the secret page
hazy recollections from the bottom of a bottle... dumping these here because there's no one i can rant about most of this to

school days

i decided to watch this on a whim because a gentlemen of taste and culture (a guy who writes literary fanfiction) is this show’s strongest warrior, never missing a chance to plug it as his favorite anime and declare it a hidden masterpiece, something i’m a huge sucker for (i should not be admitting this because now people are gonna try to get me to watch all sorts of garbage by saying it’s a hidden masterpiece). i wasn’t aware of this beforehand, but apparently that’s an exceptionally hot take because this anime used to have a notorious reputation for being not merely “bad”, but for being literally the worst anime ever. the show came out in 2007 so that reputation has long faded away, perhaps the time is ripe for a critical reappraisal... certainly there’s got to be something special about a show that provoked such an intense reaction.
for me watching this show felt like a kind of fever dream, probably in no small part because i literally had a fever while watching it and binged the whole thing in two nights while downing copious quantities of wine, having nothing better to do while ill (not that i don’t do similar things while healthy). while i’m not quite sure i can call it a masterpiece, it still haunts me on occasion, what i can say for sure is that there is absolutely no way this is even close to being the worst anime of all time, perhaps that claim was a little more plausible back when it came out because that was before the isekai boom.
the show starts off with the protagonist makoto pining after a girl from his school he sees on his morning commute in the same train carriage reading a book. his childhood friend and neighbor in class, a girl named sekai, helps him plot the seduction – and by this point you can probably guess what’s going to end up happening, because with this premise the same thing ALWAYS happens. yes, sekai is of course secretly in love with makoto, and a love triangle ensues... but what you don’t see coming is that that lasts all of a handful of episodes before things go completely off the rails and spiral out of control. in the end, makoto ends up fucking EVERY SINGLE female character save for two, and honestly for a while i was really concerned that they would go there with kotonoha’s middle school imouto too because every time she appeared she seemed infatuated with makoto. just when you think they’re running out of airtime for makoto to hit every girl, three of his classmates show up at once to his bachelor pad for an implied FOURSOME. even though it’s already infamous (“nice boat”), all i will say about the end is that makoto gets more than what’s coming to him.
one amusing observation is that as the show progresses and makoto gets laid more and more, there is correspondingly less and less fanservice. at the start the show seems to be firmly positioning itself as ecchi, the shot composition in early episodes can best be described as “leering”, e.g. the camera makes sure to capture the ZR of girls passing by in the foreground, and this is a good place to mention that the thigh highs in that school uniform are WILD, ZR readings absolutely off the charts, for guys at that school it must be almost unbearable being surrounded by that all day, zero blood flow to the brain (the paradox of thigh highs - the less that is shown, the more erotic it is). then in episode 4 there is a completely random bath scene with nipples out of nowhere, which seems to establish they aren’t afraid to show nipples and gets you excited for what’s coming, and then there are NO other nipples for the rest of that show, it’s literally only that single scene. then, late in the show, where there’s implied sex scenes all over the place, everything is remarkably sterile and desexualized, you rejoin the characters post-coitus zipping up pants and skirts in a refractory, workmanlike manner while chatting about logistics, as though they’re cleaning up after a porn shoot, baudrillardian “what are you doing after the orgy?” vibes.
the eternal question - who was in the wrong here? many seem to lay the blame squarely on makoto, saying he’s an “evil manipulative sociopath”. this was strange to hear because it didn’t seem to me like makoto did any sort of evil scheming, in fact he didn’t do much of anything, he was remarkably passive (well, besides making aggressive advances when alone with girls) and indecisive throughout the whole show while all the girls around him threw themselves at him, all you can blame him for is NEVER turning any of them down. it’s hard to see what the girls even saw in him, he had basically no interests or personality besides being a coomer, which is of course why he always said yes when girls propositioned him. there was plenty of manipulation and scheming going on in the show but it was all on the part of the girls, backstabbing each other to try and get a piece of makoto while he bumbles along following his dick completely unaware, unwilling to commit to any of them and end the gravy train.
the real mystery is what was making the girls going crazy over him, it seems plausible and yet totally inexplicable, it adds a strange element of horror to the show, - was it some kind of makoto mass hysteria event sweeping the school, some kind of “when it rains it pours” effect, some kind of mimetic desire gone wild, or perhaps makoto was just super handsome, incels could write a thousand manifestoes about this show (“even though makoto is a perverted jerk he gets all the girls anyway because he’s a CHAD!”). maybe it's all explained on a hidden layer i lack the capacity to perceive. the ending, at the very least, offers clarity – this is a cautionary tale, another sobering reminder that fucking a bunch of girls is NOT the answer, i can think of several other works with the same message. unfortunately, attempting to communicate this may ultimately be futile, the viewers of harem anime don’t want to hear it, which is why they reacted by branding this The Worst Anime Ever.
i saw somebody online make a good point that the prominently-featured flip phones are akin to soul gems... although the aesthetic is dated, if anything the show’s focus on phones and texting is more relevant now than ever... i could imagine somebody collapsing on the spot from shock if i suddenly threw their smartphone from an overpass into the bed of a passing truck.
UPDATE: i think it's safe to say the reputation of this show has been rehabilitated, look what they're coming out with soon:

yosuga no sora

this is known as THE incest show, and they aren’t even remotely subtle about it, the first episode ends with sora coming into her brother haru’s room and (dramatic lightning strikes in background) stripping down to her underwear saying “make me cum, i want to cum”. then they SLAM on the brakes at the start of the second episode, it turns out she meant “let me go, i want to go [to school]”(イカせて vs. 行かせて, fascinating that japanese also has a movement-based homophone for orgasm except reversed, in japanese to cum is to go), she was taking off her clothes to put on the school uniform. how could you have possibly thought at the end of the last episode that she meant “make me cum, i want to cum”, she’s his little sister, get your mind out of the gutter SICKO! anyways, then they leave her route (or in linear format, should i call it an “arc”?) for last, they know what viewers have “come” for, and haru spends the intervening episodes seething in the background while haru pursues/is pursued by the other heroines.
in a way, including sex scenes the way they did probably makes this one of the most faithful eroge adaptations ever made, down to the small structural details like how some of the sex scenes feel shoehorned in, or the way that the arcs MUST conclude with haru having sex with the girl. especially egregious is the nao arc, they must’ve been running short on runtime so to finish it off we get a scene under a minute long where they sneak out of the shrine matsuri to bang against a tree (“the obi stays ON during sex”) before the arc’s 終. the show is also fairly faithful to the branching structure of a vn, each successive route starts by jumping back to the branching point in the storyline and continuing from there. i think this threw some reviewers unaware this show is based on a vn for a loop, they call haru a whore for sleeping with all the girls and don’t seem to understand that the storyline branches into individual routes for each girl, there is no single storyline in which he sleeps with more than one of them (contrast school days).
since this is technically a romance show rather than the type of show i usually watch, i will deign to designate a best girl: akira, though i must confess to having a soft spot for sora, she’s needy but with the right amount of bratty mixed in that it doesn’t become annoying, also it’s probably because i’m weak to twintails. i do have to remark that i hate the way she looks in her school uniform, it looks off in a way that’s hard to describe, she should just stick with the frilly dresses. for the record, as a viewer i don’t think there’s anything wrong with like sora, it’s not like she’s MY sister. on a related note, it was hilarious of them to show haru hitting the books in the school library to find out that marriage between siblings is taboo, “i just gotta make sure bro”. why does their school library have a book about consanguineous marriage? does japan have an “incestuous hillbillies” stereotype too? speaking of which, WHAT are they putting in that rural tap water, the girls are all so well-endowed with the exception of sora, who i note is a recent transplant.
an odd thing about this show is that each episode came with a parody short after the ED (i must admit the OP/ED of this show approach my idea of what the vibes of an anime OP/ED should be), i’ve never seen this done before, but what was even odder was that the parody short had its OWN full-size ED with gratuitous fan service and music by momoiro clover Z. it’s interesting because while the parody ED appears starting with the first episode, many of the scenes it parodies don’t appear until much later in, so you end up going “ohhhhh so THAT’s what that was about” when they finally appear. for example, one of the most striking scenes in the parody ED is sora crawling beneath haru’s desk at school and aggressively lunging upward with her mouth open as if to take a bite of the camera lens, which is actually a parody of a scene that doesn’t appear until episode 11 where haru has a daydream in class of sora appearing under his desk to give him a blowjob.
UPDATE: unsurprisingly (it seemed right down his alley), bavitz has put out an excellent review of this show... he makes a great point that despite being the "main girl" and "true ending", haru is definitely the worst off with sora, he always seems miserable with her even in the cgs i've seen: also good to know i didn't misinterpret the ending (i was worried i might have because i was a bit drunk while watching), and of course he includes a gif of *that shot* from the second ED

sword art online

the damage this show has done to Anime is immeasurable... now we are doomed to One Million Years of isekai slop every season like “Even Given the Worthless "Appraiser" Class, I'm Actually the Strongest” or “The Daily Life of a Middle-Aged Online Shopper in Another World”, both REAL shows that aired last season, it’s not even worth coming up with fake parody titles because they’re already so shameless. if i could go back in time and prevent one show from being made it might be this one, though i worry that some even worse trend might rise to fill the gap...

