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I always felt that Thorfinn was the weakest and least interesting part of Vinland Saga.
That wasn't an issue in S1, because despite him being the protagonist, he wasn't really the focus of the story most of the time. A vibrant cast of interesting side characters carried the plot, which was entertaining in itself with all its political machinations, philosophical debates and grey moralities.

But none of that is in S2. The entire cast has been stripped away, the plot has been stripped away, and instead we're stuck watching Thorfinn spiraling internally while nothing happens around him. That wouldn't be an issue if he had any ... depth as a character, but just like how S1 Thorfinn was a one-note, blind 100% kill for vengeance, S2 Thorfinn is a blind 100% no violence EVER under ANY circumstances, and you don't need to be a prophet to figure out that that's probably not gonna work out too well either.
Some people might rejoice at this "deep" and "mature" character development moving at the speed of a glacier, but I simply don't think there is a need to waste 48 episodes worth of watchtime on a protagonist figuring out that "violence = bad, but a bit is necessary to protect what you care for", when other shows can deliver the same message in 3 episodes.

Also, and this hurts me to admit as a MAPPA fan, but - it's visually a downgrade from the first season. Not a big one, but it's very noticeable how long the show holds on stills compared to S1. Sometimes it's surely done on purpose - to let something sink in for the viewer or signify the weight of a certain moment - but it happens all the time, every single episode, and seemingly at random, regardless of the mood the scene is trying to convey. The animation is beautiful when it's there, but it still feels like corners were cut to some degree, by extending the amount of time they don't have to animate anything. Sadly, that means an already very slow-paced show feels even slower, because you're just staring at an unmoving straw of wheat, cloud or unblinking eyeball for 20 seconds every other minute.

Oh, and to adress the elephant in the room:
Personally I was glad the gruesome violence has been toned down a lot to the point where some people would say it is entirely absent (it isn't, but there is noticably less), but of course if that was a big draw for someone in S1, this new season is bound to disappoint in that regard.

So, overall this season has been a tedious lesson in patience so far, with a weak, uninteresting cast of side characters that just can't live up to the footprints of their predecessors and can't pick up the slack of their underwhelming protagonist. But if you think Thorfinn taking two seasons to learn the most basic lesson in human decency is interesting, then by all means, knock yourself out. At least you'll get to enjoy nice visuals and music and the occasional cameo reminding you of the interesting cast this show USED to have ;)

If you think Mario and Princess Peach was the ultimate love story, this might be right up your alley, otherwise it's probably gonna be a really boring and frustrating read.
99% of the plot is "helpless little damsel protagonist gets kidnapped, befriends his current captor, then eventually gets rescued by the love interest, only to get captured by someone else the next chapter". Repeat ad nauseum. Sometimes there's some mild variation where the protag gives himself up voluntarily to protect the love interest, who then has to come rescue him anyways, but that's about it. It might be cute the first time, but by the 12th ... time or 15th time it's hard not to get sick of it.

I'm generally a sucker for the found family trope that is at play with this little troupe of rag-tag pirates, but it's hard to percieve them as people when they only exist to blindly fall from one kidnapping plot into the next. They never grow or learn from their experiences und just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over so the protagonist can get captured again, because that's what passes for plot in this story.

The art is definitely the saving grace of this manga, the characters all look very attractive and cities and ships look unique and believable. A great strength are also the female characters, who are proper characters in their own right, something that a lot of BL manga don't bother with.

If you just want some light read about a bunch of misfits forming what's essentially a family for each other and are able to look past all the characters' IQ approaching zero, this might be the manga for you, otherwise I'd suggest you save yourself the frustration.

Unexpectedly, Orbital Children felt like a Digimon movie, and that's a good thing, because whenever it dropped that impression and tried to tell a more serious story, it became quite grating to watch.

You have a handful of lively children, pretty much all outfitted with their own personal intelligent, talkative drone pet, trying to survive a hostile environment; digital code is a physical thing you can fight with drones going pew pew, and of course there's barely-explained pseudo-science galore, calling to mind classics like Digimon Adventure: Bokura no War Game! or Summer Wars. Orbital Children feels like a natural, more high-tech evolution of those worlds, both ... in general feeling and art style, and not to its detriment.
Now, I'm not 10 years old anymore, so of course I found it a bit harder to stomach some of the more... handwave-y science and questionable depictions of anything digital, as well as the utter incompetence displayed by any adult in the show. That alone would have been fine though, it's still fun in its basic, endearing "little kids save the world with their toys" kind of plot and would have been genuinely enjoyable all throughout if it had just stuck with that.

