Chatty AF 80: Fall 2018 Wrap-up (WITH TRANSCRIPT)

DEE: Hello and welcome to Chatty AF, the Anime Feminist podcast. I’m Dee, the managing editor at AniFem. I also run the anime blog The Josei Next Door, and you can find me on Twitter @joseinextdoor. And today I am joined by fellow AniFem staffers Caitlin and Peter.

CAITLIN: Hi, I’m Caitlin. I review, I write and edit for Anime Feminist. I have my own blog, Heroine Problem, which it is one of my New Year’s resolutions to start updating regularly again. And I also review anime for The Daily Dot.

PETER: I’m Peter. I’m an associate features editor at Crunchyroll and a contributor and editor at Anime Feminist.

DEE: And today we will be doing our fall 2018 season retrospective. This includes all of the fall anime we have been watching, including sequels, which we like to throw into our retrospective podcasts. And then for this one, because Netflix dropped a whole bunch of shows during the fall season, even though they’re not technically fall shows we did want to give them a little bit of time, so we’ll talk about some of the ones that stood out to us, that more than one of us watched, as well. 

So, because we do have a lot of titles to get into, we’re going to start with our premiere digest list. And we’ll link to that in the show notes, as well. Pretty much everything that was below Yellow Flags, there’s no shows in that list where two of us are watching them, so we’re going to breeze through those real, real fast here. Peter, you’re watching the majority of the shows on that bottom half. Is there anything in there that jumps out to you as being different or worthy of recommendation for folks at home?

PETER: Worthy of recommendation… Near the top of the list, As Ms. Beelzebub Likes It. It’s got some weird stuff in it, but overall, it’s mostly a harmless, fluffy show. I think it was put there because of some warning signals in the first episode… Oh, it’s because she was naked in the first episode.

DEE: She’s naked a lot. We hesitated between it being Harmless Fun and being Yellow Flags, and we went ahead and threw it into the Yellow Flags just to be safe.

PETER: Yeah, that doesn’t really happen too much. I think that was the thing where they throw the fanservice in the first episode to get people watching. That unfortunate thing. But I don’t think—

DEE: That unfortunate thing that chases a lot of our readership away. [chuckles]

PETER: Yeah. It’s got a weird character who gets really nervous around people and has to repeatedly go to the bathroom, which I think is supposed to be cute, which is weird. But besides that, it’s pretty fluffy romance comedy in hell—a cute version of hell. I don’t think I could really recommend anything else there, based on feminist recommendations.

DEE: Yeah, that’s fine. So, Ms. Beelzebub maybe for folks to give a try.

PETER: Yep.

DEE: I will spend a couple minutes here, just real quick, mentioning Iroduku: The World in Colors. It dropped on Amazon, and it was the PA Works pretty show about the sad girl who goes back in time. And our premiere review that I think you wrote, Caitlin, the chief concern was it was going to be a story about “girl falls in love and boy saves girl from being sad.” It’s not that. There is a romantic element to it, but their relationship is based on them mutually supporting and inspiring one another’s art: her magic and his actual drawings.

CAITLIN: Aw, that’s nice.

DEE: Yeah. And then, just as important to her is the relationship she builds with the rest of the club, so the different friendships she makes; her relationship with her back-in-time grandma, so that familial bond is really important to her as well. Towards the tail end of the season, I binged it, and I ended up really, really liking it, so it wound up on our actual recommendations list write-up that we did yesterday—or, I guess by the time this drops, it’ll be about a week ago. So, I would direct folks to that if you want a little bit more on it. 

The magical realism metaphors are messy, and my critic brain can poke a lot of holes in it, but it’s a very sincere emotional story about grief and healing and finding a supportive community to help you through that, and I ended up really liking it. So, some caveats in terms of being a bit oversimplistic, but again, I’ll direct you to that recommendation. It ended up being a really sweet, nice show, so I liked it quite a bit. So, I figured I’d mention that here.

And I believe that’s the only thing on that bottom half of the list that I wanted to mention. So I guess we can just jump straight into the top half of the premieres for fall, starting at the bottom, just because it starts with a “Z”: Zombie Land Saga, which I think all— No, Caitlin, you ended up dropping this one, so Peter and I watched it to the end.

