Season in Review - Summer 2020
Holy shit, another season of anime ended! And despite that whacky coronavirus destroying the very world around us, we still managed to get a good couple of anime to TV, including a couple that were supposed to air last season but uh, didn’t. So as I do every season, let’s talk about what I watched! Should clarify before we begin that I wrote this entire post in a single sitting on the same day that the last 2 shows I was watching ended, which might not really mean anything but my usual approach is write about each show as they finish and maybe the different approach will reflect in the writing? Who knows.
Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld 2
Originally scheduled for last season but delayed to here, we have the final season of Alicization, a journey we’ve now been following for nearly 2 years. And god it’s been a fucking journey. Some of the highest highs in SAO, but also 47 episodes long so many of the lowest lows that it has too are dragged out beyond belief as well. But we’re not here to talk about Alicization as a whole, let’s just talk about this season.
I think War of Underworld 2 is probably the single best season of SAO, in that, it’s probably the easiest season to get over the bad shit for, and everything past the bad shit is pretty broadly enjoyable. That bad shit is pretty simply summarised too. There’s another dumb tentacle rape scene in the first episode which ruined the like 20 episodes with no rape streak we had going. Oh well. And then afterwards the only big issue the show runs into is dragging fights out and characters having dumb bullshit powers. I’d almost compare it to like, the bad parts you’d expect from Dragon Ball, where every supporting character gets to take a stab at the villain and maybe even do pretty well against them, but the villain will just asspull whatever power keeps them alive so that they can’t actually be beat by anyone other than Goku, though in this case it’s Kirito. PoH is able to mind control people randomly and just constantly does that, then it’ll get broken, but he’ll do it again as a twist. Asuna can get a cool finisher on him and he’ll be left with a gaping crater in his torso, but then he’ll just live and beat her anyway. Because only Kirito is allowed to beat villains. The fight against Sheldon Bazinga lasts about 3 episodes with nothing changing other than he’s constantly getting arbitrarily stronger, but so is Kirito, who can fly and turn people into trees and stuff now. Ultimately all these problems exist and persist in the show, but the thing is, they’re such consistently similar flaws that they don’t actually mean a huge amount. If the villain’s got dumb OP powers then who cares since Kirito does too? Fights might be longer than they need to be but the result is that we get to see more great animation. And time spent on fights is time that could be spent on exposition instead and I’d rather just have fights lol.
Just in general, enough time is allocated to fights that the show doesn’t even have the opportunity to be draining to watch compared to previous seasons. Because the fights are fun as fuck, A-1 Pictures genuinely popped off with the visuals this season and gave us like, Ufotable quality action animation for a lot of it, honestly. No hesitation this is the best SAO has ever looked, fucking Ordinal Scale was a movie and it doesn’t compare. And then the emotions behind the fights are honestly pretty decent. PoH and Sheldon are such shit villains that seeing them be defeated is gratifying since they’re finally over with. Lots of Asuna’s best moments incorporate Yuuki in a way that made me pop off because I’m a Yuuki simp, and Kirito similarly incorporates Eugeo into his fights a lot which is also cool.
And yeah, Kirito. He’s finally awake, walked right into that imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there. Damn you Stormcloaks, Skyrim was fine until you came along, empire was nice and lazy. Uhm, where was I? Kirito waking up is genuinely satisfying after so long. The delay made that wait even longer but it really did feel worth it. The episode where he wakes up delves into his psyche and established insecurities really well and genuinely made me feel sorry for the dude and all that he’s been through. More than any other season, Kirito is humanised pretty well here, the grief of losing Eugeo seriously affects him and that’s felt for the show’s entire runtime. There’s a great scene when we’re all IRL too where Sugu acts like a fucking sister for the first time in her life and has Kirito tell her all about what happened in Underworld, shit was genuinely nice.
And then speaking of, the IRL scenes and episodes felt significantly less intrusive than they had been for the rest of Alicization. There are some dumb and predictable twists, also Akihiko Kayaba being a robot, but the IRL stuff is more than just exposition and has meaningful stakes of its own, we could spend a full episode away from Underworld without me wanting to kill myself, which is more praise than throughout the rest of Alicization, so that’s pretty epic.
God, what else to say? Uh, this season doesn’t even really live up to the “War of Underworld” part of the title as well as the last season did, since most of the fights that matter at all are 1v1 fights without much in the way of tactics. I didn’t really feel actively bothered by that though, the show rarely pretends to even be about war anymore so I can respect them for committing to a direction. Alice isn’t as focused on quite as much until the very end of the season, and that’s also when she starts being a decent character too lol. There are some fucking nobody characters introduced at the start for no reason, Moonphase and his friends, literally no reason to exist. Eiji and Yuna get a scene that was like, fine, didn’t amount to much but I genuinely respect committing to Ordinal Scale as having canonically happened. The ending is quite silly but in a really indulgently fun and hammy way, and the visuals are so specifically incredible in that scene that they really sell it all. Star King Kirito should’ve been adapted.
And for all of that, I gave this season of SAO a 5/10. Yeah it’s, still not a glowing endorsement, if you don’t have the highest opinion of SAO I’m not gonna tell you to sit through it all just to get to this, but from week to week, this season did more to be entertaining for me than everything before, and very rarely was I bored or anything of the sort. Also the Kirito wakes up episode is like, genuinely the best SAO episode. Yeah.
Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu 2nd season
From one popular isekai sequel to another, let’s talk about the hotly anticipated Re:Zero season 2, which took like 4 years to get here lol. And to just get how I feel out of the way, I don’t really know how worth the wait this was.
