Chatty AF 171: 2022 Summer Wrap-Up (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

VRAI: Hello and welcome to Chatty AF: The Anime Feminist Podcast. My name is Vrai Kaiser. I’m a managing content editor at Anime Feminist. You can find me on Twitter, where I post a lot of my freelancing work, @WriterVrai. And with me today are Chiaki and Peter.

CHIAKI: Hi, I’m Chiaki Hirai, one of the editors for AniFem. You can find me at @Chiaki747 or @AnimatedEmpress on Twitter. My main is locked but my alt is open, and for some reason my alt is starting to become more popular than my main.

VRAI: [Chuckles]

PETER: I’m Peter Fobian. I’m a manager of YouTube strategy and content at Crunchyroll and an editor here at Anime Feminist, and my Twitter is @PeterFobian.

VRAI: And we are here today to do the summer 2022 wrap-up podcast and put an extremely lackluster season to bed. If you’ve never joined us for one of these before, the general gist of it is that we start with our premiere digest, we work from the bottom on up for the season, and we tend to leap up to the higher shows just so that we have time to touch on sequels at the very end. 

Which means that today we are starting with When Will Ayumu Make His Move? because, Chiaki, you finished it, yes?

CHIAKI: Yes. And I know it’s in the Red Flags category, but I just wanted to kinda say, I wonder if this is more of a Yellow Flag territory than a Red Flag. I’ve overall enjoyed it. It’s extremely harmless fun once things between characters get pretty mellowed out as far as the pressures between trying to get people to date each other. Overall, I thought it was pretty sweet, and it ends on a nice note. So if you’re just in for some chill anime that’s, I guess, extremely heterosexual but it’s fine, go for it.

VRAI: So if you’re a fan of Takagi-san and such, you will probably also possibly like this one?

CHIAKI: Yeah.

VRAI: I just do not like this guy’s work, so I’m just personally going to move on and that’s fine.

CHIAKI: Yeah. No worries.

VRAI: All right, but it’s nice to hear that you enjoyed it. And if folks were wondering how it ended up in Red Flags, you can check out our three-episode and premiere write-ups.

With that, we will move on up to Uncle from Another World, which, Chiaki, I know you dropped, and I completely understand. Basically, the reason we’re talking about it is that I wanted to touch on the production issues behind the scenes because this series is actually on hiatus right now. It only aired, I believe, seven episodes. And it is planning to start back up again.

So, what we know is that the animator Ippei Ichii, who also spoke up about issues of low pay at MAPPA around the Chainsaw Man trailer… This dude seems really willing to put himself out there about injustices in the industry, so at this point I always kinda feel my heart seize a little bit when I see his name because it’s nice that somebody is willing and/or in a position where they can do that and still get work. 

But he was going to be working on episode 10 with storyboarding and overseeing voice work, according to the ANN article, and basically said that he was planning to direct the anime’s tenth episode but pulled out of production because there was no animation staff available three weeks before the episode was slated to premiere. So, it sounds like a rough situation over there. 

I think there’s a little bit more to it, post this article, but it seems like this is a particularly egregious case of the buckling level of strain the industry is under right at this moment as the COVID shutdowns start to catch up with productions.

CHIAKI: And I think one thing to keep in mind about his critique of this is, yes, this is supposedly because of the COVID shutdowns, but the production committees, the people who are in charge of allocating these resources, need to do their jobs, to, even if under strain, find alternatives and people to work on these episodes, and that wasn’t happening. That’s what he was really pissed off about.

VRAI: There have been allegations, which we can’t confirm or deny, that the studio Atelier Pontdarc and the production heads here have kind of been using COVID as a cover for poor management. So, it’s rough all over.

All right. And that’s where that is. [Chuckles] I have no good segue out of that; it’s bad!

Moving up, Parallel World Pharmacy or My Stepmom’s Daughter Is an Ex [sic]: was there anything you wanted to say about either of those?

CHIAKI: Peter, you have anything?

PETER: I don’t know. I didn’t watch Stepmom’s Daughter, but as far as Pharmacy at least, I wouldn’t say there’s too much that’s new. I do want to say that I resent any piece of media where a society intelligently deals with a pandemic illness.

CHIAKI: Yeah.

PETER: [chuckling] Just the audacity of them making that now of all times.

CHIAKI: And also, they got out of the pandemic in, what, four months?

PETER: Was that even four months?

CHIAKI: [Laughs]

PETER: God, it was like two episodes.

CHIAKI: It’s like, “Yeah, hey! The noble said, we’re done! Masks off! We’re done! It’s eradicated! We cured the Black Plague!”

PETER: Well, yeah, but it was true when they said it, as opposed to reality.

CHIAKI: Yeah. And it’s truly a fantasy because everyone actually wore masks.

PETER: Yeah, they were told to wear a mask and they did it. One guy even was like, “Why am I wearing this?” and then he realized that there was a good reason and he came around to it on his own. I don’t—

[Chuckling]

PETER: When was this written? [Chuckles] I just don’t know.

CHIAKI: I mean… Like, I know—

VRAI: So it’s truly a fantasy series, is what you’re saying.

PETER: [crosstalk] Yeah, that’s the most fantastical element of the entire series, was in the entire three episodes. Yep, they do the bubonic plague thing. He punches out the bubonic plague somehow. 

I kind of wish they had… I don’t know. It’s always like there’s some good ideas there, like they introduced a character named Miss Black Mold, who should have been in the series the whole time (maybe some foreshadowing at least), who was just growing mold all day and couldn’t get any research funds, and then it turned out she’d accidentally grown penicillin. The main character was like, “Oh, somebody working in mold. Maybe they have penicillin.” And she did. She just didn’t know what she had.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Cool.

PETER: So that was pretty convenient. Yeah, it took like ten minutes. So I feel like maybe if they built that up… because she was a really cool character who got maybe five minutes of screen time to serve a narrative purpose. So, that said, [I] like Miss Black Mold, though.

CHIAKI: I feel like this was definitely a novel that was adapted [and] they just kind of wanted to get through it.

PETER: Yep.

CHIAKI: Which is too bad. It really could have used a little bit more thought and direction, and it could have been something better, but this is what we have.

VRAI: All right, I will guess we will move on from that, then. Up to the top of the Yellow Flags category, which is Call of the Night, a series that is A Lot.

PETER: Yep.

CHIAKI: The more I watch, the more I am skeeved, honestly. You know?

VRAI: Yeah. Yeah, you want to expand?

CHIAKI: I think it just really goes back to the fact that there are so many people falling over to win over this 14-year-old kid. Right?

VRAI: Yeah.

CHIAKI: Like, all the adults, the vampire hunter, the vampires, they’re all really cool. But then…

PETER: They’re all Licorice Pizza.

