi
On the other hand, we’re actually choosing the furry pick here, because every other show is a cute girl show and SAO’s males suck pretty hard, especially since Kirito’s comatose and Eugeo’s dead, so Beastars is the obvious pick. But nah I’d have gone with him anyway, he’s the second most interesting thing about Beastars next to its society obviously, but of course that society’s impact on his character so cannot be understated and it’s really great. I said pretty much all I wanted to say about his character in the Beastars section so uh, not much to add here. He’s just a phenomenally written main character and the perfect vehicle to explore the society Beastars presents us with. Great show.
And that’s Fall 2019. As you can pretty clearly tell, I didn’t watch a lot of shows this season, a mere 7 if you weren’t counting, but hey I had fun with all of them, more or less. And also, this is my first Season in Review where I didn’t drop anything at all, and since all the shows were single cours and I chose to wait until Jet Girls and Rifle were finished to post this, this is by extension the first Season in Review where I’ve actually fully finished every show I’ve covered. I’m pretty proud of that one. And I had a lot of fun writing this too, I feel like all of the shows were interesting enough in their own ways to where I could say a fair bit for each of them, and hey that’s always a good thing, plus unlike most of my Seasons in Reviews there’s not really any sections in this that I rushed just to get out or anything, I really tried my hardest to make sure I’m proud enough of every section. Obviously my perspective on my writing is informed by my own biases so maybe you think this post is shit and you fucking hate me but like, eh, I had fun with it. So I really enjoyed this season for the opportunity it gave me in this writing, even if most of the shows I watched ended up not being great, and hey we still got Beastars out of it so that’s a really solid way to close out the decade. I think that’s pretty much it. End post.