Everything that was good about Re:Zero already is still good, Subaru’s still a good character with a lot of interesting development whose position in this narrative just gives the opportunity for lots of discussion, and the world around him is similarly full of fascinating characters that we always want to know more about. The visuals, music and voice acting are also still really great, or, improved actually. The audio mixing especially is played with to really interesting effect, as in there’s one scene where Satella says “aishiteru” and it’s mixed in such a way that it like reverberates inside your fucking brain and is mad disturbing to listen to, it’s great.
However, compared to season 1, season 2 is mostly focused on one specific really long arc that’s almost like, kind of a web of branching paths. Subaru has the same checkpoint for most of the season, and the things he does and experiences and learns in each of his loops are always fucking dramatically different. This leads to a season where 2 episodes can go in completely opposite directions from one another with Subaru not really making much in the way of progress, and having to suffer significantly more than he needs to for the info gained. And I’m completely about it! Having this giant arc where finding a way out feels welly and truly impossible works wonders for the intrigues of the show, and especially for the stakes. There are a lot more lives on the line than is normally the case for the show and despite how much different things Subaru picks up on, the people he’s dealing with are complex enough to where he can’t just win them over and save the day so easily. So many conflicting character interests and goals long term and short term are established really well and we begin to learn more about some of the most already interesting characters like Roswaal and it’s all great. It’s really cool seeing these timelines butterfly effect themselves into completely new directions and working to piece it all together, and that feeling of hopelessness in spite of what we get is pretty damn engaging. We also get to meet every witch here, and they’re all waifu as fuck holy shit. Echidna’s the only one of them who gets to be a particularly noteworthy character, which is to be expected since she has the most screentime of the bunch, but they’re all still interesting and more importantly cute as fuck. Also those super branching timelines have lead to a lot of really brutal and great Subaru death scenes, dude gets munched to death by some rabbits at one point and it’s among his goriest deaths of all lol.
So for all of that, why aren’t I sure if it was worth the wait? Because it’s split cour. These 13 episodes are all we get until Winter of next year. Which is only 3 months, sure, but I’d honestly rather have waited longer for this if it meant the next half came straight after. And that’s because for all the branching this season’s narrative does, for all the characters we meet, places we go to, and things we learn, there’s not really a payoff. The season ends with Subaru being basically where he started. The only real difference is he has a slightly renewed sense of self-confidence and is gonna work towards loving himself and relying on his friends more. And that’s a pretty big difference and functions as good steps for him as a person, but because it comes at the end of the season all it is is a promise of good things to come. All this cool branching web narrative was in service of something coming 3 months down the line. And if that’s not worth all this, then what was the point? I don’t know if this was worth the wait because it’s spent so much time on branching setup (still cool) but the payoff is still to come, that’s all.
Before I score it, I’d be remiss not to mention that episode 4 I think it was, where Subaru does the first trial and gets a chance to talk to his parents, is a really damn phenomenal episode. Subaru’s parents manage to be really amazing characters really quickly without it feeling like we need to see more of them, and they add a lot to Subaru himself as a character too. The small victories he gets in that episode feel triumphant and emotional as all hell and it’s a really hard episode not to cry at. It’s also just nice seeing the inherent tragedy of getting isekai’d actually be acknowledged by a modern isekai show. I’d call generally call Re:Zero a show fairly worth watching anyway but this episode specifically is a real “watch the show for this one” episode imo. Good time.
So for all of that, I gave the show a 7/10, same as season 1. Not to say it’s better or worse than season 1, since I’m not really sure. It feels different than season 1 but I also don’t feel like if you dislike season 1 there’s a chance you might still like season 2. It’s just, Re:Zero again, and fortunately Subaru can still be an interesting character on a good character arc even after having a good triumph with his confession in season 1. Cool time. Hope to god that season 2 part 2 is worth the wait.
The God of High School
Hey Crunchyroll are doing another Webtoon manhwa adaptation with God in the title, is this one better than Tower of God? Sure.
According to a lot of people that actually read the source material, God of High School isn’t a great adaptation and cuts out a lot of the stuff that made this story interesting and stick with people. I have no idea if they’re right or not, but to be honest, I kind of don’t care. God of High School the anime is written like a shounen highlight reel, we speed through plot points at a pace only matched by those whacky 3 minute comedy anime, and this is a full length story-driven TV anime so that’s a pretty ballsy move for pacing your story. It kinda works though, because the presentation is strong enough to make you forget about what info you’re lacking. Maybe the source material feels more like a conventional shounen with dialogue to explain fighting styles or whatever, but this anime adapts the things people that are actually into shounen spend all their time talking about. It’s a show that’s so fast paced and energetic and with such strong presentation that like, I genuinely never thought about this show when I wasn’t watching it, the characters or plots did nothing to stick with me. But the moment a new episode came out and I sat down to watch it, I forgot all about that. I was completely in the show’s vibe. It’s a show that thrives purely in the moment while you’re watching it and won’t try to occupy your mind afterwards. Sometimes it goes a bit too far in that direction, episode 12 for example is sorta just noise honestly, but by and large it’s a show you put on to feel some shounen hype and then move on.
And then as for the presentation, I liked the music quite a bit, minus the dubstep crap OP, and I wasn’t big on the character designs, particularly their big red blushing ears and noses look silly to me. Also whenever the art style went chibi to make dumb shounen jokes I wanted to die. Then there’s the actual animation.
God of High School is a contender for best looking TV anime I’ve ever seen.
