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"I think solo camping is a way to appreciate loneliness."

Great cute girl anime have an effervescent quality to them that never fails to casually curl either corner of my mouth no matter how inane or minimalist the antics on screen become. By now, we’re all familiar with quiddities/odds and ends of a cute girl anime as they’re thoroughly ingrained in the genetic code that makes anime...well…“anime”. What shows like “Yuru Camp” lack in narrative heft they make up for through sheer force of charm. And that’s not to say that shows pigeonholed as “CGDCT” are entirely bereft of anything worthwhile, as the narrative often ... goes. I say this without a lick of irony, but cute girl anime almost form a sort of parasocial relationship with their audience, more-so than a lot of other genres. This is due to the grounded simplicity of the storytelling as well as the cast members themselves often serving as proper analogs for friends and family (save for the shrill voices and big eyes).

But what more does Yuru Camp have to offer that hasn’t already been retrofitted by any number of other functional cute girl shows? Truth be told, you almost have to actively try to fuck up a cute girl anime because they’re just that easy to write. Most of them nowadays don’t even try to hide the fact that they’re aping one of their predecessors. In regards to content, Yuru Camp is quite breezy, so breezy in fact that some have taken to calling it (myself included) an iyashikei anime. On top of being an exemplary cute girl anime, Yuru Camp effortlessly bridges the gap between irreverent gag comedies like K-On! and meditative deliberately paced iyashikei like Aria and Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. This is a particularly odd marriage of two genres on its surface, they’re practically diametrically opposed. But when you really think about these two contrasting energies, the shamanic self-reflective loneliness of an iyashikei and the galvanized free-wheeling entropy of being in a friend-group like a cute girl anime, therein lies the duality of a balanced life and the recipe for a damn great anime.

For transparency’s sake, I feel it’s necessary to be forthcoming about the fact that I am an avid camper myself. With that, you could potentially glean that I have a dog in this fight. Frankly, I do. Yuru Camp dials me back to those summer nights, splayed out on the pebbly shores of a campsite, drunkenly trying to point out the different constellations and asterisms above to my friends. Or simply lying there with our eyes closed as we share in a communal silence, melting into the night, knowing that when we open them again, we’ll be together once more. In the social distancing era, these moments are precious.

Where S1 of Yuru Camp faltered was in its need to establish rudimentary camping know-how. Perhaps this is a non-criticism to those who don’t know much about camping, and in truth, the sight gags and sound editing greatly mitigate what would otherwise be something of a slog. This isn’t to say that the discrepancy in quality between both seasons is vast, not by a long shot, but with all of the minutiae having been already taken care of in its first season, S2 is significantly more focused.

The degree of agency that these characters are given is frankly somewhat unprecedented for a show like this. By now you’d imagine that one of the core tenets of a cute girl anime is wholesome togetherness in the face of everything from abject misery to minor inconvenience, to the point that the term “moeblob” takes on an entirely new meaning. It’s a scary thought, imagine Tetsuo Shima’s transformation scene in Akira except with bigger eyes and multi-colored hair. The globular goofballs that populate Yuru Camp’s cast have far more freedom than that.

What really sells Yuru Camp’s characters as an organic and believable friend group is the fact that they’re not always together. Their group texts read true to life, like one you may be a part of with a group of friends, making plans but also splintering off in different directions due to availability. While they all like each other in a manner expected of a cute girl show, it’s apparent that they have exclusive dynamics only present between certain friends. I’d also be remiss to not mention just how against the grain it is to force a wedge between these girls. This goes to show just how much trust is put into these characters as individuals going off on their own adventures and yet still being fully capable of carrying episodes on their lonesome. Often, these rare insular episodes are the ones that entrance you the most with their healing properties and measured pace.

Individually, most of the characters remain largely unchanged but there isn’t really a need for them to change. Inuko’s little sister (Chibiko?) is introduced in this season, and she is just as saucy and diabolical as her sister, thank god they don’t have the nuclear codes. Nadeshiko, who was mostly relegated to an audience surrogate in S1, really came into her own this time around. Watching her navigate her first solo camping trip was delightful, mainly because Rin and her older sister fumbling to shadow her like concerned helicopter parents underscores just how much they care for her (on top of being hilarious). That aside, watching Nadeshiko put into practice what she’s learned from Rin (as well as passing some of her own wisdom down to other campers) is deeply satisfying. And of course, there’s Sensei. Ah Sensei, I’m right there with yah.

I’ve watched quite a number of anime over the years but few that I’ve gone out of my way to watch have been so emphatic about exploring Japan’s natural beauty. You’d think that these girls were charting hinterlands in any given outing they go on. For example, I wasn’t even aware that there were notable basalt columns in Japan before having watched this anime (but I guess that’s on me). A show like this was made for the standard still-frame minimalism that animators in this industry are often forced to abuse due to scheduling and time crunches. The still-frames in Yuru Camp are almost like flipping through the pages of a glossy coffee table photography book. Would I be THIS charitable to just any show skirting by on the bare minimum as far as animation goes? It’s only because Yuru Camp knows how to properly calibrate its minimalism for maximum output.

Yuru Camp is a comedy of details, and often the smallest of details do the heaviest of lifting. It’s the little things that make Yuru Camp so special, like when Ena is showing Rin photos of her trip with Chiaki and Inuko and you can see her finger partially obscuring the camera lens on her phone in the corner of the picture. A resoundingly innocuous detail but one that further adds to the organic believability of this world. I also can’t praise the character designs and outfits in this show enough. These girls have that Pacific Northwest DRIP. The character designs and general art design of the show is distinctively cartoony, save for the scenery porn. Yuru Camp does not come up short in the sight gag department. Its dry comedic sensibilities are accentuated by its snappy but simple editing style. Quick cuts and stylized facial expressions make up the bulk of the laughs but it’s not afraid to get creative with the musical cues and effects.

One scene that really stood out to me as far as arresting camera techniques was when Nadeshiko was simply walking through a town during her first solo camping trip. As she walks with a mountain in the background and with the neighborhood she’s traversing in the foreground, the natural sense of parallax is almost like an old Disney cartoon on those multiplane cameras or even Akira (leave it to me to mention Akira more than once in a friggin Yuru Camp review). The interesting camera techniques also extend to the visual gags. Like when Rin attempts to cross a rickety bridge and it switches to handheld like she’s on Survivorman.

