I don’t wanna hear no mfer complain about there being no good anime to watch if they haven’t tried watching Jaadugar: A Witch in Mongolia.

No excuses, Naoko Yamada (yes, the K-On lady) co-directing a show about the impact of imperialism on women on the big 2 6 is practically required viewing, never mind that stylistically it’s taking its cues from World Masterpiece Theatre so there’s y’ know, none of the usual anime bs that practically defines the medium.

I guess to caveat things there’s gonna be discourse on how to accurately portray historical attitudes to slavery in a piece of historical fiction but even then. It’s good yo

Though I Am an Inept Villainess - Sickly but highly motivated soon-to-be Chinese empress gets Freaky Friday’d with a conniving concubine who has a chip on her shoulder. Protagonist is very “stock shonen protagonist” genki but it’s fun sinoboo slop.

Hunter x Hunter

Watched Fog Hill of Five Elements, a donghua that has a whopping 6 episodes across two seasons. The fight scenes are incredible but everything else is forgettable garbage that frankly just wastes time before the next awesome fight scene. Apparently the team behind the first season was only five people or something, very impressive.

Working my way through Welcome to Demon-School, Iruma-Kun!, currently about halfway through S3. It’s endearing and an easy watch. I respect the mangaka’s commitment to changing every word they can to include the kanji for “demon” (魔) to force awful puns. Changing 抹茶 or macha for ground tea to 魔茶 for “demon tea”, for instance. Imo the best episodes are the ones with lower stakes, while the higher-stakes arcs tend to drag. Misc thoughts:

• Iruma’s evil cycle arc was fantastic, and the fact that his superpower is just “being a nice guy” even when evil is great
• Clara really grew on me, and the evolution of her magic pockets to creating pocket dimensions where you’re forced to have fun is awesome
• Asmodeus is less interesting as he really only has the one bit, though his transformation during the Harvest Festival was pretty cool
• Ameri’s okay, but her best bit is how the manga she has Iruma read just keeps escalating. Oh sure it’s a standard romance manga to start, but then the guy has to flee to space to get away from the secret organization that’s chasing him, while the girl learns to master taekwondo and then boxing so that she can defeat them and protect the planet.
• Opera’s interactions with Kalego and Balam were pretty great
• I like the reveal of Agares being a bishounen, and the fact that he goes from “guy who just sleeps” to “probably one of the most powerful characters” during his training arc
• The training arcs in general were great, better than standard battle shonen imo which is funny for a comedy
• Eiko-chan is the most tragic character ever to be depicted on screen.

For some completely-unrelated live-action TV, I also watched the first episode of The Leftovers and was supremely underwhelmed. Considering how hard society is collectively trying to memory-hole COVID it just doesn’t ring as realistic. I also spoiled myself slightly by looking up if the disappearance is ever actually explained, and of course it’s not. Everything being based on inexplicable magic means there’s going to be an uphill battle to win me over.

I discovered a surreal webcomic called Ranfren and its weird and gross and great

Excel Saga

I saw the first episode of that on Blorptube and didn’t really care for it, it seemed a bit overly fast-paced and “annoying” for lack of a better word.

I reached the maximum word count once again, so I’m going to try to abridge this as much as I can, and I’ve saved more in-depth notes in a .txt file:

Reading

• I’m seven hours into Katawa Shoujo: Reengineered. The third and presumably final act of the Emi route. It’s good stuff, cute stuff, but I feel conflicted about how the game handles beauty standards, and I was caught off guard by the sex scenes: turns out that “NSFW content is disabled” just means no visuals in those scenes, but the text of the scenes is still there. The scenes are pretty tame, though. Accurate depictions of awkward teenagers who don’t know what they’re doing.
• I finally read another chapter of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic IDW comic I got a while ago. It’s still decent.
• I finished listening to the audiobook of The Great Gatsby so I’ve started listening to A Farewell to Arms instead. I’ve also been reading The Great Gatsby with my own eyes now that I’ve finished the audiobook. Jay Gatsby is an interesting character. There are parts of both books that aren’t the best as a bedtime story, especially in the former, but eh.
• I also managed to find Nolan’s audiobook of The Catcher in the Rye reuploaded to Bilibili, so I downloaded that to never lose it again. It isn’t as good for falling asleep to as I remembered.
• As for things I’m reading with my own eyes, I’ve sort of stalled out on Moby Dick so I’ve returned to Wired Love, and I’m continuing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. They’re fun, especially Wired Love, which I checked and does have a Librivox audiobook for those interested in that.
• I also read a small amount of the first chapter of War and Peace just for the sake of it; it’s a bit above my level.

With Mom and AernaLingus

• Mom and I are continuing Ojamajo Doremi Sharp, Hunter x Hunter (1999), Kodocha, Sailor Moon R, Paranoia Agent, and Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san. The Kodocha torrent I’ve switched to uses a different OP so our call-and-response traditions are no more.
• We also saw some Lupin III Part 2 and Ranma ½ Nettôhen for the first time in ages. Ranma didn’t hit as hard as we’d hoped since where we left off in Nettôhen happened to be a spot that the reboot anime had already covered recently.
• With @AernaLingus@hexbear.net I finished Oreimo 2 and its ONA. It wasn’t as bad as I expected at all, it was a very solid “train wreck in slow motion” (positive intent) drama. I recall that Gosplan14 told me that it was a “pro-incest anime”, but I’d say it’s more “confused about its subject matter”, that it has a pro-incest and anti-incest aspect. Is this dialectics?
• After Oreimo we watched Girls Band Cry. Very special anime! It’s a great time, great music and voice acting, the best-looking 3D CGI anime I’ve ever seen, and very likable characters.