I have no idea what the fuck MAPPA did to make it happen but they actually managed to produce a show that looked as good on the first episode as it did the last, and everything inbetween. So much of the show is fighting but the show actively avoids taking shortcuts, we’ll see genuinely incredible human fight choreography with detailed artwork that manages to flow really well without compromising itself, tons of the characters are loosely dressed just so the animators can flex their detailed fabric physics drawings, but we’ve still got huge bulky cunts rolling around so they can have a great diversity in character designs that all move as well as one another, and the moment the show starts introducing basically magic and Dragon Ball shit, it’s big and flashy and great to look at too. The visuals are definitely at their best for the hand-to-hand shit, and also in like episode 4 maybe where Jin and Daewi fight each other it does this fuckin calligraphy type shit that looks unbelievable, but the superpowers still look pretty cool. It’s the type of show where it’s worth watching just to look at, because words can’t really do it justice.
So yeah God of High School is a totally forgettable show until you’re watching it, at which point it’s a sakuga wankfest with characters played really straight yet being endearing anyway, and that’s good enough for me. Every single negative take of the show I’ve seen I’ve probably agreed with, but I’m also seeing Diginee and BestGuyEver suck the show’s dick on Khantent and I agree with them too. God of High School exists in a weird sort of place I guess. Oh well, I gave it a 6/10.
Kanojo, Okarishimasu
Henceforth Kanokari. Kanokari is a show probably made by a simp, definitely a show for simps, and objectively is about a simp.
It’s a romcom following a dude called Kazuya who, after breaking up with the show’s best girl, rents a girlfriend for a date and then starts simping hard for her because she talks about fish one time. For the first few episodes it’s sort of a will they/won’t they thing where the two are constantly hanging out and everyone thinks they’re dating for real, best girl included, but while they’re obviously not, it looks like there’s feelings there! The ultimate culmination being the two literally saving one another’s lives from a potential drowning at sea incident.
I think this part of the show’s pretty good, the setup for them to date and stay dating is contrived as fuck but in a really fun way and I think it’s genuinely quite interesting seeing Mizuhara stand up for Kazuya and try to get him to be a better person, all the while doing her job of getting paid to hang around with him. Kazuya’s a simp who doesn’t stand up for himself but that makes their dynamic interesting, you want to see his simping go somewhere – that somewhere being him growing as a person and getting a real fucking girlfriend.
Pretty much straight after the saving the life scene, the show just goes off the rails for the entire second half. This is a harem show, so what was rental girlfriend and ex-girlfriend is now rental girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, and a 2nd rental girlfriend who falls in love with MC for a dumb arbitrary reason and forces him to date her by way of blackmail. She’s barely a character, instead she’s just some hot moe girl who’s likeable at a glance, but narratively she’s an obstacle who serves to drag a plot out way beyond when it already reached its conclusion. And then everything after her introduction is just the show wasting time doing tired rom-com jokes, what was once a funny contrivance for a plot setup is now this constant annoyance, even the funny gacha addict granny we’re doing this all for just turns into some weird fanservice character who gets to grope Mizuhara for some reason? Kazuya ditched a call with his ex to save Mizuhara in that one scene and that was the start of like an actual character arc but he just wastes the rest of the show away being a simp and later an actual stalker, it’s fun revelling in how pathetic he is at first but then it just becomes a show where you’re watching a pathetic dude be pathetic. To top it off they introduce another cute moe girl for the harem in the second last episode which is so late in the show to where you ask yourself why even bother? The show has 5 good episodes and then everything after that is a complete waste of time.
One thing I will give the show though is that the girls are really great as just moe waifus to be attracted to. They’ve all got great designs, they’re all really hot, and they’re also voiced by a fucking impossibly god tier quartet – Aoi Yuuki, Nao Touyama, Sora Amamiya and Rie Takahashi. Kazuya’s VA also does a good job but I don’t care about him really so. Show looks and sounds pretty good all around, to where that second half that’s a waste of time is actually like, not completely horrible.
Think overall I’d go 4/10. Started pretty well, lost steam really quickly, but not bad enough in the second half to be totally unwatchable. Mami’s best girl because I myself am a simp, specifically for Aoi Yuuki. That being said, Sumi was very adorable in what little time she had, so I’m excited for season 2 to get more of her. Oh yeah, season 2! Fuckin, none of the good shows get second seasons so easily, but all the trash pulls it off no problem. Anime is gay.
Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai!
For our next pile of trash that got a second season too easily, we have Uzaki-chan.
Uzaki-chan is one of those “annoying but actually cute girl annoys an everyman MC with occasional romantic scenes” types of shows, which is a more prolific genre than that really specific description implies. It’s not a genre I’ve really dipped my toes into before this, but I don’t think it’s one I’d be opposed to watching more of, despite Uzaki’s quality.
So the good parts of this show are the more like, I guess slice of life scenes with Uzaki and her everyman MC, Sakurai. Mostly because Sakurai’s actually fairly not that everyman, he’s not like some super well realised main character with defined goals or something but he has a consistent personality and likes and dislikes and stuff, I found myself liking him significantly more than I expected to. And then for a good amount of these scenes, Uzaki does a good job of being like, annoying enough to be called annoying but not to the point where you can’t stand her. And when it’s just that pair in that mentality, maybe watching a movie or playing a game or going drinking or to a cat café or something, the show’s fine. It’s not that funny, despite my lack of familiarity with the genre I felt like I’d seen every joke before and I could tell how most scenes (or sometimes episodes – the show really stretches its content) would play out really early on. However, it’s a passable slice of life, not one to really actively love watching but it’s decent for sorta just chilling to and staring at passable visuals and scenes that won’t make you hate yourself.
