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In the ten-ish years I've spent critically watching anime, I've found that there's roughly two types of 'bad' shows. The more common type, and the less egregious, is a show that seems trashy, unassuming, and/or mediocre on the outset and that ends up being exactly what was promised on the tin; it's not upsetting because it ends up being exactly what it seemed like it was going to be. The other type, the type that is far more frustrating, is a show that fumbles its interesting premise and incredible potential only to fall and barely skid itself into mediocrity.

Good Night World is the second kind ... of show.

Pitched as a family drama exploring grief, trauma, and dysfunction, Good Night World sets up a show seemingly well-poised to deliver on exactly that premise. The first few episodes do a great job of highlighting the parallel lives of the real life Arima family's dysfunction with the picturesque VR Akabane family. The near-unbelievable odds of deeply hurt and damaged people all seeking the same outlet and finding each other in another life (of sorts) where they can embody their ideal selves is an immediately touching premise that easily pulls on the heart strings.

If the show stayed grounded and focused mostly on that, I think this would go down as an all time great.

It didn't, though, and it won't.

Good Night World pulls a reverse of most works of genre fiction, using the promise of a family drama to tell a boring, kitchen-sink sci-fi story instead of the other way around. Viewers are promised "Bittersweet Family Drama" by Netflix, the only place to legally watch this show in North America, and instead get a derivative isekai-lite à la Sword Art Online and speculative fiction about AI that, because of the real world's technological growths, already seems laughably outdated and grossly disconnected from reality.

Science Fiction, more than most tightly-defined genres, relies on an audience's ability to suspend their disbelief about (often) technological speculation. Works like Cyberpunk Edgerunners ask you to imagine a future where X things happened to get there and bust their asses to make you believe it. When Good Night World not only has outdated speculation that rings decrepit on entry, but misunderstands the function of real-world tech that's been tried and true in its function for more than two decades (or more than one decade for the manga), suspension of disbelief is not only impossible, but pathetically unearned.

Good Night World has very little to say, and almost none of what it does is even worth hearing.

As a narrative within these mediocre confines, the show still badly stumbles. The pacing is atrocious; the show could have used at least twice as many episodes to tell the same story with how fast it moves. Watching Good Night World feels like skipping all dialogue in a video game and only being exposed to what the characters say in the boss fights; it's nonsensical and its emotional beats never feel earned.

The show is also unbelievably fond of fake-out episode endings and introducing new conflict that hadn't been established at all previously only to resolve it in less than an episode. There's so little time to get invested or sit with the implications of what the show's saying, as if the work itself is afraid of its fraying seams completely unraveling if it lets its viewers think about anything for too long.

Avoiding specifics, the ending is somehow even less satisfying than every major misstep previously. It skips forward eight years to an epilogue that explains nothing and neglects to actually resolve the final arc's conflict. It's not that I expected any better, but it felt like one last kick in the teeth before the show fully whimpered out.

There are different, better works that explore family dysfunction (see: Clannad), better works that explore AI and the implication of computers (see: Ghost in the Shell, Serial Experiments Lain, Psycho Pass, etc.), and better works that explore fantasy isekai themes (see: Konosuba, Re: Zero, The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady, etc.).

This show is a waste of precious time with nothing interesting to say about its derivative sci-fi or its family drama. Pass on this.

Relationship Guidelines has a lot to love, but it's too often muddied by overbearing melodrama that's more frustrating than it is entertaining.

The primary cast of Jiwon, Myeongin, Seyoun, and later Jooeun, are all complex characters that are deeply layered and who feel very realistic and human. It's fairly slow paced, with most of the manhwa taking place over the course of a school year, but it eventually does include a few major time skips. In this time, each of the primary cast members grow, mature, and have their personalities and values develop as they do. Seyoun in particular went from seemingly serving as a contrivance ... for tension in Jiwon and Myeongin's relationship to becoming one of if not the most compelling characters in the entire narrative. Her story really blossomed and her resolution pre-time skip was the most satisfying beat in the whole story. It's no wonder she and Jooeun were the primary focus for most of the epilogue chapters.

