The Ghost in the Shell (2026)

Excellent. Completely faithful adaptation of the 1989 manga. Genuinely one of the best things in a while.

World Is Dancing

Really great show about a dance troupe in shogun-era Japan. Some of the animation in this is some of the best I’ve ever seen, it’s made with real love and enthusiasm for dance.

Chainsmoker Cat

Kinda hit and miss show about the absolutely vile conditions of some of the lowest people in the working class. Smoking ad

Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You

Cute romance. Also a smoking ad. Smoking industry is investing in anime right now it seems.

Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia

Absolutely stunning show about a muslim slave living in the era of Genghis Khan. Beautiful art with a soft style that juxtaposes well with the absolutely horrible events.

A bunch of other trash because I watch all the slop too

Chainsmoker Cat

The manga for Battle Angel Alita/Gunnm is great IMO. I lucked out and my library had physical copies of the whole run, which I read about a year or two ago. If you liked the OVA, definitely pick up the manga!

I’ve been skimping on anime, so I’ll just dump an oops all manga update.

Way of the House Husband (through Vol 1): Kinda stupid, but I enjoy it. I’ve been a WFH guy forever, and take up a lot of the housekeeping and parenting responsibilities so I can’t help the “he just like me fr” dimension of enjoyment.

Maison Ikkoku (complete): Definitely dated, but overall I enjoyed this despite it meandering a little too much. It was my first Rumiko work that I’ve completely worked through. It made me want to start on Inuyasha or maybe Ranma 1/2.

Joshikouhei (complete): I don’t know what I expected from this one, but it’s something I wouldn’t recommend despite it certainly leaving an impression (being “interesting”). Too many CWs to list, but it’s a bizarre mecha series involving giant robots shaped like school girls and an interdimensional war. There’s a lot of gender going on here, and I feel like a lot of it wasn’t entirely intentional but it was interesting regardless. It was definitely a way too horny, but I kept reading it since I had no idea what the fuck was going to happen next and I had to know.

Gunnm/Battle Angel Alita: Last Order (through Vol 1): I finally picked up the first sequel manga to Alita. It’s solid so far, retcons the original endings and continues on shrug.

I’ve also been reading a lot of the Marvel Star Wars comics. I’m about to start the 2020 runs of Star Wars, Vader, Aphra, and Bounty Hunters. Currently reading Poe Dameron, which is alright. Overall, the Vader and Aphra stuff is pretty fun - would recommend if you like Star Wars.

Binged through the entirety of Re:Zero and liked it so much I started reading the web novel. It’s so goddamn good and genuinely one of the greatest pieces of fiction of all time. I’d even call it the best anime/web novel of all time, it’s just that good. Can’t wait for cour 2 of season 4 in a few weeks

Young Girls Don’t Play Fighting Games

Ghost in the Shell

perhaps in a Hideaki Anno gets credit for ideas in Evangelion that are actually from Tomino’s work way.

Oh? Do tell.

I picked up season 4 of Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-Kun!.

Fanime ass title

I watched a few episodes of Lycoris Recoil and vibes-wise it reminded me of older action comedies like City Hunter, Gunsmith Cats, etc.

It’s been on my PTW for ages, so it’s good to know I should measure my expectations. I did (mostly) enjoy Gunsmith Cats, except I wasn’t able to finish it because I really can’t stand “neck stuff”.

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Well, since it was only 15 days between this thread and the last monthly anime thread, there haven’t been too many developments.

Reading

I’m still reading Yotsuba& and Moby Dick. No progress on anything else. I apparently forgot to mention that I downloaded Parenti’s To Kill A Nation last month, but I haven’t actually read much from it. I also downloaded audiobooks of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi to, like, fall asleep to? So it doesn’t really count, either. I gave those two works proper reads many years ago, though.

With mom

We’re still watching Mono, Paranoia Agent, Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san, Ojamajo Doremi Sharp, Sailor Moon R, Kodocha, and Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated. No progress on Hunter x Hunter or anything else. We also saw a few Community episodes together, since I was watching them by myself.

Episode 5 of Paranoia Agent wasn’t the best. It’s this weird sort of fantasy delusion thing? It was kind of evocative of Magic Knight Rayearth and Cardcaptor Sakura though. Maybe on purpose, or maybe it’s just generally fantasy and I’m just comparing it to things I already know.

Obama’s Elf + Anime With Aer

I’ve mostly been watching Sayonara Lara, Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games, and Kaiju Girl Caramelise. Caramelise honestly got me to tear up during episode 4 because it’s like… yeah, being trapped inside a huge monstrous body, unable to communicate your needs and emotions to others, ceci n’est pas une allégorie transfeminine et autistique. Or maybe they’re just very emotionally stirring themes in general. Young Ladies has endeared itself more to me in the episodes after the first one as the blood has been toned down a bit. I was worried about what would happen with the introduction of these new characters, but I think it’s been handled well. SayoLara is just generally a really awesome show. We’re really eating well this season.

