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Winter 2023 is by no means a great season for anime, but from the very beginning I had my eyes dead-set on reviewing two anime. They were Oniichan wa Oshimai and Mahou Kakumei. But something called Real Life™ got in my way, and instead of writing shit, I spent my free time lying in bed, catching up on desperately-needed sleep time, half-awake and half-dreaming about some giant-ass pumpkin patch. It was pumpkins as far as the eye can see, with the hills and the valleys and the far-off mountains all textured with delicate orange stripes. Well, fuck pumpkins, fuck sleep, and fuck real life. Who ... cares about anything else when you can watch Blue Lock? It’s objectively the best football anime of Fall 2022 and Winter 2023 and it’s pointless to even consider a 2nd place. So now to answer the all-important question for the readers of this review: What is this anime about?

Blue Lock starts when our power-of-teamwork guy Isagi passes the ball to his teammate instead of shooting for himself and his teammate misses. Isagi then starts pondering if teamwork is hella overrated, and before you know it he is whisked away to the wonderful world of Blue Lock, where the goal is not to work as a team, but by becoming the single best striker in the world. And how is our now-not-so-power-of-teamwork guy Isagi gonna do this? Well, first he has to win matches in teams of 11… and then win more matches in teams of 2-5, and if he succeeds he gets to play in a better team of 11… wait… something doesn’t seem quite right, let’s try something else.

Blue Lock starts when our not-actually-power-of-teamwork guy Isagi passes the ball to his teammate instead of shooting for himself and his teammate misses. Isagi then starts pondering if teamwork is hella overrated, and before you know it he is whisked away to the wonderful world of Blue Lock, where Isagi’s current understanding of “teamwork” is immediately thrown in the trash. Our reformed-power-of-teamwork Isagi, throughout the trials and hardships of Blue Lock, comes to realize that teamwork is not about passing the ball to his teammate in any situation, but instead knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each player and working with that, to generate “chemical reactions” that play to the strengths of each player… wait, timeout, hold on a second.

Isn’t this “chemical reaction” thing just the plain run-of-the-mill definition of teamwork?

When you look at Blue Lock more closely, it turns out not to be the “revolutionary approach” to football that it boasts itself as. Instead, Blue Lock’s goal is to explain very basic concepts of football in the most overcomplicated way possible to make it sound like something really cool. Like, what is “smelling a goal”? It sounds really cool, but when we translate it from Isagian to English it turns out to just be “coming up with a winning strategy”. What about “turning zero into one”? It’s just learning how to play in a team instead of individually. And what does “awakening” mean? Easy; it means “shounen shenanigans”. Concepts such as consistency and luck are overexplained in the most overexplanatory way possible that when you realize this, this show starts to be painful to watch. The “character development” is nothing but a contrived sense of progression that is randomly bullshitted by the author with the idea that “if you throw enough bullshit, some of them might not be seen as bullshit”. There’s simply nothing to be found.

Well, if the character development is nonexistent, then at least we can settle for just the characters themselves, right? Well, no, not really. Isagi is basically a reprinted shounen character who says things like “I have to get better” so often that he skips sleep to say it more. Bachira’s characterization is that he can dribble, he is cute, and he can be shipped with Isagi. Ego is a character who spouts off some random shit and also eats random shit. Chigiri has long legs and long hair. Raichi has spiky teeth and spiky hair. Nagi’s characterization is that he can do weird kicks, he is cute, and he can be shipped with Reo. They are pretty much just shounen characters, each with strange “superpowers” that no ordinary high-schooler could possibly have, constantly talking about winning and shit.

