Interest Stacks

It's got some decent jokes, but the comedy is dragged down by some really dated bits, and I've never personally been a big fan of watching young adults trying to find out what love is, baby don't hurt them. Plus, the immediate cognitive dissonance is hard to shake, seeing our lead voiced by Kamiya against the Shinbo styled backdrop, and the comparisons to Monogatari that come unbidden put it in an unfair light. I do think the writing becomes more compelling after the first few episodes, especially when our protagonist is confronted head-on about the value of living true to yourself free of outside validation, which then leads to him ruminating more on his relationship with his father. I like how early on he talks about things like his father washing his hair once when he was a small child, and then the next day tells him to pay him back and that they'll never do each over a favor ever again, and it's all presented as completely normal because why would he know otherwise? The comedy gets a little too in the way of how it gets resolved though.

Extremely young adult novel-esque plot, but I had a lot of fun with the execution. The heavy use of jargon makes some scenes hard to follow, but the visuals are top notch. The dream world gets decently weird and creative, but I especially liked how the conceit of the brainwashing makes you question whether what you're seeing happen in reality is actually real or not. This is most prominent in the first couple episodes which make a big impression showing insane behavior that comes out of nowhere that then vanishes in the next cut. It's a shame we see much less of that happen after we move on from the outsider point of view though. Really love the performances in this from Kishow in particular. He hides it pretty well in the introduction, but the reveal that he's actually a manipulative psychopath is some good soap opera drama. He's great at chewing the scenery, laughing like a maniac in his internal monologue that it drowns out the conversations he's holding at the same time. I like how he's so far gone that he's clearly fallen to some of his own scheming, changing his motives in little, contradictory ways and morphing into some toxic gay codependency. Hope that sequel to the manga gets adapted someday.

Fundamentally, it feels like this show is afraid of holding onto uncomfortable situations for anyone for any period longer than one episode. Oh no, our lead sold his soul to some psycho freak to get out of hell. Actually, turns out she's just a normal girl and doesn't want to kill people. Oh no, our friend got kidnapped and is being held hostage. Actually, we rescued her off-screen and then flashed back to how we did it so that there's no actual tension in what the viewers see because they were already told how it ends. Oh no, we're being menaced by the evil organization gleefully perpetuated the famous slaughter of a town a century ago. Actually, this flashback we show immediately afterwards will tell the viewers that they were just coerced into it and it's very sad. It's like there's no stakes in any endeavor, and the big quests of finding hell girl's lost memories or the truth behind the slaughter feel poorly motivated. I'm also not a fan of the comedic elements, but more to the point, they frequently interrupt what should be serious scenes and undercut the tone and gravity of whatever situation is at hand. And in the end, it doesn't feel like our heroes really accomplished much of anything except our lead now knows how to love himself a little better. Good for him, I guess.

Yeah, I think this is just too abstract for me. While there are a handful of pretty neat episodes, the whole never feels like it comes together. The pacing in the first half is tortuously slow. We got a decent mystery setup with the introduction, but then we do basically nothing to explore it, instead spending the time giving each character in the main cast their own focus episode. The end result is that I'm too distracted wishing we were getting back to the main plot to care about the characters getting established in the first half, and then I have no real reason to be invested in the cast in the second half when the plotting does pick up. Most of the answers being delivered in riddles also meant that I stopped really caring about the whole mystery of the setting anyway. At least Borodin is cool. Did you know he was also a full-time chemist?

Aria's strongest suit is in its worldbuilding, unobtrusively weaving in the story of the terraformed planet's history and people in a way that makes the setting come alive, and the occasional background supernatural element helps to add to the charm and mystique of being on an alien planet. It couples well with the episodes explicitly focused on portraying the cast's professional trade which were the ones I enjoyed most. Outside of that, there's certainly no shortage of endearing moments, but the whole is, as advertised, a little too laidback for my tastes. Our leads enjoy perfectly happy lives, with each episode only presenting the most token of quandaries if at that. What I need is the bite of hardship before the lessons on appreciating life for what it is can really sink in.

