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May 1, 2021
This is a fetish show. Nagatoro is a stock sadist and her senpai is a stock masochist, and that's fine, I guess. But it's really just here for people who want a giggle at predictable situations arising from the interactions of those characters. I don't want to slag it off: if you like it, more power to you, but I find it a bit dull. It's not unamusing, I just find it uninspired. Nagatoro is pretty obviously infatuated with her senpai (for some reason) who's a pretty standard otaku surrogate who has little experience with the opposite sex, is a closet pervert, and is secretly
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horny. 4 episodes deep, and their relationships consists of flirtatious teasing and not much else. It is not bad, but even as a reader of the manga, it's not really going anywhere of import. It's not a bad show, just a fetish show, so it's not going anywhere, and if it's not your taste, it matters little. If it is your taste, it still matters little. Take it as you find it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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May 1, 2021
I was hoping for something more. More "what" I can't define, but more than what I've gotten so far. This has been a fairly disappointing season for anime in general, and though I like what this show is trying to tackle, its whole feels less than the sum of its parts.
Our protagonists are a 26 or 27 something year old salaryman and the joshikousei he takes in who's been using prostitution to support herself since running away from home. An interesting if unsavory premise, to say the least. But so far, the show hasn't done a lot with that premise that is believable. Our
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aforementioned joshikousei, Sayu, doesn't remind me of the people I've known who've lived similar experiences, including an ex, and instead she very much seems designed to appeal to certain oddly moe tastes, which I feel undermines the premise considerably. There's a quasi harem aspect to the show that detracts as well, doubly so since our male protagonist has the charisma of a brick and our heroine is an underage occasional prostitute. There's an odd amount of fan service here for a show that seems eager to take a critical look at the practice of enjo kousai, and the psychological effects of which haven't so far been explored believably. I don't know if I'll keep watching. Right now, it feels like misery porn combined with shallow themes about self-worth and trauma. It reminds me of a badly written K-drama, with lots of melodramatic elements that are designed to trigger strong emotions without the viewer thinking critically about what's happening on screen. There are better shows out there.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Apr 23, 2021
San gatsu no lion is perhaps now my favorite TV show. If you don't care for slow paced, character driven slice of life shows, there is no need to bother, watch something more to your taste instead, because that is all this show has to offer, and is exactly why I love it. In season 2, second youngest Kawamoto sister Hinata gets promoted to dueteragonist, and much of the season, and protagonist Kiriyama's thoughts, are preoccupied with her struggles. We get a realistic but stylized depiction of bullying, with realistic but stylized being something of a specialty of this show. On top of that, we
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get treated to more of Kiriyama's character growth, and pleasant and disturbing scenes of domesticity, professional life, and childhood trauma, and I find it all so very wonderful. Through it all, the show is a joy to watch, with its compelling, complex characters, its lapses into whimsy, and inviting atmosphere.I doubt I'll ever see better: I binged the entirety of the manga after finishing this season, and I'd be ecstatic if it gets a third. 10/10 for me.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Apr 8, 2021
I don't give out 10s lightly. San Gatsu No Lion is a masterpiece. It now sits atop the mountain of anime I've seen as a favorite, standing above even Natsume Yuujinchou and Mushishi.
I have no interest in shogi. I don't care for sports or competitive games in general, but that hardly matters here. Yes, the story is about a shogi prodigy but it is about his intricately characterized inner life and struggles to come to terms with, essentially, being alive. Shogi is a medium, but we are here to witness the travails of a young man as he comes into himself, and learns to
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care for himself in the wake of profound grief and turmoil, brought about by the deaths of those he was closest to and the resulting chaos in which he found himself.
The show has everything, with its believable characters, none of whom are villains or saints, but merely humans with their own struggles. Some of them are likeable, some are not, but, ironically, none feel cartoonish. There is warmth and despair, the former provided by the family whom Kiriyama finds himself befriending, and the latter coming from within his own mind, and from his foster father and sister.
Shinbo Akiyuki is an excellent director, most of the time. He has a unique way of depicting pretty much everything, from his work on the Monogatari series and Madoka Magica to the sillier fare of Hidamari Sketch and Arakawa Under The Bridge. His talents are on full display here, and he delivers a story that feels perfect in its execution not only as a narrative character study but as an anime. The way the story is told feels perfectly suited to the format, delivering an experience that could not be matched by a live action work, or even, to my mind, by the excellent manga on which this series is based. I've never before thought a series was perfect, but to me, San Gatsu no Lion is. If you don't care for slice of life shows that focus on human interaction and the inner lives of their characters, you won't get much out of this. The stakes are low, but immensely high on a personal level. Many of our characters, in various ways, need saving, but mainly from themselves, and we watch our protagonist on his long journey towards doing just that. It's truly wonderful.
I also think this is a great show to introduce someone to anime with in general. There's not a shred of fanservice, and its themes are accessible to anyone who has struggled to make sense of their place in the world, which is pretty much all of us. If I had to compare it, I would say that it is on the same level as, though it is quite different to, the works of Hayao Miyazaki. It's 10s across the board from me, and perhaps the last time I shall ever give them.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Apr 8, 2021
Gokushufudou is a great manga, and in this adaptation we get that, but with voice acting. What we don't get, though is an anime. Instead, we have a slideshow.