So what’s the point of Blue Lock? It fails at plot, fails at characters, fails at OST (it’s generic as shit). But there’s one thing it doesn’t fail at, and that is making cute, shippable characters. Take Bachira. His VA is talented and adds a considerable amount of nuance to Bachira’s dialogue. But what is this nuance used for? Better character exposition? Reflecting Bachira’s emotional state in a non-obvious way? These are forlorn hopes. The nuance’s sole intention is to make Bachira cuter and more shippable. Nagi’s backstory makes no sense: he only practiced for 6 months and is already a living god at technique. But the story’s intention is not realism; Nagi hence seems more mysterious, so he can be contrasted with Reo better, so they can be shipped together better. The whole purpose of Blue Lock is to ship cute boys together. At the time of writing (just after last episode) there are 3067 Blue Lock fanfictions on AO3. 2643 of them are categorized as M/M fics, of which 473 just so happen to be rated explicit. There are 778 Reo/Nagi fics, 382 Bachira/Isagi fics, 375 Isagi/Rin fics, and many more consisting of all sorts (and forms) of ships. Comparatively, Okabe/Kurisu from the fan-favorite Steins;Gate has only 178 fics to its name; that is less than the 225 Putin/Medvedev fics that exist somewhere on this site. So we can say, with certainty, that Blue Lock was invented to ship cute boys together. Maybe we can go further: Men’s sports manga was invented to ship cute boys together. Fuck it, let’s go even further. Men’s sports was invented to ship cute boys together. Men were invented to ship cute boys together? At this point I don’t know anymore. Perhaps I’ve been ridden to insanity over writing this review, juggling real life, and watching this show. Who knows.

So with all that said and done, let’s try this one last time.

Blue Lock starts when our cute shounen boy Isagi passes the ball to an irrelevant character and loses the game. The plot don’t matter, the details doesn’t matter, but Isagi becomes tired of his surroundings, and before you know it he is whisked away to the wonderful world of Blue Lock where he can meet other cute shounen boys for the audience to ship and scream random shounen stuff about self-improvement and winning that sounds really, really cool. As Isagi powerlevels, he can meet more cute boys and scream about more bullshit stuff, and the cycle continues until Isagi has all the qualities essential of the world’s #1 striker: know every cute boy on the planet, and be able to scream out the most overcomplicated form of every concept that ever exists. And if a story like that isn’t worth watching, I don’t know what is.

It’s the end of 2022, and the world is seeing technology advance at blustering speeds. Machine learning models such as Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT are rattling up both excitement and apprehension for the future, and AI is yet again making rounds all over the Internet. In the meantime, there is a small little show produced in Japan called Do It Yourself!! that attempts to tie the kinship of community and the spirit of modernization together. Its vision is grand; rather than labeling modernity as some dangerous force that threatens to displace “true” social interactions, DIY embraces it as a useful tool to bring people closer ... together, perhaps in the form of AR and holographic visualizations, or as an AI assistant. However, with all its ambition and devotion, DIY has somehow forgot the simplest part of its message, the very root that supports everything on top of it, and that is the characters themselves.

To say that the characters are somewhat undeveloped would be a massive understatement. All of them fall strictly under the most simple archetypes in CDGCT: clumsy airhead, smart but shy, tsundere, genius child, and acrobatic… person of an exotic race? Kouki’s character is perhaps one of the most flagrant dehumanizations of Southeastern Asian women I have ever seen. She climbs trees and wades in ponds and says nyaa or some shit all the time! Who the fuck thought of this character and thought it was a good idea? Is this supposed to be some strange satire about the spread of racist stereotypes by political and corporate entities to support their interests by disguising it with globalism and the voyeurification of cultures in non-developed areas that humanity is 200 years too early to comprehend? Jobko is not great either. She reminds me of a French character who’s predefining traits were speaking in an unintelligible French accent, having shit taste in clothing, and getting laughed at by everyone for not understanding the glorious culture of the US of motherfucking A. At this point, it would be a stretch to say that the anime is promoting community with other people. Watching this anime espouse the values of diversity is like listening to someone claim “I’m not racist against Arabs, I know all about the behavior of Arabs” and proceed to say the most ignorant shit about them. This is not to say diversity is bad; in my opinion, one of the most pervasive problems in Western society is the inability of a good number of people to view non-Western issues outside of a Western black-and-white perspective, choosing not to think about things when it becomes too complicated to label one side bad and the other side good. But to claim to be diverse while blatantly perpetuating the contrary is inexcusable