I saw a bit more Carmen Sandiego and Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir but kinda fell off them (not that I liked Miraculous even from the first episode I saw). Hilda, however, remains a humdinger, although I don’t watch it super often.

No progress on anything else. Not even Maison Ikkoku, I fear to say.

With @AernaLingus@hexbear.net I finished the first season of Oreimo plus the sequel ONA. I didn’t read Gosplan14’s spoiler, so whatever horrors await us in the second season… well, we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we get there.

Others’ Blorps

Garg has finished showing Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card. It was a good show but it ended in a pretty strange and abrupt way, i.e. the last episode doesn’t feel any different from any of the other episodes. Maybe the upcoming second season of Clear Card will rectify that? In any case I guess I’ll find out in a few hours what Garg’s gonna show next now that we’re well and truly out of cards to capture.

I caught individual episodes of Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, Dirty Pair 2, Hazbin Hotel, and Daria, the former two shown by Stalin and the latter two by Clara. I hadn’t seen any GITS content before, but I’d seen other parts of the latter three shows before, and my opinions haven’t changed much from before. Dirty Pair 2 at least has a bangin’ OP, though. I only stayed for Hazbin and Daria so that I could queue a cake day video I made for Garg, who joined Hexbear six years ago on July 31.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power continues to be a banger. Entrapta is an example of the ever-elusive “American moé” IMO.

Own Blorps

My showings of the 2013 and 2015 Little Witch Academia films were a big success. I’m really looking forward to watching the 2017 series starting on Saturday. My showings of season 1 of The Boondocks have also been a huge success: I’ll be finishing my showing of season 1 on Wednesday, where I’ll also show some fanime afterwards. Wednesday after that, I’ll start doing watch parties for Fantasy Kaleidoscope ~The Memories of Phantasm~, which I’m really looking forward to.

I finished my showings of season 2 of The Owl House last Saturday. ElChapoDeChapo presented an interesting analysis of the last few episodes of season 2 as actually being about the show’s cancellation. I also played an audio version of an essay I wrote about art, piracy, and “treat discourse” during the intermissions for the last six episodes, and that essay was a big hit with the other blorpers. That made it a pretty special watch party.

I’m also continuing to show Star vs the Forces of Evil. We’re in the stretch of the show where it really starts coming into its own. Last SVTFOE watch party introduced Mina Loveberry, the next one (this Saturday) will introduce Kelly. A few more watch parties after this and Hekapoo will finally make her debut. It’s kinda wild revisiting this sort of show, and characters you thought were a part of it since the beginning were actually introduced way later.

Anyways, Mina Loveberry is kinda like Entrapta meets Sailor Moon. Of course, Mina was before Entrapta, so the inspiration was probably (if anything) the other way around; but the Sailor Moon influence is very obvious in hindsight, and that’s another thing that’s fun about revisiting these sorts of old favorites: picking up on influences and references that went completely over your head the first time, or which you couldn’t really appreciate the first time.

I’m still using Magic Heart and the Magical Warriors and Joshua Jones as dead air material, but there aren’t many Joshes left. After Josh I’ll start showing Star Hill Ponies. Magic Heart will still last us a while, especially when counting the unofficial fan continuation.

Finished Healer Girl, it was fine/10. The most interesting part by far is that it’s simultaneously an incredibly grounded series where the main element is that there’s magic singing that heals people’s wounds.

LotGH Movies (Done) + Gaiden OVAs (Only partway through the first one, watching in chronological rather than release order). It’s funny, at the time I watched the mainline series, I wasn’t that big on it, but as time has gone by and I’ve watched more stuff, I’ve come to realize that it’s actually the best show at what it does. Truly, a condemnation of the medium of anime. Anyway, getting back into the series was like putting on a comfy sweater. I clapped when Patorichev showed up. Gotta love when it’s the end of a movie/episode and the narrator goes “20,000 ships were destroyed and 5 million people lost their lives at a battle where neither side made any actual gains, war may not actually be cool or good”. More thoughts on specific things:

• Movie 1 was fine as an introduction to the series, it gives both Reinhard and Yang some genius tactical moments, though while Reinhard’s plan around Legnica is fairly sensible, Yang’s thing with remote control ships and taking the Brunhild hostage is just a bit too convenient imo.

• Movie 2 is an odd one and I can see why people say to skip it. In trying to be more faithful to the manga adaptation’s art style, it means that any of the nostalgia I have for the main series is just shot out a window. Big things like Yang or the ships looking totally different, obviously, but even smaller things like Iserlohn not being the iconic mercury-coated disk just took me out of it. The overall writing is meh, especially considering it’s basically the same plot as the first movie but with a new (completely generic and forgettable) villain for Reinhard to deal with.

• Movie 3 is more or less just an adaptation of the first arc of the OVA into a movie where Reinhard gets to clown on the Alliance. It’s a little long for what it is and doesn’t add too much. There are so many meaningful glances between Jessica and Yang that after a while it just gets funny. Also, Frederica is there.

