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Tadakun has been just watchable thus far, but mediocre-to-lousy writing is bringing it down. Characters this extravagant and scenarios this unlikely really belong in an over-the-top farce à la Nisekoi; they jar completely with the lower-key, more naturalistic tone being attempted. It all comes off as a wild clash of story elements with little serious thought given to reconciling them. The core, Tada-Teresa romance is underdeveloped and under-justified. Teresa acts almost as if she came to Japan for the specific purpose of standing around in the park looking helpless and then falling in love with the first eligible Japanese dude who offered assistance. She immediately ... meets his family and is totally at ease with them; her hotel is coincidentally directly next door; for some reason she's enrolled in his middle-ranking Japanese high school. They barely even lampshade this stuff.

For that matter, the whole concept that Teresa is a foreigner at all seems highly questionable. As far as I can tell she's a Japanese in a colorful wig, as are all the other Larsenburg / Luxembourgish characters. Maybe the house of de Larsenburg has been secretly relying on Yamato stock to make up some genetic deficiency. Aside from hair and eye color, Teresa's foreignness is expressed entirely in a naive Weebish love of all things Japanese, which is never disappointed and which all the Japanese cast seem to regard as perfectly natural since obviously Japan is thoroughly wonderful and has no exasperating or disappointing aspects for anyone. This is set in Ginza in 2018! We live in a society!

But the side stories are even worse. There's *another* goddess with an obvious secret identity who's in love for no believable reason with a guy far below her league (and unlike Tadakun, who at least does seem to have a winning personality, her guy is an obnoxious gravure idol otaku.) There's a male sidekick who's... for some reason a dog? There's an obese cat who's just kind of there doing his own story. And these people take up a LOT of screen time, it's not just momentary relief from the main plot.

This show needed to either embrace the zaniness and tell a fast-paced madcap story, or else tell its basic story in a serious, thought-out way that doesn't rely on characters just conforming to the predetermined needs of the plot. Falling between two stools like this is no good.

They managed to make a show about vampires completely bloodless.

About the kindest thing you can say for Strike the Blood is that it's not screamingly bad in any particular way. Rather it's uniformly, monotonously bad; bad in every single way that an anime of its general description might turn out to be bad. Now bad shows are a fact of life and nothing to get excited about, but the fandom's toleration and acceptance for bad shows like this is a real shame and only encourages the studios to keep turning them out instead of something actually worthwhile.

SutoBura actually begins reasonably well. True, the first episode ... begins with an unnecessary and confusing narrative prologue, in which anonymous voices portentously explain the main character's back story, but after that the actual content is solid if unimaginative. We're introduced to the setting of an artificial island city built to safely contain magic-users and demons away from the main Japanese population – an effective concept that should have starred as practically a character in itself, but ends up in later episodes feeling completely neglected and undistinguished from any random ward of Tokyo. We meet the two main characters and set up some promising tensions between them. Himeragi, apparently, has been assigned by some kind of powerful supernatural organization to investigate Akatsuki, who simply wants to be left alone in peace despite his recent unwanted conversion to one of the world's most powerful vampires, and therefore a focus of intrigue and suspicion. Of course, they're a young boy and an even younger girl, and the usual tsundere harem love-hate dynamic is clearly seen to be developing. And there's an action scene involving some random street punks that, if a bit of a cliched throwaway in concept, at least does introduce both main characters' fighting styles and supernatural powers. Okay, none of this is earth-shattering but it does at least seem to set up a serviceable, not-too-serious high school harem action comedy-drama, which is all I was ever looking for here.

And then, over the interminable 23 following episodes, it falls apart faster and more comprehensively than one would have thought possible. The series develops into a series of 2-4 episode arcs that are effectively "Monster of the Week" affairs. But the plot-development scenes that string the fights together are interminable, wooden gab-fests. We're lectured about complex conspiracies and clashes among a host of supernatural factions that never have any clear motivation and never actually appear on screen. And none of it really matters anyway because the resolution inevitably comes in an unimaginative fight sequence decided by the protagonists' inherently superior magical powers, while the villains stand around shouting something along the lines of "Masaka! Is this the power of yada yada, that can defeat even my blah blah??" But maybe we should be grateful for the sheer incomprehensibility of the supernatural bullshit, since when the plot turns on ordinary human powers it's often laughably illogical.

