I have heard good things about Shangri-La Frontier, might have to check that one out.
I am a total sucker for silly isekai premises, but the pig isekai just seemed a bit too Inukai-san's Dog for me. I was planning on waiting to see how it was received before investing time in it. Thank you for being brave enough to wade into the unknown and report back for the rest of us. Not all heroes wear capes.
This one is on my to-watch list purely because it comes from Takahiro Oomori and I love both Baccano! and Durarara. Good to hear that it is being well-received. I think I am planning on waiting for its run to finish and then binge it.
Agreed completely on the fan service of Viola (proof). Hopefully we get a comfy, fantasy slice of life going forward.
I hadn't heard of Only Yesterday previously and it definitely looks interesting. Glad to hear you are soldiering on through your HBO Max catalog and that you are enjoying Eminence! They have really done the adaptation well through enhancing the humor through anime-only additions. Looking forward to some of the upcoming arcs which are some fan favorites.
Alright, this episode wasn't as annoying in its transitions as last episode, but they still felt disruptive. There were some that the scene would cut away to a spinning face transition only to come right back to the same scene. It just breaks up the flow of things and feels out of place. I get that this is adapting a 4-koma, but you don't need to intrusively mark the transition between pages like that, just string them along into a cohesive plot. It has been done before well (Tomo-chan and Bocchi the Rock are both 4-komas), but it feels jarring here.
In any case, Grind seems like a nice guy. I wish him the best of luck in his endeavors to stay the hell away from Alyssa and avoid Viola's wrath. Ganbare Grind!
I love the OP animation sequence. It really shows the lengths to which Rentaro will go for his family and showcases the personalities of the different girls. I had forgotten just how thirsty Hakari was in this story as it has been a little while since I read the manga (I'm not fully up to date). So far the show has done a good job capturing the absurdity of the source while retaining the wholesomeness of the interactions of our named cast of characters.
Also, the vice principal gag is really off-putting, especially when it is animated. I was not a fan of those parts of the episode. The good news is that I don't really remember her character really factoring into the story much going forward.
I haven't watched too many older shows this past week as I have been busy with work and trying to sample a lot of the new season's shows. I am still in awe of the VA work for Kotaro in Zombie Land Saga. That character is so off the rails and the voice work really lends to the air of insanity that surrounds him. Plus, it is the same CV as one of my other favorite characters, Okabe Rintaro from Steins; Gate.
As for this season's offerings, Frieren and Eminence are both really hitting for me. They are probably my favorite manga and LN series respectively, so I knew I was either going to like them or hate them, but I am so happy that the adaptations are of amazing quality. I also loved the premiere episode of 100GF, another great manga, so I am hoping that the quality stays high as I am planning on putting on episode 2 after I finish writing this post.
My wife and I started watching the new Kenshin (only two episodes in so far). We are both big fans of the original series, but the new one just isn't really doing it for us. It feels like it doesn't have the silly humor of the old series, but it doesn't compensate by doing something like upping the action sequences. It just kind of falls in this boring middle. People that have been watching it, does it get any better?
As a meta comment, I would like to thank those that have already and encourage those that haven't yet to participate in the survey about episode discussion posts. It is valuable feedback to help design the tools to help the community grow in a healthy and desirable way for us.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Any chance of pinning this and unpinning last week's thread?
I can speak as to what is likely the cause for Hirogaru being missing as I have messed around with the bot's code a bit. Hirogaru is listed as a Winter 2023 show (ref). I doubt the instance of holo that is posting here has loaded the winter 2023 shows. That would likely cause a deluge of posts of old episodes/shows that would need cleaning up. I don't think it is very easy to just load one show and have it ignore the previously released episodes.
As for Otona, sometimes there are shows that the bot seems unable to find reliably. Another example from this season would be Tearmoon as it never made a thread yesterday for it. The bot works by scraping a bunch of streaming sites and a public torrent tracker for newly episode listings, so it can sometimes miss stuff if the formatting of a site changes or if there is an unexpected naming convention of a show.
Full disclosure, the reason I am somewhat familiar with how the bot works is that I have been tinkering around with the code to try to improve some of these things. The bot was originally made for r/anime almost a decade ago, so there are now much better apis available.
EDIT: I just loaded the winter shows on a local copy of holo and it was able to pick up Hirogaru, but still not Tearmoon or Otona.
If I remember correctly, kbin doesn't allow bot accounts to federate by default. I don't know if there are manual exceptions that can be made or not.
This season of Eminence is starting out great. With all the story setup out of the way, the show can lean even harder into the comedy and general Cid tomfoolery.
I know AC has a reputation for being unpredictable, but I hadn't heard anything about The Kingdoms of Ruin. Surprised to see it jump out to the top of the chart like this over some big hitters (JJK, TEIS, Frieren). Time will tell how it shakes out as the season goes on.
Thank you!