Back to jahver's Profile jahver's Profile

(NOTE: THIS IS AN EDITED VERSION OF MY PREVIOUS SUBMISSION WHICH WAS THE HIGHEST-RATED REVIEW FOR THE SERIES UNTIL IT WAS REMOVED)
Solo Leveling might be one of the most embarrassing, confused amalgam of power fantasy tropes and self-insert garbage to ever come out of South Korea. It’s a completely worthless experience that even the most uncultured viewer will get absolutely nothing out of. The question of the day is why A-1 Pictures expended so much of their time and resources into essentially polishing a turd; every second of top-notch storyboarding and animation would’ve been better spent enhancing a more competently written and directed series. Perhaps ... the blame lies on its slavish cult following - despite its severe failings as a story, as some people (and presumably AI-generated social media posts) will tell you this completely outclasses every piece of modern fiction despite it being the inverse of observable reality. The more likely explanation is that South Korea’s media conglomerates want to take another swing at breaking into the ever-lucrative world of anime, despite just about every prior attempt to adapt the worst manhwa slop Webtoon has to offer being one unmitigated disaster after the other.

Solo Leveling is the story of Sung Jin-Woo, a mopey, incompetent loser who finds himself gifted with the power of RPG mechanics after a near-death experience; he is the only one of a group of supernaturally gifted humans called hunters who can “level up” or get stronger than the rank that was arbitrarily bestowed onto him. Jinwoo goes from being the “weakest hunter of all mankind” to one of the strongest within the span of a few episodes, and the glaring issue with the story almost immediately becomes obvious; there’s going to be zero tension after a certain point. After the first 2 episodes of the show, almost nothing is shown as a challenge for Jinwoo. His toughest battle’s over in five minutes. Around halfway through the season Jibunwo stops being a self-pitying cretin and transitions into a borderline sociopath. His original motivation of raising enough money to save his comatose mother is almost non-existent, rendering him a cold and unrelatable Gary Stu with no motivation aside from gaining power. You’d think with this rapid metamorphosis into an entirely different person being thrust upon our hero, he’d have some sort of introspection about how he’s changed. But the most self-awareness we ever get from the series is a halfassed Nietzsche quote.

Perhaps Jinwoo’s most unlikeable quality is how he seems to hold a grudge over the most asinine things; most notably against a 60/70-year old man for not carrying Jinwoo to safety during the first encounter in the dungeon that granted him his powers; when said man is fatally wounded later in the season Jinwoo’s only response is, rather than “I need to help you get medical attention!” like a normal person, but rather “You need to survive no matter what, how else can I keep blaming you?” What the fuck is this mindset? As if that wasn’t enough, the story even presents the idea that Jinwoo’s been bullied his entire life for being the weakest hunter in history, but only one instance is ever shown onscreen through a flashback - his teammate tells him to stop being a liability and get behind the others after he gets injured during a fight - less bullying and more showing concern for someone who is clearly not qualified to be there at all. All this seems to do is, rather than reinforce Jinwoo’s bizarre complexes, is raise the question of why he can’t just find another fucking job.

On that note, Solo Leveling tries to enforce a message of self-improvement and “believing in yourself” which falls flat because Jibunwo has everything handed to him by sheer coincidence and he’s the only one in the world who can get stronger. He wouldn’t have started working out and trying to become a more competent hunter had he not lucked out and pleased the statue deity. His physical transformation is the funniest thing to me because the writer has clearly never worked out in their life; if they did, they’d know that doing some pushups and light jogging does NOT make you taller or change the structure of your face unless you’re taking fucking tren.

I genuinely have next to nothing to say about any of the other characters, because nearly every single one that appears only exists to service Jibunwo. His love interest is an insufferably timid copy-paste of Orihime without any of the charm, relatability or humor Kubo would’ve endowed her with; every time she’s on screen, she’s either trembling in the corner and crying like a scorned child because fighting low-level WoW enemies is apparently PTSD-inducing, insufferably shrieking like a fisher cat, or smiling vacuously. She’s inept when it comes to healing people, her sole purpose in the story. She’s not even good at being a demure tradwife for the self-inserting audience, because she’s a whiny bitch who passive-aggressively insults Jibunwo after his transformation (“you used to get hurt so much it was annoying!”) yells at her parents for caring about her well-being, and has to rely on everyone around her just to accomplish the most basic tasks that anyone else would have no problem with. Her tremendously grating voice acting does her portrayal no favors, either. The writer seems to at least realize how awful a character she is because by episode ten she gets written out of the story.

Jinwoo’s simp Yoo Jinhoo or whatever only exists to follow Jibunwo around and larp as a hunter, as he is a literal trust-fund kid who gets to sit back and watch professionals handle everything for him. then act like he contributed after the fact. I do not see why anyone finds him likeable, as much like everyone else who isn’t Jinwoo he does absolutely nothing of value. Jinwoo’s sister and the other hunters are so one-note and static that the anime has to cut back to them having mundane conversations just to remind the audience they exist and will, hopefully, do something later down the line. Every other background character exists either to suck off Jibunwo and remark on either how much of a weakling he is before his transformation, or how cool and awesome and attractive he is afterwards. The antagonists are either your standard fantasy monsters, or villainous hunters who turn comically evil at the drop of a hat. All you’re left with is a cast of increasingly difficult to distinguish names and faces that serve no purpose other than to explain the rules of the world to the audience. There’s also a guy named Hwang Dongsuk, which is really funny.

The world of Solo Leveling is, safe to say, so piss-poor at justifying its own existence that even after twelve episodes I couldn’t find myself buying it for a minute. So there’s portals to a fantasy world that spit out monsters, and there’s people with latent magical abilities that form teams to fight them as a professional career. Sound simple enough, even a series as narratively dysfunctional as RWBY could pull off a premise this simple. However, it overcomplicates itself. Every hunter only has one set rank and can never grow more powerful through training. This deterministic angle infects the series with this ugly brand of cynicism and kills any pretense of the “work hard and you’ll get stronger!” attitude the show wants you to believe in. There’s also hunters who kill other hunters, which begs the question of why they’d waste their time and risk their lives killing the only other people capable of keeping the world safe for a little more cash. Even worse is the fact that the hunter organization recruits convicted felons with latent powers to fight the monsters in their home turf. Not exactly a great plan but throwing hardened criminals into the meatgrinder is a better alternative than making the Average Joe do it. You’d think, right? But the hunter association makes criminals fight alongside the civilian hunters who only do it to pay the bills, most notably the lower ranked hunters and ONE singular B-rank supervisor; this would instantly stand out as a logistical nightmare to anyone with a functioning brain.

Additionally, the party system is extremely poorly thought out even on a conceptual level – having poorly trained civilians doing your work for you is already questionable, but afterwards they report everything to a supervisor afterwards who believes the recounting of events of the mission at face value and doesn’t engage in any further questioning or research. No sane organization would approve of something like this, especially with how unqualified the average hunter is shown to be at the start of the series; Jinwoo’s team goes into an obvious trap in the first episode, and predictably they all start dropping like flies. Rather than stay composed and try to find a way to overcome their predicament like you’d expect professional monster hunters to do, they all start screaming like little girls and dying in increasingly comical ways due to their lack of cooperation, leading to the encounter where Jinwoo gain his looksmaxxing powers. The dramatic hook of the first two episodes is portrayed as a tragic massacre, but it’s impossible not to laugh at how they all get steamrolled so easily. To add insult to injury, there are also S-ranks, who are the strongest but they’re seemingly never around when the weaker hunters are in danger. An inspector for the organization also states that S-ranks could pose a threat because they are essentially so strong they are above the law, but he makes it sound like there wouldn’t be any enforcing the law at all. None of this makes any sense, it’s all peripherally defined and therefore it fails at even being a self-insert story because you intrinsically could not self-insert into a world so poorly thought out.

