I was right about this season being oversubscribed for me, although it’s mostly returning older series or moderately amusing trash. In addition to dropping Oni no Hanayome with violent dislike because it was sexist to the point of icky, I’ve dropped about a half-dozen others for boneheaded protagonists, being too comedic for my taste, or just not grabbing me.

If I drop another, it’ll probably be either Heavy Knight (due to motion-sickness and what felt like a third of the second episode being repeated footage from the first), or Red River (although given the age of the source material, I’m willing to give the main character another ep or two to find her brain and backbone and remove them from storage—being isekai’d is a lot more startling when it isn’t in every other manga/anime/light novel you come across).

I’m not sure which is the best of the season for me so far, because I’m torn between Jaadugar and World Is Dancing. They’re both excellent in their own ways. Sparks of Tomorrow is a distant third (after one episode).

Worst piece of trash that I’m still watching: probably Level 999 Villager. It’s actually worse than an isekai, because the world-building makes zero sense.

Not if you’re prone to motion sickness. 😵‍💫

A quick skim indicates that they’re talking about heavily-cut nonstandard localizations and some kids’ series that weren’t any good the first time around. None of these are classic or groundbreaking (there was kids’ anime on North American network TV before them), they’re just old and mishandled.

This is something of a mixed bag so far.

They spend more than 75% of the first episode setting up the main character’s generic Japanese household and school, something which could (and should) have been done in less than half that time, since it seems like a lot of it isn’t going to be relevant.

Then right at the end, things start to get more interesting and it looks like we might end up with a human-resistance-fighting-aliens story, which was not quite what I expected from the teaser blurb, but could be entertaining. Or not. With the protagonists being so young, it’s hard to tell what age group they’re trying to pitch this to, and that may end up affecting how good this ends up being more than anything internal to the story.

None of the characters grabbed me, so given how oversubscribed this season is for me already, this is probably a drop.

Only about a dozen more premieres to cover before I’m caught up, tra-la-la . . .

See you guys in like 4 years!

Nah, the entire series is only around 500 hours of footage. Plus maybe another 50-60 for the movies and various spin-offs.

Sexist garbage. Worst thing I’ve seen so far this season. Apparently in this show’s universe, a woman has value only if she’s a man’s demon’s appendage. Hard drop.

It used to be more common to keep the source style. My guess is that it’s 25% what’s easiest to draw and 75% branding (that is, whether non-Japanese exec-suite types can tell that it’s anime).

According to livechart.me, this is supposed to start airing in October. Still being made by Studio Pierrot. Other sites might have more information.

Well, yeah, it’s supposed to run through to December. Two consecutive cours.

An interesting study in contrasts: the realistic aftermath of civil war, combined with some almost Warner Bros.-esque slapstick and a sketchily-drawn dance sequence meant (I assume) to emphasise the dancer’s movement over their appearance. Worth following just to see if they can continue pulling this off.

Okay, so. The artwork and animation aren’t tremendous—in fact, I’d go so far as to describe them as “simple” and “old-fashioned”. They could have aired this in the late 1990s and it would have fit right in. The visuals’ redeeming quality is the amount of effort they put into the expressions on the faces of the various non-human characters.

The story so far . . . is more fairytale-like than I was expecting, and also oddly touching. I’ll be continuing with this one for another couple of episodes, I think. At least it isn’t another isekai.

I just rewatched the first season of Gaikotsu Kishi-sama, AKA Skeleton Knight in Another World, over the course of a week or so, to see if it was worth watching the second season (not really; it’s generic reincarnated-as-overpowered-game-character isekai except when they’re making sure we know how eeeeeeevil the bad guys are 'cause they rape, torture, and enslave underaged elven girls, which would explain why I didn’t remember it). I’ll probably do Youjo Senki next for the same reason, but hopefully a better result.

Prior to that, I watched Ayatsuri Sakon, which I’d only seen parts of before, while I was down with bronchitis in March. The fact that I liked both the OP and ED on that one made me feel kind of old, because that hardly ever happens with more recent shows.

And I think it was Suisei no Gargantia that I marathoned this past Christmas.

Ryuumon may value his country’s survival and stability over taking down the Tairas. He strikes me as the type who only dabbles in politics because he’s been promoted to the level where he’s forced to, and if he’s studied history at all, he’d know that civil war is a game where everyone loses, especially when you’ve got aggressive enemies just outside your borders.

Oddly enough they didn’t cover what happened to the Taira snot nosed brat.

My bet is that if they make another cours, he’s going to turn up again, but he was probably just recuperating during the timeframe of the epilogue (interlogue?) Hopefully he’ll have developed a habit of carrying a handkerchief if we do see him again.

I’d have picked “Blue” (the final ED) rather than “Tank!”, but at that point it’s just a matter of taste.

Let’s see here—of the songs on the list, I remember four, although I must have heard three of the others at least once. There’s not just recency bias, but most-popular-series bias. Of course, if someone asked me to make a similar list, most of it would be stuff hardly anyone else remembers.

Silly awards time! (I missed this last season because I was recovering from bronchitis—mea culpa.)

• Worst subtitles award: Snowball Earth. Rendering incoherent noises (including incoherent monster noises) as “Bach!” because there’s a plosive at the beginning has got to be a new low. I presume an LLM went rogue. (And the runner-up would be whatever series keeps using “rouge” where it clearly means “rogue”, but I’m blanking on which one it is.)
• Worst name localization award: Yuusha no Rokkotsu de, whose localized name I steadfastly refuse to use.
• Most interesting animation award: Also Yuusha no Rokkotsu de—I can’t now remember how many different styles they ran through.
• Most unusual character design choices: Nippon Sangoku. The only other series I can think of that’s even remotely comparable is Hyouge Mono, although that had less beard stubble and more odd historical Japanese hairstyles.
• Best dragon award: Himekishi no Barbaroi Yome, narrowly edging out The Beginning After the End due to at least one decently original design. (Reincarnated as a Slime, on the other hand, actually managed to tweak my bad-CGI-dragon meter at one point).
• Most ridiculously melodramatic: Shunkashuutou Daikousha. I’m pretty good at suspension of disbelief, usually, but that phone call was just too much.
• Unexpectedly fun award: Nigetsuri. I almost skipped this altogether, and went in not expecting much, but I enjoyed spending time with Mimi.
• Most edible protagonist: Niwatori Fighter, naturally. (I’m still in awe of how they managed to embed this in a season that—between Yuusha no Rokkotsu de and everyone’s favourite vending machine—made martial artist chickens fighting kaijuu look positively normal.)

Grimgar is quite an intersting choice—older, obscure, downbeat single-cours isekai. Maybe the listmaker read the LNs?

I’d add The Twelve Kingdoms, and possibly The Slayers and Kyo Kara Maoh! to this (there’s plenty in both to explore, but both sometimes drop something silly for purely comedic purposes, like the vegetarian sharks).

Definitely an Ignobel Prize contender.

What do you mean by this? Not enough light on Japanese’s atrocities ?

Might have been that (as far as I can recall, the characters were never in the correct place at the correct time to see most of the evilest stuff), might have been just that the original mangaka was trying for a more nuanced view of the war and so didn’t depict the higher-level Japanese officers as monsters. To be honest, I don’t remember exactly—most of that discussion took place around the time the series first came out.