Obama’s Elf

• I finished Young Ladies Don’t Play Fighting Games, KAIJU GIRL CARAMELISE, and Sayonara Lara. The former I regret to say I can’t really recommend, it falls off with the tournament and doesn’t get better after that. Kaiju and Lara on the other hand, very good shows! Lara in particular had a wild but IMO very satisfying ending.
• Now that I’m done with these seasonals, I’ve started watching Anyamal Tantei Kiruminzoo, the creator of Macross’ first shot at making a shojo anime from 2009. Episode 3 was kinda weird about bestiality but it was still charming enough to win me over. Fans of Cardcaptor Sakura might like to know that Sakura Tange voices a vampire girl in this one!
• Other than that, I’ve been watching some Maison Ikkoku occasionally, and it continues to be a humdinger.
• I’ve been thinking of trying to follow TETSURYO! Meet With Tetsudou Musume as it releases, but I’m yet to see episode 1.

Others’ Blorps

• I caught a bit of The Ghost in the Shell (2026) and Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? — the former I haven’t seen enough of to have an opinion on, the episode of Robot Jones I saw was amusingly the episode simply titled “Gender”, and I gotta say hell yeah to the early 2000s Cartoon Network cartoon giving us a non-binary robot dissecting gender norms.
• Catnapped! The Movie was another thing Garg showed, it had an interesting style and was remarkably like a sort of The Cat Returns before The Cat Returns. It also had a lot of scenes that felt like fetishes, not gonna lie, but that’s how you know it’s an old kids’ movie.
• Garg also finished showing Handa-kun and nearly finished showing Violet Evergarden and Mijikamon. All fun things to return to after all these years, but Violet Evergarden especially, damn is that show good and absolutely gorgeously drawn. I managed to nab some Norwegian subtitles so that was how I watched most of the episodes. A funny thing that struck us is how Violet Evergarden is similar to the titular character from Miss Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles — both blonde, strongly autistic-coded anime girls with similar voices — it’s just that Violet has blue eyes and Koizumi has red eyes, and they’re also very different types of autistic. So I joked “you can take the blue autism or the red autism”. We also joked about the idea of a crossover where Violet and Koizumi are a magical girl duo who can fuse their autisms together to make a Super Autistic blonde anime girl with purple eyes.
• Presented by Stalin, I caught the first episode of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion and while it was good to have more knowledge of such a classic, I didn’t like the characters shooting themselves.
• Death Note was a much bigger hit for me, I stayed up for three episodes and have contemplated continuing it on my own, especially now that I’ve nabbed some Norwegian subtitles for it.
• Dirty Pair Flash didn’t catch my eye any more than any other Dirty Pair anime.
• The Mitten was a cute little Soviet stop motion short.

Own Blorps

• Little Witch Academia, Star vs the Forces of Evil, and The Boondocks continue to be humdingers.
• As a one-off thing I showed She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, The Amazing Digital Circus, Daria and 31 Minutos instead of Clara, who usually hosts those shows. I still don’t really care for Daria and 31 Minutos (the latter had some bald jokes I found distasteful), She-Ra and TADC remain top-tier bangers. “They All Get Guns” sort of reminded me of the Acali expedition, I remember.
• I tried showing Friendship is Witchcraft but it wasn’t really resonating with us because it had some fat jokes and whatever, so I dropped it in favor of showing various Norwegian movies, starting with Spermageddon. It was a wild movie. We actually enjoyed it a lot. It had a healthy depiction of teenage sexuality and ended with a pro-choice song. The musical numbers were otherwise hit or miss.
• Alongside FiW and the Norwegian movies we’ve started watching Scootertrix the Abridged, another classic MLP:FiM abridged series, much better than FiW. It’s growing on me, but it was definitely the right choice to go down to 4 episodes per watch party instead of 8.
• We also saw the classic MLP:FiM fan animation Snowdrop and Scootertrix’s parody of it. It’s decent. It’s well-animated, a work of fan love.
• On Wednesdays I’ve been showing The Secret of Cerulean Sand in its Norwegian dub. It’s been a pretty big hit, although the second and most recent watch party was a lot couchier than the first. People in the chat were saying that the protagonist, Jane Buxton, is evocative of Clarisse de Cagliostro and Nausicaä design-wise, and her brother George looks like an aged-up Jean-Roque Raltique. The show itself I would say has the same sort of special sauce as Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Miyazaki/Ghibli movies, and the art style (especially the line work) is
• The fanime ODD 4 had some good bits, very silly and random, but ultimately we ranked it around the middle or lower end of the fanime we’ve watched this year.
• Magic Heart and the Magical Warriors is actually getting kinda hype lately, we’ve started watching increasingly often 2 or even 3 episodes per watch party because I really want to finish the show by its 20th anniversary on Jan 6, when I’m going to do a watch party for the Magic Heart movie. It’s got some extremely silly villains but that’s not a bad thing. It’s a pretty cozy show. Hype, yet cozy. We have 17 episodes left to watch over the span of 24 watch parties.
• As for my own fanime: I have finished prescoring Blazoner Narazen episode 2, I made its eyecatch, ED, and next episode preview, and the first storyboard of the episode itself.

You should watch SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl; it is a very good show. CēterumFurthermore cēnseōI think iūs auctōriscopyright esse dēlendummust be destroyed.