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Do It Yourself! is a charming little anime about moe girls trying to save their beloved high school club, and it's done in a very cozy way with the occasional homoerotic subtext thrown in for good measure. So, you know, it's a well written and well animated rendition of every other CGDCT anime you've ever seen... except it plays with something you rarely see this type of anime play with: the setting.

While most CGDCT anime take place in present day in any-town Japan, because that's all they really need to do to make their story work, DIY! takes place in a near future where drones ... fly about, pets can be programmed, and the self-driving school bus whisks the best and brightest students off to learn how to make cutting-edge technology. Serufu, the main character, flies in the face of everything her barely sci-fi world values - she lives in a fairly old house with 3 flesh and blood animals and rides her bike to the older school that is figuratively and quite literally overshadowed by the one her childhood friend Suride ("Purin") attends. It's a small detail that isn't given much time, but really helps drive home just how much of a lost art the DIY club is celebrating by choosing to make things with their hands. It's a bit of a shame that the show eventually decides it feels the need to spell this out for viewers in later episodes.

A small shame about the series is that, once again, Japanese animation studios are showing their lack of willingness to hire people outside of Japan to voice characters from outside of Japan. One of the main characters, Jobko, is from America and speaks in broken Japanese, often switching to English as a vocal tick... and she is voiced by Nichika Omori. While Jobko's random interjections in English are still funny and charming, this decision takes some of the punch out of the gimmick, and to say that the Japanese audience would not notice this lack of authenticity is, in my opinion, giving Japanese audiences far too little credit. This can also be seen in the character of Kokoro Koki ("Shii") who, despite growing up in Southeast Asia, is voiced by Karin Takahashi. While this detail by no means ruins the show, it feels particularly glaring in a series that put that bit of extra effort into making its setting feel authentic. Ultimately, like everything else about it, DIY! plays it safe at the loss of some potential impact.

In the end, DIY! is some of the best that CGDCT has to offer without being so bold as to stop being a CGDCT show entirely. If you liked the feel of "Keep Your Hands of Eizouken!" but wished it had stayed a little more cute and cozy like "Laid Back Camp", you'll probably enjoy this series. Just don't expect it to break any major new ground, regardless of how much it teases viewers that it might.

Toradora!: SOS! seems to be is what happens when a creator has an idea for an original shorts series but lacks the courage, budget, or both to make a new original IP, so they slap a successful IP's name onto it.

On the one hand, it's an amusing series of shorts about five friends eating/talking about Japanese cuisine that even includes a few bits of educational trivia. On the other, it simply doesn't feel related to ToraDora! in any way, shape, or form. While the characters occasionally say a line or two that reminds you of who they were in the original series, most of ... the time they feel like original characters. The only part of the episodes that really felt like ToraDora were the endcaps with Inko in them doing the same style of gag she does in the original show.

I might have enjoyed this more if I went into it expecting some characters I don't know talking about food (I'm actually a huge sucker for food anime AND short anime) but since I went into it expecting a reunion with a series I loved and not really getting that, I felt baited and switched, and it meant the series ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth... pun intended.

(Mild spoilers) If there's one quick way to ruin a love story for me, it's with a love interest who isn't appealing and shoujo manga is really good at making me question many of my fellow reader's tastes in men. Shoujo romance with an action element has an especially common pitfall of trying too hard to make a man "dangerous" or "jealous" to the point of being anywhere between uncomfortable to straight up no-holds-barred abusive. After years of rolling my eyes at this trashy trope, I am proud to announce that I have finally found the abusive love interest that easily takes the cake as the ... worst male lead I have ever seen in a shoujo manga, and it's out supposedly dashing bishounen Edgar in The Earl and the Fairy.

Edgar is a bad boy, and the manga has no problem reminding us of this frequently. He lies, cheats, and manipulates throughout the entirety of the series. One character tries to point this out to our heroine and he almost kills her. Then he almost kills said heroine. Why on Earth does she stick around then, any sane reader would ask? Why, because one time he said the color of her hair was pretty when random strangers constantly told her it wasn't. 

I'm not kidding. That's... literally the only reason she stays for the first half of the series. Then, in the second half, we learn Edgar had a difficult past, which apparently also excuses every horrible thing he has done or attempted to do. Except it really, really doesn't. The mangaka clearly isn't blinded by Edgar's charms, as we are reminded how manipulative the young man is very frequently, so this isn't a case of the writer being blind to their character's flaws. On the contrary, the writer constantly tells us more about how awful Edgar is and we're still expected to find him appealing because sad childhood weh. 