CAITLIN: Yeah. I mean, I didn’t drop it for any particular reason. I was just watching episode six and I’m like, [sucks teeth] “I’m not into this,” and ended up never going back.

DEE: Yeah, that’s fair. Not every show is going to be for everybody.

PETER: It is, however, really good.

DEE: Yeah, go ahead. Talk about it a bit.

PETER: How do you talk about Zombie Land Saga? It got me to watch an idol anime, which is a herculean feat. I’m pretty sure it belongs in the history books for that one. You know, like the ones that they give you in American high school, the general history books. I think it deserves a spot.

DEE: It’ll have a whole splash page.

PETER: It’s really funny and completely unexpected and just a great concept, and all these things came together really well. You could tell they were on limited budget, but they managed to really work within their means, as well. Just everything about the show was spectacular. 

If it had one failing, it’s probably that they didn’t really— They show you that Tatsumi’s an asshole, but they still let him be kind of heroic despite the fact that he’s obviously a sociopath, which sucks a little bit. But that didn’t really ruin my enjoyment of the series in the end. 

In fact, when they had that reveal about his potential backstory, I was one of those people that just went like, “Well, I need to see that season two, for sure.” There’s so many stray strings that I’m pretty sure we’re getting a season two, because they introduce like three potential plot elements in the last episode.

DEE: I don’t think I was quite as in love with this one as you and some of the other staffers were, but I did enjoy it all the way through—and again, I have a hard time getting into idol shows. Not for any particular reason, just not necessarily my cup of tea. And this one, I did end up watching all the way through and enjoying for the most part. 

But yeah, my main thought when I got to the end was: “Okay, where’s season two?” There’s a lot of threads here that will, I think, affect my overall opinion about the show, so I would like to see that happen. 

Yeah, the manager, Tatsumi, is— It’s one of those things where I know it’s a glaring flaw and I thought it would bother me a lot more than it did. Because at the beginning of the season, I was like, “Yeah, if they try to redeem or make him seem like a good guy, that’ll be a breaker for me.” And it wound up not being a breaker, but it’s still a pretty big hole in the show because he is a raging asshole and borderline abusive, especially to Sakura, I think. And it helps that the girls… There’s a give-and-take by the end of the show.

PETER: [crosstalk] Beat the shit out of him? [chuckles]

DEE: [crosstalk] They beat the shit out of him regularly, and I think that that give-and-take helps. But because Sakura never really fights back, I think that central relationship didn’t sit well throughout the whole show. But it’s handled well enough that it could have been a huge issue, and it wound up just being an annoyance. 

But overall, yeah, it’s a cute show. I don’t think we got to talk about this in the midseason: there’s a trans character, which probably—folks listening to this—if you’re involved in the anime sphere at all, you probably know this.

CAITLIN: [chuckles]

PETER: Oh yeah.

DEE: One of the girls is a trans girl, and it’s handled about as well as I think any of us have seen that sort of reveal handled in an anime. It’s very accepting and sweet, and the episode, I think, gave us all a little bit teary eyes by the end.

PETER: Yeah. The subplots are amazing.

DEE: So, overall, yeah, it’s a nice show and I’d recommend it to folks, for sure. And I hope there’s more of it coming. My understanding is it did really well in Japan, so I think that a season two is pretty much a done deal or a movie or something at this point.

PETER: Huge pilgrimage to Saga, so they literally saved Saga.

DEE: [laughs]

PETER: So, I imagine they’ll get a second season funded probably. It seems like that was very intentional.

DEE: Yeah, the ending is very open. So, yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing where they take the zombie idols from here. 

Okay, let’s move on, because we do have a lot to talk about. SSSS.Gridman, the TRIGGER mecha show based on an old tokusatsu series. All three of us finished that one, yeah?

CAITLIN: Yes. So good!

DEE: Go ahead, Caitlin. Talk to us about that one, because you did the write-up for the recommendations post and you’ve been having to be quiet for a little bit here, so…

CAITLIN: Well, when we checked in with midseason, there was a lot of “Well, we’ve gotten more and more fanservicey, and there’s feet everywhere” and then Akane just had her tits out for a lot of episode six. And it was like, “It’s good, but I’m just really not sure.” But right after that, it took a turn, and that turn was incredible.