Theoretically, Yuru Camp’s soundtrack is something that shouldn’t have a modicum of cohesion. The diversity of its sound palette was deliberately curated by Akiyuki Tateyama, who pulled from completely disparate corners of the globe. I can only describe the lush instrumentation as rustic which deeply accentuates the outdoorsy antics. You’ll hear anything from pedal steel guitars and fiddles to pan pipes and mandolins in any given episode which can honestly catch you off guard. The delicate acoustic guitar notes and the mellow lounge percussion remind me of Choro Club’s work on the Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou’s soundtrack. There’s even a bossa nova track or two which makes me yearn for Hekiru Shiina on backing vocals at the very least.

For better or for worse, Yuru Camp’s tactile qualities will make it something of an insurmountable wall for certain audiences. It’s not a particularly challenging anime but it’s the type of thing that you kind of just have to “feel” for yourself. I’m sure some will find it to simply be nothing more than a twee travel brochure anime padded to its core with innumerable layers of fluff and the occasional yuck. But for others (who are fortunate enough to have the means and capacity to do so) Yuru Camp is a prescient anime whose content is a charming forecast of better days to come in the great outdoors. I’m privileged to live in an area with a rich cultural heritage/a melange of biomes and microcosms to see firsthand. Nonetheless, even if it’s as simple as a leisurely trek/drive down a street you’ve never been down before somewhere in your hometown, I urge everyone to soak in something new with or without the company of others, it makes no difference. There’s not enough time allotted to us to let it all slip away like a fleeting dream.

Yuru Camp was crafted from the purview of someone who has a deep affection and understanding for what they write about. What may be a quaint show to some, to others will be a didactic reminder of our transitory human condition, and the onus is on us to make the most of that fact.

I’d like to consider myself an observer rather than an active participant in the pernicious social media discourse that’ll orbit a show like this on principle. People fascinate me, truly, because in the midst of what has been the most challenging and bizarre year in our contemporary human history, we can still find the mental vacancy to compartmentalize all of that bullshit and draw our ire towards the REAL issues...the Tid. Or more specifically, the 2D Tid, you know, like the kind you can’t feel? But I guess to properly enjoy a show like “Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai!”, you need A LOT of mental vacancy. I’m ... not going to pay much heed to any of the facile rhetoric lobbed towards this anime, because quite frankly, I don’t give a shit one way or the other. Unless a show is deliberately trying to ram a narrative down my esophagus, it takes a lot for me to roll up my sleeves and polish my ivory sword, even more so if that show is a fucking cartoon.

Uzaki-chan is one of those rare instances where I was already fairly well-acquainted with the source material and author before having watched its adaptation. While half of the Uzaki stanbase at large was drying on their parents’ mattresses, I was already hip to this shit (another notch on my anime hipster belt). I have to hand it to Take (the mangaka) though, the man’s a genius. Whether it’s rabid affection or vehement disgust, Uzaki’s viral marketing potential speaks for itself. This obstreperous oblong drove stakes through my eardrums and burned herself into my corneas well before her anime was announced. That’s due in part to Take’s distinct...idiosyncrasies as an artist.

Take made a name for himself as a decently popular doujin artist before making the eventual transition to serialization. I follow quite a number of independent artists myself because more often than not, independent artists don’t have to worry about time crunches and have far more freedom to work at a pace that will produce the absolute best result. That said, I can’t say Take’s particularities really measure up to the best of them. He’s not exactly punching under his weight, he has his niche, clearly, and I can respect that. I mean, who else can we turn to when we’re craving malformed prenatal pagan ritual eldritch moeblobs like Uzaki? I mean look at this snaggle-toothed, bobble-headed, big-eyed, monstrosity of a character design. She looks like a jack-o-lantern carved by Ray Charles with that gaping half-moon watermelon mouth and skin-sheath covering her fang. What does she even need that thing for? Will she get tetanus if that thing scrapes against her bottom lip?

As a virile young 20-something like myself, I have to admit, breasts are indeed tantalizing. There’s nothing wrong with watching this show purely for the proverbial “eye-candy” if ecchi anime do it for you, but what good is enjoying a piece of eye-candy if you’re just sucking on it with the wrapper still on? The boobs are a gimmick, clearly, but they don’t really do all that much with them. They’re just kind of there to throw darts at as an easy punchline when it behooves the script to do so. My point being, if you’re going to draw a character like this in a transparent attempt to exploit her design, why pair down the fanservice? We’re living in an era where “Ishuzoku Reviewers” masterfully broke every single rule that an ecchi should and could. When I watch a show like Uzaki-chan proudly whore their mascot out on the corner with 7 layers of thick sweaters and winter boots on the half-hearted promise of the occasional flaccid skirt lift, I can’t help but feel cheated. Uzaki-chan is about as sexy as a stubbed toe (and twice as bulbous).

You could make the argument that Uzaki as well as the whole of the Uzaki clan at large are “just drawn that way”, but that’s woeful ignorance. This is a series spearheaded by someone who cut their teeth drawing “paizuri” comics for a living. Uzaki’s “Sugoi Dekai” t-shirt is this generation’s “Mega Milk” except not nearly as fun, if you know what I mean by that. This anime lacks the sex-appeal to get away with designing a character like this for any good reason other than to just bounce your eyes from any given corner of the screen like a game of ping-pong.

It’s nigh impossible to have a discussion about this anime that doesn’t ultimately circle back to this little shit’s design. It’s fundamentally baked into the spine that supports the bosom of this show’s trademark. But why dwell on this for as long as I have? Because there’d be fuck-all to talk about otherwise.

Uzaki is just one half of a brilliant Manzai duo, and believe it or not, her partner in crime, one Shinichi Sakurai, almost annoys me as much as his...heh...“titular” co-lead. Shinichi is such a transparent case of pandering wish-fulfillment that it’s impossible to buy him as the role he wishes to inhabit. Through no fault of his own (because of his “mean face”), he’s a loner but he just so happens to be conventionally attractive in every conceivable way. He’s tall, muscular, young, and has sharp eyes which puts him in the top 5% of all knuckle-draggers roaming the land and planting their seeds. He’s such a failure of a loner that his only real problem in life is that he’s drowning in tits at any given hour of the day, oh woe is him. The mean-eyed gag is used so sparingly that it makes it even harder to believe that this man has much difficulty with ANYTHING because of his face.