Now, granted, The Earl and the Fairy is an interesting manga outside of its romantic element, set in a fairy-laden historical England. The problem is that the romance and the characters are the main focus of the story, and all throughout four irritating volumes of the worst romance I have ever seen in a shoujo anime I was too busy rolling my wishing I could slap every character involved to care much about what this manga does differently. 
Only read this one if you're as desperate for historical fantasy shoujo as Lydia is desperate for someone to complement her hair. 

 The Clockmaker's Story is one of several adaptations of Julius' romantic arc. Julius' job of repairing the clocks that double as citizen's hearts is considered vile for.... reasons? I never really understood that the first time they used that fact as a plot twist, either. Whatever. For some reason Julius is a loner everyone is afraid of and Alice warms up to him, this time with some cute art and pretty standard shoujo tropes. 

This one-volume story is sweet, if a little cliche, but one thing that kept me from enjoying it more was how the creepy behavior of some of the men in Alice's world ... was glorified. Often, Alice stories like to parody the common aspect of shoujo manga where the guy's possessive behavior is treated as endearing by having Alice not putting up with any of it. While Alice still doesn't put up with Peter's creepery in this volume, the tone of the story seems to imply that we're supposed to feel sorry for him as a romantic rival. Call me crazy, but when a guy kidnaps and sexually harasses a girl, it's hard to pity them for not getting said girl. This is one example of times this story walks that uncomfortable line of trying to tell girls that we should find unwanted advances cute, and it keeps me from enjoying the story more than the modest 6/10 I'm giving it. 

Meh. Everything in Alice in Junk Box is completely passable. The collection has some nice art, but the writer doesn't seem to know how to tell a good romantic story in the short space allotted for each one-shot. Each character comes across as a shallow version of themselves (The Queen's only trait is that she now comments on her hatred of men at every opportunity for some reason?) and the stories themselves tend to be rather cliche and boring. The best story in the bunch is a romance with Boris that smartly tells of a small moment in a pre-existing relationship instead of trying to build a ... whole romance from scratch in 10 pages, but even that one is pretty mediocre.  

If you're a big fan of the Alice series, these shorts aren't offensively bad or anything, but they don't stand out either. They just... exist. I'd advice if you decide to bother with this collection to save it until last in the Hearts series. 

QQ Sweeper is a series that looks, at first glance, to be a lot shorter than it actually is. The manga abruptly stops at the end of its first act and then continues onward as a different manga called Queen's Quality. This makes QQ Sweeper kind of hard to do a full review on as all I'm really reviewing is a beginning, and usually when it comes to storytelling you have to see a middle and end to really know if the set-up panned out like it should have, or at the least have gotten more than what equates to 3 out of 8 volumes ... into the plot. Thus, when I say that QQ Sweeper is a decent series, I have to say "QQ Sweeper is a decent series under the provisio that it continues to not be horrible as Queen's Quality, which I have yet to read."

Anyways, QQ Sweeper is about a girl who has been told throughout her life that she's cursed for some reason. One day, she meets a handsome boy who takes her under his wing to perform the duties of a sweeper - a person who goes into the minds of troubled people and quite literally cleanses their souls. What keeps this series from rating higher than a 7/10 for me is that we spend more time hearing about sweeping than actually doing it. A lot of time is spent talking about sweeping, alluding to previous sweeping, and having existential crisis about sweeping and so by the "end" of the series we've done actually sweeping only about once per volume.

Now, I'm far from the kind of person to complain about a lot of time being put aside for the romantic subplot, especially in a shoujo manga, but none of the things that distract the characters from doing the actual sweeping seem to make much progress in a way that feels natural either. Our hero, Fumi, spends the first two volumes dealing with angst about her status as a cursed girl. In the third volume, she suddenly grows into a character who can deal with the name calling without much rhyme or reason, and then just as suddenly a new villain shows up with no forshadowing and little explanation. There are so many aspects of QQ Sweeper that felt like they could have been consolidated into 1 or 2 chapters that take the entirety of the run to... sort of resolve.

That said, QQ Sweeper is still enjoyable despite its flaws and does a good job of making me want to go ahead with reading its sequel. It just takes longer than it needs to get to each plot element. If Queen's Quality continues at this slow a pace, it will end feeling like the entire story could have been told in those first 3 volumes.

If there's one overarching attitude in the world of media that irks me, it's the idea that something being less accessible somehow makes it more artistic. The back cover of the American edition of Nijihara Hologram calls the single-volume work "complex, challenging, and elliptical." Apparently, this is code for "pretentious, nonsensical, and over-complicated."

