Last week I watched 2 anime that other members of this community have been discussing. They are both coincidentally Chinese animation.

The first is the Nezha movie and its sequel. It’s peak battle shounen with plenty of flashy fights. Personally, I enjoyed Nezha 1 more than Nezha 2 despite the latter being more acclaimed.

They are worth watching IMO if battle shounen is your cup of tea, or if you are interested in Chinese mythology.

The second is Release that Witch. I binged the few episodes that have been released and I am now all caught up. I love the world-building and politics, and there is definitely a conspiracy.

In fact, I got too impatient after catching up, wanting more of the story, so I picked up the manga adaptation. While I don’t regret it, I must confess that I felt letdown. The manga felt sloppy.

Yes, there are significant differences in character design, but that’s superficial. What mattered to me is how the work is presented. The anime gave me the impression that it’s all about politics and drama. The manga on the other hand turned the story into yet another generic isekai power-fantasy.

Maybe the anime would eventually go down the same path as the manga since they are both based on the same novel, but till then I’d say it’s better to stick with the anime. Personally, I hope that the anime would pick out the best part of the source material while leaving the worst out.

Meta comment:

In case you weren’t aware, there is a lemmyvision contest happening this year and I wanted to gauge interest among the community if it is something that they would be interested in participating in. It basically goes like this:

• Our community gets together and decides on an anisong from 2025 to nominate to the contest
• The wider threadiverse is then able to listen to all the songs submitted by the different communities and vote on their favorites

So, if we want to participate, we need to go through some kind of process to decide on a song from 2025 to submit. Here is my first thought about how to run this:

• If there is interest, I can make a thread later this week asking for submissions (one submission per top level comment)
• The community votes on the different submissions/comments for some time
• I then make a poll where the top vote-getters from the submission thread can be voted on by community members
• The winner of that poll is then put forward as our community’s submission

So, let me know if you want to throw our musical hat in the ring and start thinking about what songs from 2025 you would want to use as our submission.

Had to take a break from my RE:Zero rewatch because Subaru was being too cringe. Holy cow can he be hard to watch sometimes.

Anyways, besides that I’ve started on a few of this season’s new offerings:

• Akane-banashi - Really fun adaptation of a good story, only brought down by Netflix’s shitty subtitles. They are translating little to none of the text in the background, even when that text is extremely relevant. Even when they do translate it they don’t bother with typesetting so it’s a terrible experience. Hopefully a fansub group fixes this at some point but very few people ever seek that sort of thing out these days so who knows.
• Daemons of the Shadow Realm - A great adaptation of a great story, and this time no reservations on how it was translated.
• Snowball Earth - So far the story feels very whimsical. Fun first episode with excellent CGI animation. It’s hard to say what I think of the quality of the writing at this point; I think I’m gonna have to give it a couple more episodes first.

I haven’t started on The Ramparts of Ice because as a Netflix show I’m kinda expecting it to have the same issues as Akane-banashi. I dunno, maybe it’ll be fine.