DEE: Yeah, episode six is definitely the low point for me, and then immediately after that it starts shooting up. And it’s so hard to talk about without spoiling the story, so it’s almost like I don’t even know how we can discuss it on the podcast without spoiling it for folks who haven’t seen it already.

CAITLIN: It’s about Akane. If Yuta seems like a boring protagonist, that’s because the show’s not really about him. And the way I put it—I said this in the review, too… When I said that I felt like SSSS.Gridman was going to be the closest spiritual successor to Evangelion so far, I was way closer than I realized at the time. And I’m not going to say I have encyclopedic knowledge of psychological mech series, but I do think that it very well may be the most similar thing to Evangelion that’s come out.

DEE: The whole world ends up being an extended metaphor for social isolation and anxiety and things like that. Yeah, without delving too deeply into it, it’s one of those where I finished it and I was kinda like, “Huh.” And then the more I sat on the ending, the more I liked it and the more I went, “Rewatching this would be really interesting because knowing where the story goes and having that knowledge in the early episodes…” And I don’t think—

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Yeah, seeing all the foreshadowing.

DEE: Yeah, all the foreshadowing, for sure. I don’t think there’s any excuse for the fanservice. I don’t think I can in retrospect say, “Oh, that was there for X reason.” No. It’s still pretty shitty. But if you can get past the fanservice in those early episodes… And it’s really just the beach episode was bad. Otherwise, it was pretty tame.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] And feet. Feet.

DEE: Yeah, I guess there was…

PETER: [crosstalk] Occasional feet.

DEE: I didn’t notice.

CAITLIN: [Crosstalk] Foot service.

DEE: I agree with you. I’m not gonna argue that point, but I didn’t notice it.

CAITLIN: [laughs]

DEE: But if you can get past that, I think it does gel into a really interesting and good adolescent mecha series. I’d say probably the best of the year. And we’ve had a few mecha series this year, so…

PETER: It’s a really new face for TRIGGER, too. It used to be The Imaishi Show, but I think they’re really showing a lot of their other directors’ strengths, like with Little Witch Academia now. So, depending upon who’s running the show in future TRIGGER anime, I think there’s actually a lot that people who aren’t really down for the Imaishi super-fanservice series might enjoy. Basically, look for Yoh Yoshinori or Amemiya, I guess is what I’m saying.

DEE: Yeah, this was really well directed. The cinematography was excellent, and I would say it was a much more restrained TRIGGER show. I was kind of surprised when I realized it was TRIGGER, because I was like, “This isn’t really what I think of when I think of a TRIGGER show,” and it’s because they are expanding into different directors and animation styles and things like that, which is awesome.

PETER: Delicate character interactions.

CAITLIN: They’ve had other shows like that. They just haven’t been as successful as this one. No one remembers When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace.

PETER: There’s also Kiznaiver, too, but I don’t know how commercially successful either of those were.

CAITLIN: The anime fandom collectively forgot about When Supernatural Battles Become Commonplace after it ended, which is fair because it was a pretty forgettable show.

DEE: Yeah, and I wasn’t trying to say that all of their shows look exactly the same. I was just saying that there is a style that people tend to link to their studio.

CAITLIN: Yeah, that’s Imaishi.

DEE: And I think it has some of those elements in terms of the big, exciting, well-directed and animated battles and things like that, but it’s a little more restrained, which I appreciated.

PETER: And TRIGGER also definitely has their primary shows and then their secondary shows. This one was actually their B-team, wasn’t it? This would be like a Supernatural Battles type show. You get the feeling with the other ones they were doing it to pay the bills to make the stuff they really wanted to make. And this one, they really wanted to make, for sure.

CAITLIN: Yeah, definitely.

DEE: It certainly seems that way. I don’t have any background information as far as behind-the-scenes show notes or anything like that. But yeah, looks good, well written, it was a good one. Again, if you can get past the fanservice, check it out. 

Run with the Wind, which is at its midway point, so we’ll have time to talk about this again in more detail by the end of the winter season, sounds like. We’re all keeping up with this one, too, yeah?

PETER and CAITLIN: Yep.