After the first arc we're introduced to a recurring semi-villain character who adds a delicious extra layer of inanity by showing up every so often, after something (apparently?) important has occurred, to stroke his chin and muse aloud evil-ly about how whatever the fuck just happened was actually just a brilliant manipulation he engineered in accordance with his own, still deeper plan. Pay attention, aspiring writers, this is how you make it in the light novel business.

As for the lighter, high school harem aspect of the show? The food is terrible and the portions are too small. The Himeragi relationship starts out okay but settles into an unimaginative tsundere thing; she's constantly "accusing" Akatsuki of horrible crimes such as wanting to kiss girls, but of course, these accusations are baseless and crazy since he's actually a passive, clueless dork. The other girls mostly just lust after Akatsuki for no real reason, some adding their own halfhearted "actually I hate you" tsundere routine and some not, according to taste. There's very little in the way of humor or entertaining byplay, mostly just Akatsuki walking in on girls, over and over. The attendant fanservice shots aren't even very good on a purely pornographic level; they're both artless and, largely, tame.

Even the chud who wrote this couldn't quite miss that vampires are supposed to be awesome inhuman monsters and that vampirism is all about power and sex. Akatsuki is introduced as someone fairly revolted by blood-sucking, having always suppressed his urges. Of course, he ends up forced into it by circumstances, and of course it's with a cute girl who he's already in some kind of ambiguous relationship with. But the resultant story beats are rushed and emotionless. The perpetrator doesn't fret much over the monstrous nature of the act, and doesn't afterwards struggle with an increased thirst for blood and compulsion to feed on innocent victims. The "blood donor" doesn't seem to really risk anything in the process; she's neither traumatized nor transfixed. She just makes a little bit of a sex moan and then falls asleep for a while and then afterwards everything's cool. You'd say it had all the human consequences of a botched grope session between two teenagers in the gym equipment room, except that actually, that's overstating it, if you consider how emotionally fraught that kind of thing is when conducted among actual human teenagers rather than poorly written anime protagonists.

On a purely visual level Strike the Blood is mostly serviceable though not pretty. The budget seems to have gone mostly into fight scenes (not that these are lavish) and a lot of the slower, talky scenes are virtually static, with characters' facial expressions sometimes mismatched to their VAs' performances. There are a few moments of outright "QUALITY" and a number of what seemed like contrived excuses to cut down on animation expenses, such as a scene staged on a cargo ship among featureless shipping containers and a fight involving stiff, clumsy looking robot soldier enemies. As I said up front, none of this stuff is really outrageously bad, it just provides no relief from the all-around badness. Nor do the unmemorable soundtrack and voice performances.

On the whole this is just not worth anyone's time, and a prime example of the plague of god-awful light novel adaptations that is ruining anime.

Isekai Shokudou is shockingly, relentlessly boring. There's a mundane, quiet restaurant; it has a magic portal that's branches out to a bunch of corresponding portals in a sword and sorcery fantasy world. A rotating cast of fantasy guest characters come through the door. They eat food and then leave. Back in fantasy isekai land, they do have stuff going on; this is explained through direct narration or maybe some clumsy expository dialogue. But it's just back story. The restaurant visit does nothing at all to resolve the off-screen tension (except in one case where the guy's big problem was... he hadn't eaten in a while.) ... They enter, order, eat, enjoy, and leave. That's it.

I want to be crystal clear about this because weeb apologists may think I'm just bored with slice-of-life drama, or a show about cooking, and wanted to see violence and strife. No. I wanted to see any kind of conflict, problem, or question; and then I wanted to see how it was resolved, or how the attempts to resolve it failed, and how that led logically to new conflicts, problems, or questions. In other words I wanted something that conforms to the basic essentials of a dramatic presentation. But this show doesn't. It fundamentally violates the implicit pact between author and viewer because the author is an incompetent amateur web novel guy who has no idea what he's doing.

People, this is unacceptable. Stop enabling this kind of garbage. Yes, the author didn't understand his craft; yes the studio adapted a failed, forgettable web novel and shot it scene-for-scene instead of reworking it into an actual story. But the ultimate blame lies with the fans who swallow and even praise these unnecessary, failed projects. Go take a grade school English class. If you pay attention you'll understand why this isn't good storytelling. It isn't storytelling at all.

