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More of a review for the show overall. Love is War starts off good, with an enjoyable formula, but not one that should kept being milked over and over again. But that's pretty much what happens, episode after episode. One season of narrowly missed confession or any real progress works. But 3.5 seasons of that same thing happening gets stale, and it gets old.

To take a romcom I actually enjoyed, Horimiya, works well in part because even within the span of a single season, the relationship actually progresses while Love is War is stuck trying to pull off the same bit 3 seasons later.

Maybe I'm not being objective. Maybe I watched this show at the right time in my life for it to have such a big impact on me. Maybe it dug up some very personal memories from the most fragile part of my life.
Maybe you don't give a shit.

I'm not writing this review on behalf of anyone else who watched the show. I'm writing this review for me.

Yeah, the story has its cliches, the characters are fairly generic, and its built from the ground up to be a 'sappy' rom com but you know what? It does that perfectly. I've said it before and I'll say ... it again, something that knows what it is and doesn't try to be more than that does not need to be better to achieve anything more. It's ignorant to say it needs to be different for the sake of being 'better'. Maybe you love coke. But why would you tell Mountain Dew to be more like coke because you don't like it as much? Hiromiya succeeds at being what it is. And maybe that 'it' is not what you would have liked it to be. That's perfectly fair and you have the right to say so and criticize it. But it doesn't fail. It's not a heavily flawed anime that achieves nothing. It's not a weed in a flower garden. It's beautiful for what it is.

I'll never recommend Horimiya to anyone. I love it. But I also love The Protomen and JDatE, but I've never gone and been like "hey you gotta hear/read this". It feels personal. It feels like I love it because I'm me. And something like that almost reinfores your identity in a way. It tells you more about who you are.

I loved this show. And maybe, you'll feel the same way.

Girls' Last Tour. I feel the best way to describe this anime is "low key bizarre". Perhaps bizarre only in it's individuality, but bizarre nonetheless. Two girls, post-apocalyptic setting, not a particularly outlandish scenario, really, but Girls' Last Tour didn't try to establish itself as a good story upheld by an interesting premise, no, it did better. It was a fantastic piece of storytelling accentuated by an intriguing premise.

The show takes place largely in a massive supercity, but nothing about the plot contains any grandeur. Food and water, fuel, shelter, what we take for granted is what our two protagonists' lives revolve around. Drive, eat, ... sleep. Drive, eat, sleep. Drive, eat, sleep. A large portion of the show is just the girls doing one or the other of these; it's a show driven by characters and dialogue.

And in that, was excellence.

The chemistry between Chito and Yuuri, the protagonists, is wonderfully done. The simple dialogue, as befits people their age, was not only endearing and realistic, but quite often found itself dipping their feet into the surface of their ideologies.

Life, war, memories, little tidbits of the girls' juvenile reasoning about such things are scattered throughout the show wonderfully interwoven with them whacking each other on the head. Their innocence bled through and mixed with the more depressing undertones of the past like sugar in lemonade. A perfect combination.

I really was blown away by this show. While being eerily similar in many ways to Made In Abyss, there was no forced bleakness or emotion injected into it. Girls' Last Tour was subtle and quiet in every way. No raging fires of war or guttural screams of despair, it was nondescriptly light on the outside and dark on the inside.

A sweet coffee that leaves a bitter aftertaste, neither cloyingly sweet nor sharply bitter, the flavors blend into one another to the point where you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Original and memorable, you already know it will be a standard that others will be compared to.

A short review as befits a short animation; adorable.

MAL requires that I add more words despite this being two minutes long, so here are some synonyms of adorable: cute, charming, endearing.

More words, MAL implores of me, so here's free DLC to my review: it's as good as you'd expect a two minute animated ad like this to be. Go ahead and watch it, it'll put a smile on your face. The animation is nice, the music is nice, and I mean come on, it's two cats, they can hardly NOT be cute. And they are.

Thanks for listening to my TED talk.

When life gives you a rising demand for yuri and a presumably meager budget to capitalize on it, you make Citrus.

I can't help but begin by addressing the one widespread criticism of Citrus, the whole idea of 'romanticizing' or 'normalizing' sexual assault. Unless I missed it, there was never a disclaimer at the bottom of my screen telling me that 'there is nothing wrong with sexual assault' and 'is it really a big deal at all?'. There's some fundamental misunderstanding going on here, and repeatedly, the subject of this, in the world of entertainment, is at least related to sexual assault. You don't really see ... anyone criticize superhero movies for 'advocating vigilantism'. It's easy to see how dumb the argument looks when you say it about violence or any other crime but when it's sexual assault, it becomes so much less obvious to some people.

