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This is pretty bland and normally I wouldn't have much to say about something so bland, but since it's Made in Abyss there's also a healthy dose of emotional manipulation and loli shit, both of which I find extremely annoying.

Prushka fits the mold of "character you're supposed to feel sorry for" to a T: she looks like a little girl and is completely innocent, then when something horrible inevitably happens to her we get flashbacks of scenes showing how totally innocent she is to make sure we, the audience, know that what's happening to her is really bad and she doesn't deserve it. The ... problem is that as long as you have the emotional maturity of at least a twelve year old, what they're attempting here is pretty transparent and so it doesn't work. The second you see Prushka you know something bad will happen to her, especially considering that they literally did the exact same thing in the previous episode of the anime with Mitty. For all intents and purposes these types of characters are just puppies, and the anime thinks that by torturing these puppies it'll get a reaction out of the audience. In reality this is just the laziest way possible to try to invoke some sort of emotion and when Prushka is finally revealed to have been turned into a flask full of grape drank it just comes off as silly.

Then there's the loli shit, which is an issue that constantly pops up throughout the series. Just when you think they're cooling off on the loli shit, one of the characters gets naked or starts talking about Reg's penis. Is it supposed to be fanservice? For who? This is a rare series where the child characters actually look like children, so when the "fanservice" comes out it just makes me want to groan (out of disgust, not horniness), and it also makes me not want to recommend the series to anyone else. Does Reg really need to get a boner anytime he touches Nanachi? Is it really that integral to the plot? Look, I think boners are just as funny as the next guy, but when the character with the boner looks and acts like a child that's where I've gotta draw the line, that's where it gets weird. I don't want loli poop, I don't want loli piss, I don't want shota cock, I just want to watch a series about people getting tortured and turned into blobs.

The premise of this show is that it's Madoka except trying to be even more edgy without understanding why Madoka is a decent show in the first place (when you ignore the godawful final episode). The first episode is essentially just a series of unfortunate events happening to our protagonist (the most pathetic person alive) and it's hard to take it seriously because it's so over the top. That's basically how the rest of the show goes, things happen but you can't take them seriously because they're too ridiculous or they just don't make sense.

Madoka had the whole thing with the soul gems and ... the wishes and the aliens that made it feel like more than five minutes of thought were put into the premise. In Magical Girl Site, the jannies of some deep web site give magical powers to depressed girls, and they're supposed to use those powers to hurt people, and somehow that makes the jannies more powerful? It comes off as a lot more vague and generic. Maybe the manga does a better job of establishing how the whole system works, but most of the time it's hard not to think about how similar this stuff is to Madoka and how much of a better job Madoka did with the "edgy magical girl" shit. The way the magical powers work is kind of weird, too. They're physical objects and it seems like anybody can use the objects. For example, our protagonist has a gun that teleports things. If she handed the gun to someone else, that other person should be able to teleport things, too. Of course, since this is just like Madoka, using the magical powers shortens your lifespan, so you shouldn't use them too often. Okay, cool.

The problem I have with this is that there's a character introduced in the first episode who has time stop powers, which is clearly the most overpowered power you can get. Introducing something like that so early kind of fucks you over, because now you have to figure out a way to not make "just stop time lol" be the best way out of every bad situation. Supposedly the character with the power doesn't have enough magical energy left to use it without dying, except that isn't actually a copout because she should be able to just hand the device that gives you time stop powers to somebody else. But she never does that. I feel like I have to have missed something, some reason why she never just hands the thing over to the protagonist. It's totally baffling. There are plenty of other things that happen in the show that are like this, where you aren't sure if you missed a detail or if it's just bad writing, but this was the one that kept sticking out to me because, again, they introduce it so early and then barely use it even though it would have helped out in so many situations.

With that said, I think it's safe to say that I highly recommend this. I hate to invoke memes but it's a "we have Madoka at home" situation where it seems like they wanted to make something like Madoka but didn't understand what made Madoka actually good (when you ignore the godawful final episode), so what you get is a Madoka clone with all the edgy shit turned up to eleven. By the way, there's a beach episode.

