For manga, I started Love Bullet and Shimeji Simulation. No comments on those yet 😅

Anime : so many new series!!

Lazarus -- I dont like it hahaha. I dont really find the plot to be interesting or engaging at all, going to drop it.

G-qux -- I like it a lot, but because I listen to the episodes first while working, and then watch them with my wife later, I end up missing questionable things that were animated-- like the hair sniffing. There have always been questionable things happening in gundam, and some series are more offensive than others, so I will be keeping a critical eye.

Zatsu tabi -- This one I think is better because it features adults, unlike laid back camp which I had dropped almost immediately. I'm a sucker for women going out in the world, making friends, and doing cool stuff.

Mono -- speaking of girls being friends, this one is very similar. Not as engaging but nice to have on in the background. Kinda loud tho.

Once Upon A Witch's Death -- gave it a shot, it seemed interesting. Some questionable content, not sure if I want to continue.

Cinderella Grey -- the original series I dropped within 5 minutes, this one so far hasn't had any offensive "fan service bits" so it has that going for it. Cant help but roll my eyes at the concept that you just have to push yourself hard (what would result in a real life injury) to overcome physical limitations. Otherwise I like it.

Apocalypse Hotel -- went in with no expectations, keeping myself on the critical side. I dislike that the robots are all very serious about their jobs. Not sure what kind of social commentary is going on with the Tanuki characters. We will see what happens with this one!

Rock Is A Lady's Modesty -- my wife dropped this on episode one, said there was too many red flags. I am kind of unsure of it myself, I let some episodes play while I worked & I feel like the tone and messaging is kinda meh : "im one of the good commoners! I will prove myself to the nobility." Prooobably going to drop it.

Manga: Hyakkano (The 100 Girlfriends who Really Really Really Really REALLY Love You) might seem like a stupid thing. It might even seem chud coded. It is not. One of the funniest gag/romance mangas, and I'm of the opinion if the writer and artist actually manage to complete all 100 girlfriends, it will be one of the greatest manga ever (and, eventually, anime). We just hit girlfriend 33, and needless to say the manga continues to impress with its exploitation of a very silly premise.

Anime: Lycoris Recoil: friends are thieves of time reminded me of how much I missed these characters so I'm also watching the original run again.

Kusuriya no Hitorigoto is one I got into recently. Caught up with the story and it's pretty fun.

Nothing else coming out I'm watching, so if there's good stuff in this thread I might check it out.

Gosplan, your assessment of Bakemonogatari as SHAFT at its peak is correct. Unfortunately this means some really stupid fanservice at the same time as you get some of the best Shinbo Style outside of Hidamari Sketch and Zetsubou Sensei.

I still think Senjougahara is one of the all time great anime characters, for me she's worth the price of admission alone, but YMMV especially with literally every other girl in the series. Still, the initial run's ending (episode 12) is really great and emotionally satisfying.

The OP/ED game of that series is unmatched as well. "Kimi no shiranai monogatari" and "sono koe wo oboeteru" are really great, as are "staple stable", "chocolate insomnia", and "sugar sweet nightmare"

Manga

Finished Vagabond. Don't get the hype, honestly. Maybe it's a translation thing but the "philosophy" is very unclear imo, and while the action is fine it's nothing amazing. Obviously not helped by it just going on indefinite hiatus in the prelude to the final arc. 5/10.

Anime

Finished Pluto. One of the worst things I've ever watched. Ultimately, it's about how the people of Iraq should forgive the US for the invasion because somethingsomething cycle of violence. To that I say, fuck no? Lots of world building that's just vaguely mentioned and never built upon that's much, MUCH more interesting than anything that happens on screen. Every single one of the super robots deserved it, Robot Devil is best boy, Death to Thracia, 1/10.

Finished Re:Zero S3. It's pretty bad. Why do the women and girls all have to look like that? Why does the main character have to act like that? Come on, man. Also, by avoiding the loops, they also avoid the most interesting part of the series IE trying to slowly puzzle out the best path through a problem. 5/10.

Reading: Yu-Gi-Oh, the early arc is so weird with the shadow games and bad guys. Shangri-La Frontier, really captures the feel of playing mmo games and it's lighthearted. Zatch Bell, so far so good, I love Gash and I think he's so cute how cheerful he is and I like the battles.

Watching: .hack//sign, man this is a weird one, only 2 episodes in so we'll see if it gets better.

Does Umineko count? I'm like 10 hours in ..so I'm pretty bummed about the roses getting messed up

Not watching anything, but finished reading the first volume of Classroom of the Elite. My friend recommended it to me and I was positively surprised. The first 100 pages were pretty cringe, but for the most part I kinda liked it. I'm also thinking about buying steins;gate. I watched the anime 2 years ago and thought about playing the original LN for the first time

A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof

I've also been watching this and it's pretty entertaining. It's light, fluffy slop kind of like a darker version of the slime killing isekai.

