This month, for Lunar New Year, we’re watching the first half (episode 1-12) of the K-Drama adaptation of Boys Over Flowers.
Anime Explorations Episode 40 Boys Over Flowers K-Drama (eps. 1-12)
This month, for Lunar New Year, we’re watching the first half (episode 1-12) of the K-Drama adaptation of Boys Over Flowers.
The other Isekai anime I took a look at in the Fall 2025 season was My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero’s, or “My Status as an Assassin” for short. This one was much more conventional in terms of an Isekai anime, but it handles its characterization and worldbuilding much more reasonably.
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I’ve been generally keeping clear of Isekai anime the last few years, also with a lot of fantasy series based on light novels. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t because those series were frequently crap. When I saw May I Ask For One Final Thing come up on the list of upcoming anime, along with one other show I’ll get to later, it seemed like a good time to put my toe back in. I’d say this was something of a pleasant surprise.
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There’s a quote from Kurt Vonnegut where the end of it sticks in my brain, in a good way: “Goddamnit, you’ve got to be kind.” The final season of My Hero Academia (to a degree, also the previous season), I feel, builds up to that quote being the core message of the series. There will be spoilers.
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My 2025 Anime New Year’s Resolutions didn’t quite work out according to plan. Some of this was on me in terms of scheduling – I could probably have slipped Golden Boy in pretty much anywhere (and I’m writing this in 2025, so I still might slip it in). Others less so, as for example, I’d put the first season of Mushi-shi on my list, only for the license to have expired by the time October came around, or for A Silent Voice only to be available on HBO Max. So, I’ve learned my lesson and will be dialing back my resolutions this year to 6, which I’ll try to do across podcasting and personal viewing.
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This month, indeed tomorrow, if this goes up as scheduled, the Anime Explorations Podcast episode where we’ll be discussing Robot Carnival will go live. Appropriately enough, among the options I received for this year’s Anime Secret Santa was Short Peace, the fourth, and as of today, final anime anthology film that Katsuhiro Otomo has been involved in, coming after Memories. So, it felt right to choose that film as my pick for this year.
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Earlier this year, around Halloween, I did a group-watch with some friends of the anime OVA series Vampire Princess Miyu. I also apparently completely forgot to put a review up at the time – time to fix that.
Read moreI’m taking a look at a recent romantic dramedy anime set partly during the Pandemic – Anyway, I’m Falling In Love With You.
This month we’re discussing the 4th and 5th films in the Garden of Sinners series (probably the strongest films in the series so far).
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I’ve talked before on blog posts and on podcasts that I do the unspeakable act of watching anime with my parents. Now, I don’t watch everything – we get together a couple times a week, and I carefully pick the shows we watch, but sometimes we watch things that are fanservice adjacent. My Dress Up Darling was one of them. As my dad majored in Geology, I figured Ruri Rocks would be a good fit as well. I was correct.
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Nichijou was an anime that got me and my family through the overwhelming tension of the 2019-2020 Oregon wildfires. When I learned that City, another manga from the same creator, was getting an anime adaptation this year, it became an immediate addition to my watchlist. I was not disappointed.
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This month we’re discussing the horror comedy(?) anime Mieruko-Chan.
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Anne of Green Gables was a part of my life for a significant chunk of my childhood without having read the book. The Anne of Green Gables TV series and its sequel, Avonlea, was ever present when I was growing up. So, when we got a new anime adaptation of some of the early novels, titled Anne Shirley, I had a real “Why not?” moment, and added the series to my watchlist.
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Something which has a history in Japan that we don’t get as much in the US is political satire through adult film. We get some stuff in the US occasionally, but in post war Japan, it almost became an art form – when the film censors looking at adult films are more worried about whether you are properly hiding penises and vagina than whether you’re slipping messages about Japan signing on to the US mutual defense treaty puts them on the road to increased militarization and puts the country in Soviet nuclear crosshairs (or criticisms of the lack of equity in post-war reconstruction Japan, or just straight up Marxist themes) then you have the makings of a way to deliver political messages with a shovelful of smut to help the medicine go down. (Did the Right also know about this tactic and use it themselves? Absolutely!) So, when I read the premise of Nukitashi, I recognized pretty quickly what it was here for – like Shimoneta it’s doing social satire, in this case aimed squarely at the political messaging of Shinzo Abe (though the game it was based on was released before his assassination). Unlike Shimoneta, though, there’s fuckin’!
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The rather long titled There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… was the big romantic comedy anime I watched in the Summer 2025 season, and I’d describe as the big “disaster lesbian” show, and I think is a series that worked out well, and I’ll be happy to watch more of.
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Season 2 of DanDaDan starts on a messy cliffhanger that, I will admit, makes for a rough start, with Momo Ayase facing assault (with sexual overtones, but not actually sexual) in a Hot Springs, while Okarun and Jin are facing physical assault from a bunch of incredibly powerful old grannies in the home that Jin and his parents are renting. The question because, how well does it handle the payoff?
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While the first season of Call of the Night was a series that was heavy on vibes and less on horror, the second season of the series does delve a little more into Vampire society – and also is something that really gets that while our little low-fi Camarillia is generally very chill, vampires are monsters – and even if the group that Ko is around doesn’t act like monsters, other Vampires can be monstrous.
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My Dress-Up Darling was one of the first shows we did for Anime Explorations, and it was a show we generally really enjoyed. Yes, it was a somewhat horny-on-main romantic comedy anime, but it was tonally light, and didn’t feel leering in the way that other fanservicey series did, combined with a romance between Gojo and Marin that was very sweet, so I’ve been looking forward to a second season, and was quite pleased when we finally got one this year. I already had some high expectations, but this season blew those right out of the water.
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This month we’re watching the anime adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.
This month, we’re covering the anime OVA that came out for the 10th anniversary of Macross, and was the first non-Robotech version of the Macross universe to reach the US, along with the Macross II tabletop RPG from Palladium Games. Before that, we get into the current situation ongoing with Visa & MasterCard blocking transactions for NSFW content due to pressure from a Far-Right-Wing Australian group.
Note: I’m trying a new recording platform with this episode, and I ran into some technical difficulties that carried over to my backup recording. Consequently, my audio is impacted, but not necessarily the audio from my guest and cohosts.
As we go through this season of Formula 1, I talk about the anime series that got me into watching motorsport, rather than just playing racing video games – Overtake.
I’ll admit, to my shame, that I’d dismissed My Hero Academia: Vigilantes as a manga originally as something of a nothingburger side story that wasn’t worth paying attention to. This was a mistake. Instead, MHA: Vigilantes serves as a well executed prologue to the core story, giving us a chance once again to see characters we haven’t seen for a while, plus meeting a new cast.
Read moreKowloon Generic Romance is one of the romance anime airing in 2025, and is a series that felt the most like a shojo or josei, but is instead a Seinen series. It’s also a series that I feel like the art style doesn’t quite work out in animation.
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