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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When I put Do It Yourself on my watchlist for this month, I was expecting a more generally explanatory anime series – something along the lines of Diary of our Days at the Breakwater something comedic, and explanatory about the subject matter in question (handicrafts in this case) – and chill but not necessarily a “healing” or “Iyashikei” anime. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was also one of the warmest and most life-affirming anime of the season.
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The past couple of years have had a wide array of new sports getting represented in anime forms, some of which I’ve reviewed on this blog – like Sk8: The Infinity, Re-Main, and Sport Climbing Girls. Well, this year we had not just the first hockey anime (which is a surprise right there), but it’s also the first girls’ hockey anime (and potentially the first girls’ hockey TV series – full stop), with Pride of Orange.
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Iwa-kakeru kind of got a bad break. This year was the year where we were supposed to get the Tokyo Summer Olympics and with it, as one of the new events, Bouldering – or Sport Climbing. So, Iwa-kakeru would have been placed to perfectly strike when the iron was hot, adapting a manga about this brand new Olympic sport, to rise off of the heat of that Olympic fever. And then COVID-19 happened and the Summer Olympics were pushed back at least one year. So, the question becomes whether Iwa-kakeru can hold up without that boost of Olympic excitement.
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