Sorry, I never mention these characters by name in this post.

I haven’t done one of these posts on a currently airing show in a while. It’s been a strange time for me that I don’t really want to go into great detail about, but I think I’ve needed to write something, anything for a while. I haven’t watched a lot of shows this season, but since the majority of the season had shows I wouldn’t watch without pirating or funding one of the worst people in the world I could feel better from a moral standpoint. That’s enough about me though, so I will move on to the rest of the post.

Gate is a show that I was initially hesitant about. The potential political problems with the plot and the worldviews of certain characters that I had heard about made me think that it would be comparable to Mahouka. That would mean that it would involve supporting a protagonist who is a psychopath about killing people in cold blood while getting the attention of all of the women. Gate only has half of that.

The Unwilling

The protagonist of Gate is an otaku named Itami Youji. Like many heroes of military fiction he earns distinction by being at the right place at the right time with the necessary skills.

The series begins with Itami in Tokyo on his way to buy some doujins at an event. The “gate” that is the driver of the story appears in Ginza and out come guys on horseback and armor with some other people riding flying dragons. Since most civilians don’t anticipate an invasion by people looking like they came from a new Hollywood fantasy film with a budget of hundreds of millions, there was gawking, then deaths and widespread panic.

Itami intervenes in the best way possible and calms the situation down while the Self-Defence Forces (SDF) forces arrive and defeat the invaders by having superior military technology. Then he comforts a young girl who lost both of her parents in the action. In the aftermath, the audience is re-introduced to Itami Youji, First Lieutenant Itami Youji of the Ground SDF.

A couple years later Itami is part of the first wave of SDF forces that will controversially enter the gate and I think I was already believing in him as a character at this point. He’s the closest thing to Legend of the Galactic Heroes‘s Yang Wen-li in that he is a reluctant hero who is well suited to military life, but would rather be doing anything else. Itami is also willing to do things that he feels are morally correct or will save lives without regard to the command structure of the military like taking in refugees. He also has opinions that are problematic for those above him. Is he as good of a character as Yang? Not a chance, but at least it’s a better effort than most versions of this kind of protagonist lately.

Colonialism and the SDF

In the 4th episode, Itami and another office named Yanagida have a conversation about what the new world means in relations to Japan’s status in the world. Japan is first to be able to have access to new territory with the natural resources that come with it and the potential issues that come with being cut off from the rest of the world. It’s going to be so easy for the SDF as well to just roll over the native people.

This is the exact point where the military’s role in this show becomes interesting. After the second World War, Japan had a newly rewritten constitution forced upon them by the Allied forces. It was written in English then translated into Japanese after all. It included a section that renounced war, Article 9 which reads:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
(2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

This language was adopted in 1947, and it had real meaning for oh about 3 years when war broke out in Korea. That language has been reinterpreted to allow the SDF to exist, to allow them to help on foreign peacekeeping missions and in a recent move to allow them to fight alongside allied nations if one of them is attacked. The thing is that this section of the constitution has always been popular with with most people in Japan, but very unpopular among the elected officials who want Japan to be a “normal” nation.

I look at the actions of the SDF in going into the gate as basically rendering them as “self-defense” in name only. Nothing else had come through the gate in two years, so it wasn’t as though there was an imminent threat. It’s an invasion really. After setting up a base at Arnus Hill in the other world, the other nations in the “special region” attack them. Attack in as much as what can be expected for guys with swords and using bows and arrows can do against modern military equipment and tactics. That ended up being 120,000 units lost without anything coming close to harming the SDF. It’s a number that’s massive in terms of deaths in modern combat (but more common in the type of combatants they were going up against).

With the death toll being so asymmetrical, there’s something that feels wrong about the events at Arnus Hill.

The Unqualified

Something I have been surprised about has been the depiction of politicians in the series. As most people who live long enough to realize this, Gate has pretty much decided that everyone in charge of a nation is pretty much a self-serving asshole. While the Empire’s ruler was using the SDF to take care of his internal enemies, back on Earth some important things are happening.

Early on, the American President in this series was depicted in stereotypical fashion stating that the military would have entered the gate yesterday and conquered. Then we have the Chinese leader coming in and saying that Japan is going to have to share their new shiny territory. Domestically, there’s already been a change in Prime Ministers since the last one felt that invading was a good idea and used up all his political capital. His replacement just pursues the same policy anyway because that’s just how single-party democracies work anyway.

Another aspect of this can’t really be glossed over, and it’s taking the views of these politician’s views from the outsider’s position that I hold. China’s president moaning about how China deserves this new territory and the Americans saying they would just invade are just caricatures of these nations. Anyone in a real position of power would be much more nuanced that taking positions like “let’s take all the resources” because while “taking all the oil” could be a populist campaign slogan, those people don’t get to rule because of it. The SDF’s role in all of this is a problem too since it seems to take on the role of an excellent military that would be so much better if it were just funded properly by politicians and those protesters at the beginning are so ungrateful too.

Gate is ultimately going to be a show I worry about for the balance of the few paragraphs above. It’s hard to simply insert myself into the role of typical late-night Japanese otaku who would be watching this when I come from a Western background having studied a fair amount of international politics and history. I’m probably going to struggle to be fair on this show in the end. I mean I could always just forget all of this stuff and watch Itami go around a new world with his harem of an elf, wizard and gothloli tank with my brain turned off. However, I might as well just rewatch Outbreak Company if I want something like that.

Stop everything, it’s a new feature on the blog.

Rather than just spit out a list of shows to then be subject to ridicule, I have decided to just take one aspect of each show on my list and talk about what I like about it. This may end up being a rather eccentric list that is more sad than anything open to ridicule. It’s my list damn it and I’m going to talk about what I want to on this blog.

Episode 19

The Star Trek reference on the bottle in this screenshot is one of my favorite things.

The 19th episode of Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou (or His and Her Circumstances or Karekano as I refer to this going forward) is not the type of episode that will likely ever be made again. It combines a combination of backgrounds, live-action and very little in the way of traditional animation. Or to put it another way, it looks like something that would be done by kids on a really small budget. There’s a pretty good story behind all of this, I assure you.

Having spent the previous 3 years devoted to all things Evangelion, Anno Hideaki was brought in to direct Kare Kano, Gainax’s first adaptation of pre-written material. The manga is centered on the high school romance between the protagonists Miyazawa Yukino and Arima Soichiro, who struggle to try to be themselves in a world of heavy societal pressures. Anno, in adapting the material, decided to take a personal view to how the relationships developed between different characters in the show. This personal view happened to centered around comedic moments and less on the romantic portions of the manga, the author of the manga Tsuda Masami didn’t like his version of her story.

The moment this episode becomes different.

The difference became irreconcilable as the show aired. A story that progressed well through the first half of the series suddenly ground to a halt. Recap episodes then focuses on relationships outside of the one between Yukino and Arima feel in retrospect like they were made out of spite. Then after 18 episodes, Anno quit and set his sites on directing live-action films and rushed in was Tsurumaki Kazuya, who later went on to direct FLCL, Diebuster and the run of Evangelion rebuild films. He had directed episode 12 and did storyboards and key animation for a few of the episodes before this point, but nothing that would indicate this kind of episode.

I should probably also mention at this point that Imaishi Hiroyuki was really a driving force behind this episode. In charge of animation, script and storyboard, this episode is really his in reflection. I have a love-hate relationship with his work, with almost all hate since his Trigger work began. I don’t want to be considered a contrarian for that; it’s more that I just think that left to his own devices there’s no need to be so juvenile.

In one of the more high quality scenes in this episode, Yukino’s personality confuses the class.