DEE: I’ve enjoyed this one a lot. I thought it was going to end at the midseason, so I’m glad we get two cours. If it continues in the vein it is in, I will pretty heartily recommend it by the end.

CAITLIN: If it just keeps going at a steady pace…

[Light chuckling]

DEE: It’ll hit the finish line.

CAITLIN: It still makes me irritated when they’re like, “Oh, my God, Prince is so slow!” And he’s running a ten-minute mile. Which isn’t great. It’s not competitive, but it’s respectable for— It’s better than people who are out of shape as they make him out to be generally would be able to do.

PETER: [crosstalk] Ten-minute mile is a pretty big fitness goal.

CAITLIN: I hit a ten-minute mile— Huh?

PETER: Ten-minute mile is a pretty big fitness goal for a lot of people. 

I don’t know if I’m still as keen on it. I feel like I’m hate-watching it, to be honest. I really don’t like Haiji, and I really don’t like—what’s her name, Hana? It’s not like I don’t like the character. I just don’t like the portrayal that she gets.

DEE: She just exists. I’ve honestly sort of stopped paying attention to her. I keep thinking they’re going to do something with her, and they have yet to do anything with her.

CAITLIN: It’s pretty much all the same stuff that we talked about at the midseason.

PETER: Yeah, not too much has changed.

CAITLIN: So, I don’t think we need to rehash all that. It just keeps doing what it’s doing.

DEE: Oh, my gosh. It’s been a few weeks since the show aired, so I have forgotten everybody’s names. Kakeru, the main character, right? Yeah. I really like the direction they’ve developed his character in terms of him stepping up and becoming a leader and starting to think of this as a team. His relationship with Prince, I did not expect, and I thought it was really well-handled. And the fact that they’ve been able to bond and come together was really sweet. 

Haiji has grown on me, mostly because the other characters have really started to buy into what he’s trying to do, and I think he’s done a good job of quietly mentoring Kakeru in particular. So, I don’t think he’s a perfect character by any stretch, and I’m not going to excuse his somewhat shitty behavior in getting everybody to try the running, but I think we’ve seen over the course of the show that he has a lot of good points as well as being overly pushy at times. And so, I think that makes him a more well-rounded and interesting character.

PETER: I do like where they’re going with Kakeru. I feel like this is the best trajectory for his character. And I didn’t see the Prince thing coming. I like that relationship, too. 

Although since the midpoint, when we last talked, I think there have been a lot of scenes between him and Haiji where he brings up very reasonable concerns and is kind of portrayed as the villain because he is being realistic or he thinks that running is about moving over distance quickly. Like, he literally said that, and then it’s like, “You fucking idiot, that’s not what running’s about.” But that’s exactly running. I don’t know why that makes you a villain. That’s the sport. 

But it’s like every time he brings up a reasonable objection, he’s just made out to be an asshole, and I think that’s unfair because the thing that they are trying to do is basically impossible, especially the situation with Prince. Has he ever had an unreasonable concern about the group?

CAITLIN: I don’t think it’s so much that he’s being portrayed as the villain so much as he and Haiji are not really on the same wavelength.

PETER: But the series takes Haiji’s side in the way that it portrays the two characters.

CAITLIN: Well, yes. And listen, I don’t think we’re ever going to agree on this, Peter, because you hate Haiji. I still kinda like Haiji, so I’m not saying this to try to convince you, but rather, my perception is that while Kakeru does have reasonable, commonsense concerns, it’s not about being reasonable, it’s not about common sense for Haiji, and it’s about trying to achieve this thing.

PETER: And it’s about whatever we’ll discover when his backstory is revealed.

CAITLIN: You know, “Ganbaru!” and teamwork. It’s very anime that way.

DEE: It is very anime that way. I see what you’re both saying. I don’t see Kakeru as being portrayed as the villain. I think the show is criticizing him for focusing solely on the hurdles to get there. And by the end of this first half—

CAITLIN: [crosstalk; chuckles] Hurdles.

DEE: [chuckles] Yeah, I know. I’m working in all the secret puns. By the end of this first cour, I think we see Kakeru moving into a position where he’s like, “Well, no, I still have these concerns. But instead of just starting with ‘It’s hopeless, it’s never gonna happen, we’re so screwed,’ I’m gonna go, ‘Okay, here are the problems and here’s what we can do to try to solve them.’” And I think that’s the direction the show is trying to push the characters in. 