The show’s only saving grace is the technical competence of the fight scenes; everything else is abysmal. The direction is all over the place. Most conversation scenes are just shot reverse shot, and there’s no cinematic diversity. Anytime something interesting is going on the scene will suddenly cut back to some inane conversation about something the audience has already heard between side characters the audience has no reason to care about – episode 5 cuts from the middle of a fight to Jibunwo’s sister and some random hunters talking about stuff that was ALREADY EXPLAINED IN THE SAME EPISODE – this scene has zero reason to exist, it doesn’t even introduce new characters, I genuinely do not understand what the thought process is with these moments. Furthermore, characters will state things they should already know to each other, such as their teammate’s backstory, just to make sure the audience knows. The writers behind Solo Leveling seem to be under the assumption that “show, don’t tell” is merely a suggestion.

The opening animation seems to be a perfect indication of everything wrong with the series – it’s a visually cluttered, incomprehensible mishmash of characters, location shots, and disorienting fight scenes that tell you nothing about the show itself while some guy raps in Engrish over the blandest Hiroyuki Sawano music you can imagine. Speaking of Sawano, he couldn’t be phoning it in any harder with the soundtrack, and it brings me no pleasure knowing how he could do so much better. His distinctive arrangements don’t fit the show at all, and nearly every track sounds indistinguishable. Outside of the manufactured sakuga scenes made to go viral on Tiktok, Solo Leveling is incompetent even in an aesthetic sense. Saying that the anime captures even an iota of the original webcomic’s artistic prowess would be an incredibly generous assessment. Every episode is plagued by characters constantly looking off-model in background or group shots and sometimes even in closeups.

Solo Leveling is Crunchyroll’s desperate new attempt at launching a flagship title, and perhaps there’s something to be said about how a company that’s spent its lifespan trying to commercialize and depreciate an entire medium is funding and promoting such a sterile and blatantly mass-produced series. What webtoon companies call “entertainment”, I call the violation of an art form. At the very least, the show’s aesthetic failures reflect its own failures as a story; it’s ugly, intrinsically cynical, and dishonestly presenting itself as something profound and grandiose when there’s nothing about it that justifies the portrayal. Solo Leveling is exactly what people who have never watched Dragon Ball Z think Dragon Ball Z is about, without even the cultural and historical significance that kind of prestige would entail. And God willing, it will never reach that level.