Sadly, Orbital Children was more ambitious than that and thought it could make some grand statements about the future of humanity, the nature of reality, the meaning of life and so on....and falls terribly short on all of it. It throws a bunch of smart-sounding pseudo-philosophical concepts at the viewer but doesn't seem to know itsself what to do with them.
It doesn't help that the audience never fully gains a frame of reference for the future painted by the show, because we barely ever learn anything about the background lore of this world. A few key events are brought up over time, but that's about it. It feels like getting dropped into the middle of a book for just a single chapter. Sure, by the end of the chapter you have a rough understanding of what happened during the scene and the characters appearing in it, but it's still rather unsatisfactory because you lack the context that should be surrounding it.

So, it's definitely a fun watch for anyone feeling a bit nostalgic for that early 2000s era of children digitally saving the world, as long as you can stomach the level of pseudo-science and philosophical wibble-wobble you have to get through for this :)

[Review contains spoilers.]

I'm genuinely amazed how something that started off so well in Part 1 could fall off THAT hard in Part 2. Wherever Part 1 positively stood out from the standard anime cliché swamp, Part 2 doubled down on it extra hard to make sure to hit ALL the cringey, overdone beats and issues.

None of the nuance, creativity and sensitivity that made Part 1 so compelling can be found here. The characters (or, more accurately, the empty shells that USED to be characters with unique personal view points, relationships and interests, but none of that survived into Part 2) just kind of... loiter around ... for 10 episodes while a handful of new characters shout flat speeches about morals over them, that make no sense in the context of the established threat. It gets old by the third or fifth time people try to get the main characters not to fight when it's literally the choice between dying tomorrow because humanity will be wiped out the next day unless they fight, or maaaybe dying today in battle if they do fight.

Not that there really IS much threat - unlike Part 1, where the danger was real and could genuinely be felt, where many enemy models posed a real danger and noteable characters were actually lost as a result, everyone is wrapped in 8 layers of plot armor now and everyone can easily mow down a whole army of the "extra dangerous" types of enemies on their own. Does it look TOO unfeasible? That's okay, we can just cut away and SAY they won afterwards instead of showing it, because there's no reasonable way how the characters could have survived those particular situations so if we can't think of a way for them to win, just have them win off-screen! Saves animation budget too, even better. It feels like Season 8 of Game of Thrones, and that's NOT a compliment.

Despite the lack of threat in what should be a serious war situation, despite the lack of logic to how the plot progresses, the weakest part is BY FAR the characters. Aside from the aforementioned gutting of the existing cast, one of the protagonists got entirely written out of the story for pretty much the entirety of the season, instead getting replaced with the most obnoxious, hateable loli because we didn't fullfill the anime cliché imouto quota I guess. She adds literally NOTHING to the story, constantly ruins any attempt to have a serious moment, frequently derails the plot with her constantly screaming, willful behaviour and yet she doesn't feel like an actual kid at all, constantly magically (yup, that's canon) seeing through everyone and giving out sagely advice that feels like an adult trying to lecture the characters and viewer in disguise, not like a kid lacking life experience. Everything constantly revolves only around her, even though she has no relation to the main cast at all, making her feel very much like the self-insert Mary Sue characters you find in little girls' first fanfics where the whole plot and cast constantly bend over backwards to pay attention to the self-insert character. Except this one is canon, which makes it way worse.
If we only focus on the protagonist's character, his development amounts to "he smiles in an edgy way while fighting now and that's bad, oh no". The other one has dyed a strand of her hair red and calls herself "bloody" now. Guess that's edgy enough to also count as development...

The entire story revolves around a pointless sidequest to save the loli's knight, someone who is in no way relevant or related (aside from some very far removed blood relation) to the main cast. Meanwhile interesting parts like the fall of San Magnolia, the existence of other nations that have survived somehow, the opinions on the war or social issues within Giad all get ignored entirely or just get mentioned off-handedly. If someone told me this was some bad anime-only filler, I'd 100% believe it.

Because apparently getting rid of good characters, good story and good setting wasn't enough, Sawano's music is nowhere to be heard for the majority of Part 2 either. The new ending song is a massive step down in comparison to its predecessors too and it was painful having to look for post-credit scenes while some chick screamed unmelodic high notes into my ear.
The general sound design is serviceable, though the mecha combat has returned to the more tinny, high-pitched, impact-lacking sound of the early days of Part 1 that the show had previously moved away from. When a 6 meter tall mech crashes into a building, it shouldn't sound like clinking cutlery together, but oh well.