Where it starts to suck is with the supporting cast. Ami, her dad, and some blond cunt. These 3 are the saddest motherfuckers in the planet. I don’t know if people outside of Scotland use ‘sad’ in the way I’m meaning it here, but sad is what you get called by high school bullies when they learn you like anime or something. These supporting characters are sad as fuck. All that the 3 of them do for the entire show is like, watch Uzaki and Sakurai together. And they’ll talk about how interesting or hilarious or unpredictable the pair are but they’re just, not that whatsoever. Again I don’t think they’re boring to watch on their own but they’re far from good enough to get as much joy out of as these motherfuckers do. And imo it’s sad as all fucking hell that Uzaki and Sakurai provide so much happiness to these characters that they like, go out of their way to put them in situations where they might do something funny or romantic for example. Cause again, the funny shit’s never funny, and also the romantic shit which I’ve not talked about up to this point. Occasionally they’ll do something like eat from the same bread or have a vaguely suggestive conversation and then everyone’ll ship them and they’ll both get flustered as hell. It’s boring as hell to watch. When the pair are just being friends doing chill shit the show’s fun to watch, but you know the romance is never going to go anywhere so I couldn’t stand watching it. I also hate how much the supporting cast want them to be together, fucking cucks. Imagine getting so much joy from seeing fucking Uzaki-chan and Sakurai being a couple? Yeah no thanks. I almost want them to not be a couple and just tell that heteronormative “guy and a girl can’t just be friends” narrative to go to hell, fuckin sucks. Also there’s this one cat that’s technically not a supporting character but it is a recurring one, it just follows them around and makes this really shocked face, and dog I wanted to rip this cat limb from limb it was so annoying.
Speaking of annoying, the entire culture surrounding this show! Uzaki has giant tits. She also looks 12, but has giant tits, but she’s also 20 years old. This has resulted in inordinate amounts of controversy because people can’t fathom the idea that a college age Japanese lady could possibly be this height and have this bust size. Despite the fact that there’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And also even if there wasn’t it’s anime who fucking cares? Uzaki also has eyeballs bigger than her hands like shut up. I think Geoff’s girlfriend said nobody’s complaining about her tits but that’s just not even true so, whatever. There are also a lot of people that are like, watching this show out of spite for people hating on Uzaki’s tits, and I think that’s dumb too. The show’s boring or annoying for most of its runtime, Uzaki’s a fictional character, you don’t need to fucking defend her. And neither do I for that matter. Oh well. I know this isn’t a new take I’m sharing by the way, people that defend Uzaki’s tits and also find the show annoying aren’t a minority or anything, but still.
That being said I’m not interested in defending Uzaki’s tits narratively. Every joke you can make with tits in anime is made here, they press up against Sakurai’s back, rub up against his arm, he accidentally gropes her tons or mistakes her tits for a watermelon while doing the classic “accidentally slip my hand under and into your bikini” thing, all that shit. Also every character in this show is fucking stacked anyway but since Uzaki’s the most stacked Ami still gets to be like “Oh I’m so darn jealous of those exercise balls hanging from her chest that she calls tits!”. I’ll defend Uzaki’s tits in the meta sense that anime girls should be allowed big tits but fuck what they actually accomplish in the show, they’re not hot no matter how hard the show tries to convince you they are.
Uzaki’s not hot in general, neither is anyone in the show. Really didn’t care for the visuals in general. The episode where they go to like Tottori had disgusting backgrounds, that filter you applied to those IRL photos looks jank as fuck and doesn’t match the character art. Nothing’s really horrible beyond that but like, it’s not really an art style I dig. I can’t pretend I even remember music playing in the show so no comment on the soundtrack lol. Uzaki’s voice is annoying.
Yeah, 3/10. I’ll watch season 2 anyway.
Umayon
Remember Uma Musume? Okay, you know those like 3 minute special episodes that some anime have in their Blu-Ray releases that are just some cheap chibi skit? Combine them and air it on fucking TV for some reason and you get Umayon!
I don’t even know what I should say beyond that. These episodes are as entertaining as you’d expect from that description. I didn’t know or remember most of the characters, Special Week and Silence Suzuka barely appeared, I had seen most of the jokes before. Yeah, whatever. 4/10.
Dokyuu Hentai HxEros
So you know those shows that are like, softcore hentai? And you know how ecchi is also just lewd content without being lewd enough to not air on TV? HxEros is like, softcore ecchi. It’s that fucking tame.
HxEros’ entire purpose is to like, be hot, but the show is censored in a lot of really, really obnoxious ways. It’s got the typical “fog” censoring you see on TV anime, right, but it’s arbitrary whether they decide to use that or if they’ll instead use these giant fucking sparkles that are even more distracting. And the former is sort of addressed if you seek out the uncensored versions, but they still actually have some of that fog in certain scenes, so there really is no escape. You’re watching a show with “hentai” in the name but it’s afraid to even show the mere shape of a tit, literally what the fuck is the point. And the thing is the girls are hot enough character designs to where you want to see them end up in the compromised situations you’d expect in this sort of show, but you just don’t get to. The only thing this show’s good for is giving you the boner required to go seek out any other porn.
So what is the show outside of that stuff? Uh, boring as shit. It’s some sentai parody where red Kirito and his harem of colourful waifus have to get naked so they can punch these sexy insects that drain your sexual energy and make you want to die because you can’t feel arousal. Silly premise for a silly ecchi show so I won’t complain but my god is it boring to watch, the show’s weirdly serious about it a lot of the time which makes for a really harsh tonal shift when the rest of the show just wants to be ass and tits. It’s forgettable as hell and I just didn’t care.