Haiji is in this position where he thinks… I think he is well aware of how hard this is going to be. But if that’s where you start from with any task, you’re gonna get overwhelmed really fast. So, you have to focus on, “This is what I want to do, and this is how I’m going to get a little bit better every day.” And so, I think that’s what the show is pushing for at this point.

CAITLIN: What’s the Kamina quote from Gurren Lagann? “Kick reason to the curb and go past the impossible” or something like that? Basically, in a more bombastic show, Haiji would have the same energy as Kamina.

PETER: Yeah. But this is very realistically framed, which I think is where that distance is coming from. None of this is uncommon for anime, but at the same point, everything they’re doing is very realistic. It doesn’t have a lot of the trappings of a super sports anime where they’re hitting a volleyball and turning into a flock of crows or something.

DEE: [crosstalk] Yeah, it’s more grounded, for sure.

CAITLIN: Yeah. And I think it’s interesting seeing that kind of attitude in a more grounded show. I don’t know. I want to see where the show is going. I don’t necessarily think they’re going to be successful in their goal. Yeah, I actually don’t know how it’s going to turn out.

DEE: Yeah, I’m curious to see. I feel like we could continue discussing this for a while, and, again, we will have more time to talk about it more at the end, so unless there’s something else y’all really want to mention, I’m going to move us forward.

PETER: I’m good.

CAITLIN: Okay.

DEE: Okay. All right, Peter. The next stretch of shows is pretty much just stuff you’re watching. Caitlin and I fell behind or didn’t pick up on any of these. So, as far as Ms. Vampire, Hinomaru Sumo, and Anima Yell! go, are they pretty much where they were at the midseason point, or is there anything you’d like to bring up there? I know you were pretty positive on all three of them—moderate to positive at the midseason—so…

PETER: Yeah. Ms. Vampire I think remains pretty harmless. They introduced this other vampire character Ellie who really likes to drink blood of young maidens and is a little predator-y. But it’s mostly things she talks about and never things she does. She acts like the predatory lesbian toward… God, I can’t remember what the main character’s friend’s name is. It’s like a joke. I don’t think they take it too far, but it’s definitely not great.

DEE: Yeah. Still a troubling element, for sure.

PETER: Yeah. Hinomaru Sumo. It’s pretty much still a super sports series. Unfortunately, the girl that I thought was going to fall in and become their manager just isn’t really doing anything. She just comes to events and, I guess, is supposed to be a female character that’s there so that you know that women exist.

DEE: [chuckles suddenly, as if surprised] It’s a sports anime. Okay.

PETER: I feel like they do some cool stuff with talking about physical limitations, because the main character, he’s below height, and they talk about how he could feasibly get into sumo despite that, based on some archaic rules, which I believe are real, or at least it sounds like they’re real or they’re plausible. He’s got a friend—one of the new guys on the team has this lung disease so that he can’t really fight, but they feel like kindred spirits because they both have something that should technically keep them from doing the sport entirely. 

I wish they portrayed how brutal sumo training is a bit more because it’s actually kinda… I don’t know. Maybe they just wanted to be very optimistic about it, but their training’s pretty brutal—like really, really bad. 

Let’s see… Oh, and Anima Yell I feel like pretty much just kept being good. The one thing I wanted to bring up was Vrai brought up a concern about Arima. She had Too Special Disease or something like that, where she was so good at cheerleading that she got ostracized by the club and kicked out.

CAITLIN: Oh, like Kakeru.

PETER: Yeah, yeah. So, Vrai brought that up as a criticism in their initial review of the first episode, and in the last episode, I think they addressed that and showed that that wasn’t really the situation. It was just based on some misperceptions. So, that resolved itself, I guess. 

And also, it was revealed that Arima has an older brother that helps her come up with new moves and supports her, which I think is a pretty good— There aren’t a whole lot of guys in the series, so the fact that she has a positive relationship with her brother, who is totally into cheerleading and is willing to do dance routines with her apparently, is pretty good, is a cool thing that they did, as well. 