I’ll be the first to admit I am an inconsistent writer. My life is a constant barrage of new tasks and distractions that keeps me from accomplishing, well, pretty much everything I set my mind to. Things get especially difficult to manage around the holiday season but here I am, back in the game, because over the past 13 or so weeks I’ve been subjected to one of the most indefensibly piss-poor, psychologically agitating pieces of “art” I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Hametsu no Whatever, Who Actually Gives a Shit About the Title of This Garbage is the rare kind of complete and ... utter disaster that only surfaces once every few years, whenever anime studios have to really start scraping the bottom of the barrel for content. It single-handedly snapped me out of my depressive stupor because of how eye-openingly bad it was. It even inspired me, in a way, to never produce anything on this level of quality, lest I never call myself an artist again in my life. I’ve started writing and illustrating again thanks to Hametsu, and I at least owe it or the author of the webcomic or the staff behind the adaptation a bit of thanks by trying to interpret this work of pure schizophrenia before I inevitably sink back into the oblivion of daily apathy.
Hametsu is an anime where not a single aspect of it is pleasant or inviting. It shocks you in with a bleak, cynical first episode full of rape, slavery, genocide, and just about every one of humanity’s worse vices before shifting gears and psychotically jumping between genres every single episode like an ADHD kid who managed to ingest a red skittle and keeps trying to entertain himself with whatever’s around him. We go from EXTREMELY fucking edgy revenge fantasies where characters unironically say stuff like “I don’t even feel like raping you so I’ll just kill you” that sounds more like an Anal Cunt song title than real dialogue while standing waist-deep in pools of blood rife with faux-philosophical melodrama about how “humanity is…LE BAD”, to corny shoujo shenanigans where the unbearably annoying main girl fawns over the edgelord bishounen MC and gets scared by a spider or something and turns into a chibi while silly comedic music plays. It genuinely feels like a series that was on the brink of getting axed every chapter. At a certain point I should’ve discerned that there was nothing of value on display here and moved on, but it’s hard to look away from a trainwreck.
From the very first episode, Hametsu wants you to know that this is a serious show. The comically evil and petty human emperor genocides every witch on the planet because modern technology has made magic obsolete (the emperor actually says “the fruit of our wisdom, the smartphone” is superior to fucking magic that can level cities) and sexually assaults Adonis’ mentor/love interest in front of him before shooting her in the head while thousands of people salivate like animals. Adonis is then placed into stasis (for some reason, they never really explain this brilliant little moment of bad writing) to let his hatred marinate for a few years until he’s ready to kill his way to the emperor. Want to understand the complex mechanisms at play that led to all of this happening? It’s simple, really. The queen is actually a time-traveling witch who has the power to mind control everyone on earth except for other witches, who are all female and reproduce asexually using a magic tree on the moon, and the other female MC is a reincarnation of her from the future who has the same magic power as her or something according to the author Yoruhashi’s previous work (which is untranslated so I’m doing my best to try and interpret it using what meager Japanese I know) so she decides to mind control the king and everyone under her rule into hating witches so she can wipe them all out and end any competition to her reign, and also the anti-witch technology is giving everyone super cancer.
Got all that? Good, because after Pinkshit (I’m not even going to dignify this character by calling her by name, you’ll learn why later) manages to execute a prison break by stealing the controls from a wildly out of place caricature of a transsexual, Adonis breaks out and decides that instead of killing the emperor, he’d rather cause 9/11 2 and gun down thousands of innocent people (children included) onscreen because they’re guilty by association. From there, the show descends into misery porn and over the top wangst for the next 5 or so episodes. They go to the moon, all the witches want to revive Adonis’ mentor and kill him, he summons the humans to kill them instead and revives Pinkshit (an annoying nag he’s known for all of a day), kills a guy named Yamato who wants to fuck his sister or something, burns down the magic witch tree and leaves. Is this Alpha Male behavior or blatant stupidity? Also, remember the king? The queen brainwashes him into an heroing by throwing himself off a building because he got super cancer from the anti-witch technology. He’s not important after all. What is important, however, is her becoming an Idol of all things, because it wouldn’t be a product of the absolute dregs of the anime industry in 2023 without idolshit being forced in even when it makes zero sense in-universe. Now the two are suddenly back on earth and the show takes a few episodes to devolve into a bunch of thinly-connected shoujo-lite moments where Pinkshit and Adonis are radically different characters out of nowhere and there’s an unfunny quip or silly moment every 5 seconds.
This is where the series’ two main issues become clear as day; firstly, it can’t commit to anything. The tone shifts around with little restraint in between episodes, sometimes multiple times within the span of 2 minutes. It introduces a dozen new characters every single episode and either kills them off before they can meaningfully grow or develop or blatantly writes them out of the story once the writer gets bored of whatever subplot they spawned from. Even Adonis’ revenge plot gets phased out halfway through the fucking anime. This is not how you write a compelling story; this is a teenager’s emotionally charged fanfiction you’d read on LiveJournal in 2006 where every character is based on someone from their high school.
The second glaring issue of Hametsu is how unlikeable each and every character is. I don’t think Adonis requires or deserves an in-depth explanation; he’s a one-dimensional perpetually emo dipshit with zero critical thinking skills who can’t even seem to remember his own motivation. He gets his ass kicked in every single fight and only manages to win because of his tremendous plot armor. No one ever refutes his insane rhetoric outside the other worst character, Pinkshit, who is honest to God one of the most insufferable characters ever written. She is a walking woman moment; nearly every single line of dialogue from her is her whining and crying about how Adonis shouldn’t kill the enemy combatants who are literally trying to murder and/or enslave the both of them and their entire race at any given moment. She doesn’t shed any tears for the innocent people Adonis slaughtered earlier in the show, but she’s more than willing to slap him in the face and bitch him out for defending her from the never-ending onslaught of armed soldiers and cyborgs who want nothing more than to see them hanging and literally killed off the last members of her entire fucking race a few minutes ago. Pinkshit’s even more out of touch with reality than the guy who wants to commit mass murder, and she’s supposed to be the moral high ground of the anime. Every 5 seconds she’s whining about how “we can all still live in peace!” like a braindead hippie who reduces every single complex human thought process down to the simplest possible rationalization. Sure, she may have a point, this conflict is only arbitrary and would’ve been avoided altogether if anyone in this setting wasn’t staggeringly retarded, but just because every character is a slave to their own emotions perpetuating a totally pointless and dumb as fuck battle doesn’t mean we need a character pointing out what’s already obvious every single minute they’re onscreen as if that isn’t the most annoying thing a writer can do. I’m not sure if Pinkshit’s intentionally written to be out of touch because you can never be sure of anything with this show, but if she is it shows the author has only an incredibly shallow and cursory grasp on the concept of pacifism. Writing a character who is both naïve and likeable is admittedly difficult, and Yoruhashi decides to forgo that entirely by writing Pinkshit to be so comically stupid and braindead that any sense of likeability is automatically thrown out the window whenever she opens her hole. The only thing she really excels at is rabidly simping for Adonis and taking the brunt of his abuse, because pandering to the “I can fix him!” crowd is a guaranteed way to print money.
Meanwhile, every other character in Hametsu is some kind of raving degenerate with no moral compass or a weird sex pervert. They’re all shallow, one-dimensional psychopaths. As a matter of fact I couldn’t tell you any of their names, but I can tell you what atrocities they engage in, because every character in Hametsu would feel right at home in the Dirlewanger Brigade. And the more savagery and inhumanity gets thrown in your face, the cheaper and emptier it starts to feel. There is no moral gray area here outside of Adonis; everything is presented in extremes. In Hametsu, you are either a good guy or a remorseless monster who will gladly inflict any type of suffering onto whoever you can when it’s convenient. The only in-between is Adonis, whose mass-murdering behavior gets portrayed more like a he’s just a tortured bad boy making a few mistakes rather than a victim warped into a mass murderer by his circumstances. He has no depth. If the story even bothered trying to explore his thought process and rather than trying to gloss over his atrocities, there’d be at least some semblance of humanity to him. But then his previously defined personality gets thrown out because Pinkshit’s intolerable idealism starts rubbing off on him. At the end of the day the only character I can say I thoroughly enjoyed watching onscreen was Shirousagi, the white guy with dreads and an absolutely baller hat who beats Adonis so hard he looks like he’s about to cry and gouges out Pinkshit’s eyes onscreen. What a Chad. He is exactly what he’s presented as, and in his case that’s alright because he’s a stone cold badass and the closest I came to actually rooting for a character in this entire anime. Hametsu is probably the only anime where a guy who looks like Brian Welch rips out a Mori Calliope clone’s eyes and then crushes them, so at the very least you can’t call it unoriginal.
You’d think I’d at least have something good to say about Hametsu after I spent nearly 2000 words railing on it harder than a Thailand ladyboy, maybe some words of praise for the production quality of the anime? Woefully, there is none. Yokohama Animation Lab is just about the very bottom rung in the anime studio society; almost every project of theirs is rated a 6 or below on here, and that’s probably not an accurate gauge considering how many users wantonly hand out 10s to every anime they watch. The opening animation is probably where 99% of the show’s budget went, and if I’m being truthful it’s not that bad. The song (Kieru Made by Hana Hope) is far too pretty and refined for a show like this. It almost feels dishonest; I was expecting something more like Musashi Gundoh’s infamously deranged opening, that’s a clear and present indication of exactly what you’re about to watch, but Hametsu’s opening feels like it belongs to a much more refutable anime. And on that note, I can’t bring myself to praise its extremely shitty animation and presentation. I’m not sure what I expected considering the source material was almost entirely unknown outside Japan before the anime was announced, but this anime treats drag and drop animation like a fucking Olympic sport. Every fight is a slideshow where off-model characters slowly move across still frames and jitter around. There’s a scene in episode 11 where Pinkshit drops to the ground that’s utterly weightless, and she looks completely stiff. This scene was so ridiculous looking I had to pause the episode and get a drink to steel myself into finishing it. The anime was directed by School Days director Keitarou Motonaga, a guy who is infamous in this day and age for fundamentally not understanding the source material of the projects he directs (see: Digimon Adventure tri, an incredibly pretentious borderline fanfiction-tier movie series that almost killed the franchise in terms of animated projects).
Hametsu is a show I can’t fathom anyone taking seriously, even the people behind it. The part of my mind that’s still trying to comprehend why this even exists can only rationalize it as being some kind of avant-garde parodic work. It is one of the few anime I’ve seen that goes from comically overblown edge and misanthropy to goofy preschool humor within the span of a minute every single episode. There’s a scene in episode 3 or so where Adonis brutally kills a bunch of soldiers onscreen and within 20 seconds or so it cuts to one of the villain generals chibified and dancing around while making stupid noises. That’s basically the thesis statement of this anime. Either nobody had any idea what they were doing behind the scenes, or they knew exactly what they were doing and none of us are intelligent enough to grasp this kind of cutting-edge satire.
Either way, tl;dr: https://i.imgur.com/WYNwMyK.png

I have never felt so thoroughly repulsed in my life as I did while watching the first episode of FLCL: Grunge. Perhaps it’s a sign of the current state of the medium that a beloved OVA has been turned in a soulless cash-cow franchise with each successive sequel becoming somehow even more creatively bankrupt than the last, but regardless Grunge outdoes itself in being completely void of any artistic merit, passion, or ability to inspire anything other than instinctive aversion to the rational mind. It’s clear as day this is a vanity project, the long-dead corpse of a once great 6-episode series being puppeteered by ... the callous hacks over at Toonami. I can almost imagine the pitch meeting that spawned this embarrassment, and it makes me shudder.

