Anime Review: ReLIFE

Hey y'all! Still a bit wiped from Otakon so here's what I'm going to do: as the resident ReLIFE expert on TheOASG I blitzed through the show in July and posted a review of the entire series which I'm going to repost here today. Next week we will be back to wrapping up the spring shows but in the meantime enjoy this semi-new post!

ReLIFE

Anime Review: Sound! Euphonium

This show wasn't even on my radar when the spring season started and now it's a lock for my top anime of the year list. It's funny, so far it's felt like a weak year (although fall looks amazing so far) since there haven't been as many shows that I want to watch but for the shows I am watching so many of them have ended up being ridiculously strong. Now to pray that the PonyCan release isn't ridiculously expensive....

Sound! Euphonium (Hibike! Euphonium)

Manga Review: My Little Monster (volume 4)

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I think my branch library has gotten a new employee lately who is fairly manga-savy, not just because of the "sad Naruto is over? Read these manga instead!" display but because I've seen more recent manga releases popping up in our small section recently. Obviously this was one of them, I hadn't gotten around to buying the latest volume of My Little Monster yet for, well, actually that's part of the review!

My Little Monster (volume 4) by Robico

Manga Review: My Little Monster (volume 3)

Man it's getting tough to do reviews of each volume in a manga series, I think part of my problem with this series is that 1. I remember a lot of the anime so I've got a few volumes to go before anything makes a real impact on me and 2. There's just not a lot changing in these books volume-to-volume since it's a rom-com, not a plot-heavy story. So bear with me with these shorter reviews, I am still enjoying the series for sure but there's just not as much to say unless I go page by page!

My Little Monster (volume 3) by Robico

Book Review: Give Up the Ghost

This book is one of many that has been on my to-read list for years and yet my local libraries never had a copy of it, someday I will figure out why sometimes a library has a book I want and sometimes none of them do but clearly that day has not yet come, thank goodness I keep moving to new areas I suppose!

Give Up The Ghost by Megan Crewe

Manga Review: My Little Monster (volume one)

Back in the fall of 2012 I was pleasantly surprised to see that a new anime with a very bland sounding premise (girl is badgered by boy and a romance somehow develops) ended up becoming one of my favorite shows of the season and was then saddened when manga readers noted that due to how the series ended it was unlikely to get a second season. Well, that and the DVD sales, although I was a little surprised that this was the only one of the three shojo shows that season (the other two being Kamisama Kiss and Say I Love You) to not get licensed in the US since I thought it was by far the strongest. So I was quite excited that Kodansha USA announced that they were going to be putting it out and, like a good little manga fan, I went to my local independent book store, ordered it, and then actually got my book before anyone else did it seems, hurray for being a trendsetter!

My Little Monster (Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun, volume one) by Robico

Movie Review: The Garden of Words

Like many an anime fan, I was curious about Makoto Shinkai's work but, since it was much too new for Sentai to be streaming it (and crunchyroll's annual "Makoto Shinkai day" was months and months off) there wasn't really anyway for me to see it. However I was tipped off that a local group (they're connected with the Japanese embassy somehow but I'm not sure how, enough that the staff speaks Japanese and you have to go through metal detectors to go into the building however) was going to be having a showing one night. So I braved the cold to see a short film set in the summer.

The Garden of Words

TV Series Review: Dance Academy (season two)

Today I'm continuing with my adventures in Australian tv with the second season of Dance Academy. I suppose the real reason I watched this show is a lot like why I kept watching Heros of Cosplay, I love watching dance and wanted to be lazy and not have to search all over youtube or the rest of Netflix for it. Thankfully (practically) no matter what this show does it will always be better than HoC, although that doesn't mean that I liked what it did all the time....

Dance Academy (season two)

Summary: Tara and her friends return to the National Dance Academy for a second year of ballet! Or so they'd like to say, Kat failed last year, Sammy's dad is refusing to pay his tuition so he's working at a part time job to make ends meet, and second year also has some interesting additions that are sure to shake up the group's dynamics even more.

The Good: I really liked the character arc Abigail went through, it started in the previous season and here we can see her continuing to both pull herself out and be pushed out of the destructive tendencies  (both to herself and those around her) that she had grown into to be a more stable and better person and I really liked that progression. I only really noticed it at the end of the season, when the show slightly contrasts her and new character Grace, but I think the show has done a good job at showing how she's grown a lot yet still isn't finished growing by a long shot. The other characters have grown some, new character Ben goes through a lot of character development in just the first few episodes (I think to make sure the audience didn't just start hating him) but other than that the other characters feel like they've grown far less. There is one more season to the show (I asked around and some viewers confirmed that yes that was the end, no going on forever shows here!) so I'm hoping that the writers do have good ideas for how to end the show and have the characters grow even more by the end but I won't be holding my breath for it. I will say however that I like how the overall story is structured here, the season isn't tied around one large thematic idea or even one large plot point (although the dance competition does play a huge role) yet everything manages to feel cohesive. Each episode manages to feel like just an extension of the previous and it's a nice example of how to tie together a show by being mostly character driven yet when Plot pops up it doesn't change the tone of the story at all.

The Bad: My biggest problem with the show happened very close to the end and I'm going to talk about just in a footnote which will have some spoilers because it's One Of Those Moments and I need to articulate just why I thought it was a terrible choice*. That was my biggest problem with the season, although I was less than fond of all of the romantic subplots in the show. Everyone was so confused on what they actually wanted in a relationship, with whom they wanted in a relationship, and all of those different things that they stopped feeling like "teenagers who are confused by life and trying to work it all out" and more like "characters who keep changing their lives just to keep everything dramatic." I'm also on the fence about new character Grace, on the one hand I can see what the writers were going for with her character (horribly self-destructive and emotionally manipulative towards everyone she meets, both because of her life and likely would have been that way even if she had been happier) but I think it was how the characters continuously trust her (including Tara, guys speaking as someone who was one of the more "innocent" high schoolers out there it's hard to take parts of Tara's character seriously) that broke my suspension of disbelief. I also had some trouble with another new character, pro dancer/teacher Saskia, but both of those characters apparently will be returning in the third season so I'll reserve my final judgement of them until I can see where the show decides to end. 