Jiwon and Myeongin's relationship too serves as a consistent rock to keep the reader engaged enough in the broader narrative. Relationship progress happens much more quickly than in far too many other manga/manhwa with similar plots; Relationship Guidelines is focused on more than just the question of if/when a couple gets together, but what happens once they do.

It's refreshing! So many romance stories seem wholly preoccupied with the chase and never even dream beyond the catch. Relationship Guidelines, thankfully, does not fall into that trap. Its characters are a persistent highlight anchoring the audience as they actually experience a very welcome amount of growth and development.

These character moments - moments of growth, complexity, and depth - are wonderful when they actually happen.

The problem underpinning most of Relationship Guidelines is how frustrating it is to actually force yourself to read. The conflict between characters can, wholesale, be remedied by literally any character honestly communicating with any other at any point; it's the kind of nauseating melodrama that leaves you just wanting to rip your hair out. Romeo and Juliet, even in their most overexaggerated, parodic incarnations, have better conflict avoidance and communication skills than any character in Relationship Guidelines. Every time another unnecessary fight, miscommunication, or some baseless frustration occurs between the characters, the manhwa gets harder and harder to enjoy for what works.

And the characters themselves are aware of this consistent problem; their inability to honestly communicate and not jump to absurd conclusions becomes an actual plot point later in the series. It's just a shame that it happened far too late to have any actual bearing on the overall impression the 60-odd preceding chapters had already left entrenched in the readers; which isn't to say that explicit authorial awareness of a problem even actually, you know, fixes that problem. It also didn't help that all progress on that front was subsequently lost in the epilogue chapters that, at least where Jiwon and Myeongin were concerned, retread the same melodramatic ground as the primary series.

Relationship Guidelines, taken as a whole, begs a single question: do the ends justify the means? Is it worth slogging through genuinely painful levels of some of the worst melodrama in romance manhwa in order to get to the cute relationships with complex, deep characters? Unfortunately, there's no clear answer. Everyone's individual tolerance to miscommunication-conflict will determine if they can appreciate all of the incredible good in this story without being burned too badly in the process.

I didn't quite get there myself.

CW: Sexual Assault

Arioto is a poorly written, fetishistic story about a lesbian trying to turn a "straight" girl gay under the pretense of a ¥1,000,000 challenge.

This initial pretense of their relationship serves primarily as an excuse for one high school girl, the issuer of the challenge, to push the other's boundaries far beyond any reasonable level. Screams of "no" and "please stop" serve as little more than fluff to be disregarded in service of the author's clear rape fantasies. It's impossible to overstate the harm perpetuated by the 16 year old protagonist's boundaries being consistently disregarded under the guise of "she actually wants it though."

The ... constant play toward sexual assault fantasy is one thing in and of itself, but the harm goes further when contextualized within the existing societal conversation about queer women, especially in Japan. The "predatory lesbian" is a harmful stereotype placed upon queer women the world over. It asserts, baselessly, that all women who are attracted in any capacity to other women are perverse and dangerous, their desires clearly being rooted in nothing but an insatiable need to abuse and lead "normal" women astray.

This is categorically false, obviously, yet persists due to myriad factors far too complicated to truly delve into during a manga review. Yet, to generalize, homophobia, misogyny, and a general fear of "other" all contribute to this harmful stereotype, one that leads to serious harm enacted both legally and interpersonally against queer women.

So when a work is not only built around playing into this stereotype, but tries to present it as "sexy," it's fairly difficult to find anything of value in it.

There's nothing erotic about sexual assault, regardless of how "tender" the abuser is presented throughout the story. The two ending up in love for real by the end of the manga feels more like Stockholm Syndrome than love, but the manga seems blissfully unaware of the toxicity and explicit harm of their relationship. In fact, it presents their entire journeys of self discovery as something close to admirable.

This is all certainly not helped by the sexualized characters being near-exclusively minors.

Arioto is not just uncritical of the revolting, it's aroused by it.


Better works tackle similar dynamics with significantly more tact, nuance, and respect. Bloom Into You and I Can't Say No to the Lonely Girl in particular both stand out as better, more worthwhile reads.

Colorless Girl has more to respect than it has to necessarily enjoy.