The only thing I have to give the show credit for is the fight scenes, which have notably improved from Part 1. Instead of short montages of disjointed jump cuts, we now get actual, proper mech vs Legion battles, some very stylish 1vs1 fights and just overall much better camera work and movement of the mechs where we actually see how they move and fight in detail.
Outside of combat, 86 Part 2 looks fine too. It took several delays and filler episodes to get there, but thanks to that, the actual episodes look fine.

Overall, I was about to drop the show numerous times and only pushed through by sheer willpower, in the hope that this pointless sidequest will end eventually. Looking back, I wouldn't have missed a single thing if I had just skipped straight from the end of the first episode to the final two, which is when the show becomes alright again.
It ends with a picture that very much sums up how the entirety of Part 2 went: a beautiful shot of the main cast reunited, that gets ruined by the loli trying to force herself into the picture aka story.

The individual parts of this show are generally fine - which makes it all the more frustrating that they don't fit together at all. Tokyo 24th Ward doesn't know what it actually wants to be, and that's the main problem.

Individually, the mystery and political maneuvering are relatively intriguing, the comedy is mostly funny, the action is smooth and well-animated most of the time, the heart-felt moments are sweet and the dramatic ones are devastating. But they are so randomly mixed together that none of them are able to really shine, because they immediately get interrupted by a ridiculous shift in tone as soon as you ... might start to feel invested in what is going on. You just witnessed a tragic death, are you in the mood for 20 minutes of boob jokes? No? Too bad, that's what you'll get. Starting to feel comfortable with the slice of life aspect of the show? Out of nowhere, let's throw in a life-or-death situation, a touch of societal critique or random twist - no build-up necessary! Ultimately, the abysmal pacing kills any sense of tension, emotion or other feeling the anime aims for.

It's ironic in a way, that a show that is entirely about CHOICES (both in the form of the various "choose the future" trolley problems the main plot is about, and in the form of the protagonist's main internal conflict being about what choices he wants to make for his own life and future) ultimately fails because it DOESN'T make a choice what kind of show it actually wants to be. It's not a good mystery, it's not a good action show, it's not a good character drama, comedy or romance, because each aspect gets undercut by the other aspects that it needs to share the limelight with. In a more competent show, these would be additive, but here, they just detract from one another.

Ultimately, it has some good takes on morals and philosophical questions to tell, but they stay wrapped up in random plot twists, tone shifts and weak or unexplored characters all the way to the end, which undermine any lesson the creators intended to share with us.

For most of its runtime, this anime follows the formula of unrelated, one-episode long mini stories, which is where it excels, as they are all quite interesting, sweet and thoughtful, and sometimes handle surprisingly sensitive topics with a good amount of care.
Sadly, that all falls apart once the story tries to do more than that for the season finale, where for the final few interconnected episodes, all reason goes out the window, characters completely forget lessons they've already learnt in previous episodes, things just randomly happen against all odds over and over again, people just know things with no explanation whatsoever, and so on. ... It's a narrative mess that has no excuse for being this messy, because it doesn't feel rushed (it starts about 4 and a half episodes before the end, so there's ample time to make this work, it's just badly executed).

Visually, it's quite nice to look at, the character designs are distinct and easy to tell apart despite the realistic setting limiting designs to normal clothes, hair colors etc. that makes some other works struggle to differentiate characters. Richard himself is appropriately gorgeous to look at, considering his beauty does play a role in the plot.
There were a few instances of janky movement in key focus scenes but rare enough to only really leave an impression BECAUSE they stood out due to being so rare.

The sound was a very positive surprise, with an unusual range of music genres represented in the BGM and barely any, if at all, repeated tracks. Of course, the focus was classical music, but it fits the series well. The voice actors fit their roles well and the opening and ending were pleasant to listen to.

So overall, it was interesting and very enjoyable to watch, aside from the frustration towards the end how much the story ended up falling apart, which sadly keeps it at a 7/10 to me.

Finally, to adress the BL topic (though it didn't affect my rating):
I went into this expecting it to NOT be BL. I figured there would be some yaoi fangirl baiting, but within reason, and just wanted to see a normal story about unlikely friends. But nope. The amount of baiting is ridiculous and there is zero attempt to portray their relationship as a mere friendship whatsoever. The characters go from liking each other to constantly raving about how attractive they consider the other, to literally confessing their love several times while chasing each other across the globe, to then entering a civic partnership (all while one of them is convinced the other is gay). But of course nothing ever comes of it, because this isn't a BL series.
I personally found it pretty irritating, because none of that needed to be there. If it's not a romance, don't try to portray it as one. If it is, do it properly and not in this half-assed way. If this was Chinese media, I could somewhat forgive it because of the censorship rules forcing creators to turn actual BL into a "they are just really, really, REALLY close friends, your honor" trope, but Japan doesn't suffer from the same kind of censorship. If they had wanted to make this a BL, they could have done that.

