Delayed a bit to let the new seasonals start.
Manga:
I started Five Star Stories (1987) and Kowloon Generic Romance, but have not gone far into them. Good to see some quality world building though. Something often missing these days.
Anime:
Super Robot Wars W is excellent, and it convinced me to watch Tekkaman Blade. A good early 90s sci-fi mechanime. So far it’s pretty lean in story, but what’s there is good. B+
I’ve been continuing shows I’ve been watching with comrades, and Full Metal Panic is still peak.
Not much of a status update, but I figured to make this month’s thread, because nobody else did.
I was looking at my old list and there was a 10/10 that stood out to me - Kyousougiga (2013) - because I barely remembered it. I gave it a watch, it was quite good but not a masterpiece imo. I really like family-oriented stories and stories that are a little overwhelming, so I can see where I was coming from a decade ago, but it didn’t quite move me this time.
I tried to watch the first episode of every anime this new season, I gave up because the amount of generic isekai was too much for me to bear. Most were really bad, some were okay, specially the not isekai ones, there was nothing I watched that really stood out, except the one that felt like some post apocalyptic madoka, but I wasn’t in the mood for that and I don’t even remember the name.
I don’t have too much to report since most of the anime I’ve been watching I would’ve already included in my end-of-year retrospective chart.
What I’ve been watching with my mom
I guess what I will say is that in the course of the past fortnight, I watched Oomuro-ke: Dear Friends with my mom — the second of the two Oomuro-ke films released in 2024.
It’s a bit of a weird situation with the Oomuro-ke films, since they’re both ~45 minute compilations of various vignettes involving the titular Oomuro family. These films could’ve just as easily have been released as a single ~90 minute compilation, and I don’t think anyone would’ve complained; or perhaps even better, each vignette could’ve been released separately, perhaps on a weekly schedule, as TV shorts.
Otherwise, mom and I have also watched one episode of The Boondocks, Minami-ke: Okawari, and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water since the new year began, not much to say about those I haven’t said in previous threads.
Love Live
I’ve started watching Love Live: School Idol Project since I finished my three-episode try of it back in December.
Because Pahe’s video player stopped working today apparently because of an SSL issue, I ended up streaming Love Live on a different site tonight, which had soft subtitles clearly using some bad OCR, that kept changing the idol group’s name because apparently the OCR in question doesn’t know the Greek letter μ. So that was a little inconvenient, but I shouldn’t be reading the subtitles, anyways.
The episode I just watched now had some uncomfortable “booby shit”, but for the most part that hasn’t really been a huge problem with this show until now. The episode I just watched also introduced a Russophone character very clearly voiced by Ayane Sakura, who I know best as Natsumi from Non Non Biyori. Apparently ol’ Sakura is voicing the titular Dr. Ameku in that new medical anime everybody’s talking about, too, though? That’s a neat little coincidence, I’ve been meaning to check that show out, 'cause people keep making House memes out of it.
But yeah, as a whole Love Live has pretty consistently been able to make me smile by the end of each episode, and although the CGI is a bit janky, that’s part of the charm, isn’t it? I can see why this show is considered to be such a classic of a genre that I haven’t really explored until now.
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind
Last night I stayed up to watch the first five episodes of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind on Hextube. It was good to finally see a bit of a show that’s been so heavily memed, and to try some JJBA content for the first time since 2019, but honestly it didn’t really draw me in. I actually skipped out on watching the last episode they were playing that night, mainly because it was getting so late, but also because it just didn’t really feel worth it, especially with how the video player kept crashing on me.
The end theme of Golden Wind, though, took me a bit by surprise, since it has the word “horny” in it. It’s the 1995 song “Freek’N You” by Jodeci — Golden Wind takes place in 2001, so I guess they wanted to use something roughly contemporary to that time period? In any case, using the word “horny” in an anime ED reminded me of “Sexy Sexy” from Ghost Stories, and for that matter “Kiiroi Vacances”, the first OP of Pani Poni Dash, which uses the Japanese word for “butt”.
The comments under the official YouTube upload of “Freek’N You”, unsurprisingly, is 99% JJBA fans now.