There's a niche microcosm of LGBT manga that seem uncertain as to whether they're narratives or how-to guides. These works are almost always well-intentioned explorations of queerness within various Japanese communities, but seem to sabotage their own potential with an unclear purpose and a muddied intended audience.

Colorless Girl, like so many in its sphere of influence, is confused. What is it even trying to be?

The manga slowly introduces an ensemble cast of characters that rotate POV, though it always returns a single, primary focus: the ostensible protagonist, Aoi. Aoi presents feminine in her ... daily life, but was assigned male at birth. The overarching plot of the manga follows Aoi's journey of self discovery through her first year at an art university. All the while, time is allotted to various side characters who rotate time in center stage. Many of these Aoi-adjacent characters are queer themselves (though not all), and the chapters centering them tend to explore their unique experiences.

It's a fairly tried and true method of kitchen-sink style LGBT storytelling, though admittedly more rare coming from Japan than the west.

When Colorless Girl is in its stride, it tells a compelling drama about identity, purpose, and goals that feels incredibly grounded in a wonderful primary cast of characters who feel like real human beings.

Where Colorless Girl always seems to stumble is its focus. The side characters are well humanized and mostly compelling, but their inclusion as POV characters in the first place seems to stem from a desire to cast a wide net over queer and ally experiences and not to tell a cohesive, overarching narrative. At least half of the manga is spent in the head of a character that isn't Aoi, yet these chapters almost never feel like they justify themselves. At best, they're mostly related to Aoi and/or the main plot, adding a degree of depth that couldn't be gained otherwise. At worst, they feel like wholly unnecessary departures from the happenings of the primary cast.

These departures into the POV of minor characters always tend to highlight queer experiences outside of Aoi's very specific perspective. They're mostly well written and never seem to grossly misrepresent the lived experiences they're aiming to highlight, but they also never feel particularly compelling. Each mini-narrative, be it centering a gay man's perspective, a trans man's perspective, or a gender-norm-rejecting ally's, suffers from the same sterile, purposeless malaise.

No story in Colorless Girl feels like it's exclusively designed for those whose experiences it's aiming to capture, nor do any feel like they're wholly for an outside perspective. Instead, in a well-intentioned effort to do both, Colorless Girl manages neither.

Colorless Girl does not know if it is a manga for queer readers or for allies. It tries to be both, but only muddies its purpose and undermines its pacing. Everything is presented with tact and deep care, but ends up ringing hollow as an effort at crafting an interesting story.

Perhaps if you're more inclined to relate to or project onto queer stories than I am, you'll find more to love from this. I genuinely hope that if you're a member of a group being represented in this manga, you feel that representation and that it feels good.

It just did not quite land for me.

Godly Artist High School Girl and Fujoshi Office Lady is not good.

The art, pacing, character designs, comedy, and the overall personality are pretty good, and I assume that's why it's seemingly won a lot of people over. The idea of a relationship between an untalented super fan and an artist who feels inspired by them seems like it should be great, after all. It would be very easy to try not to think too deeply about what's actually going on and just enjoy what's presented uncritically.

The problem is that it's really disgusting and I can't just not see it for what it is.

Godly Artist High ... School Girl and Fujoshi Office Lady (henceforth just called JK+OL) is about the romantic relationship between a woman in her mid-late 20s and a high school girl who is a minor and is about 10 years her junior. Everything else about this manga is ultimately moot in the face of this.

JK+OL does not just use the age gap as set dressing; it loves the dynamic that it knows is wrong. Multiple side characters repeatedly point out the immorality and literal criminality of the relationship, but they are never taken seriously and most end up supporting the protagonists. The POV character herself, the titular Fujoshi Office Lady, is fully aware through the entire run of the manga that it's both weird and wrong to be romantically involved with a minor. That never stops or deters her, to be clear, but boy is she aware of it!

Everything about JK+OL from front to back centers the criminal age gap between the protagonists in a spotlight and simply says "cool lmao." There is no criticism and there is no nuance. The reader is expected to root for the hebephile to get with the child and cheer when things go their way. I really can't stomach it.

This manga is not good. If you're interested in age gap yuri that's handled well, check out If I Could Reach You. Please pass on this gross groomer-bait.

Boku Girl is fine.