Uzaki-chan’s endgame as a story (besides the boilerplate slice of life hijinks) is to have Uzaki facilitate Shinichi’s social competency. There is absolutely nothing wrong with living a solitary lifestyle if that’s your preference, but Uzaki-chan has absolutely no idea how to broach this topic in a clever or didactic way. It’s perfectly content with taking a flippantly dismissive stance against people who choose to do so. I don’t know about you, but if I were a character like Shinichi being pestered by some manic pixie dream goblin, that would make me even MORE of a recluse. Uzaki-chan reads to me as an unrefined amateurish work conceived by someone who knows how to sell their manga but with only a tenuous grasp of what to actually do with it.

Anything that gives this show a sense of identity is effectively dismantled by and cherry-picked from other properties that rock it better. Why watch this show for the T&A if there are any number of functionally better cartoons to get your rocks off to? Why watch this show for the character dynamic when you can watch or read Takagi-san or Nagatoro-san that do far more interesting things than just “BAHAHAHAHAHAH SENPAI!!!” ? Why watch this show for the high-pitched squealing and sleep-paralysis gremlins when Keeping Up With the Kardashians is 19 seasons deep, dog?

Suffice to say, anime is perhaps the most renewable resource on the planet. There’s a school of thought not just among anime fans but with people who regularly consume media whose core tenet is to defend mediocrity because originality is overrated and doesn’t always pay off so we may as well just accept recycled tried and true formulas as long as they are competently executed. “Uzaki-chan wa Asobitai!” isn’t just mediocre, it’s AGGRESSIVELY mediocre. This show isn’t bad enough to knock a few back with a group of friends and enjoy with tempered irony. But it’s not good enough to recommend in any capacity. We all know why people bother with giving this show the time of day, it’s in the title of the damn thing, but hey, I’m not one to point at and laugh at one’s proclivities (as vexing as this one in particular may be). But come on guys, you can do SO much better.

Your time on this earth is finite my friends, don’t waste it on shit like this just to prove how “red-pilled” you are, nobody’s impressed. I do it so you don’t have to.

I have an affinity for “Re:Zero” that I often struggle to divorce myself from when I’m looking at it objectively. I was two years out of high school attempting to navigate my adulthood, fettered by the shackles of wage-slavery, and weening myself off of an indulgent lifestyle that I feel the residuals of to this day. At the time, it seemed like anime was my preferred method of escapism, marrying the puerile wonder of animation with storytelling, two things that are very dear to me. There was a lot that I gleaned from Re:Zero, particularly in its cautionary tale about the potential ramifications of escapism ... (in Subaru’s case, escaping to a different world did nothing for his self-worth). My maid waifu consolation prize must’ve gotten lost in the mail somewhere.

Episode 18 of Re:Zero effectively reinforced the strengths in this show’s conflict when it was often lampshaded by tired fantasy minutiae/world-building, sky whales, and a perfunctory “Game of Thrones”-esque political subplot. I apologize if I come off blasé to any hardcore Re:Zero fans (full disclosure, I haven’t read the source and I’m not really all that interested in doing so unless the discrepancies are just THAT egregious), but in truth, none of these components that make up Re:Zero’s vertebrae enthrall me quite as much as the abrasive deconstruction of its main character’s psyche due to repeated trauma (I’m a sucker for the psychological). Re:Zero's centerpiece is Subaru, an unapologetically but deliberately flawed otaku self-insert that shines a light on the darker implications of that lifestyle.

The methodology behind making him such a transparent analogue for the people who are more than likely consuming his story, in my mind, makes him a cut above the rest when you look at other isekai protagonists. His only real boy-wonder superpower is one that causes him immense pain and stress, which is pretty counterintuitive but purposeful/subversive nonetheless. Due to his lifestyle in his previous life and admitted self-hatred, Subaru is a socially dysfunctional character. In Season 1, you got the sense that even in a normal setting, he’d struggle to even properly tie his shoes without being overcome with anxiety. Through his contempt for himself and an unmitigated onslaught of misery, Subaru’s deeply metaphorical plight as a character was one that I really sank my teeth into. Watching him spiral further and further into desperation and borderline insanity to find a way to overwrite his mistakes or even just to find a sense of normalcy in the world was something that I could easily latch onto.

And I’m not saying it’s a terribly original concept to make the main character in your anime an otaku as to open a dialogue, I mean look at friggin “Welcome to the N.H.K.'' (not to say one is inherently better than the other). I can’t blame anyone for being averse to a character like Subaru, because he is utterly defined by his flaws and often confoundingly asinine decision-making skills. It goes without saying, but your enjoyment of this series will completely hang its hat on how much you are willing to accept Subaru as the focal character.

I'd be lying to myself if I said I wasn't caught in the grips of this show's pace. But eventually, that petered out, and the reason as to why is quite simple. Subaru developed. The aptly named episode "From Zero" was a genuine clean slate for this character, and as a byproduct, this story can no longer readily rely on what it was that made it as effortlessly entertaining as it was to begin with. Now that Subaru’s arc feels fully formed, the only natural progression for this anime...is for it to just continue being an isekai, and that just doesn’t interest me. I saw very gradual signs of this in the later episodes of its first season (that friggin whale arc was rough man) but now the plot has essentially kneecapped itself by forcing its main character to move past what it was that made him mildly interesting. I’m not some sadist who needs this show to lean on the excessive gore and horror that mottled the episodes in its first season so it can return to its psychological thriller roots as to torture this guy. However, now that Subaru seems to be a new man (so to speak), the script DESPERATELY needs to give him something to make him interesting again.

The first episode had the unique opportunity to rob Subaru of his mental faculties yet again by taking away the only person that gave him that modicum of self-worth...so why did they forgo that? Any sorrow or pain this character will feel from here on will just feel manufactured now that he has taken what has happened to Rem with a disappointing amount of stride. He even goes so far as to nonchalantly reaffirm to Emilia that Rem is “just as important” to him as she is, which is just insulting. I’m not even over the moon about Rem as a character, but she was the only one in the previous season whom Subaru was able to cultivate a genuine unconditional relationship with and resoundingly had better chemistry with him than Emilia. Watching Subaru and Emilia interact is like watching a one-sided relationship in some rom-com, and not a particularly good one.

Re:Zero was never willing to get quite as intimate with its ancillary characters (although Rem comes somewhat close) as it was with Subaru. You can attribute that to this story being a first-person account from Subaru’s perspective so you will only get to know these characters as well as he does. By its very design, these secondary characters will never be as interesting as Subaru, and that’s because it’s not willing to compromise the spotlight in order to cut someone else open with that same psychological scalpel, even though that has the potential to greatly mitigate some of this show’s problems. Fantasy series will often balloon their casts with one-dimensional characters for the sake of making their worlds feel populated, and this show is no different.