The truth is, the show never tells us whether any of the actions of any character are good or bad. That's not, in my mind, something a good show ought to be doing at all. The purpose of the show is to tell a story, and it's the duty of the viewer to come to conclusions about the actions of its characters.

Moving on to an actual review of the show, Citrus was a pretty interesting show. It's biggest flaw was that some parts felt very inconsequential to the overall story, added just to drag the show a couple episodes longer. It could've scored an 9 simply by omission, perhaps something that could be said about many an anime series, but I digress.

Story: Apart from what I just wrote, there was absolutely nothing special about it. But it didn't have to be. A show can be good despite its ending being set in stone for the viewer, and I think Citrus did a pretty good job of that. "Yeah that was obviously going to happen" was never really a complaint of mine because Citrus did a pretty good job of keeping these moments interesting enough.

Art & Sound: The art was okay at best, and the cgi lacking. The sound however, in retrospect, despite initially never striking me as particularly good, was the key constituent of the heavy atmosphere Citrus excelled in creating.

Characters: Varied widely, but Mei definitely the best. Much more than any typical, overdone archetype; she was unique. She comes off as somewhat of a psychopath, but without it feeling like a forced negative trait, unsure of how to express herself, confused about her own feelings, with a lack of respect for either her nor Yuzu's body. Yuzu herself, while not being a very unique character initially, certainly experienced an adequate amount of growth and development. The supporting characters were by and large, very lacking in all aspects, but massive props to any anime that has two main characters anywhere as near good as these Citrus does.

To sum it up, this show isn't just some guilty pleasure for any softcore yuri fans that it's widely made out to be, nor is it some flawless masterpiece of the genre. Citrus certainly does some things right, and I only wish it was better, because it certainly could've been.

(1 major spoiler in the 4th paragraph)

The biggest letdown of Alderamin on the Sky was that it had the potential to be great.

I'm not a particularly patient person; if an anime doesn't seem interesting enough to keep watching after about 3 episodes, I'll let it go and find something better. With this show, however, I spent about 7 episodes holding an opinion that was teetering on the ridge between "this show is okay but will probably get pretty good later on" and "this show is okay and not going to get any better". And well, it really didn't.

It's disappointing, really. Alderamin on the Sky ... had a couple, just a couple, of really good scenes that seemed very promising, but it simply failed to stop belching out one tiresome, shallow cliche after another. There was no improvement, or a mop up of it's early mistakes, just more of the same, until episode 10, after which the shows few "very good" scenes dry up completely as well.

<Spoiler>
Maybe it's my bias towards sci-fi and fantasy, but I genuinely thought Alderamin had quite a few elements it needed to be a great show. The world was interesting, the layering of politics was a nice approach, the narrative (which was pretty much revealed to be true in the last episode) that the 'good country' was maybe not a good country and that maybe the enemies they were fighting were a better nation from an objective point of view, all wrapped up by the good character the mc initially promised to be, could've made for a great anime.
</Spoiler>

But no. Alderamin fell into the clutches of many a common anime mistake. Our protagonist turned out to be what was aptly named by another reviewer as another "Pandering, Faceless Protagonist". Through some miracle his character remained fairly one dimensional while being contradictory on several occasions. Look, to be frank, the "good guy who has no real flaws, although the anime might throw in a couple 'bad features' at some point only to completely forget about them later, who is smarter than everyone at everything, good looking and gets (at least some of) the ladies despite being (not in this case but sometimes) socially awkward" trope, or the "Pandering, Faceless Protagonist" is a vector of the disease of mediocrity plaguing the anime industry. And I'm, pardon the pun, sick of it.

To the show's credit, our two main characters had a really interesting and well executed relationship, and the art was pretty terrific, but those were the only things to remain good throughout the entire show. While on the flip side, the show suffers from shallow, piss-poor characters, predictable storytelling, lackluster tropes and absolutely no real resolution at the end.

Tldr; it's one of those fancy cups of hot chocolate that you'll gingerly pick up, sniffing deeply, hoping this intricate concoction with its curious aroma will taste as good as its priced, only to be dismayed by how it was ruined by just a few mistakes. The ginger didn't complement the sweetness. The marshmallows were too chewy. It could've been a celebrated, shining jewel of the culinary world, but alas, your egocentric search continues.