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Metallic Rouge – A Forgone Failure

Something I always do before watching an anime, specially an original one not based on a source material, is seeing the previous works from its director, as that’s usually a good sign of what you’re getting into. Motonobu Hori being the name at the helm of this anime was an instant red flag, as he had previously helmed 2 shows (Carole and Tuesday, Super Crooks) that are very bad, and Metallic Rouge ends up unsurprisingly suffering from many problems.

Its attempts at a story are slow paced, but not because it can actually set anything of substance, but because it feels ... like it has no idea what it truly wants to be, between the CGDCT-type protagonists that feel straight from a Lycoris Recoil rip-off, cyberpunk world that’s the millionth take on the long used “robots can dream” plot, mystery story with no actual driving question, this show feels like a mismatch of ideas that never truly gel together. Aside from its aimless plot, the characters have no chemistry, the attempts at making them feel like friends being incredibly forced, while the animation is bog standard from the Bones staff, and the scenes they seem to actually care about (the fight parts) just feel so bland, I literally stare at them with a blank expression as none of them make me feel anything.

Even worse, the series suffers from a major case of what’s known as narrative gaslighting. It tells you things, but these things don’t match up with what’s actually happening, and it refuses to accept it’s wrong and instead convince you it’s right. Neans are treated as these poor little things that are always suffering… when we see that the reason they’re like this is because they’re very clearly a danger to people, they seek to attack humans and only don’t because they were wise enough to put restrainers on them, the ones we see entering fights are clearly the type who’d kill a person the second they got a chance, with Rouge’s clearly violent behavior from not having these restrains being the best example. Neans are supposed to be seen as victims, when they very much either a) shouldn’t have issue with being unable to attack people given they literally exist for labor and thus should carry no desire to fight or b) are a restrain away from becoming dangerous criminals, so it feels very rational for them to not be allowed to become murderers.

At the end of the day, the biggest sin of this series is that it’s just so empty. I scrambled to even write what to say here as this show is just so lacking in terms of substance, it’s hard to critique something in a constructive manner when I can basically sum up every single issue with this show by saying “every part of it sucks”, as it’s really just a bunch of bad writing that doesn’t have anything to make it stand out. Metallic Rouge is simply a fundamentally flawed series to its very core, with barely any aspect of it that doesn’t suck, so a project so blatantly doomed to fail as this one is painful to see, because it was a forgone failure from its inception.

Thank you for reading

Have you ever seen the amount of anime that are power fantasies for men for the audience to self-insert into? Well, you don’t have to worry about that in this show, because this decided to do the “innovative” idea of making a power fantasy but for women, with Maomao serving very clearly as a Mary Sue to do this.

I mean, when you look at the conversation around this show, you see people being fine with the protagonist, which honestly confuses me, because this is the kind of show that, if it had a male protagonist, it would be rightfully called a self-insert power fantasy. The ... exact moment that I got to this conclusion was when Maomao put on makeup, because this moment showed that Maomao isn’t some plain girl and that her freckles are actually fake but she puts them on for safety reasons, which means that she makes herself uglier on purpose while she is actually so pretty that she surprises people with her beauty, a blatant example of the “looks ugly but is actually beautiful” trope being used to make the protagonist look better.

I’m fine with Maomao being good at testing poisons and having deep knowledge about the subject, she worked as an apothecary after all, and has even tested poison on herself. Maomao being a detective might be fine, her scientific interest aligns with critical thinking, but the fact that she actually guesses correctly every single thing thrown at her can make her look too perfect at a job she doesn’t actually have. She also teaches concubines about how to be better at having sex, despite being a virgin, and this is a problem, as she is better than other people in their areas of expertise when she is supposed to just be an apothecary, and that extends to things beyond this point. It’s fine if she is smarter than a quack doctor, but it almost seems that without her, the palace won’t be able to continue running because she solves almost everything.

You can just look at her qualities and see that her flaws aren’t actually flaws. Being ugly is a completely self-imposed thing, as she’s apparently the most beautiful around. She is very quirky and shows no interest in men, but that’s what gets her Jinshi being interested in her, since unlike the other girls who are lusting over Jinshi everywhere he goes, she is not interested in him as she is not like the other girls and her quirkiness makes her “interesting”, so she ends up getting attention from the perfect guy despite the fact that he doesn’t receive any reciprocation from her. I thought that we made fun of this when a romcom is about a 10/10 girl talking to the completely average guy just because he is nice, why is this suddenly okay when the exact thing is being done here?

Also, there are other girls who don’t like her and they are always proven wrong by saying they were just jealous of how amazing she is, I swear that I could barely look at the screen on episode 4 where she scolds that lady-in-waiting and slaps her in the face, I mean, Maomao was in the right (she always is) but it made me cringe at the scene, it almost felt like when in revenge fantasies the MC puts a popular guy “in their place”. I don’t even want to go about who her real father is, is there any other hidden talent or important connection that she has that I do not know?

Honestly, I’m very confused at the very positive reaction this series got, maybe it’s just that I can’t see this series and think in the MC as anything other than a massive case of a Mary Sue MC, because to me she is just blatantly written as one.

Thank you for reading.