The Melancholy of Haruhi-chan Suzumiya
Although I didn’t particularly care for JJBAGW, I’m probably still going to join in on the Saturday anime streams, if only for the sake of playing The Melancholy of Haruhi-chan Suzumiya shorts in the intermission between episodes of JJBA. I played the first of these Haruhi-chan shorts in one of the intermissions last night, and because the subbed version wasn’t on YouTube, I ended up playing the dubbed version instead. So that was my first time hearing what the dub of Haruhi-chan was like, since the only other time I watched Haruhi-chan was with my mom some years ago, in Japanese.
I’d completely forgotten, if I ever noticed to begin with, that Kyon’s little sister was played by Kari Wahlgren in the Haruhi dub, so it was a bit of a fun surprise during that Haruhi-chan short suddenly hearing what was very clearly the voice of Kagami Lucky Star.
Too much to watch!
And now, unrelated to any of that, I’ve been thinking of giving Smile Precure (AKA Glitter Force, its Saban adaptation) another try. Even though I gave it an “extended try” of five episodes such that it could introduce all the main characters, I still decided I didn’t like Smile Precure when I first tried it last year. But who knows, maybe if I gave that show a second shot now that I have a better idea of what to expect, I’d actually end up liking it better? Sometimes a second shot can completely turn your perspective on a show, but just as often it can’t.
That aside, God, there’s just so fucking much anime out there, am I right? There’s several anime coming out this year that I’m looking forward to (that Hatsune Miku movie, the CITY anime, the Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid movie), there’s several anime I tried or started a long time ago that I want to get back to, and I just have otherwise a huge backlog of things on my planning list. Honestly sometimes I think of making a subcategory for “priority planning” on my planning list.
I think the number one thing I want to prioritize watching with my mom is Tamako Love Story, because we loved Tamako Market when we watched it many years ago, but just never got around to that movie despite how good people say it is. I’d also like to prioritize Do It Yourself!!, but there’s also, well, many other things I’d like to prioritize, to the point where “prioritization” feels like a bit of a meaningless idea.
It is on the one hand absolutely wild that there is so much good anime out there — I don’t want to be ungrateful for the abundance — but on the other hand it’s a shame that I’m probably never gonna get through all the anime I want to watch, especially all the anime that I want to watch with my mom. She’s getting older, and we only watch anime together a few times a week, and we often have to cancel our plans for one reason or another, you know.
Been really enjoying Orb: the movement of the earth.
Apothecary Diaries aka Shen Yun: the anime just started back up.
Dragon Ball: Daima still going strong with the nostalgia.
Don’t think there’s much else I’m watching. Mangawise…
Chainsaw Man is quite appetizing.
Hajime No Ippo is taking so many breaks that the fight i was expecting to end in November is still going.
Giant Killing occasionally pops out a chapter.
One Punch man is still funny, still interesting.
I have managed to continue to resist reading Dandadan, but I’ve also been pretty busy. So we’ll see how long I can hold out.
Lit wise, I just read the YA Iron Widow series and can happily recommend it as a pallet cleanser for more adult books. First book is a very stereotypical YA romance with asian furry mech characteristics and the second book is flat out leftist revolutionary propaganda with a Strong man leftist antagonist that the author does a pretty good job of showing how the revolution would fold to reactionary forces without his willingness to violently subjugate said reactionaries. CW for SA tho, they are YA romance with all the tropes that go with it.
Oh yeah, Maoism is back on the menu.
I wanna watch Castlevania Nocturne Season 2 next week when it releases. Thats it atm.
I’m so keen for more gay vampires, Castlevania team really hit it out of the park with this series as a whole.
I watched Kemozume this week, which is animated by Masaaki Yuasa who is one of my favorite Japanese animators/directors. The art style is intentionally rough looking but that’s pretty standard for something that Masaaki touched and I feel like it works well with the show. While the general premise is on it’s face pretty average anime slop (there is an organization of hunters that fight demons that prey on humans) the themes get more complex as the show progresses into more of a love story and at 13 episodes it’s not a huge time investment.
Anglo comics have taken over my interests lately but I’m still working my way through Dragon Ball.
also @[email protected] can we pin this?