A mystical gate to another world opens up, and out pours an army of tedious genre bullshit.

GATE's choice to make the Earthlings far more powerful than the fantasy nations should, in principle, have been an interesting one. Combat is consistently one of the most boring and decadently overstylized elements of anime. Instead of a digestible through-line – the reckless charge gradually disintegrates under unanswerable fire, the duelist affects a false opening to bait a real one from his opponent – anime usually gives us visual noise, "badass" dialogue, and arbitrary "dramatic" violation of the author's own, self-devised rules. Taking any of prospect military defeat off ... the table at the outset could have created an opening for more absorbing sources of tension. It's a culturally and diplomatically fraught situation, a kind of super-Colombian Exchange in a present-day context complete with modern communications, mass media, democratic politics and great-power competition. Rich and rewarding stories might have been told.

Instead we get a bunch of completely pointless "battle" scenes. Numerous one-sided massacres are depicted in loving detail; the protagonists make no attempt to deter battle or obtain the enemy's surrender, and the antagonists obligingly charge into meaningless death for no reason. After a while, the writers seem to become aware that this is a problem, and start reaching for ways to place the protagonists in genuine danger. Unfortunately they're absolutely terrible at it. Small, isolated patrols travel through hostile territory for no reason and run into completely predictable trouble. At one point the protagonist's motor convoy is held up, literally, by mounted knights pointing lances through the opened windows of their Toyotas; instead of flooring it and scattering the opponents, he gets out of the truck to "negotiate" and is promptly and predictably captured.

The problem with GATE is not that it's militant nationalist propaganda. Some of the unquestioned masterpieces of 20th century film are militant nationalist propaganda. The problem with GATE is that it's narratively incoherent. Events happen for no reason other than plot convenience and characters act with no motivation other than playing to type. Russia, China, and the United States (!) are depicted as jealous international rivals simply because the author doesn't like foreigners. Japan monopolizes access to the gate (isn't it more like an international strait?) and seemingly annexes the entire fantasy world as the "Special Region," but the rival countries don't seem to object or apply any conventional form of pressure against Japan. Instead and for no clear reason they send terrorist hit squads into Japan to be promptly massacred while spouting dialogue along the lines of "Argh! We mere Delta Force operatives are no match for the superior Japanese!"

We're repeatedly assured in dialogue that this nonsensical international struggle revolves around the fantasy world's "strategic resources." We're never shown these resources nor even told what they are until well into the second season; somehow the world knows these resources exist and are extremely important, but not where or what they are. We never meet or even hear about geologists or natural scientists of any kind, nor for that matter linguists, anthropologists, ethnobotanists, or anyone else with a relevant civilian occupation. A demigodess and a powerful mage hang out with the main character yet no-one seems especially interested in investigating the entirely unknown physical principles underlying their abilities, nor does anyone seem bothered by the implications for world religions of a woman claiming divinity and able to manifest miracles at will. One subplot hinges on the Japanese side's complete and explicit disinterest in a large number of dragon scales which we're later told are an organic material comparable to tungsten, one of the hardest and densest materials in existence. The supposedly strategic resources eventually turn out to be mundane cash cows like uranium and petroleum.

Minor details and story beats are just as botched as the big picture. Armaments and military equipment are depicted in loving, autistic detail; meanwhile bare-headed soldiers salute civilians indoors, subordinates unashamedly deprecate superiors, and the commanding officer takes a spontaneous nap in a war zone without telling anyone. One of the soldiers – a 5' redhead with big tits, naturally – is assigned the role of beat-down artist and repeatedly wins unnecessary melee combats with multiple armored opponents twice her size bearing superior weapons. One-off characters are introduced by name in subtitles for no reason, including a stereotypically merchant-looking guy who's there solely to deal in merchandise. The subtitle identifies him as a merchant.

There's just no enjoyable viewing of GATE. As a drama it's one-dimensional, cliché-ridden, and unserious. As a harem comedy it's burdened with boring, tonally inappropriate scenes of massacre and high politics. The animation is mostly unobjectionable but done purely by-the-numbers. Even as right-wing nationalist propaganda, it will repel anyone with the slightest degree of sophistication whatever their politics. It's nothing but trash.