Sousou no Frieren is a series with a great premise, it starts after the demon king is defeated and it is focused in what comes after that, the passage of time is very important as we follow an immortal elf that sees the friends she fought alongside with getting older and dying and she feels that she should have known them better, so she decided to go on another journey retracing her steps. This could have worked wonderfully, if only the protagonist Frieren wasn’t a Mary Sue, Fern wasn’t Frieren 2 but with some more human concerns and Stark wasn’t Zenitsu but somewhat less annoying. ... Honestly, I had such high hopes for this series, when I saw it was animated by Madhouse and it was directed by Keichiirou Saitou (who people surely know for his directing work in Bocchi the Rock), the fact I’m disappointed despite all the big names on it is easily because of the writing. This series tries to be an introspective series about the passage of time and relationships, but it gets very inconsistent and half-assed with that, when half of your episodes are focused on action arcs then you have a problem here because, as fans of the series will tell you, this series isn’t about the battles and so having as many battles as this does just ruin the mood and sour the experience, despite not being a fan of multiple parts where a scene happens and basically the exact same thing happens again in a flashback, it at least feels like it tries to tell you something, that maybe Frieren knew her friends better than she thinks and it is only understanding that now, some episodes manage to be meaningful in this aspect, but others definitely don’t contribute this at all.

The worst offense of the series is that sometimes it doesn’t know what it wants to be, it starts as a slice of life but sometimes it will turn into a battle shonen, and I think there’s nothing wrong with having some battles here and there nor that I have problems with battle shonen themselves, the problem is that the series isn’t supposed to be this, you don’t have to look further from the PVs, the synopsis and what everyone will tell you about the series to know this, it is supposed to be an introspective series, not an action show. Just take a look at the arc where they face Aura and her minions, this is clearly formatted this way, I was baffled when watching episode 9, not because of the incredible animation, but because I was confused why this series was turning this way. You get many problems here going from Stark’s battle against Linie, which is stupid when you think about it, really, Stark is getting completely defeated by Linie until he has a flashback about his master and realizes that apparently Linie’s attacks have no weigh to them, never mind he has a lot of blood in his body from said attacks, and then proceeds to one-shot her, this kind of asspull is literally out of a battle shonen, it made me feel like I was watching Kimetsu no Yaiba. Then you have Fern’s battle, somehow it managed to be both impressive and unimpressive at the same time, it is impressive because of the quality of the animation put in there, if you check the manga you will see that the anime improved the battle scene so much it’s unreal, but at the same time it’s unimpressive because watching it makes me feel nothing, I’m not excited to see this battle nor interested in it, the fact Fern’s face looks like she is having the most boring battle of her life doesn’t help either. And you will see that things that were talked about earlier don’t make sense either, when Stark and Fern are hiding, Fern is the one that says that if they face the demons alone they will die, this clearly isn’t true because her battle with Lugner was pathetic performance on his part, why would she lie to Stark about this? It’s not like the demons are hearing them or something, honestly that episode annoyed me and I thought it was the worst episode of the series until that moment.

The worst part about this is that the next episode was even worse, I was already worried when I saw the next episode title the week before episode 10 aired, because I knew nothing good would come out of it, this episode is something that made me roll my eyes, because not only the episode is horribly paced, it is also terribly done. The episode has 15 minutes of flashbacks about Frieren and Flamme, where they talk about how hiding your mana is a great technique to trick demons even if it takes hundreds of years to do it, and Frieren asks Flamme if demons can hide their mana, she very clearly says that they can’t but shortly later mentions that they actually can suppress their mana and sometimes do for some stealth, then she says that there’s no benefit to them if they hide their mana, and then says that they can’t control their mana when it was clearly stated that they can just a couple of statements ago, can you see how contradictory these four statements are? It’s like there’s no consistency in what they wanted to say about it. So, apparently this special technique that Frieren would use to beat Aura was hiding her power level, no, really, just think about it for a second, oh yes, she has been training this ability that was never mentioned before for a thousand years and coincidentally works perfectly when put against the gimmick of this gimmicky enemy. Saying that the writing in the “battle” against Aura was stupid is saying too little, actually, I remember that the very season this ep came out an isekai anime called Watashi no Oshi wa Akuyaku Reijou was airing and a couple of weeks later than this episode in Frieren they mentioned a battle with scales, and I remember doing a remark that it will surely go the same as Frieren’s episode, and as it just so happens it was exactly that, honestly it was my most disliked part of that series because of how stupid it is and I can’t believe I predicted it perfectly using another series as an example, because in both cases it was stupid. Surprisingly, by making the pacing of the episode completely suffer by making such a long explanation of a basic ability, it makes me feel like this series doesn’t trust the audience’s intelligence to get it the first time it was mentioned, if I wanted a series that did the hiding your power level bit better and without so much redundant exposition I would go and watch Dragon Ball again. This moment was clearly used to make Frieren look cool by making the villain kill themselves in a completely humiliating way, sadly, it fails to do that because it only makes her look like a cringe kid on the internet saying to others that they should kill themselves. It doesn’t even have a relevant purpose, because if I wanted to know that there are demons still roaming around even after the demon king’s dead, we already had Qual to make this point and that battle actually had a connection to the series’ theme of the passage of time as it talked about how humans improved in the last 80 years because his magic was terrifying so they reverse engineered it and created a counter to it. Mind you, I’m not saying that Aura shouldn’t have died, I’m saying that the way she dies was terrible writing, I don’t think I was supposed to feel pity for her after the fact. I remember that I was watching the series with my brother because he was also interested in the premise and he dropped the series right after that episode and never watched anything about it again because it wasn’t what he what the synopsis had promised, and I can’t blame him, honestly, that’s my entire point here.