And if that wasn’t enough, there was the scene in the dramatic climax of the show that left me feeling quite infuriated (This section has spoilers). Here’s the rundown: Serufu is sad. Purin wants to cheer her up, but she has never been open about her feelings. Purin decides to be vulnerable for once and talks about things that she has, for so long, publicly decried, and even suggests ideas. But as it turns out, Serufu is perfectly fine and was just thinking about those very ideas, and the tsundere Purin gets embarrassed yet again. Cue audience laughter. Now, this scene is not totally lacking in merit, as Serufu does thank Purin at the end for worrying about her, which alleviates some of the awkwardness. But it’s clear that this anime is scared of venturing outside and actually taking an opinion on an issue. Who needs to do that when you can play it safe, hope not to piss off anyone, and make as much money as possible? No one cares whether Purin’s vulnerability is made the butt end of jokes, or that the social stigma surrounding mental health is left untouched. The audience wants CGDCT, so you better give them what they want.

There are some merits to DIY. Yasaku does not fit under any specific archetype, and the way she holds the club together is well-crafted: subtle enough to be hard to explain, but so strong that it is impossible to not notice. The artstyle is daringly bold, mixing hazy and blurred backgrounds with simply colored line art characters and an occasional detailed CGI object in the foreground. The music is eccentric (although somewhat repetitive), and the sound effects are not obnoxious. And as stated before, the vision this show tries to put together is possibly one of the best, most nuanced messages that CGDCT has to offer. It’s such a shame that it’s rendered obsolete by such a crudely-designed cast. I find it almost comical that such poor execution was spent on an idea like this. What a waste.

Yojouhan Time Machine Blues is Science SARU’s treat for all the Tatami Galaxy fans wanting more. Our ever-so-unfortunate Watashi and the zany crew are as delightful as ever as they travel across time and space to save an air conditioning remote control from its fizzily death. Although it is a side-story of The Tatami Galaxy and roughly follows the plot of another move, Summer Time Machine Blues, the show does a good job at assimilating the story in The Tatami Galaxy universe, with the location, character relations, and cast all carrying over. The only new character, Tamura, integrates quite well into the pre-existing gang. And ... there are plenty of Easter eggs for sharp-eyed fans to find, such as Jougasaki’s shirt.

The Tatami Galaxy’s shining point is its cast, all with their own eccentric personalities and intersecting stories, who help explore the main theme through varying angles. And although Yojouhan Time Machine Blues opts not to focus on developing a particular message, the cast remains as strong as ever. The script and voice acting takes the variety of the cast a step further; there is no mistaking Watashi’s tense, hurried sentences with Higuchi’s words of (dubious) wisdom, or Ozu’s mischievous voice with Akashi’s sharp and direct one. The diversity of the cast goes far in making the irony funny and memorable, and the story brisk and witty.

Although there isn’t really any “bigger message” hidden inside Yojouhan Time Machine Blues, it is still very good fun to watch. The story is like one big time-travel puzzle, and the way it unfolds is very well-done. There are many time-travel movies where the “solutions” get increasingly complicated and confusing to the point of unintelligibility (Tenet, for one), and I can confidently say Yojouhan stays far away from that mistake. If you want a short and fun watch, Yojouhan Time Machine Blues would definitely be a good choice for you.

Very slight spoilers below.

If there was a World Item that would magically turn Summer 2022 into an actually good season, I would do anything to obtain it. I would set up a tent under the nearby bridge and never worry about the real estate market again if it meant I didn’t have to see people raving about a 35-year old grooming a 14-year old. I would create an OnlyFans and join the bottom 99.5% of small, unsuccessful accounts if it meant that uninitiated watchers didn’t look to an emotionless pseudo-intelligent high-schooler as a flawless role model. I would become the world’s most authentic Indian sword-swallower ... if I could have walked up to an incel character, complete with four cardboard wish-fulfillment girlfriends, and erased them off the character sheet. And if I could find any reason to care the slightest fuck about Overlord IV and its myriad of predictable events and hollow characters, I would gladly swim all the way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and consume every last piece of debris until all the fishies and sea turtles from Kamchatka to Baja California can stay happy and clean.