CHIAKI: Yeah. And then you get to deal with sort of a gender-ambiguous, assigned-male-at-birth vampire who’s just kind of… He’s queer, and it’s cool, but then you realize he’s kind of like the worst asshole, the worst predatory asshole ever.

PETER: By far.

VRAI: Yeah, he is gender nonconforming as fuck, but also, he’s kind of running his polycule like a cult. And that kind of sucks. [Assumes a deadpan tone] And of course, naturally, this is a character who is referred to with she/her pronouns for most of the series until we do a genitalia reveal. Love it.

CHIAKI: I will say, on the Japanese side, since I’m just listening, that wasn’t generally an issue. I think it’s more of an issue with subtitling, but—

VRAI: I got you. So this is more of a no-pronoun situation.

CHIAKI: I think that was the case, yeah. I mean, I wasn’t watching too closely, but I didn’t really notice it until I was like, “Oh, wait, what?” [Chuckles]

VRAI: Yeah, fair. Ah, yeah, I didn’t… So, I dropped the anime, but I have kept up with the manga because they have it at the library and it takes maybe 20 minutes to read an entire volume as opposed to watching a single episode. And I did read all eight volumes. The ninth one just came out, but there’s an extremely long waiting list because it’s the latest volume.

So, reading the manga, right… I mentioned last time that it’s a little easier because you can kind of skate over the skeezy fanservice stuff that the anime spends a lot of time on. So, doing that, I can kind of see what people find appealing about this show. I think it has a sense of melancholy about it in its best moments and sort of hits on depression and this question of “What is it to feel like you don’t belong, to feel like you’re a freak if you don’t necessarily know how to love someone?” Multiple characters come up as ace or aro coded in some way. 

And as the series goes on, it does get better about one thing that I kind of wanted from it from the beginning, which is writing Nazuna as basically emotionally 16 so her relationship with Kou feels less creepy that way, but it doesn’t ease the fact that you have all these extremely emotionally and physically adult women still hanging all over him, and that’s gross and uncomfortable. 

And there are queer characters besides Hatsuka, the gender-nonconforming vampire. There are lesbians later in the series, but that’s also frustrating because one of them is a sad lesbian who’s pined for her dead love who didn’t feel that way about her ever since. And I hate that!

CHIAKI: Oh, well.

VRAI: Yeah. It’s really frustrating, this series, because when it’s good, I can vibe with the kind of “Who wants to live forever?” type story that it’s playing around with in occasionally interesting ways, but then it keeps doing shounen bullshit at really crucial, emotionally tender moments in ways that feel kind of like a punch, because it lulled me into a state of wanting to invest in it, and that sucks more than a series that I just am flipping through nonchalantly and isn’t trying to hit on those big themes. Does that make sense?

CHIAKI: Sure.

PETER: Yeah, I agree. And I think I was really vibing with the series at the start because of its focus on people who go out at night, their problems with academia or work culture, social stresses and the appeal of the liminality of spaces during the night where you can do things that you couldn’t otherwise do just because of a lack of crowd or traffic or whatever. 

But I feel like most of that disappeared in the second half. It was just more and more like “Romeo and Juliet with vampires” / “this weird harem thing where all these women are hanging off this 14-year-old boy for some reason.” It is strange that Abe died and suddenly we have an anime about the undead having stress about reproducing.

VRAI: [Chuckles]

PETER: I wonder if there’s anything to that.

VRAI: I mean, the manga did start in 2019, but…

PETER: True. I understand the timing…

VRAI: [Laughs]

CHIAKI: Seems very prophetic.

PETER: I don’t believe in coincidences, is all I’m saying. Yeah.

VRAI: [chuckling] Okay.

CHIAKI: Yeah, I mean, I do also agree with you on that, that I think the beginning of this series felt a lot more grounded, a little bit more personal to Kou. But it increasingly becomes the “What’s up with the vampires?” hour towards the end. I will say, I did break out my trench coat to pseudo-cosplay Ogura yesterday while I was on camera. [Correction: This character Chiaki is referring to is Uguisu]

PETER: Nice.

CHIAKI: It’s a good look.

VRAI: Anko is very cool and sexy aesthetic-wise, which makes it very sad that also she sucks.

CHIAKI: Yeah.

PETER: Probably the worst perpetrator, I would say, among all of the adult women.

VRAI: Yep.

CHIAKI: [Sighs] Why is she such an icon?

PETER: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Are either of you going to keep up with the season 2 that is definitely coming because this anime was a huge hit?

PETER: Was it a huge hit?

VRAI: I think so.

CHIAKI: I’ll be there for the vibes because I’m here for the vibes.

VRAI: Fair.

PETER: I don’t know if it was a huge hit. I don’t think I’ll watch a season 2, though. I think I pretty much… The thing that drew me to the anime in the first place was almost gone by the end of the series, so I doubt it will suddenly… If it rushes back let me know, but I doubt it.

VRAI: Yeah, I’m still up with the manga for now. It just got into some interesting Nazuna-related flashbacks.

PETER: Ooh.

VRAI: But we’ll see how much longer it continues to also occasionally slap me across the face.

All right. That is the cherry on that for now, then. Yakuza’s Guide to Babysitting. Chiaki, how did it fare at the end?

CHIAKI: It reminded people that this is a show about yakuza at the very end.

VRAI: [amused] Okay.

CHIAKI: [Chuckles] With a sudden kidnapping plot that just gets… (Kirishima, was it?)

PETER: Yeah.

CHIAKI: (Kirishima, right? Yeah.) …to get angry and start punching people. Yeah!

VRAI: All right!

CHIAKI: Otherwise, I mean, it’s fine. It’s exactly what you expect probably.

PETER: They kind of foreshadow the thing where Yaeka would be put in peril at some point because of the connection to the yakuza. I don’t know how I really feel about that as part of the premise at all. 

On one hand, it sort of feels kind of inevitable that that would happen. On the other hand, it felt really exploitative, kind of putting this character in danger just to create some drama for the main character, especially because it was at the designs of a character who, correct me if I’m wrong here, seems to have kind of a homoerotic obsession with Kirishima.

CHIAKI: Yes. Very Majima vibes, if you played Yakuza.

VRAI: So, when does he show up as a stripper in a nurse outfit, then?

CHIAKI: [deadpan] That will be season 2.

VRAI: Ah.

PETER: [crosstalk] Yeah, yeah, I guess, season 2 content incoming. Right now, he just orchestrated Yaeka getting kidnapped and having her… What did the guy…? Did he…? He hit her on the head, right? She got a concussion or something.