Honestly the series would be so much better if it stayed like it promised it would be, a pretty comfy adventure that explores the world in the eyes of an immortal elf and how she sees her relationship with the people around her, and said theme actually returned in a way when Sein was introduced. In fact, I liked Sein, he was this jaded guy who was a drunkard and who had a friend that promised to meet him years ago but never returned to the town after he decided to go on an adventure, the catch here is that that friend asked Sein to go with him but Sein declined, so when Frieren and co try to make him go with them again and again, he eventually accepts because he started to feel that he needed to meet with his friend from many years ago, and actually I liked where this was going as he is a much more interesting character than Stark and Fern combined. Too bad that this series cannot keep itself interesting and decided that he should go after like 4 episodes, Sein was a good addition to the cast, but the worst part that came from this wasn’t letting Sein go, it was what came after it.

The next arc is actually the worst part of the entire show, remember that this show was an adventure to rekindle Frieren’s memories? Well, it no longer is about that as they stay in the same place taking an exam for 10 entire episodes, and it is stupid from its inception, the fact that they wouldn’t let the legendary mage who defeated the demon king traveling to the northern lands is stupid, especially because the situation doesn’t look bleak at all because there are cities ahead, and literally some episodes ago Frieren was simply allowed to pass another roadblock because of her reputation. And the more you think about this the more stupid it gets, as you can’t go to the northern lands in foot unless a 1st rate magic is there, when there are only 50 first rate mages, so searching for one just to go there is absolutely stupid, in fact, Frieren’s group could completely skip going that way and just go in a boat, but nooo, they have to do this because Fern has to eat, because that is the justification given despite how little sense it makes in this context, so we leave one of our main characters behind, because Stark doesn’t fucking matter in this show, so we can introduce a whole bunch of new characters that will also be examinees. The first part of the exam is putting people on a dangerous forest where there are creatures that could kill them while they try to capture a bird and there is also the possibility of stealing the captured bird from other participants, which is straight out of a battle shonen arc, you name it, Naruto’s Chuunin Exams or Hunter x Hunter’s Hunter Exams, it’s as cliché as it gets. The second exam is literally dungeon crawling, and Sense decided this test because she supposedly is a pacifist, despite the fact that there is a monster that create replicas of the participants and has their exact abilities and the willingness to kill them, honestly, this series just keeps contradicting itself the more it goes.

Ubel is a whole hell of a can of worms, but most notably has an ability that clearly makes the magic system stupid. She can copy other people’s magic if she empathizes with them, really, that’s it, she doesn’t need actual understanding of how that magic works, she just learns it. She has a spell that can cut through things as long as she is able to visualize herself cutting that thing, an example is given in the series itself, in a previous exam many people were incapable of making the first class mage leading the exam move because he has a magic cape with a gazillion of defense magics to the point no one has been able to damage him ever since he turned into a first class mage, so then comes Ubel who not only bypasses his defenses but also kills him in the process, which is because she visualized herself cutting through it as “they were just clothes”, which almost makes the defense magic look like a bluff because if a simple spell can cut it if the user visualized it being cut then why other people can’t do it too? The only explanation is that they are imaginationlets, because it has been mentioned across the series multiple times that magic in itself works through visualization, so why more people don’t just visualize themselves doing crazy shit? You would expect that since they have knowledge about this, they would practice it. This even makes previous scenes look stupid, take as an example the scene where Fern defends herself against Qual’s spell, Qual is completely sure that he is going to evaporate Fern and Fern thinks she might not be able to stop his spell, so under the logic of visualization, Fern should have been evaporated right there because Qual was visualizing himself piercing Fern’s defensive magic. This makes the magic system look stupid and the characters look even more stupid, as they literally just need some imagination and that’s it, they can do whatever they want. Honestly, Ubel’s character doesn’t annoy me as much as her abilities do.

On the other hand, Serie is a nonsensical character, she is written to fit whatever moment she needs to fit in to be a foil to Frieren. Flamme implies that they wouldn’t fit in an era of peace because she is inclined to fight and she agrees, but she doesn’t actually fight anything, not even when demons are still fucking around in the current era, she didn’t even try fighting the demon king which I guess would have been the only good challenge to her. She is against magic spreading, but then also decided to create a magic organization that helps magic spread. She is just there to exist and antagonize others in stupid ways because she herself is stupid.

I'm actually happy that Sousou no Frieren premiered across Christmas season, since the themes that people keep repeating around those times are pretty similar to the themes of this series and there was a video around social media that I saw and it was along the lines of "Christmas eve is finally here, and you prepare for the reunion with your family and you see multiple empty seats and now you finally understand what your grandmother meant when she said that the best gift she could have in Christmas was being with all of you" and when I watched that video I thought "isn't that obvious?" because for me understanding why you care about people even if they aren't there is something extremely basic if you have actual mental maturity, the message is pretty nice, yes, but it isn't something that you shouldn't know if you aren't a teenager. Last year I watched the Yuru Camp Movie and halfway through it I came to the realization that "hey, I haven't met with my high school classmates in years" even though we had a pretty good relationship, that movie actually made me think about me and my relationship with other people, which is something that not many anime can do, sure, it wasn't some kind of K-On! level masterpiece when it comes to being able to relate to what's happening on screen, but the feeling is still there. And it just so happens that while I was writing this review, I actually met up with my high school friends again as one of them was leaving the country, we had fun, they had drinks and smoked, I personally don’t do that but I liked seeing them having their fun and we talked about a bunch of stuff that happened in all this time and some things we remembered for hours. The reason why I mention this is because there wasn't a single moment across this entire series in which I stopped and thought about anything related to me, this show doesn’t actually make me feel anything on a personal level, maybe because it feels very artificial, as the world is a JRPG fantasy world that you could easy pass as something you would see in an isekai series, hell Himmel feels like he’s about to say he came from Japan any time we see him.