revue starlight

i hope one of these days scientists are able to discover a new twist for this kind of show... until then, we wait

overlord

another highly acclaimed isekai series that ended up being trash, HUGE surprise. somehow they managed to take what seemed like a promising premise (what if the main character is a “villain”?) and take it in the most boring direction imaginable. it looks like there's a big recent trend of “villainesses” (ah yes, improve on it by making the main character a GIRL) but i think this was really the first show with that premise. in the usual isekai fashion, somebody came up with a modest innovation to the formula that became popular, and then dozens of copycats sprang up to beat the concept to death.
i guess my main gripe is that the main character is overly cautious while also being obscenely overpowered, so the show just goes between him autistically overanalyzing every situation and brief fight scenes where the enemies get one-shot. it makes every fight feel like a shaggy dog story, you watch 10 minutes of preparation just for the fight to end almost immediately, like isekai one punch man. i think this is the kind of trap you fall into when you try to make a premise like “guy gets trapped in a video game” too realistic. i seem to recall one fight scene that was preceded by 5 minutes of the main character swallowing various status-boosting potions and casting fortifying spells, like you'd do before fighting a boss in an mmo. so realistic! at that point you might as well just watch a streamer playing a video game. now yes, if people actually got trapped in a video game they probably would become very cautious so that they don’t suddenly die in a now dangerous and unfamiliar game world... most people also choose to play it safe in their real lives for similar reasons, however they usually don’t make tv shows about them.... i wonder why....

shakugan no shana

now here's one only the most decrepit boomers will remember, it was already kind of regarded as an "old gem" by the one who memed me into watching it, the friend whose recommendations i should've stopped listening to way sooner. if i had to describe it i'd say it's a lightnovelcore "urban fantasy" mixed with some magical girl elements, shana basically transforms into a "flaming" form to fight a series of magicians (mostly weirdo perverts for some reason) who come to pick a fight with her. oh, there was also this maid side character who shows up eventually who had this annoying verbal tic of attaching ~de-arimasu to the end of every line of dialogue that i probably wouldn't have noticed if the subs didn't insist on putting it in (untranslated) every single time, which always drew my attention. at one point i even conducted an inconclusive search to try and figure out what it meant, so then each appearence became a monument to my failure to determine its meaning. to this day any time i hear that expression it still jumps out to my ears like a shrill whistle.
somehow it got 3 seasons of 24 episodes each, the entire middle season consisting almost entirely of mind-numbing daily life filler, mostly this love triangle between main character yuji, shana, and normal school friend whatsherface. i ought to have dropped it at that point but at the time i was in this weird mindset where i'd grind through and dutifully finish every episode of a show, even if i wasn't really enjoying it. however, it's almost redeemed by the third season, i hate to give spoilers but nobody is gonna watch this anyway, what happens is that the milquetoast main character gets possessed or something and goes full joker mode, more-or-less becoming the villain. he instigates a war that leads to a bunch of epic high-budget battles, and it all culminates in a ballsy grand scheme to get everyone a happy ending. i'm not sure it's all worth the brutal slog through the first two seasons, though. oh yes, also, the first op/ed are legendary bangers, op is absolutely classic i've sound and the ed is by the same singer who did "a cruel angel's thesis".

shakunetsu no takkyuu musume

a classic "our group of quirky but loveable protagonists goes up against a crew of certifiably-insane psychos in battle to the death for the regional championship" high school sports show. also, all of the girls seem to be getting off on ping pong, i mean what is all that "i must get DOKI DOKI off of playing super hard against this player" business. then there's the great lengths the animators go to in order to depict just how SWEATY everyone is getting playing such intense ping pong. it could be a fetish thing (KINOma citrus always seems to choose one to focus on in their shows), but when i tried my hand at ping pong many years ago my yugoslav coach bato, in one of the rare moments when i understood him through his thick accent, made the dubious claim that table tennis is the best exercise. also: why did japanese schools let perverts design their athletic uniforms for so long? speaking of which, look at that poster up above, it draws the eyes in to the exposed midriff at the center, but then the navel is covered by a ping pong ball... whoever designed it was a true sicko.
one last thing i must mention: for absolutely no reason, the soundtrack goes UNBELIEVABLY hard. i listen to openings/endings pretty frequently, but this is pretty much the only show where i'll also go for the full OST.

madoka

probably the closest that anime has ever come to assembling “the dream team”: directed by akiyuki shinbou (best known as TV anime’s most avant-garde director) with animation production by his studio shaft, character design by ume aoki (best known as the author of genre-defining slice of life and long-running kirara staple hidamari sketch), and script by gen urobuchi (best known for writing a disgusting pornographic video-game in which the protagonist has intercourse with an eldritch entity that looks like a little girl).
one of the most perfectly paced shows i’ve ever watched – it gets through more than other shows would struggle to do in twice the length, there is not a single extraneous scene, and yet at no point does it feel rushed, an incredible sleight of hand. it still amazes how much they got through in a mere 12 24-min episodes. i would be willing to call it anime’s supreme masterpiece.

mirai nikki

ah yes, god is dying so to choose his successor he bestows the ability to see the future using their phones to 11 bloodthirsty psychopaths and reserved, mild-mannered middle schooler amano yukiteru, then has them fight it out in a kind of battle royale/hunger games type thing. a classic premise, i really want to call it nietzschean but i don't know enough nietzsche to be sure.
overall the plot is an absolute mess, strongly reeks of "making it up as i go along", papered over with gratuitous gore and most character's motivations being inexplicable because they are simply insane. however, i must give it credit for being bad in a grand, ambitious way, with constant zany plot twists incorporating every sort of edge imaginable. it really feels like you've been on quite a ride by the end of it, i'm starting to think that back in the day even the bad shows were better. it's not the sort of thing you see very much anymore, a lot of bad shows these days give the impression that nobody cares and even the staff have given up. i actually find myself slightly missing all these edgy gorefests now that every other show is a stupid wish-fulfillment isekai based on a light novel crapped out by some salaryman on his phone while on toilet breaks at his soul-crushing job.
i don't know if this was the first show to do the "yandere" thing but it was certainly one of the most prominent, and probably ruined hundreds of relationships. i also never want to hear anyone say "yuki" again, especially in a plaintive voice. the second opening is sung entirely in the most gratuitous engrish i've ever heard in a show, it even contains spoilers but i doubt any japanese or english speakers ever catch them without subtitles.

