the time will pass anyways

A lot of people are talking about frieren-dungeon meshi-witch hat atelier as the "fantasy big three" and as "the fantasy anime renaissance", but i feel like people are missing that a big part of why these shows are so good and why they're often talked about together is the way they write women. Women are written to be protagonists, to have complex (sometimes not even morally good) motivations for what they do, and overall to be just well rounded characters. which shouldn't be so hard to do, but anime so often manages to miss the mark on even this!!!!! That's why your isekai slop is never going to be on par with these, because its female character writing can't be compared to the heights of Marcille secretly researching forbidden magic purely for a thirst of knowledge, of Frieren being such a span above the rest of the mages around her that she's basically considered an eldritch horror, of whatever little gay rivarly Aggot and Coco have got going on! it just can't!!!! these are such fun tropes that women have never been allowed to touch, and now they're being served to the public with a degree of quality that has never been seen before. this is the secret sauce of the fantasy renaissance that so many people are missing.

i love how the devil wears prada 2 seems to tackle society losing touch with analog media like magazines, journalists getting laid off in the name of optimization and profit, and this growing collective delusion that ai can replace the deeply human, deeply soulful thing that art has always been