I’ll give obvious credit where is due, the series is animated by Madhouse and with that comes the amazing quality of animation, anyone with eyes should be able to tell you about how Frieren’s animation looks great. Honestly, when I watched the first couple of episodes that premiered at the same time I wasn’t actually surprised, not because it doesn’t have great animation but because this is the quality I have come to expect from one of the biggest powerhouses of animation such as Madhouse, I would actually be more surprised if it didn’t look as good. The biggest improvement that came from this was obviously the battle scenes, because if you check the manga the battle scenes there are pretty bad, but the number of added details to these in the anime alongside the great animation makes them look fantastic.

Honestly, Sousou no Frieren looked like a series that had with so much potential, only for it to squander it, no wonder one of the editors at Shogakukan said that he wanted the series to be the next Kimetsu no Yaiba as that’s what it feels like, but with that comparison I think there are two options of what happened here, either the author really decided to go on different directions that have no relation to the premise and themes presented at the start of the series or his editors made him do things that would obviously sell, but whatever happened there made Frieren not as good as it may have been, and that’s pretty sad. Also, the mimic joke isn’t funny at all, there’s no need to keep repeating it, please stop it.

Thank you for reading.

When you think about isekai surely one of the first things that come to your head is that it has an OP MC. This show is completely about this, about an OP MC killing things, that’s why it’s called Sokushi Cheat ga Saikyou sugite, Isekai no Yatsura ga Marude Aite ni Naranai n desu ga aka Instant Death, and just as those other shows where the OP MC makes every single battle uninteresting because they have no stakes, this series is no different, actually, it is even worse because of how Yogiri is designed to be, he is designed to try to be the strongest ... character, and not just from his own series, the author of this very clearly tries to make Yogiri the strongest when compared to other characters from other shows.

Actually, Instant Death is not a show, it is VS debating brainrot. If you don’t know what’s VS debating is I’ll give a little explanation, have you ever seen people asking “who will win Goku or Superman?”? Well, VS debating is taking that question and actually trying to answer it, people will search feats of the characters, use physics to calc their speed and destructive power and even classify every single one of their abilities, and while classifying them you will get to a tiering system to put the characters in some tier of power level. What do I mean with VS debating brainrot? Well, obviously, some characters will be created unintentionally powerful to the point of being ridiculous, but then what if someone knows about this kind of stuff and decides that he wants his character to be even stronger than them? Well, this series happens, that’s why you get some really specific details about how Yogiri’s instant death ability works, to make it able to affect characters when compared to him in VS debating, that’s why there are random scenes of people saying “oh, he killed my avatar and was also able to kill my real self” or introducing a character to kill their external power source that was in another dimension, this is to showcase his feats, because the creator of this series knows about VS debating, so as I said before, this isn’t a real series and it is more a wanking fest of a character to make him the most powerful fictional character. This makes the series completely worthless, as it doesn’t tell a real story, the characters are just there to have different powers and abilities to be defeated by Yogiri so someone can say “my character can beat this other character” in a discussion.

Honestly, even if you watched it because the main character has the ability to kill people and see stupid people “paying the price” for what they did, it would still be a waste of time, the way they die is so instantaneous that it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t feel satisfactory to see idiots die because they just drop dead on the spot. You can’t watch it for the animation because it is terribly done, none of the battles between other people matter because the protagonist can kill them with a thought and they just drop dead.

This series is a pit of nothingness, there’s nothing here, it doesn’t exist, because it’s complete and utter shit, it’s the meme of the OP isekai MC but taken to the absolute extreme, so it is just boring to watch. Honestly, the only reason why I knew about this series beforehand was because of hearing about Yogiri in VS debating posts, because there’s nothing more to discuss about this show.

Thank you for reading.

Zom 100: Zombie ni Naru made ni Shitai 100 no Koto has taught me that people don’t know what “dystopia” means anymore. For the last 5ish years, I’ve seen a lot of complains on why the generic isekai we get by the dozens are popular, but I find the answer to that question very obvious: escapism, as they provide an outlet for MC-kun to get free from the burdens of the real world, and enter a fantasy world where he can do whatever he wants, while the high school age viewers places themselves in his place. Zom 100 offers the same idea but for the ... working age viewer, with the zombie apocalypse replacing the travel to another world, showing our working-class MC-kun being able to do whatever he wants now that he’s free from his work so the overworked viewer can self-insert on him.

As a direct result of its escapism angle, the series isn’t actually horror, having a lot of light hearted moments and comedy to make it look like this is a superior lifestyle, which backfires on it hard because the comedy in this series is atrocious, I’m talking about “going naked is funny” and “fart jokes” levels of bad comedy, I wanted to slam my head on a wall when they unironically showed a zombie farting as if it was a punchline. This same light tone also undermines all the serious moments, not helped by the fact the series suffers from “getting character development means you’ll die” syndrome, so you get a scene painted as tragic because a character we barely knew is a zombie followed by the cast laughing at silly jokes. I’m a big fan of the style of Hiroyuki Imaishi, and one thing his series manage is to strike a balance between the serious character moments and the absolute batshit insanity going on around them, but this series clearly has no idea how to do that, as the tonal whiplash here is so jarring even Code Geass and its constant back and forth between racial politics and waifus eating pizza feels more balanced.