CHIAKI: Well, they were holding her hostage and dropped her and…

PETER: Beating up Kirishima, yeah.

CHIAKI: Yeah. But you could see this coming from like a mile away. He was in the shadows constantly going, like, “Kiryu-chan!” from episode 4 or something. [Chuckles] So, it’s like, oh, there’s something finally happening and we’re just doing this because it’s the end of the season and we need drama to have people keep watching, I guess. Which is, I think, one of the biggest crimes in anime.

PETER: Worked, too. Feels gross. But yeah, the rest of it was pretty sweet, I guess. [Chuckles]

CHIAKI: It was weird. I mean, it had its nice moments. It had its nice moments. They became YouTubers for a period of time.

PETER: Yeah. Just that last story arc, I think, I didn’t quite like how they… I feel like they could have done it without it feeling that gross, but it felt a little gross.

VRAI: Teppen? I know that you wrote out your feelings about this, Chiaki, so if you just kinda want to gloss, that’s fine with me.

CHIAKI: Everything makes sense at the end. If you’re interested in watching a long con of an amazing narrative experience, go for it. It left me going, “What the hell just happened?” and it was funny.

VRAI: [crosstalk] I love anime like that.

CHIAKI: It’s hilarious. Well, it’s hilarious when you look back at it. I wasn’t laughing when I was watching it, which is the crime of this show.

VRAI: Fair. All right. Shine On! Bakumatsu Bad Boys. It sucked at the beginning and sucked in the middle. How did it do at the end?

CHIAKI: I mean, it got worse.

VRAI: Okay! How did it get worse again?

CHIAKI: It just got so forgettably pedestrian by the end. It had nothing up its sleeve.

PETER: Yeah, I was thinking about it the other day, like how did this get made? It didn’t seem like it really had a concept or… It was like a premise without a story. You know what I mean? Usually when I see an anime, I can see what they’re trying to do or why they think it’ll become popular or, I don’t know, the gimmick they’re trying to do. Bakumatsu is just like, “Here’s a historic fantasy thing, but then we just kind of meander around for 12 episodes.” I don’t know. It was an unfinished idea.

CHIAKI: Everything was so canned. You could see everything coming. There was no twist whatsoever.

PETER: Yep.

VRAI: Mm. I got you: just extremely by the numbers. Everything you predicted would happen did in fact happen just like that?

PETER: Yeah.

CHIAKI: Yeah. And like, “Oh, we beat the bad guys. Everyone’s happy now. Yay!” And I’m like, I cannot care.

PETER: Yeah, it was like a canceled Shonen Jump manga.

VRAI: [Chuckles painfully]

CHIAKI: No, no, it would—

PETER: Where they have to wrap everything up really fast after it gets a 20-chapter run or something.

CHIAKI: [Chuckles] That’s true. But I would say it’s even worse than a canceled Shonen Jump manga because Shonen Jump wouldn’t have even picked it up.

PETER: Yeah, for sure.

VRAI: [crosstalk] Oh, wow!

PETER: It’s really surprising that they got the author of Shaman King to do character designs for this since… I don’t know. What did they bring to the table that attracted…? [Chuckles] I guess, just money. Just money.

CHIAKI: I mean…

PETER: Good for Hiroyuki Takei.

CHIAKI: Yeah, I guess?

VRAI: All right.

PETER: [crosstalk] What can you say? [Chuckles]

VRAI: Let us speak no more of it. I think that’s more than it deserves!

CHIAKI: [Chuckles]

VRAI: What about…? So, we are recording this on the day that Kdin Jenzen put out an extremely damning editorial about her time at Rooster Teeth. How did RWBY: Ice Queendom finish up?

CHIAKI: Was I the only person watching this?

VRAI: Yes. I promise after this I will talk and not bother you for a while.

CHIAKI: Okay. It kind of pulled through, like the same… As I said, the story needed to come to a close a little earlier than the end of the cour. And it did. They wrapped up around episode 11. The final episode is just like… the story continues, right.

VRAI: Gotcha.

CHIAKI: [Sighs] I didn’t really appreciate the pacing so much, because of this. It just felt like it was too drawn out. You know, Jaune becomes The “It” Boy…

VRAI: Again.

CHIAKI: Again. And ultimately, I’m just like, I don’t really care. Also, in the final epic battle, they ran out of funding.

VRAI: No!

CHIAKI: They totally…

VRAI: The funding was the whole draw!

CHIAKI: They totally ran out of funding. Within the last 30 seconds of the fight, everything goes to dogshit because you can tell… There was great sakuga moments, they’re just animating this complex action sequence, and then as soon as that kind of dies down and they’re going into the final moments of the battle, after the climax of the battle’s done, right, the characters are like weird scribbles. It is amazingly bad. [Chuckles]

VRAI: [exhaling] Hoo!

PETER: Yeah, the animation was really good in the beginning, but it did feel like they were in danger. I feel like the early signs is always… even if the animation is good, you can see the compositing doesn’t look that great. Like, if the characters in the background don’t seem to be moving together, that probably means they got the animation super late and weren’t able to really stick ’em together, because that’s like the last step, right. You saw that with Yasuke and stuff. 

That made me really nervous to start off with, watching the characters move past that cliff but it looked like it was two different worlds. It’s kind of predictable, I guess is what I’m saying.

CHIAKI: Yeah, I guess what I’ll say is they didn’t run out of money per se; they ran out of time. It absolutely meant, “Okay, we need to absolutely finish these really cool fight scenes, and this one that isn’t the focus of the fight scene, we can kinda fudge it because everyone’s going to be paying attention to that scene instead.” And the final episode very much kinda… [Sighs] I don’t know. It just—

PETER: The food fight.

CHIAKI: Food fight. It was cute, I guess. But by then, I was just like, “Please wrap it up.” They do talk about, like, “Hey, can you talk about the racism aspect with all the beast people?” and it’s like “Ooh.” [Inhales]

VRAI: Didn’t they bring in having Blake be essentially the token representative for beast people from, as I recall, the first season of the web series and that came back for the anime?

CHIAKI: Yeah. They flat-out ask her to be the representative and liaison to better relations between beast people and humans. And she’s like, “Ah, I’d rather just be Blake,” which is fair. Which is fair. But I feel like this show is trying to talk about race, racism, and it just does not have the chops to do it at all, especially because it’s kind of an afterthought.

VRAI: Mm-hm. On the bright side, you got stuff you enjoyed out of the original RWBY that you went back and watched after this.

CHIAKI: Do you think I really enjoyed it?

VRAI: I never know with you sometimes.

CHIAKI: No, I had the original RWBY running while I was playing Final Fantasies XIV and grinding crafter quests.

PETER: Nice.

VRAI: Yeah, that’s the way to watch it.

