Welcome to another general discussion thread! Feel free to use this thread to talk about things you have watched recently, questions you have, or recommendations you want to give!
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I have awakened from my slumber to watch more terrible anime! (and good ones too hopefully)
This season seems to be going pretty well so far, with lots of promising new shows. I’m particularly eager to see more from Lazarus, YAIBA, and Gorilla God’s Go-to Girl, with a special shout-out to Classic★Stars, an anime I am very much enjoying even though it is trash and I don’t think anyone else cares about it.
Speaking of trash, though, here’s my garbage pile from the past week:
The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows - 2/5
There’s potential for a good story here, but wow was this structured badly. They dedicated the first half to harem hijinks, without even really introducing us to the waifus or their relationships with the main character (who was absent). It felt like filler, which is a terrible first impression to make. When we finally do see our main character, he’s being a badass and extorting the rich out of their slaves so that he can free them and give them affordable healthcare, which is based as hell (especially considering the state of current anime’s relationship to slave waifus). I feel like this premise could make a really good and engaging story, but it seems like the show wants to focus a lot on how all the hot animal girls want to jump his bones, and I truly do not care about that.
I also learned that the entire first episode is anime-original, and the choice to write new boring content instead of adapting the actual story doesn’t bode well for their writing decisions going forward. Not to mention it seems like when we flash back, we’ll get the bog-standard banished from the hero’s party story we’ve seen a million times.
Please Put Them On, Takamine-san - 2/5
The art is cheap and bad and the core story feels more what you’d throw together to make a softcore porn than an actual attempt at real fiction. Boring and bland, but if you’re into the fetish stuff it’s going for, then I guess it’ll serve its function.
YOUR FORMA - 2/5
A few minutes in I had to go check to make sure this wasn’t a sequel. It felt like the story expected me to know context I didn’t, and not in an in-medias-res way. It isn’t, so I continued, assuming it was just a strange storytelling choice and we’d get back around to the backstory and lore later. After the episode was over, I found out why from the source material readers.
Apparently, the anime took the bold and confusing choice to skip the first volume of the novels. They cut right to the start of volume 2, without rewriting things to fill us in on the missing context. They also went ahead and revealed most of the major twists from volume 1, essentially locking themselves out of flashing back to that later (at least in a satisfying way). So in a way I was sort of right, this is a sequel, just not to any anime that exists. This strange choice (as well as some other changes the source readers pointed out) really doesn’t bode well for the quality of the adaptation going forward. I have no idea how good or bad the source material is, but this adaptation is honestly worse than nothing.
ETA: i forgor that shoshimin is back this season! I haven’t watched it yet because of all the new stuff, but once things calm down I’ll be keeping up with that one!
It’s nice to see you back again at the start of a new season! Just as a meta aside, I want to thank you for stress-testing the bot by requesting multiple threads between the bot checking on messages (every 5 minutes usually). It’s a usage pattern that I hadn’t really thought about ahead of time or tested, but I am glad to see that everything worked the way it is supposed to.
I always mean to stick around farther into the season, but for one reason or another it never seems to work out, lol.
And I’m glad my impatience came in handy! I realized I had a few to send to rikka and considered waiting for a reply each time to make sure I didn’t break her, but ultimately decided it was probably fine, and thankfully it was! You’ve done a great job with her, so thanks for all you do.