The Production Values: Once again everything continues to look fine with no weird audio or video snafus. There was one point where Abagail was singing and I wondered if she was lip-syncing with another actress doing the singing (or just lip-syncing to a recording of herself, I would understand why the production team might choose to do either of those two things but there was something that was just a hair off in that scene which made me wonder) and it was a bit off-putting once or twice later in the season when the show used some music, which previously had only been used by a particular dancer for their piece and never anywhere else, in a different kind of scene and it gave me an odd feeling of dissonance. It was as if I was watching a movie and they played the theme for character A when character B was having an important moment, except this was the music character A had a dance choreographed to so you wondered why everyone else even had a copy of it. All in all those are nitpicks however, just about everything was perfectly fine.


So, for that ending I'm only giving this 2.5 out of 5 stars for being overly dramatic in way too many cases for me yet when the drama wasn't as large scale I did really enjoy the show and found myself watching episode after episode the way someone grabs a bag of skittles and then discovers they already ate the entire thing. I know that the third season just finished up in Australia and when it pops up on American netflix I will make sure to watch and get my review up as quickly as I can!



*right, prepared for major, end of series spoilers? Good, the short version is that a character is killed off less than five episodes before the end of the show. This character hadn't been sick previously or raised any of what some fandoms call "death flags", they were simply run over by a car off-screen and if it wasn't for the fact that they had the character film some more scenes with them (when the others were remembering them while mourning) I would wonder if the actor had actually died in real life. My problem with this is two-fold, one, this isn't the kind of show where people suddenly die. Yes people are killed in car accidents in real life, and in other ways, but we never see shots that focus on a how busy the streets are or how dangerous the characters lives are and this is fiction, not real life, you must foreshadow these things to make it seem as if the writer has control of their own story. Yes there were one or two references to death earlier in the season but only one of those involved the character who died, I wouldn't call it foreshadowing, so instead of feeling a great loss I just felt like the writers had lost it. Secondly, the show already had a huge number of dramatic plots running at that point. The competition, the Grace vs Tara rivalry that was bringing back stuff from the Tara vs Saskia conflict from earlier in the season. The tension with the school play which was also tied into the tangled romantic plots and, I thought, was supposed to be an interesting contrast with the musical that Abigail had become involved with. There was so much to work with that they could have easily filled up the rest of the season with it. I can understand them not wanting to have the season end exactly the way the previous season had (the dreaded trilogy syndrome) but I still don't think this was the right way to do it. Finally, and this is truly spoilerly territory, it does fall into this particular death trope which I really wish would, pun not intended, die already.

Spring 2013 Anime Round-up

And the spring shows have started folks! Trying to get this out a bit earlier than usual so for all of the shows here I’ve seen just one episode and I’m cramming everything into one post, should be fun to check back in three or six months to see what I actually kept/dropped. And as a quick note, I’m still following three shows from the winter season, Chihayafuru 2, Doki Doki Precure, and Space Bros. So far Chihayafuru feels a little weaker pacing wise than the first season (they only spent a few episodes at Omi Jingui and had completely wrapped that arc up by episode 15 but here we’re at 13 and still in the team matches, I’m wondering if the rest of the season will be spent at Omi Jingui and I really hope not) but it still has my attention and it’s managed to flesh out the two new club members better than I had hoped and the rest of the gang continues to grow (even if Arata still isn’t showing up on screen much, I finally found a word to describe him though guys, he’s a tritagonist!). Doki Doki Precure isn’t as good as Heartcatch so far but it’s self aware enough to make me laugh along with it and have fun casually watching it each week, although I’m having real trouble with the villains each time (instead of focusing on the monster/victim of the week like Heartcatch did we see a quick shot of them thinking a selfish thought, being mature and saying “naaaaah” and then they turn into a monster anyway, this idea is as awkward as it sounds in writing). However, unlike most of the shows I watch I don't feel super motivated to find fansubs for it each week and if this season gets busy I'll probably drop it and check back on it later to see if it's worth picking back up. And finally it looks like Space Bros is in for the long haul, it sounds like the anime is somewhere around volume 10 out of 20 volumes so far and I want to say I heard that the manga-ka is predicting it to go on for around 30 volumes. I’m really curious how much longer this one is going to be sticking around, it would be hugely impressive if it went all the way to the end, at the current pace they have about a year’s worth of material to animate still and in the past the manga-ka churned out an impressive four volumes a year but last year only produced two. I guess in theory the manga could stay far enough ahead (and it seems like the anime pads a bit with recap bits to help with this) and the show just got placed in a new timeslot which is right before Detective Conan on Saturday afternoon/evenings which is apparently a really really good sign. Regardless I still enjoy it’s humor, all the space stuff, and all the stuff involving it’s multiple sets of siblings now which makes me reflect on my own relationship with my siblings, although I do feel like a mediocre big sister when compared to Mutta.

Arata the Legend (Arata Kangatari)
Arata (no not that one) switches places with Arata (again, not that one) from another world.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure this is Yuu Watase’s only non-shojo work and it’s always interesting to see when an author (of any medium) who is very heavily associated with one genre (in her case shojo) switch to a different one (shonen) and seeing just what tropes carry over. You could actually make this into a shojo very easily so I'm wondering what this genre switch will bring besides male main characters (which she's had before, Alice 19th had them for sure and a lot of her earlier works have a good amount of action as well). Also, I noticed on a scanlation site the other day that in Japan that the story is over 150 chapters yet the show is only going to be one cour, how the heck is that a good idea? With a story that long I can almost guarantee that individual arcs in the story are going to be longer than 13 chapters and, even if the pick up the pace and put multiple chapters into one episode (like they did here) they’ll still have a freakisly hard time making that work. Really at this point that’s what’s keeping me from getting really excited about this series, while it has potential I just don’t know if it has the time to make it work.

Arata the Legend is streaming on crunchyroll but only for United States and Canadian viewers and it might be for subscribers only. If it is subscribers only, the wording is a bit strange, I 'll have to drop it since I'm using a free subscription now to save money and won't be continuing with it.  

The Devil is a Part-timer (Hataraku Maou-sama!)
Satan escapes a crusading Hero and flips burgers.
Someone pointed out this one to me a few months back when they noted that a voice actor I had heard and liked had landed the leading role here so I checked out the manga (adaptation of the light novels this is based on that is) and found that the humor worked surprisingly well there. And here the humor continues to work, the first episode starts off a bit slow as it gets through the backstory of “how the hell a conquering demon lord is now trying to become a full time McRonald’s employee” but once it hits the second half it pulls off the situational humor pretty well. So I have high hopes that the entire show manages to stay funny and keep my interest, if that manga adaptation is any indication then it should fulfill those expectations very nicely.

Funimation has picked up the show for streaming and can be viewed either on their website or on hulu.