The visuals are honestly pretty good, with pretty consistently good character artwork and surprisingly nice action animation, but as I already said the main thing you’d watch this for is the porn and it’s too censored to get anything out of. Thing is character designs are hot enough and general artwork well drawn enough to where I assume if this was completely uncensored it’d be one of the better shows of this type. But as it stands, no. And I mean, this type of show is only really a substitute for hentai anyway, but why substitute what’s exactly as easy to find? Idk man, show’s entire existence is dumb like that.
With the boring everything about this show and the hentai not existing, it’s no wonder I started watching it in double speed like, 5 episodes in or something until the very end. 3/10. Hottest and by extension best girl was Sora who got barely any screentime which was disappointing. Actually the tan girl from the other branch was really hot too. Idk. Loli Kirara best girl.
Japan Sinks 2020
I can’t really pretend there’s a meaning behind how I order these shows in this post at all, but this is literally the last show I watched this season, in fact I watched it yesterday, but that’s probably 2 days ago by the time I post this since it’s nearly midnight. Anyway, hey wow a disaster show. I’ve never actually watched one of those before, so how was my first foray into the genre? Well, it was a disaster!
Okay, not really, I just wanted to make that dumb predictable joke that’s definitely been made before. That being said, this show really wasn’t that great.
There are definitely elements of this narrative that worked, the main one being I guess the tone of it all. There’s certainly an inherent unrealism in the setting – Japan being struck with earthquakes so hard that the entire country sinks and Fuji erupts is a bit too extreme to be believable, but I think the show manages to run with it anyway and make this disaster feel appropriately like a disaster, there’s a pretty constant sense of danger and the challenges posed to the characters as a result of the setting feel grounded and more or less human. I also felt like, despite the deaths being pretty predictable, they mostly all came about in natural enough ways to not feel contrived or anything, and they were also generally well placed, it’s never just one character dying after another for no reason.
I also think it works in terms of theming, because a lot of what this show is about is Japanese identities and nationalism. Having those be challenged with the very literal sinking of Japan works, because if Japan’s gone what value is there in Japanese identity? And the show ends up having a nice answer, helped by the 2 main characters being mixed race anyway with a Japanese dad and their chad Philippines mum. The show clearly doesn’t respect nationalism, with some characters we encounter who go on about pure blooded Japanese people only being blown up moments later. But I don’t think it’s one-dimensionally anti-patriotism either, there’s a scene where the main boy raps about Japan’s culture sucking and then this older fully Japanese dude is like “hey fuck you Made in Japan is a sign of quality” so it doesn’t like, hate Japan or anything. But then the ultimate conclusion is having main girl do a whole “borders are just lines on maps, we’re diverse, fuck all of everything”. Heard it before but it’s not like it’s a disagreeable notion, and when Japan rises again they’re all like “okay let’s appreciate Japan but also share it in a way that stops xenophobia or something”. It felt like it worked while I was watching it anyway.
Ending in general was pretty sweet, characters achieve their dreams in a nice way that feels worth what we put them through, and also the happy birthday video Ayumu gets was damn good, I love that trope so fucking much, having a group of long dead people be able to send something they took in the past to someone in the present is fucking great every time.
About why it’s not that great though, one thing about the show that sucked a lot is how often characters make really obviously dumb decisions for no reason that end up having drastic consequences. For example, I just said everyone achieves their dream, and that includes Ayumu becoming an Olympic athlete. But actually, she specifically becomes a Paralympic athlete. This is because at the very fucking start of the show she gets a horrible gash on her leg from the initial earthquake that sets off events. And at no point in the entire show does she give it even bare minimum medical attention. And this show takes place over like, a good 2 weeks or something maybe, I don’t know. It’s a while to just, have a cut on your leg and do nothing about it! She doesn’t even clean the wound or bandage it or anything. Several characters obviously notice it but nobody ever stops to say “hey should we maybe cover that up?”. She loses her fucking leg because of it, and I hate that that had to happen for such 0 IQ reasons.
Another example is the mother’s death, who died because she had to go swimming to free an anchor on a speedboat. At some point she realises she won’t be able to free the rope from the jetty she’s been trying to free it from for a good minute. So do you think she resurfaces to grab some air, take a break, and then try again? Nah dude, she goes deeper. She swims further down, does sort the anchor out, saves the day, but dies for it. Again, 0 reason to be so stupid. It’s the one death in the show that actually does suck and not make sense.
Probably the least offensive instance of this, somehow, is that the entire character of KITE who can fly around on his propeller and parachute setup, decides to ditch said setup and hang with the main fam because it sounded interesting. I get that he’s a YouTuber and a clout chaser but I still can’t really get behind putting yourself in so much danger for the sake of some random family that like, shouldn’t actually be that interesting to him at this point? Felt like a really arbitrary way to get the Gary Stu who can do everything in the party.
Another thing about the show that’s pretty rough is how sidetracked it can get. We spend like, 2 maybe 3 episode hanging out with some fucking weed cultists? And this is only a 10 episode show so that’s a long time. Nobody we meet while doing this is a good character, that pure Japanese guy I mentioned is the only one who gets any “development” and it’s literally just him being pressured to DJ, so now he’s opened up and can talk to people and he was a completely binary character, god. The entire point of this arc ends up being having some old morphine addicted guy we adopted for some reason try to kidnap a child he knows isn’t his but says it’s his because he wants to hold out hope or something? And then he just dies. Also we add a black guy called Mr Onodera to our party and he blinks in morse code and can predict earthquakes, sure. Pure plot device character.