MC-kun, named Akira this time, is a self-insert character, as unlike any other person or even the other characters in the same show, he shows absolutely no horror or regret at the idea of the world ending in a zombie apocalypse, instead being happy that he doesn’t have to work anymore, obviously a tool to enable the escapism aspect of the premise. This behavior is just downright nonsensical, as we have no explanation or thematic point made by Akira acting like the death of most of humanity is his comfort catalyst, and in fact makes him come across as a sociopath rather than the sympathetic character the narrative tries to paint him as, something that’s very notorious in episode 3 where contrasted against his friend who has a far more logical reaction to seeing everyone around him turning into murderous monsters. A character acting in an extreme way CAN be done well, as shown by Shirou in Fate/stay night and Shu in Ima Soko ni Iru Boku, but only if said behavior is done to make a thematic or moral point, something that’s not the case here, as there’s really no clear reason for him to act like that beyond making it #SoRelatable to the viewers who also feel overworked. Also, what’s up with the fact he doesn’t even look like an adult? If you showed me his design with no context, I’d say he’s 15, and even watching the show he acts just like I’d expect an anime teen to do it.

The other characters aren’t really much better. Kencho has no character at all beyond being the comic relief, and by that I mean that he’s an obnoxiously loud idiot who clearly doesn’t know how to deliver jokes, with getting naked seriously being the best he can come up with in terms of comedy, just to put into perspective how poor the overall comedy of this series is. While I think that Shizuka was passable, given she seems to be the only sensible person here, she’s mostly used as a strawman damsel in distress despite her supposed capabilities to highlight how cool our MC-kun is, leading her to be a fanservice source at best. Bea is a westerner obssessed with Japanese culture - that's her entire character, everything around her revolves around being a weeb, and once again she's just a tool to provide some extra fanservice.

An aspect for which I wanted to give this series points, however, is the visuals. We live in an age of seasonal shows that all are filled with so much cost cutting like CloverWorks works being filled with blurriness, and the idea of what good animation is has been reduced to just “flashy visuals” rather than having any appreciation for the technical aspects with MAPPA churning out disaster after disaster that isn’t well animated to anyone who knows of animation but looks flashy so it gets called “good animation” by those who don’t know, making Zom 100 a show that stands out in this landscape because it actually tried. The first episode didn't have the generic simple shots made to save money, it had an actual visual identity, something that’s such a rarity in modern anime that I can see why people act as if this was groundbreaking, even if in reality it’s more of a minimum to look good, at least when they don’t use CGI, that still looks bad even here. However, this “carried by the animation” angle was only at first, as each episode got uglier and uglier to the point it got rid of much of the praise points I could give it, as it looked like any other anime by its later half, which very likely relates to its now infamous troubled production and grueling working crunch. Given that from what I read, this new studio BUG FILMS was created by people who felt overworked on their previous work at OLM, and the evils of overwork being the main theme of the series, the fact this new studio now perfectly reflects the very type of company the anime criticizes is incredibly hypocritical.

Overall, this series is just a failure all around, it fails at being entertaining, it feels at giving social commentary on Japanese work culture, it fails at being funny, it fails at building actual characters, and most importantly, it fails as an anime production, with its terrible development hell that postponed the last batch of episodes for months being a perfect example of the terrible state the anime industry is in nowadays.

Thank you for reading

Romcom is dead. That’s it. That’s my review.

Now, seriously, Kimi no Koto ga Dai Dai Dai Dai Daisuki na 100-nin no Kanojo is probably one of the worst romcoms in recent memory. The word “romcom” originates from combining the words “romantic” and “comedy”, so, here we have a romcom that is neither funny nor has romance, fundamentally failing at the most basic level of the genre.

I have always found a problem with romcoms and that is a reason why, even though I like some of them, they are always flawed in one way or another, as usually girls will fall in love with a guy ... because he was nice to them once, and that’s pretty much all she needs to want to pursue the MC, but in this series you don’t even get that, here the girls fall in love because they saw the MC to his eyes. The problem with these girls is that they don’t have much else going on for them aside from loving the MC, Hakari is constantly lusting after him and Karane is a complete tsundere towards him, and that’s pretty much their entire personality. You can literally describe all the girls of this series in a single gimmick, after all, the author is supposed to create 100 female characters, so making them have an actual personality would be almost impossible.

I honestly didn’t find the comedy funny at any point, as even the boke and tsukkomi routine doesn’t work because even the tsukkomi is insanely stupid too, making it near impossible to actually differentiate it from the boke. The references to other things were fine I guess, like the Biohazard one, even if some were very forced like the “Ghoul from Tokyo” one in the first episode. This series also tries to have some serious moments, like Shizuka’s backstory to explain why she behaves like a generic shy anime girl, but most girls won’t get this kind of stuff for them.

The biggest problem of this series isn’t the comedy or the characters or how it looks like, however, the biggest problem is the premise itself, this series’ romance is completely disingenuous. Why I say this is really easy: the romance in this series is completely based on brainwashing the girls. I remember that I came across the manga because I saw a lot of people saying how good and funny it was and since I like to watch romcoms I decided to give it a read, and so when I was like half a chapter in and the god explained to Rentarou that he would get 100 girlfriends because he will rewire their brains into loving him, I immediately dropped the manga, honestly, the first time I saw the girls was in the PVs for the anime. I mean, I’ve seen arguments as to why this series supposedly doesn’t have brainwashing, and some specific examples were occasions like when Nano didn’t want to become his girlfriend, but those are completely untrue, the second Nano and Rentarou saw each other, she instantly fell in love and wanted to become his girlfriend, in fact, she was the one who asked to him to date her first, and she probably wouldn’t be dating anyone if it wasn’t for the zing given her own mentality. Even worse, I’ve seen some claim it’s not brainwashing because Rentarou is affected too… which just means he’s also being brainwashed by the god, with neither side of the relationship being real.

