#now playing

Quickly burned through this one because I have also read some of the manga (like, 12 volumes of it) and the anime made some changes early on. 

The thing is, the manga is already… I read it because I think the art style is cute and it’s easy to leaf through. But the plot is the most basic thing possible, and the characters are completely flat. Not a single character has any real meat to their backstory, goals, interactions, etc. In fact, most of them lack those things. 

What the anime did was compress A Lot, especially in the early chapters so they could put to the first demon appearance at the end of the first episode. The first episode overall had the most changes, including a heavier emphasis on the (quote unquote) main couple, which actually led to Matthias seeming to have a rather different personality. 

Fortunately, this evens out in the rest of the show, where they’re more faithful to the manga. 

They definitely made an effort to create clearer plotline throughout, with the demon stuff, but tbh the manga just didn’t give them much to work with. The characters are seriously just completely flat, you can’t do much there. Unfortunately, the production values are also very average, so it can’t really hold up during fight scenes. 

It’s a very whatever show, in the end. I do appreciate that they have a consistent little team, at least. That’s cute. 

alternative27angel

I tried watching/reading this one! Yeah, the utter disconnect between Kumoko and the rest of the characters made the two storylines feel like they had no reason to be involved with each other ever, and the edgy deconstruction on EVERYONE made the story in general seem rather pointless.

Around S2, it becomes clearer. We always more or less knew that the kids and Kumoko were from the same reincarnation incident, and toward the end of S1, it’s revealed that there’s a 15 year offset between them (they were all born together, but spiders don’t need time to grow lol). 

Once you get around end of S1, start of S2, you get that old magician’s perspective on an encounter with Kumoko, the explanation that the dragon girl came from the egg Kumoko had found early on, Kumoko meeting the vampire baby and then seeing the same girl grown up… and you also get the fakeout that Kumoko got a human form and became the Demon King, plus the thematical (quote-unquote) stuff about how Shun had it too easy because he got to grown up in a stable, prosperous kingdom while others in their group had to struggle, but actually all of the reincarnators are “living on hard mode” as Kumoko puts it, etc etc

S1 definitely suffers somewhat from the tonal disconnect, but imo the anime wasn’t really wrong to move this stuff up. Otherwise, it would probably take even longer to start converging. 

The bigger issue is that they didn’t include anything to make the human(oid) cast like… interesting or likeable or engaging in any way? I’ve dropped other shows for similar issues, where they just kind of chug away at their plot, but I just Do Not Care (recent example, “Seirei Gensouki: Spirit Chronicles"). I can let that kind of thing play in the background if it’s just bland, but if everyone is also annoying… well. 

The other issue for me personally is simply that I don’t vibe with this kind of tone. The human sections and the overall future of the show post-grinding is basically Overlord. It’s just that Overlord skipped all the grinding by using Momonga’s game avatar to make him OP from the start. 

I didn’t exactly love Overlord, so… 

I had watched like 4 episodes when this first came out, and I decided to continue it now because I remember the anime making some changes from the manga, and I wanted to compare it to how Sleepy Princess handled it (which made some imo really good choices on the adaptation). 

I got to this episode 14 and realized I just do not care about any of the storylines we’ve got going, lol. 

So the thing about I’m A Spider is that the manga starts out with just Kumoko’s grinding storyline, for 6+ volumes (which is how much I read). It’s just her, killing things and leveling up to become OP without anyinteractions until D’s short phone call. 

This is whatever in the manga because you can flip through it very quickly and Kumoko’s internal narration has good energy, but the anime decided that this would not roll in adaptation. The entire thing wouldn’t have been helped by how bad a lot of the monster CGI looks, so they probably weren’t entirely off. 

So what they did was move forward (I assume, I didn’t get to this in the manga, but I think this isn’t purely new material) the storyline about the rest of the reincarnated class… which takes place 15+ years after Kumoko’s section. 

However, the first problem you get is that these two storylines don’t really mesh well. They don’t feel like two halves of one story. The tone and the focus is just too different. 

The second problem is that, frankly, neither storyline suits my tastes. 

Kumoko is just grinding endlessly until you become totally broken cheat level, and then you can go fight gods while info dumping about the messed up system of this specific setting. This is a fairly common thing in modern isekai, but it’s really just not very interesting. It’s a shounen training arc except extended for volumes upon volumes, and then it’s DBZ powercreep at its worst, but you skipped through everything that came before. The vast gap in power just makes the entire thing detached and bland. 