As for the episode itself, it’s a pretty standard late series storyline of characters catching up after summer break and then planning for the cultural festival in the fall. That’s not really why I like this episode so much, it’s the damn visuals that draw me in as well as the opening moments of monologue at the beginning of the episode.

First the beginning of the episode. If you had watched the series up to this point, the first few minutes look visually just like the 2 recap episodes that were a few episodes back. So people recapping the plot over various still images. It’s the words that strike me each time I go back and watch this. This is a story set in and still is a changing time period for Japan. The end of the century stills show no people, but convey a feeling that I can describe as this: humanity is capable of creating so many different things for so many people, so why did everything have to stop?

May as well destroy the building too.

When that is all over, it switches to this episode’s signature of cheap looking animation of storyboards and reused cells from earlier in the series. Yes, of course there is also the stick puppets and the literally setting stuff on fire plus also just filming a television and then setting more stuff on fire during the end credits. Plus there was crushing Gainax headquarters during one of the rare bits of action during the episode.

I still have a pretty hard time really describing my feelings on the episode in the end. It’s definitely an indulgent sort of episode, but of the sort visually that was like Shinbo’s early works for Shaft in trying to craft their own style. It’s rebellious against the situation the people involved in making this episode were put into. Yet, it still does move the plot forward a little and allows those who had nothing to do with the disagreements between Anno and Tsuda to still do their proper work. I’d like to think there was a production meeting after Anno had abruptly left where they just decided to do everything as cheaply as possible to make a point and then set it all on fire at the end to cleanse themselves of this mess of a series.

Just burn it all.

This is not what this post is about nor is it actually true.

Rather than just spit out a list of shows to then be subject to ridicule, I have decided to just take one aspect of each show on my list and talk about what I like about it. This will be an  eccentric list that caters to me and my ridiculous taste. Then again, it’s my list and I’m going to talk about what I want to on this blog.

Support Networks

I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying (or Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken or HUSBANDUNNO as I and a few other people know it) is a serious of shorts that aired first in the fall of 2014 and followed up by a second season in the spring of 2015. The story is about the daily lives of the newlywed Tsunashi couple, Kaoru; an office worker who lived a normal stressful work life prior to marriage, and her husband Hajime; an otaku who lives a stress-free life and works from home after eventually finding a job.

Before I continue with this particular post I need to say a bit about short anime in general. They are perfectly capable of telling any story or using the same amount of jokes or simply being in the same realm of healing-type as well as any other longer format show. I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying is definitely one of these types of shows.

I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying delivered some excellent episodes in its 2 season run (to date). The final episode of the first season is about Kaoru’s daily struggles before she met Hajime and definitely stayed with me emotionally. In the second season, there were episodes about Hajime pondering his own adulthood with Kaoru pregnant, and a flashback episode where he dealt with the bullying his younger brother Youta dealt with as a kid which were both fine episodes in my opinion.

This post, though, is about the people around Kaoru and Hajime that form a support network for the newlyweds. There’s Youta, who serves as a way to allow Hajime to be comfortable in the otaku world with someone he’s comfortable around (Youta is a yaoi mangaka) while being a friendly presence for Kaoru. He’s also in a relationship with Hajime’s boss which is never elaborated on, but completely accepted by everyone else in the series.

For Kaoru, she has two friends who are important to her. There’s Tanaka, a doctor who really serves as a mentor on how relationships work on an adult level beyond marriage, and Rino helps her with the more intimate aspects of marriage as a newlywed herself. In addition, they are all fully capable of having conversations between each other without husbands or men being a part of them.

That would be the sign to say that there will be lots of sex for 6 hours and Hajime will be experiencing none of it later on.

This group all comes together from time to time on different adventures or activities that they do simply because they are a big group of friends. There’s no ulterior motives behind these get together. Hell, they are even willing to spend time alone with Hajime on Christmas Eve because Kaoru is working…at least until 9pm then all bets are off. It just makes for a positive contrast between shows about people growing apart because of relationships or simply real life experience. Marriage doesn’t mean an end to forming new relationships with other people or staying close to others.

Yes, yes you did. Now you are gone.

This season I have taken a different approach with the newly airing shows this season. Since I am still in the middle of boycotting a licensor that shall not be named here, I ended up starting 19 different shows. Each week, I am eliminating one (or possibly more) shows that I deem the worst for the week until the end of the season is finally reached. As I have decided to start this feature on a whim, there is no week 1.

After Lance N’ Masques was eliminated for the crime of being dull and having only an anthropomorphized horse as the only highlight of its opening episode, it was now up to the remaining 18 shows to prove that they belonged in my watch list. After tweeting about this challenge I received just one response:

Now Reiseng, I think you are great and all for responding to my dumb tweets about anime, but trying to predict my taste is just foreshadowing the downfall of whatever I’m talking about at the time.

Hackadoll The Animation is a short that I have been known to keep watching despite it being utterly terrible. Hell, I finished Ishida to Asakura which should have resulted in my award of a Purple Heart, but I digress. The second episode of this story about degenerate nth-generation AI trying to help people focused on a producer trying find a replacement group of idols. Lo and behold a trio of idiotic AI show up to lift his hopes up and end up delivering a spectacularly bad show that left most of the audience as dead as Randy Quaid’s acting career. Except for that one damn fan who kept cheering all of it. I bet his favorite idol anime is Wake Up, Girls.

That was enough to doom it to the dropped pile as my 436th one according to MyAnimeList. That doesn’t mean there weren’t others that are now on the cusp:

To provide context: this character entered the room for the sole purpose of having the others talk about her backstory then she left.

Comet Lucifer delivered a 2nd episode that just felt sort of like Fractale with mecha. Admittedly a kid who likes rocks is an interesting start for a protagonist of this sort of show, but it doesn’t mean that the mysterious girl that comes from one, Felia, has to have the intelligence of one.

Komori-san wa Kotowarenai! is pretty much the same show as the manga that I read before and is just as good as I thought it was when I brought it up here. It’s an interesting concept for a main character wasted on terrible jokes about breast size coming from her friends.

Subete ga F ni Naru: The Perfect Insider has fantastic use of lighting in its scenes. Unfortunately I just can’t buy any of the characters. Maybe as the plot is just now getting started it can start focusing on developing characters other than Shiki.

Taimadou Gakuen 35 Shiken Shoutai is a terribly written mess of a show with a self-insert protagonist who lucks into power because reasons. Needless to say, this is probably a show which will be up there with Magical Warfare in just being bad at everything. It’s somehow made it to the 3rd episode for me.

On the plus side, Gakuen Toshi Asterisk hasn’t turned out to be the absolute dumpster fire I thought it would be. Peeping Life’s Idiot Couple on vacation has proven to be one of my highlights of the season. Osomatsu-kun is doing a good job of showing how to make updated versions of classics without making it an entirely different show and only including the original title in your social commentary piece.

Finally, there’s Utawarerumono: Itsuwari no Kamen which would be a series that I would recommend to normal people if I knew any normal people I could recommend anime to. It continues to prove that when it comes to adaptations of Aquaplus visual novels, the 2nd series is always the one to watch. Maybe this one can sneak in to my top 30 list at the rate it’s going early on.

As always, those still standing can be seen on my MAL.

Because Peyton is the right Manning for Bad QB League Play

Trust me, this isn’t really a post about American football or what not, but it’s tangentially related enough to put in the gif above. The origins of this post have to do with the whole process of trying to recommend a show to someone. Why does it have to be so hard?