I think JC Staff gets a bad rep. I actually like a lot of their work, both their classic version of Azumanga Daioh and more recent moe SoL fare like Machikado Mazoku are a-okay in my book. And in this case, it's not really their fault. The producer and mangaka basically asked for them to do this, and they did it, and it's not very interesting to watch. I can't understand the logic, why make an anime
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if you don't want it to be, you know, animated? Hell, even the somewhat divisive live action drama is leagues better than this. Oh well. The manga is still good, so I'll just read that instead.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Apr 2, 2021
The second season of Yuru Camp is everything I want in a slice of life iyashikei. It’s a fun little romp about a group of highschoolers living an idyllic life and spending their off hours camping and being generally cute together. In this season, we get hints of character development, but nothing earth shattering, and many side characters who only basically had cameos in the first season get some screen time. We get a bit more glimpses into everyone’s home lives too, where things are generally supportive and pleasant and on the whole peaceful.
What puts shows like Yuru Camp a head above many of
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the duller SoL or CGDCT shows is that they invite the viewer into the little world the girls inhabit, and that world is interesting. Afro, the manga’s creator, clearly loves camping, and (he? she?) puts that knowledge and love of the hobby on display in a way that feels believable. We get to watch our characters, of varying levels of expertise, spend their off-time exploring the hobby and we become invested in their little triumphs.
The scenery is also well realized, based upon real locations, to such an extent that watching the live-action drama felt pointless since it was more or less exactly the same, right down to the buildings. The way the girls enjoy the atmosphere, the food they’re eating, and the simple joy of each other’s company makes it easy to imagine yourself there, enjoying the same views and food and company.
The adult cast is also very likeable, from Nadeshiko’s doting parents and her elder sister to the surprisingly responsible functioning alcoholic Minami Toba.
If you like SoL and CGDCT shows, you’d be remiss in missing this one. I don’t know if we’ll get another season, but what we’ve gotten so far is phenomenal if you like this sort of thing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Mar 31, 2021
This is not a bad show. It's pretty fun, a bit childish but it has a charming art style and is well enough acted to be enjoyable. The plot, though is pants. It isn't terrible, but like so many other creative original anime, it feels poorly realized and nonsensical. I won't spoil, but things go off the rails the most after the second OP gets introduced and things get "serious".
A lot of the male characters in this show are really sexist, but I'm kind of fine with that given the military setting. A loooooot of people in the military are even more misogynistic than
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this, at least in the US, so it strikes me as realist. But then again, realism might be completely out of place here.
I can't say anything about a 3+ year old anime that hasn't been said better in other reviews, but I will say that there's a lot of fun to be had here if, and only if, you switch your brain off. Not a bad show, a visual treat, but nothing spectacular.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Mar 30, 2021
Wonder Egg Priority is nonsense. It’s all, pure nonsense. I had high hopes in the beginning. Sure, the show was unsubtle and often seemingly ill-conceived with regard to how it treated its subject matter, but it seemed to be trying, and I wanted that effort to mean something. But it doesn’t, and maybe it never did.
Our characters are “troubled,” but not believably so. We get surface level explorations of various forms of abuse: bullying, exploitation by adults, depression, etc. but none of it amounts to anything. The closest we get to a payoff is through the character of Rika and her ark as she struggles
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with many toxic ideas about gender roles and life in general while coping with self and parental loathing. But minor characters, most of them traumatized girls who committed suicide, come and go with very little fanfare or backstory except for the exact incident that incited their trauma. At first, this is depicted through dialogue. Later, unnecessary shock value is added by depicting such events in flashbacks. In the most egregious example, we witness the preamble to the rape of a trans boy, and it feels terribly exploitative and edgy.
The story is nothing. At first, it’s implied to be a personal story belonging to our “main” main character, Ohto Ai (so named because she’s odd eyed, in a stellar example of the level of symbolism we’re working with here), as she attempts to reckon with her own guilt surrounding her best friend’s suicide. She’s also seemingly trying to puzzle together the various factors that contributed: her teacher, Sawaki, who seems to be a hebephile (but don’t worry, that doesn’t really go anywhere), her own intentional blindness to the various abuses her friend was suffering, etc. But then the show shifts focus to the poorly written camaraderie she has with a group of three other girls with similar goals regarding suicidal friends. They’ve all been promised, you see, by immediately terrifying doll-men, that if they fight monsters in a dream world, their friends will come back to life. At first, I thought this obviously Faustian setup would be of significant importance, and tie back around to the theme of child abuse by adults, and in the end it kind of does, but only by being given lip service, rather than being integrated into the show’s themes episode by episode.