Getting smatterings of Subaru’s past life (while not entirely pertinent) isn’t a bad touch although the timing and context makes it feel disembodied from the rest of the story, I also don’t feel like this is entirely necessary. The art and animation look fine, there’s not much of a discrepancy between the first and second seasons. The opening theme is also not nearly as good as the previous two. I was surprised to find out that there wasn’t a change in director because S2 genuinely feels like it’s moving far too quickly for its own good. This season is slated to be split-cour which makes me curious as to how exactly it’s going to be compressed/edited for that purpose.

Re:Zero just isn’t what it used to be for me. S2 has gotten off on the wrong foot and, in my view, does nothing but further obfuscate the strengths of its first season. It feels so neutered and sanitized now that its focal character has become such a blank slate. Instead of presenting fresh ideas and concepts, S2 is content with doing the bare minimum by playing in the proverbial sandbox all on its lonesome, and I can’t say I’m that interested in joining it. Even if it gets better, it’ll never have that same bite that it used to.

Ah, Mirai Mizue, every indie animator nerd’s favorite screensaver virtuoso’s latest outing is a collab with idol group “Maison book girl”.

For as layered and elaborate as some of Mizue’s animations are, very rarely do they convey a narrative as much as they are vehicles for his sensibilities as an animator. “Kanashimi no Kodomo-tachi” is not much different in regards to his other animations. And suffice to say, considering the structure of most works I’ve seen in Mizue’s catalog that I’ve been able to get my hands on, I’m surprised he hasn’t collaborated with more artists in this capacity.

I never really made the connection ... with Maison book girl but considering they’re a rather alternative outfit compared to a lot of other mainstream pop idol groups, the song pairs quite nicely with Mizue’s style. There’s sort of a Latin pop/flamenco flavor to this track that I haven’t heard this group experiment with before. The pianos are bright and carry a wonderful melody. The rhythm guitar is subdued and melts into the rather chaotic clapping percussion but I like that it is treated as more of an accent than a focal point in the mix. The instrumentation/sound palette is layered, varied, and exotic but not eclectic to the point where it’s just unintelligible noise. Vocally, the members of MBG aren’t too disparate from one another (at least to my ear) but that just makes their harmonies all the more pleasing.

Aside from the layers upon layers of animation, conceptually, the video is resoundingly pretty simple. Several character models (which I can only assume serve as avatars for the members of MBG) float in entropy until they eventually disintegrate and disembody in a manner that is neither needlessly gory nor easily defined. The ending of the video is a bit perplexing and I haven’t quite been able to figure it out, but I’m sure that was the intended effect.

If I had a single complaint about this music video, it’s more so to do with the missed opportunity presented by the rather abstract lyrics. They don’t necessarily pair with the visuals in the video and I think they would’ve been transcribed quite nicely with Mizue’s style, but of course, he had to forgo that in favor of his typical mandala/paisley/floater-esque visual motifs. I’d reckon most people who listen to a song in a foreign language don’t really pay much attention to the lyrics as much as they do the music itself, so this is probably going to be a non-issue for most people.

That aside, this is a really solid music video. While I’m not terribly enthusiastic about the visuals, the song on its own is worth giving it a watch. MBG is a great alternative idol group especially for people tempered by the typicalities of bubblegum pop groups that anime has predominantly pushed to the forefront.

Writer James Beckett of AnimeNewsNetwork once said, speaking on the anime “Fire Force”, that it felt like it was written by “two middle-schoolers stacked on top of each other wearing a thick trench coat.” Sorry if I didn’t get that exactly right, James. Can I say the same applies to “Plunderer”? Well, as someone who was once a middle schooler thumping my feet to Slipknot and Green Day as I scrawled in the margins of my homework, I’d like to think my capacity to conjure a competent narrative was at least marginally better than whatever...the fuck I just saw.

I’m going to keep this review ... of Plunderer as brief as possible because I’d rather it vacate the mental real-estate it has occupied in my head-space now that it has finished airing. You think of anime like “One Punch Man” and “Attack on Titan” where absolutely every aspect of production had to fall perfectly into place in order for the celluloid to properly translate to screen, in other words, lightning in a bottle. Plunderer is like the inverse of that, imagine, if you would, a 2-liter bottle of shit filled to its absolute brim over the course of 24 weeks until...well...you get the idea. Plunderer is the type of legendarily bad anime that you only get once in a decade because anything that can go wrong with an anime during its syndication absolutely did go wrong.

Plunderer is juvenile, it seems to be under the impression that a good story is predicated on otherworldly plot-twists, tragic heroes, and romance, but that’s just not the case. At the core of Plunderer’s story is a horribly unlikeable protagonist, Licht Bach. Licht checks just about every box for how not to write a compelling protagonist. He sexually assaults any woman in sight, has a happy-go-lucky attitude about it, and hides behind a shield of tragedy to force some degree of emotion out of the audience.

I’m an unrepentantly perverse and salacious bastard, the furthest thing from a prude, but even I have to draw the line somewhere. For a character like Licht Bach to have as many love interests as your run of the mill harem protagonist is nothing short of insulting. The number of women queued up to swing their legs open for this dude is staggering, it gets to a point where they are actively embracing being sexually assaulted just to have this man’s dick. I don’t normally allow my convictions to bleed into anime, because applying real-world logic to a cartoon can have varying results. But in Plunderer’s case, I just can’t ignore how these female characters are presented, because it’s nothing short of reductive and dangerously exaggerated.

Is the story at least good enough to distract from the chaos of its forced character relations? Well...no, not really. Trying to explain the story of Plunderer would be like asking Charlie Day to expound on the modalities of Pepe Silvia. It’s mired in minutiae and messy plotting, so for the sake of it, I’ll highlight some of the essential bullet-points. Licht Bach is some kind of super-soldier from the past that was forced to kowtow to his superiors to spare his peers, he bastardized his ideals when he was forced to kill others even though he was in a fucking military academy, and now in the present when the world is virtually unrecognizable he’s seen as a pariah known as the “Legendary Ace”, also there are aliens involved?

One of my absolute favorite scenes in Plunderer is when the main cast is forced to visit the past and during the school’s opening ceremony, the Commander straight up pops 3 punks in the crowd. It was jaw-dropping, to say the least, but it’s not until after the back and forth with Licht does he reveal that he actually shot them with a paint gun...even though they acted like they were dead the entire time. Like “Oh yeah, golly, I’m not dead!” Seriously, I checked out from this anime when I saw an attack-helicopter slowly rise from the smoke of the abyss.