• Spiral Labyrinth, the first of the Gaiden OVAs, starts off strong but gets weaker over time. The production is clearly nowhere near as lavish as the original OVAs, and some of the VAs have been recast. We finally get to see what Yang actually did on El Facil, and while it’s not amazing, it’s still cool to have that bit of backstory confirmed. The history lessons on all the admirals around the Third Battle of Tiamat is great, though it must be noted that my favorite episode of the OVA is Julian’s history lesson so this may not have broad appeal. Also sets up some more interesting distinctions between the Empire and FPA with regards to how prisoners are treated. The Empire are “not barbarians” so instead of killing the people they capture, they instead checks notes send them to be worked to death in slave camps. Meanwhile the FPA has an extremely lenient prison model and will even give those who are released a pension corresponding to their rank.

Also still watching Ascendance of a Bookworm S4, the pacing is fucked, there have been some good moments but also a lot of stuff is clearly rushed despite getting a full 26 episodes.

Demons of the Shadow Realm - I want to like this more than I actually do, because Full Metal Alchemist is one of those pieces of media that fundamentally shaped me as a person, but the writing feels kinda unnecessarily convoluted? There’s some really fun character designs though, and seeing Arakawa’s take on the dark urban fantasy (ala JJK and Chainsawman) is kinda neat.

Witch Hat Atelier- Finally caught up, I think I’m going to start recommending this alongside Dungeon Meshi if anyone asks for good fantasy recommendations, and completely gloss over Frieren for reasons I’m not particularly compelled to re-litigate. Just hands down a really beautiful show.

Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games - I was sold when one of the MC’s did a cross-cut DP in the first episode.

The Ghost in the Shell - Ok, so, I saw a post a while back commenting about how the original manga had some downright reactionary viewpoints, and I had wanted to interject at the time that there should to be a distinction made between the characters and the author. Yeah, the Major does tell an orphan child working in a government sweatshop to pull himself up by his bootstraps, but it kinda makes sense that this disaster bisexual gremlin would act like that because she’s a special forces operator whose paycheck is coming from some black budget line note in a parliamentary memo: of course she and her team are chuds. Shirow himself tends to be more sympathetic to labour and the working class- the problem is that his views are buried deep in the (quite frankly) ludicrous amount of line notes. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any reactionary messages in GiTS (Shirow IS a weird oily sex pervert, albeit a liberal one) rather it is to simply state that the original work is a bit more nuanced than “Ronnie Reagan and Margaret Thatcher Good, Mulch the Working Class Beneath the Military Industrial Complex Hoo-Rah!”

Unfortunately I think that the original commentator is right about the show, because without Shirow’s pushback in the line notes too much of the show frames our elite Cyborg Operators as heroic and (more importantly) correct, even when they’re advocating for whack ass things like the removal of a citizen’s right to protest (as an example), to the point where the casual viewer probably is going to unironically “wow cool robot” the cyberpunk. Which is a shame, because this is probably one of the best animated show on air atm.

(Also rewatched a bit of GitS: SAC and I didn’t realize at the time just how liberal that show was, like the Major literally tells a terrorist to get the fuck out of her country if he can’t live in society, and if he can’t do that to go kill himself lmao, just peak cop dialogue. Oshii’s philosophy nerd version is probably still the best.)

Manga

Steel Ball Run- It’s peak.

**ANIME **

I binged like a shit load of stuff in the last couple of months. A LOT of isekai. Here’s the stuff that stands out.

Ascendance of a Bookworm - was fun in the beginning but kind of losing my interest in the latest season.

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation… - Oof. Ecchi! But also really good. Like it has no business being as good as it is. But, if Dandadan wasn’t your thing, this will be too much for you. It reminds me of older anime and there’s just too much of THAT going on to really recommend it to people that didn’t grow up with anime just being like this. Seriously, you’ve been warned.

Zatsu Tabi: That’s Journey - was fun and more wholesome. Travel about Japan.

Solo Camping for Two - also another travel kinda show, but they throw in an age gap romance that kind of makes me question recommending it. But it’s mostly fun and down to earth.

Demons of the Shadow Realm - I like it. I missed Arakawa’s style and have really been enjoying it. Silver Spoon proved that she can write about any topic and I’ll vibe with her style.

I’ve also just kinda been pulling random ongoing shows off of animetoki.com https://animetoki.com/ongoing-anime/

READING

He Who Fights With Monsters - I broke my ‘binge every anime’ and ‘doomscroll all the things on insta’ habit by breaking my phone and reading all 12 available He Who Fights With Monsters books. It’s LitRPG, isekai. IDK, like the fantasy side of things is fun, but the author Shirtaloon is a total lib that virtue signals socialism while regularly repeating western propaganda. If there’s a bleak doomish vibe to an area, gotta bring up USSR Architecture. Ya know, constantly coming up with reasons to try to dunk on China. Just eh. I will give credit that it’s a total power creep fantasy that has a pretty decent mechanic for explaining out the power creep and it is pretty fun and funny. But what dogshit takes on geopolitics. Note that I still did read all 12 books and will read the 13th this october.

Oh, also Becky Chambers is coming out with a new book in October called As You Wake, Break the Shell. Yay!