Monogatari had a brilliant Best Girl in Senjougahara only to later stuff her in the fridge in favour of lolis and imouto jailbaits. Truly the world has no taste.

 

RIP. I guess I will have to treasure Bakemonogatari.

 

Never thought I would see somebody falling for Anime Maru.

Actually in the topic of articles and recommendations I will recommend this one - The Broken Cogs Of The Anime Industry – Production Assistants

 

Pshaw best girl in monogatari is obviously Kaiki D. When he sings in the OP. Beautiful.

Having just finished watching Zoku Owarimonogatari, I'd honestly say the quality of the show increases over time. SS is by and large better than bake even if nise was rather meh. Kizu was phenomenal. Owari was consistently great. So yeh if you have the patience to watch like 70+ episodes I'd heavily recommend, especially since some of the best characters are introduced later like sodachi and ougi.

Oregairu S1 does not hold up on a second watch, the animation and the music are just so janky. S2 is still good though.

Man this season of anime is so meh.

Also not even joking Ping Pong the Animation is one of the best things I have ever seen.

 

Monogatari is my jam, plain and simple. Probably gonna rewatch the entire series again before diving into this season.

 

PPtA is supposed to be the shit, but call me basic - I've never been able to make myself watch the fuck ugly art. One day, maybe, one day.

 

It's masaaki yuuasa's style, you either love it or hate it, there's really not any middleground. I'd say that it does serve a very strong purpose in this case to ground the characters and the themes in very relateable territory. Also the soundtrack is fucking great.

Also I fucking hope they make a new season of march comes in like a lion. They fucking better.

 

It's less Yuasa here and more Taiou Matsumoto here. Though of course Yuasa likes both sketchy styles and deformations.

 

Oh my fuck, they're making season three of Hibike! Euphonium.

Squee!

https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/bvj9yy/hibike_euphonium_3rd_year_announcement_pv_feat_a/

 

So, I got a random question. A while back I watched Hunter x Hunter and loved it. Going to watch it again, but I remember that the new Anime does not actually complete the story. There is more to come after. Does anyone know if there are any plans to continue the anime along the same lines as the anime?

 

I thought the anime told a complete story. The story in the manga is ongoing, even with the hiatus, but it involves new elements introduced after the anime's endpoint. A new season might come after the current arc finishes, although it'll take a long time, as the mangaka suffers from health issues that cause the long hiatus between chapters.

For what it's worth, the mangaka thought the anime's endpoint as the natural end of the story. So you should be able to enjoy a complete story without a new season.

 

Ah, yeah no the anime does finishes in a good spot. It’s just that it was so good, I’d hope there’s more to come. And wiki told me there was more.

Cheers for the info.

 

Cells at Work is the most delightful anime I've seen in years.

Osmosis Jones eat your heart out.

 

To whomever gushed about March Comes in like a Lion:

Thanks. From what I've seen, it's nothing short of a master's work.

 

I finally watched Re-Zero, and it was great. Exciting, as one would expect from an All You Need Is Kill style time loop done well; but it's also a very brutal and compelling deconstruction of the very idea of the entitled male otaku, who wants everything - happiness, success, respect, and of course the affection of the heroine - despite having done nothing to earn or deserve it.

Re-Zero Season 2 is coming, and I say - bring it.

 

It's ultimately a better written version of Shield Hero, which attempts the same thing and seems to lose sight of what made it good. The one complaint I had was the sword boy going and finding the sword girl who beat him once, beating her, and asking her to marry him. Why ask her? Why does she say yes? I get that we had to set up his revenge against the whale, but it wasn't the best way to write his tragic backstory.

 

They're re-airing a "director's cut" of Re:Zero right now broadcast in hour chunks with possible changes to the story. I don't think much has changed in the first few episodes but it seems pretty likely there will be changes later on to lead into season 2.

 

Shield Hero is dogshit because it's a power-wank fantasy played straight, and indeed made all the worse by a heaping pile of non-ironic self-pitying resentment. Whatever one thinks of Re-Zero, it's not that, but a deconstruction, and an exploration of not just the logical consequence of an otaku NEET being transported to another world (spoiler: he fucking sucks, and dies more frequently than it rains), but also of the accompanying emotional stakes (the MC is self-loathing, as he well should be, and realizes that wanting something without doing anything to deserve it only makes you worth nothing) - which ultimately says something about the whole isekai culture and what it means to not be a failure in life.

 

So I'm close to finishing Ascendance of a Bookworm, and good damn is it surprisingly deep.
Brief synopsis: isekai with a girl who wanted to be a librarian gets reincarnated as a sickly peasant girl. Her family loves her, and takes care of her during her frequent ones bouts. But she has one dream, to be a librarian, and she will accomplish that, even is she has to invent the library.
For those of you watching Dr. Stone, it's a more emotionally driven (and much slower paced) and less scientificaly focused.
Full recommendation. If you don't like it after 2 episodes, you won't like the rest.

 

For the mc not to resent the fact that he came into a world that hated him from the start, taking for granted that everything would be great, and then have it still hate him after fighting to help it would be entirely illogical. He's not a neet, he actually had a life where he went to school and apparently was trying to steer his brother back onto the right course, though not much of 'real life' is covered. If he hadn't been a respectable young man with a backbone the show would've ended with everyone dying. I was not trying to say that the show deconstructs the isekai mc; it only deconstructs a lot of the other isekai tropes.

-spawning in a good, just kingdom where everything is black and white
This is one of the most, if not the most attractive prospect about leaving this world for another that the isekai genre presents. There's no need to think about anything, no complex world politics, you just have an evil king bent on world domination or destruction; your choices are obvious by every moral philosophy to ever exist. Shield Hero is basically made to serve an evil king, who could have stood to be smarter, and it was somewhat ruined by his more powerful queen just fixing everything, but it's not like I said it was perfect.

-overpowered advantage from the start
It's a good shield, but it's a shield. He needs help to be able to actually fight, and he needs to figure out how the damn thing works to make use of its powers. The other characters, by contrast, get damaging weapons at the very beginning, and seem to think his weapon is overpowered because they don't know about the work that he put into it. They aren't really supposed to be parodies of standard isekai mc's, because none of them are neets with no character, but they're under the illusion that everything is fair because they don't use their brains and nothing external sets them straight until the end of the season. I wish the shield didn't have a curse mode where it can deal damage, but that's my main complaint.

-get the girl instantly
The cute girl he meets at the beginning is a helpful princess who's skilled in magic, so it seems pretty standard, but it goes just about as poorly as it could after that. She turns out to be genuinely despicable and tries to kill him at every possible opportunity. I would have preferred that people would stop falling for her stupid schemes earlier than they did, but there you have it. The mc eventually gets a girl, but he hardly sought her out for romantic reasons, and met her under the least romantic of circumstances.

To summarize, I agree that Re: Zero is much better, because of the added component of deconstructing the main character, having more interesting villains, and directly teaching the lessons that neets should be learning from it, but I enjoyed Shield Hero because the main character behaves more reasonably, so we don't have to go through the same, punishing character arc we did in Re: Zero.