Devil Survivor 2 the Animation
Kids summon demon’s with their cell phones.
Initially this wasn’t on my to-watch list since I’ve never played any of the Shin Megami Tensei games of any franchise but, since I saw a number of good reviews for it and that reasoning hardly stopped me from watching Persona 4 the Animation, I gave it a shot and yeah, that was pretty solid. Thankfully here they’ve chosen to give the main character, in the game the player avatar, a real personality instead of trying to develop him as the show went on a la P4tA and the story gets to the action pretty quickly. I can still see that this was adapted from a game (“oh here is the exposition, this one is probably the tutorial fight” etc) but it doesn’t feel like I’m just watching a Let’s Play of the game so for the moment I’m sticking with it.

DS2tA (DeSu2A?) is streaming on crunchyroll for people in : USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, and Scandinavia..

Gargantia on the Verduous Planet (Suisei no Gargantia)
Mech pilot accidentally space-warps to backwater Earth
This was one of the shows I was most excited for going into the spring season. Scratch that, I was curious about a number of shows but only really excited for this one, it's a low-key season for me this time around, and I had such a hard time waiting for the second episode that I eventually found a fansub of the second episode (ripped from a DVD given out a few weeks earlier) with subpar subtitles and still enjoyed the heck out of it. Somehow this one just worked for me, I've seen a lot of people say that the first half moved a little too slow for them but I like space battles and space operas so I was just fine with epic-scale outer space fighting (and no the CGI does not look bad, it's not quite as nice and neat as Majestic Prince's was but it's perfectly fine guys, the show in general looks fantastic) and I was also okay when the story did a pretty large genre shift for the second half of the episode/for the rest of the series it seems. I’m okay with how they’re handling the shift to a quieter, not exactly slice of life but certainly smaller in scale story following the remnants of humanity on Earth living on boats and endlessly moving on the all-encircling ocean.

Gargantia is steaming on Crunchyroll for United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, South Africa, Turkey, Brazil, and Portugal. 


Karneval
Two boys get entangled in secret, colorful, organization.
I’ve been a bit worried about Karneval for a while now since I’ve read the manga and I can say first hand that this series has it’s strong points and it’s weak ones and the beginning is most certainly one of the later. The anime works with the source material as best as it can, namely by compressing the first three chapters into one episode which does cut out some problems (I don't think the manga-ka even knew what they wanted Circus to be in the very beginning) but the pacing as a result just does not work. I’m tempted to say that the staff spent more time trying to figure out how to make the story look cool than how it was going to make sense and I’m really hoping that it gets smoother as the series goes on but that’s another thing I’m worried about, the length. This has been confirmed to be a one cour series and based on what characters have been posted on the website I can guess at least how far they’ll go and frankly I don’t think there is a really good stopping point after just thirteen episodes. All all I'm nervous about this series, I've seen manga fans say "yep that made about as much sense as the manga did at this point" and non-manga fans optimistically say that they think they like where it's going but yeah, I'm going to hold off recommending this show until it ends and I can say whether or not it worked.

For those willing to risk dazzlement and confusion, Karneval is being streamed by Funimation for Region 1 viewers.

Majestic Prince (Ginga Kikōtai Majestic Prince)
Five failing teens are flung into mecha fights.
Another of the mecha shows this season and one where I really wasn’t sure what to expect when I went into it. The good news is that the snark I saw in the trailers was present in the actual show, but a bit of snarking alone isn’t enough to make me keep watching a show especially when it’s got weird character designs (seriously, here are the original designs, here’s some promo material, and here’s an actual screenshot, I think a side character in the first few minutes stole everyone else’s noses in order to have a large schnoz, this is even worse than the Moyashimon Returns character design changes) and nothing new about the premise in general. Heck, while it is also fast paced and has some nice fight scenes it’s seriously lacking in the explanation department (or perhaps the common sense department, I want at least a line about why they took the worst teen mecha pilots and gave them the best robots they had AND someone at least noting that they seem to be working much better as a team than they were just a few hours earlier) and sure that can be remedied in further episodes but with so much other stuff coming out this season I’m not going to stick around to find out.

Majestic Prince is streaming on crunchyroll for USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand and has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks.


My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU (Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Come wa Machigatteiru or literally My Youth Romantic Comedy is as Wrong as I Expected)
Teacher forces student to join service club.
Intially this wasn't on my to watch list since, well, the premise on the lists and charts of the upcoming spring season didn't interest me and it sounded like Brain's Base was just redoing a less interesting version of My Little Monster (Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun) half a year later. But after seeing a couple of good reviews, plus the fact that I wasn't interested in that show before trying it either, I gave it a shot and nope, my instincts were spot on. The show actually reminded me more of Bakemonogatari in how it sets up two of it's lead characters, the guy's appearance to a small extent, how it tries to be artsy with flashbacks and such, and guys, if you're going to be similar to another show you had better be better than them and that's not what happened here. I'd like to say that I'm not saying that one light novel series copied the other here but this one is certainly the weaker of the two and I'm not a huge fan of the -monogatari series to start with. Also, as I was watching this I thought "the author here feels young" and yep, the original author is only 27 and since this series is now on it's fifth or seventh book he must've started when he was even younger and it shows. Neither he (I believe it's a man) nor the director/writers of the show were able to make the characters believable or even interesting and the idea of a group/school club that helps people is a pretty tired premise yet they didn't do anything to spice that up either. 

Another dropped show for me but those interested in checking it out can go over to crunchyroll, provided you live in United States, Canada, South Africa, Finland, Norway, Sweden, or Denmark. 

Red Data Girl
Girl breaks computers and boy is broken.
So I caught one of the rips of the niconico stream a week or so back and man, maybe the fact that I was watching the worst quality video I’ve ever seen that wasn’t a copy of a copy (etc) of a VHS tape but this first episode just didn’t grab me. Looking at other’s screenshots I can say now that yes the art looks fine, lesson learned there, but the first episode just felt a bit awkward. We can see the characters acting but we don’t know why, why is cutting Izumiko’s hair so important (it’s not like this is Crime Edge, heck that makes this the third anime this year to place a focus on hair so I'm declaring 2013 "year of hair" at this rate) and why is Miyuki’s dad so insistent that he’s going to help her? Since there are a few more episodes out I’ve seen some people say it gets stronger I am going to give it a few more episodes (especially sine Funimation is streaming it) but there's another problem, the legal streams (and the tv broadcast) are a full three weeks behind, almost a month in Funi's case, the internet streams which is going to make avoiding spoilers for the series nigh impossible. I have absolutely no idea why there's such a huge delay, it was weird enough last season that there was a three day delay between when the first tv stations showed From the New World and when the main station/crunchyroll did and this is even stranger. Oh well, at least I'll have something to watch on Wednesdays.