I finished watching the first season of this a couple of months ago but now that I'm writing this I can't for the life of me recall anything that actually happened in the first season. That's okay, this is the second season, the first season is in the past. Except, surprise, I barely remember anything that happened in this season either and I just finished watching it. I suppose this is why I don't watch slice of life shit, because nothing ever happens in them, but I figured this one could be worth a shot. Well, I can say with confidence that after 40+ episodes ... of this show I still have no interest in slice of life shit. Sorry!

To be fair, I do remember one thing from the first season, and that was the little arc with Kiriyama and his Asuka clone sister. That was actually a pretty interesting relationship and I was genuinely interested in seeing how it got resolved. Unfortunately Asuka-lite is completely absent from this season. I don't think she actually shows up a single time in all 22 episodes. It's a little strange, really, not even getting relegated to background character status but just totally disappearing from existence.

This season does have one arc that's somewhat interesting, which is the bullying arc. I feel like every fucking anime I've seen that involves high school has a bullying arc, but whatever. I was at least interested in what was going on because it felt like some sort of progress was being made. At every other point in the show, it just feels like things happen but none of it has any relation to anything else. Durr hurr hurr that's life for ya, yeah I get it, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Maybe some people enjoy watching the older sister cook something and then have everyone eat it and then they all go "Oishii!" for a minute. Maybe some people enjoy watching that exact same scene play out every other episode. I'm not one of those people, and if I ever become one of those people you have my permission to track me down and put me out of my misery (Yes, I'm talking to you specifically).

Feels like a parody of the first one. The story is the same general "We have to catch this villain with mysterious motives" plotline that shows up in half of Oshii's movies, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Issue is, GitS and Patlabor 2 were a lot more interesting and I just watched both of those, and by comparison this just doesn't have the extra spice to make it stand out. Batou's the main character this time but he isn't nearly as interesting as the Major, and a solid 50% of the script is dedicated to quoting philosophy. You could ask Batou what he had ... for breakfast today and he'd probably give you a Bible verse followed by a Confucius quote, then that wailing music would suddenly start playing for 30 seconds or so. The first movie actually brought up some interesting ideas about what it means to be human and all that shit, but in this one everything's muddled by the seemingly random quotes getting thrown out constantly.

The animation is also a general downgrade, usually the CG stuff looks fine but there are some cases with like parade floats and birds where it looks really ugly. I'm sure most people would agree that a lot of the appeal of the original GitS is that it's cool. In this case, there is some stuff that's cool but it usually just feels like it's either a retread of cool stuff in the original or it's just medium-level cool. Medium-level cool can't hold a candle to high-level cool stuff like the optic camo fight at the start of GitS or that one scene where the guy's hands split apart and type really fast.

Well, I wouldn't call this a bad movie, the problem is just that the original basically does everything better and this one often feels like it's trying to channel the original but not doing a very good job of it.

After watching Redo of Healer with my friends we thought it would be funny to just start watching hentai, so someone (not me) suggested this one. I know it isn't technically hentai, but you kind of know what you're getting into when you read the synopsis. The main issue with this show is that it fucking sucks. Each episode is basically the same, the characters find some new species of woman to fuck and then fuck it and then give a review. Very cool! This continues for twelve episodes.

The sex stuff is sometimes played up for laughs, but not usually, actually I'm pretty sure ... you're supposed to be jacking off or at least have a semi-chub during most of the runtime. Something like Redo of Healer or Prison School is so insane in how it depicts sexual situations that the thought of jacking off doesn't even cross your mind. That is why those two shows are good and Interspecies Reviewers is not. For a show about fucking skeletons and fairies, it doesn't have the balls to go to the extremes that turn anime sex stuff from lame to funny. Nope, instead we get "Today we went to the slime girl brothel. The slime feels nice and cool around your wiener. When she stuck her slime up my butt I was surprised. Eight points!"

