It was THE show everybody talked about when it aired. It even leaked into non-anime discourse. Ichbiban no takaramono hit the heavy rotation on JP radio stations and sold like hotcakes. The show was everywhere at the time. It was story-complete, though, so that’s why there is no second season.

Ben-To is peak. The premise is too silly, though, to get normies into it. I tried. It’s like Keijo!!! in that regard and deserves more love.

Grimgar deserves to be forgotten. Ranta is unsufferable and Haruhiro is whiny and moping around for most of the anime adaptation. I’ve read the light novels further than what was adapted in the anime and by the point I dropped it I couldn’t stand a single character anymore. Even Yume-butt can’t save this. It was incredibly pretty, though. It’s a shame the background artists died.

I binged the light novels recently and I had a good time with the series. I am unsure though how well this translates to the anime format without the inner monologue that explain most of MC’s actions. Basically the humor lies not in what she does, but in why. Without her reasoning for doing something it would come across as just your basic overpowered-can-do-everything MC. On the other hand halting the action for long streaks just to her the MCs inner thoughts makes for really boring anime. I hope they find a way to make it work.

On one side of the adaptation spectrum, you have BUG FILMS working on Witch Hat Atelier, which actually tailors the girl’s clothes to get the animation putting them on right, and on the other side, you get WIT Studio on Bookworm, who can’t even be arsed to read the stuff they are adapting.

I just don’t get it. How can it be that one of the best-selling book series can’t get a good adaptation?!

Summer Wars

I agree. Not a fan of the cyberspace mumbo jumbo, but I really like the movie for everything else.

No. Are you insane? Why would they spent time on anything? No rest for the wicked as they say. And there is nothing more wicked than the ones responsible for this adaptation.

I would assume every time you hear complaints flare up again it’s because there has been a new case.

Where to start. They have so many issues that there is something in there for everyone:

• price hikes and end of the free tier
• declining quality of subs and the use of AI for subs
• activist localization slash “woke” changes to the subs when humans translate <— with the previous point, now both the pro-AI and anti-ai crowd are unhappy
• data breach (at least one, but I think they had two)
• Funimation customers got fucked since they lost access to purchased content after the merger with Crunchy
• monopolistic tendencies and general corporate greed and tactics
• comment sections got removed because people dared to be negative

And possibly a myriad others. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Crunchy mentioned in a positive way.

I take AI subs over activists rewriting character any day of the week.

As I said, I like isekais, so I’m not trying to shit on the genre, but my working theory is that for a lot of authors, this is used as a narrative crutch. A helper setting that allows them to describe the world in contemporary terms. The dragons were “large as a school bus” instead of “one score feet long and as high as a korrexian wabbit can jump”. Coming up with a working magic system is hard, but saying it’s like video game skills is a lot easier. They might also find writing something that they know easier than tackling something unique for their first steps. And tracing back many animes to the source, it makes sense as well. Many shows start as web novels from hobbyist writers. It’s no wonder they take to the isekai setting. It’s popular, and it makes writing easier. It’s a win-win in that regard.

On the flip side, this also means that many isekais are written by first-time authors writing glorified fan fiction, and it shows in the quality of many shows. So the problem is not the setting but the quality benchmark Kadokawa has for what gets picked up.

Isekai is one of my favorite genres, but man, they really have a low standard of what they publish or adapt.

Finally Lessy. Doesn’t make the rest any better but I try to tune that out.

Where is the Inou Battle mention?

Don’t know about dubs.

If you like the manga then you will love the anime. It’s the best adaptation I’ve ever seen.

Po or angel girl. Forgot the first rule: never bet against an isekai protag.

Î am aware.

I don’t think I can look past the art style.

So people now just show up out of nowhere. And then they just come up with their designs out of nowhere. Same with the pictures and everything else. This WIT adaptation continues to take everything that is earned in the novels, cuts out all the effort and their motivations, and then just shows the results. You know, just like in Rocky where the movie starts with some posturing of Rocky and Creed and then there is a cut to them having bloodied faces in the ring. What that wasn’t how the movie played out? I guess it wasn’t done by this WIT team then. Lucky Rocky fans.

But I do have to say that in this episode, I think the after credits scene about the ordonnanz has a very weird spoiler.

Who cares at this point? The ordonnanzes are all wrong anyway.

Too bad Sayu didn’t get that picture at the end on the train.