Anime:

Lazarus is kind of disappointing. Given everyone involved in this I was expecting something much better, but the art and choreography makes me think of like early 2000s saturday morning cartoons, the CGI isn't the worst but it's still worse than if it were just static panels, and the cinematography is awful. The writing is also really mediocre, at least so far. I'll keep giving it the benefit of the doubt and giving it a chance in the hopes that it'll turn around and payoff, though. Something like a C, although that's maybe being generous because I expect it to hit its stride sooner or later.

I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level is light, fluffy slop that's half slice of life and half monster of the week except the end result every time is the weekly monster gets adopted into the ever growing circle of found family and friends. The art's not fantastic but it's not bad either, there is literally no tension ever, and the story doesn't go anywhere. Maybe a B or a C, because it's entertaining and inoffensive but nothing particularly stunning.

Solo Leveling is completely vapid, pointless slop with flavorless, one-dimensional characters, a bland, extremely derivative story, and pretty bad pacing, but holy fuck does that not even matter because apart from being nicely animated in general the sakuga action scenes are just gorgeous with amazing choreography, visual design, and cinematography and the only CGI that I've ever looked at and thought "wow that actually looks pretty good and doesn't detract from the scene at all." To top it all off the musical score is both great and perfectly blended into the scenes to control and elevate their emotional impact so that I actually got chills watching the most trite bullshit you've ever seen. This series is an aberration that defies any and all reason, taking something so completely flavorless and empty that even Todd Howard looks inspired by comparison and giving it such a lavish treatment that it somehow becomes not only good but an amazing spectacle. A for the sheer spectacle, D for the story on its own.

Mushoku Tensei is a deservedly notorious series that I've seen ascribed the blame for all the worst trends in isekai slop, but I remember someone here saying that it's weirdly much better than you'd think, and is in fact much better than its premise would suggest so I gave it a shot earlier this month. The protagonist starts out as a repulsive brainrotted pedophilic gooner, but after dying horribly and being reincarnated as a newborn baby in a fantasy world he slowly grows up and self-crits his way out of his main character syndrome and the heinous intrusive thoughts he has while working through trauma, loss, and depression and forming meaningful and healthy relationships with other people, gradually becoming a better person bit by bit and loathing who he used to be every time some heinous intrusive thought pops back up.

I started reading the books after finishing the second season and the first few of those are a lot more unpleasant reads than the anime but also make it way more clear that Rudy at that point is in fact meant to be understood as bad, actually. Like I always argue that when depicting something bad you can't just implicitly trust the audience to understand that it is in fact bad, you have to tie in a refutation and condemnation somehow, and these very explicitly do that in a direct and textual way, cycling from the worst intrusive thoughts -- and I've been calling them this throughout because that's how its presented in the text, they're these disruptive interjections that pop up unbidden into Rudy's internal monologue and break its flow -- into revulsion and self-loathing and usually some kind of direct refutation albeit one that's filtered through his brainrot, and if his internal monologue can't do that job the story hops into a different character's POV to do it better and more clearly. Over the course of the first six books those intrusive thoughts become less and less frequent and he loses most of his brainworms, and by the 12th book (which is as far as the anime's gotten) he's basically just "what if Harry Dresden wasn't a chauvinist, and instead was the world's most enthusiastic wife guy," with a great bit of self-reflection at the end where he tears into what an immature, awful piece of shit he's been over the previous 16 years and how much his failures cost him and his family.

The whole thing's an incredibly slow-burn character drama that jumps back and forth between genres, is full of amazing worldbuilding and a treatment of history and myth that most series just don't bother with (I'd put it on par with the Wheel of Time in this regard, and there are some other parallels with that as well), and is quite possibly the only isekai to actually use that narrative device for a good reason and to good effect (emphasizing alienation and homesickness and how being ripped away from one's home and family is a tragedy and not a fun adventure fantasy, both through the character of Nanahoshi and through the big catastrophic thing that happens in that world as well) instead of just as a lazy way of sending some audience-insert blank slate into an escapist power fantasy. It's also got a bunch of really suspect, problematic things that creep past any sort of textual criticism or resolution, in addition to all the unpleasant and gross things that it does actively criticize and work through. I could go on and analyze and criticize it further because I've been doing all this in my head over and over while churning through more than a volume a day, but that would take too long and I still don't know what the fuck I think of it anyways. I will say I can almost forgive the harem bullshit it eventually turns into because of just how incredibly gay Rudy is for his wives, like he thinks about them the way Enver Hoxha talked about Stalin and it makes the whole thing almost tolerable.