The music is terribly anachronistic, mundane, and poorly integrated from scene to scene due to poor directing. The animation doesn’t even have to be spoken for in this case, but for the sake of it, I’ll say that Plunderer is so poorly animated that you can count the number of smear-frames per episode on your fingers. The coloring and linework is incredibly flat to the point where this show looks and feels like it was released over a decade ago.

Plunderer is…awful, irredeemably so. But it was never boring, far from it. With a bit of grandad’s cough medicine coursing through my system, it was actually raucous fun. Can I recommend it? Well honestly, that’s for you to decide whether or not I want the rest of you curious viewers at large to...share in my pain.

HEY! Listen!

“Listeners” is fucking garbage, and in most cases, I’d say you’d have to see it to believe it but I pray no one besides myself has to lay themselves bare to this level of unfiltered drek.

If the litmus test for a half-decent anime screen-writer is having listened to the musical stylings of Jimi Hendrix, Prince, and Pink Floyd (among many...many others), then you can consider most dads in the continental United States accomplished enough to pen something equal to or better than Listeners. This isn’t a show for music nerds or people who can appreciate the hallowed halls of surface-level dad-rock, no, no, ... Listeners is a bit more sinister than that. Listeners is 12 straight episodes of some smug prick patting himself on the back for having listened to the most bare-essential “classics” in the history of popular music. You like Nirvana? So does the rest of the world, dude.

Besides its flashy concept and presentation, Listeners is one giant nothingburger of an anime. Its intentions are pretty damn transparent, to the point where its disjointed narrative throws caution to the wind in order to fulfill the fucking reference quota in any given episode. The dialogue in this script simply acts as a placeholder for more fucking references. I shit you not, entire sequences of conversation in this show can be boiled down to two Talking Heads (see, I can make references too) reciting famous song lyrics to each other in place of substantive discourse, exposition, or character interaction. I’ve seen some call this “impressive” for sheer virtue of the fact that you have to frame this in a manner that both visually and narratively fits the story… PUHLEASE!

Mu, of course, the mascot character and strong female deuteragonist. Another mysterious Mary McGuffin who lacks social graces, sports a bitchy attitude, and is generally unlikable by most standards. Complete with a nebulous past that is somehow directly involved in the plot, lovely, haven’t had enough of those. But she wouldn’t be complete without “Echo”, what a lovely character. An intrepid young lad with an appetite for (reconstruction?). These two may as well just be Kamijou Touma and Index but even they had better chemistry than these two buffoons. Your average character interaction between them will generally involve Echo regurgitating essential world-building and Mu calling Echo a weirdo for doing so, brilliant.

I get that this show is supposed to be some kind of kitschy tribute to artists of old but there’s little to no consistency in terms to what it chooses to riff that the references at best come off like a Spotify playlist of rock essentials. The world of Listeners suggests a reverence for rockstars, but the references wouldn’t lead you to believe so. This makes me question references to MBV and Robert Johnson, I mean does the type of music Kevin Shields produces exactly scream “rock star?” People under the supposition that this show has consistency in terms of what music it chooses to pay tribute to are gravely mistaken. Additionally, artists like Kurt Cobain who famously repudiated this degree of blind idolatry have flagrant references strewn about like kitschy decor, which is stunningly ironic.

It would be one thing if all these on the nose winks and nods to popular music acts from back in the day were for the sake of aesthetic (take Jojo’s for example), but it couldn’t be that simple, this shit is intrinsically tied to the narrative. Everything from “Teen Spirit” to “The Wall” has some form of off-the-cuff functionality in the world-building that lives and dies with whatever episode it was mentioned in. Also, I have to question the rationale behind making the Jimi Hendrix (widely recognized as one of if not THE single most important black musician in the history of music) stand-in, a generic pasty-skinned rock god catch-all. What kind of optics are these? Who the fuck co-signed this shit? The same dude who tried to cast Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman?

The CG models for the mechs are chunky and distractingly out of place which makes for some of the most awkward action sequences I’ve seen come out of an anime in this year. Give this concept to Trigger or David Productions and I’m sure they’d at least be able to cobble something together with the visual panache to distract from its cliched sensibilities.

Yeah...so...Listeners, that was a thing, I guess? Alright, listen (okay...I’ll stop), perhaps this show wasn’t made for someone like me who is cognizant of most if not all of the musicians it proudly flaunts, but I have to question if this show even really has a target audience I could recommend it to. If you’re someone who is completely oblivious to all or most of the references, what leg would this anime have to stand on? There isn’t a compelling story, not a single noteworthy character, or even just a brief cut of decent visuals that isn’t just lazily aping the music it pays tribute to. It’s just utter nonsense and sci-fi gobbledygook.

Needless to say, this anime made me foam at the mouth, and not in a good way. This show is so eye-roll inducing that my sockets have ballooned by at least a centimeter over the course of its 12 episodes. Fuck you Jin.

Since it first began airing, “My Hero Academia” has been the unwitting punching bag for joyless old dogs like me who have lost the childlike fascination with watching cartoon characters whale on each other with little rhyme or reason. Not that My Hero Academia has ever really prided itself on intricate or brutal fights worth revisiting when compared to some of its peers, because in all honesty, as of late, this anime has lacked even that to keep me motivated to continue on.

If there’s one thing that My Hero Academia’s 4th season has proven, it’s that mangaka Kohei Horikoshi has mastered the art ... of spinning his wheels. And that’s not to say that the production team attached to this project doesn’t share a portion of the blame, for all I know, the manga could just be THAT much better. But this score, this review, it’s not a nagging response as a disgruntled fan of the manga frustrated with the panel to frame fidelity, I don’t have that frame of reference to care all that much. I’m sure it doesn’t need to be said because the general lack of excitement for this season more or less speaks for itself, but this is the most uneven and nonessential season of the My Hero Academia anime to date.

Not counting any brief transitional arcs, Season 4 can essentially be divided into two major story arcs, the “Shie Hassaikai arc” (for brevity's sake I’ll simply refer to it as the “Overhaul arc”) as well as the “U.A. School Festival arc”. If I were to describe the essential structure of this season, it’s sort of a weird Frankenstein’s monster of the latter halves of both the Second and Third season. Cursory filler aside, the Overhaul arc doesn’t take much time to get going and after a point resigns itself as a collection of poorly strung together action sequences of varying quality. Let me just say, for as poorly handled as that License arc was in the third season as both a transition from the previous arc and as a necessary plot device, I contend the School Festival arc might be even worse.