oreimo

i always wrote this off as "that oddly popular incest show", one of those shows everyone seems to have seen but nobody ever recommends, maybe people were keeping quiet about it because of the subject matter. then, when we were doing karaoke in japan i noticed that my friend shibs was singing the first op a lot, and from him i learned that there's more to the show than that, it turns out it's also pretty heavily focused on "otaku culture", lots of scenes in akiba or comiket and the like, and because of that it's become something of an "otaku classic". that piqued my interest (i've also always been intrigued by kuroneko, the character wearing goth lolita) and i ended up picking up the show since one of my personal projects lately has been to fill in the gaps in my "essential otaku classics" watchlist... but oh man, i really should have just watched lucky star or k-on or something...
the first four episodes or so seemed pretty promising, the very first shot is of the chiba suspended monorail (Hell Yeah), at times i was thinking "wow, what a premise, i can see how this got popular, it could even end up being slopkino". basically, your average generic male high school protagonist kyousuke accidentally discovers that his hot (she works on the side as a model) and popular middle schooler little sister kirino is secretly a huge otaku with a particular interest in eroge (this show runs on pure clean-burning gap moe), specifically ones where the heroines are little sisters. after years of being distant the siblings are brought back together by this terrible secret, hijinks ensue as they conspire to hide her power level from her normie friends and their dad, who is of course like the most intimidating conservative japanese dad ever. to be fair, guy's got a point, she's in middle school playing 18+ games, i'm actually shocked that they're allowed to depict that on japanese tv while showing underage drinking in anime remains remarkably taboo despite japan's drinking culture (there was an interview where director akiyuki shinbou mentioned that one of his favorite chapters of hidamari sketch is unadaptable because it's the one where yuno gets drunk).
but the main thrust is that kirino is also desperate for somebody to share her otaku interests with, so she forces kyousuke to play some of her favorite eroge (imagine that, a girl forcing a guy to play a porn game), and kyousuke also helps her find some otaku friends online to meet up with. the otaku friend group is where kyousuke's other main love interest is introduced, the chuuni goth loli character kuroneko, and together they all have fun introducing kirino to all the typical otaku stuff like shopping in akihabara, cosplay, comiket, etc. there's a lot of soul put into it, for example they get actual doujin circles to illustrate doujin covers based on the in-universe magical girl show kirino is obsessed with. they also get some OG illustrators for the ending and the real sickos can see how many they can guess based on the art style alone, as a pro art critic i got aoki ume, NA-GA, huke, and then was also correct when i guessed that one of them was by whoever was the lead artist for "nanatsuiro drops".
the otaku friend group all go to comiket after just four episodes, and then that's where the cracks begin to show. the huge problem with this show is that kirino fucking sucks, and since she's the "main girl" she's basically always being shoved down your throat. she is, and i do NOT use this word lightly, a giant cunt: selfish, narcissistic, haughty, arrogant, moody, uncharitable, quick-tempered, the list goes on and on. even with her otaku "friend" kuroneko she seems to spend most of her time just verbally sparring. she's one of those vintage tsunderes that's all tsun and no dere, she spends basically the whole show abusing kyousuke, who gets nothing except for the occasional reluctant mumbled "arigato" after he goes to bat or falls on his sword for her YET AGAIN. it happens over and over throughout the first season, kyousuke goes out of his way to bail her out or do something nice for her, somehow gets absolutely nothing in return besides being yelled at and called "kimoi" for the thousandth time, then leaps at the next opportunity to do something for kirino. the thing is, it's not like the man doesn't have other options, in a couple of the episodes we're introduced to some of the other girls in his orbit and by comparison they make kirino seem like even more of a selfish asshole, one of them is his soft-spoken meganekko childhood friend who's like the kindest and gentlest girl ever, and in the kuroneko backstory episode we find out she's a caring big sister from humble origins who's willing to compromise and put on the magical girl show she hates if it's what her two little sisters want to watch. basically kirino's only redeemable quality is that she's hot... but i dunno, maybe that's enough for most guys to put up with her shit, i remember during my trip to miami with the Fellas we had a discussion one night about if you would prioritize looks or personality in a wife and everyone except me was strongly in favor of looks over everything... this is probably how so many dudes end up in marriages with women they can't stand after five years, in the same way that i couldn't stand kirino after five episodes of her showing absolutely no signs of softening up (character development, you might call it) whatsoever.
to some extent, though, you almost can't blame kirino for having such an attitude because the whole damn world in the show seems to revolve around her, the Hand of God is clearly pulling strings for her too. on top of being a model and kyousuke intervening to solve all her problems for her, she's effortlessly successful at anything she puts her hand to, the most egregious example being a short arc late in the first season where she decides to write a dogshit indulgent light novel. it's a huge hit, instantly picked up for publication, then suddenly in the next episode they're already picking it up for an anime adaptation, it came out of nowhere so hard that i thought it was some kind of extended dream or fantasy sequence, but no, kirino really did casually toss off a light novel that managed to get an anime (then again, this was the era of "keitai shosetsu"... also, the certainly-awful light novel this show was based off did the same...) of course, she goes in and makes a bunch of outrageous demands from the production staff, then kyousuke has to go in and secretly bail her out. at the end of the first season, it's also kinda suddenly revealed that kirino is a track star too... she makes kyousuke go buy her the midnight release of some eroge in akiba, then it's so late that the trains aren't running so he has to BIKE all the way back so she can play it ASAP... and after all that, the next morning she VANISHES without a word, turns out she was scouted by some american track coach and went off to a training camp in america without telling kyousuke at all. what the fuck? then, in the 4-episode ONA "true route" there's a couple episodes without kirino that feel like such a breath of fresh air, it's just kyousuke with kuroneko and they're getting along so well... until she's about to confess to him and out of nowhere he decides he needs to jet off to beg kirino to come back. i swear, it's like he's in one of those abusive relationships where the victim keeps going back to the abuser... this show is only for serious masochists or guys with a domination fetish, the same ones into that whole "getting bullied by a hot girl" microgenre of "romance" manga that's appeared lately.
probably one of the funniest things i realized after finishing the first season is that despite being a purported "incest" show, oreimo completely fails to deliver on that too. kyousuke and kirino just have such negligible chemistry and never DO anything close to risqué or romantic that you could believably watch the whole first season and NEVER realize it's supposed to be an incest show, they mostly seem like normal siblings who fight a lot (mostly kirino's fault though). it's a far cry from yosuga no sora, where at the end of the first episode sora comes into her brother's bedroom one dark and stormy night, strips down to her underwear, and says "make me come"...
now, the second season is where the show crashes and burns, i forced myself to keep watching but at times i found myself fantasizing about having toothpicks shoved under my fingernails in a PoW camp instead, the only thing that kept me going was occasional establishing shots of the suspended monorail. the first episode shows us that despite everything that's happened so far, kirino's as hostile as ever to kyousuke, it's like they hit the "sitcom reset button" and the first season never happened. for most of the second season the focus is off kirino, though she does show up for some nonsense like pretending to date some effeminate guy in order to make kyousuke jealous i guess, which leads to her dad getting drunk in his room alone to cope with it. oh and then there's a somewhat refreshing episode when kirino's track rival from america comes for a visit and mogs kirino at every opportunity by being faster at running and way more easygoing, it's like the only time in the show someone's able to get one over perfect kirino and it's great to see her taken down a notch. the only problem is that throughout that episode they drive this tedious "rival comes on to kyousuke or otherwise puts them into a compromising position, kirino sees it, freaks out and calls him a hentai lolicon" bit into the ground, i swear that exact routine happens like eight times in a single episode, it's almost impressive.
anyways, a lot of screen time in season 2 is spent "developing" the side girls, by which i mean having them fall in love with kyousuke and turning this into a harem show. it is of course de rigueur for the genre that kyousuke does little to merit all that female attention, he has no discernable hobbies or interests (besides an unflappable devotion to kirino, guy had nothing going for him before that fateful day he found his sister's dropped eroge), your typical irresistibly bland harem protagonist who wins the undying loyalty of girls by being nice to them once. over the course of all that some more nonsense ensues, like a short arc where kyousuke actually dates kuroneko that somehow concludes with the EXACT SAME SUDDEN UNANNOUNCED MOVE thing kirino did at the end of the first season, now there's some good honest hack work on the part of the original light novel author. oh, and who could forget that weird little interlude where kyousuke gets kicked out of the house and lives alone briefly so he can focus on studying for exams (and also because he's getting too close to kirino??) and also entertain every member of his growing harem in peace. by this point the only girls in the show not obviously into him are kirino and saori, the swirly-glasses otaku girl who organized the original offline meetup. saori has a very clearly defined role in the show as the "facilitator", despite supposedly being this big otaku she's never really shown proactively participating in otaku activities the same way others are, she's just kind of always around, on hand to act as a mediator or go-between whenever the other characters start fighting over something again. in her backstory it seems to be implied that creating a circle of "otaku" in this way is the only way she knows how to make friends, having been a rich shut-in before being introduced to her big sister's otaku circle...
but, the thing is that this is after all still the incest show, so all those other girls are just being set up to be torn down. it's a foregone conclusion that kyousuke will still go for kirino no matter what, which gives the last part of the show this underlying sense of resignation, of doom, you can't do anything but watch as kyousuke mercilessly works his way through this gauntlet of wonderful girls confessing to him by inexplicably rejecting them so he can go crawling back to kirino's abuse, it's like watching a car crash in slow motion. probably the worst part is that even if you completely disregard the incest angle, kirino still easily seems like the worst match, i would STILL be mad if kyousuke got with kirino even if they weren't siblings at all. to justify it all there's a backstory dump out of nowhere at the end showing how kirino was secretly into kyousuke this entire time... once again perfect kirino effortlessly gets everything she wants. the final victim of kyousuke's rejection is the gentle soft-spoken meganekko childhood friend, kirino's there too and gloats so hard about winning (like genuine "IN YOUR FACE! HA!" 12-year-old boy behavior) that the childhood friend LOSES IT and socks her in the stomach, before delivering them a brutal reality check that shows kyousuke hasn't thought through this getting-with-his-actual-sister thing at all, he's just like "lol yeah idk whatever". the final scene is kirino and kyousuke renting out a church for a staged wedding... the way you could almost fix this show is by having all the rejected girls storm the church and collectively stab them to death.
oh but wait, that WASN'T the final scene, it was a fake-out all along, the author is too much of a wimp for an actual incest ending, instead it turns out kirino and kyousuke had a secret pact that they'd pretend to be a couple until graduation and then go back to being "normal siblings". the show ACTUALLY ends with the miserable old status quo restored, kyousuke doing a "yare yare" face as he's once again relegated to being the bag mule while kirino gleefully ignores him on another akihabara shopping spree... so i guess kyousuke just torpedoed every relationship he had with a girl so he could eternally simp for kirino. it all basically amounts to nothing, what an enormous waste of time, irredeemable slop. i actually haven't been this mad over a show in a long time... i may have to quit watching anime for a while after this.

shoujo shuumatsu ryokou

there have been complaints i’m too critical and never seem to talk about anything i like here... fine, have this. LITERALLY the only flaw is that they didn’t adapt the whole manga, then again i’m not sure people could’ve handled it, the kettenkrad breakdown would be an instant Top 10 Saddest Anime Death Scenes. OVERFLOWING with SOUL. name EVEN ONE other time where the mangaka did the entire ending animation THEMSELVES, and so well that it puts pro animators TO SHAME. if we invent cloning technology it should immediately be used to clone a studio’s worth of tsukumizus so we can get entire shows like that.