If you’ve seen any of my reviews before, you know that I am decidedly outside of the intended audience for a work like this; I am not crazy about male-gazey ecchi (especially involving non-adults) and a lot of the common shounen/seinen character archetypes present here tend to frustrate me. Nothing about this manga seems like the kind of thing I’d be compelled to read, much less finish.

Still, Boku Girl is simultaneously better than it should be and not as good as it had the potential to be.

It’s just, you know, fine.

(To avoid spoilers, I will be referring to the protagonist Mizuki ... with gender neutral pronouns throughout)

“Magical Sex Shift” exists both as a common anime/manga plot device – usually in the form of body swapping – and also as a rather niche stand-alone genre in its own right. Boku Girl commits fully to its premise on this front; this manga is about the sex shift and the antics that come from it, through and through. Mizuki and the turmoil they experience due to their sudden goddess-induced sex change is “the point” of the entire manga.

And it actually tells a decent story, though not without its fair share of drawbacks.

See, for everything Boku Girl does well, it also feels the inexplicable need to force a hamfisted, unfunny scene usually involving something tantamount to sexual assault against Mizuki as some kind of twisted balancing act. These scenes weren’t funny the first time they happened, they weren’t funny the 10th time they happened, and they certainly weren't funny when they were still happening toward the end of the 100+ chapter run. It’s as if the mangaka was terrified that the readers would be able to enjoy the story too much if they didn’t shoot the pacing and the characterization in the foot every few chapters or so. This nonsense was old the first time it happened and it only got worse.

Yet, somehow, the story and characters still manage to keep enough positive forward momentum to not be completely crippled by the mangaka desperately trying and failing to be funny. In spite of its faults, Boku Girl is surprisingly committed to exploring its themes of identity, sexuality, gender, and the need to insist upon your own truth. It was both refreshing and frankly surprising to see how tactfully an ecchi tackled a lot of these themes and all while mostly respecting its cast.

Mostly. It isn’t amazing, but it did a better job than I think anyone could have expected it to.

Where it fumbles the bag again is how it rarely goes all the way on these themes and the way that the final arc sort of undermines everything established so far. Boku Girl seems mostly oblivious to the notion that sex does not inherently equal gender or gender expression, all while trying to tackle the confusion arising from that very real topic. It’s baffling how a work can take feelings and emotions expressed by real people, make it fantastical, and then almost never connect the dots between them. It’s such a missed opportunity to really unpack the heart of the feelings that would even prompt someone to write this kind of story in the first place.

This is exacerbated dozens of times over with the terribly handled final arc of the manga. I won’t get into spoilers, but the way it ties Mizuki’s sexuality rigidly to their sex, ignoring ways it’s more complicated than that and also refusing to even entertain the possibility of Mizuki being bisexual is kind of mind boggling. I think they mostly managed to bring it back together at the very end with a passable explanation of things, but it should have handled the road to that point far better than it did.

The whole thing is just kind of fine. Boku Girl does a surprising number of things well and royally screws up a near equal amount. To be honest, this is one of those works that makes me wish MAL had a .5 element to their scores, as 5.5 just feels right. As it stands though, Boku Girl mostly just kind of nets even.

Which, to be honest, is an impressive feat for something so far outside of my usual spheres of interest and with so much baggage weighing it down; it just makes me wish even more that Boku Girl was better than it is. It had so much potential in spite of the things working against it, but it just couldn’t quite bring it home.

Looking back, I can only describe it as youthful indiscretion. But the summer between undegrad and grad school, I watched what you might call a dumpster fire.

Every few months, I get an urge to randomly select and then watch a show that I am squarely outside of the target audience for and that I don't particularly expect to enjoy. I like to think that it's a good way to keep my finger on the pulse of artistic movements outside of my otherwise-narrow bubble and, in all honesty, I sometimes come away quite surprised. There are three or four shows like this that I've seen this ... year alone that really blew me away; these positive experiences always end up leaving me encouraged to keep expanding my taste and trying new things. They push me to keep doing what I'm doing!

My Stepmom's Daughter Is My Ex is not one of those shows. Shows like this make me feel like a desperate masochist at the best of times.