Overlord IV is the season where Overlord has finally run out of steam. Overlord I and II were pretty bad, but they did introduce characters or something. And Overlord III at least introduced the “MC might actually be kinda evil” schtick. But every joke, story, or plot twist in Overlord IV can be traced to one of the past 3 seasons. Still pining for old guild members? Been there. Bluffing that he knows everything to his subordinates? Done that. What about having the Pandora dude do some crazy big-brain pretend-to-be-someone-else thing or having Nazarick be evil and kill a bunch of people? Don’t worry, Season 3’s got that covered for you. Character development? Novelty? What’s that? Just feed the fans the exact same Nestle Baby Formula you’ve always been feeding them and the stream of money is guaranteed! It’s honestly not that surprising nowadays when authors go “Fuck it, coming up with new ideas is too hard, my franchise might get flamed, better reuse all the same shit” and squeeze every last bit of milk out of those who stay.

Everything else about the anime can pretty much be copy-pasted from any other bad anime. Pacing is unbearably slow, characters never develop, CGI is bad (but better than before), baddies always act the same, backgrounds are generic, OST is kinda fine but doesn’t stand out, etc etc. Overlord IV looks identical to a low-effort moneygrab, and that is because it is one. The opportunity for passion and invigoration has long gone, and all the decisions are dictated by the dollar (or yen).

There isn’t much more to say about Overlord IV. I hope that if you liked the previous seasons of Overlord, you will like this one. To everyone else, I can confidently state that Season 4 is exactly like the other seasons. If you gave S1 a shot and liked it, then sure, why not. But if you didn’t like it, or haven’t watched the first season yet, then I’d recommend choosing something else to spend your precious time on.

(Reposted because MAL can't tell Non-Preliminary reviews from Prelim ones)
Tens of thousands of years ago, an underwater volcano poked its head out from the ocean for the first time. As the volcano erupted over and over, the lava cooled to create swaths of basalt, and the volcanic ash and fallout gradually condensed to form tuff. Birds, weary of the long flight over the ocean, used the island as a resting spot and brought plant seeds along. The island grew rich in foliage and fledglings, and one day, a small community of traveling humans set foot. Cut off from the rest of the world, they developed ... their own culture and religion, carving massive stone statues out from the tuff. These statues depicted a stoic, emotionless head, and their purpose is unknown, but the current consensus is that they served as symbols of power and authority. Hundreds of years passed on this island, and generations came and went. But the status quo could not last forever. One day, outsiders invaded the island, saw the statues, and took them to the great big world. Outsiders, fascinated by this puzzling sculpture, deemed it a curiosity and showcased them in museums. And sometime, somewhere, and for some reason, a Japanese passerby saw one of these historical legacies and thought, "Wouldn't it be amazing if the main character for our popular upcoming anime had a face that permanently looked like this cool rock?"

And thus Lerche presents Classroom of the Elite II to the world! Starring our favorite moai Ayanokoji and his harem of calcite cutouts, it has everything you could possibly expect in a garbage anime. Ayanokoji is your everyday hyper-gigachad high-schooler, capable of beating up all the baddies, wooing all the girls by simply existing, and showing everyone around him who’s the biggest alpha in town with his sheer intellect. I kid you not: I literally saw a YouTube video titled “How to be emotionless like Ayanokoji” the other day with tens of thousands of views. How does one possibly watch someone manipulate everyone around him and conceal everything with lies and end up thinking “Damn, I wanna be like him when I grow up” or something? This show feeds on those with an immature mindset: that they can get anything they want as long as they can know or control everything. Reality check: you can’t. Escapism is fun and all, but it should not be confused with reality.

