Life imitates art, as they say.

In about 60 hours of playtime, Luce will be level 99 and set off to kill God. What have they unleashed?

The recent film Blue Giant is great. About a young man who moves to Tokyo from rural Japan to pursue his love of jazz. Great visuals and music.

It’s mainly the fault of the people around him for not cluing him in. I get that he’s been beat down and told he was worthless his whole life. But you’d imagine at least someone would exclaim some praise after he beats one of these legendary monsters.

It does seem to be turning a corner but it drove me crazy the first few episodes. I was so glad when Ossan Newbie dropped the act after two episodes.

Yeah, and it’s very hard to predict based on isekai titles whether you’re going to encounter that kind of worthwhile passion project or one of the very silly ones.

I actually avoided Slime for a couple years because the title didn’t draw me in - I though it sounded uninspired and derivative just based on the name. Little did I know I was missing out on one of the most interesting and complex isekai worlds until I gave it a shot and was immediately hooked.

I’m really enjoying it but I also understand the other view. I would say it might be more fun to binge all at once since we’re waiting a week between multiple episodes with worldbuilding/slice-of-life without the story advancing far. But I’m a longtime Civilization and SimCity fan and honestly some of my favorite parts of the show are about building up the JTF and the diplomacy with other nations.

I really enjoyed it, but I do think there’s some inconsistency of tone that makes me kind of wonder what the show is trying to say. At some points (Ai’s fate, Kana’s difficulty finding work as a former child actress, Akane’s experience with cyberbullying), it feels like the show is trying to expose the dark side of the entertainment industry in almost a Black Mirror episodic kind of fashion. Then the long arc of Aqua’s revenge and finding out what really happened to his mother - maybe even looping in Akane’s almost preternatural understanding of Ai - is another thread that could provide a lot of momentum to the narrative.

These threads are much more interesting to me than the story of Ruby starting an idol group, but it seems like the serious and interesting subject matter takes a back seat to a side of the show that’s fun, but sort of frivolous. I think you could do a show about the hardships young performers face in the entertainment industry, or a supernatural murder mystery about Aqua finding what happened to his mother, or even both put together with episodic bits within a series arc. But doing both of those and an idol show all at the same time makes it feel a little bit unfocused, or even like the idol portion is a little bit undermining the seriousness of the first two topics.

I’ll still watch the second season and I’m interested to see where it goes from here - but in 11 episodes, it felt like there wasn’t as much progress I’d hoped on the more interesting sides of the story.

Quick work! Well done.

I’d love to see this community grow, and having automatic places for discussion would certainly help it along.