After the first week of the NFL season had concluded last month, Aeroblip, the producer of the podcast of which I am a contributor, Anime Soapbox (still sadly lacking Crunchyroll and XBox sponsorship) and I made a wager. This is something that he had done with Kelloggs last year. Essentially, it’s the winner in the fantasy football league matchup gives the loser a show they must watch for review. Let’s see how my team Hidan no Arians AA (named for Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians in case you think I’m some sort of spelling-challenged national socialist) did this week:

So as of this writing that would be a win because wide receivers generally don’t score NEGATIVE FIFTY-ONE POINTS. Which now leads me into the question of what sort of show do I recommend to Aeroblip?

I talked to Kelloggs, who won their respective bet last time, and he ended up giving him Sakura Trick because he wanted to give Aeroblip a show outside that he liked and outside of his usual preferences. The feedback afterward was less positive than trying to run a football play 2-on-4.

My history of recommending shows to people other than Aeroblip has been pretty spotty. There was that time I recommended Itsudatte! My Santa out of spite. There was the time that Flawfinder basically rage quit on Anime Secret Santa because of what I gave him. Needless to say, I’m not exactly in tune to most people’s tastes in things.

It reminds me of one of the little points of emphasis with the various music streaming services that are out there. A lot was made of Apple having hand-curated (whatever the hell that means) playlists for customers to give them music they would like. On the other hand, there is Spotify that uses an algorithm to match a user’s taste to those of others and uses what was playlisted by similar users to build a suggested playlist. The former ends up being way too conservative in selections while the latter has consistency issues. There should be a middle ground somewhere, but I think moneyed interests will prevent it from happening there.

Yep, my taste again.

Meanwhile in anime, there’s no money to be fighting over, so it should be easier to come up with some sort of solution for anime recommendation. I mean I can’t be trusted with one of the shows I came up with on my own. Why can’t there be something out there where I can just put in some shows and ratings and it will spit me out the perfect show? Why do people have to be so subjective? If I had the time of day I would probably come up with something, but I have a job to fulfill and it would be a second job for no money.

I’ll have to trust my gut on this one I’m afraid.

Sorry, I never mention these characters by name in this post.

I haven’t done one of these posts on a currently airing show in a while. It’s been a strange time for me that I don’t really want to go into great detail about, but I think I’ve needed to write something, anything for a while. I haven’t watched a lot of shows this season, but since the majority of the season had shows I wouldn’t watch without pirating or funding one of the worst people in the world I could feel better from a moral standpoint. That’s enough about me though, so I will move on to the rest of the post.

Gate is a show that I was initially hesitant about. The potential political problems with the plot and the worldviews of certain characters that I had heard about made me think that it would be comparable to Mahouka. That would mean that it would involve supporting a protagonist who is a psychopath about killing people in cold blood while getting the attention of all of the women. Gate only has half of that.

The Unwilling

The protagonist of Gate is an otaku named Itami Youji. Like many heroes of military fiction he earns distinction by being at the right place at the right time with the necessary skills.

The series begins with Itami in Tokyo on his way to buy some doujins at an event. The “gate” that is the driver of the story appears in Ginza and out come guys on horseback and armor with some other people riding flying dragons. Since most civilians don’t anticipate an invasion by people looking like they came from a new Hollywood fantasy film with a budget of hundreds of millions, there was gawking, then deaths and widespread panic.

Itami intervenes in the best way possible and calms the situation down while the Self-Defence Forces (SDF) forces arrive and defeat the invaders by having superior military technology. Then he comforts a young girl who lost both of her parents in the action. In the aftermath, the audience is re-introduced to Itami Youji, First Lieutenant Itami Youji of the Ground SDF.

A couple years later Itami is part of the first wave of SDF forces that will controversially enter the gate and I think I was already believing in him as a character at this point. He’s the closest thing to Legend of the Galactic Heroes‘s Yang Wen-li in that he is a reluctant hero who is well suited to military life, but would rather be doing anything else. Itami is also willing to do things that he feels are morally correct or will save lives without regard to the command structure of the military like taking in refugees. He also has opinions that are problematic for those above him. Is he as good of a character as Yang? Not a chance, but at least it’s a better effort than most versions of this kind of protagonist lately.

Colonialism and the SDF

In the 4th episode, Itami and another office named Yanagida have a conversation about what the new world means in relations to Japan’s status in the world. Japan is first to be able to have access to new territory with the natural resources that come with it and the potential issues that come with being cut off from the rest of the world. It’s going to be so easy for the SDF as well to just roll over the native people.

This is the exact point where the military’s role in this show becomes interesting. After the second World War, Japan had a newly rewritten constitution forced upon them by the Allied forces. It was written in English then translated into Japanese after all. It included a section that renounced war, Article 9 which reads:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
(2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

This language was adopted in 1947, and it had real meaning for oh about 3 years when war broke out in Korea. That language has been reinterpreted to allow the SDF to exist, to allow them to help on foreign peacekeeping missions and in a recent move to allow them to fight alongside allied nations if one of them is attacked. The thing is that this section of the constitution has always been popular with with most people in Japan, but very unpopular among the elected officials who want Japan to be a “normal” nation.

I look at the actions of the SDF in going into the gate as basically rendering them as “self-defense” in name only. Nothing else had come through the gate in two years, so it wasn’t as though there was an imminent threat. It’s an invasion really. After setting up a base at Arnus Hill in the other world, the other nations in the “special region” attack them. Attack in as much as what can be expected for guys with swords and using bows and arrows can do against modern military equipment and tactics. That ended up being 120,000 units lost without anything coming close to harming the SDF. It’s a number that’s massive in terms of deaths in modern combat (but more common in the type of combatants they were going up against).

With the death toll being so asymmetrical, there’s something that feels wrong about the events at Arnus Hill.

The Unqualified

Something I have been surprised about has been the depiction of politicians in the series. As most people who live long enough to realize this, Gate has pretty much decided that everyone in charge of a nation is pretty much a self-serving asshole. While the Empire’s ruler was using the SDF to take care of his internal enemies, back on Earth some important things are happening.

Early on, the American President in this series was depicted in stereotypical fashion stating that the military would have entered the gate yesterday and conquered. Then we have the Chinese leader coming in and saying that Japan is going to have to share their new shiny territory. Domestically, there’s already been a change in Prime Ministers since the last one felt that invading was a good idea and used up all his political capital. His replacement just pursues the same policy anyway because that’s just how single-party democracies work anyway.

Another aspect of this can’t really be glossed over, and it’s taking the views of these politician’s views from the outsider’s position that I hold. China’s president moaning about how China deserves this new territory and the Americans saying they would just invade are just caricatures of these nations. Anyone in a real position of power would be much more nuanced that taking positions like “let’s take all the resources” because while “taking all the oil” could be a populist campaign slogan, those people don’t get to rule because of it. The SDF’s role in all of this is a problem too since it seems to take on the role of an excellent military that would be so much better if it were just funded properly by politicians and those protesters at the beginning are so ungrateful too.

Gate is ultimately going to be a show I worry about for the balance of the few paragraphs above. It’s hard to simply insert myself into the role of typical late-night Japanese otaku who would be watching this when I come from a Western background having studied a fair amount of international politics and history. I’m probably going to struggle to be fair on this show in the end. I mean I could always just forget all of this stuff and watch Itami go around a new world with his harem of an elf, wizard and gothloli tank with my brain turned off. However, I might as well just rewatch Outbreak Company if I want something like that.

Stop everything, it’s a new feature on the blog.

Rather than just spit out a list of shows to then be subject to ridicule, I have decided to just take one aspect of each show on my list and talk about what I like about it. This may end up being a rather eccentric list that is more sad than anything open to ridicule. It’s my list damn it and I’m going to talk about what I want to on this blog.

Episode 19

The Star Trek reference on the bottle in this screenshot is one of my favorite things.