Everything else is not that great either. The story is jarringly rushed, and plenty of important details are missing. Characters exist for the sole purpose of existing, never developing in any shape or form, just patching their problems with shoddy solutions that are convenient beyond practicality. Character designs are awfully plain. The music seems like it was created in pre-production instead of post-production. Ayanokoji’s presence blocks out all emotional outlets of the show. Pacing is consistent(ly bad). This anime is basically a power-fantasy in a school setting, with nothing interesting besides the premise.

Come to think of it, what is Ayanokoji even trying to do? What message does the show try to say? What makes this even remotely worth watching? For me, the answer for all these is “nothing”. I’m sure some smart aleck can explain the hidden reasoning behind everything and anything in this show, but I can’t be bothered trying to squeeze water from an obviously dry stone. Classroom of the Elite II is just another waste of time better spent elsewhere.

Spoilers below.

LycoReco is the obligatory “Cute Girls Do Cute Things and Occasionally Shoot Guns” anime of Summer 2022. I’ll be straight: I really like the “CGDCTaOSG” genre. It doesn’t matter if Chisato and Takina are two blockheads in a bunch, or if the Lycoris system makes absolutely no sense: as long as I get a fun Slice of Life without bullshit drama, I can live forever.

So how does LycoReco do? Let’s take a look at the story. Takina gets the boot from her agency for breaking orders to save a teammate. She is transferred to a small cafe run by Chisato, a fun, lighthearted ... airhead who is also an elite assassin. However, Chisato doesn’t like killing people, so she always uses special bullets. Takina wants to go back to the agency, but over time, Chisato’s goofy personality and kind heart makes Takina realize that there is more to life than following a trashy agency. Takina decides to abandon her goal and resolves to spend more time with Chisato. The two struggle with the ups and downs of the cafe, and one day, Chisato tells Takina that ever since she transferred in, her life was filled with colour. They sever ties with Lycoris completely, and the cafe becomes a place where customers can request the pair to help out on life problems. Chisato and Takina try their best to help; sometimes they are successful, sometimes they are not. As the years pass by, the two are exposed to the many facets of life and they slowly start maturing. One day, they confess their love to each other; they get married, and although the path ahead lies uncertain, the two are imbued with the courage and the wisdom to approach the future with a big smile and open arms.

If you couldn’t tell by now, that is not how the story actually went. Takina never realizes that Lycoris is a toxic organization filled with crap. She visited the building, saw that it was run by shitty managers and filled with shitty people, and for some unfathomable reason she still wants to go back. Chisato and Takina then get mixed up with Green-Hair Dude, whose personality traits seemed to have gone through a round of telephone in a drunk frat party. Green-Hair Dude does a lot of things that absolutely no one cares about for the next few episodes. He suddenly reveals that his motive is to make people realize that terrorism exists by giving a bunch of people guns in the street, revealing the Lycoris, and blowing up a big tower. However, he forgot that the average civilian in Japan has 50 IQ. After the government tells everyone that the guns and Lycoris were a promotional event (haha this person was literally shot thats so cool tickets for this new show are only $10), everyone somehow believes them, and everything goes back to normal. But what about the blown-up building? It turns out Green-Hair Dude is a softie and had a firework party instead of building-toppling explosions. Way to go, dude. That frat party must have been really interesting.

Additionally, we have this other character called Intimidating Father Figure. Intimidating Father Figure sets Chisato on a death timer, which she can only avoid by killing him. The show drags the drama for much too long, with Chisato going "oh dont worry about me i dont wanna kill anyone so id rather have this obviously evil guy live" for several episodes. How does this end? Does Chisato realize morality is more complicated than just not killing anyone? Does she convince Intimidating Father Figure that his obviously evil actions might actually be pretty bad? Nope, someone else kills him. Chisato's character development remains as slow as her brain.

