Anime:

Sakamoto Days was great. It’s gorgeously animated and as creative and unflinchingly silly as JoJo. Easy A.

Beheneko is a flaming trainwreck that I keep wanting to do a dedicated review/rant thread about because it’s just so awful on every level in a way that’s pure spectacle. It’s reincarnation fantasy slop about a generic hero in a generic fantasy world reincarnating as a tiny behemoth kitten which looks like just a normal cat, and then horrifyingly becomes a harem show because every single female character on the cast wants to fuck the hero, who they think is a normal but magical cat. Also it’s vaguely(?) transphobic but in a very weird way where there’s a supporting character who’s a generic offensive caricature but is otherwise just sort of there and well-liked by everyone and just generally reliable and helpful? I hate every part of this show but could not look away, the unique blend of baffled confusion, disgust, and anger it invokes was just too nourishing. An F surrounded by increasingly angry question marks and wordless screaming.

Manga:

How Do We Relationship just finished. It’s a poignant, sometimes harrowing, and very grounded yuri manga premised around more or less starting where yuri stories usually end and so deals with like normal life, personal conflicts and dysfunction, messy breakups, the fear of homophobia, etc instead of being some whirlwind romance. A+, no complaints except that it could have maybe done a better job wrapping up some of the side character’s stories and exploring their issues.

Other:

If light novels count, Zilbagias the Demon Prince is surprisingly good for edgy reincarnation fantasy slop. The premise is that a hero whose home was destroyed by a demon-led army and who’d spent his entire life after that as a soldier fighting on the front lines against their imperial conquests dies while on a doomed assassination mission aimed at taking out their leader, only to subsequently wake up several years later as said leader’s seventh kid. I went into this expecting trashy, edgy slop and was pleasantly surprised when it does things like repeatedly interrogate the protagonist’s genocidal hatred of the Demon Kingdom and its peoples and temper his perspective by humanizing them without actually changing his material goals at all, because even though they’re all also people who aren’t ontologically evil as he’d initially believed the Demon Kingdom as an imperial institution is monstrously evil and has to be brought down even if that also hurts some innocent people or people who were actually quite nice to him personally. It also stops the story dead to cogently talk about socio-economic inequality and demonstrate that literally all it takes for a demon to develop empathy and question the brutal fascist ideology of the kingdom is to be on the margins and care about someone the system would rather see dead, showcasing that the demons’ cruelty is something that’s learned and rooted in material self-interest instead of nature. Also the Demon King himself is a reformist lib who’s trying to efficiently and peacefully run the imperial horror, slavery, and murder machine in a rational way and it actually acknowledges that this is still bad, actually, and he still has to die. It also holds up a mirror and basically says “the human kingdoms do evil, fucked up things too, but the empire is still evil on an entirely different scale and must be destroyed” instead of equivocating the two.

Unfortunately it also does some weird gross fetish stuff that kind of gets glossed over because the text doesn’t really linger on it, and it’s sort of turning into something harem-adjacent even though the protagonist is entirely disinterested and seems to have been vaguely ace even as a human. The manga adaptation is also extremely gross and bad trash drawn by a pedophile, which not only does not gloss over SA and weird fetish stuff it goes out of its way to insert more of it. I earnestly hope this never gets an anime adaptation because that would be even worse, because I think it’s a story that literally only works in a pure text form that’s stuck firmly inside the head of someone disgusted by everything he sees.

Overall, maybe a C, tentatively a heavily qualified B if it keeps its current trajectory and doesn’t veer off into becoming more explicit slop or pull some lib shit like the protagonist deciding he could be a good Demon King that does even more liberal reforms of the fundamentally fascist empire or some nonsense.