Characters in general were pretty weak. As already said, Onodera’s a plot device, KITE’s a Gary Stu, Japanese boy is completely binary, and then everyone past that tends to suck for one reason or another. The dad’s a boring “I can do it!” guy, which I guess makes him dying first a good subversion. His death results in Ayumu’s worst moment though, where she lashes out at the mum and says like “you blame me for dad’s death” which makes no fucking sense! Like obviously she’s not mentally able to process what’s gone on but that’s still not even a leap in logic, she just decides she’s being blamed for it out of fucking nowhere. It’s a genuinely unbearable scene to sit through. The mum also sucks in this scene and doesn’t even attempt to comfort her grieving daughter, instead just arguing with her. They later pretend it’s because she feels like if she doesn’t act tough then she’ll fall apart but I feel like telling you’re daughter she’s disgusting isn’t acting tough, you’re just being a dick. And then mum after that is basically the same character as dad, “I can do it!” girl. And the main boy’s just annoying, genuinely couldn’t stand his voice or his random English words, it’s so jarring hearing him say normal Japanese sentences but he’ll say “dad” in a really weird accent all the time. TL;DR is that characters were annoying, unlikeable, boring, or just whatever other negative adjective a lot of the time.
Not helping the characters are their actual designs. So let’s talk visuals. This is a Masaaki Yuasa anime, but actually some Korean newcomer director did most of the direction it seems. Explains why it looks really bad. Yuasa’s art isn’t exactly conventionally appealing of course, but what I know of his other shows make up for that with good character designs and great animation. This doesn’t really have either. The characters look so plain and lacking in detail to where they often look underproduced in comparison to the actually pretty solid background art. And they don’t really animate well either. Everyone’s perpetually off model for no other reason than because they couldn’t draw them on model. Just looks bad all around. I mean, maybe not “all around”, there are definitely shots that do look good, it’s just that it’s a glaringly inconsistent production at the most random of times.
I also did not think the voice acting was good. I really like Reina Ueda but her performance as Ayumu in this sounded like a really shit Tomoyo Kurosawa. KITE was Kensho Ono who I like but he genuinely sounded phoned in here, not that it was even a bad performance but he literally sounded like he had been given a broken mic or something. Little boy sounded annoying as fuck as I already said. Everybody else was fine actually.
Soundtrack was really great though, I managed to tell really quickly that it was by Kensuke Ushio which felt poggers as hell. I think especially in the first episode it’s a really interesting decision to have his calm, beautiful piano tracks accompany the utter destruction surrounding everyone, but it worked. And then he had a few more fast paced, almost video-gamey sounding songs in other scenes that would work really well. I think the soundtrack did a lot to enhance the show while also sounding good on its own which is like, the main thing you want out of a soundtrack, so great job there.
Feel like that’s about everything I have to say on the show. 4/10 seems fair. I did have fun with it but also I don’t know if I’d have wanted to watch it if it was 12 episodes.
Lapis Re:LIGHTs
So this show was an absolute fucking shoe-in for me. Magical girls and idols? You’ve boiled it down to all I really want from anime. Simply having those is a guarantee that I will complete your show.
And I mean, yeah I completed this. It was fine. God writing all of these in one sitting is a bad idea actually. Uhm, so Lapis ends up spending a lot of the time in early episodes just being a fantasy slice of life comedy. And that was the best part of the show! The girls are basically all really cute and the show has great costume designs too and it’s a lot of fun seeing this girls play magical dodgeball for a full episode, cute girl slapstick is my favourite thing so yeah. Or like the scene where a girl says “this mushroom looks great” but it’s obviously poisonous and then some other girl’s all “let me see” and then just eats the whole thing and is like “Yep, poisonous!”, that was great! Sorry to explain a whole joke but this show was just mindless moe fun for a good while and I really liked it. It was like God of High School but for moe idol magical girls instead of shounen. The actual idol stuff ends up just being performances put on whenever because of whatever but I didn’t care, even if I literally couldn’t remember a single song after the episode ended. All the magic is generally fun and used for cute slapstick or whatever. It’s just a nice turn your brain off and look at moe girls show.
That is, until it starts trying to have a plot! Yeah so the show like sets up what the main conflict could be pretty early on and then spends the last few episodes on that, but holy fuck is it boring. Hanakana is MC’s sister and just fulfils the “oh I’m edgy and want to protect you” role and it was dull and lifeless and everyone gets to sneak into a castle which was cool but past that the last few episodes are pure noise. Yeah I guess has the same issue as God of High School in occasionally turning into pure noise, but God of High School had that by being like, too over the top shounen, where Lapis ended up there by dropping everything entertaining about it to tell the same boring story we’ve seen a billion times. It’s literally just some dumb interpersonal drama shit that meant nothing to me since the show’s done nothing to make me actually value these characters beyond their base moe appeal.
And like, yeah that’s my opinion of the show. Looks cute, sounds cute, mostly is cute, but gets really boring when it wants to have a plot, and like lowkey even the earlier episodes wanted to have plots and character drama but it’s genuinely impossible to care for, this show has no merit beyond the moe factor. 5/10.
Gibiate
Haha, god what a show this was! Gibiate had a fuckin sick premise, a samurai and a ninja are warped to a few years in the future to fight against this virus that turns everyone into monsters. It’s basic as hell but it’s loaded with cool energy that you don’t see that often. But the show turned out to be really quite the opposite of cool, however the show clearly thinks it’s as cool as the premise implies – or in fact, even cooler. It’s honestly an interesting case study in that regard, the show’s perception of itself versus how the product appears to everyone with half a brain cell.
It’s not really that hard to get into what makes Gibiate so bad either, it’s just sort of impressive that it would turn out this way. See, everything about Gibiate is bad, awful even. Or, no, the background art is alright. But everything else is comically awful.