The verdict? LycoReco, like every other CGDCTaOSG show before it, has plenty of bullshit drama. If this was about two girls doing everyday-life stuff with guns added in the mix, that would be amazing. Add that with the solid character designs, the fluid animation, and the top-tier OST and animation (all thanks to A-1's generous budget), and the potential is enormous. Instead, the show felt compelled to add dumb villians, dumb goals, dumb drama, and dumb plot holes, and those decisions resulted in yet another mediocre show. How can this show be improved? It's simple: remove main villians and long storylines. Instead, let the characters forge their own path, learning how to resist the temptations of group pressure and see what truly benefits them. As the characters learn that not all goals are headed in the right direction and not all stories can be firmly resolved, they will be free from being constrained by external plotlines and characters, letting their true personality shine. Let them find happiness with only each other to support as they navigate the tumultuous world we call life.

Spy x Family, despite how it wants to appear with its Cold-War setting and its bad-ass characters, is a very average anime. WIT’s and CloverWorks’s experience is evident from the smooth animation, beautiful and well-researched art, and the appealing OP and soundtrack. As animation studios, they have done their job perfectly. However, the same could not be said about the manga, whose story-telling abilities display visible flaws that carry on to the anime.

First of all: Where did all the spy plots go? We are routinely shown who Loid Forger is, but we are rarely shown who Twilight is. We rarely see the “Best in the ... West” spy in action, most of the time, the spy plot is completely unrelated to the main one. For example, the heist in the second episode is barely connected to the plot; all it does is explain why Loid leaves and to introduce the ring into the fray. The “stealing the papers” reference is just as useless; once again, it doesn’t tell us anything about Twilight. WIth that said, the show still manages to do well sometimes. The first episode uses the kidnapping encounter to demonstrate Twilight’s thought process in action. And the last episode hits the mark directly, tying the spy mission to his family one. We know Spy x Family is fully capable of integrating our spy and our family worlds, but aside from the first and last episode, it chooses to focus solely on the family world. However, succeeding in creating family interactions that stand out is very hard in the anime genre. Yor’s character, while certainly not shallow, is still far from the best deuteragonists anime has to offer. Her background as an assassin is never explored in the show. Anya is quite well-developed, but the school setting the story places her often confines her character to dealing with well-explored tropes. And Loid and Yor’s (and Anya’s) progress on trusting each other more has progressed slower than how the East German economy did in the 1980s.

Spy x Family is also not very funny. Anya’s telepathy is confined to reacting: she reads the minds of one of her parents, is shocked by their thoughts, and maybe says a line or two. But her role is all but passive. What if there was a whole episode where she, trying to please one of her parents after mind-reading what they want, goes out on an adventure and gets mixed up in a secret police plot without the help of her parents? That would be entertaining, and it would also tell us much more about Anya and her powers than the current story does. But no, all we get are student scenes, which have been explored so thoroughly in anime that every comedic interaction is practically a trope in and of itself (And don’t get me started on the headmaster, who uses the word “elegant” like how a newfound critic uses the word “pretentious”: all the goddamn time). Aside from Anya and school, there is practically no comedy to be found, except for the story with Yor’s brother, which I still found quite entertaining despite being predictable.

The genre of Cold War-era spy films is extensive, and it has plenty of tropes that are novel to anime. But Spy x Family never reaches out to use them, instead sticking to the tropes it knows well. Spy x Family seems different with its Cold War-vibe, and that may be slightly true, but it is largely just another family + school anime. If you’re looking for a family/SoL anime with a different setting, I would recommend Spy x Family. But if you’re looking for a unique spy anime, I would still recommend it, but you might not be getting what you’re hoping for.

If you were to ask if Komi could represent a realistic human being, then the answer is yes, and you have to look no further than yours truly. Five days ago, a strain of COVID viruses had decided to ambush me, and the barrage of coughs that followed had been too much for my poor throat. Since then, I’ve been left without a voice, unable to talk directly with any of my friends (not that I directly met any, as I was in quarantine). I resorted to expressing my ideas through writing (texting), and with the help of my friends, I was able to discover ... joy and happiness even in my deepest times of despair.