serial experiments lain

haven't seen it, but it seems to be legally required to have watched it if you're on neocities (along with playing some game called "yume nikki"), so my account will be terminated shortly

city hunter 2

i watched a couple episodes of this because one of my favorite songs is in the op for this, angel night ～天使のいる場所～. it's extremely stylish, you could run a whole "retro anime aesthetics" social media account based off this show alone. however, it quickly got tiresome (if not grating) because literally 80% of the runtime of each episode was just gags about how horny/perverted the main character is, like he'd go AWOOGA over seeing some booba and then his female sidekick would bonk him on the head with a 10t sledgehammer (seriously). to fill up the full runtime of an episode, rinse and repeat with minor variations (e.g. increase the sledgehammer weight by a factor of 10) another dozen times. don't get me wrong, i enjoy the occasional classic nosebleed gag, but you can't replace the whole plot with that kind of shit.

kodomo no omocha

i've only seen a couple episodes so far but it's absolutely cooking, looks like i'm going down the babbit hole... frenetic pacing, a good watch if your attention span is fried, random little musical numbers and a guaranteed cliffhanger every episode. sana’s motormouth is the final boss of understanding spoken japanese

look back

plebs watched this because it's an adaptation of a work by the chainsaw man mangaka. patricians watched this because it's the feature-length directorial debut of the guy who directed "flip flappers"

summer pockets reflection blue

might as well throw this in... contains LETHAL levels of nostalgia for that teenage summer vacation you spent staying with relatives on a remote island in seto inland sea, that is to say something you've never actually experienced... my sources tell me that feeling called "anemoia", though i wonder if it's one of those terms no one actually uses like "sonder" ( well, i just looked it up and turns out both were coined in 2012 by the same guy who compiled a whole book of them). another reminder that there is nothing more wabi-sabi than the brief but beautiful span of summer vacation. going into my "impeccable island vibes" list, along with, uhh... Myst and... Riven: The Sequel to Myst? a highlight is the surprisingly fleshed-out ping-pong minigame side story, it shouldn't have been that difficult but i was playing on a laptop trackpad, i still don't know how i managed to complete it.

bocchi (the rant)

not even close to the best show in its genre (cgdct) but somehow this one managed to break out of the usual audience for these types of shows and into some of the “normie weeb” audience, gaining a permanent foothold in the minds of certain specimens of obnoxious internet memers and discord addicts. my personal theory is that this happened because it had a lot of easily-memeable scenes, specifically bocchi’s brief breakdowns which deployed a lot of creative animation. they were extremely easy to cut into shareable gifs and spread far and wide, just like family guy clips. also, to those same discord addicts, bocchi’s comedic struggles with social anxiety were “relatable”, in a “post-ironic memes about depression” kind of way. me when i accidentally say "you too" to the alaska airlines gate agent scanning my ticket when she says "have a nice flight": gif of bocchi having a seizure and dying
even though i have a whole blog post titled after it, i don’t care for it all that much, i skipped out on the nendoroids even though the sculpts were good, i didn’t buy the manga because i didn't like the art style (though i do like the anime art style) even though they pushed it HARD at kinokuniya for the longest time (the show was a surprise hit abroad so there wasn’t an english translation for a while but that didn't stop them from putting the japanese versions front and center, i guess they were hoping fans who didn’t even know japanese would pick it up as “merch”), and just the other day i deleted the show to make space on my hard drive for a cracked copy of pump it up prime 2. i guess it didn’t hit as hard for me because i’ve never fantasized about being in a band or having friends, but hypothetically if i were in a band, i know i would do lead vocals, with a stage presence so strong they’d call me something like “the demon”, just like shin hae-chul (except without the whole dying young due to medical malpractice thing, hopefully).
bocchi’s affliction obviously invites comparisons with anime's GOAT socially-awkward girl, tomoko kuroki. ultimately, i think tomoko is the more compelling character, bocchi doesn’t really have any personality besides being hideously shy, otherwise she’s just generically nice and canonically has huge honkers hidden under that trackuit (what an inspired addition). tomoko, on the other hand, has enough personality that maybe 90% of her show is just her internal monologue, seething with bitterness and rage beneath her pitifully shy and awkward exterior, filled with incel rhetoric years before that term even came into common usage. you wonder: did being an outcast make her bitter, or is she an outcast because of her distasteful personality? there's the disturbing nagging feeling that perhaps tomoko just might deserve to be alone...

code geass

one question that fascinated umberto eco was why the count of monte cristo is so good, in spite of being objectively poorly-written and laden with tropes and clichés. eco's theory is that such works manage to rise above and become transcendant specifically because they contain all the clichés, deployed to perfection. based on that line of thought, in my opinion code geass is the monte cristo of anime. it has everything: a revenge plot, secret identities, supernatural powers, mysterious girls, fan service, hammy villains, multiple romantic interests, ludicrous KEIKAKUS, criticism of the media, mechas, outrageous twists, and in between all of that they somehow STILL find time for the kind of high school hijinks that anime viewers know and love. it has plenty of flaws of course, like absurd asspulls and contrived plot points, but according to eco obvious flaws also appear to be a necessary element of "cult" works. anyways, i will defend this show until the end of time.

girls und panzer

what a simultaneously brilliant yet moronic concept, this is exactly the sort of thing fiction was invented for. only the japanese could have come up with something like this. fundamentally it's a sports show, but centered around a completely made-up sport that could not possibly work in real life for dozens of reasons, though one that dudes would be guaranteed to go nuts for if it were. this is wish fulfillment done right. the icing on top, in-universe somehow it’s all cute girls who are into it, which honestly makes it more of a fantasy than 99% of isekai. the producers could have rested on their laurels and done quite well for themselves based off the premise alone, but no, they didn’t stop there, they went for it on the story and made each tank battle a thrilling affair with plenty of twists and turns with creative (although dubiously realistic) tactics. exquisite.

flcl

this is one of those shows anime fans a generation or two older than me always speak about reverently, saying shit like “NOTHING hits harder than watching FLCL when you’re 15, it CHANGED my life”... meanwhile i watched it at pretty much that exact age and all i can say is... ehhhh? i mean i won’t deny it was extremely stylish, there's nothing cooler than japanese alt rock and all, but i dunno, people who really connected with this show seemed to have experienced some kind of traumatizing puberty/adolescence i simply didn’t... maybe it’s because back then they were partying hard or chasing girls or taking on part-time jobs or something, meanwhile i was just... playing minecraft the whole time and shrugging off any "teen angst" or “hormones” or whatever. honestly i'm even wondering if the “difficult puberty” is just a cultural meme people only experience because they think they’re supposed to, i mean the concept of “adolescence” wasn’t even invented until like 1906... anyways, this seems to be one of those shows like "cowboy bebop" (which i was also lukewarm about and never finished) that was way more popular overseas than in japan, because why else would [adult swim] have produced a sequel series like twenty years later... must’ve been mid because i’ve heard absolutely nothing about it. has there been even one instance where the "decades-later sequel" thing ended up actually working out?

bang dream it's mygo!!!!!

i watched this because it was one of the very few anime options available on the inflight entertainment on my japan airlines business class flight, and boy did it end up being the right choice. i put it on mostly because the five (!!!!!) exclamation points in the title seemed intriguing, also i dimly recalled somebody having recommened it to me before, though turns out i had it confused with its sequel ave mujica. for whatever reason it had chiense subtitles i could not figure out how to turn off, if it was even possible. i was hooked from the opening scene, where a soaking vaguely jirai-looking girl comes in to band practice at a studio and dramatically announces she is quitting the band immediately for Reasons. the genki girl tries to convince her to stay by talking about how fun the band was, to support her argument she turns to the quiet bassist (?) for a concurring opinion, however she immediately deadpans "i have never had fun being in this band actually"
after that incredible cold open, we switch perspectives to that of an enthusiastic transfer student ready to make her mark at her new school. maybe i misheard this but i SWEAR her name was literally "anon". anon-chan wants to start a band, but somehow everyone at school is already in a band. luckily, she manages to find the one girl in the whole school not in a band, this girl who see stumbles upon playing with rocks and who maintains an absurdly-specific collection of penguin-themed bandaids. possibly it was due to being so autistic that she was not already in a band. as part of her recruitment effort anon-chan drags autistic girl to karaoke, where she has a meltdown and runs out due to some unspeakable band-related trauma that was inadvertantly brought up. anon-chan makes chase but is stopped by a gruff girl who's like "hey! leaver her ALONE!", anon-chan tries to justify herself by saying she's just a friend trying to recruit for her bandm, and gruff girl is taken aback, yelling " you tried to recruit HER to a BAND?!?!? you fucking SICKO!!!", roll credits. evidently there is some backstory there...
i don't remember much from the second episode except that anon-chans recruitment efforts continue in a cozy cafe where gruff girl happens to work (giving her the cold shoulder service-wise), then quiet girl from earlier comes in (and has somehow developed heterochromia), busts out a guitar, absolutely SHREDS for a minute or two inside the peaceful cafe, refuses to elaborate, then leaves.
but all of this PALES in comparison to the third episode, which was entirely the FIRST PERSON POV of autistic girl's life. she starts out playing with rocks and bugs as a young child, causing concern for her mother who's on the phone saying "that girl just ain't right". though autistic girl doesn't have much trouble making friends, she feels like she's never really able to connect with anyone on a deeper leve because nobody shares her absurdly-specific hyperfixations, like penguin-themed bandaids. standing on a bridge above a rail lain, she cries out to the wind "I JUST WANT TO BE NORMAL!!!" while reaching out to a floating flower. suddenly, she is yanked away by a girl who thinks she's about to jump off. somehow they both end up going to autistic girl's house, where it seems like the other girl might be the kindred spirit autistic girl has been yearning for all along. the other girl stumbles upon a hoard of old notebooks written by autistic girl, containing her angsty ramblings about not being like the other girls, and somehow mistakes them for genius song lyrics. one thing leads to another and the girl ends up putting together a band, using autistic girl's embarrassing diaries for song lyrics, reading them aloud in front of a bunch of band recruits. everyone says the lyrics are brilliant, but autistic girl just goes "... lyrics? what lyrics?". then, on top of all that, autistic girl is made lead vocalist despite having no experience or desire whatsoever...

