I recently finished rewatching Frieren S1 in preparation for (finally) watching S2.

…I started that rewatch back in January. Such is my life lately. 🤷️

I’ll watch Mushoku Tensei S3 most likely (not sure if I’ll follow as it airs or wait and just binge at the end; I usually prefer the latter). Would like to try the new GITS but I have no enthusiasm for dealing with Amazon’s streaming.

non-action battle-shounen

The first thing that comes to mind when you say that is Yakitate Japan. Shokugeki comes to mind next as a newer take on the idea of cooking competitions. Let me know if I’m misunderstanding the wording though.

I think they mean that they’re blaming Mary Sue-ish/wish fulfillment isekai specifically. i.e. like stories that are stereotypical of self-published content on Shosetsuka ni Narou (lit. “Let’s Become a Novelist”) – not two separate genres.

(“Narou” itself just means “let’s become”, but it’s slang for the website if I understand correctly.)

RIP.

(Screenshot is from Bodacious Space Pirates – he directed the anime.)

Consequently, the opening sequence recently published on YouTube has been removed from the platform.

Anyone save a copy of it? Would be interesting to see what they thought was OK to ship vs what they replace it with.

No sequel movies, only standalone

No Ghibli movies

I don’t really watch a lot of anime movies. Excluding Ghibli and movies that are associated with / cap off a TV series cuts out a lot of the ones I’ve seen as well.

Colorful and Paprika come to mind pretty quickly. Would have to think a bit for what else I’d put on there. May edit this later if more come to me.

whenever the top pirate site goes down, a decent chunk of its users switch to legal services.

[X] Doubt

They would probably make more money if they’d just put the shows up for sale for direct download as soon as they air.

Seriously, it’s 2026 for fucks sake. Why can’t I just go to the studio’s website and pay them a dollar (or whatever) to download an MP4?! I can understand the old conservative idiots running old studios with old stupid practices, but why is NO ONE doing this? Especially as studios keep going out of business and reforming? Have they never seen Steam and GOG for game sales? Bandcamp for music?

…rant rant rant…

minimal inaccuracies

I (mostly) liked the show, but conflating the physical compression of a blackhole with data compression really grated on me.

CITY is not on CR – or, at least, it wasn’t when I was looking for it last year.

Wikipedia has it listed as licensed by Amazon Prime Video. (I expect most people just raised the Jolly Roger though…)

You put works like Mushoku Tensei, Steins;Gate 0, 5cm Per Second, Re:Zero in your Good to Great tiers. Frieren has some similar aspects and might land in a similar range for you. Seems a bit odd to reject it without even trying it just because it’s popular.

I recently managed to get a physical copy of Evangelion. Most of the discs work, so I’m watching through the series now for the first time. The only disc that didn’t work when I tested them is the one that has something called “Evangelion:Death(True)2” and the End of Evangelion movie plus some bonus content – this is an AACS issue rather than physical damage so there’s hope that I can watch it eventually, just… not now.

I was told that the ending theme has been changed. The copy I have has an instrumental piano piece instead of the various “Fly Me To The Moon” versions on animethemes. It’s not clear to me what the title of the ending piece on my copy is, and the version on my discs isn’t listed there.

I was expecting some weird stuff from this show, naturally – the later parts of it are infamous for that, even though I don’t know exactly what I’ll encounter yet – but, even still, the casual presence of the penguin was a surprise.

So, I dug back into physical media a bit at the end of the year and managed to scrounge up some copies of older works that I either hadn’t seen or where my copy had issues (like parts of a few episodes skipping due to physical defects on the discs).

One of those I haven’t seen before is To-LOVE-Ru. I don’t know how the hell I never realized this – having seen it pop up in fanart and such for a decade or so… – but the name とらぶる is obviously a transliteration of “trouble” into Japanese. So far, the writing is wonderfully stupid; I’m not expecting much out of this in the story department, but a lighthearted distraction from our extremely depressing reality is not unwelcome right now… I’ve heard the show described as “thinly veiled hentai” before, but even with that description I was still a bit surprised they actually put unobscured female nipples in the first episode. This kind of episodic ecchi harem comedy isn’t something I find bingeable, so I’ll probably be chipping away at it episode by episode for a while when I’m in the right mood for it. Hopefully I get a few good reaction shots out of it.

For upcoming releases, I am planning to watch S2 of Frieren, but given that that’s the kind of thing I expect I’d rather want to binge, I will probably be waiting towards the end of the season to start it.

97 minutes

At that length, I think I’d call it a movie/film even if it’s part of a TV series’s progression.

If we’re including Japanese anime films in general, In This Corner of the World is supposedly the longest at 168 minutes for the extended version, followed by Final Yamato at 163 minutes, and then The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya at 162 minutes – according to this list on Wikipedia.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the story, but Garden of Words is worth watching just for the scenery art.

School Days😬🤮

It’s rare that a show makes me that mad, and the ending is unforgettable, but I’m pretty sure it’s not quite the same kind of emotional payoff that OP’s looking for… so, “Troll Answer”. ;-)

Most of the stuff that comes to mind is already on your list.

Maybe you’d like the movie, Colorful, or the series Your Lie in April?

This is a stretch, but maybe also consider Shin Sekai Yori? The particular things that’ll hit you there are, uh, a bit different though, if it works on you.

Troll Answer: School Days. 👹️

Not on my copy – I double checked before posting.

Could be there’s a different version of the DVDs with it though. 🤔️

Yeah. I expect it was probably some licensing bullshit like either they couldn’t get the rights again for the re-release or it cost to much to get them, but I don’t know why they did it specifically. It irked me when I realized they’d changed it though.