A strange one. We have a pretty unique and compelling hook in our lead character's trauma in being kidnapped as a child, but it's basically ignored for most of the show, brought up in casual conversation and then quickly moved on from. Instead, the bulk of our time is spent mostly on fluff. The baking process that's shown isn't very interesting since it never really goes beyond pointing out desserts and giving them fancy French names. The characters do have some decent beats, but they're held back by having their issues mostly contained to one-off episodes in both setup and resolution, and they for the most part act the same before and afterwards. The kidnapping case is fun to follow when it does finally come into the limelight, and while it ultimately does feel a bit shallow when its purpose is revealed as a bait-and-switch, I can appreciate the show sticking to its message of letting go and moving on. I do also like how this is explicitly not a romance. Sometimes you can share a cringe high school confession and still be fine friends a decade later.

I always respect a show that takes its time to do its proper setup, turning a narrative that starts with the world's angriest teenager on a single-minded quest for vengeance into one ultimately about forgiveness and empathy and lends his character development all the more weight. And honestly, it's just really refreshing to see a teenager grow up to be more understanding and reject who he was before. I like how the glory of war and honorable duels and the like are full front and center in S1 and get turned on their heads in S2, where you get to see from the outside the toll of conquest and how delusional one would have to be to enjoy participation. It's neat how the Viking traits usually framed as positive in culture like honor and masculinity are shown to needlessly escalate violence and retribution and make everyone worse off. Thorfinn and Canute are the standout characters in these two seasons as our pair of foils, each dogged by their fathers' ghosts, and essentially trading roles between seasons. In a sense, they're a moderating force for each other. S1 ends with Canute cutting Thorfinn off from chasing after his revenge, dropping him into a despair necessary for his rebirth. S2 ends with a dialogue between the two, their first meeting since S1, where the strength of Thorfinn's character convinces Canute to back off on a complete takeover and shifts him off of going down his father's callous path. The courage to not fight is a difficult lesson to learn indeed.

It's an alright setup, but the central mysteries of where the treasure is and the nature of Asirpa's hertiage seem way too straightforward at this point to be all that compelling, and the disjointed execution leaves a lot to be desired. The slice of life Ainu culture scenes and the skirmishes between the various treasure hunting factions could almost come from two completely different shows, and the way some characters come and go feel like they were the work of some meddling manga editors. Like it's pretty weird how prominently the wolf gets featured in the OP, built up as the last of his kind, until a few episodes later we find out he's had a family this whole time off-screen and exits the story forever. The characterization in general definitely suffers from feeling like we're still in the prologue. Nothing really happens with our main characters, and we also get tons of dudes who get basically only a couple scenes to do their big thing, and then they're gone or just die the next episode. Expected given the premise, but the end result is that it's hard to keep track of who's actually going to be important again later. At least they got the biggest character trait across: they're all freaks. I mostly don't vibe with the comedy either, be it the juvenile dick jokes or the silly Asirpa faces, but I admit that the complete lack of reaction to some scenes did get a chuckle out of me. In conclusion, at this point the most compelling element of this show is but one question: does the bear CG get better?

In some sense, watching Paradise Kiss kind of feels like reading a great American novel in high school. It's a neat lens on the multitude of flawed relationships and flawed people, but the teenage angst suffusing it all means I don't really care what the end point of any of the relationships are. I do like how the animation emphasizes our point-of-view character's naivety and social anxiety from the get-go, with the majority of character shots framed claustrophobically close to their faces. It's a bit of shame the fashion setting mostly just serves as window dressing, but it makes sense with who our protagonist is. She never ask, she doesn't care. She's only in the modeling gig for her own self-satisfaction, and we see this attitude mirrored in how her relationship with her boyfriend plays out, who himself is shown to consistently value the friendships he has with other people over her. They're careless people, and carelessness kept them together, but I can appreciate a narrative that makes no pretense in depicting imperfect young lives as imperfect as they are.

I can't help but think of this show as a direct improvement of how frustrating I found Fruits Basket. Characters have problems to work through which aren't resolved by them finding a man (or I guess in this case a woman). The protagonist is endlessly kind and forgiving, but the hints that she had to grow into those traits give her character some necessary depth, and she refreshingly doesn't get framed as a savior figure. The show hits on the standard themes about embracing change and coping with new directions in life, but the execution is direct and well done, and every tale presented adds to the worldbuilding, giving a sense of forward momentum in the narrative even when it's mostly segmented into interactions with one-off guests. The comedy is pretty consistent too, sometimes teasing or stupid but never feeling mean-spirited. But man, the occasional horny shot really takes me out of it, and some are definitely way more tonally dissonant and tenuously justified than others. They come off like the writers needed a crutch to get the audience's attention because they had no confidence in their material, and it certainly dragged the weaker episodes down.

