If someone is wondering what the difference between this and Heroine? Saint? No, I’m an All-Works Maid (And Proud of It)! is: This one is more like a collection of short and heartwarming story vignettes with some occasional overarching plot development connecting them. Think of how Violet Evergarden was structured.

edit.: Strike all that. It’s too early, and my reading comprehension wasn’t turned on yet. Explains at least why all the recommendations were especially shit.

I consider Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day the perfect beginner anime for a couple of reasons:

• short - with only 11 episodes it’s not a huge time investment (compared to multi-cour shows or mammoths with hundreds or thousands of episodes)
• universal - the concepts of the show are universal to every gender and culture. And you don’t need to know or learn any Japan-specific terminology to immediately understand the plot (ie. chuunibyou, shinigami, yokai, etc.).
• everyday people - the show has normal people who are thrown into an uncommon situation, which makes it easy to empathize with the characters.
• likeable characters - self-explanatory.
• believable - the show is juuust outside the norm. Enough to be interesting but not so far-fetched that every little thing is a new concept watchers have to wrap their heads around.
• instant hook - the show’s hook is near-instant. No “it gets good after 10 episodes” or “once the X arc starts in episode 180 it’s really great”.

Yes. Why wouldn’t he?

I had forgotten how funny Jean is. Fran is Fran.

The only positive thing I can say about this is that after next week they will have two years to remove the current staff and get their shit together. Better yet, get another studio entirely. Is KyoAni doing something at the moment?

I reread that part. This is just yet another example of the adaptation not giving a shit. In the light novel, Lessy is on his side, and Myne stands up, with her upper body half outside the window since Lessy is only half as wide as she is tall. That’s when she gets grabbed by the light rope and is pulled out of the window. The size of Lessy is the same in the anime, so there was absolutely nothing holding the adaptation back from doing the same here. But instead, they opted to have her climb out of the safety of Lessy like some idiot. At least they are consistent, since they prove in every single episode that they neither read the source material nor understood it.

Summer '26 wasn’t a very good season for me. I had high hopes for a lot of shows, but the anime adaptations were lackluster. The frontrunner in this regard is Bookworm Part 3. But also, Livid Lady and Victoria of Many Faces were just bad adaptations. Even Grand Blue was not funny to me, but that was mostly true for the last season as well.

The only show I was looking forward to that didn’t disappoint was Frontier Lord. The animation was nothing to write home about, but at least it stuck to the pace and plot of the light novel. It might have been too slow for anime-onlies, and making the few action scenes a sakuga-fest would have been nice, but I’m happy with what we got.

For the new-to-me shows, I only really enjoyed Chainsmoker Cat and Dara-San. Those two were great, though, but in the end I would just give those 3 shows my stamp of approval. So, not the best season, and the next one looks even weaker for my taste. I hope there will be some surprise hits for me.

The World’s Strongest Witch - the premise sounds interesting and I’m hearing a lot of positive opinions. Could be fun

For what it’s worth, here is what I wrote about the first LN volume. TL;DR: don’t put too much hope into it.

#I’m Looking For a Zombie - from the author of Hitoribocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu

The better Bocchi. There, I said it!.

Nia Liston is fun. I hope the adaptation will be good.

No. Execution is the only valid punishment if the retard was a fair Aub. Others get executed for less. Including children.

Realistically, the blame lies less on Wilfried than on Veronica and Sylvester, who raised him poorly.

Well, they didn’t raise him at all. That’s the problem.

From Part3, Volume 5:

The plot was fairly devious, if you asked me: Wilfried had essentially been raised by his grandmother since birth, so it only made sense that he would love her more and consider her more trustworthy than his actual mother, who had only recently been given the opportunity to regularly interact with him. Veronica had his unconditional trust, and it stood to reason that he would welcome her guidance in a situation like this.

Letting him run free around nobles of all factions? Ridiculous. Oswald should have been instantly fired for allowing this to happen, at the very least.

Oswald did have his eyes on him until he was relieved by Linhardt.

“Nothing abnormal happened while I was there,” Oswald responded, “and I stayed with him until Linhardt came to relieve me.”

Linhardt had desperately run around trying to keep up with Wilfried and his friends, but at one point, he tripped over and fell hard enough to hurt his legs. While Linhardt was being treated, Wilfried was looked after by his friends’ attendants.

It’s not being said specifically, but I assume that tripping Linhardt was also part of the plan to get Wilfried out form under his attendants eyes. I have enough problems with Oswald as a retainer for Wilfried, but in this case he’s blameless for once.

I have HanaKana’s B-bAAAKAAA!! as my text notification.

Should have executed that fucker. If it had been anyone else’ kid they would have been on the chopping block the moment they said they entered the tower. But because it’s that stupid retard’s son he gets a slap on the wrist.

I want to see the P.A.Works version of guy who gets kicked out of the heroes’ party.

When it’s good, it’s my second favorite genre, so I consume a lot of it. Sadly, it’s mostly bad. Most of the time, it’s just a crutch for the author to explain the world to the reader/watcher in modern terms and as blatant self-insert pandering. It’s very seldom that the isekai aspect has actual ramifications on the plot. Most isekai would just as well work as a fantasy where the main character just so happens to be born with a special power. The Earth knowledge of most MC’s doesn’t really play into the narrative.

As for good examples, I would recommend Ascendance of a Bookworm. I have problems with the anime adaptation (a whole different can of worms, and once I start, I won’t stop again), but it’s the opposite of a power fantasy (she nearly dies from climbing a flight of stairs), and her modern-day knowledge is her only superpower and her motivation. Without her Earth knowledge, she wouldn’t have the motivation that drives the entire plot, and she wouldn’t have the means to rise above her station.

Depends on how you want to interpret the question. Is it about adapting the story of a specific game, or is it about adapting the setting of a game into anime form. Nier would be the former, Edgerunner the latter. Goblin Slayer is something in between. So regardless of how the question was meant, I gave a example.

It’s my favorite anime. My one and only anime that I would give an 11/10. But I wouldn’t call it cozy because there is an underlying darkness and uncertainty to the characters and what’s going to happen to them. It doesn’t feel “cozy” even though nothing “un-cozy” is happening plot-wise.

Goblin Slayer, NieR:Automata Ver1.1a, and Cyberpunk Edgerunners come to mind.

And take Dragon’s Dogma and the Persona animes as a template for what not to do.

Series that lack characters acting out of malice and plots without perilous situations. On the other hand, even shows that are usually cozy can, out of nowhere, turn into the most brutal betrayal that shellshocks generations of viewers.

I have only seen the first episode of Kimi to Boku and am not familiar with Hetelia from memory, but Daily Lives of High School Boys is a prime example about how boys centric show would generally follow more raunchy themes. If the other two shows are different and genuninely show innocent themes, then I would call them outliers more than the rule. Same as with outliers to girls being depicted as innocent. Sure there are girls that play on the gap-moe bit those are the outliers (and lets be honest here, they are more often then not just there to deliver some innuendo joke).