The 19th episode of Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou (or His and Her Circumstances or Karekano as I refer to this going forward) is not the type of episode that will likely ever be made again. It combines a combination of backgrounds, live-action and very little in the way of traditional animation. Or to put it another way, it looks like something that would be done by kids on a really small budget. There’s a pretty good story behind all of this, I assure you.

Having spent the previous 3 years devoted to all things Evangelion, Anno Hideaki was brought in to direct Kare Kano, Gainax’s first adaptation of pre-written material. The manga is centered on the high school romance between the protagonists Miyazawa Yukino and Arima Soichiro, who struggle to try to be themselves in a world of heavy societal pressures. Anno, in adapting the material, decided to take a personal view to how the relationships developed between different characters in the show. This personal view happened to centered around comedic moments and less on the romantic portions of the manga, the author of the manga Tsuda Masami didn’t like his version of her story.

The moment this episode becomes different.

The difference became irreconcilable as the show aired. A story that progressed well through the first half of the series suddenly ground to a halt. Recap episodes then focuses on relationships outside of the one between Yukino and Arima feel in retrospect like they were made out of spite. Then after 18 episodes, Anno quit and set his sites on directing live-action films and rushed in was Tsurumaki Kazuya, who later went on to direct FLCL, Diebuster and the run of Evangelion rebuild films. He had directed episode 12 and did storyboards and key animation for a few of the episodes before this point, but nothing that would indicate this kind of episode.

I should probably also mention at this point that Imaishi Hiroyuki was really a driving force behind this episode. In charge of animation, script and storyboard, this episode is really his in reflection. I have a love-hate relationship with his work, with almost all hate since his Trigger work began. I don’t want to be considered a contrarian for that; it’s more that I just think that left to his own devices there’s no need to be so juvenile.

In one of the more high quality scenes in this episode, Yukino’s personality confuses the class.

As for the episode itself, it’s a pretty standard late series storyline of characters catching up after summer break and then planning for the cultural festival in the fall. That’s not really why I like this episode so much, it’s the damn visuals that draw me in as well as the opening moments of monologue at the beginning of the episode.

First the beginning of the episode. If you had watched the series up to this point, the first few minutes look visually just like the 2 recap episodes that were a few episodes back. So people recapping the plot over various still images. It’s the words that strike me each time I go back and watch this. This is a story set in and still is a changing time period for Japan. The end of the century stills show no people, but convey a feeling that I can describe as this: humanity is capable of creating so many different things for so many people, so why did everything have to stop?

May as well destroy the building too.

When that is all over, it switches to this episode’s signature of cheap looking animation of storyboards and reused cells from earlier in the series. Yes, of course there is also the stick puppets and the literally setting stuff on fire plus also just filming a television and then setting more stuff on fire during the end credits. Plus there was crushing Gainax headquarters during one of the rare bits of action during the episode.

I still have a pretty hard time really describing my feelings on the episode in the end. It’s definitely an indulgent sort of episode, but of the sort visually that was like Shinbo’s early works for Shaft in trying to craft their own style. It’s rebellious against the situation the people involved in making this episode were put into. Yet, it still does move the plot forward a little and allows those who had nothing to do with the disagreements between Anno and Tsuda to still do their proper work. I’d like to think there was a production meeting after Anno had abruptly left where they just decided to do everything as cheaply as possible to make a point and then set it all on fire at the end to cleanse themselves of this mess of a series.

Just burn it all.

This is not what this post is about nor is it actually true.

Rather than just spit out a list of shows to then be subject to ridicule, I have decided to just take one aspect of each show on my list and talk about what I like about it. This will be an  eccentric list that caters to me and my ridiculous taste. Then again, it’s my list and I’m going to talk about what I want to on this blog.

Support Networks

I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying (or Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken or HUSBANDUNNO as I and a few other people know it) is a serious of shorts that aired first in the fall of 2014 and followed up by a second season in the spring of 2015. The story is about the daily lives of the newlywed Tsunashi couple, Kaoru; an office worker who lived a normal stressful work life prior to marriage, and her husband Hajime; an otaku who lives a stress-free life and works from home after eventually finding a job.

Before I continue with this particular post I need to say a bit about short anime in general. They are perfectly capable of telling any story or using the same amount of jokes or simply being in the same realm of healing-type as well as any other longer format show. I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying is definitely one of these types of shows.

I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying delivered some excellent episodes in its 2 season run (to date). The final episode of the first season is about Kaoru’s daily struggles before she met Hajime and definitely stayed with me emotionally. In the second season, there were episodes about Hajime pondering his own adulthood with Kaoru pregnant, and a flashback episode where he dealt with the bullying his younger brother Youta dealt with as a kid which were both fine episodes in my opinion.

This post, though, is about the people around Kaoru and Hajime that form a support network for the newlyweds. There’s Youta, who serves as a way to allow Hajime to be comfortable in the otaku world with someone he’s comfortable around (Youta is a yaoi mangaka) while being a friendly presence for Kaoru. He’s also in a relationship with Hajime’s boss which is never elaborated on, but completely accepted by everyone else in the series.

For Kaoru, she has two friends who are important to her. There’s Tanaka, a doctor who really serves as a mentor on how relationships work on an adult level beyond marriage, and Rino helps her with the more intimate aspects of marriage as a newlywed herself. In addition, they are all fully capable of having conversations between each other without husbands or men being a part of them.

That would be the sign to say that there will be lots of sex for 6 hours and Hajime will be experiencing none of it later on.

This group all comes together from time to time on different adventures or activities that they do simply because they are a big group of friends. There’s no ulterior motives behind these get together. Hell, they are even willing to spend time alone with Hajime on Christmas Eve because Kaoru is working…at least until 9pm then all bets are off. It just makes for a positive contrast between shows about people growing apart because of relationships or simply real life experience. Marriage doesn’t mean an end to forming new relationships with other people or staying close to others.

Yes, yes you did. Now you are gone.

This season I have taken a different approach with the newly airing shows this season. Since I am still in the middle of boycotting a licensor that shall not be named here, I ended up starting 19 different shows. Each week, I am eliminating one (or possibly more) shows that I deem the worst for the week until the end of the season is finally reached. As I have decided to start this feature on a whim, there is no week 1.

After Lance N’ Masques was eliminated for the crime of being dull and having only an anthropomorphized horse as the only highlight of its opening episode, it was now up to the remaining 18 shows to prove that they belonged in my watch list. After tweeting about this challenge I received just one response:

Now Reiseng, I think you are great and all for responding to my dumb tweets about anime, but trying to predict my taste is just foreshadowing the downfall of whatever I’m talking about at the time.

Hackadoll The Animation is a short that I have been known to keep watching despite it being utterly terrible. Hell, I finished Ishida to Asakura which should have resulted in my award of a Purple Heart, but I digress. The second episode of this story about degenerate nth-generation AI trying to help people focused on a producer trying find a replacement group of idols. Lo and behold a trio of idiotic AI show up to lift his hopes up and end up delivering a spectacularly bad show that left most of the audience as dead as Randy Quaid’s acting career. Except for that one damn fan who kept cheering all of it. I bet his favorite idol anime is Wake Up, Girls.

That was enough to doom it to the dropped pile as my 436th one according to MyAnimeList. That doesn’t mean there weren’t others that are now on the cusp:

To provide context: this character entered the room for the sole purpose of having the others talk about her backstory then she left.

Comet Lucifer delivered a 2nd episode that just felt sort of like Fractale with mecha. Admittedly a kid who likes rocks is an interesting start for a protagonist of this sort of show, but it doesn’t mean that the mysterious girl that comes from one, Felia, has to have the intelligence of one.

