Nice mix of cute and funny, just as I’ve come to expect now.

The whole gimmick of the supposed BL manga being pretty much just shounen action and the admonition that “you have to find BL for yourself” was amusingly meta. And the fact that the flowers that appeared in the background behind each girl’s head were actually real in-universe and you could hear them bouncing off of Poem’s head and burying her in an avalanche made me laugh out loud.

And I smile every time Poem’s mom is on-screen. She’s just so adorable and so sweet and such an ongoing embarrassment for Poem.

I think it’s coming together well.

The first couple of episodes were just a barrage of surreal imagery and quick cuts and bits of disjointed narrative, but it started taking more time after about the third episode, sort of backing and filling and connecting all those disjointed bits of imagery and narrative, so we’re getting to know the cast - both the avatars and the people behind them - and learning more about who and what they really are. It’s still relatively surreal and still has a lot of quick cuts and such, but it’s building context so that it’s all making more sense. And most of the sense it’s making is not pleasant - in that at least it’s definitely sort of Lain-ish.

Nothing this season has really knocked my socks off.

The OP for Akane Banashi is the first thing that comes to mind, but that’s as much about the animation as the song.

In that vein too, the OP for Needy Girl Overdose is pretty impressive. The song itself is actually sort of abrasive, but in combination with the visuals, it just about perfectly captures the spirit of the series.

And… that’s really about it.

Dammit - they’re going to redeem that foul old bastard, aren’t they?

Yeah - that one struck me as suspect at best.

I don’t doubt that it really is a criticism that’s being floated now, but I think it’s much more likely that that’s just AI pimps sensing an opportunity rather than an actual criticism made by people who were actually involved.

Not only is it the case that AI couldn’t do anything about mismanagement of budget, but AI couldn’t even really do much of anything at all, since all of the roles that AI can play in that sort of production have been filled in the anime industry for years or even decades now by purpose-built software. So to the degree that the problem might be a failure to use technological tools, it still wouldn’t be a failure to use AI specifically, since they wouldn’t have used AI anyway - they would’ve used the tools that already existed back when AI was still just a techbro fantasy.

Watched this all the way through twice (and English-subbed) last night, and it was… odd.

A good illustration of the likely source of a lot of their bankrupting costs:

There’s a scene in which one character is writing on a piece of paper.

A normal production would’ve likely left the paper and the off hand static and used two or maybe three short loops of generic hand motions for the writing hand.

This one used a complex and undoubtedly accurate single set of writing hand motions (complete with shifting positions of the pencil in the hand) and dynamic movement of the off hand and the paper, even going so far as to show the off hand shifting in such a way that it twisted the paper and created a wrinkle. And all of that for something that was essentially just a backdrop to the conversation that was the actual focus of the scene.

It was very impressive, but hardly necessary.

The even more notable oddity to me though was that all of the exquisite animation was in service of a cute girls doing cute things school slice of life with a side of girls love - sort of a cross between Lucky Star and YuruYuri.

So even beyond the oddity of investing that much obvious time and effort and care (and budget) into lush animation - they invested all of that into animating a lightweight CGDCT SOL, which seems doubly pointless.

I liked it though, and to some degree specifically because of the budgeting thing. Just as far as CGDCT SOLs go, it was only okay. It didn’t really compare with the classics, but it was at least as good as the run of the mill (I liked it better than Ichijouma Mankitsu Gurashi, for instance).

But there’s something sort of quixotic about it. Looking at the incredibly complex and subtle animation of a skirt fluttering in the breeze or a character’s hair shifting with every little movement of their head, I can’t help but be impressed. It’s all sort of pointless, and as it turned out, unfortunate, but it’s still sort of admirable.

All right - I’m going to have to sit down and watch this all the way through sometime later, but after a quick browse (and not having read the story), did this literally bankrupt the studio? Like the budget for this is what killed them?

Because with the little I watched, I think I believe it. What I saw of it at least, the animation goes beyond amazing and into a realm that’s almost ridiculous. There’s so much detail and it’s all so smooth and nothing is ever static - there’s constant little changes of expression and movements of hair and hands and flutters of cloth and so on - just an obsessive amount of detail.

Mm… yeah. I think you’re right - that’s the difference.

Seo in the manga is sort of quietly socially awkward - he gets a strained look on his face and thinks to himself about how he’d rather be at home or whatever, and the girls have come to recognize when he’s feeling that way, but that’s about the extent of it. But in this (like with Genichirou in this episode) he keeps going all the way to that full-blown stammering and screeching panic.

And yeah - thinking about it, they got the kind and considerate side of his personality pretty much right - like his interactions with Sayu in this episode.

It seems out of balance because the socially awkward part is too over-the-top.

It’s that much more unfortunate because they’ve shown that they can do balance with Ijichi. She’s sort of balanced in the same way that he is - at first, she seems like the stereotypical brash, loud, genki blonde gyaru, but she’s actually more thoughtful and reserved (and smart) than that. And I think they’ve done a good job with her. Not so much him though.

I didn’t expect this series to be such an emotional rollercoaster. And we still don’t know what the story is between Koyun and Igarashi.