Where can I even possibly begin with a show wearing its fetishistic influences so proudly on its sleeves? What is there even to say about a show whose Venn Diagram of influences are a near-even mix between step-sister porn, bad light novel romances, and quippy one liners à la super hero movies? My Stepmom's Daughter Is My Ex puts the trash into trashy and owns it.

It's also absolutely infuriating in its competency.

See, if this show was just a trashy, taboo romance anime, I'd have given it a low score and moved on feeling nearly assuaged in my resentment toward myself for wasting my own time. Nothing about it would have annoyed me so greatly as to write about it.

What pushes this show over the edge and what ultimately pisses me off about it more than anything else is how "fine" it is. The acting is fine, the art is fine, the characters are fine, the pacing is fine, the sound design is fine, the visual story telling is fine, the musical motifs are fine - nothing about the show's structure is anything but fine.

It drives me crazy! How can a show that flirts so brazenly with incest from bottom to top be so competently crafted and just "fine"? How can a show so openly misogynistic be so "ok" in everything about its structure?

The story is bad, reprehensible even. Playing into an incest fetish more and more every episode is not good (wow so brave of me wow). The very notion of this show being taken on by a studio with a decent reputation and being handled so competently is genuinely unsettling and deeply aggravating. Every time a My Stepmom's Daughter Is My Ex gets produced, a different, almost certainly more deserving story gets snubbed. In the zero sum game of corporations controlling art, the mere existence of decently made shows this reprehensible to the core can't be anything except disturbing.

This is the shit that gets made because this is the shit that sells. It breaks my heart.

Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible is a relentlessly cute, feel-good show that feels like wrapping yourself in a warm blanket with a hot cup of coffee on a snowy day. It makes no effort at being anything but exactly that and it almost always hits the mark perfectly.

If you are looking for an adorable romantic comedy that's easy to watch and makes you feel all warm inside, you can't really go wrong here. The show isn't "done," but it so recently aired that the possibility of a season 2 is high enough for me to feel completely comfortable recommending it on just that.

"But, ... Queen!" I hear some of you saying, "If you liked this so much, why did you only give it a 7?"

Well, straw-manned reader I invented as a transition tool for this review, I'm quite happy you asked!

Kubo-san (as I'll be typing for the rest of this review, because god knows "Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible" is too long) is genuinely as cute and feel-good as I've already stated. I did quite honestly enjoy almost every episode from start to finish and I do recommend it on all of these bases. The show is not bad by any stretch, it's just not perfect.

However, with that said, there is a chance that nearly all of my criticisms will be addressed in the event that a season 2 is announced and released. Kubo-san has a *conditional* 7/10 from me, with the simple existence of a season 2 being enough to raise it to an 8 or 9.

With all of that finally out of the way, there are two things about Kubo-san that don't quite land with me as much as I'd like. The characters, while incredibly likable and fun to watch, are a bit too static for me. It's not that they didn't change or grow at all - there is definitely character growth on display here - but with how much time actually passes in the show, it feels a bit too limited. Character growth thankfully never feels forsaken for the sake of a gag, but it's a bit too subtle for my liking when viewed in totality.

The other part of the show that kind of bummed me out is how little "progress" is made. I can't say much more without veering into spoiler territory, but as it stands, I'd argue Kubo-san is more "Romantic Subtext" than a "Romance" show.

Still, both of these things can quite easily be addressed in a potential season 2! In the meantime, I highly recommend this to anyone who's looking for what this show offers, because even with the inconclusive ending, the show expertly delivers on its many promises.

Talentless Nana is a really enjoyable show from start to finish that's unfortunately kneecapped by overly repetitive episode structures and the story being left on an indefinite cliffhanger.

(This review is spoiler free with only minor allusions to events of the first episode throughout)

Let's start with the good first!

Talentless Nana has an incredibly compelling premise, as revealed in episode 1. I can't speak to the details without spoiling things, but rest assured that the gears get turning very quickly and keep you hooked. The plot is rather breakneck in speed by most single season anime standards, and it's honestly a nice refresher from the all-too-common ... slogs.

The show also quite easily delivers on its promise of suspense. The stakes continually seem to rise and only sometimes read as contrived. Momentum too from episode to episode is preserved really well and it made binging the show in a couple of days a really enjoyable way to consume it.