As noted above, RDG is being streamed by Funimation, also make sure you use the hastag #rdg_anime on twitter or apparently you'll offend a small town in England.


Valvrave the Liberator (Kakumeiki Valvrave)
Average teen meets mech, gets messed up
And the award for the show which made me snark the most this season so far goes to Valvrave! Seriously folks, this show has some okay moments (when part of the what looks to be a good sized cast chilling in school), some bad moments (maybe I'm getting jaded but I couldn't take any of those military operations/people seriously), and then, well, one rather large WTFDIDIJUSTSMOKE moment at the veeeery end of the episode, make sure to watch past the credits guys. I seriously don't know how to feel here, the show looks great but the plot alternates between being generic and feeling like the creators are trying to hard to replicate their past successes, namely Code Geass. Here's the thing, I liked Code Geass (or at least the first season, the second season promised to reveal some things which it didn't and that annoyed me) and even Guilty Crown (which I believe also shares a lot of the same staff) didn't have me snark-raging as much as this did. Honestly in that respect the show reminds me a lot of K but with K I tried the second episode and went "you know, I think the writers are aware that what they're writing is kinda silly and they're just rolling with it, I can deal with this" and enjoyed the show, I don't think that's what Valvrave is doing. I'm going to give it another episode or two (mainly because of how pretty it is) but if this doesn't get at least more amusing then I'm going to find other shows to spend my Fridays watching.

Valvrave is streaming on crunchyroll for  US, Canada, United Kingdom, and Ireland. 


SO, now that I've finally gotten through everything, my final verdict? I am following Gargantia, Chihayafuru, Maou-sama, and Space Bros for sure (and most likely Doki  Doki) and I'm gonna be pumped for them each week. And I'm going to continue with Arata, Karneval, RDG, Devil Survivor, and Valvrave for now, if any of them fail to keep my interest for a few episodes I'll drop them with no hesitation. And dear lord, all of those shows except Precure and Space Bros (maybe Devil Survivor, Valvrave is apparently confirmed as split cour) are going to end this summer, I am going to be very busy come late June/early July with reviews.

Webcomic Review Month 2013: Take Off! Tripping Over You

So when I was originally getting my list of comics to talk about for this month I noticed that I had a lot of BL and not much GL, even though I do like both equally, and was going to talk in one of these intros how that was interesting and how it seemed to be because a lot of the BL manga published in the US was rather explicit, hence I turned to webcomics, but the GL was just fine. Then JManga shut down and threw a wrench in my plans because that's where most of the ALC titles I know of went on and I've heard what numbers they did, 300 volumes for a top-selling book which was just enough to cover translations, they aren't going to be putting these in print and that's certainly not enough money to build their own platform, maintain/advertise for it and still bring over new stuff. So now all I can say is that I have had a few people recommend me places to find more gl, a list which I throughly perused (and just didn't like most of the titles on there) and a tumblr which I haven't had time to tackle yet, and would love if people knew of any specific webcomics since my reading is a tad more unbalanced than I would like. And one a similar note, Daniella Orihuela-Gruber of All About Manga recently bought quite a bit of BL and has resolved to review a volume a day until she's done and she's managed to find some good stuff and some crappy stuff, totally recommending people check out her reviews especially considering just how much crappy BL there is out there to avoid. 


Take Off! by Meaghan Carter

In a world called Inbetween a great race between many different creatures and their riders is at the heart of everyone's lives so when Grey the dragon's rider is killed the four heads of Inbetween are scrambling to find him a replacement as fast as they can. They settle on Cassidy, a girl from Earth with some problems but it seems like they're going to have an even larger problem to get the still-grieving Grey to accept a new rider.

It took me a little while to get into this one but once Grey and Cassidy started to accept each other (key word is start, as of writing they're still not on great terms) the story started to fit together. The other characters are interesting as well and the plot, while nothing exceptionally original, works for the moment and is paced well. The art looks fine too, it's been solid since the beginning and while the coloring and shading are a bit on the simple side it looks like a deliberate stylistic choice, not like Carter is unskilled. So far the story seems to have a good idea of where it's going, how it's going to get there, and who it's characters are so even though I don't have a lot to say now I'm sure that by this time next year I'd have to restrain myself to keep the review quick.

Take Off! can be read online and does not have a print version as of writing. 

Tripping Over You by Suzana H. and Owen W

Liam is a bit of a high strung kind of person, frustrated by a lot of people including his roommate (who keeps dragging him along to events to be a third wheel to help him out) and his sorta-friend Milo. But Milo seems to have some distinct feelings for Liam and, well, as long as the rest of the school doesn't find out and make his life hell with bullying, he's okay with the feelings he has back for Milo. 

Like a couple of other webcomics I've talked about over the years, this comic is one where the first chapter doesn't quite hit the mark and then suddenly does starting in the second chapter with no trouble at all which I guess goes to show that both art and writing have rather steep learning curves. By the second chapter the creators seem more comfortable with the characters and know how to place them in the story, how to make them interact, and all the relationships (both romantic and platonic) start to progress quite nicely. I'll admit that I'm biased between romances that focus more on making the relationship work rather than "will they or won't they?" and that's what we have here. I also like the direction the art takes starting with the second chapter, the font is changed to something a bit more legible and the lines become a bit less sketchy (also, I honestly wasn't 100% sure if Liam was the person with the black hair as seen in the top picture when I read the first chapter and he thankfully starts looking a bit more like that in the second chapter as well). I do think that you can tell from the first chapter if you'll like the series or not, the mood and tone don't change very much but if you try the first chapter and aren't sure how you feel about it try a few pages of the second chapter too. 


Tripping Over You can be read online and actually has a kickstarter going right now for the print copy, looks like they easily passed their goal and have about a month to go if you want to try out the comic first and then scrape together the funds to help out.


2012 "T" comics
2011 "T" comics

Webcomic Review Month 2013: Penny Dreadful, Polterguys Prince of Cats, Princess Princess

Whew, got the biggest batch of reviews for the month here, even though I'm a little sad I don't find as many great webcomics every year I have to admit it's nice that I don't have to make as many huge posts as this. Oh and the ComicMix March Madness tournament is still going on so if that's your thing make sure to go out and vote, think they've reached the quarter-final round as of writing this so it's going to finish up pretty soon!