The show could never settle on a tone. The overly violent dream world with silly, psychedelic monsters representing the traumas of various girls who killed themselves, the home drama of Ohto Ai, and the oh so “kawaii” friendship between our cast of heroines never meshes, and never meaningfully impact each other either. We have a series of vignettes, well done ones, mind you, but we don’t get into the main plot until around episode nine, when the story shifts tone again, going for edgy violence and mediocre sci-fi, by revealing that all of the suicides are the fault of a robot girl, built in the image of an ideal daughter by our sexist doll-men (who used to be humans). This revelation actually takes all the way until episode eleven to be completely spelled out, because this show’s pacing is terrible. And it’s an absurd plot twist, one that deflated all of my hopes for the show building itself into something worthwhile from its parts. What’s more, during the iteration of this plot thread, we’re given the notion of alternate universes, which plays into the final (TV) episode in a very silly way. There’s Freudian silliness about Eros and Thanatos as well, but it hardly matters with how flimsy the theming is.
Episode twelve is hardly worth talking about. It’s a confused mess of themes trying to tie themselves together. Ai literally saves herself, both her present self and another self from a parallel universe who committed suicide, and the doll men let slip that all of this has been undertaken in the hopes of saving one’s daughter, who died to suicide thanks to the aforementioned ideal-daughter bot.
In the end, WEP says nothing, about nothing. Its themes are shallow, its characters underdeveloped, and its plot is criminally drawn out. It’s beautifully animated, with a mediocre soundtrack, and its visual charms might well get you through its other flaws, but I can’t recommend it. Every time it brings up a serious topic it fumbles the ball in one way or another, and plot threads that should have been woven into the fabric of the show instead show up as a patchwork. More than anything, I feel as though it’s wasted my time, and while it isn’t bad, it’s definitely not as good as it tried to be, or as many insist that it is. If I were a teenager, I’d probably think this show was great. But I’m not, and I don’t. But I won’t fault it for trying, I wish more anime would attempt to do what it attempted. In the end, though, I just don’t think it was worth it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Mar 29, 2021
I'd say I'll miss this show, but I won't, because I'll be watching it again. This final season concluded the long running CGDCT series Non Non Biyori quite nicely. Nothing too exciting happened in it, but that's not what we're here for. We're here for wholesome, amusing vignettes of the lives of our young cast, with occasional lapses into sentimentality, and that's what this, the final season of the now-concluded manga, provides. Our idiosyncratic but likeable cast remains so, with even a touch of character development, and glimpses of our charming cast of elementary, middle, and high school kids growing up. This show is and
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was iyashikei to the core, telling soothing stories in a soothing, bucolic setting. There is no drama to be found here, no major conflicts, no earth shattering revelations, just the mundane lives of mundane kids and their mundane parents and guardians. If you hated the first episode of the first season, you'll still hate it, probably, and the inverse is also true.
This season ends at the same point that the manga concluded, so it truly is the end, and what a long, wonderful journey it's been. It's a show that simultaneously made me nostalgic for my own misspent youth, and reminded me of the privilege we have as adults watching the young people in our lives come into their own. It'll long be on my rewatch list with the likes of K-On!, Flying Witch, and Natsume Yuunjinchou when I need something calm to pave over the slings and arrows of real life.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Mar 21, 2021
The second season of Yamada Naoko's adaptation of K-On! brings loads of much needed character development, as well as an undercurrent of existential... something. Dread is the wrong word, but Azusa' promotion to duteragonist brings a sense of seriousness and worry to the proceedings that gives K-On!'s second season a weight missing from the first.
The second season focuses on a single year in the lives of our main characters, compared to two in the first, and takes twice as long to tell it. What that gives us is a second season that allows everyone much needed room to breathe, allowing them space for their
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worries, hopes, dreams, and even simple, tender moments of camaraderie, to be depicted with considerably more weight. This is amplified by the shift in focus towards Azusa, whose comparative seriousness and broodiness lends a credibility to her character compared to the rest, and may evoke adolescent feelings in those of us old enough to look back on high school nostalgically.
Our cast is still carefree, but worries of their fate as friends begin to mount. Azusa is a year younger than and behind the rest of our cast, and her anxiety about being left behind takes center stage when her perspective is explored. Our four third years worry about being able to attend the same university, and what it might mean for their friendship and precious band, around which their highschool lives have focused, if they cannot. We also get a lively cast of extras, like Azusa's classmates Ui, Yui's younger sister, who is appallingly sweet, and Jun-chan, a slightly rough around the edges but nonetheless good natured sort.
These elements impart a beautiful melancholy to an otherwise silly show, making this second season special among slice of life anime, which often feel a need to generate drama from nothing, rather than address the inner turmoil of their often-young,and consequently fraught cast members. This is, seemingly, a specialty of Kyoto Animation, who even managed to bring a similar weight to moments in the infinitely light-hearted shows Nichijou and Lucky Star. What's more, all of this is explored deftly enough that K-On!! never feels maudlin, and one never loses sight of the light-hearted fun that remains the show's center. It is a wonderful SoL show, if you enjoy that sort of thing, and is as refreshing and cathartic as a cup of cocoa or a warm bath. It's depictions of friendship are so Platonic as to perhaps be unobtainable, but it warms the soul more than anything I've watched save perhaps Mushishi or Natsume Yuujinchou.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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