Komori-san wa Kotowarenai! is pretty much the same show as the manga that I read before and is just as good as I thought it was when I brought it up here. It’s an interesting concept for a main character wasted on terrible jokes about breast size coming from her friends.

Subete ga F ni Naru: The Perfect Insider has fantastic use of lighting in its scenes. Unfortunately I just can’t buy any of the characters. Maybe as the plot is just now getting started it can start focusing on developing characters other than Shiki.

Taimadou Gakuen 35 Shiken Shoutai is a terribly written mess of a show with a self-insert protagonist who lucks into power because reasons. Needless to say, this is probably a show which will be up there with Magical Warfare in just being bad at everything. It’s somehow made it to the 3rd episode for me.

On the plus side, Gakuen Toshi Asterisk hasn’t turned out to be the absolute dumpster fire I thought it would be. Peeping Life’s Idiot Couple on vacation has proven to be one of my highlights of the season. Osomatsu-kun is doing a good job of showing how to make updated versions of classics without making it an entirely different show and only including the original title in your social commentary piece.

Finally, there’s Utawarerumono: Itsuwari no Kamen which would be a series that I would recommend to normal people if I knew any normal people I could recommend anime to. It continues to prove that when it comes to adaptations of Aquaplus visual novels, the 2nd series is always the one to watch. Maybe this one can sneak in to my top 30 list at the rate it’s going early on.

As always, those still standing can be seen on my MAL.

Because Peyton is the right Manning for Bad QB League Play

Trust me, this isn’t really a post about American football or what not, but it’s tangentially related enough to put in the gif above. The origins of this post have to do with the whole process of trying to recommend a show to someone. Why does it have to be so hard?

After the first week of the NFL season had concluded last month, Aeroblip, the producer of the podcast of which I am a contributor, Anime Soapbox (still sadly lacking Crunchyroll and XBox sponsorship) and I made a wager. This is something that he had done with Kelloggs last year. Essentially, it’s the winner in the fantasy football league matchup gives the loser a show they must watch for review. Let’s see how my team Hidan no Arians AA (named for Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians in case you think I’m some sort of spelling-challenged national socialist) did this week:

So as of this writing that would be a win because wide receivers generally don’t score NEGATIVE FIFTY-ONE POINTS. Which now leads me into the question of what sort of show do I recommend to Aeroblip?

I talked to Kelloggs, who won their respective bet last time, and he ended up giving him Sakura Trick because he wanted to give Aeroblip a show outside that he liked and outside of his usual preferences. The feedback afterward was less positive than trying to run a football play 2-on-4.

My history of recommending shows to people other than Aeroblip has been pretty spotty. There was that time I recommended Itsudatte! My Santa out of spite. There was the time that Flawfinder basically rage quit on Anime Secret Santa because of what I gave him. Needless to say, I’m not exactly in tune to most people’s tastes in things.

It reminds me of one of the little points of emphasis with the various music streaming services that are out there. A lot was made of Apple having hand-curated (whatever the hell that means) playlists for customers to give them music they would like. On the other hand, there is Spotify that uses an algorithm to match a user’s taste to those of others and uses what was playlisted by similar users to build a suggested playlist. The former ends up being way too conservative in selections while the latter has consistency issues. There should be a middle ground somewhere, but I think moneyed interests will prevent it from happening there.

Yep, my taste again.

Meanwhile in anime, there’s no money to be fighting over, so it should be easier to come up with some sort of solution for anime recommendation. I mean I can’t be trusted with one of the shows I came up with on my own. Why can’t there be something out there where I can just put in some shows and ratings and it will spit me out the perfect show? Why do people have to be so subjective? If I had the time of day I would probably come up with something, but I have a job to fulfill and it would be a second job for no money.

I’ll have to trust my gut on this one I’m afraid.

Any damn excuse to make this an imouto incest show.

Each week I am going through the anime series available to me this season and choosing to drop the worst performer that week. Lance N’ Masques was eliminated for being boring. Hackadoll was eliminated for being putrid idol bullshit. Which terrible show will hit my drop list this week and make my viewing much easier and much more bearable?

Beneath the usual shonen series (and outright porn), but above Haikyu, which is good, is our “winner”

If one was to take a look at Crunchyroll’s most popular shows at any given time, it’s pretty much dominated by the Shonen Jump adaptations and anything that was recently released. If anything outside of that hangs around for a couple of days, then it’s probably legitimately popular with the users of the site. (Waits for someone to tell me immediately this analysis is totally wrong). Out of the most popular shows at the time of this post, Anti-Magic Academy: The 35th Test Platoon is this week’s winner. It’s a show that is popular, and I think anyone who does like this unironically should feel bad.

This week’s failure of an episode included a new character called Mari, who is a witch. You know Ouka hates witches so it creates an instant point of conflict. She’s also a tsundere character who is after Takeru within minutes, because reasons. That’s not even the worst part of the episode though. Usagi enters the team in a competition where they can win 1,000 points toward I guess not being considered as shit as they are by the rest of the academy. So Takeru has to glance at the bracket and he’s immediately confronted by the leader of another platoon who just acts like a dick to him for unexplained reasons. This may be acceptable for a feud in an 80s action films or professional wrestling, but this medium is neither of those. This terribly written, yet popular work is now gone from my watch list.

“Contenders”

I could swear that really is what mixed farming is.

Since I don’t want anything to come as a surprise to my single-digit readership, I try to give an idea of what shows could be next to be dropped in the coming weeks. Here’s this week’s cases of not being good.G

Comet Lucifer continues to do nothing for me. It may survive the season by simply not doing anything.

JK-Meshi! is a short series in which Ruriko shows the intelligence of a grade school girl and she and the three others have a simple meal at the end of it. At least it must not cost much to make.

Beautiful Bones -Sakurako’s Investigation- has badly declined with each episode. Shoutarou is just going to spend the whole series exasperated at Sakurako isn’t he? I think after his action star turn last episode this was just back to a formula that already seems so tired.

The Perfect Insider can’t have as obvious a culprit as I think it is? I think this show hit peak stupidity when in this week’s episode Moe kicked off a spell of exposition in which both she and Souhei went into “Hey we’re doing the exposition thing now!” mode. When will Noitamina get back to airing good shows again?

Positives

This is excellent.

I like to wrap up the week by highlighting the fact that there are usually a few good episodes each week. Here are this week’s selections.

Magical Somera-chan continues to be wonderful. Yes, I liked Ai Mai Mi and you should too. Wait, where are you going? Come back. Please.

Utawarerumono may have managed to get me my first APR vote total since the whole death in the family situation several months ago, but I still insist that it’s actually a good show. They even brought Ray Romano back from underwater for the third episode.

In this edition of TTILAMTFA (which looks like a terrible program responsible for building death machines), I discuss an aspect of my 28th favorite series, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. This is a series that I just came across by circumstance, and there is one particular character that made it memorable. Unfortunately, no one else in the whole wide world agrees with me on this. It’s my post, so I’m going to gush over them how I want. Got it?

Sekiutsu “Maria” Tarou

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is a wonderfully dark comedy with a few seasons and specials that ran from the fall of 2007 to a conclusion in January 2012. I say that it’s wonderful because it fully embraces the philosophy that there’s no light without the darkness.

For those who don’t know anything about the series, it’s a harem series starring a teacher named Itoshiki Nozomu, which written horizontally is zetsubou (despair). He’s introduced to the audience in the middle of an unsuccessful attempt to hang himself from a blooming cherry blossom tree. He’s introduced to his students slowly, but he manages to accidentally get all of the girls to fall for him in between his despairing about modernity itself. Each of the characters in the class is pretty one-dimensional like a hikkikomori, a girl who is bandaged, the strict class representative-like girl, a stalker, the one who is essentially the only normal girl and that bothers her, etc. Maria, or Mataro as she is called by Kafuka, goes by is an illegal immigrant and the inspiration for this post.