So, generally it did a lot of really cool things and was surprisingly funny, and I’ve got like 80 reaction images from that series that I want to use.

DEE: Nice. So, one for folks to check out. 

Just a real quick check-in: at the midseason, I was keeping up with The Girl in Twilight. I dropped it pretty much immediately after the midseason check-in. I have never had a show where the fanservice was so dissonant that it provoked me to drop a series midway through. Usually at that point I’m like, “Okay, fine, it’s there. I’ll deal with it.” But it was so out of the blue with the content of the actual show. 

And then the writing itself was… It was okay. But the show was all about female friendship and coming to be comfortable with your identity even if it didn’t fit into prescribed norms. And so it had all these nice little messages running through the background. And then it’d be like “boobs in your face!” out of nowhere. It sucked. And it finally got to the point where I was like, “This isn’t fun. I’m done.” So, I dropped it. 

And then… Peter, you are still keeping up on Radiant, yeah?

PETER: Yeah.

DEE: That’s the next one to talk about.

PETER: Just keeps getting better.

DEE: Yeah. So, that’s another one that’s continuing into winter. We’ll have more time to talk about it then. I’m going to try to catch up with it for the winter season, so hopefully the two of us can chat about it when it gets to the end there.

PETER: You’re going to love it.

DEE: Okay, awesome. I was going to say, is there anything in particular you want to mention or is it pretty much where it was at the midseason as far as things folks should be aware of?

PETER: I think we had some concerns about Melie’s split persona, which is kind of a not-great trope, but I feel like they’ve done some pretty good stuff with it. Her main personality is defensive magic only; her aggressive personality is offensive magic only. They do away with that absolute dichotomy that would force her to be switching personalities all the time, and she’s not just a mascot character or anything. So I feel like that series has treated her very well after kind of a questionable introduction, and that’s a good thing.

DEE: [crosstalk] That’s good to know. Yeah, I’m gonna give it another whirl here. 

Next one on our list was—ha-ha, oh, boy—Double Decker, which I think we all felt pretty good about three episodes into, and then over the coming weeks felt less and less pretty good about it. I dropped it around eight. We got the Max backstory episode, and then I think I got about halfway through the one after that and went, “I’m not having a good time,” and I just dumped it on the floor. 

Peter, did you finish it? Caitlin, I know you actually did complete it, right?

CAITLIN: Yes. Yes, I did.

DEE: Okay.

PETER: I… Where am I? I’m at like episode five.

DEE: Oh, okay. You’re quite a ways back then. All right, Caitlin, let us know. How did it wrap up? Did it save itself?

CAITLIN: Ha-ha-ha! Well, the plot in Double Decker is always a mess. The big plot with the organized crime gang kicks in, and it’s complete nonsense, garbage. I’m sure some people will come in and be like, “Oh, no, no, no. It was actually very easy to follow.” But the problem is that I didn’t care enough about the actual plot to try to follow it. Double Decker is very much a group of very good characters who need better writers.

DEE: Mm-hm.

CAITLIN: Because the last episode picked up that energy from the first few episodes again, and it was like, “Oh, right! This show can be really good sometimes.” But when the plot is going, it’s just like, “Whatever.” So, I would watch the heck out of an episodic police procedural Double Decker where the narrator comes in a lot and Travis is an idiot and we slowly get to know the characters a little bit better and they put some time and some effort into the LGBT stuff. 

Still not sure what they were going for with Valery. It’s all very confusing, especially since Kirill seems pretty comfortable with gender fluidity. There’s an episode where he wears a wedding dress and it’s not like, “Ha-ha-ha, Kirill’s wearing a wedding dress”; it’s like, “Kirill’s wearing a wedding dress to do a nice thing for someone, and he looks very beautiful in it.” So, it’s weird. The show really talks out of both sides of its mouth for everything.

DEE: That’s frustrating. I heard there was a little bit of a Bury Your Gays towards the end. Is that accurate or no? This is just something that buzzed up on my feed.

CAITLIN: No, but not because of people being wrong, but just because the show’s doing its silly bullshit. Not in a bad way, but just— You know, something happens and it seems terrible, and the narrator comes in and yells about it, and it turns out that Travis did something stupid again and didn’t tell anyone and that affected the situation.