Penny Dreadful by Maggie G Vicknair

The 20th century is barely a decade old and Penny Hart has found herself lost and alone in it. Through a series of strange events she finds herself in the employ of the Harker Institute of Super-Natural Studies and while she finds herself starting to enjoy her new life of adventure it's still a bit much to simply take in a stride.

As a heads up, this is one the webcomics which has a fairly dramatic art shift early on, apparently Vicknair completely changed the way she drew it starting in chapter two, so if you don't like the art very much in chapter one be sure to look at a later chapter before writing off the comic for that reason (and of course the art style does change and become more sophisticated as the story progresses as it does in practically every comic out there). As for the characters and plot I'm really fond of this one since the characters are just a touch sarcastic (well, more than a touch at times) and being a sarcastic person myself I occasionally wonder why characters aren't commenting on how strange their lives are. Despite this little extra self-awareness the copious supernatural elements of the story manage to feel just right for the story without anything out of place (although a little more exposition about how magic works in this world would be nice, I'm assuming that's simply coming later) and the story seems to be slowly revealing that there is a greater plot lurking behind the events of the individual chapters, can't wait to see what's going to happen!


Penny Dreadful can be read online and does not have a print version as of writing.


Polterguys by Laurianne Uy and Nathan Go

Fans of shojo manga will undoubtedly find something familiar about Polterguys but in a fun, enjoyable way. Like many a heroine, Bree finds herself living with a bevy of cute guys under strange circumstances but her's are a bit stranger than normal. While she's simply moved out of the dorms for a bit of piece and quiet the five guys living in her old house are all dead, none of whom can remember how they got that way, and there are demons out there who will happily hunt down a lost soul and send it off to wherever those souls go. In a moment of impulse Bree puts her own life on the line to give the boys a chance to find peace before they move on but can she really do anything to help? 

Bree is a likeable heroine whose relatable, has spunk, and also has a rather realistic experience of having college turn out to be different than she expected (although most of us didn’t have demons and ghosts to make the shift even harder). This first book neatly wraps up one plot while leaving plenty more for future installments and introduces a new one which might prove even more interesting in the end. I'm not sure when the comic is going to start updating again (as far as I can tell, from twitter and tumblr, I think Uy and Go have started outlining it but haven't gotten much farther so it's likely to be a while) but even if it's only as consistent as this first installment then I think it'll be worth the wait.

Polterguys can be read for free online or purchased as a book.


Prince of Cats by Kori M. Handwerker

Lee might be able to talk to cats but frankly that isn't a really big problem or concern in his life currently, high school is. In a small, conservative town where you can be rich or poor but never anything but straight and that certainly doesn't help when his relationship with his best friend Frank starts to change and neither of them feels quite sure where they want, or even expect, it to end up.

Yep this is another story with queer characters in it and, while there hasn't been anything that would be considered graphic by anyone so far, the about page does indicate that there will be some non-graphic sex scenes later on, readers with delicate sensibilities or a habit of reading webcomics at work be warned. Funny enough this is also yet another comic done in watercolors which I'm seeing more and more of these days and I rather like it. Obviously this has no impact on the story but I still like the feeling it gives. Getting to the actual story, it's a little slow moving and awkward but honestly that sums up a lot of high school as well. I am happy to hear that there are going to be other gender/sexual identities present in the story as well (since it always seems odd to me whenever you have a large cast of characters and every single one of them is straight and Prince of Cats is developing a pretty large cast of background characters), although a bit sad that it sounds like there will be an asexual character but they won't even recognize what they are in story. I can certainly relate to that, and it sounds like they'll be a minor character in the story anyway, but I at least hope I can recognize who it is.

Prince of Cats can be read online and the first few chapters are also available in print form.

Princess Princess by StrangelyKatie

I know I said that I wasn't covering any finished comics this year but I completely missed that this one was in fact finished so I'll just slip it in here. Princess Princess is a rather quick tale about a princess locked up in a tower whose recused by, well, another princess. The story is based on that simple idea but fleshes out its two princesses quite well into distinctly different people with their own problems and lives, it doesn't just change one of them from a prince and call that a day. It's cute, quick, funny, yes the two girls do like each other as well, and smarter than you'd expect so I recommend everyone to check it out over here if you have some time. And while you're there I'd also recommend another of Katie's comic's, which I've seen around on tumblr before but hadn't realized it was hers, which is even shorter and nicely bittersweet.


2012 "P" comics

2011 "P" comic (which weirdly enough also finished up within hours of me writing about it, I'm amused by the similar timing anyway)

Webcomic Review Month 2013: Fragile

Oh good, this was a webcomic that had started by the time webcomic review month 2012 rolled around, just wasn't sure if I wanted to talk about it since it was so new so I decided to put it off for a year and cross my fingers to hope that it didn't stop updating in the meantime. And it didn't, I love it when that happens! Also makes me feel a bit better with choosing to wait another year before talking about some other comics but for the moment let's just talk about this one.


Fragile by María Victoria "Shouri" Robado

Marian and her friends are starting their final year of high school and while some of them definitely know what they want to do with the rest of her lives others don't. Add in work, romance, and strange new students and it's certainly not going to be a boring year in any case.

Slight clarification on the summary, the story actually starts a bit before Marian and co start their senior year of school but judging from the summary on the site itself the story won't be continuing beyond that so I think that mine is still an accurate synopsis. In any case, in case you can't tell from the summary this is practically a shojo manga in webcomic form (if not in the age/demographic definition of the word then certainly in the way it borrows a lot of popular shojo tropes). Yet, unlike quite a bit of OEL manga I read when TokyoPop was still around, this story feels like one that merely borrows from the genre rather than tries to mimic one of its stories. It's a bit slow to get going, heck the story feels like it's still getting going even though it's four chapters in now but I'm hoping that once the characters get a bit more established and some more time has passed (in-comic) that the pace will pick up a little bit and that everything with progress nicely.


Fragile updates every Tuesday and Thursday online, there is a print edition for the first half of chapter one but I haven't seen any more plans for a print version so if there's one coming (which I strongly suspect to be true) then it's a bit of a ways off. The story can also be read in Spanish although it seems like only the first chapter has been translated so far.


2012 "E" comics
2011 "E" comics

2012 "F" comics
2011 "F" comics   

Manga Review: The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko (volume one)

It took about a month but I finally found time to swing by the library near my school (it's my senior year and it seems determined to break me, hence the really late updates) and they had a few new offerings in the kids comic section, one being last week's Shay's Story and the other is this title which TokyoPop published two or three volumes of before they went out of business. Despite the fact that it seemed like a lot of people online liked the story it just didn't seem like my kind of story so I didn't put any effort into tracking it down and trying it out, until I had a copy staring me in the face and practically nothing else to read that is.