CHIAKI: Yeah. So, to enjoy it means I was focusing on gathering supplies.

PETER: Made that Pactmaker gear?

CHIAKI: Yeah.

PETER: Nice.

VRAI: I mean, I still enjoy the podcasts I listen to while I’m farming for souls in Dark Souls, so… you know.

CHIAKI: Yeah. Okay.

VRAI: [Chuckles] Fair enough. It happened. It ended. Thank you for reporting in on it.

CHIAKI: Let’s hope we never have another season again.

VRAI: Hurray! There is nothing to report on Chimimo besides what we said in the midseason. Dee dropped it, not because it did anything particularly badly, but because it was more or less staying the course and she got caught up watching Bee and PuppyCat instead.

All right, as promised, I will do some talking now because this moves us up to Yurei Deco, a show that is good enough; I’m frustrated with it for not being better.

PETER: Yeah.

VRAI: I made special notes for this. I think—I think, ultimately, this is a very ambitious series that bit off a lot more than it could chew. I really, really respect Science Saru’s… what seems to be a baseline philosophy for its shows, wherein it includes a lot of very casually diverse worlds, in terms of race and ability, gender presentation, that kind of thing. 

It really is warming to see, in a way, how they are able to write it in a way that does feel very smooth and naturalistic and nobody has to make a shitty joke about the fact that Hack doesn’t have pronouns or Finn is extremely femme presenting. There’s a cool old lady who uses a robot to punch people, and that’s great! In that sense, I liked it. 

I liked the characters well enough, even though, Peter, I haven’t stopped thinking about the fact that Hack is “we have Ed at home” ever since you said it.

PETER: Sorry for…

[Chuckling]

VRAI: I think because the series wants to do so much, it ends up being this sort of amorphous Rorschach test that gives you what you bring to it. I was having a conversation with Dee, who liked this show more than I did but still felt mixed enough on it that, spoiler alert, it won’t be appearing on our summer recs list. 

And we were talking about Finn’s backstory. So, Finn’s motivation is that he originally started working in his disadvantaged neighborhood to try and fix this local generator that had malfunctioned and was causing pollution in the water supply. But because he tried to bring this to public attention, all it ended up doing was causing a lot of the sort of harmless but technically illegal things that were going on in his neighborhood to be shut down and the water is still polluted. And then everyone gets mad at him for this and drives him out of town, basically.

And so, to me, when I watched that episode at first, I really liked it until the rest of the community turned on him because I thought there was a lot there about how it can be really discouraging to be part of a vulnerable group, and if you are young and idealistic enough that you still believe that the system is going to help you and then it blows up in your face that can really hurt, and I felt like they handled that pretty well. 

And then it got to the scene where all of his neighbors are like, “This is your fault,” and “Never come back again. We’ll run you out of town on the rail. All we wanted was to keep our illegal phones, and you’ve ruined that for us.” So, to me the first time I watched it, what I brought to it was thinking about stuff like the Flint water crisis. 

And so, in that sense it felt very trite and manufactured that it had taken this big swing of commentary that it had had wanted to do and then sort of fumbled it by making “Ah, well, Finn’s the only one who realized what was going on because he doesn’t use a Deco. He can’t because he has motion sickness. And all these people who are plugged into their opiate of the masses are just too gosh-darn oblivious and small-minded.” And I hated that and I found it really condescending.

And then I… So, when Dee watched it, she brought to it thinking about the COVID… And by the way, I pulled Flint, but I think you could also easily talk about the fallout from the tsunami that’s still going on and activists are still trying to bring attention to in Japan. But so, when Dee watched it, she brought to it this idea about folks in the wake of COVID and this idea that people don’t want to wear masks because it’s inconvenient even though it would demonstrably be for the greater good. 

And in that light, the crowd scene hits a lot more truthfully as something that, “ah, yeah, we all watched this happen for two years and counting.” And so, it is a really, really hit-or-miss show depending on who’s watching it in a lot of key moments, and I don’t necessarily think that’s to the show’s credit when it’s dealing with capital-B, capital-I Big Ideas. 

On the one hand you could argue, if it’s holding up a mirror to society or whatever, isn’t that interesting? But if it’s so opaque that two people don’t get the same read on what it wants its central message to be, then maybe it’s failed at conveying what it wants to, you know?

PETER: Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, because I knew they were trying to make commentary in that part, but I don’t know, I just felt a very strange lack of thoughts or feelings in regards to what I was watching. Where I feel like normally, if a situation like that came up, I would have clicked with it more. I’m not quite sure how to describe what the sensation was like. It just completely missed me, I think, because they… I don’t really know if they had any idea of where they were going with it either. And this is something I am really tired of anime doing. 

I feel like they’re just obsessed with the moment in The Matrix where they go into the room with Colonel Sanders in it and just this moment where you meet the authority running the system and you make the appeal to authority, and then either everything just gets magically fixed by deus ex machina (the deus, I guess, being Colonel Sanders) or nothing happens. And both, I find equally frustrating.

VRAI: Yeah, this does basically have the same ending as Deca-Dence to an extent, where they get up to the system and the system in this case is like, “Yep. I, too, am tired. Here. You try!”

PETER: Yeah. “I was just waiting for somebody to appear in this room and ask me to stop. So I guess I’ll fix everything since you were so polite.” Yeah, it definitely pulled a Deca-Dence, Psycho-Pass, for sure.

VRAI: It’s frustrating. And this certainly insulted me less ending-wise than Deca-Dence did because as it went on it certainly became clear that this is a show meant for middle-grade audiences. And once I realized that, I was able to be a little more forgiving of how extremely broad-strokes it is, although then I found myself wondering: are kids who grew up with the internet from birth watching this intrigued or insulted? I just don’t know.

PETER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, with a younger audience, the fear of the ubiquity of the internet thing I don’t imagine would [chuckles] make any sense to them.

VRAI: And it does get a little bit less “Old man yells at cloud” than the first couple episodes, where it’s like, “Technology is a tool, but it shouldn’t be the only thing that’s important to you.” And I can respect it going for that. There are moments that I think work, but it’s such a frustratingly uneven series and the moments when it’d fail really hit a bitter chord, you know? 

I don’t know. I watched it. I don’t think I’d actively discourage people from watching it, but I’m not gonna go out of my way to recommend it to anybody either.

PETER: Yeah. I didn’t feel like it was bad. I just felt like I got nothing out of the experience, really, besides… I don’t know. The first couple episodes were charming. But yeah, they kept—

VRAI: We never got Hack’s backstory, and maybe they’re trying to do something there where it doesn’t matter, because you are who you are now and what’s important is the family they’ve made, but they sure did allude to it a lot to then just not go anywhere with it.

