Current:

May I Ask for One Final Thing is still going strong, and ended on quite a cliffhanger last week. And I really enjoyed the dynamic between Scarlet and Alflame. Broadly, I still have no notable criticisms of the series - everything about it is at least good, and the characters in particular are excellent.

And Gnosia is still piling on the mysteries without resolution, though it was sort of interesting to see the game from the gnosia point of view. I continue to hope that we’ll get some answers before this is all over.

Past:

For one reason or another, I ended up watching a lot of anime last week.

First up was SSSS.Gridman, but I didn’t stick with it for long. I liked it well enough and wanted to watch it, but it’s oddly unpleasant. It somehow seems mean-spirited and cruel, and that just wasn’t what I was in the mood for. So I switched to Dandadan. I read the manga for a while early on, so I knew basically what it was about, but I also expected it to be sort of disappointing, and for the same reason I ended up dropping the manga. And sure enough - it was fun and stylish and intriguing and had great characters and I mostly enjoyed it, but the problem is that if you strip away all of the oddity and style, it’s really just that plain old shounen action perpetual motion machine - introduce the new villain, fight and lose, regroup, regain inspiration from the power of friendship etc., get a power up, fight and win, introduce the new villain… It was fine all in all, but that endless loop inevitably bores me and even in spite of everything, I had pretty much lost interest by the time it ended.

Then I went back to SSSS.Gridman. It never really stopped being mean-spirited and cruel until the last episode, when it finally eased up a bit. I liked it all in all though - it’s an interesting world with interesting characters (and crassly I have to admit that Rikka’s character design is an anime dream come true for me). I plan on watching the second season, but not quite yet.

Then I bounced off of Gakkougurashi I was sort of ambivalent about watching it in the first place - I followed the manga from beginning to end, and even had the good fortune to read the first chapter on the day it was posted, when it didn’t even have spoiler tags, which was an amazing experience, and there’s just no way that an adaptation could match that. But even with my lowered expectations, it was too disappointing. The biggest problem to me was that the anime leaned too heavily into the whole cute girls doing cute things thing. The manga had a reputation for combining CGDCT with drama, but the reality is that it was always drama first and foremost, and CGDCT only sort of peripherally. The adaptation unfortunately focused more on emphasizing the CGDCT than on telling the story the way it was originally told. But oh well.

Next up was one that I noticed back when it was first shown, but had since forgotten about and just happened to stumble across a couple of weeks ago - Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? I thoroughly enjoyed it and especially liked the way they expanded such a simple concept into such an enormous and convoluted plot, but that enormous and convoluted plot was, as I began to suspect about halfway through, sort of a problem. It’s one of those light novel series adaptations that takes the route of telling its story in detail rather than condensing it, and that meant that it didn’t really manage to finish anything before it ran out of episodes. It even ended on multiple cliffhangers. I’m tempted to read the LN, just because I really did like the story and the worldbuilding, but unfortunately it’s probably more likely that I’ll just forget about it again.

Next was a very pleasant surprise - Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai That’s been on my TBW pretty much from the moment it was released - I wasn’t watching much anime then, but I was online, so I couldn’t help but know who Rikka was (funny that I watched two different series with very notable Rikkas in them last week). I expected it to be good, but I didn’t expect it to be as good as it actually was. There’s just so much more to it than I would’ve thought possible. The story is terrific from start to finish and the characters are top-notch, and I just loved everything about it.

And at the moment, I’ve dived into one that’s been on my TBW since it was released - Ping Pong the Animation. Sports generally does nothing for me, but Yuasa has never let me down, so I figured it was worth it. And it very much has been. And unexpectedly, I’ve found a sports protagonist I identify with in Tsukimoto. Like him, I have no competitive drive (which is probably a lot of why sports anime/manga have never done anything for me). So it’s been a particularly interesting experience.