2023 Spring Premiere Digest
This is a season of meteoric highs and nightmare lows.
Reviews Category
Results-
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Oshi No Ko – Episode 1
My feelings veered wildly between “Love this!” and “oh NO!”, settling on loving it. Oshi no Ko powerfully explores women’s emotional labour in the idol industry and more broadly.
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The Marginal Service – Episode 1
Just a bag of police brutality-flavored yikes.
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Dead Mount Death Play – Episode 1
Dead Mount Death Play has managed to put so many conceptual hats on top of one another that it’s come round to being kind of entertaining.
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Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion – Episode 1
Raeliana is a great protagonist, but it’s a shame that the animation production isn’t as good as it wants to be.
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Insomniacs After School – Episode 1
How it fares will depend on a couple of key things: how it handles its love interest, Isaki, and how it handles the theme of mental health and isolation that underpins the whole premise.
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Stella of the Theater: World Dai Star – Episode 1
World Dai Star is interested in the actual process of acting, of how actors inhabit the minds of their characters and use all the tools of physicality and stagecraft to create the artifice of inner life. And it is a joy to watch in this way.
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A Galaxy Next Door – Episode 1
On paper, A Galaxy Next Door sounds like a cliché rom-com where a magic wife fixes a sad boy’s problems. And it very well could turn into that, but this premiere is a lot more charming—and way more relaxed—than its synopsis would have you believe.
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Rokudo’s Bad Girls – Episode 1
There are glimmers of interesting thought here, but not enough to keep the show from collapsing under the burden of its own premise.
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Too Cute Crisis – Episode 1
Do you like watching cute animal videos?
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Summoned to Another World for a Second Time – Episode 1
The possibilities are endless but sadly it’s obvious this show isn’t heading in that direction.
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The Café Terrace and Its Goddesses – Episode 1
This show is bad in an interesting way, in that it reveals the interfaces between sexism and capitalism. Just go with it.
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Magical Destroyers – Episode 1
Magical Destroyers is simultaneously A Lot and very little at all.
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MASHLE: Magic and Muscle – Episode 1
Fantasy allows us to ask exciting, imaginative “what if?” questions, like “what if this guy punched a wizard in the face? Would that be funny or what?”
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Otaku Elf – Episode 1
It’s a supernatural comedy first and foremost, but that silliness is grounded in characters that feel like characters rather than one-off jokes.
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Opus.COLORs – Episode 1
Nothing bums me out quite like shows with unrealized ambition.
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My One-Hit Kill Sister – Episode 1
I’m watching a generic isekai! I’m watching an incest show! I’m watching the combination generic isekai incest show!
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Yuri Is My Job! – Episode 1
Oh, there’s some fun to be had with this premise.
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The Legendary Hero is Dead! – Episode 1
I would rather chew off my own fingernails than watch another episode of The Legendary Hero is Dead. Or someone’s fingernails, anyway.
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KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World – Episode 1
Some wonders cannot be described, only seen.
