I remember they announced this immediately after the end of the first season. I enjoyed the first season, but it had its ups and downs. It always managed to stay unpredictable though. Is it an isekai? a fantasy? magical girls? The show decided to be all of those things at once.

Lots of the Otome Villainess genre these days has some element of court drama. Stuff like broken engagements, high-stakes tea parties, and spilled drinks on ball gowns are part and parcel with the genre, though they also tend to inject quite a bit of humor. Each of them have their own spin on things though, whether that be a unique magic system or what have you. Some recent ones I enjoyed would be I’ll Become a Villainess Who Goes Down in History, Villainess Level 99 (more on the humorous side), Endo and Kobayashi Live!, and Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion (a bit more serious).

You can check out the Royal Affairs tag on AniList to get a browseable list of royal-inclined anime, but it isn’t going to be limited to Western-inspired courts since shows like The Apothecary Diaries or My Happy Marriage would also be listed there despite being set in China and Japan respectively.

A bit of a curveball is that a lot of the gundam or other space opera type series tend to have a large focus on political intrigue in addition to the battles. I remember that being a big theme when I watched Gundam Wing as well as Escaflowne and I have heard people say the same about Legend of the Galactic Heroes (but I haven’t seen that one).

I saw this from my ani.social account since I tend to just browse the local feed there, but saw that lemmy ui choked on the video. So, I went over to piefed.social to see how much work it was going to be to fix how piefed handles posts like this, just to see that everything went smoothly and the video preview plays just fine.

Crisis averted!

I’m really looking forward to this one. I adore the manga and seeing the pure, concentrated weirdness of these two in anime form will be great.

The post flair situation on piefed.social is a bit of a transient one. I had originally made the flairs as a bit of an experiment to see how the piefed/lemmy interop worked with them. The tl;dr is that it is pretty janky at the moment because lemmy will forward flair information in some cases and not in others. This should all be improved once lemmy 1.0 comes out. When that happens, the post flair will be created/standardized on the lemmy side since that is the community’s home instance.

I was really happy to have something cheery and well-executed to turn towards with all the darkness in the world these days.

This is exactly what I wanted out of City and it delivered completely. I often will turn on an episode or two of Nichijou when I feel like shutting off the world a bit. I foresee myself doing the same with City in the future now as well. This was also my AOTS.

I can’t wait for the movie.

Same!

I was also surprised at how much I liked the show. I had somehow managed to avoid spoiling the cold open to episode 1 for myself and found myself cracking up during the first OP. I am never not impressed by Kotaro and the voice acting performance by Mamoru Miyano. His lectures at the chalkboard totally give off the feeling that the director basically just told him to let it rip and the rest of the show just tries to keep up.

About Mushishi - I will preface this by saying that I love the heck out of the show. I actually agree with your point #2. I think Gingko feels like the average person wouldn’t understand mushi or would just be frightened of something they couldn’t see, even if they understood it better. However, I agree with you that he could have at least tried more.

Related to that, I think your fourth point is related to something that I found interesting in that the preventative measures in the setting of Mushishi often took the form of superstition or local myth. Things like don’t cross this mountain after dark or don’t store food in this building that are just common knowledge among the locals, but they don’t really understand why. Well, it turns out that the actual why is often because otherwise you will interact with mushi in a bad way. It reminds me of how religions basically created supernatural origins and explanations for physical phenomena that were not understood at the time.

I think your points 1 and 3 are intentional elements of the setting. I think the author just wanted to slowly wander around through this world and take it in. To a large degree, that is all that Gingko is doing through the story. There are some episodes where he is traveling to a place for a stated purpose, but more often than not, he just happens to be passing through for no particular reason that we know of.

I loved this show. It was so needlessly well produced. Probably one of the darkest comedies I have seen in some time.

The manga is great as well.

I kind of feel like this was a missed opportunity to have Ponko replace Yachiyo in the OP.

I am traveling right now, so I am going to keep it short. I wasn’t really feeling this episode for a while. Yachiyo going through a rebellious phase (no matter how hilarious or well animated it was) felt a bit out of character to me. However, they brought me back around with the emotional exchange between the two. I am going to miss this show when it is over.

This show is taking its time with the later parts of this story despite going a bit faster early on and I think it is paying off. Honestly, despite the obvious lack of budget/production available for this show, they have done a fantastic job with the adaptation. They have changed up the order and pacing to better suit the medium, leading to some great moments.

I’m traveling, so I am going to keep this short. This episode was probably the best produced episode all season. I have absolutely loved this show. Even having read the manga, this show has elevated the source to such a high level it has been a joy. I will miss this when it ends.

This episode was certifiably nuts. The production on this show has been phenomenal when it has no need to be. It’s been something special all season.

Also, this is neither here nor there, but I have been trying out piefed lately and it’s pretty cool. Thanks to the devs over there, the anime community should be a lot more compatible with piefed going forward thanks to squashing a couple bugs I found from our use cases. Specifically, piefed users should now enjoy:

• Images on episode discussion threads don’t disappear when I edit in a screenshot submitted by a user (relevant issue)
• Clips submitted to the community will no longer break the UI in Tile or Wide Tile view (relevant issue)