There are plenty of fans who have dubbed this arc “filler”, which isn’t necessarily true in the literal application of the term. But the severe lack of consequence in this arc does make it feel like fluff. I’ll humor anyone who’s curious about Gentle and La Brava later.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a season of My Hero Academia without debilitating amounts of pointless character introductions, most of which you’ll probably never see again and live and die with their shallow characterization. The reverence for comic books is cool, it really is, but unlike comic books which have the benefit of recontextualization, My Hero Academia feels pointlessly overstuffed. I’m not expecting Frank Miller or Grant Morrison to write their own takes on these characters, so it just feels like Horikoshi is overpopulating this world for the sake of it (I will gladly eat my crow if more manga like Vigilantes are green-lit).

One issue I have with the way Horikoshi writes characters is the utilitarian manner in which he will introduce and then dispose of them like they never mattered all that much I.e., scapegoating. This happens a few times throughout this season, one of which is with Mirio. With the way the kid was gassed up by his peers and specifically by Nighteye for being more deserving of the torch that All Might left behind than Deku, it was a clear path to this kid’s demise.

The obvious parallel you can draw with the Overhaul arc is with the Hero Killer arc but it also heavily treads territory that the Raid arc did in Season 3. Mirio is essentially a stand-in for All Might, both of them being used in the exact same way. Have both of them fight the villain, have both of them lose their powers, have both of them reaffirm Deku’s goal as the “Number 1 Hero”. Not to diminish Mirio’s character, he’s likable enough on his own, but his lack of presence in the story up until that point only makes his story beat vastly inferior to All Might’s (and it’s already annoying enough that they were used in the same way). Nighteye is handled in a similar fashion. The show expects you to care about what ultimately ends up transpiring but barely gives you a chance to even digest his character before it happens. If nothing else, it’s pitiful.

Eri is the latest addition in a long line of prepubescent power-sources (lolis specifically) to be exploited for the protagonist’s use. You’ve seen it in Berserk. You’ve seen it in the Monogatari Series. You’ve seen it in the A Certain Series. I get it though, I get the fun hacky appeal of having a little girl be the source of immense power, it’s “ironic” if not just a bit on the nose. The issue is, compared to characters like Schierke and Shinobu, Eri’s character starts and ends with her status as a plot device. She has no personality, not much of a backstory, not much of anything really, but the story expects you to care and buy into the other characters’ investment in saving her because she’s a little girl. It’s such an easy out.

Deku in Season 4 is like that beater car you bought with your first two paychecks in high school. 6 years later and now it has a tacky spoiler, phone mount, and a full tank of gas. At this point, you can’t be bothered to change anything about it because you’re just going to get rid of it when given the chance. Deku in Season 4 is just Deku from Season 1, except now he has cup-holders. I get that the intent was to make his conflict simple and relatable for the audience by having him overcome his bullies as well as the societal role handed to him because of his shortcomings. But all of that hard work and studying is undercut by the number of plot conveniences and hand-outs hoisted upon him. For as hard as Horikoshi tries to make this kid relatable, his character arc feels as insincere as Naruto finding out he was kid Jesus.

That said, Horikoshi, please, You have A TON of characters in Class 1-A that have yet to do much of anything, stop needlessly proliferating this fucking cast like a pack of rabbits in heat and use the characters you’ve already established for crying out loud! Bakugo for instance, he had a great character arc that culminated fantastically in the previous season! He’s an afterthought in this season!

The conflict in My Hero Academia just isn’t palpable. Cutting up Deku's fingers and giving him a sunburn on his arm just isn’t good enough for me. Having All Might fall from grace is a given, but a good step in the right direction but that’s not enough to hold things over for much longer. There is no tension in this series, it’s only a step-up from shows like Fairy Tail that tout friendship and love as a badge of honor. Nothing of significant consequence happens in this show’s story, and Season 4 perhaps the worst offender of that notion to date.

In itself, the entire concept of having these kids do work-study/interning for agencies that will very likely throw them in perilous situations is just asinine to me. The series made it a point of conflict in the past to highlight the school's reckless abandon for security as a fundamental flaw in the system, so why leave these kids to handle these situations on their own when death is clearly a looming danger? I get that these kids are hot-shots with provisional licenses but why leave Mirio, Tamaki, Deku, Kirishima, etc. to their own devices when they are clearly dealing with literal Yakuza who are out for their heads at any given chance? For consistency’s sake, isn’t that an incredible oversight in terms of the school’s security policy? Does this piece of plastic essentially wipe the school’s hands clean of any responsibility if a death were to occur while a student is on assignment interning for an agency?

You know, maybe it’s just the child murder renaissance we’re living in (I’m American if you couldn’t tell), but it’s not like Horikoshi has a limited roster to choose from. It’s a simple solution and admittedly would probably only put a bandaid on this series’ several chronic ailments, but having the guts to kill a major character from 1-A can be spun in a variety of ways. Imagine the fallout and backlash this would cause for the school. Imagine how Deku would internalize this. That’s an interesting conflict to work with, and as I already hammered down on, this show is in DESPERATE need of decent conflict and tension.

Oh God, I haven’t even touched base with the villains yet.

I have my reservations about Stain, his paper-thin platitudes, and the very obvious holes in his flawed ideology, but I could buy into his persona as a delusional loon with a few screws loose. Overhaul doesn’t really have much of an excuse.

The dude comes in and kills one of Shigaraki’s goons (good, Shigaraki and the League of Villains get on my fucking nerves) and clearly carries himself with a menacing cool. Another notable aspect to his character is his overtly paradoxical ideology. So you’re telling me the guy considers Quirks a plague upon humanity (setting aside the fact that he himself heavily relies on his own Quirk) and his master plan is to create a vaccine as well as a vaccine for the vaccine...because Yakuza? Overhaul is a joke, to put it bluntly, and to further rub salt in the wound, he lets a loser like Shigaraki get the best of him.

Gentle and La Brava have been both hated and lauded for their pitiable backstories and relatability. If it wasn’t made clear by La Brava spelling it out during their fight, Gentle is essentially a “this could’ve been you” character for Deku. Gentle lacked the aptitude and ambition to make the cut as a pro-hero and spirals into depression when he is ostracized from society after making a miscalculation. Listen, I appreciate the sentiment and under the supervision of a better writer, this very well could’ve been an effective dynamic, but does anyone really expect the thematic underpinnings of these two characters’ stories to significantly alter the trajectory of the story or Deku’s character?