The original OVA series was nothing short of remarkable, and you’d be hard pressed to find anything quite like it now. The cynic in me knows we’ll never get a project on this scale ever again. Something like FLCL is the culmination of so many brilliant minds putting painstaking effort into creating a work that, while totally unlike anything else at the time, was still evocative enough to strike a chord with people even 20 years later. The animation was boundary-pushing, using countless storyboarding and directorial techniques to reframe what could’ve been an unremarkable coming of age story into an adulation for the visual medium, accompanied by some of the most striking rock music ever composed courtesy of The Pillows. There isn’t a single uninspired thing about FLCL. You could probably recognize Haruko or Canti even if you’ve never seen the anime. When I look at FLCL: Grunge, I see a derisive, flavorless, calculated product. Completely devoid of any ambition, Grunge resigns itself to cheap, tacky 3D animation more fit for whatever brainwashing programs they show preschoolers on TV now; it’s fitting, because Grunge is also mindless slop, produced for America’s ever-growing army of adult children who refuse to let go of familiar things lest they be forced to step outside their comfort zones and experience the unfamiliar. Remember FLCL? Well, it’s back, with a shiny new coat of paint, but not too different. We even got The Pillows to come back! All the characters from the original show everyone loved too! You don’t have to think or learn new things, just be content with what you have. In its opening episode Grunge manages to force as many current year references to such vapid cultural touchstones as #MeToo and “mansplaining”. As if the last 10 years of entertainment weren’t already chock full of awful platitudes for the chronically out-of-touch (Californians) like this, now they’re in anime. Or whatever this is supposed to be, I’d honestly be doing anime a disservice by lumping this in with it.

What the fuck happened? FLCL was a story about maturity. Naota has to come to grips with the hard realities of life and accepts that he has to be his own man in order to face his problems head on. Screw what anyone thinks of him. FLCL: Grunge feels more than happy to oblige with what our increasingly neurotic society demands art be; inoffensive, free from anything that might offend the shareholders, or the emotionally stunted egocentrics of modern America who want everything to be safe and reassuring so they don’t have to pay $100 a month for antidepressants that don’t do anything rather than face the reality of how shitty everything is now. It’s the polar opposite of its predecessor. I hate it. If you have any self-respect not just as a viewer but as a human being, you should hate it too. If you do, Adult Swim’s execs might take a minute from counting their ever-dwindling stacks of money to consider funding animated projects that aren’t irredeemably bad.

tl;dr: it sucks. I saved you 23 minutes of your lives

With every anime season there’s a minimum of five terrible new fantasy anime to come along with it. Genre fatigue has been slowly setting in for years, and nearly every one of these glorified internet fanfics have been derided as “power fantasies” or “self-insert series” by people who actually care about the quality of the media they consume. Extremely bland peerless main characters plowing their way through any obstacle and hundreds of indistinguishable girls in increasingly trite fantasy realms seems to be the basic establishing formula for these series, most of which were written on novel websites made for the sole purpose of getting sheltered ... Japanese teenagers a chance to become a regular Nisio Isin (if he had zero literary credibility). Name any seasonal anime that sounds even marginally like what I described and it’ll probably have spawned from one of these places. They don’t even have to be isekai anymore, that’s the really tragic part. The cancer has been metastasizing into other genres. It’s basically an endless content farm for fledgling hacks who think originality is unoriginal, the ones who keep using the same exhausting story beats over and over because they genuinely can’t conceive of anything better. Beast Tamer happens to be one of the worst to rise from these kinds of places in recent memory; a series that falls onto the production line already pre-assembled, ready for mass consumption and unlikely to induce any kind wonder, awe, or intellectual stimulation of any kind.

Seriously every episode gets progressively less and less separable from every other foray into the genre that by the time I reached episode 13 I couldn’t even remember the name of the show. Was I still watching Yūsha Pātī o Tsuihou Sareta Bīsuto Teimā, Saikyōshu no Nekomimi Shōjo to Deau or was I watching Shin no Nakama ja Nai to Yuusha no Party wo Oidasareta node, Henkyou de Slow Life suru Koto ni Shimashita? Or was Ningen Fushin no Boukensha-tachi ga Sekai wo Sukuu you desu? (Fucking Christ stop letting these people write their own titles. They’re longer than some chapters in their own novels.) Summarizing the plot of this show would take too much effort, when it deserves so little; basically this boring asshole named Rein gets booted from a party of annoying one-dimensional asshole adventurers who do nothing but bitch and moan about literally everything (everyone in-universe hates them too because this show lacks subtlety), since his incredibly useful and niche Beast Taming power isn’t strong enough to reach their specific standards (even though they recruited him in the first place, I’m not sure why it suddenly became a problem after what seemed to be years of companionship because the show doesn’t explain anything about any of the characters’ reasonings) and he goes from place to place using his talent to pick up chicks to add to his harem-party. They all happen to be unfathomably overpowered too, so they all team up to fight monster designs traced from a middle schooler’s How to Draw Manga book. Then they meet the boring asshole heroes again and predictably beat the fucking shit out of all of them in the least cathartic fight ever “animated”, I’m talking 5 FPS here, and after being defeated they offer Rein his position back like a bunch of NPCs and he predictably says no, because who would give up crushing monster girl pussy every day for a bunch of the writer’s high school bullies personified? They fight a demon at the end of something too. They have another Microsoft PowerPoint battle, Rein uses some dumb new power to save the day, they meet a new ghost girl, everyone still hates the asshole heroes, and nothing else happens to meaningfully change the status quo. If you think I’m oversimplifying it, you’d be wrong, because I’m actually making it sound even more complex than it actually is.

I can’t imagine why anyone would watch this kind of creatively bankrupt slop; I’m not even trying to sound pretentious here. I like Fairy Tail for God’s sake. I’m just dumbfounded. Getting through a single episode of this shit nearly put me to sleep, because within the first 2 minutes I had already predicted nothing engaging would happen for the rest of the episode. If an uncultured Philistine like me struggled to watch half an episode of this series without convincing that my life was critically lacking in some form of intimacy, I hate to imagine what would happen to the most prodigal media analyst if they tried engaging with this. They’d probably lose the will to live upon seeing how far anime has degraded as an artform. I might sound a little defeatist here but it’s hard not to when the medium you’ve loved for years has become almost unrecognizable, just a corporate-controlled springboard for mediocre writers to keep regurgitating the same content for years instead of trying to hone their talents. 90% of anime looks like this now, and even then not many other forms of media are faring well either. Art used to be about constantly challenging yourself to create something only you could make; but now it seems like anyone could make half the stuff you see on tv or in theaters. It’s not hard to imagine why so many people are even more depressed and unfulfilled than ever; all their routes of escapism are slowly becoming homogenized and boring, and art only exists to tick off boxes on a checklist to appeal to the stupidest kinds of people. I fucking hate Beast Tamer, I hate that it’s getting a second season, I hate “web novels”, I hate isekai, I hate what the anime industry has become. It’s just the same goddamn thing every month. If any aspiring writer picked up a pen one day and made something genuinely special, something that doesn’t fit into any preconceived molds and fills others with inspiration, one that an AI couldn’t replicate with minimal effort, it’ll render corporate-approved swill like Beast Tamer completely worthless. Please everyone, go out and write a story no one else can. Don’t let this be the future.