PETER: Oh, yeah. I got really nervous during the Alice in Wonderland scene with Hack. I was like, oh, what are they going to do here? But then it was literally, again, nothing. Just nothing happened. It was just like, “Oh, you better escape this mind palace so we can…” It was just an obstacle, I guess.

VRAI: Yeah. Yeah. That was a show. It’s right up there with… Oh, what was that show a couple of seasons ago that…? Tokyo 24th Ward!

PETER: Oh, yeah!

CHIAKI: Yeah! Okay.

VRAI: This is the good side!

[Chuckling]

PETER: Yeah. True. Yeah, that was the appeal to the authority. It was the girl that they had to save. And then she stopped being the authority or something. I actually can’t remember quite how that ended. Did she keep being in the computer?

CHIAKI: So, it was basically they realized that they sacrificed a girl to be in the computer because she died and her brain was going to be a waste to just bury anyway, and everyone realized that was a very terrible thing to do, actually. And so it’s time for everyone to sit down and think about what they’ve done…

PETER: And work together.

CHIAKI: …and work together.

VRAI: And we can reform the cops. It’ll be fine because our friend is in it now.

CHIAKI: And also, and also, the governor is sorry.

PETER: Yeah, yeah, he feels real bad, so we should forgive him for creating a police state. Yep.

VRAI: Yeah. Oh, so, yeah, Yurei Deco was an interesting, ambitious series. I gotta give it that much.

Lycoris Recoil is a show that I understand why people really, really loved it, but… And I didn’t hate it. I watched all of it. Mika is great, and I wish we could have had more of this fantastic queer Black disabled dad doing dad stuff and having a secret agent past—

PETER: He’s not disabled.

VRAI: —but it’s fine. [Catches on to previous statement] Right, he is…

PETER: He’s pretending to be disabled.

VRAI: He’s pretending to be disabled. That is quite the reveal at the end. 

But I don’t know. It reminded me a lot of Revue Starlight, the more I sat back and thought about it, because that’s a series and film that I quite liked. Well, first of all, Takina and Chisato are like if you swapped Karen and Hikari’s personalities but kept their plot roles the same (which I think has some problems for narrative momentum). But Revue Starlight, because it’s so crunched with the amount of characters versus the amount of time it has, sort of skates by on hitting on archetypes and trusting you as an invested viewer to bring what you know about those archetypes and kind of fill out what they’re suggesting rather than saying about the characters. 

And I think that is a lot of what Lycoris Recoil is doing, which I think is why people who bought into it are really into it, because they see this very intense fanfic-like life and interiority they’ve brought to these not-bad, very archetypal characters. Whereas for me, I didn’t really make that click with a lot of the cast, even though I do think Chisato’s pretty interesting. Takina exists. 

So, for me, it was this very cold viewing experience where I would sit back and think, “Oh. That was a cool action scene” and “This is an alright scene with character dialogue” and “There’s an homage that they’re making in that scene. This is the Legato and Vash scene from Trigun. All right.”

CHIAKI: Yep. Exactly the same feeling you have. I really enjoyed the visuals. Can I speak much about the actual content? Okay! Yeah! [Chuckles] It’s a show.

PETER: I feel like it had really strong vibes and really cool gunfights, and I think a lot of people just watched it on that surface level and enjoyed it, which, again, is fine. But it didn’t capture me the same way, so I was paying attention to the story, and I feel like it was pretty bad a lot of the time.

VRAI: Yeah, if I focus too hard on the tone, then it starts to get a little insulting vis-a-vis “Oh no, these girls are being gunned down in the line of duty and they give their all to war as child soldiers. And also, here is a fun action sequence where Chisato is having a bad day so she shoots a guy’s tire out. But don’t worry: we’re not thinking about how he might have wrecked or taken out people on the freeway behind him because this one is a comedy scene, not a drama scene. Move along!”

PETER: Well, and then at the end, Chisato straight-up tries to kill Majima unceremoniously after the big scene where she is definitely never gonna kill anybody. She didn’t know that he survived falling out of that tower, and that was meant to kill him. But there was no narrative weight to the fact that she decided and acted upon an effort to kill another human being. I felt like that was very strange, considering they were doing a Vash the Stampede with her.

VRAI: Well, no, because she didn’t let him die in the same way that Batman didn’t kill Liam Neeson back in Batman Begins.

PETER: [Chuckles] I feel like that—

VRAI: He could’ve gotten off of that train!

PETER: True. I made that comparison myself, but I feel like it’s worse because the train was running and he just didn’t save him, but in her specific case, it’s like she put him in the train and then started moving and then jumped out. She’s like, “Gravity will kill you. Also, I’m pushing you off.”

VRAI: [Laughs]

PETER: “But the gravity is killing you.” Yeah, just super weird. Also, Majima, I really hated how he got to be a zany villain when he was like, “Ah, I’m just murdering teenage girls. I really hate child soldiers, so I’m going to kill all the child soldiers.” [Chuckles] You fuckin’…

VRAI: Would you say he’s like a dog chasing cars?

PETER: Oh, God. I hate that.

[Chuckling]

PETER: Yeah, his plan…

VRAI: Do you think we live in a society?

PETER: … didn’t make sense. It sucked. I wish he had murdered the people running the frickin’ child social programs rather than the child soldier. That kinda makes more sense to me, but whatever.

CHIAKI: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, his entire plot makes no sense overall. Like, “Hey, I’m just gonna put out 4,000 guns into Tokyo and see what happens.”

[Chuckling]

PETER: And literally nothing happened with that either. There were like two shootouts with cops and the girls or something, and then I don’t even think they discussed what happened to all those guns after the fact.

CHIAKI: There’s like a one-liner of “We’ve recovered half the guns and we’re trying to find the other half.”

PETER: [sarcastic] Great, cool. Welcome to America.

CHIAKI: [crosstalk] I will say, this show could be interesting. And I hate that I would say this, but this show could be interesting if they made a season 2 and it’s just Chisato and Takina actually doing their own Gunsmith Cats kind of thing.

PETER: Yeah! Yeah. I wish they’d gone one way or the other.

CHIAKI: [crosstalk] That would be fun!

PETER: Either do Gunslinger Girls or Gunsmith Cats. Don’t try to do both because those are so different. So different!

VRAI: Specifically the Gunsmith Cats OVA, if you’re listening out there. Monkey paw.

CHIAKI: [Laughs]

VRAI: Just putting that out there. But yeah, I don’t… I can see why people were really into it. Big ups to all the folks who put out all that great Chisato/Takina fan art. It just did not click with me. And I think it’s kind of a mess that got by on how good it looks and the investment people brought to it from outside.