Well, I still don’t have a friend who is a psychopath that tries to sexually assault me every other day of the week. But I’m working on it.

The second season of Komi Can’t Communicate largely suffers from the same mistakes as the first, and there is no greater offender than Komi herself. She is, to put it bluntly, a completely whitewashed version of the disorder that she supposedly represents. Throughout the entire series, Komi’s “communication disorder” not once inconveniences her in any serious way. Let me illustrate an example straight from the story. If you couldn’t talk to anyone and you needed to find a group for an upcoming trip, what would you do? Would you hope to merge with leftover people to form a group? Or would you skip it and try doing something interesting in the meantime? Well it doesn’t matter, because the 20+ people who do nothing but beg and plead for your attention have shockingly and unexpectedly decided to beg and plead for your attention. Oh, and the teacher says that the groups would be a lottery this time around, even though she literally said “tomorrow, we will pick groups” the day before without mentioning it. What about if someone came up to you for conversation, but you were too scared to respond? Maybe you’d hope that they would understand your struggles, or maybe at least shrug it off and leave with no bad impressions. But no, they hail you as a “Communication Master” and regard your communication issues as the holiest teachings in the East. These events are neither humorous nor ironic; it’s ignorant bullshit at best and straight up insulting at worst.

And I don’t mean to speak straight from speculation myself. I’ve volunteered in helping children with autism and similar issues socialize with others, and I can say Komi Can’t Communicate is so ignorant it’s truly pitiable. Communication issues affect not only speaking, but writing and gesturing as well. To put it broadly, they affect the ability to express general ideas into a set of words or actions. It seems like the manga author saw someone who was selectively mute (someone who chooses not to talk publicly, but can write) and thought “Hey, that’s cool, do they have a communication disorder or what?” And even if the anime was about the selectively mute, it would still be inaccurate; people who are selectively mute tend to talk to people they know well, such as family or close friends. To say I feel peeved about this portrayal would be an understatement. When people with communication disorders are depicted as perfectly beautiful, perfectly capable of communicating non-verbally, and unaffected by any prejudices or stereotypes about them, it doesn’t help anyone with a real communication disorder, who are usually normal in appearance and unable to accurately express their thoughts in any way. There are many societal norms that prejudice against people less than able to talk, and Komi Can’t Communicate does nothing to dispel them.

The other characters are also poorly done. Tadano’s interactions with Komi remain unchanging. It seemed like Tadano started to become a bit more outspoken when he became friends with Katai, but their relationship sadly became milked for homosexuality jokes. Yamai promotes an atrocious double standard. Najimi’s character remains ultra-flat and generic, and Onemine’s only noteworthy role is Tadano and Komi’s fallback. Everyone else just does not meaningfully contribute to the story and character development.

One last thing I want to discuss is how the show uses absurdity. I’m a big fan of absurdity in all forms of media; it can convey a message in a way conventional storytelling cannot. Take the famous potato chip scene in Death Note. It, along with being absolutely hilarious, showed that Light has the capability to fully counter L’s attacks; in all prior ones, L had managed to make progress. Or take Iino’s misunderstandings in Kaguya-Sama S2: all of them helped freshly establish her character’s relationships with the rest of the student council. Looking at the absurdities in Komi-san, it is safe to say that they all serve no purpose - the cat scene did not tell us anything new about Komi’s character, the snowball and card game scenes repeats the “Komi beats everyone else” joke, and the masculine pose scene barely develops Tadano. These scenes are all but pointless, only rinsing the same ideas over and over again.

After watching the first season, I had hoped that the show would start focusing on quality instead of quantity, but with 100 potential friends to develop, the show’s direction was all but set in stone. Komi Can’t Communicate misses every single mark: it fails to accurately depict communication disorder, develop any of its characters, and introduce any new ideas. This is compounded by the repetitive soundtrack, the intrusive text boxes, and the ever-abundant still frames. Thus, Komi Can’t Communicate can be best described as a thorough waste of time. All I pray for is that it doesn’t get worse.

