I don’t know what to expect with this. Probability of it turning out good feels low. It looks like it’s just gonna be a lot of action. I didn’t get much personality from the trailer. I’d hope they add in the weird stuff. Although I guess Sekiro had less of that than Souls or Elden Ring.

It’s impressive how much the show can mix up its art style and level of detail. Lower res for the anime bits. Super high detail/realistic lighting for the camera bits, etc.

It’s been interesting getting to see more of Marin’s life/friend group and how they look in on their relationship. There’s that contrast between Gojo’s fears of how people judge his interests with how relatively reasonable everyone has been. It feels like that girl from his childhood was the anomaly, although it could also be that it was more common and most people just grew out of it after a certain point. That was kind of my school experience. By sometime in late high school the people who used to be bullies just kind of stopped. We didn’t suddenly become friends, but they didn’t go out of their way to cause problems for me either.

It makes me wonder if that girl is going to show up again for some character arc that reckons with their past or if that’s just not something the show wants to tackle now that it’s settled into a groove.

At this rate Gojo is going to be the last person to know that they’re dating. :P

Some of my favorite shows of the last few seasons have been unexpected. Off the top of my head right now the two I’m thinking of are Apocalypse Hotel and Snack Basue. I’ll maybe add some more later when I have time to look at my list to remind me.

First I can think of is the end of K-On! I watched the show for the first time in my senior year of college, so that feeling of having to go away from the friends I had made in my time there was pretty significant.

Some random others off the top of my head:

Frieren for kind of the same reason.

Violet Evergarden, especially the episode about the mom writing to her daughter.

Grave of the Fireflies.

Probably some others I’m forgetting.

I’m so glad this show is back. It just makes me so happy to watch.

Also Japanese question: What was the word confusion that made craft store guy misunderstand what Gojo meant? It wasn’t clear from the subtitles.

I guess it was like this before, but it’s only something I really thought about now: It’s nice that the fake anime looked lower fidelity than the real one. I have a running joke with friends whenever we see an anime in an anime and ask whether the anime is photorealistic in their world. But here the thing one level down from their reality looks less real than their normal animation, so it kinda works out. All I’m saying is I want to see an anime where their world’s anime is in 1D just for the gag. The audience never actually gets to see it properly and the characters talk about it like it’s completely normal to them.

Having seen way too many rom coms… I give it a zero parcento chance of that going anywhere other than just getting interrupted or awkwardly shrugged off.

Nice ending to the season. I figured the kids were coming back to life. I don’t know if that was meant to be a twist with just how telegraphed it was over the last 2 episodes. I was both surprised and not surprised by Shi Sui being alive. I thought she didn’t seem like she was planning to die and had some kind of plan, but then she got shot… a lot. I don’t know how she survived that. Did she have ye olde bullet proof vest and blood squibs?

Jinshi still can’t take a hint. That whole relationship feels like one of those things that would be creepy if they weren’t playing it off as cutesy/comedic.

I’m looking forward to S3. From the teaser trailer I’m hopeful that we’re going to get some kind of status quo shift/reset so we can get back to the more Mao Mao focused stories. But we’ll see.

Yeah as much as I love the show, the political intrigue has mostly just confused/bored me. I just want more bits with Mao Mao being Mao Mao. I don’t know the source material, but the S3 teaser makes me think we’re going to get away from all of that since it says they’re going to a distant land. Seems like a reset.

I can’t remember. I feel like I’ve seen it on at least one other place though.

One of the doctors going to fight the bad guy in hand to hand combat has the same vibe as the bridge crew in Star Trek always going on away missions because they’re the main characters.

Hey, sometimes they also bring shampoo!

I’m wondering if it’s gonna be Trigger again. That’s mostly why I bothered with it in the first place. But they tend not to do sequels, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t.

Yeah it’s a pretty depressing ending. The shift technology isn’t letting them go back to fix anything. The world and the people they knew are dead. He and Ontan just noped out of the world to live in basically a fantasy rather than live with the world or try to change it.

I just finished Ascendance of a Bookworm.

I felt kind of unsatisfied by the ending. Not that it doesn’t end up going in a nice direction, but that’s what it was: A direction with no endpoint. Much of the final book felt like just another book in the series with all the usual kinds of developments, conversations, etc, just maybe with a bit more recap. It would have been a fine book if it wasn’t the last one. Sure Myne has kind of gotten what she wanted, but it’s far from a done deal. We could follow the politics of how she deals with being a new aub in a previously hostile duchy. We could see how she expands printing from here. Etc. The story could basically continue as it was minus the countrywide politics plot.

As it was, it actually took me a really long time to finish this last book because I wasn’t that engaged between all the recap (which honestly the series did too much of in general) and the knowledge that none of this was really going anywhere.

Also, you’d think the epilogue where she gets to re-unite with her family would be emotional, but… idk… it just didn’t really provoke much emotion from me in the way that I felt when she was separated in the first place, or when she was remembering her life in her old world that she couldn’t return to. I think part of the problem is that the family really fully left Myne’s life, but they did kind of disappear from the reader’s perspective. They haven’t been relevant for so long that when Ferdinand asked Myne if she wanted to go back to being a commoner I didn’t doubt for a second that she would stay on her current path. It’s kind of just how stories work.

Still a bit sad that it’s over just because I don’t have anything to look forward to now. This was the first time I went to read the source material after watching an anime I liked. I haven’t felt that compelled to go check out another, or at least my trouble making decisions has prevented me from starting any others I might be interested in.

Probably JoJos? Or maybe Monogatari? How many episodes does that have? There are a lot of seasons.

This was a surprisingly good show. I guess the only things I can really say that disappointed me about the ending though are:

• It felt kind of rushed. This could have used like one or two more episodes. Like there were 3 parts shoved into one episode: Whatever happened between Mahiro’s meeting and the concert, the concert, then the epilogue. So we kind of had to skip a lot of stuff to fit it all in one episode. Did they not talk between the meeting and the concert? Was their relationship just in suspended animation until they met after the concert?

• I’m surprised they never addressed the kiss. I don’t know where I’d expect that to go, but it’s weird that they just never talked about it again and just left it as a tease for the audience. Idk, it’s not the biggest deal. They still had an interpersonal emotional arc independent of any yuri bait. But why include that at all if it wasn’t even going to affect their relationship in the slightest?

But setting all that aside, great show even within a pretty packed season. Fun characters with relatable problems and a story that kept a good pace at least until the last episode.

The show is really good. However, the last few episodes we’ve watched (a few behind) have been a long tournament arc and it’s not even done yet. The episodes themselves are still pretty good, but it feels like forward progress in the story kind of screeched to a halt.