The story has already moved on without them like they never mattered. It’s like Horikoshi lacks the self-awareness to realize that these villains deeply undermine Deku as a character. I get such mixed messages as to what the point of these characters was because they only make Deku look like even more of a child of privilege. Was that the message he was trying to convey by introducing and disposing of these villains? That if you hit a rut in life but still have that fire in your belly to realize your dreams and “be a hero” maybe some venerable benefactor will literally drop from the heavens and bail you out? It’s depressing to think about.

Fittingly, there were plenty of power-point reminiscent montage stills of characters just doing things, really dialed back my clock to high school when I would do the same thing. I guess that was the point since they’re in high school? But hey, at least Horikoshi’s designs are perdy to look at. I haven’t fully kept up on news as far as this season’s production schedule but it’s worth noting that this season was produced in tandem with a film (that I’ve yet to see) which apparently affected which animators were available to work on the TV series. Maybe my eye isn’t trained enough to catch the subtleties in the key-frames or perhaps my lack of investment in the manga makes this a point of contention that just flew over my head, but this season seemed pretty par for the course for the previous seasons. If there’s one thing I’ll say about Horikoshi, it’s that he’s a fantastic character designer and a pretty talented artist, even if the anime doesn’t properly translate his panel-work.

Horikoshi has gone on record taking breaks for “research”, but in reality, I feel that research is really just to buy himself time to conjure more story. For lack of a better phrase, it really does just feel like he’s making shit up as he goes along or rehashing the same story with a shallow coat of paint. This season is so under-written that you could basically just read a list of a handful of notable bullet points and skip the entire thing without missing so much as a good action sequence. Perhaps I’m overthinking it, but to that end, I’d say that cutting this show slack is only doing a disservice to the countless number of well-wrought comic books and battle shonen to choose from in this modern era. Some may call this a predictable review, and to them I say, it’s only appropriate to fight fire with fire.

Life sucks, so let’s just allow ourselves to sink into the soft pillowy embrace of alcoho-er...I mean...cute girl anime.

If its core fanbase wasn’t evidence enough, it’s hard to fuck up a cute girl anime. In the past, I’ve gone on record being fairly lenient towards most low-effort moe anime. With “Koisuru Asteroid”, most of my convictions about cute girl anime have been gravely perturbed.

The term “CGDCT” or “Cute girls doing cute things” is one I’ve never been a fan of, if not for the sole reason that I grew up in the era that encapsulated its inception and persistence. I get the appeal ... because I lived through the majority of this genre’s golden age. I understand why certain fans will come to the defense of even the most niche entries in this genre.

There’s a reason why the term “CGDCT” is used as a pejorative, and that’s because shows like this will rise to the surface every once in a while. Let’s cut to the chase, this show is mind-numbingly boring. Let’s stop kidding ourselves with this shit. Is this show REALLY worth defending? The core audience for this show is insomniacs, frankly, that’s the only type of person I’d ever recommend this show to. Someone so out of sync with their body-clock that conventional methods of conking out just don’t do it anymore.

I’ve been seeing this show unfairly defended as an “iyashikei” anime, but the whole point of iyashikei anime is to heal you, not put you to sleep by the time the opening theme is finished. To me, this show has carved the path towards an entirely new genre of anime, anime so boring and full of grey-matter that it melts your consciousness into a sleep-inducing lull.

What can I say about Koisuru besides the fact that watching it was a blur? None of the characters track. Not a single one of them had new or interesting traits we haven’t seen recycled dozens of times already. The protagonist is your typical bubbly energetic moe-blob joined at the hip with her reserved best-friend, what a genius contrast, you couldn’t make this shit up. There wasn’t a single believable or compelling storyline and most of the side-characters were just there to pad the runtime. The character designs are plain/simple which is an honest rarity for Doga Kobo.

Unless you’ve already cultivated an active interest in the topic at hand (not that it can't be framed in an interesting way) you’d need the goddamn Ludovico Technique to stay awake watching this show. It is utterly bereft of anything worthwhile in a half-decent cute girl anime.

Let’s just end it here, because at the very least I can credit this show with fixing my sleep schedule, thank fuck. Goodnight folks.

You know, I like sex, but probably not as much as these guys.

Defunct cultures throughout the aeons have tried to make sense of our purpose in the macro. Why are we here? Why do we love? What is the nature of sin? When ruminating on these questions, I can’t help but think, what kind of footnote will anime leave in the Akashic records? I think I’ve finally found my answer.

“Ishuzoku Reviewers” is PEAK culture.

If you’ve been a part of this community for a respectable amount of time, it’s no secret that anime has a skeevy underbelly that your average bear isn’t quick ... to embrace. But for those of us who have, we can recognize the more scientific appeal of the ecchi. I’m always open to watching the latest ecchi anime, not only for research purposes but because it’s interesting to see just how much further this medium can sink into the depths of depravity.

Ishuzoku doesn't exactly move the needle much farther in regards to what I’ve seen come out of the more extreme entries in this genre. Don’t get me wrong, Ishuzoku has a thick oily film on its surface left by a cheeky porno-stached mangaka duo, as all good ecchi should have. However, despite the overtly lascivious draw of its concept and unabashedly lurid presentation, Ishuzoku is actually not without a sense of purpose or self-awareness.

It flourishes in this strange dichotomy, a plane of existence that teeters between both the politically incorrect and the sex-positive, and it does so with a confounding lack of effort. It indiscriminately acknowledges that people of all shapes and sizes walk the earth and in some form desire copulation. As crazy as it might sound, or as drunk as I might be, this show kind of embraces inclusivity. It’s a stupid show, without a doubt, but it’s stupid in a way that can get you to think critically in ways you may not expect.

I try to keep my political reservations in check when I consume media, I mean, there are such awful things going on in the world right now that a trio of fantasy characters going around having fantasy sex is pretty damn quaint in my book. Not to diminish the perversity of this show, it is very much so what it advertises itself as. Hell, this is pretty on-brand for what people associate with when it comes to the more fetishistic side of anime. For anyone who on principle dislike ecchi anime, the inherent absurdity of this show’s concept just might be enough of a distraction to the pornographic content being portrayed on screen, otherwise, expect an unfettered onslaught of smut, ecchi-fans.