Let's see, ratings... I honestly don't know. The anime is gorgeously animated with nice music and for the first season every opening is some bespoke series of scene-setting environmental shots that look wonderful, and it's just all very well put together. Content-wise it's a lot milder than something like Game of Thrones, it's just that especially early on you've got the literal worst guy ever saying the most heinous shit you've ever heard at regular intervals. Overall it's quite good, it's just that's also going along with a lot of uncomfortable bad, too. Let's say a heavily caveated B? for the anime, and an even more critical A? for the novels, but without actually recommending either unless someone can stomach wading through all the gross bullshit it heavily frontloads the series with in order to get to the big payoff of genuine character growth with characters who manage to form healthy relationships while grappling with their own insecurities and inflated opinions of one another, and an overarching story that's basically "what if you mashed up the Wheel of Time and The Dresden Files?"

I'd started watching some other series but between the pirate streaming site I'd been using having horribly buffering issues that made everything unwatchable and getting unhealthily engrossed in reading and critiquing Mushoku Tensei, those are the only things I've seen more than like one episode of in the past month.

Manga found Uncle from another world, saw the anime and liked it but I heard they cut a lot of content for time. Anime been watching the netflix baki pretty fucking weird but I like it. Western animation been watchig lego monkie kid with sibling but we kind of stopped watching it together maybe will get back to it.

Not mentioning stuff where all I can really say is "I/we've been continuing it"...

My mom and I finally finished Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. I really do wonder if that's the single anime we spent the longest on watching. It was a good show but the epilogue caught me a bit off guard with the whole age gap romance thing.

We also finished the Tamako Market specials — turns out that the second half is significantly better than the first half, although not like spectacular or anything. The first three of the six specials are focused on Dera's bar while the last three are about Choi being silly goofy.

By myself I watched some more Angelic Layer but decided to put that on pause for now, and then I decided to dig through my long-term paused list for things to give a second shot. I ended up binging through Angel Beats, Quintessential Quintuplets, and Engaged to the Unidentified — none of them are sliced bread necessarily, but I didn't have anything better to do.

Engaged to the Unidentified has just zero chemistry in the lead couple, more accurately the boy has like zero personality and just feels super out of place in the show. Both Engaged to the Unidentified and Quintessential Quintuplets had some Anime Shit — you know what I mean — enough to bother me but not too much for me to stop watching.

Angel Beats feels like it at times tries too hard to pull on your heartstrings, at the same time as it at other times just immediately undercuts any drama or tension with some gag — but one thing I notice about Angel Beats watching it now compared to when I first tried it as a neeb (noob weeb) is that feels very clearly inspired by Haruhi, right? And even with its faults, it did eventually manage to get me somewhat invested in the world and plot. Although Angel Beats also suffers like Love Live from just having Too Fucking Many Characters. Who are half of these people!!!

I also tried to watch another episode of Uzaki-chan — which I had apparently given a three episode try when it first came out — but I could only last a few minutes. Nope. Big boobs and being annoying is not a personality, certainly not one that makes for good comedy. Who is this for?!

I also saw the nineteenth episode of Hetalia, a show I haven't watched since I was a neeb, and it's... fine...? Like it's the type of thing you can watch occasionally, but the thing is when there's so much else out there what even is "occasionally", right?

Also from the paused list I've started watching High School Fleet (or Haifuri). I gave that a three-episode try when I was a neeb, and decided it wasn't for me, but I gave it a second try a few months ago and figured that it wasn't actually half-bad. So now I've started watching it regularly, pacing myself rather than binging, and yeah, it's fun enough. Like it's still got some Anime Shit, and my past self still wasn't wrong to call it "Girls & Panzer but with ships and also not nearly as good", but G&P is a high bar to pass. Haifuri has moments of genuine tension, it also has funny moments, it's got kitty cats (hell yeah), and it's also got some moments of just being a bit silly but in a way where you aren't quite sure how seriously it's taking itself.

So yeah, fun stuff.

I've also lately found myself hankering for PreCure and Tokyo Mew Mew again. I've actually been contemplating organizing watch parties for those on Blorptube at some point, along with a number of other anime.

Fang of the Sun Dougram: Finally finished this one after almost a year. The only other Ryosuke Takahashi work I'd seen was Votoms, but I think I'm a pretty big fan of his now. Anyone looking for a guerilla warfare focused, anti-imperialist Gundam show - it's here!

Eureka Seven (34/50): Sill going strong with this one - it's great!

Mobile Suit Gundam AGE (32/49): Super weird show - feels like they packed a 100+ episode show into 49.

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX (4/??): Pretty good so far, looking forward to this in the middle of the week.

Overman King Gainer (1/26): Trying to wrap up the last few Tomino shows I haven't seen (this and Xabungle). The first episode of this feels similar to G-Reco, which is a good thing to me. The setting is super cool - post-apocalyptic dome cities on a frozen world with trains connecting them. Also, the protagonist is a