The music sucks and is always inappropriate as hell for whatever scene it is, the voice performances are all phoned in as fuck, they genuinely sound like the type of shit that any amateur picked up off the street would manage to do, the sound design is so bad as to take you out of every scene completely.
And that’s not even scraping the visuals, my fucking god the visuals. If there was ever an argument against the mere existence of 3DCGI in anime, this is it. The horrible, unfiltered blend of 2D animation and PS2 quality 3D models is in itself a marvellous display of a lack of quality. The 2D artwork is near permanently off-model and it’s not like they make up for it with good animation, you can count the number of frames in most scenes on one hand. And the 3D models have such grossly jank animations and again, no effort was put into like, filtering them into the environment or anything, they literally occupy their own plane of existence and it looks awful.
The character designs would almost be cool if the show wasn’t as visually impaired as it is. Some of the Gibia are almost there but suffer from hilariously bad colour choices and textures, and their constant reusage really highlights those issues. And then of the main cast, my god I don’t know what to say. It’s like, the artwork being what it is obviously hampers them, but can it really be that hard to just make a samurai and ninja look cool? This show fails, they’re so generic and lacking in personality as to be completely forgettable and early on the show was weirdly obsessed with giving their designs slight touch-ups in really forced and unnatural ways. So for example, the samurai gets little belts around his arms just, because girl wanted him to wear them, or ninja has his hair dyed blue because girl wanted that too. And I didn’t really get the point of having the designs go through these slight changes that don’t actually add anything. Some of these changes also came in the form of weapon upgrades – the samurai and ninja find their old swords in a museum in like episode 4 or something and it’s hard to not wonder why the show just didn’t give them them at the start. It doesn’t feel like a cool upgrade or anything, it’s literally just “we decided to give them meaningless shit that they didn’t really need to not have in the first place”.
And that thing of like, hiding things from the plot until early on for no reason somehow extends to entire characters. In like episode 3 or something, they decide to have a monk time travel to join us in the fight too, and that was apparently supposed to happen anyway because of plot shit or whatever revealed at the end, so why didn’t he join them instantly? Is it because he’s not a bishie sexy anime boy so he doesn’t instantly get your juices loose like the other two, ergo we can’t introduce him? Is that also why he’s the first character who actually dies that mattered? No the fucking mum didn’t matter and don’t pretend she did.
And then characters mattering is technically a good excuse to talk about the overall writing, and god is it bad. It’s one of those shows where every single character is just impossibly stupid literally all the time, and they’ll constantly make dumb decisions that get them killed. I mean the mum died because for some reason everyone in the show doesn’t realise that they totally can just sleep in the RV they have, instead they’ll like all go outside to scour some dark factory to look for a place to rest, like what the fuck! You have a place to rest! Even if it’s not good enough why are you so insistent on bringing the noncombatants into every single fight? Like what’s the fucking point! Also the oh so subtley foreshadowed twist at the end is that the doctor was the villain all along, but his reasons for being the villain are so fucking insane. Turns out that he and this one special Gibia called Meteora are aliens, and when the group kill Meteora, he gets mad at them and tries to get revenge. Should be noted that in their 2 prior encounters with Meteora where they fought back against it, the doctor never said anything about it. He literally just lets them kill it and then gets mad at them. Okay. Everything from the grand overarching plot to the simple moment to moment is incompetent in a level one would hardly imagine possible, let alone when a lot of pretty prolific names are behind this thing.
And just one last thing, most of the episodes open with some camcorder interview scenes, which I can’t see as anything beyond a dumb gimmick to fill time since they’re not exactly hard to animate episode after episode. Really this entire show can be described in that same sort of way, dumb gimmicks to fill time, shortcuts to make it cheap and fast rather than being any level of good.
The only truly commendable element of the show is that there’s a really fat guy with a stutter, but there are no jokes at the expense of his weight or stutter, only at the expense of him only ever making curry. Subversive masterpiece.
Gibiate is truly an exercise in incompetence, a masterpiece of being bad. Pupa, Skelter Heaven, Mars of Destruction. Gibiate deserves a place among these shows. In the Hall of Fame for utterly atrocious anime. I don’t hate Gibiate at all, it was surprisingly not that boring, I never wanted to die watching it or speed it up or anything like that. But to give this show anything higher than a 1/10 would be lying to myself. Gibiate is arguably too long to even be worth watching if you’re into bad anime anyway, 12 full length episodes is a lot of time to commit to something as messy as Gibiate. But hey if you can stomach it, I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Anime of the Season – Deca-Dence
At last, we’re nearly done with this post. I’ve been writing this for a good few hours now, I’m not necessarily tired but I certainly want this to be over with, it’s 2am after all and getting to sleep would be nice. I do always end these with my favourite anime of the season of course, so at least we get to end on a high note, though I’m actually not confident in my ability to do this show justice. Obviously in part because I’ve been writing for so long at this point, but also because I feel like I need to rewatch this show first.
Now Deca-Dence isn’t one of those shows that like, requires a rewatch or something. It’s not constantly drip-feeding you info and wrapping you up in a mystery that only makes sense once you’ve got every piece of the puzzle. Quite the opposite in fact. Episode 1 is big on mystery, albeit not very directly, the setting establishes itself quite cleanly in fact, it’s just hard not to notice all the odd little details, like the purple people in the background and shit. And then the 2nd episode is basically just a big exposition scene that reveals everything about the world, including those purple people in the background and shit, woah! And then everything past that is just plot and character progression. I just feel I should rewatch the show because I wasn’t really into the first 2 episodes in a way that made me assume the whole show would sorta suck, but then I loved the rest of the show. That happens to me more often than you’d expect, and every time it does, I rewatch the show and love the parts I didn’t like. I think Deca-Dence deserves that treatment too, being able to love every part of this confidently would be a lot better than, uh, not that. It’s also a show that I think would probably flow better in a marathon setting rather than weekly, but I mean, what are you gonna do?