Another aspect of Ishuzoku that I feel isn’t being addressed in favor of its surface elements is just how gleefully it takes the piss out of review culture. I’m not quite as dedicated or as skilled at writing reviews as most of my peers regularly clocking in their hours on this site, clearly, but I’ve been around. You’ve heard the phrase “different strokes for different folks”, never has that been more aptly applied to anything than with Ishuzoku, and I mean that in a very literal sense. It does such an excellent job of characterizing just how flippantly people will form their opinions and does so with such a sophomoric irreverence that I can’t help but laugh at the deliberate self-seriousness of these characters getting their rocks off. This is serious business to them, and that’s patently ridiculous, but I’m here typing a review for a friggin cartoon about this shit and for the outside looking in that’s probably just as ridiculous. It’s kind of a big fat middle-finger to the pedantic snobbery of people who critique entertainment mediums as serious art-forms, and I say that as someone who’s no stranger to that.

The real...uhh…“meat” of Ishuzoku’s content comes in the form of the reviews themselves. Stunk, Zel, and Crim all have very different reviewing styles cleverly illustrated by the limitations of their species. As innocuous of a detail as it may seem, the simplicity of having a human struggle to efficiently have sex with something a fraction of his size because he’s too well equipped or the dwarf feeling smothered by the ponderous weight of something more than ten times his size shows me that the writer on top of being a huge pervert is also a bit of a pragmatist.

Technically speaking, I can’t say that Passione has wiped the slate clean, still, I genuinely enjoy the art-design of this show. The character designs are varied and unique and the world feels surprisingly lived-in which can be the crux for a lot of fantasy anime with middling visuals. The music also isn’t really anything spectacular (not that I expected it to be) although the opening theme is fun and anthemic.

So, just how long before one of those pearl-clutching vape-juice huffing "columnists" over at AnimeNewsNetwork conjures a stink-piece on how this show actively champions sex-trafficking and perpetuates a narrative of misogyny in-between sips of Pamplemousse La Croix? Ishuzoku isn’t so much the resuscitation of ecchi that so many of us thought it needed as much as it is the legitimizer that fans of this genre have been waiting for. At just 4 episodes, this is already one of the most impressively written ecchi I’ve ever seen, and even setting aside the fact that it proudly wears its ecchi tag as a badge of honor without pretense, there’s enough there that just makes this a really solid anime. It’s meta, it’s relatable, it’s clever, it has heart, it’s funny, and most importantly it respects the genre it owes everything to.

To round off this year of abysmal drops in the bucket from the rusty spigot tapped into the vast ocean of low-effort isekai anime still waiting down the pipeline, “Ascendance of a Bookworm” hit me like a brief mouthful of ambrosia that I desperately desired.

There are only so many ways to frame an isekai anime nowadays, it’s like when Fox announces they’ve renewed The Simpsons for another 3 seasons and realizes, “Haven’t we already done everything?” In this regard, Bookworm isn’t exactly novel when you think about how it recontextualizes this tired concept. It’s not an original concept, but it’s one that recognizes the ... charming beauty of its simplicity.

To put it simply, Bookworm is a tight and focused character-piece that neither preoccupies itself with empty flash or needless frills. It feels deceptively quaint and almost procedural compared to most high-concept isekai anime. Its scale is cleverly stripped back, its pace slowed to a manageable stroll, and its tone kept consistently light to taste. Bookworm’s centerpiece is Maine, a delightfully original spin on tired isekai protagonist tropes.

Maine incrementally and deliberately progresses through her world much slower than you’d expect of normal protagonists. She is thoroughly constrained by the fact that she is now a sickly young girl on the lower-end of the tax-bracket and social pecking-order. The only thing that Maine really has going for her is her vast retention of book-knowledge, but don’t expect her to go full Senkuu any time soon. Bookworm embraces the mundanities of plausible conflict. Maine is a child (one who frequently suffers from an otherworldly fever) and at that one who actively lacks the resources to overcome short-term goals because of her social class. Bookworm never feels overbearing despite this. It never beats you over the head with misery-porn or begs you to feel sorry for Maine's situation, not that there aren't occasional emotional beats peppered throughout its episode count. Instead, Maine is both intrepid and charming, taking her failures in stride with a childlike irreverence.

Save for towards the very end, I never really got the sense that the show was trying to hold Maine’s hand by introducing a plot-contrivance or hand-out that would get the ball rolling. Bookworm’s idea of trial and error is one of very gradual progression, and it makes those smaller victories all the more satisfying when Maine does clear her hurdles.

Bookworm was a consistently low-key and understated viewing experience. Despite the darker implications of Maine’s reincarnation, the show never makes it a point to become overtly shocking for the sake of creating a tonal dissonance. I’m happy that Bookworm both decided to address this detail and show a commendable amount of restraint by not playing up the melodrama. Bookworm posits the question, is this world better off now that Motosu Urano has become a surrogate for this young girl who perished under the noses of her family? Is it fine for this family to keep living under the pretense that the daughter they once knew continues to live under their roof?

Bookworm’s real meat comes in the form of Maine’s identity crisis. Maine is fully cognizant of how she has essentially deceived everyone into thinking there’s nothing going on beneath the surface. This is a subplot explored through the character of Lutz. Being forced to sort of play along with Maine’s antics, Lutz begins to cultivate a deeper relationship than he previously had with her, as well as a suspicion for her true identity. This eventually culminates in one of the most cathartic and emotionally potent scenes I’ve seen in an anime in recent memory, but you kind of just have to see it to believe it. It’s simply wonderful watching this character accept both her new identity and her new family as her own. Looming fever aside, there’s always a sense of dread that Maine will have to confront her conflict of identity again and that it might just come crashing down on her. It’s an effectively simple conflict that I wish more isekai anime would take the time to explore.

Technically speaking, Bookworm isn’t all that impressive as it doesn’t particularly necessitate flashy action set-pieces. There are endearing gag sequences where the art-design will completely flip into a stylized chibi format but those don’t tend to last more than a couple of seconds and are mostly used as eye-catches to transition between scenes. The character designs lack the edge that you’d expect from an anime in this genre, although I wouldn’t necessarily consider that a bad thing. As always, Yuka Iguchi is excellent and characterizes Maine with her typical brand of saucy sarcasm.

Ascendance of a Bookworm is Dr. Stone for those who were let-down by its over-the-top antics and seemingly infallible protagonist. It’s pragmatic almost to a fault, and a show that I wouldn’t easily recommend to viewers not willing to get caught up in its slower pace. If you’re like me and have resigned yourself as an unabashed isekai garbage-eater, Bookworm might just be what the doctor ordered. Ascendance of a Bookworm was a classic case of a show far surpassing my expectations and one I learned to love more and more with each passing episode. Bookworm is as warm and comforting as curling up with a good book, and I’m sure that’s the sentiment it wanted to leave us with until its second season.