PETER: Much like Psycho-Pass.

CHIAKI: I just like guns.

VRAI: I’m just walking away from that.

PETER: [Chuckles]

VRAI: [Chuckles] Any final thoughts on that one before we move on?

PETER: Way too many, but that’s just beating a dead horse now.

CHIAKI: Don’t smoke Lycoris lilies. They’re poisonous. Do not.

PETER: [crosstalk] Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, don’t smoke spider lilies.

VRAI: [deadpan] Gosh, dream ruined.

Biscuit Hammer, I made you finish under duress. Is there anything…? Did it…? How?

CHIAKI: I feel like the story is picking up. If you get Stockholm syndrome and you’re watching this show because you have to, you kinda start getting invested and you start caring about the characters. I guess.

PETER: Yeah. Can’t even talk about how it finishes because it’s 24 episodes.

CHIAKI: Yeah, we’re still in the halfway point. Yeah, it feels like we’re getting into plot now, right. People are fighting; people are training. And so there’s a little bit more focus on the characters, which I think is what the show really needs. There are moments, though, that I’m still kind of like, “I feel like there were like four or five chapters that should have been here to develop this, to flesh this out,” because we’re just kind of going like, “Yeah, this is what we’re doing now.”

PETER: Yeah, amazing how fast paced it seems when it’s got twice as many episodes as Planet With.

VRAI: Yeah, I guess this is an opportunity to remind people that Planet With is good?

PETER: Yep. Watch Planet With.

VRAI: It has a Blu-ray now.

PETER: Mm-hm. Oh yeah.

CHIAKI: Oh! Okay! Nice. And just so you know, Vrai, my Crunchyroll subscription has expired, so you cannot force me—

VRAI: [amused] So you’re free?

CHIAKI: You cannot force me to watch this show anymore.

VRAI: I can’t; you’re free! Be free. You can watch the catgirl sword anime now. It’s okay.

CHIAKI: [crosstalk] Oh, hell yes. Oh, hell yes!

VRAI: Speaking of catgirls, Tokyo Mew Mew New, which I am still watching and, I think, will continue to watch when it has its second half in spring 2023. It really settles into itself in the back half, I feel like. 

Aoyama sucks less. I still think they keep giving him weird lines about Ichigo being a kitty, but it feels less like this kid sucks and more like the writers are just saddling him with pickup lines that are thematically relevant to our main character being a catgirl. So I started to forgive that. 

Quiche sucks, but I respect that it’s framed in this way where the audience can sort of swoon a little bit over this terrible boy and how they could fix him but the narrative is very firm on the fact that he’s a creeper. So that’s nice.

I don’t like Ryo, and that is down to the fact that this series has a consistent problem with the fact that the main girls are all voiced by fairly new voice actors who are talented but are bringing much more naturalistic performances and the dudes are all voiced by, like, 35-year-old industry veterans. And it works for the aliens, and Aoyama [has] gotten better. His voice is less frighteningly deep for a 15-year-old. But Ryo sounds like a 35-year-old man who smokes and it creeps me out when he hits on Ichigo.

CHIAKI: [Chuckles and sighs]

VRAI: So that’s a problem for me. The finale was nice. It had a lot of good friendship moments and it was like peak magical girl where we’re fighting the giant monster to save the day and save planet Earth, but also our friend needs to go on her date! That’s good shit. I’m here for that.

So, yeah, I think it’s shaping up into a pretty enjoyable magical girl series, albeit one that still occasionally feels like you can tell it’s glossing over stuff that had a lot more time to organically develop in a longer series. And also, please do continue to tell Discotek to license the original anime.

Oh, the other thing was that we did get confirmation from several commenters and stuff that, yeah, this new anime tones down the Chinese stereotypes around Bu-Ling a lot!

CHIAKI: [crosstalk] Oh, good.

VRAI: Which is deeply unfortunate for the old series.

CHIAKI: Oh, bad.

VRAI: Yeah. So, yeah, that’s where I’m at with that one. It’s fun. It’s just a nice, enjoyable show.

All right, that brings us not quite to sequels because we’re going to do a little talk about Edgerunners now.

CHIAKI: [Sighs]

PETER: [Chuckles]

VRAI: Enjoy!

CHIAKI: You want to start, Peter, or do you want me to?

PETER: I guess so. I’ve got really weird mixed feelings about this show, I think more in regards to the reaction to it than even maybe the show itself. I think I watched… it was Glass Reflection who had a video that was like, “It’s the most punk anime ever made,” which… 

[Correction: It was Mother’s Basement, not Glass Reflection] 

CHIAKI: Oh, God, no!

PETER: Yeah, I think he was editorializing, but also, no, it’s fucking not. Don’t even say that. What the hell are you…?

VRAI: [crosstalk] Akudama Drive is right there. How dare you.

PETER: Yeah, yeah, literally, not even the past two years could you say it’s the most cyberpunk anime. But he did make a good point, I think, which was Trigger was probably a good choice because they are one of the most punky studios. And between Beastars, Promare, Kill la Kill, they do have pretty… you know, they’re hit and miss on execution, but they are very, I would say, progressive and anti-authoritarian in their narratives, right? They do have a pretty punky series.

VRAI: [crosstalk] They try.

PETER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no matter how it rolls out, you can see the intention behind it and what they wanted to do. And it’s… Yeah, they’re trying.

VRAI: Row, row, fight the power, indeed.

PETER: It’s just bizarre to me that… I felt like the show was such a miss. And I don’t know who to point to, because apparently CD Projekt Red wrote it and they made a better story in their own game, executing on these same ideas, and then Trigger has done better stories on their side, so how did both come together to make something that was less than the sum of its parts?

CHIAKI: So, what I’m seeing here is that CDPR came up with the story and it was totally crap. I think it was an afterthought. It’s like, “Oh, we’re doing an anime tie-in. We gotta come up with a plot.” And so they came up with this. And, I mean, apparently the most interesting thing about Edgerunners is the fact that Trigger added in Rebecca into the story.

PETER: Yeah, but otherwise it was just a more poor execution of the main story of the video game.

CHIAKI: So, I feel like there just wasn’t energy from CDPR here, aside from, like, “Here’s the assets and here’s the stories. Figure it out.” And then, Trigger… yeah, as I call… as I say it, this show sure is cyberin’.

PETER: Yeah. [Chuckles] Cyberin’ all over the place.

CHIAKI: [Laughs]

PETER: Everybody’s cybering in this anime. [Chuckles]

CHIAKI: And they got the feel, they got the look down. But I don’t think anyone has the narrative… the chops to actually write convincing and powerful stories. Trigger cannot land its stories. And we know this. And I was totally expecting this to not. And that’s what I got, and I’m like, “Okay, yeah, this is about…” It’s what I got.