My first exposure to The Eminence in Shadow was my friend on Discord singing praises for the anime. He told me it was a parody show that took all these tired isekai cliches and turned them on their head, much like Overlord. And he was right; The Eminence in Shadow is much like Overlord in that they both use the illusion of satire to deliver the same regurgitated stories and character archetypes as the genre they claim to parody, played completely straight with only the slightest modicum of irony to keep the veil from dropping. At first glance, you wouldn’t even be able to tell ... this is a parody. I struggled to sit through 4 episodes, and dropped it when I realized it was exactly as I’d feared; mediocre isekai nonsense putting on the pretense of being something greater to sell merchandise of the cast of nondescript archetypal anime girls. Only months later, after copious debates with my Discord friends and after several drinks was I able to finish the proceeding 16 episodes, all the while baffled by what I thought at the time was the sheer incompetence of the directing and adaptation of mediocre genre fare. But upon looking into the manga and LNs, I can confidently proclaim that Eminence in Shadow (the anime) is one of the most subversive, avant-garde comedy anime of all time. It’s so dedicated to making every single joke, every mildly humorous moment from the original works so profoundly atrocious and lacking in impact that it circles back around and reaches its intention: being the world’s greatest anti-comedy.

I’m going to get this out of the way quickly and say that, despite my earlier claim, the original manga and LNs (or whichever comes first) for this series aren’t masterpieces. The writing and dialogue are stiff and awkward, the story hinges on contrivance, half the cast is sorely lacking anything to distinguish one another, and there’s copious amounts of “ironic edge” that would make an r/nihilism user blush. But I’ll give it exemplary praise in that it’s actually genuinely funny at times, something so rare for the majority of media like this that I was caught off guard at first. Cid Kagenou is truly hilarious whenever he goes into one of his absurd Machiavellian rants in his head as he details his complex blueprints for putting on the front a boring, cringey man. He seems like the natural conclusion of Lelouch from Code Geass (or Light from Death Note if you’d prefer I cited an actually good character), taken to an illogical extreme. He’s the kinda guy who would nail himself to a cross to get stronger (he actually does this in one of the novels!). He truck’d himself for the specific purpose of being isekai’d. Scenes like where he asks a girl out in the most humiliating way possible are just so expertly compounded by him narrating every single action and decision in his head, such as calculating the perfect trajectory to bow down like a pathetic spastic. Here, every chuuni delusion is spelled out, making him look simultaneously awe-inspiring yet totally corny. He takes everything in stride; playing a pussywhipped slave is all part of his self-proclaimed master plan to rule the world in secrecy. Even when he’s surprised at how accurate his random guesses are, he just rolls with it. As much of a copout as it is, I think it’s a really great bit that keeps the story moving without getting too predictable. We even get to see inside the heads of other characters as they try to process the shitstorm of absurdity unfolding in front of them.

Now try to imagine an adaptation that completely cuts out the vast majority of Cid and the rests’ monologues, shoots down the jokes in midair so they just fall flat, and throws the tone of the series into disarray, killing any and all nuance the source material had going for it. Even disregarding the lack of first-person mental POVs for the most part, the comedic timing and execution is awful. The anime can’t seem to decide how it wants to portray Cid, choosing to take him 100% seriously the vast majority of the time. This distortion of the manga’s comedic nature to justify going all-in on the embarrassing power fantasies seems almost purposeful, and I’m not cynical enough to consider it a case of full-on directorial incompetence, nor a case of misplaced hubris like MAPPA’s Chainsaw Man adaptation; despite this being his first true directing gig, Kazuya Nakanishi has a good 20 years of experience working mostly assistant director and animation director positions on a number of well-received titles. I’m not sure how likely it was that everyone involved with production completely misunderstood the nature of the series, so I’m guessing they decided to change it to appeal to more casual viewers. It’s like the inverse of the manga, where there was some self-awareness around how much of an admirable dweeb Cid actually was behind all the posturing; the exaggerated art hammered the point home and made it so the tone was never too self-serious. He’s supposed to be cool because his ridiculous larp always ends in success, not because his ridiculous larp looks cool in-universe. The anime just asks you to take everything at face value, or at least seems to because the way they handle comedy in the anime is frustrating.

Everything in the anime is taken dead serious, failing to preserve the ever-present irony of the source material. It’s a dreary, obtuse mess where every scene plays out about as lifelessly as a bad Shakespeare adaptation; try to count the number of times there’s an expository scene that’s just shot reverse shot of characters talking with uninterested faces as nothing else happens for 3 to 4 minutes. Sometimes it happens multiple times per episode. Even worse, every time they try and go ahead with landing a punchline it derails the tone of the scene. Even a modicum of comedy feels out of place in an adaptation this dull. It’s like Fullmetal Alchemist 03 took SSRIs. But for all that show’s failings, it had competent directors, writers and production staff to turn it into something worthwhile, all of which Eminence in Shadow does not. Whoever was planning the anime out has no idea what makes the original material funny or engaging. Instead of embracing the inherent silliness, the anime only retains the worst of Eminence’s “humor”; repetitive gags that wouldn’t impress a middle schooler. You can almost spot the gaps in dialogue where they could’ve added canned laugh tracks after every joke. A character’s name being “Perverted Asshat” and it being thrown around ad nauseum is one of the least terrible examples might give you insight into how dire the material you’re dealing with can get.

And that’s not even getting into the problems I have with the source material itself. Firstly, Cid’s character makes no sense when you look into his motivations; his goal is to become both a background character AND the man behind everything, yet every action he takes as a civilian is contradictory. He’s always interacting with the most important people around him, getting into fights he easily wins with his superior magical powers, and finding himself involved in every conspiracy. Most of the time he isn’t even pretending to be Shadow while doing all this. Am I missing something? It feels like the writer just wanted an excuse for Cid to dick around in at magic highschool and somehow couldn’t find enough of a reason to have him do his supervillain shtick while he was actually in-character. What’s the point in immediately render your main character’s goal meaningless? It’s not like they wanted to dedicate any time to developing other characters, because as many as there are, they’re shallow as a puddle.

As much as Eminence can satirize edgy self-insert MCs, the series hardly has any faith in its characters and reduces them to boring, derivative models taken from every other low-effort power fantasy that came before it. Every female character has the same face. I can’t even remember half their names outside of Delta, who looks like Blake from RWBY, which is somehow a more watchable show than this. At least I can name most of RWBY’s cast and describe their personalities. Seriously every new female character in Eminence feels like they were produced in a factory that makes anime girls who are so hard-tailored to be appealing to lonely, bitter people like me it actually feels patronizing. The worst part is that they all look so similar that they blend together after the first 5 episodes. I started getting confused as to who was talking to who in some scenes because even their voices have very little differentiation. I don’t have any problem with conventional characters insofar as they possess interesting attributes; I couldn’t even begin to describe what makes any of these copy-paste bitches so special. That won’t stop people from spending thousands a month trying to summon them in all their fanservice uniforms on the shitty Eminence gacha game Crunchyroll was promoting (even though they don’t own the streaming rights to the anime???). The other side characters are equally dismal. If you skipped all the scenes of Cid’s classmates at the dumb Light Novel magic school talking about inane plot developments or fucking about you’d be skipping more filler than the average Shippuden arc. I know most of these season isekai shows spend an exorbitant amount of screentime on side characters jabbering on about dumb bullshit but it feels particularly egregious here, in a show where none of them serve any purpose aside from that. I’d be really impressed if you could find somebody who genuinely cares about these losers.