So no, you shouldn't be watching this expecting it to actually be funny like the other shows I mentioned. It turns out there's a large subsection of anime out there that exist to be jacked off to, and this is one of them, but it's just self-aware enough that making a "boioioing" sound or panting dog noises any time there are big titties on screen isn't actually that funny. I suppose that's the ultimate state of limbo, not good enough to actually be funny and not bad enough where it's funny to make fun of. Instead, you just have to sit there and watch the titties jiggle and know that if you say anything you'll only come off as horny.

Kago's a man after my own heart because you can tell he just tries to come up with the most retarded ideas possible and then turn them into stories. This one's a collection of four of those stories, which are all unrelated to each other and cover about 40 pages each. The first one's pretty silly and the third one legitimately fits with the kind of stuff you'd see from Junji Ito. The concepts for the second and fourth stories are a little too retarded to work, the fourth in particular involves vampire cars which is definitely a novel idea. If you want to be ... really anal about review scores, the first and third stores are like a 6 and the second and fourth are like a 4, so the whole collection's pretty average overall.

The art is standard Kago, although there's no poop, only minimal rape, and the guro elements aren't as extreme as in his other stuff. Personally I consider myself poop- and rape-neutral, although it's hard to deny that poop and rape are two of the cornerstones of Kago's works. Reading something from Kago and not seeing poop or rape in it feels like playing a Mario game and not seeing Yoshi or Bowser. I suppose I could recommend this as something tamer than what Kago usually farts out, but if you're not reading Kago for the poop, rape, and guro then what's the point?

In short, feel free to pick this up if you see a copy at like a Mandarake or whatever, but don't go actively seeking it out or you may find yourself disappointed.

One day as I was searching for a cool and new anime to watch I came upon this show. I saw that it was something like the 12th highest-rated show and thought to myself "Damn, maybe it's worth watching just to see why the hell people like it so much." So, I watched the first episode and I'm sure by now anybody who's reading this shit knows what happens in it. So yeah, you start off with the stupid idol worship and then there's reincarnation bullshit, but then - holy cow! - someone gets murdered and now it's up to our hero to figure out ... who did it! Haha, they really got me with all the boring shit in the first hour and a half, but it looks like this series is going to go in a dark, Monster-esque direction that a cool anime watcher like me can enjoy.

Only problem is, the next episode goes straight back to idol bullshit. Wait, idol high school?? No way! Yeah, here's the problem with this show. Any time you think it's going to go in a direction that's actually interesting, it just drops it in favor of - you guessed it - idol bullshit. There's a part where a character is getting megatrolled online and contemplates jumping off a bridge. Oh, cool, maybe we're gonna go in a dark direction here. Nope, by the end of the next episode everyone's happy again. A little bit later, a character somehow demonstrates the ability to perfectly imitate the individual that got gatted up in the first episode and the thought briefly enters my mind that our hero is going to start trying to use this person to replace the dead one. You know, a Vertigo type of situation, something that would actually be interesting. Nope, that gets dropped immediately because a completely separate set of characters needs to get ready for the super epic idol festival that's coming up soon.

So, what we've got here is a series that seems like it wants to be dark/psychological/edgy/whatever but doesn't have the balls to actually commit to this direction. It really wants to have some kind of message related to "the dark side of the entertainment industry", but the best it can do in that vein is have characters randomly go off about how being an idol/TV star/whatever isn't as fun as it's cracked up to be. "Actually, idols don't make a lot of money and most of them retire before they turn 20!" Thanks for telling me that, dude, but weren't you and the protagonist just making lunch plans? Seems kind of weird to just bring something like that up.

I suppose there are some people out there who are really into the idol bullshit. I don't know if I would feel safe being around those people. For everyone else, it's hard to see what would make this show worth watching. Perfect Blue came out over twenty years ago but did a much better job of covering the themes that this show seems to be attempting to cover, and it did it with a consistent tone and without having characters attempt to outright explain that the entertainment industry isn't all fun and games.