It’s sort of funny that even after seeing things from Minato’s point of view and getting some insight into how he actually thinks, he’s still irritating when it pulls back to a purely external view of him.

I’d ship Yota and Koyun too…

That was mostly good, but sort of disappointing.

Somehow they aren’t getting Seo quite right. He’s neatly balanced in the manga - he’s undeniably an otaku, but he’s not as awkward and cringey as a stereotypical otaku would be in the sort of situations in which he finds himself (like going to the beach with two gals). He manages to generally function okay. But he never shifts too far away from his basic otakudom - it’s still there - it’s just not overwhelming. It’s one of the things that has impressed me about the manga - when it started, I didn’t think there was any way it could work, just because a stereotypical otaku would never be able to actually pull that off. But he manages to do it, and without moving too far away from the otaku identity. Again, he’s neatly balanced.

But they don’t seem to be getting that balance quite right in the adaptation. I’m not sure why, but he seems more to be shifting back and forth between the two personality types rather than balancing them, and it makes for an odd sort of mood whiplash that mostly doesn’t exist in the manga.

It’s still enjoyable, but it’s not quite doing the manga justice.

I haven’t sorted out the extent of it yet, but it seems that most of the reason their personalities are different is that Nao isn’t a perfect mental copy of Sunao - only a perfect physical copy. Her thoughts and memories are her own. IIRC there is some transference - when Nao is summoned, she doesn’t have to catch up with Sunao - she knows basically what’s going on currently. But there are missing details - for instance, it appeared that Nao wasn’t even sure who Hayase-senpai was at first, while Sunao knew exactly who he was and had apparently had some sort of confrontation with him already.

And it appears that Sunao doesn’t know anything about Nao - that all she gets is whatever she’s told.

Which as I think about it, oddly puts Nao in a sort of stronger position - Sunao shares at least some details with Nao essentially automatically, but Nao doesn’t seem to share with Sunao at all - the only way Sunao knows what’s going on in Nao’s life is if she tells her.

I assume that sort of thing is a lot of what it’s going to get into over time. Even though they’re nominally the same, there are actually a lot of differences between the two.

Great episode.

I wondered how they were going to deal with that cliffhanger from last episode - I expected some sort of last second rescue or something. But they took a completely different tack that immediately made a disturbing sort of sense, then instead of just treating it as a sort of deus ex machina and going on, they folded that into the plot too.

And the scene with asshole-senpai was very satisfying.

And Ricchan knew about Nao all along. But of course she did, really, just as she said.

And I can’t wait to find out what’s next.

Good episode.

It was pretty much a gimme how it was going to work out, but it was still nice to see.

And this coming arc is going to be momentous…

This is sort of quietly becoming one of my favorites of the season.

The basic setup is really simple, but it’s playing out more subtly than that would imply. And Bertia is such a great character - she’s so kind and generous and earnest that she’s determined to be a proper villainess so that the heroine can win in the end, and she’s so kind and generous and earnest that she just sucks at actually being a villainess.

One would think though that with all of her experience with otome games, she’d recognize all of the flags that she and Cecil both keep running up. Probably she’s just so focused on the way the game is “supposed” to play out that she can’t see the way it really is playing out.

Suzuki cameo! That was very cool.

More broadly, this episode was a brilliant storytelling choice - it was exactly what the series needed here. It’d reached the point that Minato was just about completely intolerable, but then, by showing everything from his point of view instead of Koyun’s, it completely flipped things. Within mere minutes, Minato had already gone from an annoying ass to a sympathetic figure trying his best and awkwardly failing.

It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

Holy crap.

As if the first half of that twist wouldn’t have already been enough by itself, they twisted the twist.

This series is impressing the hell out of me. I can’t even guess where it’s going to go from here.

Aaahhh… 😊

This series is just such a pleasure. It’s not breaking any new ground - it’s just a sort of boke and tsukkomi slow-burn romance with a great supporting cast. And it looks great too - the art style is sort of a cross between Baka to Test and Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop, and it’s very effective.

It’s just a nice balance of comfy and odd, and never fails to make me smile.

The standout last week for me was the final episode of Release That Witch. The series overall has been a revelation - it’s well-written, with interesting and well-defined characters and solid and effective, if not exceptional, art and sound, all of which is just that much more impressive because it’s a donghua. And for a series that has gone on far beyond what could be adapted into a single season, the “ending” was just about perfect - neatly wrapping up the immediate issues, and setting the stage for much more to come. I can’t imagine it won’t get at least a second season, and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

This is settling down nicely.

Well - “settling down” might not be quite the right phrase, but after opening with a barrage of surreal imagery, free associated dialogue and disjointed slices of the lives behind the streamers, it’s slowing down a bit and focusing more, and filling in some of the gaps. Which is just as it should be.

I liked how unique Shaft art direction was, back before they killed its uniqueness by repeating it over and over and over and over and over and…

Looking forward to Shoushimin. I expect I’ll start it either tonight or sometime tomorrow (I still have a couple of current series to catch up on).