true voyage is return

Coai Week 2026

Our annual celebration of the Conan x Ai | Shinichi x Shiho ship is starting from 25th to 31st of August this year ♡

Prompts :

Hanakotoba - Flower Language (ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)ꕤ.ﾟ

♡Day 1 - Lily of the Incas ☆ Indescribable Connection ♡Day 2 - Sunflower ☆ Respect & Radiance ♡Day 3 - Zinnia ☆ Loyalty ♡Day 4 - Yellow Camellia ☆ Longing ♡Day 5 - White Chrysanthemum ☆ Truth ♡Day 6 - Gardenia ☆ Secret Love ♡Day 7 - Free Choice

★ All prompts are open to personal interpretation ★

You can participate by posting or submitting any form of media such as (but not limited to) fanart, fanfiction, AMVs, Gifs, edits, headcanon lists, metas, fanmixes, cosplay, etc etc.

Please make sure to tag #coaiweek2026 so we can reblog your entry!

For all the talk about media literacy on social media these day, fewer people seem willing to actually engage critically with a work’s themes, especially if the critique challenges their beliefs or personal attachments. There is a clear difference between a story that intentionally depicts something controversial and a story that attempts to address a theme but fails to do so within an effective or thoughtful framework. (This is often the case when a white writer takes a racially blind approach to a story. The argument often is that, because there is no concept of race in the fictional world, then applying real world racial stereotypes to its rules is wrong. This clearly ignores the fact that our biases will always seep into our work, and your ability to learn and grow from those mistakes is an essential part of any mature writer.)

roots

Hiroshi Yoshida 

Venture Bros starts as an AAC but turns to a genuinely compelling Dramady over time, and you never feel like the jokes are out of character or detract from the plot.

Scavenger's Reign is beautifully animated and has some incredibly compelling characters. Incredible scifi worldbuilding.

Bojack Horseman will drift between a comedy and genuine character growth exploring the absolute worst that a broken man can do, and why he feels that way.

While it's much more episodic, Inside Job does have character growth throughout and the consequences of one episode at least tangentially carry over to the next, while the jokes are much higher tier than most stuff. It feels like it takes the audience's capacity to understand the underlining themes even in a fairly wacky show.

Mars Express is one of the most incredible scifi movies I have watched in recent years. It tackles the questions of humanity, artificial sentience in capitalism and who you can trust in a neat noir package. My favourite film to ever come out of France.

Cyberpunk Edgerunners might have been a tie-in, but it left an impression on so many people for a good reason. It handles themes of autonomy, opportunity and trauma in a way that isn't overclouded by its action-packed fight scenes.

Porco Rosso might be family friendly enough to let your kids watch it, but it's still a tale of survivor's guilt, a growing fascist state and how isolation plagues one's own self perceptions. It's delightful to watch at all ages and gains a new level to it the older you get with each rewatch.

Invincible is a love letter to comics and its source material, handling mature themes even setting aside its infamous gore. It's brutal, it's harrowing and it takes its audience seriously in what they can handle.

Genndy Tarkatovsky's Primal is a wonderfully well animated and quite literally wordless narrative that tells an amazing story despite its own self-imposed limitations.

The Animatrix is one of those seminal pieces of science fiction that you will constantly end up seeing parallels to in your life, not least if you're paying any attention to trans rights issues in the world currently.

You might notice that there's still a lot of scifi and comedy, and there's good reason for that. These are the two genres that have the most to gain from respecting animation as a medium: comedy can use the exaggeration of movement and flexibility to portray far out and hilarious situations all the better at a fraction of the cost, while science fiction has the ability to portray things that would be impossible practically or incredibly expensive in CGI. The problem isn't with adult animation, it's that you're refusing to look beyond 20+ year running IPs and Netflix doubling down on their mistakes in order to find the best stuff.

On top of that, you cannot hail ATLA as a paragon of children’s animation because ATLA and a few of a selective batch are the outlier. For every The Owl House and Steven Universe out there there’s at least five Miraculous Ladybug-esque pieces of work that don’t make it through the noise. Milk-toast, cheep, and shabby comedy also happens to be very frequent in children’s animation, but unlike adult animation, kid shows are cut more slack because of the underlying credence that animation is a children’s medium.

Most of the good stuff isnt as popular as hellaverse or big mouth etc

There are some good ones that end up successful like blue eyes samurai and invincible

I think im most interested in the hidden gems because there is some really weird interesting stuff like The Wolf House

I haven’t been watching much TV lately, but Common Side Effects (from the same creators as Scavengers Reign, which is easily one of my favourites due to its refreshing take on alien life) is a really solid watch, in my opinion.

As for films:

Junk Head: a clever dark comedy that really hits the spot for sci-fi aficionados. Some camera shots are beautifully shot even to the eye of a novice such as myself.

Dead Leaves: deeply weird, borderline chaotic, and one of those films where you finish it thinking, “I’m not sure I fully understand what I just watched,” but still find it visually hypnotic. Definitely a love-it-or-hate-it kind of experience.

A Town Called Panic: pure chaos incarnate, and arguably one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. It’s technically for kids iirc, but it works for adults just as well.

Angel’s Egg: much slower, more meditative and introspective, leaning heavily into atmosphere and symbolism.

Also a sprinkling of some Italian recommendations because European countries are tremendly underrated when it comes to animation (some of these might be a bit harder to find, but I’ll leave them here anyway):

The SuperVips (Vip mio fratello superuomo), a superhero parody that feels genuinely ahead of its time. Also by Bruno Bozzetto is Allegro non troppo (I’m not sure if it has a direct English title), which I’d describe as: weird as hell, deeply cynical but not in a nihilistic way. It carries that very Italian brand of skepticism that emerged in the wake of the violence and disillusionment of the 1970s. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it mentioned much, but it really captures that pessimistic edge of Italian comedy, though it’s generally more funny in live-action films, partly because animation has historically been less supported and less widely produced in Italy.