Moving on to the next of the anime series of the Spring Season that I’ve been watching – as of this writing I’m about 4 episodes into Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie – one of the new rom-com anime of the Spring 2022 Season that caught my interest. I’m about 4 episodes in so far, which is far enough to give me a pretty good feel of the show’s dynamics.
Continue reading “Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie: Quick Thoughts”
Outside of the shows that carried over from the Winter Season (like Requiem of the Rose King), there were a couple earlier series that I reviewed that are getting second seasons, that I feel like giving some quick thoughts on – partly to cover for time on the blog (because, again, work wrapping up) and partly because honestly, I haven’t done much with the “As They Air” thing for ongoing series before and this might be worth doing for the long term. So, here are the two Season 2-s of anime I watched from earlier seasons that I’m checking out in the spring.
Continue reading “Spring 2022 Anime: Season 2-s”
Wotakoi is a remarkably chill slice-of-life rom-com anime. It’s just a fairly drama light series, which focuses on two otaku couples who share a workplace, and have mutual friends, just spending time together. It makes for a nice, refreshing bowl of vanilla bean ice cream in anime form.
Continue reading “Wotakoi: Love is Hard For Otaku – Anime Review”
I’m a sucker for an anime that has an element of instruction and education to its premise, and as someone who also appreciates cosplay, but who does not cosplay himself, I’m interested in the craft behind it. So going into the Winter 2022 season, I’d already suspected that My Dress-Up Darling would be my jam on that front. What I wasn’t expecting was to get a tremendously sweet love story along the way.
Continue reading “My Dress-Up Darling: Anime Review”
It is a long-standing trope in romance fiction to have an author protagonist whose own romantic inexperience drives them into the relationship that is the focus of the plot. Normally, the way this premise works is that the author has a degree of self-awareness of their own inexperience, in turn leading to them being self-conscious about it as they look for a partner. Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-Kun, however, is not one of those stories. Oh, the male lead is inexperienced, but he’s also a grade-A Wholesome Himbo.
Continue reading “Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-Kun: Anime Review”
Of the fall 2021 anime, one of the two main romantic comedy anime series for me was My Senpai Is Annoying, a workplace comedy series with a nice healthy dose of romantic comedy that worked very well for me, as a Geriatric Millennial.
Continue reading “My Senpai Is Annoying: Anime Review”
Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S is Kyoto Animation’s big return to television after the horrific fire of 2019, along with the pandemic, so it feels right for them to come back with something as cheerful and heartwarming – and also horny on main – as Dragon Maid.
Continue reading “Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S: Anime Review”
Many romantic comedy anime series use misunderstandings as the focus of their humor. Something is misheard, or not told, and it sets up a snowballing series of events, like in Maison Ikkoku. Girlfriend, Girlfriend is the exact opposite of that. It is a series based on the fundamental premise of “What if people were maybe just a little too open and direct?”
Continue reading “Girlfriend, Girlfriend: Anime Review”
My Next Life As A Villainess All Routes Lead To Doom X (or HameFura Season 2 for short) – continues the adventures of Katarina Claes. In the first season she successfully survived the events of the otome game “Fortune Lover” after being reincarnated as that game’s antagonist – and in the process got every possible route (and rival, and the game’s protagonist) to fall for her, all without deliberately trying to do so, and she is still unaware of this fact. Now with a bright future ahead of her, clearly it’s all just slice of life comedy, right? Well… not exactly.
Continue reading “HameFura Season 2: Anime Review”
Maison Ikkoku is, like a fair number of Rumiko Takahashi’s manga from this period (including Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2) – very sitcom esque. It finds a status quo, will venture away from it at the start of an arc, and will generally will return to whence it came at the end, with some forward movement, but not necessarily a lot. Such is the case with the second and third volumes of the manga, where after introducing the cast in the first volume, it’s starting to find its rhythm.
Continue reading “Maison Ikkoku, Collector’s Edition Vol. 2-3: Manga Review”
If you were expecting the Manga Contest to come to some sort of a head this volume, expect disappointment.
Continue reading “Hayate the Combat Butler Vol. 37 Review”
This week I’m covering an anime from last year that I omitted from my 2020 Anime Recommendations list – not because I didn’t like it, but because I wanted to spend a little more time on it – Uzaki-Chan Just Wants To Hang Out.