PETER: [crosstalk] [Chuckles] Well, when you say it that way—

VRAI: Did it end as a giant battle in space? How do we know it’s a Trigger anime?

CHIAKI: It does end in space.

PETER: Yeah, I guess it does end in space.

CHIAKI: [Laughs]

PETER: It’s just the final battle isn’t there, actually. That’s true. Again, it ends exactly the same as the video game! There’s a showdown in Arasaka Tower where you fight Adam Smasher. Literally, that’s the ending of the video game, too.

CHIAKI: Thanks for spoiling the video game for me.

PETER: [deadpan] Oh wow. Sorry.

VRAI: [Laughs] [deadpan] The video game you’ll play.

PETER: Yeah.

CHIAKI: No. Well, if it’s like… My joke is—or my serious thought is—if it’s $2.50 [pronounced “two-fiddy”], I’ll buy it on Steam. But there are so many things, and I’m fully… what’s the word where you say that you’re biased?

PETER: Uh, you would say you’re biased. I don’t know… [Chuckles]

CHIAKI: Full disclosure!

PETER: Oh, okay, I see, I see.

VRAI: Ah!

PETER: A disclaimer. Yeah, okay.

CHIAKI: Yeah. Full disclosure: I did help write my own cyberpunk…

VRAI: You know, I’m giving you carte blanche to go ahead and plug Hard Wired Island, a tabletop RPG that is a lot more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk 2077.

CHIAKI: Yeah, exactly.

VRAI: I give you the license to do that.

CHIAKI: Thank you for plugging the game for me because I wasn’t going to. But please buy it. It’s on Itch.io. The thing where…

PETER: [Obscured by crosstalk] …bona fides than a disclaimer? Because you’re saying, “I have written a good cyberpunk story” and this is not that good.

CHIAKI: [Laughter] Well, I only advised on it.

PETER: Okay. Oh, I see.

CHIAKI: But to speak on this, Cyberpunk 2077 and 2020 are fundamentally flawed, right? Those products—that media—came from a period where cyberpunk meant the Yellow Peril, fighting against “the Asians” coming to take over the American way of life. And CDPR, Trigger, everyone swallowed it whole and spat out Cyberpunk 2077 and Edgerunners. 

So it cannot be punk. That is my fundamental thing here. It cannot be punk because it’s based on an old-hat mentality of what cyberpunk is. It has no bearing to what’s going on today in society. And it is so frustrating for me to see people saying, like, “This is so edgy!” and “This is what cyberpunk is!” It’s like, no! Cyberpunk… The “punk” in cyberpunk is that you have to… for me, anyway, it’s about making a meaningful fight, and there is no meaningful fight here.

PETER: Yeah, it’s literally just the main character is told that they’re the main character and they need to do something great, which drives them to, I don’t know, just be a very generic, gormless hero.

CHIAKI: And I said that Lucy is there to keep David interesting because otherwise this show falls apart. And then Lucy isn’t even that interesting in the anime at the end.

PETER: She gets major sidelined. Yeah.

CHIAKI: It’s hilarious that literally the thing that saved this show was Rebecca.

PETER: Yep. Trigger’s fun new character.

CHIAKI: [Laughs] Rebecca!

VRAI: People love to make memes of that there pigtail girl.

PETER: Yeah, she’s fun.

CHIAKI: [Sighs] I’m gonna go reinstall Payday 2 again.

VRAI: There are cyberpunk stories that embrace transhumanism, and they just don’t seem to be the ones that ascend to popular consciousness, and it’s frustrating!

CHIAKI: It’s all about the neon and the grunge… and Harrison Ford.

VRAI: [crosstalk] And the boobs. Do not forget the boobs.

CHIAKI: And the boobs. And the boobs. I mean mostly it’s— There are so many boobs in this show! I think this is absolutely a show where Trigger said, “Hey, how lewd and violent can we get before somebody tells us to tone it down?”

PETER: Oh, yeah. I like… In the game, there are netrunner jumpsuits that you wear. It’s what you wear when you’re doing the brain-hacking thing that regulates your body temperature and stuff, and they have special chairs. 

And they do have the tubs full of ice, but you wear the netrunner suit and you get into the tub of ice, and that’s only for extreme netrunning or something like that. But I don’t know what changed or if Trigger just said “What if they were naked in a tub of ice instead? I think that would up the visual appeal a bit” or something.

CHIAKI: And they even say it. They were saying—

PETER: Oh, yeah, yeah. She said “I don’t like wearing the suit” or something like that.

CHIAKI: Yeah, it’s like, “Hey, Lucy, when are you gonna buy yourself a suit?” and it’s like, “Never.”

PETER: “Neither. I’d rather be naked on screen.”

CHIAKI: Yeah. Also, everyone’s naked in their apartments because I guess they can’t afford pajamas in Edgerunner’s world. Like pajamas are too expensive or something.

VRAI: [deadpan] Tragic.

CHIAKI: Nobody wears clothes [obscured by crosstalk].

PETER: [crosstalk] That’s the real capitalist hellscape: is nobody can afford sleepwear.

[Chuckling]

VRAI: I feel like I should end this segment by saying I liked Promare.

PETER: Yeah, Promare’s good.

VRAI: Please, Trigger fans.

CHIAKI: [crosstalk] Promare’s fine.

VRAI: Please. [Chuckles]

All right. We are running a little bit long, so, for CJ’s sake in the transcript corner, we are going to slam through the sequels. Chiaki, do you have anything to say relevant to Rent-A-Girlfriend, which I did not know you were watching?

PETER: [Chuckles]

CHIAKI: Uh… It’s shit.

PETER: Yeah.

VRAI: All right.

CHIAKI: It continues to be shit. It’s terrible.

PETER: Nothing happened this season, at all.

CHIAKI: Literally nothing happened. I guess he gets some kind of gumption to do something for once, at the very end of the season, and it’s like, “Anyway, wait for season 3 for anything to happen.” I’m like, “Good for you!” Also, half the cast sucks. Right? Chizuru is okay. She’s all right. I like her enough.

PETER: She’s classy.

CHIAKI: Yeah, she’s classy. And then waif girl… [Sighs] The wallflower girl. I forgot her name. Oh, God.

PETER: Wallflower?

CHIAKI: The quiet one.

PETER: Oh. Sumi?

CHIAKI: She’s nice. She’s precious. I love her. The other two: fuck right off. I hate them.

PETER: Oh, yeah, Mami sucks. And Ruka… I would hate Ruka except that fucking… the main character is so awful to her that I’m on her side! Like, knowingly leading her on as such an asshole.

CHIAKI: That’s true. But also, Ruka fucking sucks.