Maria is introduced to the show as a replacement for the real Sekiutsu Tarou. It turns out that he found the idea of selling his entire identity to a foreign girl and her numerous siblings very appealing. So he spends his days sitting naked in an empty box since it’s the essence of being nothing.

The thing that stands out for me about Maria is a point that never seems to come up in anime or manga since they rarely deal with real life issues is that she is inherently a political character. Her role basically isn’t so much to just be a token foreign character (there’s already someone to technically play that role in Kimura Kaere, a girl returning from abroad), but to be commentary on society as a whole. She’s treated very well be nearly everyone around her and given all sorts of things by people from a society filled with excess and prosperity.

Japan seems like a very nice country as a result and welcoming country to her, but her status makes this interesting. Officially, Japan’s population is 98.5% Japanese ethnicity. This is a staggeringly high number that is only really rivaled by South Korea in the developed world. Japan also has a declining population with one of the oldest populations in the world, yet there’s very little in the way of immigration to Japan because of the barriers that are put up. Since Maria made it inside of this system by buying a Japanese identity, she gets the benefits of living in a society where resources are abundant and social connections make it easier to tap into it. This is unlike her unnamed home country where presumably everyone is poor so there is nothing to give to other people in bad situations. Maria even became so indoctrinated at one point that she gave a speech before the diet against illegal immigration.

I’m also going to mention that Maria is voiced by one Sawashiro Miyuki. She seemed everywhere for a time; as is the case for almost any voice actress that reaches a certain level, but I have a definite pantheon of her roles in which Maria definitely belongs.

The Completely Unofficial Sawashiro Miyuki Character Pantheon

• Celty (Durarara!!)
• Hakaze (Zetsuen no Tempest)
• Maria (Arakawa Under the Bridge)
• Maria (Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei)
• Mint (Galaxy Angel)
• Puchiko (Di Gi Charat)

Anyway, the long and short of this is really that Maria is a character that made me think about Japan as a country beyond the old “anime is great, so Japan must be a great country” thoughts. I was in Japan for my first visit last month, and even that 98.5% figure above seems low even as I was really just visiting major cities. There’s going to be more on that in December by the way.

This is not what this post is about nor is it actually true.

Rather than just spit out a list of shows to then be subject to ridicule, I have decided to just take one aspect of each show on my list and talk about what I like about it. This will be an  eccentric list that caters to me and my ridiculous taste. Then again, it’s my list and I’m going to talk about what I want to on this blog.

Support Networks

I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying (or Danna ga Nani wo Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken or HUSBANDUNNO as I and a few other people know it) is a serious of shorts that aired first in the fall of 2014 and followed up by a second season in the spring of 2015. The story is about the daily lives of the newlywed Tsunashi couple, Kaoru; an office worker who lived a normal stressful work life prior to marriage, and her husband Hajime; an otaku who lives a stress-free life and works from home after eventually finding a job.

Before I continue with this particular post I need to say a bit about short anime in general. They are perfectly capable of telling any story or using the same amount of jokes or simply being in the same realm of healing-type as well as any other longer format show. I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying is definitely one of these types of shows.

I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying delivered some excellent episodes in its 2 season run (to date). The final episode of the first season is about Kaoru’s daily struggles before she met Hajime and definitely stayed with me emotionally. In the second season, there were episodes about Hajime pondering his own adulthood with Kaoru pregnant, and a flashback episode where he dealt with the bullying his younger brother Youta dealt with as a kid which were both fine episodes in my opinion.

This post, though, is about the people around Kaoru and Hajime that form a support network for the newlyweds. There’s Youta, who serves as a way to allow Hajime to be comfortable in the otaku world with someone he’s comfortable around (Youta is a yaoi mangaka) while being a friendly presence for Kaoru. He’s also in a relationship with Hajime’s boss which is never elaborated on, but completely accepted by everyone else in the series.

For Kaoru, she has two friends who are important to her. There’s Tanaka, a doctor who really serves as a mentor on how relationships work on an adult level beyond marriage, and Rino helps her with the more intimate aspects of marriage as a newlywed herself. In addition, they are all fully capable of having conversations between each other without husbands or men being a part of them.

That would be the sign to say that there will be lots of sex for 6 hours and Hajime will be experiencing none of it later on.

This group all comes together from time to time on different adventures or activities that they do simply because they are a big group of friends. There’s no ulterior motives behind these get together. Hell, they are even willing to spend time alone with Hajime on Christmas Eve because Kaoru is working…at least until 9pm then all bets are off. It just makes for a positive contrast between shows about people growing apart because of relationships or simply real life experience. Marriage doesn’t mean an end to forming new relationships with other people or staying close to others.

Yes, yes you did. Now you are gone.

This season I have taken a different approach with the newly airing shows this season. Since I am still in the middle of boycotting a licensor that shall not be named here, I ended up starting 19 different shows. Each week, I am eliminating one (or possibly more) shows that I deem the worst for the week until the end of the season is finally reached. As I have decided to start this feature on a whim, there is no week 1.

After Lance N’ Masques was eliminated for the crime of being dull and having only an anthropomorphized horse as the only highlight of its opening episode, it was now up to the remaining 18 shows to prove that they belonged in my watch list. After tweeting about this challenge I received just one response:

Now Reiseng, I think you are great and all for responding to my dumb tweets about anime, but trying to predict my taste is just foreshadowing the downfall of whatever I’m talking about at the time.

Hackadoll The Animation is a short that I have been known to keep watching despite it being utterly terrible. Hell, I finished Ishida to Asakura which should have resulted in my award of a Purple Heart, but I digress. The second episode of this story about degenerate nth-generation AI trying to help people focused on a producer trying find a replacement group of idols. Lo and behold a trio of idiotic AI show up to lift his hopes up and end up delivering a spectacularly bad show that left most of the audience as dead as Randy Quaid’s acting career. Except for that one damn fan who kept cheering all of it. I bet his favorite idol anime is Wake Up, Girls.

That was enough to doom it to the dropped pile as my 436th one according to MyAnimeList. That doesn’t mean there weren’t others that are now on the cusp:

To provide context: this character entered the room for the sole purpose of having the others talk about her backstory then she left.

Comet Lucifer delivered a 2nd episode that just felt sort of like Fractale with mecha. Admittedly a kid who likes rocks is an interesting start for a protagonist of this sort of show, but it doesn’t mean that the mysterious girl that comes from one, Felia, has to have the intelligence of one.

Komori-san wa Kotowarenai! is pretty much the same show as the manga that I read before and is just as good as I thought it was when I brought it up here. It’s an interesting concept for a main character wasted on terrible jokes about breast size coming from her friends.

Subete ga F ni Naru: The Perfect Insider has fantastic use of lighting in its scenes. Unfortunately I just can’t buy any of the characters. Maybe as the plot is just now getting started it can start focusing on developing characters other than Shiki.

Taimadou Gakuen 35 Shiken Shoutai is a terribly written mess of a show with a self-insert protagonist who lucks into power because reasons. Needless to say, this is probably a show which will be up there with Magical Warfare in just being bad at everything. It’s somehow made it to the 3rd episode for me.

On the plus side, Gakuen Toshi Asterisk hasn’t turned out to be the absolute dumpster fire I thought it would be. Peeping Life’s Idiot Couple on vacation has proven to be one of my highlights of the season. Osomatsu-kun is doing a good job of showing how to make updated versions of classics without making it an entirely different show and only including the original title in your social commentary piece.