The most egregious example of all this is the end of episode 10, and the first 17 seconds of episode 11 basically prove me right, the complete change of character once the brainwashing takes place is actually jarring. How am I supposed to believe this isn’t some kind of brainwashing when the girls’ minds were clearly reprogrammed so they would fall in love with a guy without knowing anything about him and that they will die if they don’t go along with it? And this basically turns this series into something uninteresting, this series is literally the opposite of doing a good romcom, it is fundamentally broken because all the relationships presented here are forced and unnatural to the most absolute extreme. Of course, this turns Rentarou’s character into a mess and someone that one could easily call a self-insert, he is a perfect boyfriend for every single one of the girls, no matter how different they are from him or if they actually have anything in common, he doesn’t seem worried at all about the huge number of girlfriends he will have, I don’t think he even has any kind of hobby aside from loving these girls, he feels even more factory-made than the girls.

I have no mean words towards the people who enjoy this series, please, go ahead and enjoy it if you want to see a plot straight out of some sleazy hentai be presented as if it was a wholesome romcom, but there’s nothing that can change my mind that this series is fundamentally flawed from its very conception.

Thank you for reading.

There’s almost always one random anime that will get some controversy no matter if for something that is minimal or stupid yet will become the center of criticisms about the show, and in this case the series that got this treatment was KimiZero. For some reason, the main girl made some people go crazy with part of her gimmick, which in this series is that she already had relationships with other boys in the past and even had sex with them. That’s all, and as it was proven in the past by series like HigeHiro where you could complain about basically anything like bad writing, ... bad animation, badly written characters, etc, but instead people ignore them and whine about a completely unrelated thing, as the main complain there was also that the girl in the cover wasn’t a virgin.

Some people will say that the writing of this series seems like it was made by an incel, and I have to disagree, after all, that kind of people are the most likely to complain that the girl had sex before. In fact, I can’t comprehend how such a simple series like a romcom got so misunderstood, the memo that you get from here is not that having multiple relationships and sex with literally anything is good, no, the series paints this in a negative light and Runa regrets it because it happened due to her bad decisions on how to make a significant relationship. The fact that this simple fact gets over so many people’s heads is surprising to me, as it is something very easy to pick up from so many episodes, the one in the festival in particular is extremely blatant about this. This series at least tries to make sense, as some people will have a sexual life earlier than others, and they might regret it later if it isn’t with someone that matters to them in the first place.

But now, is KimiZero a good series? Of course fucking not, as much as I want to side with the fans of this series, that simply isn’t possible for me. At the very least, I think this series is commendable for actually having the main girl who is super popular and beautiful interacting with boys, and having had relationships in the past, because in most romcoms God forbid that the main girl has ever interacted with any boy except the MC. The series obviously suffers from average romcom and light novel writing, nothing actually exciting happens, and when it does, it is written like a Mexican telenovela, like, do people think that the twin sister of a girl faking to be her is not something ridiculous? As it happens, the MC is also bland as hell and the relationship came to be in a completely unnatural way, it happened because Tanjiro asked Runa to become his girlfriend after he lost a bet with his friends and she simply accepts like it was nothing, no one in their sane mind would see this and think it isn’t forced, and even if some moments between Tanjiro and Runa were fine enough, it isn’t enough to see this series and think it was anything meaningful. I can stand the telenovela tier writing because I grew up watching a lot of them, so that’s why most romcoms are not something that bother me at all, and this one is not exception, this series is simply boring most of the time and not much more, it isn’t actively annoying, and it was a good enough joke when a character started talking about something they are very passionate about and the other was completely lost without understanding anything.

Nicole acting like a bitch towards Tanjiro was always something weird, she constantly told him that he shouldn’t do anything bad about Runa, when he looks so inoffensive and his personality is literally “I’m nice”, I can only wonder if she was doing the same for previous Runa boyfriends or if she saw Runa being hurt so many times she started being overprotective coincidentally with him, I want to believe the second one, especially because Runa seems to ignore a lot of her advices, but there’s nothing to tell me that she isn’t like this because the current guy is the protagonist and apparently she must annoy him. There’s also other romantic relationships happening in the background with Tanjiro’s friends and the other gyaru, but they go nowhere and fail miserably at it. And Maria is probably the side character that is most important, her deal is really weird, she is also in love with Tanjiro and he even confessed his love towards her in the past but she rejected him, so why is she seeking for his love now even after she rejected him before? Is it just to have more drama in the show, as it happens she is jealous of Runa, but at the same time wants to be more noticed by her because of their relationship? She acts like a bitch half of the series and then victimizes herself, she clearly has problems in her, and it all revolves around Runa and Tanjiro.

As it stands, KimiZero is basically just a generic romcom with more drama than it should have, but at the same time has a female MC that seems more plausible than other girls from other romcoms, thanks to her not being an untouchably pure virgin. I seriously cannot make an effort to be on either side of the conflict about the series, since I for one think that anyone can have any relationship with anyone they want, so I cannot agree with the haters, but I also disagree with the people saying this is a wholesome show, as nothing about it stands out as actually meaningful or even cute.

Thank you for reading.

The last time I complained about this series I said that if this was a parody, it was a terrible one, but after analyzing it and talking to other people I have to come to a simple conclusion, Kage no Jitsuryokusha ni Naritakute! is not a parody, the novel is an actual work that uses isekai tropes in a completely unhinged way, the only reason why you hear the series is a parody is because people read the manga version, which is almost like a parody of the series and get to the conclusion that this series is a parody when it isn’t. Now, does ... the series not being a parody suddenly makes it better? The answer is still a no, a bad isekai where the world bends over in favor of the MC for him to be the best ever to have ever existed is not a good series by any means.