Eminence isn’t all contrivances and pretensions. As boring as the direction is in conversational scenes, it’s got enough flashy fight sakuga to distance itself from the dozens of far worse isekai that came out around the sam. Episodes 5 and 20 are the standout, where the direction and animation quality actually take a massive step up for a few minutes during said episodes’ central fights (I AM ATOMIC is way too cool a moment for this series). Kenichiro Suehiro (the RE:Zero guy)’s soundtrack is the hypest shit you’ll ever hear. As much as I want to scrutinize every aspect of this series out of spite, there’s some genuine passion put into it. I can be a sore loser and say “I wish Hoshi no Samidare got that same treatment!” but that wouldn’t solve anything. As a whole The Eminence in Shadow is just so sincerely unimpressive that it makes me wonder what anyone sees in it; of course I already know what they see in it, cool fights, self-insert protagonists and women who show affection, but it makes me wonder why nobody wants anything else. The isekai/”literally me!” genre dissolved into a homogenous mess of repetition somewhere around 2016 or 2017 and the anime community hardly seems to care. But the amount of fans acting like Eminence is really that much of a breath of fresh air just goes to show that deep down, people are growing weary of the formula and any surface-level deviation from the norm is cause for consideration. I can see it. I understand. It’s still bad, but I’d be lying if I said it’s less more inviting than “I Got Reincarnated as Chad and Girls Pay Attention to Me Now” or Attack on Titan: The Final Season Part 9 out of 20.

The Rising of Shield Hero Season 2 is one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had to sit through, and this is coming from a Yankees fan. How do you even manage to fuck up a sequel to one of the most popular LN adaptations of all time this badly?

Say what you want about the first season of Shield Hero, but it was hard to deny it was all the rage back in 2019. As early as the first episode’s airing people were either ranking it among their Top 10 or throwing shitfits over it. There’s not much to say about Season 1 that hasn’t ... already been said by thousands of others. Shield Hero is the definition of low-hanging fruit at this point. It’s juvenile shlock with terrible characters and endless plot contrivances that has no idea what it wants to be. I hated it, but at the same time I kept coming back. At the end of the day I had fun watching it week to week, laughing at the comical amounts of edge, tonal whiplash and stilted dialogue. Season 2 on the other hand strayed so far from my expectations I was left speechless by just how consistently fucking terrible it managed to be every episode. It’s not bad in the entertaining sense, it’s bad in a way that just leaves you incensed. So much of it fundamentally fails on every level that you’d think this was the result of some kind of corporate sabotage scheme put into place by the vengeful author of another terrible isekai series, angry that his internet fanfiction turned legitimate franchise was overshadowed.

As you can probably guess, Season 1 left off on all the plot threads that kept people watching (the rape accusation, the “other universes” nonsense, etc.) resolved in the most unsatisfying ways possible; now Naofumi the Shield Hero/wholesome slave owner and his harem of walking cliches have pretty much accomplished all the goals that were set in the first season, or the first 5 volumes of the novels. Here’s the issue: the whole point of the "rising" of the Shield Hero was already shown in the first season. There’s nowhere else to go from here, but considering there was still 17 volumes left to cover, a second season is pretty much a given. Guess what Kinema Citrus decides to do? Rush through the following volumes, completely skip context to new characters and story developments, and drag out what fans already consider to be the worst arc in the series with a decreased animation budget and worse directing. Great. Of course most viewers won’t know any of this supplemental info at first, so they’ll be immediately let down. I couldn’t think of a better way to make sure 70% of viewers drop your series within the first 5 episodes.

The Spirit Turtle/Kyo arc is (from what I’ve heard) incredibly boring enough in the novels, so I have no idea why the studio chose to turn it into even more of a pointless slog. I couldn’t tell what the worst part of this season was, the endless scenes of characters spouting prosaic dialogue at each other for minutes on end, pedestrian attempts at developing characters or the stale, repetitive fight scenes that only exist to hook the audience back in after the other 2 put them to sleep. Director Masato Jinbo doesn’t have that bad a record, working on stuff like Shakugan no Shana S2 and Yuru Camp. The animation is considerably less polished than Season 1 and there’s an embarrassing number of off-model shots, even during still frames or any one of the thousands of mind-numbing talking scenes. Looking at all the shoddily drawn characters is more stimulating than actually listening to them converse. It’s a direct contrast to Season 1, which looked leagues better than this. In Season 1 characters were hardly ever off-model for 25 episodes, and the worst I can say about the animation was that it relied too heavily on CGI models for a lot of fight sequences. The background characters even looked like humans instead of stick figures most of the time, and it's sad that I have to praise it for doing the bare minimum that most anime can't even seem to accomplish these days. What’s the problem here? Did they not care? I’d have to guess that condensing the volumes of the story this season covers into a 13 episode season gave the staff less time to refine everything from adapting the light novels to a television format to making sure it actually looked halfway finished. This was probably the decision that sealed Season 2's fate.

On the topic of characters, one of the biggest blights on this season is the new character Rishia. She’s so fucking annoying. I thought people were overreacting before I started the season but yeah, she really is one of the least likeable characters ever written. 99% of her screentime is wasted on her obsessing over one of the heroes who wants nothing to do with her (understandable), crying for some reason or just being dead weight in fights or emotional scenes. Season 2 opts to skip most of the scenes establishing her and make her feel like a genuine addition to the cast and just skip right into her training, making her feel like she was awkwardly inserted into the story at the last moment. You’d think a character like this would have some kind of arc or emotional resolution but she NEVER IMPROVES. She’s obnoxious and stagnant enough to the point Naofumi calling her out during his rage scene feels completely justified instead of mean-spirited. The reason I reserved almost an entire paragraph for her is because she’s a major character in the season, and you’d better believe they try to force you to like every time she’s onscreen despite the fact there’s absolutely nothing to like.

Naofumi and his harem are as insipid as ever. The other new characters from parallel universes range from uninteresting to background scenery. Glass, the mostly silent rival to Naofumi from the first season, gets ruined as she becomes another sidekick for Naofumi. The arc villain Kyo is a bland, two-dimensional prick with about as much likeability as Rishia. Season 1 at least had the smart idea of making all the villains comically over the top, unapologetically evil scumbags so you could enjoy how awful they were, and get some satisfaction when they finally go down. Kyo is not only unbearably annoying but also has no depth to him. Filler villains in Naruto have more complexity than this guy, who’s supposed to be a major player in the Shield Hero world, as he’s the illegitimate Book Hero as well as being from a parallel world. He appears, conducts a little evil in the background, makes some evil swords (ripped off from that one Bleach arc for some reason) and gets defeated in one of the least exciting climactic battles ever animated. You really think nothing of him the entire season and forget everything about him once it’s over.

Shield Hero Season 2 is an unbearably ugly, passionless and aggravating sequel to a series that didn’t really need any further continuation. I actually feel like I was too hard on Season 1 in the past, because despite it being tasteless, ludicrous and offensive to everyone, it was entertaining. It was fun, ridiculously grimy shit you got invested in because it always managed to rise to some absurd new level of stupidity. Season 2 has nothing of value. It insults fans of the light novels and the manga by removing key elements of the story. It insults casual viewers by being an ugly, vacuous waste of time. There is nothing redeeming about The Rising of Shield Hero Season 2 and it should not have been made. There was no passion put into the production at any level and it absolutely shows. The best thing you can say about this season that it’s a massive letdown and the worst thing you can say probably breaks several MAL guidelines. I’m not even a fan of the series yet I still feel like a part of me died watching this.