Despite that, I wouldn't call the series queerbaiting, because I very much did enjoy the casual representation of other LGBT+ characters in the series (like the lesbian couple and the probably aro friend).

I can't fathom why this season is rated as high as it is, giving it a 5 feels overly generous already. I have never seen a show as rushed as this, to the point where literally nothing makes sense unless you've read the source material. Watching it feels like sticking eight bookmarks randomly into a book you haven't read and then ONLY reading the eight pages you landed on with zero context.

The story wildly jumps through time by huge increments, often without ANY indication that time has passed, nothing is ever explained, characters and things just show up and immediately are forgotten for the rest ... of the story.
I don't know why they only got eight episodes to work with instead of fifteen like the first season, but the creators seemed determined to squeeze fifteen episodes worth of story into eight anyways (and then add their own fanfiction on top of it which takes up another 2+ episodes, which is MAYBE not such a great idea when you are seriously pressed for time already...).

The result of that is a jumbled mess of unrelated scenes just vaguely strung together without rhyme or reason. A few episodes in I gave up and read the novel instead. Armed with that knowledge, I could finally understand what was going on, but even then, it was a rather unsatisfactory experience because they combined several scenes from the novel into one to save time more than once, regardless of the scenes fitting well together or not and absolutely shredding any natural character interaction in the process (for example, one character goes from hating and accusing a girl of fraud to shouting at her to awkwardly being in love to having a baby with her and getting murdered in like 30 seconds flat, without the fraud case ever getting resolved, without us ever seeing how/why they fall in love, NO TIME, GOTTA MOVE ON TO THE NEXT SCENE).
It's frustrating to watch even if you do know about everything that was cut out in between, because it leaves the characters as empty husks that just stumble through the vauge resemblance of a plot, with no time to actually show character traits or relations that make them unique.

From an adaption standpoint, there's also the issue that core concepts of the plot were completely changed, and at least in my opinion, for the worse.
SPOILER NEXT.
A big part of what makes the characters in MDZS so intriguing is that many of them aren't just shining perfect heroes. They struggle and fail and do terrible, unforgivable things, especially the protagonist, but the reader can hardly hate them for it because the circumstances they do these things in are relateable.
The animation takes these interesting, multifaceted characters and declares "Nope! Anything bad they ever did was because they were the victim of an evil conspiracy!" Not because they gave in to their anger and grief. Not because they used a power that they had always been warned they would lose control of. It's because someone secretly fed them evil energy or some bs like that. Turns out, the heroes were always perfect and never did anything risky or wrong, immediately stripping them of that entire interesting aspect of their character. Demonic cultivation is in the title, for god's sake, but I guess the writers for this animation thought it was better if it is just the same as normal cultivation, lol.
SPOILER OVER.

The only thing elevating this season is the art and music, which are once again absolutely stellar, though they did reuse quite a few shots from the first season, which does make it feel a bit lazy in comparison.

Summary:
A beautiful show that got absolutely RUINED by the abysmal pacing and massive cuts to the story. Watchable only if you've read or seen the source material or another adaption already, and even then you have to be okay with detrimental changes to the core narrative. If you enjoyed season 1, don't ruin that enjoyment by watching this.

Horimiya is a very enjoyable and sweet shoujo romance anime. What makes it so great is that it avoids the main negative pitfalls of these kinds of stories while doing the standards very well.

The place where Horimiya shines most is the characters, which are all very nuanced and relateable, with many different facets. Even characters that might at first glance seem unlikeable or even antagonistic tend to have a well-developed background and reasons for why they behave the way they do. Side characters get just as much room to grow and shine as the main pair.
Relationships between characters also feel pleasant and realistic ... in a way few anime manage to do, especially the romance between the main pair feels natural and almost entirely free of typical shoujo clichés. The main characters actually communicate, there are no contrived misunderstandings, forced love triangles for extra drama, unrealistic girls that never have any sexual desires, and so on. It feels like a breath of fresh air to anyone who has been reading and watching shoujo manga/anime for many years.
The healthy female - female and male - male friendships are a big plus too, once again avoiding the usual envy and bullying clichés.