Now, be it far from me to be upset with a work for challenging its audience - I have no problem with having to think while I read - but there's a fine line between a work asking its readers to think and a work being so needlessly confusing you'd need a flowchart ... to figure out what the heck is going on. I don't have a low enough faith in my understanding of graphic novels to assume that "Oh, well, I just don't get this because it's too deep for me." I think that for most of the people passionate enough about manga or graphic novels to be reading this review have enough of an understanding of the craft that its time to dismiss such flawed logic. While I don't believe a reader has to baby their audience, I think a certain amount of responsibility for making an understandable script does indeed fall on the author. This is a very unpopular opinion, it seems, but I firmly believe guiding a reasonably intelligent audience through a narrative is as much a skill as any other aspect of storytelling.

Nijihara Hologram is a collection of interwoven stories throughout the lives of a group of characters living near a cursed underpass, and Asano-san chooses to have these stories told by randomly bouncing between them out of sequence. (According to the back of the book, we're also bouncing between timelines, but I didn't sense that in the actual story in the slightest.) Stories told out of order to reveal certain facts later or follow a certain emotion can be interesting, but Hologram seems to bounce around without any rhyme or reason, creating no narrative or emotional arc. From what I could grasp of the story, nothing would have been lost by telling everything in order, or at least telling each character's full story before moving onto the next one. Seeing as the scrambling of narratives adds nothing for the reader, the entire story reeks of this pretentious attempt at being more artistic by dropping everything into a blender.

The only reason I gave Hologram as high of a rating as I even did is half because the art is wonderful, and half because if you don't try to tie the stories together, each of the segments has its own interesting emotional baggage and inklings of a story.

It's clear that Asano-san knows how to tell a gripping story, but Hologram is marred by a superfluous attempt to make it seem more meaningful by making it impossible to understand.

How to Keep a Mummy is a hard anime to rate because, when you think hard enough about the show, not much happens during its 12 episode run. The show's main pull is just how adorable Mii-kun and the rest of the fantasy creatures that appear in the series are doing totally mundane things. The only plot the show has is a handful of mystery-themed episodes where the main cast stumbles upon some element of Japanese mythology with its cuteness factor dialed up to 11.

That said, while you could argue that the story doesn't have much going for it, the show is a constant onslaught ... of cuteness and it knows it. How to Keep a Mummy ends up feeling like the supernatural equivalent of watching a ton of baby animal videos - nobody is watching this show for the sake of the plot. My friend Ali and I watched this together and pretty much spent the entire run of the anime cooing and squealing like it was the first day with a newly adopted puppy.

You'll be able to tell if How to Keep a Mummy is for you from the first ten minutes. If you think Mii-kun is adorable and enjoy his adorable antics, you'll like the show. If you don't, you won't, and also you have no soul.

Seriously, look at how cute this mummy is!

Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles is comprised of two plots. The first is the standard and incredibly boring group of high school girl anime stereotypes going on adventures tangentially related to the main character, Koizumi, featuring one of my least favorite tropes of all time: a girl with a creepy obsession who can't take "no" for an answer and is one genre-shift away from going full yandere. This part of the series of abysmally boring and I often find myself getting distracted when it's the focus.

The reason I kept watching Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles despite its dreary side characters is Koizumi herself and her adventures - ... Koizumi, like me, just wants to talk about ramen and be left alone by her fellow students. Each episode's other half features her going to various ramen joints, trying new recipes, and giving the audience tips for serving up the perfect bowl. Of course, as with any half-decent food anime, the art goes all-out to make sure even the most humble instant ramen looks inhumanly delicious. Many nights where I watched the show were spent trying out these new dishes for myself and realizing just how big the world of Japanese ramen really is. These segments of the show reminded me of the short series Wakako-zake and I found myself asking more and more as the series went on if maybe it should have been a short anime itself.

Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles is thoroughly enjoyable when it focuses on being a food anime, and my guess from how bland and cliche every other aspect is that the series even having any other focus is thanks to some editor appealing to the lowest common denominator of otaku culture. Clearly, the heart of Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles is in its food, and it shines so brightly in this that for food anime fans, its worth putting up with an otherwise lackluster presentation.

I decided to take the plunge this season and watch a children's anime that hadn't been subtitled with my minimal knowledge of Japanese, so take this review with a grain of salt. I'm sure there are subtleties and jokes in Mameneko that I missed completely, but one of the nice things about the series is it manages to be simple enough that most of it can be grasped between the animation and knowing a few basic Japanese phrases.

Anyways, Mameneko is a charming little short series about cats being cats, and is the most realistic of the three cat-related short series we got this season. ... Nothing really insane happens in this series; it's just a relaxing romp about silly cats being silly cats. If you enjoy watching cats, you'll like it. If the average cat video on Youtube bores you to tears, you won't find much of interest here.

All in all, the show is fine for what it does, although there's nothing about it that really makes it stick out from the horde of cat-related shorts that exist. In the end, it was a fun - if forgettable - little series to spend 3 minutes a week on.