ninkoro

even though i was already watching more shows during this season than i've watched in years, i decided to pick this up after one of my friends wouldn't stop raving about it, even though it didn't look at all like the type of show he watches, it looked like the kind of show I watch. also, i found out it was animated by shaft, and you can rarely go wrong with them. i could see pretty quickly how this show managed to unexpectedly appeal across demographics to somebody like my friend, it's quite genre-defiant, the best i can do is to describe it as a dark (almost sociopathic) comedy slice of life. after only 2 episodes i wrote down "the turning-things-to-leaves power is subtly terrifying", and BOY did the rest of the show prove me right about that. it has elements from a number of other genres too, e.g. the way there's an attack by one of the pursuing ninja assassins in almost every episode is reminiscent battle shounens or episodic shows, but of course they're all dispatched immediately without a fight by konoha's blade. then, right when you think you've got the show somewhat figured out after a couple episodes, the mad scientist character gets introduced and suddenly half the show is sci-fi hijinks (which also seem to be the only catalyst for any character development). the show doesn't take itself too seriously, all throughout there's a lot of "random shitpost" energy and they don't care if you get whiplash while along for the ride, it's absolutely all over the place, between gags there's random social commentary about gacha game addiction or social media, and the almost-poignant robot doppleganger episode is immediately followed up by an episode based entirely around satako enlarging her breasts to a comically impractical size. also, why was the "final villain" literally just the chick from FLCL?
overall i'd say the show was a good time, as expected of shaft the animation is excellent (the coloring especially is resplendent) and just avant-garde enough to be interesting but not distracting (it's also fun to spot the subtle little shaft-isms they put in like the head turn), and rarely for anime, the jokes were actually funny and original.

zatsu tabi

watching this because tkmiz endorsed it with a support illustration... WOW, they have made an anime about exactly the kind of travel bullshit i’m on about – spontaneity, dubious destinations, trains, excessive walking and other unnecessary self-imposed physical challenges, fun facts from wikipedia or random info signs, endorsements of random local businesses, stuff randomly being closed on the day you’re there and not knowing until you show up, same-day hotel bookings, obsessing over costs, trying to escape failure/ennui, posting about it Online (albeit i do so at far greater length and delay)... all it needs is about 50% more frugality and walking, and alcohol. if any production committee is interested in optioning my various travelogues for an adaptation, my contact info is available at bottom left on the home page...
of course now that it’s the end of the cheapest era of travel to japan that we’ll ever see in our lifetimes (thanks to the weak yen/strong dollar, plus i heard there’s actually INFLATION in japan for the first time in like 30 years), my friends are discussing doing a trip there this summer... i guess i should’ve just gone solo last year, when the exchange rate was 160 yen per dollar, but i’d feel too guilty leaving my one friend who’s been hyping it up since forever behind, plus it felt like everyone was going to japan last year and i’m averse to doing things that are too popular. however, maybe i should have just left them behind anyway, i’m not sure our visions of a trip to japan align anymore, they seem to want a repeat of the usual... everything carefully planned, long-term stays in the big cities like tokyo or osaka... i used to be all about that, last time i spent weeks researching and meticulously planning a two-week railpass trip across the whole country that went off without a hitch (you can always rely on japanese trains to stick to the timetable), but since then i’ve gradually shifted towards a more “zatsu tabi” travel style (look up what “zatsu” means if you don’t already know), going off to random places on a whim and seeing what i find, arranging accommodations the night of, and so on. the japan trip i’m imagining now involves purchasing a light motorcycle immediately upon landing and then touring the country visiting obscure rural tourist traps, mountain dams, and run-down resort town haikyo.

watamote

this might be the only cringe comedy anime that's ever been made, and somehow they nailed it. i cannot deny there are a lot of very funny scenes in the show, it's just that in the back of my head there's this lingering feeling that maybe i shouldn't be laughing at this because the whole premise is just making fun of somebody who's supremely socially awkward? like, isn't that kind of punching down in a big way? if i recall correctly gwern complained that the show seemed a little too mean-spirited, especially because there's absolutely no character development or redemption for tomoko, she ends the series in pretty much the exact place she started. at the same time, though, it's not as if tomoko is entirely innocent, as i mentioned in bocchi the rant she might to some extent even deserve it, e.g. her interactions with tomoki, the incident playing card games with the kids, and of course her constant judgmental inner monologue, disparaging her classmates as sluts and whores while at the same time arguably there's nobody more obsessed with sex than tomoko, spending her free time gooning. although it's not all that subtle, i do worry sometimes that the irony in this show may fly over the heads of some who find tomoko "relatable"...
one thing tha also occurred to me is that this show would be way too depressing if the main character wasn't a girl. there's absolutely no hope for tomoko, i mean you know she's beyond help when she played pop'n music like somebody who's actually good at the game (unlike that guy in lost in translation), and it's not like welcome to the nhk where satou has yamazaki right next door for shenanigans and of course misaki (purists would even call satou a fakecel because he did stuff with the girl from the club). but tomoko is still better off than a guy in an equivalent situation, to some extent social awkwardness/shyness can even be attractive in a girl, it's cute/moe, and there's lots of men attracted to stinky/poorly-groomed girls. men are just so horny that girls have to be truly in the bottom 1% of the 1% to be considered as unfuckable as an incel, thus "femcel" requires a definition that is not based solely upon ability to procure sex, i've seen multiple "femcel" substacks where they seem to have quite a lot of sex. instead, the femcel experience is more about being able to attract sexual attention only from total scumbags, which either leads to a succession of unsatisfying and pathetic sexual experiences with "hit it and quit it" middle-aged dating app predators, or a voluntary withdrawal from dating/sex altogether (what incels would call "volcel", as sex is still an option). there is a kind of beautiful asymmetry in the male/female experience, both cursed in equal and opposite ways, perhaps proof that we live in a fallen world. but is it the difference that gives it value in the first place, would it be truly satisfying if both men and women had perfectly matching sex drives and desires?
also, i should mention this because i don't think i've ever seen anybody else talk about this, but this show has really good production value/directing, there are a lot of shots with very creative cinematography, like they were channeling SHAFT or something. gives off major "passion project" energy in places too.

re:zero

this show marked the last time i'll ever take a recommendation from degenerate isekai addicts, they all said this was the absolute pinnacle of the genre to the point where even i got memed into giving isekai one last chance and watching it. the great rem vs. emilia debate was the waifu war of a generation, even though i'm pretty sure like 80% of people sided with rem (somehow). anyways, standards in isekai appear to be so abysmally low that any time a show does anything even mildly creative or subversive, isekai watchers immediately hail it as some kind of masterpiece; re:zero's innovation was that instead of having your usual overpowered wish-fulfillment protagonist, they had one that was particularly annoying and useless, also his gimmick involved a lot of gore which always gets people excited (see: elfen lied). other than that, the show falls into all the common isekai pitfalls like shallow, generic worldbuilding and so on.

code lyoko

if we want to get technical this was the first anime i ever saw, though it's actually franime. many don't know this but the french are some of the biggest weebs, maybe it's some kind of mutual affinity between snobbish cultures because the japanese are such big ouiaboos that they get "paris syndrome" when they finally visit and it doesn't live up to their expectations. anyways, i only watched it once, on a hawaiian airlines flight back in the day when they used to let you rent these personal media player devices that went on your tray table. they only had like three episodes and knowing how inflight entertainment goes it probably was a couple random ones from the middle, but i got obsessed with them and watched them on repeat during most of the flight. on the drive back home i was even inspired to write down a bunch of notes to try and remember what i saw, it grabbed ahold of me like nothing else i'd seen before. it was so powerful even in diluted form, instinctively i understood the danger of what i'd discovered and kept clear and pure for years. but as is obvious from this page, eventually i let my guard down and it lured me in, and i fell into sin. despite that, i still think they should have showed this in french class instead of "téléfrançais", this québécois kids show set in a junkyard with a creepy talking pineapple that became one of those surreal childhood memories you think may have just been a fever dream but then you look it up and it's 100% real.