And then the class storyline has way too many characters that aren’t given any smaller arcs to make them interesting or distinguishable, until they run head first into the edgy “deconstruction” that I don’t care for. There is a Hero! But he gets betrayed because Politics! He’s framed and an outcast, his brainwashed brocon little sister blows his father’s brains out in front of him, the church is corrupt, blah blah blah

I just don’t care, man. 

It’s not necessarily the adaptation’s fault (their changes weren’t entirely smoothly integrated but were probably not a bad choice), but the content just becomes increasingly disinteresting to me, and the anime quality is rather mediocre, which just makes the entire experience that much more tedious. 

Very light but good.

I read some of the manga for this and ultimately dropped it for getting too repetitive, since it had no plot at all and was just sleep-related hijinks (I don’t remember where I dropped myself, but the manga has hundreds of chapters). 

However, the anime does a good job of either heavily compressing what happens later in the manga or just making up whole cloth a small but present storyline throughout. Two of them, actually, with one being the demons getting more used to and attached to the princess as time goes by, and the other being about human-demon relations (the opening narration in particular starts this from the very first ep). The two come together pretty well in the last ep. 

As far as the humor goes, it’s okay. There was one point where they got me and I burst out laughing, though I don’t remember which joke it was. 

I completely forgot this entire sequence from the manga, though the wiki confirms it was there (chapter 6). 

I think this is my favorite episode so far. It’s just so ridiculous, and yet has so many cute details, like Yor in the background all the time, waving drunkenly, or Anya’s deadpan “save me” delivery. The best part though is definitely Loid. He’s SO embarrassed by all this. At the same time, he also keep nitpicking about the supposed plot - why is there a witch, why does she use physical attacks, why does Anya call him dad at the end when he’s supposed to be the Bondman stand-in… Oh Loid. 

Second best was Franky’s dedication to being as over the top in the role as possible. Third best was the agents who are all like “I don’t know what’s going on here, but if I get to fight Twilight-senpai, then I’m in.” 

On the whole, the adaptation has been quite nice so far. It seems they’re doing roughly one chapter per episode (which makes sense since the chapters are quite long and there isn’t much stuff that can be compressed), so I guess the first season will probably end on Yuri’s introduction? He’s in the ED, and the chapter counts to the end of his arc line up almost perfectly, up to halfway through chapter 14, it seems like. (After that is the little merit stars stuff.)  

Currently, the manga has just passed 60 chapters, so there’s definitely enough content for several seasons. But given the production values and such, they definitely won’t be consecutive, even if they are greenlit. On the one hand, it’s nice that they won’t overtake the manga before it’s finished, but on the other hand, it’s also unlikely that the entire story will be adapted in the end. Which is too bad, I’d like to watch it all, haha. 

6 episodes of the OVA, 14 episodes of the TV anime, 12 more episodes of Dash. It was an interesting experience, in a sense. 

All three series are made on the basis of the same manga… in theory. But they are all extremely different, in tone and just in terms of the basic stuff like character roles and personalities. If there is anything I would compare it to, I guess maybe the various takes on Tenchi Muyo? 

In terms of tone, the TV anime is pure fluff with nothing serious at all, Dash tries to be serious with only some really weirdly placed comedy, and the OVA probably goes most similar to the manga (I assume) and is kind of in the middle. 

But another way to look at the differences is in terms of the emotional focus, which generally expresses in what relationship is focused on in the climax. 

For the OVA, it’s the Natsume-Mishima family and more specifically Nuku Nuku’s attempts to reconcile Akiko to heal the fracture within the family. So the final episode has Akiko finally acknowledge Nuku Nuku (”who would have thought a robot could have such a kind heart”) in between the robot of the weak. The OVA generally comes off as the most cohesive version because everything ties into the family, whether it’s Nuku Nuku’s origins, Mishima corporation, the main conflicts, etc. 

For the TV anime, it’s the relationship between Nuku Nuku and her high school class. Most of the hijinks throughout the series feature the class members, and the climax has Nuku Nuku reveal that she’s a robot to everyone, at which point they confirm that they accept her as she is (because they’d already figured it out, she’s not subtle). The TV anime probably suffers most from the fact that the classmates are all kind of boring one-note cliches, so the hijinks that make up basically the entire series are generally just not very interesting. Even so, some of the humor can work at times. 