DEE: Okay. Well, I guess that makes it slightly better, maybe? But it sounds like it was a big mess. Yeah, this one, I think, was maybe the biggest disappointment of the season for a lot of folks.

CAITLIN: Once again, I would watch the hell out of a show with those characters that’s just slice of life, not worried about the whole organized crime overarching plot. I love all of them so much. Doug is a kind of character that you don’t see very much. It’s got a great female cast when the writers are not doing them terrible disservices. They all deserved better and, unfortunately, they did not get better.

DEE: Okay. Well, that was Double Decker then. Womp-womp.

CAITLIN: Rip Double Decker.

PETER: Double disappointment.

DEE: Double disappointment. That’s what the D stood for. Surprise.

PETER: It’s Always Gunny.

DEE: [chuckles faintly] But that does bring us to the last title on our fall list before we jump into sequels and Netflix shows reasonably quickly… is my goal here. 

Top of our list was Bloom Into You. I don’t have a lot to add beyond what I said in the midseason. At the midseason I was like, “I was lukewarm at the beginning, and now it’s really growing on me,” and that’s still where I am. The show kind of just ends, because the manga’s ongoing and they didn’t want to try to slap on an awkward anime-original finale. I hope it does well enough to get a season two. I will definitely be picking up the manga, which I think is one of the higher recommendations I can give a show, is when I end it and go, “Yes, I’m gonna keep reading this!” 

It’s just a really good, very grounded, realistic depiction of queer teenagers trying to figure their shit out. Each week, it was beautifully produced, animated; storyboards were lovely. And I was just a little bit more impressed with it every week and liked it a little bit more every week and would definitely recommend it to folks. I think it’ll clear my best-of of the year pretty easily at this point. So yeah, I would recommend it to folks. 

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there is the ongoing discussion around this series as far as the main character initially seeming ace and aro, and then as the series progresses, it starts to seem more and more like she was just sort of a late bloomer or even possibly repressed because her dad’s kind of a homophobe. 

And I think that’s fine. I think this series does a really good, organic job of depicting that, and I think that is a valid and important story to tell, as well. I also think it’s totally valid if folks who were watching it and were hoping it was an ace/aro love story are disappointed by that. Your feelings are also valid there. But I just don’t think that’s the story that Bloom Into You wants to tell, and I think that’s also fine. That’s not a criticism. You know what I mean?

CAITLIN and PETER: Yeah.

CAITLIN: Let’s hear it for the late bloomers. Yay!

DEE: Yeah. So, yeah, it’s been great, and I look forward to seeing where the manga author takes the story from here. And, again, hopefully we get a second season of the anime, because it was very lovely.

Anyway, that’s the end of our fall series. Well, that’s the end of our new fall series. There were also sequels, carryovers, and shorts—which, again, let’s try to touch on these somewhat quickly. Let’s start with the short, Skull-faced Bookseller Honda-san. Peter, you didn’t watch this one?

PETER: I got four or five episodes in. l liked it. Just…

DEE: [crosstalk] Just busy?

PETER: You know, anime stuff.

DEE: Caitlin and I watched it. My general opinion… It’s not a super deep show. It’s about a bunch of people working in a bookstore. I used to work in a bookstore, so I loved it. It honestly made me miss working in a bookstore.

CAITLIN: [chuckles]

DEE: Like, a lot. It’s funny, it’s pretty accepting, and it’s a nice show about basically nice people, and it’s 11 minutes an episode. And yeah, I’d say check it out. It’s good.

CAITLIN: The implication is that it is in a popular tourist area in Tokyo because they get a lot of tourists.

DEE: Foreign customers, yeah.

CAITLIN: A lot of foreign customers. And how Honda-san is sort of the designated English speaker even though he’s not very comfortable with it, but he tries his best. I really like how it portrays the cultural differences with that sort of stuff. It is, at once, “Foreign customers can be hard to deal with” but also not judgy or “Man, those wacky foreigners.” Just like, “I would not expect to see someone doing this, but they’re foreign and they are different, so…”

DEE: Yeah, I think it’s embracing and poking very affectionate fun. It does not seem to have a mean-spirited bone— Ha-ha, bone, because skeleton. But yeah, Honda-san was good. Again, I don’t think there’s a deep discussion to have about it, but it’s a nice series that folks should check out. 