The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko by Ririko Tsujita (volume one)

Summary: For some unknown reason, Kanoko has to change school quiet often but that's fine by her since she doesn't like interacting with her classmates as she does observing them and this helps keep her more detached from them. Although, even though she claims to have no interest in making friends and doesn't view her classmates as anything more than subjects she often gets involved in their lives anyway.... 

The Good: This was actually a lot more fun than I expected, Kanoko is a very sarcastic narrator and after all of the blah shojo manga I've read over the years (especially those in a school setting) it's quite nice to see a story that mocks a lot of the character types and situations. That's not to say that it doesn't use shojo tropes as well, but the ones it uses without irony and sarcasm certainly feel less tired that the ones Kanoko mocks. 

The Bad: Despite the fact that this was fun, like I initially suspected I don't think I could read an entire series where in every chapter Kanoko goes to a new school, observes and eventually ends up involved with her classmate and then moves on. Funny enough this volume works pretty well as a standalone since the first and last chapters involve the same cast so I actually feel pretty satisfied reading just one volume.  

The Art: If someone was to pick up this book and flip through the pages they would think it was probably a regular shojo series since that's what it looks like, a regular shojo series. It's nicely drawn, despite the fact that there were tons of characters in this volume alone I didn't have any trouble telling them apart (even if there were too many at times to keep straight), and this story just wouldn't have worked as well if it didn't look like a shojo series.


Bit short but since there isn't an overarching plot to speak of and I didn't want to talk in depth about each story there isn't much more to say. So in short, it's a fun series but not one I think I would enjoy in the long run, although I'm sure plenty of other people will. Oh and I would like more snarky narrators in all kinds of fiction please! 

TV Series Review: Veronica Mars (season one)

I had my way I would've started watching this show right after Life on Mars just for the fact that both shows have "Mars" in the title but sadly neither my school library nor Netflix streaming had the show available for me. But the college library near my home did so I spent all summer watching the show bit by bit (curse their two-dvds-at-a-time limit) and wow do I wish I had watched this show years ago.

Veronica Mars (season one)

Summary: In the town of Neptune there are only two kinds of people, the millionares and the people who work for them. Well, and Veronica Mars, daughter of the town's sheriff which gave her an in with the popular crowd, until her boyfriend dumped her, his sister/her best friend was murdered, and her dad was driven out of office by going after their father and he rallied the town against them. Now Veronica is stuck between those two worlds and instead of being on the pep squad she now assists her dad with his private detective business while she takes on cases of her own from classmates on the side. But recently some new things about her friend Lily's murder have come to light, among others things, and Veronica is finding out that her town has even more secrets that she would have bargained for.

The Good: This show does an amazing number of things right, from the balance of when Veronica is at school and when she's out (I've seen so many stories forget that high school students are, you know, in school for almost 40 hours a week), broke plenty of stereotypes and tropes all over the place and made the show feel a hell of a lot more realistic that way (from the cult one to the episode involving a substitute newspaper teacher). Veronica is an interesting, I'd even say  likable, character but it's very obvious that she's already broken by the time the series starts and that she's trying to figure out how to put herself back together, which I personally prefer to a story that spends more time breaking it's characters than putting them back together. The other reoccurring characters were surprisingly well fleshed out, there are adults who don't stay on the sidelines in order to let the younger characters tell a story, Lily's death has affected over half the cast (one or two of which might be even more broken than Veronica) and Lily herself ends up being very well fleshed out for being, well, dead before the story even began. The show also does a very good job at weaving in details about the overarching mystery in the smaller cases Veronica and her dad take on and it all ties itself together in the end very well.

The Bad: Since this caught me really off-guard I'll say it up front, the ending to this season is a bit abrupt in places and, according to wikipedia (I was convinced something was wrong with my disc so I had to look things up) the remaining threads will be wrapped up in the next season. So while everything comes together, what's revealed in the final episode isn't itself wrapped up (and for once I was mistaken about the episode count so the show was even able to catch me off guard with the ending). That's my only real complaint about the series, since Veronica will still be in high school in the next season there's more than a chance that various side characters will show up again and get more character development (I was confused why wikipedia listed Mac as a main character when she didn't have a lot of screen time compared to many other characters), overall the show made very good use of it's runtime when it came to developing characters. 

The Audio: The show's catchy opening theme is actually the shortened version of an already existing song "We Used to be Friends" by The Dandy Warhols which surprised me, the lyrics fit the show so well ("we used to be friends/a long time ago") that I had assumed it was created specifically for the opening. The rest of the music didn't stand out to be as much, although I did like the music used in the ending credits as well, but given how catchy this opening is I think I can be excused.

The Visuals: The actors do look a bit old to be highschool students but only people who are around high school students on a regular basis are going to notice that, I didn't until I saw someone who looked very similar to Lily Kane and realized that she was technically older than Lily is in the show yet looked much younger.

I could have written even more things about this show I loved (like how Veronica likes multiple guys and she's NOT portrayed as a whore, or the subplot involving her mom) but I didn't want to go on even longer, let it suffice to say that I fell hard for this show and I was wondering why I didn't try out this show earlier. A look at the show's air dates clears that one up, it would've started airing late middle school/early high school for me and even if I had seen the show then I don't think I would've connected with it as strongly. But in any case, this is a great, engaging, gripping, smart story that I really recommend to anyone who has any tolerance for realistic fiction/stories involving high school students. I should probably include a trigger warning for rape so just be careful if that applies to anyone (I'd be willing to post in the comments which episodes to look out for if anyone wanted me to).

Spring Anime 2012 round-up

Once again I am later than everyone else but to make up for it I have all my reviews in one place (so, erm, it's long, I had just hit a fourth page on Word when I was writing these up).Did not try Jormugand, Sankarea, Hyouka, Kuroko no Basuke, or Nyarko-san but might later on if I somehow get bored, they all sounded like something that may catch my fancy but I already have enough shows I'm committed to watching to keep me entertained (plus Funimation still hasn't put up Sankarea, y'all sure you know what the word "simulcast" means?). Still following Bodacious Space Pirates and Aquarion Evol in addition to Legend of Korra, thank god MLP:FiM just finished up or I'd be spending my entire Saturday watching cartoons. Funny enough my one and a half fansub shows this season are both mecha (half since I watch Evol on a weird schedule so it only half counts), and the fact that I was already committed to one and a half shows is why I didn't try out Hyouka (the entire reason this is delayed so much, I had expected it to be simulcast which obviously didn't happen). Enough mindless rambling though, let's ramble about the actual shows!