Continue reading “Uzaki-Chan Just Wants To Hang Out: Anime Review”
I’ve reviewed most of the anime adaptations of Hayate: The Combat Butler, and reviewed much of the manga that’s been officially released in English to date (in spite of the official US release being several years behind the Japanese release – which has since ended). When I learned that author Kenjiro Hata’s latest manga, Tonikawa, was getting an anime adaptation, that show quickly ended up on the list of shows on my watchlist for that season, and I was not disappointed.
Continue reading “Tonikawa: Over The Moon For You: Anime Review”
In what feels like decades since the last release of Maison Ikkoku, Viz is re-releasing the manga, using the 10-volume format that the series received in Japan, instead of the 15-volume release they used for the previous version, and with a new translation. Since I didn’t get particularly far in the manga with the previous release, I figured now is a pretty good time to start over from scratch.
Continue reading “Manga Review: Maison Ikkoku Vol. 1 (Re-Release)”
I’ve talked a bunch on this blog about my having Autism, and how my Autism informs media I consume. Well, one of the things that my Autism does when it comes to shaping what I do with my personal time is it makes me something of a homebody. I generally need to get a push to go out to do some activities. It doesn’t have to be a hard push, but that push has to be there. This lead to me resonating a lot with Uzaki-Chan Wants To Hang Out, one of the slice of life rom-com anime from the Fall 2020 season.
Continue reading “Uzaki-Chan Wants To Hang Out: Anime Review”
The manga Shinji Ikari Raising Project does a lot with a pretty simple concept – what if we take the small slice-of-life rom-com anime vignette from the last episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and expand on that to its own series? Generally, it succeeds at that concept, with some solid humor, though with some missteps later in the series that gets things kind of awkward.
Continue reading “Shinji Ikari Raising Project: Manga Review”
This past season of anime started with me having about 6-7 different series I was planning to watch… and then COVID-19 hit and with postponements, that number dropped down to two. One of those was Fruits Basket Season 2, which is still ongoing, but the other was a new Isekai series based on a Light Novel, and one with a premise that really caught my interest – My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! (or HameFura for short).
Continue reading “My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! (HameFura) Anime Review”
Each anime season, however heavy everything else gets, in terms of what I’m watching, I do try to go with at least one romantic comedy anime. For the Winter 2020 season, the rom-com I went with was Science Fell In Love, so I Tried to Prove It.
Continue reading “Science Fell In Love, So I Tried To Prove It: Anime Review”
Oreimo is a manga which starts well – high school boy Kyousuke discovers his fashionable (as in fashion model) and popular younger sister Kirino is secretly an otaku who is really into games with moe little sisters and decides to bond with her through her fandom while also covering for her with their parents – and then hits an ending where the brother ends up in an incestuous relationship where he ends up marrying that sister. One of the supporting characters in that work is Kuroneko – one of Kirino’s friends in otakudom, who also has a romantic interest in Kyousuke. Now, Oreimo Kuroneko dares to ask the question – what if instead of boning his sister, Kyousuke decides to court his sister’s classmate who is also into him instead.
Continue reading “Oreimo: Kuroneko: Manga Review”
After this past year’s horrific fire at Kyoto Animation, I found myself looking at all the animated series that Kyoto Animation had done in the past, and found that I had seen so very few of them, and that they were also all on my to-watch list well before the fire. The body of work of the studio was at a level that I’d compare to GAINAX at their prime. So, having read the first volume of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid a couple jobs ago, while I was working in Downtown Portland, I decided to bump that show up on the list. Also, as a part of the weekly anime viewing nights I’d started with my parents after I got my Dad into anime, I decided to add that show to the rotation, sight unseen. The results were favorable, with an asterisk.
Continue reading “Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: Anime Review”
When a creator revisits an old creation, it can be interesting from a reader’s perspective, as we see how changes with time influence that work, whether it’s the Eva Rebuild movies, or Chris Clairmont returning to the X-Men, Timothy Zahn returning to Star Wars, or what have you. With the revival of Genshiken – Genshiken Second Season – the manga elects not to pick up right where the old manga did, and instead skips forward, to a new generation of otaku and a look at how fandom has changed with time, with some interesting results.
Continue reading “Genshiken Second Season – Vol. 1-8: Manga Review”
A while back I reviewed the anime We Never Learn: Bokuben – and I described it as a fanservice anime with Enthusiastic Consent. Hensuki is, unfortunately, less so.
Continue reading “Hensuki: Anime Review”