Finally, there’s Utawarerumono: Itsuwari no Kamen which would be a series that I would recommend to normal people if I knew any normal people I could recommend anime to. It continues to prove that when it comes to adaptations of Aquaplus visual novels, the 2nd series is always the one to watch. Maybe this one can sneak in to my top 30 list at the rate it’s going early on.

As always, those still standing can be seen on my MAL.

Because Peyton is the right Manning for Bad QB League Play

Trust me, this isn’t really a post about American football or what not, but it’s tangentially related enough to put in the gif above. The origins of this post have to do with the whole process of trying to recommend a show to someone. Why does it have to be so hard?

After the first week of the NFL season had concluded last month, Aeroblip, the producer of the podcast of which I am a contributor, Anime Soapbox (still sadly lacking Crunchyroll and XBox sponsorship) and I made a wager. This is something that he had done with Kelloggs last year. Essentially, it’s the winner in the fantasy football league matchup gives the loser a show they must watch for review. Let’s see how my team Hidan no Arians AA (named for Arizona Cardinals head coach Bruce Arians in case you think I’m some sort of spelling-challenged national socialist) did this week:

So as of this writing that would be a win because wide receivers generally don’t score NEGATIVE FIFTY-ONE POINTS. Which now leads me into the question of what sort of show do I recommend to Aeroblip?

I talked to Kelloggs, who won their respective bet last time, and he ended up giving him Sakura Trick because he wanted to give Aeroblip a show outside that he liked and outside of his usual preferences. The feedback afterward was less positive than trying to run a football play 2-on-4.

My history of recommending shows to people other than Aeroblip has been pretty spotty. There was that time I recommended Itsudatte! My Santa out of spite. There was the time that Flawfinder basically rage quit on Anime Secret Santa because of what I gave him. Needless to say, I’m not exactly in tune to most people’s tastes in things.

It reminds me of one of the little points of emphasis with the various music streaming services that are out there. A lot was made of Apple having hand-curated (whatever the hell that means) playlists for customers to give them music they would like. On the other hand, there is Spotify that uses an algorithm to match a user’s taste to those of others and uses what was playlisted by similar users to build a suggested playlist. The former ends up being way too conservative in selections while the latter has consistency issues. There should be a middle ground somewhere, but I think moneyed interests will prevent it from happening there.

Yep, my taste again.

Meanwhile in anime, there’s no money to be fighting over, so it should be easier to come up with some sort of solution for anime recommendation. I mean I can’t be trusted with one of the shows I came up with on my own. Why can’t there be something out there where I can just put in some shows and ratings and it will spit me out the perfect show? Why do people have to be so subjective? If I had the time of day I would probably come up with something, but I have a job to fulfill and it would be a second job for no money.

I’ll have to trust my gut on this one I’m afraid.

Any damn excuse to make this an imouto incest show.

Each week I am going through the anime series available to me this season and choosing to drop the worst performer that week. Lance N’ Masques was eliminated for being boring. Hackadoll was eliminated for being putrid idol bullshit. Which terrible show will hit my drop list this week and make my viewing much easier and much more bearable?

Beneath the usual shonen series (and outright porn), but above Haikyu, which is good, is our “winner”

If one was to take a look at Crunchyroll’s most popular shows at any given time, it’s pretty much dominated by the Shonen Jump adaptations and anything that was recently released. If anything outside of that hangs around for a couple of days, then it’s probably legitimately popular with the users of the site. (Waits for someone to tell me immediately this analysis is totally wrong). Out of the most popular shows at the time of this post, Anti-Magic Academy: The 35th Test Platoon is this week’s winner. It’s a show that is popular, and I think anyone who does like this unironically should feel bad.

This week’s failure of an episode included a new character called Mari, who is a witch. You know Ouka hates witches so it creates an instant point of conflict. She’s also a tsundere character who is after Takeru within minutes, because reasons. That’s not even the worst part of the episode though. Usagi enters the team in a competition where they can win 1,000 points toward I guess not being considered as shit as they are by the rest of the academy. So Takeru has to glance at the bracket and he’s immediately confronted by the leader of another platoon who just acts like a dick to him for unexplained reasons. This may be acceptable for a feud in an 80s action films or professional wrestling, but this medium is neither of those. This terribly written, yet popular work is now gone from my watch list.

“Contenders”

I could swear that really is what mixed farming is.

Since I don’t want anything to come as a surprise to my single-digit readership, I try to give an idea of what shows could be next to be dropped in the coming weeks. Here’s this week’s cases of not being good.G

Comet Lucifer continues to do nothing for me. It may survive the season by simply not doing anything.

JK-Meshi! is a short series in which Ruriko shows the intelligence of a grade school girl and she and the three others have a simple meal at the end of it. At least it must not cost much to make.

Beautiful Bones -Sakurako’s Investigation- has badly declined with each episode. Shoutarou is just going to spend the whole series exasperated at Sakurako isn’t he? I think after his action star turn last episode this was just back to a formula that already seems so tired.

The Perfect Insider can’t have as obvious a culprit as I think it is? I think this show hit peak stupidity when in this week’s episode Moe kicked off a spell of exposition in which both she and Souhei went into “Hey we’re doing the exposition thing now!” mode. When will Noitamina get back to airing good shows again?

Positives

This is excellent.

I like to wrap up the week by highlighting the fact that there are usually a few good episodes each week. Here are this week’s selections.

Magical Somera-chan continues to be wonderful. Yes, I liked Ai Mai Mi and you should too. Wait, where are you going? Come back. Please.

Utawarerumono may have managed to get me my first APR vote total since the whole death in the family situation several months ago, but I still insist that it’s actually a good show. They even brought Ray Romano back from underwater for the third episode.

In this edition of TTILAMTFA (which looks like a terrible program responsible for building death machines), I discuss an aspect of my 28th favorite series, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. This is a series that I just came across by circumstance, and there is one particular character that made it memorable. Unfortunately, no one else in the whole wide world agrees with me on this. It’s my post, so I’m going to gush over them how I want. Got it?

Sekiutsu “Maria” Tarou

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is a wonderfully dark comedy with a few seasons and specials that ran from the fall of 2007 to a conclusion in January 2012. I say that it’s wonderful because it fully embraces the philosophy that there’s no light without the darkness.

For those who don’t know anything about the series, it’s a harem series starring a teacher named Itoshiki Nozomu, which written horizontally is zetsubou (despair). He’s introduced to the audience in the middle of an unsuccessful attempt to hang himself from a blooming cherry blossom tree. He’s introduced to his students slowly, but he manages to accidentally get all of the girls to fall for him in between his despairing about modernity itself. Each of the characters in the class is pretty one-dimensional like a hikkikomori, a girl who is bandaged, the strict class representative-like girl, a stalker, the one who is essentially the only normal girl and that bothers her, etc. Maria, or Mataro as she is called by Kafuka, goes by is an illegal immigrant and the inspiration for this post.

Maria is introduced to the show as a replacement for the real Sekiutsu Tarou. It turns out that he found the idea of selling his entire identity to a foreign girl and her numerous siblings very appealing. So he spends his days sitting naked in an empty box since it’s the essence of being nothing.

The thing that stands out for me about Maria is a point that never seems to come up in anime or manga since they rarely deal with real life issues is that she is inherently a political character. Her role basically isn’t so much to just be a token foreign character (there’s already someone to technically play that role in Kimura Kaere, a girl returning from abroad), but to be commentary on society as a whole. She’s treated very well be nearly everyone around her and given all sorts of things by people from a society filled with excess and prosperity.