There’s not much to say for this season that I didn’t say for previous one, I mean, did the series actually change at all? No, the jokes are still repetitive to the point that, even if you were to find one joke funny, it would be so overused that it would make you roll your eyes after the 10th time it’s used. Let’s take for an example the first couple of episodes, where half of Cid’s lines were repeating the same phrase over and over and over again, and apparently that’s what makes a joke in this series.

This season there was even an entire arc built on fake drama, I can’t even think why someone thought this was a good idea, it was as smart as someone asking “if there’s poverty, why don’t they print more bills?”, which is almost the basis of the entire arc. Oh, and that arc is followed by an original episode obviously for the sole purpose of promoting the gacha game, so instead of actually doing something with Shadow Garden, they just thrown them in swimsuits, because actually creating a character out of these pieces of cardboard with boobs would be too much work.

The battles of course are still as uninteresting as ever, because as the first arc showed, the MC is so strong that even one of the monarchs of the Lawless City, who was strong enough to actually fight against Shadow Garden, was still easily defeated by him. How is he so strong? Because he is the protagonist of an isekai series where the world bends over in favor of the MC to get maximum power fantasy points for those self-inserting as him. Actually, that is the entire joke of the series, that whatever delusion the MC has is actually true, and this problem goes all the way back to season 1. And don’t worry about animation, it looks about the same as it did in season one, which is mediocre but nothing too bad.

How this shit is popular or considered good at all is something I will never comprehend, I always compared it to Overlord as it has pretty much all the same issues that one has, and while I guess that is good for some people, for me it means that the series belongs in a trash bin.

Thank you for reading.

Shingeki no Kyojin, no matter if you hate it or if you love it, is definitely one of the most popular anime ever made. The first time it dropped it was an instant hit, being beautifully animated by Wit Studio and with the great directing of Tetsurou Araki, you could see that the people watching it were passionate about and it and even better the people working on it were too. Sadly, there was a studio change because Wit couldn't keep up with the schedule and the man behind the original story Hajime Isayama obviously didn't know how to have the story keep a momentum, ... as he didn't know how to end the series, and at the end it turned out to be one of the worst endings ever made, with people even comparing it to the absolute terrible ending of Game of Thrones for good reasons.

Telling you that I have ever at any point liked Shingeki no Kyojin would be a lie, but I have been following the series for a long time and while I wasn't a fan of the first couple of seasons, mostly because of things most people could surely ignore, once it turned into The Final Season and the studio changed from Wit Studio to MAPPA the series was no longer salvageable. I mean, even if Wit Studio adapted this part of the series with the beautiful animation and cinematography they gave to all other seasons as, unless they changed what happens after the timeskip almost completely, it would still be shit. After all, the writing of the Avengers Arc is just all over the place, Armin doesn't deserve to be called a leader in any sense of the word, as he only convinces people that were even opposed to him in the past because he mastered Talk no Jutsu to levels Naruto couldn't even imagine using, and he is in the right because every other side wants to commit genocide (as apparently you need your enemy to be Hitler). I mean, I'm sure I don't have to say this, because anyone who understand how war works must already know it: there is nothing wrong with defending your nation from other nations that want to destroy yours, what Eren does is not fully black unlike what the series tries to despict it as, even if it turned out to be pretty stupid and nonsensical on the long run.

I'm not even a fan of this series but I remember when the ending of the manga dropped a couple of years back and damn, after laughing my ass off to what I was seeing, it came to me that this is absolutely disrespectful for all the people following the series, and it almost seems like Isayama has no respect for his own work either pulling out an ending like this one. It is a complete catastrophe and people were rightfully pissed at it for doing character assasination left and right, giving us some of the worst quotes I have ever seen like "Thank you for becoming a mass murderer for our sake" or "No, I don't want that! Mikasa finding another man...?! I want her to think about me and no one else for the rest of my life! Even after I die... I want to be in the front of her head for a while! Ten years, at least!". Armin being an absolute idiot and suddenly going from "I must stop Eren!" to "Thank you for everything Eren!" is absolutely bottom tier writing, and all this happened because of the character assasination I mentioned before. Eren's plans was just nonsense since the start, "I'll commit world genocide, but I don't actually want to do it and want to be stopped halfway through", if you didn't notice it, this is dumb, specially because as the plan didn't actually get carried out it means that while his friends lived, a couple of generations later they would all be killed. Eren doing that last cry for Mikasa when he never had any romantic interest in her across the entire series where he talks as if he was an incel is also a point of character assasination, and don't get me started on the Dove Eren. There's just so much wrong that I can't, I can just wonder how Dove Eren felt when he saw Mikasa with another man I guess.

It was also clearly obvious from the level of production ever since the first part of the Final Season premiered that MAPPA didn't actually care and just got the series to have another cash cow to milk: ugly backgrounds, shoddy CGI, so many lines as shadows on the character's necks for no clear reason, bad animation, terrible color palette, everything bad you could ask in a production was there, and even if these last 2 episodes looked a little better because they took some more time doing them, it is still far below the work that Wit Studio did 10 years before, even worse, it was even less intense that the very manga they were adapting despite having the tools to make it stand out even more. People were coping for years that the ending would be changed, but MAPPA was obviously leaving it as it was no matter how bad it is, there was no way they were changing the ending.

Tell me, it doesn't matter if you are a hater or if you have been a fan of Shingeki no Kyojin for 10 years at least, this is the ending you really wanted? This is the ending one of the most popular anime ever made deserved? After some point, the ending isn't even funny, it is just completely embarassing.

Thank you for reading.

Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto – A Post-Mortem

I know most people who watched this show probably don’t care about this detail, but it’s one that I’m going to use a lot in this review, so I’ll get it as a starting point: Pluto isn’t just based on the manga of the same name by Monster’s author Naoki Urasawa, it’s also a remake of the “Greatest Robot in the World” arc from the Astro Boy manga by “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka. Because of this, I’m going to compare Pluto to its original material a lot, as while I believe there’s aspects it improved from the classic story ... arc, it mostly doesn’t reach its level.

From the most obvious difference between both stories, Astro Boy focuses on Pluto going to challenge the seven most advanced robots in the world one by one to claim himself the greatest robot in the world, almost in a tournament arc kind of vibe, while Pluto moves the focus away from the action and instead delves on a minor subplot about robot detective Gesicht investigating the murders knowing he could become a victim of them. Because of this, I’m not going to compare the stories, as they’re completely unrelated, and thus judge purely the fact that Pluto tries too much in too little time to an even greater degree than the original. While the original story feels rushed for the first part until reaching a more natural flow in the latter part, Pluto has so many subplots and side characters all happening at the same time that it’s very hard to tell what even is the point of it all beyond finding who Pluto is (an answer that at best works like Titanic in being a forgone conclusion), with characters coming in and out with no rhyme or reason.

The reason Pluto reaches this level of over-stuffing is actually pretty simple: the other six robots that serve as Pluto’s targets have little character in the original arc, with only Epsilon having a full character, the rest are mostly one-note traits. To amend this, Pluto places heavy focus on them, with Gesicht straight up replacing Astro as the protagonist, so you have large amounts of screen time dedicated to developing doomed characters. Indeed, Pluto can be described as “the cryporn of the hour”, as every episode puts a lot of effort into making you feel for a character who’s going to die, something that didn’t affect Urasawa’s manga as there was a greater gap of time between each death, and of course doesn’t affect Tezuka’s because he didn’t try to get emotional response of every single character who died.

Speaking of emotions, the themes in Pluto and Astro Boy for this story are something I want to address, as Astro Boy simply comes across as having more mature and meaningful ideas despite being the version aimed at kids. The original is an anti-war story, dealing with the sorrow of soldiers who’re forced to wage war against their will, as well commentary on how technology that could be to help people is being misused for power hungry goals, both reflected allegorically on the challenges posed by Pluto towards the seven most advanced robots. Pluto isn’t that, instead seems to ironically enough be written by a robot who has no idea about human emotions, because it posits the thesis that hatred is the source of all human evil and that we need to erase it in order to reach a better world. Anyone who’s actually human can tell the issue here: hatred is a part of human nature, you can’t “cure” it, and acting as if that was possible is incredibly childish. On that note, I want Urasawa to share with me the computer code for hatred, as apparently, it’s something that can be programmed into machines here (never mind the fact they explicitly say early on that not even Astro’s immensely advanced AI is still only imitating human feelings rather than actually having it as presented later).

Now I may be coming across as very negative here, but there’s one aspect of Pluto I really want to praise: the characters. As said before, Tezuka doesn’t actually develop five of the most advanced robots in the world beyond one-notes, and that’s the part where this series actually surpasses Astro Boy. Gesicht appears for a whole of 2 scenes in the original, so of course he’s massively expanded compared to his counterpart and made into a compelling figure, all while maintaining his original presentation intact, a feat I’ll openly praise given how hard that must’ve been. The two characters that already had a lot of material to work with, Astro and Epsilon, are mostly left intact, as there’s really no need to do anything with them but what Tezuka set, but everyone else from the group who didn’t gets a glow up that helps make the cast far livelier and more memorable than the original, with each having its own story, personality and goals clearly set here. The only characters Urasawa fails with are Pluto himself, ironic considering he was the most developed of the original and this new version is named after him, as he loses almost everything that made him interesting and relevant to the story’s themes in favor of more cryporn, and Bora, mostly because of the reasons explained on how he missed the themes of the original meaning he’s filler now.

Mostly unrelated note: There's this incredibly contrived scene where a kid is inexplicably surrounded by tigers and lions, who just stare at him until Uran calls them away, and they just seem to understand her somehow and it's all solved with no further mention, which I have no idea how to take as there’s no explanation how she can do this given how much focus is taken away from her here.

An aspect of this anime that makes me split is the visual department, and I’m going to touch both sides of the issue there. The traditional art is nothing short of great, being always on-model, detailed and fluid, all of which are so rare to find in modern anime, I’d have to conjure something from the OVA era like Macross Plus to compare how well it looks. And just like Plus, the actual issue with Pluto is the digital aspect, not just the CGI, but everything that would normally belong the digital processing like the effects look off, with the storms/tornadoes Pluto creates being a particularly jarring example given we also see a traditionally animated one in the show that doesn’t look like a PS2 monstrosity, and that’s not even getting when the backgrounds become the digital and the characters look photoshopped over them. Reading Twitter comments from an animator who worked on the series before COVID, they explained that all these effects were added without him and the other animators knowing, which explains why the entire show looks like it was handled by two completely different teams, because it was. Also, while I’m not a fan of Urasawa’s character designs (the only characters that have designs escaping his trappings are the ones who are modernized versions of Tezuka characters), I can respect his art, and having cross checked the manga as I watched the anime, I can firmly say they screwed what looked good in his manga with this anime.

In general, I think that Pluto is a good remake, as it expands greatly on the weakest aspect of the source it’s taking, but it fails to work as a standalone story, as its themes are weak and the story is so padded beyond what it needs to, both are which are issues plaguing his previous work Monster as well, but hey, this is still much more tolerable than that one. Also, I know this is a nitpick, but why does every translation of this series I can find call Astro by his Japanese name Atom? Seems like a weird attempt to try to distance yourself from the most important anime ever made.

Thank you for reading