Horimiya's biggest weakness is that it struggles to find the time to actually DO much with this big cast of characters. The story randomly jumps around without clear focus. The opening hook is dropped almost immediately, when I'd argue that people who started the anime based on the synopsis would actually like to SEE a story about what they were told the story would be about. Yet Hori immediately is relieved of her housework duties and Miyamura immediately loses the piercings and we never see his tattoos again either. Every episode the story wildly jumps around between characters and points in time, sometimes without even bothering to resolve the pevious conflict or issue first. Sometimes the plot dips straight into psychological territory, which can be jarring with the otherwise comedic and cute tone of the show.
Due to the big jumps, some major relationship milestones also feel like they come out of nowhere because there's no lead-up to them.
I saw manga readers say that a LOT was skipped, sometimes up to 40 chapters between anime scenes, so that might be part of why the anime feels so disjointed sometimes.

Visually, this anime is beautiful, from the character designs to the animation, colors and effects. The music works fine with it as well.

In the end, what's best about Horimiya are the things it DOESN'T do compared to standard shoujo stories. Nevertheless, it is still very much a part of the genre. If you don't like a sweet dreamy high-school romance for girls, it won't be for you. I'm saying this mainly because many of the low-rating reviews complain that it has bishounen character designs or pretty visual effects for romantic scenes, and that it panders to the female fantasy of having a boyfriend who will do anything for you. Yes OF COURSE it does. It's a shoujo romance. It just happens to be a better one than most, but if the genre in general isn't your cup of tea, Horimiya won't be enjoyable either.

Anohana sadly fails fo live up to the hype surrounding it. It starts strong but quickly loses itself in pointless relationship drama for the vast majority of its runtime and only returns to form in the final episode.
Looking at the tags, synopsis and many reviews, you might think this is a story about friendship and loss. I certainly did. And while those themes ARE the foundation of the plot, they aren't what the plot actually revolves around for 8 out of 11 episodes, which instead focus on the melodrama of the "unrequited love"-pentagon between the characters, with no progress on the actual plot whatsoever.

In ... fact, Anohana literally goes out of its way to avoid plot progression as hard as possible, never attempting the most obvious solutions for countless episodes so it can continue to seep in pointless melodrama. (Spoiler example: Menma is constantly shown to be able to interact with the world just fine, yet there is never any attempt to show her moving objects or writing stuff to the other characters who doubt her existence, until it is plot convenient.)

Visually, the show is great and the sound is amazing, especially the opening and ending songs capture the themes of the show way better than the actual show itsself does. Visuals and audio are therefore very much the saving grace of Anohana, making up to some degree for the meandering plot so it never quite fully turns into a chore to watch.

The characters and their motivations sadly don't come across as understandable or natural. (Light spoilers ahead.) Some characters stay incredibly flat and unexplored (like the dark haired girl or Menma's parents for example) while with others, one almost wishes they'd stay less explored because their creepy obsession with a little girl can get seriously uncomfortable.
In general, it sometimes feels hard to relate to the obsession these characters have with their deceased childhood friend - they played a few times with a fellow 5 or 6 y.o. and then she died. But 10 years later, everyone is still in a state of utter obsession, their entire life revolving around that child that died back then. And when you get scenes like an almost-adult having a nightly sniffing ritual of a little girl's dress and kneeling and telling said girl's father how deeply in love he is with that 5 year old, "uncomfortable" doesn't even begin to express it.
The ghost girl in question herself rarely feels human at all, she's your typical bland moe bait, with 90% of her dialouge consisting of calling out the protagonist's name in cute ways and being inhumanly selfless, generous and inoffensive.
There are a few characters that stand out in a positive way; Poppo in particular does, and while she's at the center of the time-wasting relationship drama, Anaru as well, since at least her emotions make sense for a teenage girl and she's adequately explained.

In the end, Anohana is an acceptable, somewhat enjoyable show with a strong start and finish that might even elicit a tear or two at the end, but it's nowhere near the outstanding tearjerker it is hailed to be and the high expectations placed on it are bound to cause unnecessary disappointment.

Umibe no Étranger is a lovely little movie overall. The art is great - fluid, beautiful animation and gorgeous backgrounds make it an absolute treat to watch. It manages to avoid pretty much all major BL pitfalls and stays wonderfully wholesome throughout.
That's about it though, because the actual "plot" barely even deserves that name. Even though the pacing often feels like it is crawling along at a snail's pace, the romance feels extremely rushed somehow, because the characters fall ridiculously deeply in love in the span of maybe half a conversation of knowing each other, and basically continue at the same breakneck speed throughout the ... entire movie. One has to he a VERY devout believer of "love at first sight" to not feel at least somewhat whiplashed by the way the romance progresses.
I'm glad for the representation of healthy queer relationships, but a more coherent, less jumpy plot would have done an even better job. The way it is, it's more something to watch just for the art than for the actual romance.