Japan seems like a very nice country as a result and welcoming country to her, but her status makes this interesting. Officially, Japan’s population is 98.5% Japanese ethnicity. This is a staggeringly high number that is only really rivaled by South Korea in the developed world. Japan also has a declining population with one of the oldest populations in the world, yet there’s very little in the way of immigration to Japan because of the barriers that are put up. Since Maria made it inside of this system by buying a Japanese identity, she gets the benefits of living in a society where resources are abundant and social connections make it easier to tap into it. This is unlike her unnamed home country where presumably everyone is poor so there is nothing to give to other people in bad situations. Maria even became so indoctrinated at one point that she gave a speech before the diet against illegal immigration.

I’m also going to mention that Maria is voiced by one Sawashiro Miyuki. She seemed everywhere for a time; as is the case for almost any voice actress that reaches a certain level, but I have a definite pantheon of her roles in which Maria definitely belongs.

The Completely Unofficial Sawashiro Miyuki Character Pantheon

• Celty (Durarara!!)
• Hakaze (Zetsuen no Tempest)
• Maria (Arakawa Under the Bridge)
• Maria (Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei)
• Mint (Galaxy Angel)
• Puchiko (Di Gi Charat)

Anyway, the long and short of this is really that Maria is a character that made me think about Japan as a country beyond the old “anime is great, so Japan must be a great country” thoughts. I was in Japan for my first visit last month, and even that 98.5% figure above seems low even as I was really just visiting major cities. There’s going to be more on that in December by the way.

Moe is exhausted after explaining the plot to the audience again.

Welcome back to another edition of the Fall Eliminator. Each week I am going through the anime series available to me and choosing to drop the worst performing show that week. Lance N’ Masques was eliminated for being boring. Hackadoll was eliminated for being putrid idol bullshit. Last week, the 35th Platoon bit the dust with its catastrophic writing. Which terrible show will hit my drop list this week and make my viewing much easier and much more bearable?

This robot does not have emotions. If it did it would be upset at sharing screentime.

In this week’s installment of the Eliminator, we get to see yet another Noitamina series fail to reach the heights of even Black Rock Shooter and Guilty Crown let alone anything that ever aired on Anime no Chikara. Wait, you guys don’t remember that do you? There’s always hope for their next series which revisits the end of the Showa era. I don’t know a lot about Boku Dake ga Inai Machi, but it can’t be this bad, can it?

So what did The Perfect Insider do this week that upset me so much? This is more a culmination of things. There’s Moe, who could be the most interesting character in the series if she wasn’t in love with a guy who had less charisma than that robot that unlocked and locked the door to the professor’s room. There’s the insistence that I was feeling that because Magata Shiki was exploring her sexuality when she was younger that it must obviously mean that she’s mentally ill. There’s the fact that the culprit of all of this is obvious. Seriously though, that robot had more charisma than everyone except Shiki and Moe. I guess this is mostly just a standard boredom drop of a show that thought it could make for an intelligent thriller.

Contenders

This is a thing that happened in an episode during the year 2015.

Comet Lucifer is not above this section simply because of the dancing vegetables segment. That was fun as hell. There’s a good chance this doesn’t survive another week though.

Komori-san wa Kotowarenai! gave us an episode where Shuri couldn’t do everything. Yet, it was still kind of boring.

JK-Meshi! revisited last week’s episode and the dumb girl managed to get the best score on the history test. Studying, how does that work?

Positives

Not as good as Nichijou when this line was used.

Hakone-chan is just adorable. Even if she quotes Nietzschean lines while bemoaning the lack of steamed buns, it’s still pretty cute.

Osomatsu-san has been incredibly good as an update to a series from decades ago. Juushimatsu swinging a baseball bat around in a girl’s room while waiting for her had me laughing. It was also great how the opening joke tied into the final gag of the episode.

Osomatsu-san is a very serious show about medical ethics and the treatment of animals.

In this second half of this week’s 5th episode of Osomatsu-san, the story revolves around a cat that is able to understand human emotions. Four of the sextuplets mess around with the cat at Choromatsu while Ichimatsu sits in the corner. He has a soft spot for cats, but not so much ones that will spit out what a person is really feeling. It turned out that it would lead to a sort of touching insight into feelings I am very much familiar with:

Good comedies sometimes have moments like these. It’s not as though Ichimatsu really wants to be the loner he feels he has to be, but he doesn’t know any other way and no way to get out of it. So he really talks a big game of how great he thinks he is compared to other people when it’s really the opposite.

I probably don’t get personal enough on this blog even though it is my thing. However, this conversation really got to me. I end up feeling just like and acting just like Ichimatsu here. It’s a positive feedback loop of having no confidence leading to not acting leading to even less confidence. Fortunately for Ichimatsu here, he still has his brothers, both parents and a Showa-era idealized community to help him out in times of trouble. I really didn’t expect a dumb segment in a dumb comedy series to hit me so hard. I just wish more shows would take the time to go exploring the depths of human emotion in a safe setting.

Exactly the type of line that would be shouted by someone who would never be unpopular in real life.

Welcome back to the latest edition of the Fall Eliminator. Each week I am going through the anime series available to me and choosing to drop the worst performing show that week. Lance N’ Masques was eliminated for being boring. Hackadoll was eliminated for being putrid idol bullshit. The 35th Platoon bit the dust with its catastrophic writing. The Perfect Insider channeled its inner Dan Brown to go wherever the Vatican stores their supply of antimatter. Which terrible show will hit my drop list this week and make my viewing much easier and much more bearable?

Going this week is a show I completely forgot to put in the contender’s category last week. Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note is a series that is about a grade school girl who is only good at Japanese partnering with the members of a boys soccer team who happen to also be good at only one subject in school to solve mysteries. I would have noted last week that the first mystery ended with one of the kids fighting a guy who stole his bike and was armed with a knife because drama. It’s about as silly as Sakurako‘s main character managing to fight off an actual murderer, but at least he has experience in fighting people.

So this week began a new story for the group that all went to different middle schools. One of them even had to settle for a public school, what a shame. His life is effectively ruined, but I digress. The main girl, Tachibana Aya, fits in about as badly as you would expect for a girl who isn’t particularly intelligent and whose parents have devoted their efforts to her older brother and younger sister. She runs into a new boy who is misunderstood and commits the ultimate crime for a middle school girl; being friends with attractive boys. It’s just so clumsily handled that I’m checking out now.

Contenders

Comet Lucifer continues to do one thing, and only one thing each week that convinces me to continue watching. The mecha battle was pretty cool in the snow and maybe this show will be more watchable with Felia more grown up.

JK Meshi! just continues to mess around with the character of Ruriko, who has transformed from a clumsy idiot to super-intelligent ninja girl. This was my 2nd choice to be dropped because that was a really terrible take on pizza at the end.

Sakurako-san is well…I don’t even know anymore. It just kind of exists at this point in this space between detective series, angst and peak unintentional comedy. They just need to give this new villain in the series a white cat to pet between scenes.

Positives

Utawarerumono introduced a new girl who happens to be a princess and is way up in the best girl rankings for this series. Also, Haku’s reaction to having his kebab ruined is the (intentional) comedic moment of the season for me so far.

Peeping Life doesn’t get enough love outside of this blog since I think the number of people watching it might be in the tens. My favorite moment of this week’s episode was the sketch in the matchmaking center when a 38-year-old office lady mentions that she’s an idol groupie.

Finally, Komori-san has managed promotion to this tier. It was just a fun episode that focused on Negishi, one of Komori’s friends, and at least made a character seem human. That’s all it takes to make it up to this tier, it isn’t that hard.