yuri seijin naoko-san

now THIS is denpa

death note

i feel like this is another premise that would never fly in western tv. “you write their name in a notebook and it kills people? rubbish, it’s too simple, it’s too stupid, it sounds like a gimmick from a goosebumps book, we can’t do this, people would think we are insulting their taste and intelligence”. i applaud the japanese for making it work, i always enjoy a good battle of ruses. generally they were quite good although there was definitely a couple times that they wrote themselves into a corner and had to come up with something contrived. this, i think, is the kind of battle-of-minds i wanted from the a24 netflix series "beef". i complained about it in an old blog post (and so did sam kriss in a substack), but instead they decided to squander such a promising premise and went all in on a bunch of therapybrained pop psych drivel. regrettable.
incidentally i think this is a great example of a microgenre i've theorized about, the "rules drama", where most of the plot is driven by exploring the full consequences of a set of rules. the death note comes with a strict set of rules which are emphasized throughout the show, and a good number of light's schemes creatively exploit them.

haruhi

by all rights, this show should have been completely unremarkable. i’m pretty sure it got made because the light novel was enormously popular but i can’t imagine why, somehow it takes the premise of “hanging out with a bunch of characters with supernatural/sci-fi abilities” and makes it quotidian. maybe that's the whole point, it's all a big joke on the viewer, you sit glued to the screen closely watching that powder keg of a premise for any hint that it's about to explode, and then the show ends and nothing ever really happened, the show's climax ends up being that scene where kyon ALMOST lays a richly-deserved hand on haruhi when she goes completely off On Her Shit, but of course he doesn't actually do it. or, maybe people really liked the snarky main character who is “so over this shit”, a novel and innovative character archetype back when this show aired in 1976 (fact check: not even remotely close to when this show aired). as they say, “god knows”.
the anime, however, is spared from mediocrity by kyoto animation's signature superb animation, and also for the astounding and absolutely perplexing decision to air the episodes out of order. what could they have possibly meant by that? was it some kind of grand artistic statement, or perhaps an elaborate tactic to hide the fact that the plot is rather lacking? either way, years down the line the "haruhi watch order" question inspired an anon to prove a new combinatorics theorem.
then they went ahead and TOPPED that in the second season with one of the bravest and most insane students in the history of television, the "endless eight" arc. here's the situation: it's been three years since you produced the smash-hit first season, on track to becoming one of the most popular anime of all time. people are obsessed with it, spontaneously breaking out into the hare hare yukai dance in the streets and the school cafeteria. there is plenty of material remaining to adapt, so of course you're doing season two. the hype for it is unreal, fans are frothing at the mouth and everyone on the production committee is throwing money at you to get this shit made because it's a guaranteed winner. your budget is stratospheric, your resources effectively unlimited. you HAVE to deliver. so what do you do? after one "normal" episode, you remain absolutely faithful to the source material and proceed to adapt the time loop arc "endless eight", by producing and airing eight consecutive episodes that are almost entirely the same. when i first encountered it, i thought for sure i had accidentally selected the same episode again, so i skipped ahead one and it was the same thing again. 「きょん君、電話？」
was it merely a cunning scheme to save money by reusing animation? well no, because episode contained brand new animation of the exact same scenes. i'm talking new shots, new camera angles, characters wearing slightly different outfits. each episode was entirely reanimated, all at that same kyoto animation standard. absolutely incredible, i highly doubt we'll ever see a more, er, "realistic" depiction of a time loop because no one else could possibly ever be maniacal enough to risk boring viewers to that extent. bravo!

super cub

one thing that i could not get over the whole time watching this show is how ridiculously over-the-top they went with making the main character koguma a total blank slate, she makes your typical bland self-insert protagonists look like fully fleshed-out characters with deep backstories. the show starts with a voice-over monologue from her about how she has “nothing” – no friends, no hobbies, no interests, no ambitions, no skills, no money (and you might also add some extras like no personality). “well, obviously she’s just supposed to be depressed” you might think, but on top of that she also has NO parents or relatives and lives alone in a spartan apartment. living alone at an improbable age isn’t that uncommon in anime, the odd thing about super cub is that it’s never explained and barely even acknowledged, in fact through the whole run of the show you find out basically nothing about koguma’s backstory, how she ended up in this odd situation living alone on a pittance? i spent the whole time on the edge of my seat desperate for answers that never came – what happened to her parents? are they dead? is she an orphan? did she run away because they were abusive and that’s how she ended up so fucked up? how did she get that apartment? why is there no social worker or distant relative ever checking in on her? where does the income she’s barely scraping by on come from, welfare? trust fund? inheritance? charity? bitcoin? you get absolutely nothing, it’s like she just spawned in to that tiny apartment in the middle of nowhere.
of course, koguma’s life completely turns around when one day she goes out and buys a Honda Super Cub (i guess she did have one interest/ambition after all). the reason people call this a blatant honda ad is because that single purchase is really what transformed her life, basically nothing else was required – the next day she shows up at school with it and immediately becomes friends with the other super cub girl, later on she gets a delivery job and starts making more money thanks to having the cub, and of course riding it is so fun that it cures her depression (indicated by the show’s muted color palette suddenly getting a lot brighter/saturated when she’s having a good time, it's a bit cheesy). if you just buy the right Product you can get friends, a job, happiness... what better pitch is there? “You lacked the Product, and yet you persevered?” you know what, maybe i should buy a cub...
this is also one of the slowest-paced shows i’ve ever seen (and believe me i’ve watched a lot of shows in this “genre”), it will probably put your typical shounenslop viewer into a deep coma, even the slice-of-life enjoyers may be fighting their eyelids because it makes your typical SOL look exciting and action-packed. it’s not a bad thing, you can just turn your brain off and relax, except that my problem was that all of those slow scenes gave me plenty of time to keep thinking about how weird koguma’s living situation is. is she in witness protection, did her testimony get a yakuza kingpin put away? or maybe she’s a retired assassin, now living a peaceful retired life in hiding off of meager savings... for me personally, it's quite amusing how strongly the relaxing atmosphere of the show contrasts with my own brief experience riding a low-powered moped in japan, one of the most terrifying things i've ever done, nonstop thrill and adrenaline, i had to take a whole day off afterwards to mentally recover from a little ride across town. but i could see it making sense because koguma isn’t operating in the same max-stress situation i was in - she’s on her home turf, she biked a lot, she does some midnight practice sessions when the streets are empty, she doesn’t live in a big city, she doesn’t head straight for the treacherous mountain roads...
oh yes, people are ALWAYS talking about the infamous Incident that happens towards the end of the show, it definitely did not seem like you could walk away from that easily... but then i brought it up to my friend who's done a lot of wilderness survival training and the like, and he said that actually it's not all that unrealistic, people can be revived pretty easily after a shocking amount of time in the cold, i guess that's where the concept of cryogenics comes from...

amagami SS

this show was a good palette cleanser after the craziness of school days and raw sexuality of yosuga no sora, a nice wholesome sequence of comparatively-grounded romantic comedies. However, though the show definitely keeps it PG-13, the erotic situations they do cook up under that constraint somehow feel MORE perverted than if they just had sex – sneaking out to the pump shed to kiss back of the knees, ear biting, tummy kisses, “would you slurp me if i was a miso ramen”, finger biting, the FISH thing, getting stuck under the fence, returning to the private booth at the movie theatre (is this actually a thing in japan) to find your girl rocking a full gothic lolita fit out of nowhere, the secret hot spring (ok this one is actually played pretty straight). it’s pretty realistic how relationships can develop naturally through a gradually escalating series of moments of plausibly deniable intimacy/titillation.
it's hard to pick a favorite girl, they’re all so charming in their own unique way, enough to restore even the most bitter misogynist’s faith in women, and if this can’t turn gay men straight then nothing can. kinda crazy though how BOTH of the protagonist’s little sister’s friends are potential romantic partners. but watching this, six short comedic romance stories taking place in the same school milieu, i’ve had a sudden realization about the nature of vns. although on the surface it may appear that the underlying male fantasy behind them is the same “getting all the girls” fantasy behind the “harem” genre, there’s a crucial difference. sure, from a meta perspective, you can “get” all the girls in a vn by playing all the routes, but from an in-universe perspective each heroine’s route is mutually exclusive, you can only end up with one at a time, barring rare exceptions there is no route where you end up getting all the girls at once as in a harem. the vn player is not greedy, he is willing to accept canonical monogamy, as long as he has the potential to end up with any of the heroines he chooses. the parallel endings of a vn constitute a multiverse, within which for all heroines there exists a universe such that you end up with her. the fantasy of vns is not that you get all the girls, it’s that the possibility exists of getting any of the cute girls at your school, provided that you make all the correct decisions, select the right dialogue options. call me a pessimist but i believe that this is ultimately a fantasy, there are fundamental incompatibilities that means some people could never end up together (and shouldn’t), even if you had a thousand-year time loop to perfect your seduction it would never happen. in some cases i think the “anything is possible” mindset can be harmful, some dudes get so neurotic about potentially “ruining their chances” by making the wrong decision and scaring off a girl, ending up in an anxious analysis-paralysis that ends up driving her away anyways. the sages know that there is no point worrying about such matters, if a girl is truly interested in you there are no wrong choices.