Accel World: Set a few decades in the future, high school life in Japan is similar to today’s except that the technology has rapidly progressed and everyone is now permanently wired into the ‘net. This works in Haruyuki’s favor since he uses his favorite online games to escape the bullying at his school and it turns out that someone has noticed his skills, student body president who is only known by her handle Kuroyukihime, and recruits him to help her in a different kind of game called Brain Burst. I checked out the first chapter of the manga adaptation which didn’t really catch my attention but the anime did. It’s paced well, looks good (do wish Haruyuki was a bit less deformed but I’m not going to obsess over that like some viewers have) and while the plot is a bit on the simple side it works just fine. I can’t tell at this point if I’m going to keep enjoying the series as much as I have, especially since it’s “plot twists” seem rather predictable at this point, but for the moment I’m having fun with it.

Accel World has been licnesed by Viz Media and can be viewed by USians either on hulu or on their site using the hulu player, Canadians are in a pinch here.

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia (Tasogare Otome x Amnesia): Many years ago Yuuko was a student at a strange high school and died under mysterious circumstances and now her body lies beneath the Paranormal Activity clubroom. She claims that she’s not interested in why she died or any of those details, she can’t even remember them to start with, but when Teiichi comes along and is able to see her she starts to become a little more curious and starts the club in order to find out. Honestly that’s all that has happened in the first two episodes (the majority of the first episode was taken up by a hilarious segment showing the episode first from the point of view of the club member who can’t see ghosts and then from the POV of the two who can) and the show has more fanservice than I care for* but somehow the show has grabbed me anyway and if it’s going to be a short series then I’ll be sure to stick around and see what ends up being revealed.

The show has been licensed by Section 23 and for the moment can be viewed on Crunchyroll.

Eureka Seven AO (Astral Ocean): The follow-up to the original 2005 show Eureka 7: Psalm of the Planets (which I have seen, it was just back in 2009 back when Anime News Network was starting to stream shows), Ao has grown up in Okinawa under the guidance of a local doctor when his mother (who is clearly Eureka) vanished while he was small (no mention of his father but it’s Renton almost for sure) and has endured harassment ever since for being an “outsider”. But when a monster emerges from the alien scrub coral and starts spreading havoc it seems like Ao is one of the best chances they have to save the island. But for older viewers a few things seem off, the series is set on a modern looking Earth in 2025 (instead of 12005 on a changed Earth like the original series) with scub coral attacks dating back to the 1940s. I think it’s an alternate universe here so on the one hand I want to say that people who have read a bit about the original but not seen it can follow but at this point it’s not quite safe to say. Ao is a more likeable protagonist than Renton so far and I never disliked Renton to start with, although I am a little hesitant on who seems to be the female lead Naru but I’m warming up to her fast. At first glance the two shows seemed very different but I can now see a number of similarities and I think I’ll end up liking this a lot.

Fate/Zero II: Continuing mere minutes from where the first half left off, Fate/Zero is a record of the fourth Holy Grail war (10 years before the 5^th war in Fate/Stay Night) where pairs of Masters and Servants (heroic spirits summoned just to fight in this war) fight to the last pair standing to receive the wish granting grail. And fight they do, almost half the servants are gone by the time I write this and there has been fighting amongst the pairs as well, much like the first half the show loves to have long monologues on philosophy and morals between characters and then spend the next ten minutes showing a beautifully done fight sequence. I’ve really gotten into the show now, enough that I’m planning on watching F/STN over the summer once this finishes and even though I’ve guessed/been spoiled enough to figure out how this story is going to end I can’t wait to see it play out, as triumphant or tragic as it may be.

While not licensed per-say in the US, each new episode can be viewed on the Japanese NicoNico site with English subtitles and on Crunchyroll a week later. 

Hiiro no Kakera: When Tamaki's parents suddenly get jobs oversees, something that seems a bit suspicious to her, she moves in with her grandmother and discovers that she was brought there to be the next "Tamayori Princess," someone who deals with the spirits in the area and whose power seems to be growing. In a twist that shows it's dating-sim roots there are five attractive men assigned to look after her and the chemistry begins! While I can easily see the appeal of dating-sim games I don't really see the appeal of the animated adaptions since they take out the best part, actually getting to choose what to do and which guys to get closer to. So this one gets a pass from me, although I am tempted to make a plushie out of that adorable fox ghost mascot.

Hiiro no Kakera is streaming on Crunchyroll. 

Kids on the Slope (Samakichi no Apollon): One of my most anticipated shows of the season, Kids on the Slope makes up half of the noitaminA spot and focuses on transfer student Kaoru who has just moved to Kyushu in 1966 for his father’s job and expects this move to be like all the others, another chance for him to be isolated and lonely in his new surroundings. But things go a little differently this time around thanks to the friendly class president Ritsuko and delinquent classmate Sentarou who introduce the piano playing Kaoru to a new kind of music, jazz. I’ve only had a chance to check out the first episode so far but I really liked the vibe it gave off. The setting was different, the music was great and the characters already feel a bit rounded. I am really worried at how this show is going to compress all nine volumes of the manga into just 12 episodes, especially since it sounds like their aren’t any subplots that can be easily cut out, but fingers crossed and hoping for the best!

Section 23 has already licensed the show and it can be viewed on Crunchyroll.

Lupin the III-A Woman Named Fujiko Mine: I saw the first episode of this show on accident actually, I was watching a livestream and the streamer decided to show the latest incarnation of the Lupin the III franchise (which can be summed up as Lupin is a famous thief who likes to steal difficult things because of the challenges they present).  As I had already figured out from the reviews I’d read, this isn’t the show for me but it’s a pretty cool show. I’m not a big fan of Lupin, like many my only experience with the franchise is The Castle of Caligstro (which I didn’t  like that much) and the whole phantom/gentleman thief genre is hit or miss with me to start with. All of that said, you don’t need much familiarity with the Lupin franchise to follow this show and it looks gorgeous (to quote a friend, “they blew the budget of three anime studios in the first five minutes of this show”) in it’s super detailed retro style. Funny enough the copious amount of fanservice in the first episode didn’t bother me either which I think might be because the show not only has a female writer (Mari Okada whose work I’m plenty familiar with) but also a female director (Sayo Yamamoto who did Michiko to Hatchin which I still need to get around to seeing) and I wonder if that had just enough of an influence on the show to make the fanservice less annoying. In any case, Funimation is now streaming the show and if this sounds at all interesting I recommend people check it out (just be careful where you do however, the first episode is seriously NSFW because of Fujiko’s frequent stripping to distract the male characters).