The Orbital Children is a long-awaited misfire from Mitsuo Iso, the sublimely passionate and creative writer behind Dennou Coil, an underrated classic in terms of mid-2000s scifi anime. Orbital Children takes a great deal of inspiration from its predecessor, which somehow ends up being one of its weakest points; it feels like a heavily degraded version of the show people love. Nearly every aspect of The Orbital Children feels shallow and pretentious, although this could mainly be blamed on the length (or lack thereof) of this anime. Dennou Coil had a fully realised world, likeable and nuanced characters and themes that were explored over a ... 26-episode storyline, while Orbital Children is a theatrical release (or a 6-episode anime if you watched it on Netflix). It’s understandable that a feature-length anime film lacks the burgeoning plot of a two cour television series, but Orbital Children is 3 hours long, and it makes almost no use of that inflated running time.

The story is simple: a bunch of generic, annoying self-inserts get stuck on a space station that’s been sabotaged by unknown forces, and they have to work together to escape. None of them progress past being cardboard archetypes for children to self-insert into; rather, they just get more baffling and uninteresting as the show moves on, culminating in an ending that takes wish fulfillment to a new level. Touya is one of the strangest main characters possible for a show like this; he’s nihilistic and cold towards Earth’s humans because he believes they all consider cybernetically enhanced space-born humans a waste of resources, and through some gap in logic he wants to program an artificial intelligence to move past its technological limitations and wipe out the planet. Essentially, he’s Char Aznable but not cool. He gets less irritating later but still radiates preteen angst up until the finale. He gets stuck on the damaged space station with his psychic best friend, a fucking tiktok girl and her easily impressionable brother, and Taiyou, who is the most annoying character in the entire show and an excuse for United Nations propaganda (which still exists in the future for some reason). There are adult characters but none of them have much of an impact on the story outside the incredibly obvious, unthreatening strawman antagonist whose motivations are entirely decided by “it’s prophecy, it doesn’t have to make sense!” which doesn’t make for a compelling adversary, especially when the reveal, 99% of their character development and their death happens in the span of a single episode. There’s also some senile dude in a mascot suit. I think they were aping Pino from Ergo Proxy but I can’t be sure.

The Orbital Children tries to tackle futuristic dilemmas such as the nature and evolution of artificial intelligence, space colonization, and humanity’s need to curb their own progress with all the introspection and self-awareness of a fax machine. 99% of the dialogue during “philosophical” scenes is pseudointellectual babbling that amounts to absolutely nothing and comes to a total of zero conclusions about any of these quandaries. There is no wisdom being dispensed here; instead the writing team just wanted to stuff as much fruitless dialogue into the script as possible to sound intelligent so people will go “Wow! It’s just like Evangelion!” which the show actually tries ripping off in the last 20 minutes with an absurdly tryhard ending that would have been profound if anyone involved with the writing of this series knew what the fuck they were talking about. Instead of being like Dennou Coil, which knew when to space things out and keep viewers attention spans, Orbital Children is full scenes of characters spouting their ideologies at each other in the most lifeless way possible.

The entire series feels lifeless, as a matter of fact, and I’m not sure what happened. Iso’s input was great in Dennou Coil; we got a feel for the world through the way it was framed, through the energy and color of the series. Maybe it was the 15 year span between the two series, but Orbital Children feels largely like it was put together dispassionately; characters are constantly off-model, the direction and cinematography are bland and colorless and even the soundtrack hardly anything special. Within the first episode I counted at least 10 shots being repeated within the same 3 minute scene with little to no variation. It was just shot reverse shot every time someone spoke for the entire slog of a first episode. Iso is talented, no doubt, but Orbital Children feels like it was something he either worked on out of necessity or something that was completely butchered during production, which seems to be the more likely candidate (14 pages of storyboards were apparently cut from the second half of the show). Even Iso’s attention to detail seems to be missing; how does a man renowned for being so meticulous and passionate about science fiction forget that fires can’t start in space? Half the series feels like nonsense. Rather than a calculated, insightful anime about the near future we get talking AI space rocks, drones firing digital lasers at each other and literal fucking magic for some reason. And I know Dennou Coil leaned into pseudoscience at times, but it felt natural because of the setting. It even managed to inspire real-life breakthroughs in virtual reality because of just how well-conceptualized and intuitive it was. The Orbital Children lacks that kind of prescience. I have to make the assumption that Netflix had a hand in turning the series into the final product we have, because it doesn’t feel right. It feels like something groundbreaking could’ve come from this series, but it was curbed and turned into something safe like the artificial intelligence in the show itself. There’s something strangely ironic about that.

The Hunters Guild: Red Hood is a haphazardly written, agonizing lesson in why people shouldn’t call a manga “the next Demon Slayer” a week after it begins serialization. I understand fans were getting tired of waiting for another massive franchise to get invested in, but the public consensus was made too quickly and far too many people set themselves up for disappointment. The week-by-week read became agonizing within three chapters and it became apparent that former My Hero Academia assistant Yuuki Kawaguchi cannot structure a story or write compelling characters to save his life. You’d think it would be impossible to fuck up such a ... simple concept that badly, but time and time again Red Hood managed to blow my expectations out of the water by being even more of a boring, fruitless experience with each successive chapter.

Red Hood’s most glaring flaw becomes immediately apparent within the introductory arc. Characters dump paragraphs of exposition in some of the most shameless and unsubtle ways possible. There’s manga where the slightest bit of exposition would drastically improve the story, and then there’s manga like Red Hood, which make the average HxH chapter look like a picture book. The amount of times the dialogue takes up around two thirds of the page is astounding. Even in the first chapter there’s at least eight to ten speech bubbles on most pages, I’m not fucking kidding. All of this text just accentuates how cluttered and disorganized the art is. You’d think Kawaguchi was trying to rush through all the necessary lore at the start so he could get into the action, but no: all eighteen fucking chapters are like this to some degree. There’s nothing to even guide the viewer’s eyes across the pages, it’s completely counter-intuitive and amorphous. I put together a small compilation to show you how bad it looks: (https://imgur.com/gallery/CF60TgJ)

There’s too much going on in any single page, none of the characters feel like they’re in focus unless the perspective is a close-up of their faces. The art itself isn’t bad, but when Kawaguchi is this bad at setting up the pages he has hardly any chances to really show it off. The pacing of the story as well as the paneling and art drastically suffer when a character has to sit down and explain the entire setting as well as the major factions, characters, and what hackneyed shit like “wolfonium” does. I seriously can’t get over wolfonium, it’s too goddamn stupid even for a series like this.

The MC is the least interesting part of his own story. There’s not much of note about Velou/Vero since he’s just another Deku, Tanjiro or Asta clone. I can appreciate how grounded and quick-witted he is at least, but he’s nothing groundbreaking. Velou gets overshadowed by his huge-tits female mentor, the one who got all the fanart and probably the only reason a lot of people wanted this series to succeed. The villains somehow have more personality than the two leads, the werewolves aren’t mindless monsters either which is pretty refreshing, plus they’re amazingly grotesque and inhuman in design while still retaining the fairy-tale aesthetic which makes them a delight to look at. Red Hood’s designs are probably the best part of the manga. There’s so many inventive aspects to the world that tragically get glossed over in the endless spew of text and dull action sequences.

This interesting fantasy world full of werewolves and other fairy tale monsters, the main reason most fans got invested in the story, hardly gets explored at all; the first five chapters are spent meandering through some town explaining rather than exploring. Everything has to be conveyed through dialogue rather than simply shown to the reader. Every potentially cool moment is ruined by there being ten or more speech bubbles inserted over everything in case you didn’t what incredibly obvious things are occurring. Characters spout their entire motivations for three pages on some occasions and even then they feel hollow and unrelatable.