summer pockets

originally i was going to skip this because it seems like it’s only adapting the original vn and not reflection blue so there will be no shiki, however there have been some hints now... who could that be standing in front of the fan in the ending, and what could those kids in the background of one scene in episode three have possibly been referring to... i’ve been in a big anime-watching mood lately so i started watching it anyways and i feel like i’ve been enjoying it an absurd amount, am i just super drunk on nostalgia and wine while watching or is it actually really good? i have no idea what other people think because /a/ has been down... (checked just now and it’s back, that’s good because i don’t know how i’d find anything to watch otherwise, i check it once every 3-4 months and within 30 minutes i’m able to determine exactly what i should watch next, it works so well that it’s been years since i had to drop a show.)
that said, i take immense psychic damage anytime i watch this, i need to go to an island RIGHT NOW, throw my phone into the sea on the ferry over, spend the whole time scooting about on a little motorbike chilling and bantering with a diverse cast of island girls. if i brought my typewriter and a full case of costco mai-tais, i’m sure i could finish my novel, whether it’s at that molokai ghost condo airbnb or somewhere deep in the inland sea. somebody PHYSICALLY RESTRAIN and STOP me from dropping 60k alaska airlines miles on a business class japan airlines ticket leaving in four days...

sasami-san@ganbaranai

a light novel adaptation of the sort that just doesn't exist anymore... deep otaku media, you MUST be familiar with all the tropes and also shinto mythology otherwise you will be left behind. the plot is utterly incomprehensible and i don't know if it's because they had trouble adapting everything from the light novels, or i don't know enough shinto mythology, or i may have been too drunk, or maybe it never made any sense in the first place. i recommend watching just the first episode like a standalone OVA purely for the insane vibes, plus the animation budget must have been stratospheric. incidentally, i lifted the symbols floating in the background from the opening of this, long before i saw that mcdonald's japan ad on twitter and found out it's ヲシテ script.

yuyushiki

this show has a crazy dynamic where the poor tsukkomi is constantly tormented by two idiots tag-teaming her - one genki and ditzy, the other slow and spacey. well over half of the "jokes" are just them repeating something over and over again, or heinous wordplay. i'm not sure i believe this is how high school girls spend their free time (or anyone, frankly). there is a surprising amount of animation considering the quotidian content of the show, any other studio would have tried to get away with as much slideshow animation as possible, sasuga KINOma citrus. as with all of their shows, there's a weird focus on one particular fetish, in this case somebody working on the show must have been seriously interested in tummies/navels, the bottom of those girls' shirts just do NOT stay down. the shirt in their school uniform must have been designed by some perv that made it just an inch or two too short to cover everything outside of ideal conditions. in anime you know stuff like that is never on accident because there's gotta be somebody in the studio carefully drawing all those keyframes.

onegai my melody

i’m positive 99.9% of the people out there rocking various kuromi merch have not done their time in the trenches and watched even a single episode of onegai my melody, shameful. could not be me. this was a real “taking off the training wheels” moment because the only two options are english hardsubs or straight rawdogging it, so i had no choice but to watch it with no subtitles whatsoever. about half of the episodes have never been subtitled in english at all.
you may wonder: who in their right mind would possibly watch this? as a certified MORIWACKY MANIAC, it is my solemn duty to make my way through moriwaki makoto’s entire filmography, which includes this show.
i had my doubts to begin but a couple episodes in there was an episode with a crazy guy who lived in a house full of trash, including an ENTIRE CAR in the vestibule, and i was sold. there are quite a few unusual things about this show, in fact. for one, it has the vibe of a mahou shoujo, but if you pay attention you realize that the protagonist uta actually has almost no role in resolving the conflict of each episode, every single time my melody just shows up and deus ex machina's it by waving around the melody key and saying "onegai?"🥺. the bad guys also win pretty frequently, there's a typical episodic structure where somebody has some hidden wish, kuromi grants it but of course in monkey-paw way and things go very wrong, my melody shows up and undoes it, and then the person regrets it all and thanks my melody for saving them, yielding a white music note for my melody to collect. but occasionally the person is completely unrepentant and goes “wow that rampage i just went on was freaking EPIC”, and to everyone’s surprise yields kuromi some delicious black music notes for his butt-monkey eggplant (tapir) sidekick to consume. also, if the "kuromi note" is to be believed, kuromi really was wronged many times by my melody's carelessness and naivety. the show really pops off, though, for about 10 episodes 3/4 in, when even the writers seem to have gotten tired of the formulaic structure and played with the formula a bit. disaster was averted at least once through an accidental gay kiss. from there, they go on to do a classic JRPG final boss ending.

elfen lied

GHASTLY rigamarole. the kind of show your friend or older brother takes you aside one stormy night and reverently introduces you to as if it is some dangerous forbidden text, thereby inducting you into a kind of perverted secret society. to many raised on a steady diet of disney or cartoon network, it is a revelatory work demonstrating that animation can include gratuitous gore and/or nudity. i won't lie, this is the first anime i ever saw. it's possibly the high-water mark of the peculiar noughties near-centennial anime revival of the old “ero guro nansensu” trend that in the 1930s yielded literary delicacies like edogawa ranpo's "human chair" and, of course, DOGRA MAGRA. the show contains moe and edge in nearly equal amounts. the op/ed are jarring, sung in latin and putting characters into gustav klimt paintings, perplexingly pretentious and oddly high concept compared to the rest of the show.

bongo bongo dogs

early in college my friend dated a girl for all of a month who was obsessed with this show and got into it himself to an embarrassing degree, which led to him trying to show it to me. i was barely able to stomach even one episode, no media had ever made me unironically think "MY CULTURE IS NOT A COSTUME!!!" before this show. also, it bothered me how they did random chibi gag scenes in the exact same style as fullmetal alchemist (same animation studio, i believe). in the end it was all worth it because i was able to pull of an incredible prank by convincing my friend to "tantei opera milky holmes" by telling him that it had basically the same premise, detectives in yokohama, but better (all technically true). every episode of milky holmes starts off with this dark little animated narration about the eternal fight between detectives and phantom thieves that really does make it seem similar, before suddenly going into one of the most aggressively moe OP's of all time. the reaction when that happened was priceless.

evangelion

enough pseudointellectual ink has been spilled over this show, instead i encourage anyone reading this who hasn't already seen it to watch "Extracurricular Lesson with Hideaki Anno" immediately. ok, i will also say this: i believe at the heart of evangelion is the struggle between anno-the-otaku and anno-the-artist, the struggle to create a truly original work, the struggle to recapture the grand narrative (coupled with a healthy dose of the pathological self-awareness of the postmodern artist). at stake: can otaku, the creature of copies, create genuine art? the tentative answer: no...
p.s. liking rei is a serious red flag

bakemonogatari

a better match between studio and adapted work has probably never been found. RELENTLESSLY stylish. probably the show i would have most liked to have directed. (i don’t remember writing that last sentence but it’s probably true)

angel beats

i had a lot of troubling nailing this show down, but then one day i had a sudden brainwave and pinned it down precisely: it's anime LOST! they had to swap out the island for a high school because it's an anime of course, but besides that they both feature a huge cast stuck in a mysterious location that may or may not be limbo or hell or a dream or something. the show had such extreme "based on a vn" vibes that i was shocked to discover it was an anime original, though it does seem that they later made a vn adaptation. the main character's backstory was so over-the-top tragic that it puts many creators of outright suffering porn to shame, and they just casually dropped it as an episode somewhere in the back half of the series. it goes so far that it practically overflows and turns comedic instead.

nekojiru udon

although i can't deny there's certainly something to it, i cannot in good faith recommend anything by nekojiru, it's unhinged in a bad way. the vibes are completely off, almost demonic... i will not elaborate. it could even be dangerous for the wrong person to read it, if they have an inadequate mental immune system it could be like downloading a virus, similar to this page:

renkin san-kyuu magical? pokaan

this had the exact vibe of the kind of stuff i’d watch as a kid on like cartoon network, down to the fact that each 24-min “episode” is actually split into two self-contained 13-minute halves with unrelated plots and the occasional wacky premise. the only difference is that this show is CLEARLY intended for adults because of all the fanservice... very hit or miss, the directing sometimes felt really wonky, but i watched it all the way through because i was craving that noughties art style and coloring...