Show is being streamed by Funimation on their website, you do need a free account to view it however due to the boobies.

Medaka Box: Tried this one out because, well, it was on Crunchyroll and I was bored? I also had a raging headache at the time and I’m not sure if that contributed to my feelings on the show or not but this just didn’t quite work. The premise is simple enough, Medaka is the new president of her high school and her first act is to create a suggestion box for the students and her first request is to clean up the kendo dojo, and by clean out they mean kick out all the delinquents who have taken up residence there. The problem is that Medaka just isn’t that interesting a character, she feels a bit like a Maniac Pixie DreamGirl to the male lead whom I suspect is actually the main character, and is simply so out there (with her proclamations that she will fix everything for no reason other than the joy of helping others) that I couldn’t take the show seriously and didn’t find it funny either. The premise reminds me a lot of Sket Dan, which I read the first chapter of a year or so ago, but at least there the series focused on comedy, here the show just feels disjointed and like it’s trying to do two different things at once.

This show is streaming on Crunchyroll as I mentioned earlier.

Polar Bear Café (Shirokuma Café): The lone josei offering of the season is a strange one, a comedy series set in a world where humans and animals live everyday lives with each other, the first episode shows the character Panda (who, true to his species, is rather lazy and would rather lay around all day eating bamboo) trying to find a job and eventually ends up with part time work as a panda in the local zoo. A large chunk of the show also takes place in the eponymous Polar Bear Café which shows off the best bits of the series humor with it’s strange puns and odd situations (plus, if you’re familiar with Japanese seiyuu then there is plenty of humor to be had in hearing them voice various animals). I did laugh a few times but I don’t think that this kind of humor would stay funny to me for an entire season (and in general I prefer series where humor is a secondary genre, not the main one like here), but I’m sure plenty of other people will enjoy it enough to make up for me.

Currently the show is unlicensed but it is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Saint Seiya Omega: I’m not familiar with the original Saint Seiya at all, beyond a basic plot synopsis that is, but I really liked the art style for the show and that I was familiar with. From the same people who did Casshern Sins and Heartcatch Precure (which I really need to see) I had been reminded of just how much I liked their retro-esque designs last fall when they did an episode of Mawaru Penguindrum and I decided that was enough of a reason to give this show a shot. And it seems that not much knowledge of the original Saint Seiya is needed to get this show, it seems to be a sequel where we start off with main character Kouga who is being put through some brutal training to become a “saint” who will one day protect the goddess Athena and he’s not particularly happy with this choice. It’s a super shonen-esque show with calling your attacks, hot blooded determination trumping experience and mysterious mentors calling upon Kouga to use some kind of inner strength he has, although I have no idea if the original show had magical girl-esque transformation sequences as well (looking at the team’s previous work I could easily see this being their own flair). In the end the show didn’t do enough things differently for me to want to continue, think I’ll just track down Heartcatch Precure sometime to get my fill of the artstyle that way instead.

Saint Seiya Omega is streaming, like a lot of other things this season, on Crunchyroll.

Space Brothers (Uchuu Kyodai): Set a few decades into the future, brothers Mutta and Hibito both had the same dream as kids, to become astronauts and explore space. Of the two however only Hibito has been able to achieve this dream while Mutta has been recently fired from his lucrative job as a car designer for head butting his boss. But even if Mutta has pretended to forget his dream his family hasn’t and he soon finds himself taking the JAXA [link] exams to become an astronaut. Hmm, realistic, near-future science-fiction (can it even be called that?) with an older protagonist? Sounds fun and sounds different, the pacing is a bit slower than most of the other shows out here but it sounds like the show will be running for a full year so it has the time to set a steady pace. I am a bit amused that Mutta has the same VA and similar appearance to Kotetsu from Tiger and Bunny last year, then again I remember the VA (Hiroaki Hirata) joking last year that after that role he’s now the “ojisan” actor and maybe that’s coming true…

Streaming on Crunchyroll.

Tsuritama: The other half of this season’s noitaminA timeslot and from the same director who did [C], Mononoke, and Trapeeze, Yuki is also a transfer student as he moves to Enoshima, has also moved around a lot and despite that also still gets panic attacks whenever he tries to introduce himself at his new school. Given the, odd nature of his panic attacks (outwardly he just makes strange expressions but inwardly he imagines being swallowed up by a rising wave) he’s also short on friends and not expecting to make any but self-proclaimed alien Haru, also a transfer student, has taken an interest in Yuki (as well as moved in with them) and seems intent on dragging him and two other guys all over town fishing. This show gave me a lot less to go on than Kids on the Slope and if it wasn’t noitaminA I would’ve considered dropping it since it was just so odd (actually, given who the director is and my strong feelings on the ending of [C] this still isn’t out of the picture). Right now I’m going to give it a few more episodes and see if I get into the swing of it since I have absolutely no clue right now what it’s trying to do.

Like Kids on the Slope, Tsuritama has been licensed by Section 23 and is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Zetman: In a dark and edgy setting, Jin was created as an experiment, a “player” with superhuman and near demonic abilities, but rescued as a baby by a man he grew up to call Grandpa. His grandpa was killed by a rouge player and soon after Jin’s own powers activated and ever since he’s tried to not get close to others to keep them safe. Another case where we’re getting a severely compressed adaptation (the entire manga series in one cour, sounds like they’ve already had 20+ chapter timeskips) but it wasn’t the pacing or such that put me off the series, as a non-manga reader the first two episodes flowed alright even though you can see it was compressed, I’m just tired of seeing “dark and edgy” shows. I might give this a go again later if I get bored, although given how much I have to watch I don’t foresee that happening. So it’s a case where the show isn’t bad, just not for me.

Just like this post started, Zetman has been licensed by Viz Media and is being streamed by them as well.

And that's all from me! So, seven new shows to follow, two continuing, four or five I might try/follow anyway (since it seems like every season I end up following one show I don't even mention here), and a giant backlog for when I get bored. And, given that all the shows I watch air between Thursday afternoon and Sunday evening I do get a bit bored by Wednesday, or I could use that time to catch up on live action shows.... 

*yes Japan, boobs are squishy and bounce when you don’t wear a bra, moving on