So yeah with that out of the way, let’s talk about what makes Deca-Dence good! In short, it’s a fairly standard “fight the system” narrative played pretty straight, but in a cool enough setting, with good enough characters, and with all around strong enough execution to make it work and stand out. The Deca-Dence mobile fortress is actually an entertainment facility for cyborgs, though its actual human population doesn’t know that. And if you get too close to finding out the truth, uh, yeah. Meanwhile for the cyborgs, they can actually log into human avatars ala SAO to hang out with the humans and moreover, go do cool monster fights in zero gravity. That’s pretty unique, and they give us both a human and a cyborg protagonist so we can get both perspectives, and so we can fight both systems. It’s just honestly super cool and consistently fun to watch, the most consistently fun thing to air this season in fact. I say that like it’s a surprising statement but this is my anime of the season so, not really a surprise.
And then those two protagonists are really great too. We’ve got Natsume, a cute shounen protagonist girl with a prosthetic. But it doesn’t actually take very long to see her shounen protag mentality be genuinely put to the test, seriously challenged in a way that does a lot to humanise her and make her stand out from the crowd. Ultimately she’s putting on a front, because she has to. How else does she live in a world like this? And Kaburagi is our cyborg rep, someone who’s far more knowledgeable and connected than Natsume, though has long accepted the system he’s in as being inescapable without dying, so he simply waits for death. And when the two characters meet, they’re able to inspire the other, to teach the other how to live. Again it’s not a new dynamic, but it’s a reminder that this dynamic is great, that two characters can be really important to one another and mentor the other in the act of living, and inspire the other to go above and beyond to do new things, to break their limits. And it’s also great to see them not take it in a romantic direction at all. Even without questionable age implications, I think romance would be a layer that detracts from their chemistry rather than adds to it. It’s good that a show managed to run a main male and female character without forcing them to be a couple.
Now as actual characters, the supporting cast hardly hold a candle to Natsume and Kaburagi. Nobody really has much in the way of meaningful growth or development, and the few characters who do get distinct arcs don’t get much screentime devoted to said arcs, they’re very simple and you’ll have seen them before. But those small arcs tend to hit pretty hard, Sark’s some little cyborg dude feeding people his own vomit or something and he gets a heroic sacrifice moment after a genuinely well done redemption arc for example. That’s, actually basically the only example. But yo as personalities? The supporting cast are fucking poggers as all hell. It does not take very long to get a grasp on who everyone is but they’re all so charismatic and feel very realised in their simplicities in a way that makes basically every character endearing, the likes of Donatello and Jill and Minato and Kurenai, you can sorta sum up who they all are in a sentence but they feel like big and impactful characters regardless, and like they earn their weight in the narrative as well. I guess it’s a fairly small cast so it’s not surprising that the important characters are so memorable, but just like, everyone’s always fun to watch for basically the entire show.
And lets take fun to watch and use that to transition into talking about the visuals I guess. Deca-Dence looks really damn amazing. The character designs are easily my favourite of the season, every human character has a really readable and aesthetically pleasing design, with a slightly simpler art style that really lets the characters move gorgeously in those intense zero gravity battles. Flying around ends up being a lot of fun, there’s no fight in the whole show that’s not just fun as hell to watch. Not really surprising given this is directed by the same guy who directed Mob Psycho 100, you’d expect this show to then be great at action scenes and smaller emotional stuff and comedy and yeah, it’s really good at all of those. That comedy aspect comes through more in the cyborg designs, which are reminiscent of like, if you go to the very bottom of the MAL seasonal charts with kids’ shows turned on, yeah all the weird shit you’ll see in there. They’re honestly super endearing and have lots of good visual jokes going on, just because the designs are such that they can really be played with. Also there are a couple of action scenes with them and they animate better than you’d expect, they’re so simple that complex fight animations seem like they’d be undoable but nah the show pulled it off really well. In general Deca-dence is just, say it with me now, fun to look at.
Probably the main thing I’d say against the show, other than the aforementioned episode 1 and 2 things that might be fixed on a rewatch anyway, and also a dumb scene in episode I think 6 where Natsume’s shounen nature is fake challenged for no reason, is the fact that the ending doesn’t actually change the system that much, which seemed to be the goal of the show. But then somebody brought it to my attention that the director wanted to keep the ending fairly open in that sense, basically just because they have more stories to tell in that world and a more definitive ending could kill the chance of having a sequel be greenlit. I’d be happy to see more this setting so I’ll take that explanation just fine.
Cool show, would recommend, probably will rewatch, 8/10.
Girl of the Season – Natsume
Remember everything good I was just saying about Natsume? Yeah well she’s also voiced by Tomori Kusonoki.
Boy of the Season – Natsuki Subaru
Subaru was good this time around, his growth from the first season has been genuinely felt since he’s like, not nearly as annoying now, and the arc he’s been set up for is really great too. Really hope it’s capitalised on well.
And that was that the Summer season. Not a brilliant one to be honest, most shows didn’t get positive scores from me and among those that did I was still only giving out a single 8 as my very highest score. But we got Re:Zero season 2 after so long and it was pretty fun, Alicization went out with a bang, Crunchyroll did a better job with a manhwa thing than last time, and we got a cheeky little surprise with Deca-Dence. I’m happy enough with that.
