Anime

I finished NHK ni Youkoso!. It's quite a lot of action and drama for someone like me but I got through it fine. The plot feels quite forced at points, but I guess I feel that way about seemingly any plot based anime series so I don't know if that says anything about this one in particular. I thought the characters were quite human and the subject matter is presented very well despite it flaws.

Surprisingly, my local cinema was showing AoT again, but this time in one of the better rooms. So I went again since the other experience wasn't very good. Very glad that I did. I was able to immerse myself much better this time because the sound didn't sound like it came from a big TV speaker anymore. A little weird to do the bad room first and then the good one, since most'll have seen it already.

Besides that, I've dropped Guild Receptionist. The gimmick has gotten stale for and the plot is not doing it for me. Anime Dr. House also isn't doing too hot. Animation quality has dropped significantly and the story's a bit all over the place. Dr. Stone, Apothecary Diaries and Bureaucrat Villainess are still my top picks (not in that order). The rest of what I'm watching is fine. I'm still meaning to pick up Flower and Asura and continue Re:Zero.

So first up for me this week was the rest of Punch Line, which I started last week. It was actually surprisingly good all in all. It started off really cheesy and contrived, and then wandered off into all sorts of seemingly disjointed weirdness, then actually pulled the entire mess together and tied all of up into a neatly complete and satisfying story. It wasn't great by any means, but it was entertaining enough, and if nothing else impressive just for making some sense of the mess it was in the middle.

Then I (sort of coincidentally) went on to an entirely different one that also turned out to be better than I expected - Sounan desu ka? aka Are You Lost?

It's a simple tale of four schoolgirls who are marooned on a desert island - an oujosama, a childish athlete, a meek meganekko and a loner who conveniently enough spent large parts of her childhood traveling around and learning how to survive in the wild with her father. The challenges they face are generally relatively minor and things work out relatively easily for them and it's mostly focused on character interactions and gag humor. And like Punch Line, it's not great by any means, but it was fine all in all.

Then came the highlight of the week, and one that's been on my TBW for years - Dimension W. And it was excellent. It's a fascinating and compelling story with a wide range of interesting characters, and it's very stylish and visually and musically appealing, but more than anything else, the two leads - Kyo and Mira - have wonderful chemistry. And Kyo drives one of the coolest cars ever - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_2000GT. I just enjoyed everything about it, from start to finish.

Then came another that's been on my TBW for years - Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai. I mostly enjoyed it but with one notable exception - as it went along, I found myself disliking Yozora more all the time, and by the OVA, I was ready to reach into the screen and just kick the living shit out of her myself. I don't care what sort of history she has - she's a foul, loathsome, cruel, vicious bully and she richly deserves every single awful and horrible thing that might ever happen to her in her sorry excuse for a miserable, fucked-up life.

Other than that though, it was okay all in all. 😁

Then, because I apparently hadn't had enough of dislikable characters, I finally did something I'd been steeling myself to do for a couple of years and dove into the second season of Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru.

The first season has the unique distinction of being the only anime I've ever seen that didn't have one single main character in it that I liked at all. It's not until you get to Hachiman's imouto that there's finally a character who isn't awful in one way or another.

But I guess, to their sort of credit, though they're all awful, none of them are as utterly vile as Yozora (though Haruno is close), and that made them sort of tolerable at least. Mostly though I'm just trying to slog through this season because my understanding is that they finally start being actually decent human beings in the third season, and I want to see that.

My post will be quite brief this week. Between work, travel, and work-related travel, I haven't gotten to watch basically anything this past week. I have been able to periodically keep up with the news to post things like visuals and adaptation announcements. However, having a good, solid chunk of time where I am with it enough to focus on an episode has been elusive for me. I am hoping to try to catch up on things over the course of this week, but time will tell.

As a brief note, I just wanted to quickly plug [email protected] where there is a discussion thread devoted to the GQuuuuuuX movie release if you were able to see a theater screening and want to talk about it.

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Re:Zero
2. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Solo Leveling

Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.

Lots of green on the AC chart this week. I suspect this is largely due to Amagami Sister dropping from #3 last week to #13 this week, leaving lots of shows able to move up 1-2 spots, helped by Dr. Stone dropping a bit as well.