If Ya Boy Kongming! can give us one insight about the business world, it’s that it is competitive and ruthless. This can be applied not just to the music industry, but also to the anime one, where producers employ their various stratagems to entice the populace. Of these, the most significant one in the show is frontloading; by allocating more technical and creative resources to the premiere episode, the show can stand out among the others and attract a sizable audience efficiently.

However, this stratagem comes with a fatal flaw, and it is not too difficult to discern what it is: the quality sharply drops as ... the show progresses. After the (must I say almost perfect) premiere, cracks start forming. The second episode contains numerous still shots. The comedy starts tiring in the third, with the strongest element of the show, Kongming’s absurdist genius, becoming overused. After the third, the show rightfully attempts to solve this by shifting focus towards the other characters, but the show never replaces Kongming’s striking presence with anything, instead choosing to delve into several generic and uninspired side plots.

So what went wrong? After all, multiple shows have created a great premiere while still maintaining the quality of the later episodes. The mistakes made in this show can be attributed to several factors.

The first, and certainly the most understandable one, is that Ya Boy Kongming! is P.A. Works’s first anime based on a manga, as opposed to a novel or an original work. Manga is unique in that it provides the outline for the anime’s scenes; although this relieves the pressure of storyboarding substantially, scenes that might be slightly challenging to draw become nightmarishly difficult to animate. Crowd scenes are extremely taxing, and it seems like an excessive importance was placed on its faithful adaptation instead of drawing the line somewhere and moving on, a flaw above all caused by inexperience.

The second is that the show’s comedy goes all-out in the first episode. Granted, this does not mean that the first episode was bad; I had a blast watching it. But good comedy is not an infinite resource. Good comedy is rooted in the nature of the characters, and thus a joke needs to reveal a little more about the character to be fresh. For anime adaptations, adding in new and creative jokes becomes unreasonable after a certain point in production, as the character needs to be slightly changed to accommodate it, wasting time that can be spent elsewhere. Therefore, by expending all of its quality jokes early on, the show leaves its later episodes devoid of fresh comedy and fresh character development.

Lastly, the show’s solutions to the characters’ problems are all but shallow in the last few episodes, further widening the gap in quality. The characters these episodes focus on are Eiko, Kabetaijin, and Nanami. Their goals are all made clear early on: Eiko needs to find her voice, Kabetaijin needs to find a motivation to rap, and Nanami is stuck between her desire to be herself and her desire to progress in the music industry. Although all three dilemmas are quite interesting and complex, the solutions that the characters eventually take are all surface-level. What makes the screen better than online forums at answering questions is that the screen not only provides examples or scenarios of these solutions, but it also captures the essence of these characters more than words or descriptions of scenarios could ever achieve, allowing us to understand the solution intuitively. The solutions in Ya Boy Kongming! never reach this level, as it focuses too much on the situation instead of the spirit of the characters.

All this is not to say Ya Boy Kongming! was a terrible show. As stated before, the first episode was extremely fun to watch, with Kongming’s remark about the blockchain and his Wiki page cracking me up. The OP is groovy and full of personality, and while I am not fond of chibi style, I found the music in the ED to be catchy. The OST fits the tone and is never intrusive, and the artstyle, especially for scenes related to Eiko, is vivid. And by focusing on music production, the show breathes new life into the stale music genre. However, the show’s aggressive frontloading and its consequences are too evident to ignore. As Sun Tzu said in his Art of War, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” Ya Boy Kongming, by going all-out on its first few episodes, has neglected its purpose and production, and so like the defeated warriors, cannot convert its initial momentum into any long-term goal. And while ending a review with a quote is corny, I could find no more fitting way to sum up my disappointment with this show’s wasted opportunity.