PETER: Yeah, she does suck. She sucks too. But she doesn’t deserve that. Nobody deserves that really! [Chuckles]

CHIAKI: It’s kinda like watching Seinfeld.

PETER: [laughing] Yeah! Hate them all?

CHIAKI: Where it’s not funny, but it’s not funny. [Chuckles]

PETER: Yeah. That’s good. That’s a good comparison. Yeah, but I guess the impetus behind this whole season was that they’re going to do the moviemaking subplot from A Silent Voice, maybe in season 3 or something. Who knows?

CHIAKI: So I should just go watch A Silent Voice.

PETER: I would do that instead, yes.

CHIAKI: All right, cool. Season 3 is solved.

VRAI: You know, what was really good, though, is Shadows House season 2, which saved my anime season.

PETER: Oh, yeah, yeah.

VRAI: God, I love this show. Season 2 really benefits from expanding the cast and looking into the Star Bearers. It’s able to get into a lot more of the sort of inequalities that it wants to talk about. 

Kate’s a really great protagonist in that she’s really smart and resourceful but she still has weaknesses in a way that doesn’t feel like “Oh, we need to make sure this girl isn’t too smart and intimidating.” Her shortcomings feel like natural evolutions of [the fact that] she’s sort of an immature kid and she needs her friends around her to help her do things and keep her emotionally balanced. So, she is really great to have as a protagonist. 

The whole ensemble is great. I love playing “spot the horror homage” with the names because this series is made for me.

It does a lot of interesting things with… you know, it’s a series about the journey from childhood to adulthood and the kind of gap and the power leverage between those two societal groups. And it actually makes a lot of pretty smart commentary on that front. 

It also introduces a character—I guess two characters, because she has a girlfriend. It introduces a character where I thought I was back in the ‘90s, that we have a character who is as strongly lesbian coded as humanly possible without ever actually saying the words “I kiss my girlfriend.” She’s a princely character who explicitly tells another character, “Oh, no, no, I’m not interested in that dude I’m close to.” And there’s a whole subplot where they have tender hair-stroking. And it’s nice.

It’s a really good season! I love this show. I cannot wait for season 3, which I hope is coming soon because it ends on a pretty… not exactly… kind of a cliffhanger, on the precipice of some really big developments. So, yeah, if you are into Gothic series that are really good character dramas with a little bit of creeping dread but it’s not too scary, this show is exceptional. And yeah, I really like it.

None of us watched Made in Abyss. I have said before that if there was enough interest from readers in hearing an AniFem retrospective on it, I at least would be willing to go and watch the movie and season 2. I know Lizzie was kind of tentatively interested in watching it just on their own. 

Dee and I both dropped the anime after season 1, but we could probably… Either I could convince her or we could find another third person if folks really wanted us to do a retrospective. But for now, I don’t have enough emotional space left to deal with the Everything about Made in Abyss.

PETER: Yeah. I plan to watch it. It’s just kind of a shitty season, and this season of Made in Abyss is literally also about shit.

VRAI: Yup!

CHIAKI: Yeah, I was gonna say, it’s been a very shitty anime?

PETER: Yeah, literally not dying from diarrhea seems to be the impetus behind three-fourths of this season.

VRAI: Everything I’ve heard from the discussion from other people, including folks in the Discord who have been watching it… Which, there have been some folks who really thought season 2 is an improvement on season 1, and I believe them. But yes, it seems to be Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, the Ursula K. Le Guin story, but also we have a lot of shit in it because it’s Made in Abyss. [Sighs]

PETER: The diarrhea arc.

CHIAKI: So, I’m just curious. I am having a Berenstain’s Bears moment where I’m trying to find this one doujin artist who made nothing but guro and weird shit art that feels like it’s from Made in Abyss, and I cannot find who the heck it was. I think his name was Sebone. But if anyone listening…

PETER: Oh, okay. [Laughs] This is [obscured by crosstalk].

CHIAKI: … remembers who this is, could you just, like, DM me that name? Because I am trying to pull that reference out and I just cannot.

PETER: I was wondering where you were going with this and it’s literally just “Anyone out there? Please help me.”

[Laughter]

PETER: Okay, cool.

VRAI: And Alex is not on, but I know that they watched and enjoyed Love Live! Superstar!! season 2, so you should see more about that in writing. 

Was there anything that we forgot to talk about on this fine day for this terrible season?

CHIAKI: Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World had a catgirl at the very end.

PETER: Nice.

VRAI: All right. Well, that saves it from the Pit of Shame. It’s no longer a horrible toxic-from-the-premise-up show.

CHIAKI: Too bad [the] sword anime has the same but she’s emancipated immediately.

PETER: Oh, watch the Girl from the Other Side OAV. It’s very good.

VRAI: Yes, yes, it is. It’s quite good.

PETER: And then read the manga, because the anime doesn’t tell you too much, but…

VRAI: No, it only covers like two volumes!

PETER: Yeah, yeah, but it’s super beautiful and the manga is great, super great.

VRAI: And please, somebody animate Nagabe’s other work where he draws gay furries. Please.

PETER: Didn’t know about that one, but, yeah, also that.

VRAI: Yeah, that’s most of his other work. It’s awesome!

PETER: Oh wow. Didn’t… Okay, cool. That’s cool.

VRAI: [Chuckles] All right. And that wraps us up. Thank you so much for joining us, AniFam. If you liked this episode, you can find more from us on our website at animefeminist.com. You can find articles as well as more podcast episodes there.

If you really liked this, consider going to our Patreon and tossing us $1 a month. It really helps us to continue paying our contributors and our editors. We’re trying to save up enough to increase our costs… [Corrects self] “Increase our costs.” We have enough of those. We’re trying to save up to increase our payments to both our editors and our contributors. So, we would really love your assistance on that. We’ve wanted to raise our rates to pay people what they deserve for the hard work they’re doing.

If you don’t want to use Patreon but still want to chuck us a buck, we are also on Ko-fi at ko-fi.com/animefeminist, where we have both one-time and ongoing donations.

You can go to our store at animefeminist.com/store, where we have cool embroidered patches and hopefully some new designs dropping in the next couple of months. Hint hint! Cool things are happening.

CHIAKI: Do you want a bandana, for your dog?

VRAI: We have those! We have dog-sized bandanas and I’m very excited about it.

CHIAKI: Yeah!

VRAI: [Chuckles] You can find us on social media. We are on Twitter @AnimeFeminist, on Tumblr at animefeminist, and we are also on Mastodon if you are over there, I believe also @AnimeFeminist.

Thank you so much, AniFam. And we are going to go catch a nap before Fall season crushes us to death with the number of shows that look good to watch.