I watched Synduality: Noir in a previous season, enjoyed it, and was looking forward to the second season. The second half of the series does do a good job of changing up the dynamic, exploring a few more of the world’s mysteries, and bringing the series to something of a satisfactory conclusion.
There will be spoilers below the cut.
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Metallic Rouge is Studio Bones celebrating its 10th anniversary by going back to its routes with an original anime series, with an action show about a pair of ambiguously lesbian characters going on a journey – in this case a science fiction trip through various planets in the solar system, in the process uncovering several mysteries about the world. The problem is that the series, at 12 episodes, doesn’t quite have the time to really do justice to all the themes that they want to cover.
Spoilers below the cut.
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Solo Leveling was one of the web novel titles that I remember seeing promoted heavily by Yen Press. It was one of the first of these Web Novel turned Light Novel titles that got an audiobook release in the US, and generally it had a fair amount of buzz behind it. So, when an anime adaptation came up on the Seasonal charts, I decided it was time to find out what all the buzz was about.
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I don’t know what I expected coming into this show. On one hand, I got drawn in by the Real Robots Meets Super Robot take on the show, combined with the involvement Masami Obari. Obari as a director is someone who I almost became more familiar with through his involvement on the Fatal Fury anime series, animating the Brave franchise, along with creating the Angel Blade franchise – putting him at the confluence of strongly choreographed action, spectacularly done super robots, and a lot of… actively heterosexual fanservice. So, I was a little surprised to see just how incredibly queer – and particularly gay, Bravern is.
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Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End was the anime series in the Winter season that was most able to make me ugly cry. It starts off with some heavy reflections on grief and mourning and every few episodes it manages to slip in another shot in the feels. That said, this isn’t a depressing show – instead, it’s a bittersweet reflection on the fact that we and the people we know will eventually grow old and die, so we should value our time with them while we can. It then proceeds to do all of this interspersed with some tremendous fight scenes.
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So, we’ve hit the end of the Winter Anime season, so I’m going to take a short break from the Let’s Play to get through some of the anime series I finished this season – starting with the fanservice anime I went for this time – Chained Soldier.
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I’ve been making a *very* good pace at lopping resolutions off the list – after last month I was able to take care of beating Marvel’s Midnight Suns, this month I was able to finish watching Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.
Continue readingDavid & Tora are back, and we’re getting caught up on this season’s anime, before discussing Fate/Stay Night (2006)
One of the things you normally don’t think about when talking about watching anime, is watching anime with your parents. It often comes up as something to be avoided – as opposed to something to be embraced, particularly with the amount of sex that comes up in Anime. However, once you get older, it gets a bit easier to talk about watching anime with your parents – and it helps if your parents are long-time fans of Speculative Fiction. So, with that in mind, I figure I’d give an update on how it’s gone, and give some notes on some of the shows we’ve watched.
Continue readingSince I did my last Anime Holy Grails video, pretty much most of the works on that list have been licensed in some form or another. So, it’s time to revisit the list.
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Our Dating Story: The Inexperienced Me and the Experienced You almost feels like the polar opposite of Girlfriend, Girlfriend. While Girlfriend, Girlfriend is aggressively polyamorous with some hints at bisexuality, Our Dating Story is very monogamous and heterosexual. The other series is very horny, much more horny than the first season, while Our Dating Story is fairly chaste (while being aware of sex).
Continue readingIt’s time to look back on the year that was, with 8 picks for my top Anime (along with 2 honorable mentions, which I guess means it’s 10) of 2023.
The core refrain of the first season of Girlfriend, Girlfriend was “They are such horny idiots.” – That refrain remained true in the second season of the series, with the addition of another Horny Idiot to the series.
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When Bullbuster was announced, it was viewed as a more grounded successor series to Dai-Guard, a Super Robot anime series that had its tongue firmly embedded in cheek, as it grappled with the tough questions of how do you financially justify operating a Super Robot to fight kaiju. Bullbuster revisits those questions, except with a more grounded Real Robot (though still fighting fairly large monsters), and couches the story in the conflict between small businesses and big corporations.
Continue readingThis month we memorialize Leiji Matsumoto and the creator of the Anime Music Video (not necessarily in that order).
In the Fall 2023 season, we had an interesting occurrence of two different racing series, each covering different kinds of racing, scheduled on the same day, in adjacent time slots (and I believe on different channels). One was MF Ghost, the sequel to Initial D, and the other was Overtake – a series about Formula 4 Racing. While both were about racing, the two were remarkably different.
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Yasuhiro Nightow is a creator with style by the truckload. Trigun and Gungrave both are works with a tremendous sense of flair, with Trigun also having a strong heart as well. So, when I learned about Blood Blockade Battlefront, I went “I should watch that” — and then never got around to it. When this year’s Anime Secret Santa came around, the show was among my options, and I decided now it’s time had come. I chose wisely.
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The Fall 2023 anime season featured the spiritual sequel to the classic street racing Anime, Initial D. As people tend to mellow with age, so has the creator of Intial D. MF Ghost continues the concept of racing on regular roads with normal cars, but expands the concept from pure drift racing, and moves it from beyond the underground.
Continue readingThis week I’ve got a review of a book about film history, covering the history of Japanese Animation.
In the previous episode of the Anime Explorations podcast, I mentioned that this month’s episode is going to include some discussion of Anime Music Videos, in memoriam of the creator of the medium, James Kaposztas, passing away this past year. I had put together a playlist and had some notes on each of the videos, so in advance of the episode, it’s only appropriate to embed it here, along with my comments on each video selection.
If you’d like to join the conversation in the next episode, please E-mail animeexplorationspod@gmail.com, with your comments, and they may be read on the show.
I took a bunch of photos at Kumoricon 2023 of hall cosplay, the Gunpla competition, and the cosplay contest. I will see about embedding those below the cut.
Continue readingOne of the things that I was introduced to while watching the 2023 Desert Bus for Hope was the British game show “Only Connect” – with several fan-made games submitted over the course of the week. So, I created my own anime-themed one – and as of this writing I don’t know if it will get picked. Whether or not it does, I figure I’d post the link to my slide deck here! If it does get picked, I’ll also post the video as soon as the Desert Bus Video Strike team posts the video on the Desert Bus YouTube Channel.
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Spy Classroom Season 2 is one that is a lot more serious than the first season. It’s not to say that there isn’t a large quantity of slapstick, some comedy around the members of Team Lamplight’s personality foibles, and more development for some of the other members of the group – that’s definitely there. However, it does make an attempt to be more dramatic than last season, with varying degrees of success.
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