For Dash, it’s (sigh) the romance between Nuku Nuku and aged up Ryunosuke. The problem is that, unlike the other two which were comedy fluff with some character moments, Dash is plot-focused. And the plot is about Mishima and their various unethical experiments. (My face when the second to last episode started going on about the founder keeping himself alive with illegal genetic modification and the board of directors being clones) Except that Dash removed Ryunosuke’s connection as Nuku Nuku’s owner, Kyusaku as the creator of the robot body, Akiko as the founder’s daughter…

You could also say the focus is Nuku Nuku’s self-actualization and choosing to go beyond just following the orders of her creator, but her creator only shows up in the last two episodes, while she peppers in a lot of “Ryunosuke-san” in her dialogue and her “last memories” are all of Ryunosuke. Plus, they made a very deliberate choice to age him up because it was explicitly a romantic relationship they wanted to push (and Ryunosuke is the narrator most of the time), so it’s like… the most important thing is Nuku Nuku’s self-actualization, but we’re going to see it through the lens of this horny teenager who has the hots for her and she kind of comes to like him too. I guess it’s a kind of “finding a lover is proof of achieving adulthood and moving beyond the parents” thing…? 

Except, you see, the romance is, uh, not good. Ryunosuke is a whiny, self-centered brat who likes Nuku Nuku based on love at first sight and a whole lot of horny. Nuku Nuku spends most of the series being extremely naive, submissive and kind of weepy because her memories were sealed. Their relationship really comes across as tepid at best, and Ryunosuke’s detachment from the plot focus gets really noticeable toward the end. He can’t react to the robot reveal because there’s no time and he can’t even say anything meaningful about Nuku Nuku’s personal crisis and choices because he has no direction to approach it from. He’s the POV and his relationship with her is the most important one, but the actual meat of the story is her personal choice, which he has no participation in, but he’s gotta be in the last scenes, so……. yeah. 

With this kind of confused and split focus, Dash comes out the worst of the three. (The fanservice doesn’t help.) Funny enough, it’s also the one furthest from the manga, so I wonder what that could mean. 

The absolutely funniest, most ridiculous thing in modern novels/comics is when the transmigrator MC looks at the OG protag of whatever world they ended up in and goes 

“This self-insert power fantasy to make the readers feel cool is TOO COOL, I can’t relate! I want to prove how cool I am by ruining everything he would have achieved!” 

“He’s too OP! Fate is on his side, it’s unfair! Ignore my OP system giving me cheats, I am the real relatable one here, don’t you see” 

This weird envy and hate toward standard protag types and the desire to supplant them is just bizarre and hilarious. The personality-less self-inserts are just not patheticenough for some guys to project on, I guess??

On the subject of Blossoming Blade, I haven’t read a lot of the murim stuff, but I’ve read a couple now. 

Here are the ones I enjoyed and still follow: 

Doctor’s Rebirth

It’s very power fantasy isekai/transmigration, but I do like that the MC is a doctor and has a very doctor drive to help patients, even he tries to logic himself out of it. It’s also impressively gay (though I assume it’s not really intended to be that way). The MC has managed to get two boyfriends fighting over him already, and he’s full UST with a third. Godspeed, you dumbass. 

I’m a Martial Art Villainess, but I’m the Strongest!

(The link it just to the scanlation site, because they keep doing something to make bookmarked URLs not work.)

The title hits the main points. There’s power levelling, politics, and romance, it’s got everything. Also, the ML has the biggest tiddies. 

Precious Daughter of the Greatest Martial Arts Villain

The usual “reborn as the baby daughter of a whackjob, time to act cute to survive” but in a murim setting. The dad is hot though, very my type. Jokes aside, it’s a pretty cute story on the whole. 

Bonus: Special shoutout to SSS-Class Suicide Hunter which is doing a take on the murim setting in its current arc. 

I’m only putting this separately because I don’t have a list to add it to lol

This is just a comedy series based on the tokusatsu aesthetic, similar to Love Before World Domination (though very different direction). This kind of thing is fairly common, and Kuroitsu isn’t particularly outstanding. 

But it’s fine at what it does imo. There were a few segments I particularly enjoyed, like the last part of ep 9 about the retired heroes and villains, and the last episode is a fairly satisfying (if deeply cheesy) conclusion, with the overseas company trying to horn in on these idiots’ territory and everyone coming together to fight them off. I also like that Kuroitsu just directly wants to become an executive, since it’s weirdly rare for protags to have goals if they aren’t shounen leads. Good on her! 