It's got some okay emotional beats, but so much of the writing is dedicated to sabotaging its own potential. We get some promising character development setup wrestling with things like how to balance duty and principle and how that struggle can distort your relationships, but it all gets resolved at the speed of Shounen Jump cancellation. The most egregious case is with the primary antagonist of the season, where she's unreservedly forgiven after her tragic backstory gets magically instantly transmitted to everyone, but honestly that's exactly what the show does to the viewers again and again. Almost every character who comes off as rude at first quickly gets a detailed flashback about their sob story or some such where they get shown to be actually really sweet and caring, and then never act a smidgen mean again in the present despite barely any circumstances changing. It's like the show wants the emotional payoff of having its characters grow to be better people, but it's too afraid of making the viewers uncomfortable by sitting on the part that needs to be grown out of for more than like 15 minutes.

It's the same story with our protagonist being deaf and mute; it doesn't matter. They lead off with him knowing how to read lips from the start so everyone can understand him and he can understand everyone else. The action heavy second half of the show is also a huge drag. You've got the usual pointless extended jobbing bits, but on top of that the mortality danger is extremely fake. There's one episode in there where you get characters getting written off by the cast only to be miraculously saved moments later, and it happens like seven times in a row, thereby effectively evaporating any stakes for the remainder of the show. But at least the snakes never stop being very cute.

It's not an isekai, but the naked wish fulfillment, anachronistic dialogue, and bubblegum pop inserts sure make it feel like one. The storytelling is pretty incoherent, with what probably should be main plot beats seemingly forgotten about after a few episodes and random character development happening in leaps and spurts. Our lead's love interest is mostly just a pile of abusive boyfriend shoujo cliches, supported by a cast of tedious sex pests and simps and incredulously vapid jealous women. Anything that might threaten to make the story too interesting is for the most part relegated to the background, like the hows and whys of the main supernatural conceit of the show.

I didn't expect the first few eps to be so episodic heavy, and well, it's a shame it doesn't last because it's easily the show's strongest material. The overarching plot is conistently underdeveloped, with progress mostly relegated to the background until the very hasty conclusion, as if the writers wrote themselves into a corner despite not really writing much of anything at all to begin with. Dealing with the ramifications of a rogue developer trapping everyone in a life or death MMO for two years could have been interesting, but we basically just ignore the fallout. Eh, we'll put the kids in remedial classes, they'll be fine. No reason to take the headset that kills you off the market though! Going through the MMOs are also pretty dull and disappointingly straightforward, where the solutions are just grinding or cheating in your special admin privileges but more or less playing the game as intended. The supporting cast is tediously one-note, where all the women exist to fall in love with our protagonist and pine uselessly in the face of his one true love, the antagonists are all two-bit cartoon villains whose only traits are about how much they love being evil, and the men don't do anything. Overall, it's at least less offensive to me than Accel World, even with the three lovingly animated sexual assault scenes they threw in here.

It's been like nine years since I saw the first season so my memory might be kind of shaky, but I distinctly remember it having more for me to relate to on the lived experience of playing in an orchestra. A disappointing turn for this season, where it mostly feels like window dressing for the drama scenes, which are good, even great individually, but they're stymied a bit by how disparate they feel. Again and again we'll have a few characters having some issues and then fade into the background once they get resolved, so the whole ensemble mostly feels like it's made up of tiny isolated friend groups with no real sense of greater camaraderie. Even when the whole group is obviously distressed over Asuka's absence, we only really see Kumiko trying to get her back, or people pushing Kumiko to do so. Of course, we only see what happens from Kumiko's perspective, but it's hard to get a sense that there's anything actually going on beyond our viewpoint. What I would have really liked to see was more in the way of real consequences though. Kumiko mostly prefers functioning as an observer, but we see things work out okay with or without her involvement, and it's really just her sister who gets shown to be miserable because of not acting on her desires.