There is a lot more to praise Talentless Nana for, but I fear I'd be overselling what is ultimately an unfinished and unsatisfying experience.

As I alluded to above, the show only sometimes reads as contrived; the problem is when that begins and how it persists. After a few mini arcs, the audience learns very quickly the kind of formula that's being utilized to make this show tick. It's not that it gets worse at executing that formula; I actually think the show hits its themes and goals better as it goes on. It's just that by the time it hits its stride, the magic is already gone. The structure of an episode will already have become formulaic enough to be predicted by a viewer early - sometimes even as early as during the cold open. By the time the climax of the show is coming to a head, every plot point seems to just happen because the story needs it to, not because the characters are behaving like rational, reacting beings.

Everything just feels too convenient after a while.

The characters themselves are mostly whatever. The two leads are easily the most compelling, with the majority of the others being mostly flat, static background noise with varying amounts of screen time.

Talentless Nana's biggest weakness, and why these problems are ultimately unforgivable, though, is the way it ends:

It doesn't.

Like far too many shows that come each season, Talentless Nana is an incomplete adaptation of a manga that has long since moved on and has no indication of a season 2. Any promise the show made has been left undelivered and the show suffers in posterity for it. I'm so tired of anime that serve as little more than extended previews of a manga or light novel series that will never be adapted in its entirety.

The show is fun and it's really easy to binge, but it amounts to nothing. If I ever want to see the conclusion to this story, I'm going to have to read the manga, and that's just exhausting. This is a series that had the potential to go out with a triumphant bang and is instead an unfinished, sputtering whimper.

Heavenly Delusion is one of those rare shows that is uncompromisingly insistent upon what it's trying to do and I genuinely adore it.

(This review is entirely spoiler free)

So many of the shows released in a season - hell, even a year - are derivative, yet usually inoffensive, narratives too afraid to trust its viewers to think. Foreshadowing is often limited to expository flashbacks at the top of the episode in which that new info is finally relevant and usually resolved within a single 21 episode runtime. The thought of introducing concepts, themes, or arcs in advance, long enough that viewers may not remember, seems ... unthinkable.

And it's kind of exhausting! I burnt out of watching almost any anime at all for a couple of years because I just felt so perpetually let down by these super popular shows that can't be bothered to trust its viewers to even pay attention. Spoon-fed, dime a dozen heaps of uninspired derivate feel condescending at best and actively offensive at worst.

When Heavenly Delusion was making the rounds on various anime forums and social media sites, I was apprehensive. I've heard enough "this is the best shows of the season!" comments about some of the most painfully average works to last myself a lifetime.

So, color me fucking surprised to find the praise for Heavenly Delusion wasn't just a bunch of people blowing hot air.

Heavenly Delusion is a gem that treats a season of television as a cohesive narrative. The writers understood that slowly building upon established concepts every episode to ultimately build toward a well-foreshadowed, immaculately executed climax is the better way to write and consume a show. Nothing ever felt padded, contrived, or like it was a slave to medium and genre orthodoxy.

Instead, Heavenly Delusion tells one of the best Sci-Fi stories I've experienced across any medium in the past decade. I know that I'm not speaking into any specifics, but I truly believe that any plot details, even those that wouldn't be deemed spoilers by most, would dampen the experience of this show.

If you like sci-fi mysteries for adults, I cannot recommend this enough. Do not look up story spoilers and just watch it.

Heavenly Delusion is not perfect; there are some moments that are just a bit too "teehee anime!" for me, but they're very few and far between and they rarely negatively impede the viewing experience.

Another thing that I'd be sorely remiss not to mention is how heavy this show is. There is a laundry list of content warnings needed before engaging with this show. Please be advised that if you are particularly sensitive to the witnessing or suggestion of gore, death, grief, sexual assault, terminal/chronic illness, childbirth, and/or trauma, that those themes and others are featured extensively throughout the runtime of Heavenly Delusion. This is not an easy watch and if you're going through particularly hard times, maybe look elsewhere.

With all of that said, Heavenly Delusion has asserted itself into being one of the best mature sci-fi anime of the decade and I cannot wait to see what happens next.