totono critique

spoilers approximately 8 years ago i saw some idiot online claim that subahibi was the “better japanese doki doki literature club”, which prompted me to read subahibi. although i enjoyed it, i spent almost the entire time on edge expecting a meta twist around every corner, then it just ended without one and i was left feeling a little baffled. well, as it turns out there IS a japanese DDLC, it’s this game. it even came out several years earlier than DDLC, though the fundamental conceit is “obvious” enough that i could believe salvato arrived at it independently, plus there wasn’t an english translation for totono for quite a while.
as a “japanese” take on the concept, here's what's different:
- significantly longer, the boring slice-of-life prologue portion of totono alone is probably longer than all of DDLC. that’s pretty much the norm in japanese vns for introducing characters, i think the idea is that a large time investment leads to a stronger attachment. the thing is, it’s not exactly required, even with a fraction of the screentime DDLC characters have acquired a rabid fanbase.
- sex scenes, of course
- the whole haru thing lol
but, seriously now, i think the major difference between DDLC and totono is that while both are frequently called “deconstructions”, it’s only totono that really is. for whatever reason every time somebody makes a “dark” or “meta” twist on a genre people rush to call it a deconstruction, but just that isn’t enough to make something a deconstruction. to be a genuine deconstruction it needs to play with the structured and conventions of the genre, work within the “tradition” of the genre so to speak, and most importantly in doing so it should say something about the genre in general. as such, to be fully appreciated a deconstruction also requires an audience that’s conversant with the genre, which is why one of the biggest giveaways that a work isn’t a “true” deconstruction is if it is very popular with people who have never encountered anything else within the genre. DDLC, for example, has many satisfied fans and players who have never read any other VN. another example is madoka, most viewers have probably never seen any other “mahou shoujo” which is ok because despite being a dark twist on mahou shoujo, it doesn’t have much to say about mahou shoujo in general, in fact rather than deconstructing what it really did was codify an entirely new subgenre of “dark mahou shoujo”, spawning imitators like yuuki yuuna and so on. this is understandable considering that urobuchi had apparently never seen a mahou shoujo prior to writing madoka, for which shinbou made him watch nanoha (which itself isn’t very representative of the genre). now all of this is not to say that those kinds of works aren’t good, they’re just not “deconstructions” as many like to claim.
what’s different about totono? totono works firmly within the japanese vn tradition, leaning heavily on established vn conventions, which can only really be fully appreciated if you’ve played at least a couple other vns to become familiar with them. the vn tropes starts out light, with a running gag of aoi bluntly pointing them out whenever they occur, but ultimately totono sets its aims much higher, launching a devastating attack right at the core of how this kind of vn is structured and played.
i’ve spoken a little about the general structure of this type of vn (multiple heroines, branching routes) in prior work:
the visual novel focus on characters is revealed by one of their most distinctive elements, the use of branching “routes” and multiple endings. the importance of giving each character a complete individual storyline is more important than presenting a single cohesive plot or narrative, and so the overall “plot” of a visual novel is an indefinite superposition, a hazy cloud of possibility-space. the plot is subordinate to the characters. there may be a “canonical” “true ending”, but this does not reduce the effect because usually they require playing through every branch (and even if they don’t, many otaku will do so anyway, not considering the visual novel “complete” until they do).
now, i feel like i can’t be the only one who’s ever felt a little odd, a little uneasy with the “standard” vn playthrough style going through every heroine’s route in succession. you spend hours getting to know one girl, sharing many intimate moments, professions of eternal love, reach the emotionally-devastating climax at the end of her route... then to “beat” the game you’re supposed to turn right around, roll everything back reloading an old save, and then do the exact same thing with a different girl? it feels a little... wrong? cynical? shallow? could it even be cheating? often after finishing a route i’ve had to put a vn down for at least a whole day before going back and starting another one, and sometimes i never go back...
well, now i’m sure i can’t be the only one who’s felt that way, because turns out that’s exactly what totono is about. it even begins to explore it before the “big twist”, with aoi’s unfaithfulness. if you think about it, what aoi does is the exact same thing a vn player does, from her perspective she’s collected all the CG’s and finished the Shinichi route, so if she wants more juicy CG’s she’s got to go off down another route... but from shinichi’s non-game-brain perspective (and perhaps the player's as well), that kind of normal vn player behavior looks an awful like cheating. the only way things are resolved amicably between shinichi and aoi is through an explicit recognition that it’s a vn and that’s just the way they’re set up... that is until miyuki shows up and goes to bat for her opposing viewpoint...
the treatment of the main theme becomes direct at this point, miyuki gets right into YOUR face and calls YOU out (amazing the effect zooming in on the character portraits more than usual can have). then, she demonstrates visual novels do not necessarily have to be like “that”, using the code to dramatically modify the structure so that it’s now only “tono”, or if you will, “just miyuki” (now i am thinking salvato ripped this off, both six-letter names that start with “m”?). what's especially clever about all this is that it only happens if you play like the standard vn player and go back to try and complete the aoi route after finishing the miyuki route... there might be somewhere out there who played to the end of miyuki route and then put down the game, satisfied. they remained faithful to miyuki, thus no need for any callouts.
beyond the obvious "is playing multiple vn routes cheating?", totono makes me wonder - is playing other vns cheating too then? is playing vns when you already have a gf cheating? in a way, these questions are the same as the one posed at the end of totono, which you must answer by choosing only one: miyuki or aoi?
(implications left as exercise to the reader)

tokyo ravens

ah, a light novel adaptation from back in the Good Old Days when men were men and light novels were all based off of japanese mysticism instead of video games... i do not remember a single thing about this show and barely remembered i even watched it, it’s amazing how often this happens with anime, like you go into a micro-coma for the duration of each episode. i guess this is why anime watchers in particular are so obsessed with “logging” the shows they watch, otherwise they might accidentally rewatch something... there might be some poor soul out there who’s condemned to endlessly rewatch the same forgettable shows because they don’t scrupulously keep track...

hidamari sketch

if you subtract urobuchi from madoka, this is the result

time travel shoujo

absolutely run out of stuff to watch and prepared to probe the depths of ostensibly-educational japanimation? do you want to watch the only anime in history that namedrops Giordano Bruno? look no further. i knew this one was a keeper when ten minutes in, a character gets hit with a baseball and nearly dies from a heart attack as a result. he's revived by a defibrillator, i think the point was to demonstrate the importance of electricity in the sort of outrageous manner my middle school self would go about it. this might also be the only anime with time travel that DOESN’T feature a time loop. honestly the funniest thing about it is how absolutely unconcerned the characters are about creating any sort of time paradoxes, they go around casually breaking ALL the established time travel rules and almost make bill and ted look responsible in comparison. even the "adult" in the room, the main character's dad who invents time travel, seems to use it exclusively to go back in time and gush while meeting all of his historical scientist heroes, talking about how he’s from the future and how he’s visiting because of how famous they’re gonna get from their work that often they haven't even done yet. in one episode i’m pretty sure he even tries to alter history by giving one of them a bulletproof vest so he can survive an assassination attempt. though the villains are part of some sinister organization, they're kind of justified because they're just trying to collect a debt, they bankrolled his expensive research and he disappeared into the past without paying it off...

kimi no na wa

i remember when this movie came out, absolutely everybody was talking about how GORGEOUS the background art was, which absolutely baffled me because i couldn’t remember there being anything notable about the art at all. then at some point i remembered that i watched the most pirated version in existence, watermarked 240p hardsubbed in both chinese and english with a long anti-piracy warning scrolling across the scene approximately every 10 minutes. on top of that, i watched it on one of my oldest and shittiest laptops, possibly an iBook G3. at the time, though, that was the only version available to torrent because it was still playing in theatres and hadn’t come out on blu-ray or anything yet, it was probably some kind of chinese dvd release beta version that somebody leaked. the twist got me so hard that i had to pause and walk around the house for 10 minutes shouting “NO! NO! NO! THEY DIDN’T!” before resuming.

cardcaptor sakura

very highly regarded however the truth is that within mahou shoujo, it is inferior to ojamajo doremi in almost every way besides the fact that the show looks VERY good, character design/costumes are on point and the genuine hand-drawn cel animation is beautiful. besides that, the plot of almost every episode is extremely formulaic and the characterization is so-so when compared to doremi. style over substance, i suppose. i remember reading one rave review prior to watching calling it the “best depiction of puppy love ever put to screen” and after watching all i can say is ???

nanoha

i'm fairly sure this is one of the first magical girl shows targeted specifically at the sizable audience of older male viewers that the genre had attracted. there are a few giveaways, just in the opening: it doesn't include subtitles for the opening song (a staple of children's anime), and oh yeah, there's a gratuitous panty shot in the brief transformation sequence. i didn't actually find out the most notable thing about this show until quite recently (and when i found out i almost fell out of my chair): it was directed by AKIYUKI SHINBOU, who years down the line would go on to direct madoka magica. allegedly when starting to write madoka, urobuchi remarked that he didn't really know anything about mahou shoujo, so shinbou instructed him to watch this show for research, which honestly isn't that representative of the genre as a whole...
as one of his earlier shows, shinbou didn't yet have the latitude to break out his style, so it's a lot tamer visually than his usual fare. its major innovation was introducing significant sci-fi elements to mahou shoujo (mostly beam weapon attacks that had the bonus of being easy to animate) and also tons of panty shots of nanoha, who i'm pretty sure was supposed to be a fourth grader. it really was the wild west (east?) back then.
the only thing i can solidly remember is that there is this absolutely baffling dinner scene in the first episode (starting at 15:22, for those curious) where the animation undergoes a jarring shift in style and quality, to the extent that you might even call it overanimated. suddenly, the line work gains an extra degree of detail and character movements are animated so precisely that they look practically rotoscoped. there's even MULTIPLE characters moving at the same time! what is this, akira? then, just like that, it ends after the next cut, and never returns for the rest of the show. it feels like a fever dream, what the heck happened? i almost thought i'd imagined it, but i went back just now to make sure and it's one hundred percent real. i guess they must've subcontracted that one scene out to some studio or animator that went way too hard or something.
otherwise, the show is really a product of the time, though i will say that the op is great (could just be because i'm a big mizuki nana fan). i'm also impressed they bothered to get an actual native english speaker to voice the "raising heart" thingy, incidentally the same person who does the english announcements on the tokaido shinkansen.