Finally got caught up on Rock is a Lady’s Modesty (11/13 episodes) and I’m enjoying it well enough, but I’m not sold on it as a music anime. I think it’s the same reason I didn’t really enjoy Your Lie in April: it feels like a sports anime wearing a music anime’s clothing. There’s nothing wrong with sports anime—Chihayafuru is one of my all-time favorite shows—but music is really important to me, so if the show goes in-depth about how people engage with music and it feels inauthentic, it really takes me out of it. It’s clear that effort has been put into authenticity in the music itself and the animation, since they did motion capture of Band-Maid actually playing the songs, but the writing feels off, especially when they’re just throwing out jargon randomly. I’d be curious to hear from anyone who’s actually played in rock/metal/punk bands, though.

There’s plenty of shows I’ve enjoyed that have music as a theme but focus more on the interpersonal stuff that I’ve enjoyed, such as K-On!, Girls Band Cry, and Bocchi the Rock!. But as far as music shows go, I doubt anything will ever hold a candle to Hibike! Euphonium. Truly a love letter to band geeks the world over.

Things that are actually good:

To Be Hero X: this one is amazing. It’s the first mostly-CGI anime I’ve ever looked at and thought “this actually looks pretty good and genuinely does not detract from its quality at all,” and it cuts away to absolutely gorgeous traditional artwork when it matters which it stylizes wonderfully in a way that’s just visually stunning. The soundtrack is also phenomenal, as expected of Hiroyuki Sawano. Even the writing seems pretty decent, kind of like BNHA with better themes and worldbuilding and conveys a much stronger message of “everything about the world in this setting sucks and is toxic, actually, and we’re going to show you exactly why it is bad and actively hurts everyone involved repeatedly and clearly” than BNHA is ever willing to do. Strongly recommend, absolutely top tier so far.

The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World: this is a very silly, self-aware shitpost of a concept, with an already-superpowered protagonist getting isekaid from one cliched genre to another in a way that textually clashes and confuses everyone involved. The animation is mostly ok but doesn’t do anything that stands out, and its CGI is bad but not as bad as CGI can be. The writing is a pretty good parody of both genres it’s riffing on and it’s delivered with a shiteating grin that you can almost feel. It’s dumb, light fun that seems to have a decent core to it and is full of lines like this:

A Ninja and an Assassin Living Together: did I mention this last month? I can’t remember. Either way, it’s a very cute and extremely tonally dissonant series that manages to blend lighthearted silly yuri with absolutely harrowing plot points and scenes. Very enjoyable.

Garbage I found that I just have to rant about:

Gonna Be the Twin-Tail!!: I don’t even know how I found or wound up watching this absolute garbage. I mean I like trash, I like piling up a big pile of trash and going “yim yum, look at all this trash”, but this is just a baffling level of garbage that somehow manages to be extremely problematic and incoherent nonsense without falling to the level of shit like Highschool of the Dead. It’s a gender-bending magical girl/sentai show that literally revolves around twin-tailed hairstyles and weird otaku aliens with weird hyperfixated but mild fetishes who just sort of show up somewhere to leer and go on creepy rants about their particular fixation before dying. The translation is also bizarre enough that I genuinely don’t know how much of it is accurate to the source material (oh right, this is an adaptation of a LN series with 21 fucking volumes somehow, which fortunately/unfortunately have never been translated and only four of which were adapted into the anime) and what’s “artistic” interpretation, but holy fuck is it incoherent, baffling, and awful to the point that I’d assume it was a channer fansub if not for the fact that it also has a dub and so seems to have official subtitles. Despite how completely awful it was I kind of wish the LNs were translated because I’m morbidly curious about this absolute fever dream of a story now. There is absolutely nothing to recommend about this: it’s a confusing pile of uncomfortable garbage that’s too incoherent to even hate watch, and it also just sort of ends with the villains – and I am not exaggerating even a little – just sort of going “we have other things to do, so we’re leaving now” and leaving.

According to my MAL:

Manga:

Dragon Ball

Yu-Gi-Oh

Berserk

The Guin Saga

Anime:

Mobile Suit Gundam (rewatch)

.hack//sign

So far just plugging away at my stuff. I really enjoy DB and YGO, they feel like such peak shonen manga. Gundam is great again, this time I’m watching it with the english dub for a change since I’ve seen this show like 2-3 times now. .hack is ehhh it’s okay I guess, just kind of weird and not really all the engaging.

Nadia: The Secret Of Blue Water