The series showed some promise when the premise shifted to actually travelling to the Hunter’s Guild, but right after we were stuck with a training arc which shifted into a generic exams arc that turned into a game of cops and robbers with no tension or stakes. Around this time it was confirmed the manga was going to be canceled, so Kawaguchi quickly turned the story into a metanarrative about how destroying stories means destroying a universe to spite WSJ; while I can appreciate the motivation behind this plot development, it comes completely out of left field and makes for an unsatisfying open ending to an already fragmentary manga.

If Red Hood was in the hands of a more competent writer and artist it could’ve had the potential to be a groundbreaking series, but for a manga based around fictional tales it was frustratingly unimaginative. Regardless, I look forward to Kawaguchi’s next work, and I hope he’s managed to better hone his skills to avoid making a mistake of this level when the time comes again. If he can make it into Shonen Jump once, he might be able to manage it a second time.

After watching the first six episodes of this I have come to the completely justified conclusion I've already seen everything the show has to offer. It's the anime equivalent of putting your ear next to a fax machine for 20 minutes. There is literally nothing of real value on display; the art is mediocre and the animation is stiff, even for a seasonal FOTM "comedy" and the jokes are so far from landing you can't even hear the impact. The story and characters are about as deep as a mountain.

Another thing is the fact that every single joke has the exact same punchline and execution; ... someone does something goofy or something bad happens and the characters obnoxiously shriek about it to explain the joke to the audience in case we weren't capable of comprehending the truly masterful utilization of comedy and pretense. I know this is (apparently) a staple of Japanese humor but they repeat this joke format like fifteen times in a single episode. If they added a laugh track it would still manage to be less subtle.

Jahy's voice is cute but it's not enough to make me want to watch any sort of animated media related to this franchise again. Everything in this gives me a migraine, even the soundtrack is obnoxious. Nagatoro genuinely looks like a Mamoru Oshii production in comparison to whatever incoherent nonsense this is supposed to be

Skate Stay Night: Unlimited Board Works isn’t a terrible series, and if anything it’s an enjoyable sports up until the 7th episode where it delves into painful, trite melodrama and loses the focus and energy that made the first half of the show so popular in the first place. What started as a fun skating-based show with a passionate, vigorous production ended up being derailed by agonizingly forced queerbaiting, melodrama and nonsensical character motivations, where the main leads devolve into obnoxiously unlikeable, overdramatic manchildren. This tragic descent into mediocrity propelled SK8 off the path to greatness and directly into the ever-overflowing pit of mediocre seasonals. ... It’s telling when a series that developed such a rabid fanbase within a day of the first episode’s premiere fell almost entirely back into obscurity mere months after it finished its run. In any case it’s a genuine shame that such a promising show declined so badly when it was just beginning to play to its strengths.


The story and characters of SK8 are archetypal, but what makes them stand out is a combination of their striking, vibrant designs and the chemistry they have with each other. Each skateboard death-match is energetic and Bones put the work in to make the animation as flashy and spectacular as possible. During pivotal moments you could easily confuse it with an Ufotable production. The series distinguishes itself by utilizing color; from the characters designs to the races, they all have pronounced and attractive visual styles. The characters are hardly ever off-model either which is rare for Bones in this day & age, and they deserve commendation for this. Hiroko Utsumi is a wonderful director and her talent extends beyond the racing scenes, where even the average scenes of down time between the next race never look bland. It’s easy to see why so many people were drawn to this series, excluding the unsubtle gay undertones. The best part of this show are the catchy the opening and ending themes. The soundtrack is competent, and composer Ryou Takahashi put together some great songs for the racing scenes.


MC Reki is energetic and upbeat and he contrasts with Langa’s reserved personality: this makes the scenes where Langa loses that façade and gets caught off guard way funnier. Reki and Langa are good main characters up until that certain point where the series quality takes a nosedive; their friendship is endearing and cute until they’re forced apart by terrible writing that holds the emotional weight of the average TV soap opera shitfest. Reki’s obnoxious angst at not being good enough the very first time he gets knocked down a peg is an arc that put me in a position of me doing everything in my power not to skip through all his scenes. He inescapably comes off as whiny and irritating, a sudden contrast to the personality I was starting to enjoy in previous episodes. It was like watching the life drain from a friend you only just became acquainted with. The resolution to this character arc is even more boring and uninstructive and turns the endeavor of watching all of into an unfulfilling timesink after the fact. There’s scarcely a payoff for this couple of episodes and I would consider it a waste of time if not for the other far more interesting plot elements involving Langa. Ichiro Okouchi usually excels as a writer and seeing him put together something like this makes me feel like he either wasn’t given enough creative reign or was borrowing too many notes from the Code Geass playbook.


The side characters (Shadow, Miya, Joe, Cherry, etc.) aren’t well-written enough to be more than surface-level; all of their motivations revolve around the main antagonist, but their interactions are at the very least funny as fuck at their peak, although Miya’s gamer shtick gets tiring within his introductory episode. The relationships are poor attempts at gay representation; replace one character in an implied couple with a woman and nothing would significantly change. The main issue is that they lack build-up. Nothing about the main duo really demonstrates that they belong together. Reki spends a good four or five episodes resenting Langa over stupid shit and he barely even gets over it.


And why is Adam a thing? Why the fuck does Adam exist? His entire motivation is being romantically attracted to underage boys and wanting to fuck them/beat them in skateboard duels. They had the perfect villain for this kind of series; a rich, corrupt and insanely stylish politician who spends his free time hosting violent illegal skateboarding competitions where he can humiliate his rivals and dress like a Type-Moon character. His rich family is a bunch of pretentious jackasses hanging over his head and constantly projecting their expectations onto him. He jumps out of helicopters and bashes people’s faces in with his sick skateboard. He’s the Aizen of skateboarding. By the 12th episode he’s a complete joke, a deranged groomer who fails miserably to seduce a literal teenager and laughable attempt at writing a nuanced antagonist who loses to a bunch of kids and gets redeemed by the power of having fun while still coming off as a gay predator stereotype. He’s stuck in this utterly worthless arc about government corruption that gets tacked on to make the decomposing remains of his character feel like they have a place in this failed narrative. The detective character who tails him literally gets written off in a joke scene at the end of the final episode, because the writers realized how completely fucking pointless this entire plot point was at the last second since they neglected to make any use of it., or that the audience didn't actually care.


The subplot about Adam's family produces nothing to drive the plot forwards aside from Adam’s weirdly sexual relationship with his manservant, who shows up at random points in the story to keep the wheels turning. An elementary schooler could write with more depth. On the topic of “fun”, this series beats you over the head with “skateboarding is fun!” at the most unearned moments, especially during the climax. The show makes skateboarding look like a physical and emotional deathmatch. Maybe the theme would be more applicable if more time was spent showing the characters training and bonding instead of teenage whining and background characters pointing out every single important thing that happens onscreen five to ten times per race in the most annoying way possible.


Sk8 is a true tragedy, cherished by many and immediately forgotten by the time it was over. It isn’t atrocious but it underutilizes the concepts that helped it capture an audience in the beginning. The story gets more disjointed as it progresses in order to create tension when there doesn’t need to be any and the characters barely grow or deal with the consequences of their actions. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table aside from being a mainstream big-budget skateboarding anime. The underground deathmatch setting is underutilized because the show overexerts itself spending too much time on pointless histrionics and yaoi tropes. I would recommend you go read Air Gear instead because it’s also technically about skateboarding but I barely remember anything about the series.