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the music is very catchy. There is one specific track that just keeps looping in my head, and the OP/ED tracks are very… concentrated anime but in a good way. 

The hit list: 

1. Skeleton Knight in Another World

Ep 3, dropped. Its crimes are countless. Starts with sexual assault, rendered in loving detail and lingered on. Continues with a rather convoluted and contrived excuse for why the MC is OP. MC is also bland. Continues on with the female lead being stupidly confrontational, and adds on to its sins by going “look how strong she is, she doesn’t need help just like she said!” except you can just smell she’ll need help in a minute because how else will the MC wiggle into her good graces. And she does… with more sexual violence. Good times. 

Aside from that, it tries (rather limply) to do a kind of old school vibe with the opening song and the spell title cards. Think like… old super robot anime. That kind of thing. But they can’t really carry it through, and it’s not nearly enough to excuse everything else. 

Overall mediocre and run of the mill, but I have better things to spend my time on, even as background noise. 

2. The Greatest Demon Lord Is Reborn as a Typical Nobody

Ep 3, dropped. This one is mostly just too stupid. I’ve seen a few shows with this premise of “the MC was super OP, but he decided to ‘reincarnate’ into the future because reasons and now everyone is amazed by this magic super child who is the hottest shit.” This one is like… whatever, but it is the most mediocre harem focus. 

The concepts seem interesting, but I can tell they’ll never get past the stupid way they’re being presented. All this did was remind me of this one Monster High School show where the main girl was a pink-haired vampire with a cool alterego and the MC started to become a vampire too and the second girl was a succubus… it was a much better show. The character designs were also much better than this pathetic mess. 

Bonus mention to how much this show cannot handle its own premise. “Typical nobody” but his dad is a super mage and everyone actively refers to him as the son of a great mage, by ep3 he’s announcing himself boldly so everyone will know his name and casually showing overpowered magic… And not even getting into how people from his old era are still around but somehow the magic from back then is treated as a secret lost art. 

3. The Dawn of the Witch

Ep 3, ongoing… for now. Though not precisely on its own merits. 

This shows is like… it has a fairly good concept, being not an OP protag power fantasy and not being set in a school, with a main cast that has specific backstories and personalities and a setting I at least understand and don’t mind. 

But the pacing. The pacing is such a mess. I don’t know if this is an adaptation issue, but you cannot just drop two tragic backstories and a big betrayal in episode 2 and think it’s going to work, on an emotional level. 

However, since beginnings are hard, I’m tentatively willing to see how it goes further in. 

4. RPG Real Estate

Ep 3, dropped. This one isn’t bad, actually. But it’s just “cute girls doing cute things,” and I am not interested in that. The fantasy setting is nice in theory, but it’s just too off from my tastes. 

5. Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs

Ep 1, dropped. Lasted about 10 minutes and then I’m out. I don’t need this moron with an inferiority complex (and the author with presumably the same) wasting my time shitting on a genre made for girls to begin with. 

But I will say this: you should have just put the game on auto for the dialogue and looked up a guide for everything else. If you had so much trouble clearing it when it looks turn-based, that’s on you. 

6. Love After World Domination

Ep 3, ongoing. I’ve actually read the manga for this. The anime adaptation is pretty good so far. Special mention to the transformation voice announcement and also the way they draw the thighs and asses on the guys. 

That aside, it’s just a fluffy rom-com. It’s kind of nice to see such an uncomplicated romance sometimes. 

7. SPY x FAMILY

Ep 3, ongoing. Good as expected. God, Anya is so dumb, I love her. 

Going forward the two biggest questions will be whether they can keep the pacing from being too slow or too fast, and how they’ll end the season, since the manga is still ongoing. But so far at least I’m pleasantly surprised by how solid the adaptation is. 

8. Ascendance of a Bookworm, S3

Ep 3 (ep29), ongoing. Bookworm is still Bookworm in the new season, without too much difference, though they are entering a new arc with more scheme-y political stuff. I enjoy it as a medium engagement show - I pay some attention to what’s going on, but I’m not super into it emotionally. It’s nice and rather different from the isekais we usually get animated. 

—-

….And that’s about everything new this season that I’m planning to try. 

Not much survived, and something else will probably bite the dust in a few more weeks, but for now I’ll go and find something else to marathon while waiting for new eps, haha. 

Wanted: a person to cuddle with