Huh…

Well first, to get it out of the way:

Started the week finishing up my rewatch of Trinity Blood, which, to my relief, was pretty much as I remembered it. I had forgotten a lot of the details, but broadly remembered that I enjoyed it all in all, and I did this time through too. It’s definitely a product of its era and not without flaws, but still worth it all in all.

Then about midweek, I watched an excellent movie - Sarusuberi: Miss Hokusai. It’s a sort of stylized biography of the daughter of the artist Hokusai (of Great Wave Off Kanagawa fame), and it was very, very good. The story was more or less accurate, or at least appropriate (it couldn’t be entirely accurate since there just aren’t records detailed enough), but the art style was modern, which was a nice combination - it made it sort of simultaneously exotic and familiar. It’s not particularly plot-driven - more in the nature of a slice of her life with her father - but it was very well done and satisfying.

Then I watched a fairly impressive but sort of uncomfortable series I just happened to stumble across - Just Because. It’s a mostly melancholy and bittersweet sort of romance. I say “sort of” because while it was largely centered around romance, most of the love was undeclared and/or unrequited, so it was a lot of awkwardness and longing and hope and doubt. It was mostly good all in all though - the characters were well rendered and sincere, and while many of the situations were sort of sad and frustrating (and one absolutely devastating scene in the last episode), it mostly (though not entirely) didn’t come across as contrived, as so many awkward romances do.

Current series:

Release That Witch - I’m quite impressed so far with this one. I started off watching it mostly because it was a donghua with an art style that I actually appreciated and a broad concept that I found ironically amusing, but it’s actually turning out to be entertaining in and of itself.

Shiboyugi - a sort of oddity about this series is that since the violence is generally obscured, the more violence there is in an episode, the less there is actually going on on-camera. I was expecting this episode to be brutal, and in a sense it was, but only sort of by implication. In another sense, it was actually even more serene and surreal than most, since mostly it was just Yuki wandering through rooms full of broken but otherwise clean and featureless bodies (the lineless cel-shading art style obscures most of the details) and lots and lots of white fluff (the producers of the games use some miracle chemical that instantly turns blood exposed to air into white fluff). So since I’ve gotten acclimated to the way the show works, it was just as awful as I expected - we’re talking carnage on a battlefield scale (the exposed ribs poking up out of some of the bodies were especially effective as far as that goes). But in a more immediate sense, it was just colorful vaguely human-shaped lumps and lots and lots and lots of white fluff. And a sort of cliffhanger, but since we’ve already seen Yuki after this game, it’s more just a question of how rather than if she’ll survive.

MF Ghost - frustrating as this series has become, I have to admit that I really enjoyed watching Kitahara getting her chance to shine. I knew she had it in her. And it’s going to be interesting seeing how this race works out, since it started so surprisingly. Unfortunately, unless I read the manga (which I might have to do), it’s going to be at least a year or two before I find out.

Roll Over and Die - still enjoying this, though this episode was mostly transitional - detailing Flum starting to become aware of the events we already saw last week and setting about responding (plus some really disurbing but not particularly surprising revelations about Ink). It was a bit frustrating, since part of the set-up for what’s to come was Flum acting uncharacteristically stupid in order to make the creation of a situation possible, but I’m expecting this one to finish strong. Though I think it’s only barely scratched the surface of a much larger story.

Champignon Witch - another irritatingly disjointed episode, and in the course of it, I figured out another thing that I think has been bothering me all along. Too much of each episode is spent retracing the same tired emotional loops - Luna being meek and self-effacing, Lize being whiney and self-doubting, Claude being a crude asshole, Minos being tediously and loudly naive and whichever council witch(es) are present being casually sociopathic. Lize in particular is really starting to annoy me, though still not as much as Claude. And broadly, it still doesn’t feel like it’s going much of anywhere - there’s almost no sense of progress toward a goal, and that in spite of the fact that they started the series with the introduction of a literal life or death goal. But in the face of that, it’s still mostly just this repeating loop of Lize being whiney and Claude being an asshole and Luna being meekly silent and nothing being accomplished by any of it.

Frieren - Thank god it pulled itself out of that arc as quickly as it did - I was actually considering dropping it, and if it had been the standard shounen action “mostly get their asses kicked but then right in the nick of time there’s a faint ray of hope so tune in next week” dreck, I just might have. But instead they put together a satisfying set of fights and got it out of the way, and the journey continues.

Scum of the Brave - After this episode I checked to be sure, and this is scheduled for 24 episodes, which is good, because it still has a long way to go. I like the way it’s headed though.

You and I Are Polar Opposites - another adorable episode. This series has been a revelation. I loved the manga, but didn’t expect a whole lot from the series just for that reason - at best, I thought it might manage to equal the manga. But it’s really standing out on its own, with very good animation, voice acting and music in addition to the already good characters and story.

Journal With Witch- somewhere along the way, I’m pretty sure this has become my all-time favorite anime, full stop. It’s just so astonishingly good. This episode was going along, already impressing me (notably Asa almost accidentally sorting out some of her issues even as she created new ones and Makio showing that she’s learning to be patient) when it switched to one of those scenes of Asa in her desert, except that for the first time, she wasn’t alone - Makio was standing next to her. That was a huge moment, and brilliantly just sort of slipped in along the way.

And I can’t wait to see Asa’s audition - she’s going to shine.

And I’m already counting on and looking forward to season 2.