I also watched Thunderbolt Fantasy, the puppet show, season two. It’s wonderful. I love it. Check it out, folks. I recommended it for the season write-ups just because I could. Yeah, I would say give the martial art puppets a try. Gen Urobochi is living his best life, and God bless him for it. And that’s all I have to say about Thunderbolt Fantasy. 

You guys have been watching JoJo’s. Any quick thoughts?

CAITLIN: A lot of people seem to like this JoJo best. My heart still belongs to Joseph and Josuke. I think Giorno’s kind of boring. I’d like to see Trish get to do more and see more of what her whole deal is. It’s good. It’s not my favorite JoJo. That’s still Diamond Is Unbreakable. But it’s a good, fun action show every week.

DEE: Folks who like JoJo’s will continue to like it, basically.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

PETER: I think anyone planning to go into this one as an entry point, though, I feel— Well, I don’t know. It’s something I’ve complained about regularly with JoJo, and I feel like I should bring it up in case anyone’s considering watching this show that might have problems with violence against women. There’s a really graphic depiction of a woman getting beaten and a camera leers on it for… I think I counted a full 13 seconds of her getting punched in the face.

DEE: Geez!

PETER: And also, they introduce gay characters and also instantaneously fridge them—brutally murder a gay couple and mutilate their bodies as a plot point. So, if those things are things that would make you not want to watch a show, come in prepared to JoJo.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

DEE: Damn. Nobody ever talks about that with JoJo’s. They always talk about the dog death.

PETER: My big issue, there’s a lot of violence against women in JoJo’s and not too many positive portrayals of women, at least from my perceptions.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] All right. We’re not gonna fight about women in JoJo again, Peter. But I want it to be known that I think that the depiction of women in JoJo is a more complicated discussion than just “it’s not good at it.” But we’re not gonna do that, because that would take a while.

PETER: That can be a separate podcast, but I think in this case—

DEE: [crosstalk] I was gonna say, a JoJo’s podcast would be a good idea, yeah.

PETER: If you are sensitive to graphic violence against women or fridging gays—Bury Your Gays kind of thing is a dealbreaker for you, then both are present in JoJo Part Five.

DEE: Would you say that’s fair, Caitlin?

CAITLIN: Yes. I would give it… not credit… It is a violent series in general. It’s not good that it introduces an obvious gay couple and they are killed immediately. Yeah, no, it’s not great. There’s a lot of death in general, so, you know, go into JoJo’s expecting a lot of people being violently, graphically murdered.

DEE: Okay. Yeah, no, I think that’s good to give folks a heads-up, because, again, I don’t necessarily know that of all the JoJo buzz I hear, I don’t think that’s something I hear a ton of. I mean, I know there’s violence in it, but yeah. Okay, so that’s JoJo’s and, again, it sounds like we could benefit from a longer podcast just talking about the series as a whole. So, maybe something you guys could do. That’d be fun.

Others… The last sequel that I had listed for us was Golden Kamuy. Peter, you and I are both watching that one. My feelings on part two is that it feels extremely rushed, and based on manga readers, that is the case. They’ve hacked and slashed a lot out of the series. I feel like Golden Kamuy is 90% problematic shit, but because it’s so weird, it just washes over me. It’s a really strange series.

PETER: Yeah. It’s kind of like Dorohedoro, where everyone’s essentially a serial killer but they’re all so goofy and lovable that you just want all of them to live their best lives. And they don’t really go around murdering people. A lot of them are ex-cons who were killers or something like that, but they spend a lot of their time just cooking and poking fun at each other or having a very dude-y hot springs trip together. Stuff like that. 

It’s another series that’s hard to talk about because there’s just so much going on. You’re definitely right: that second half was super rushed. They cut out a lot. If you watched the last episode, it was pretty obvious they wanted to leave it off at that particular point, and they sacrificed story elements to get there. 

I think the mystery continues to get more fascinating. They keep expanding the cast with these cool characters who are constantly switching sides. It’s like everybody’s Revolver Ocelot in that series.

DEE: Yeah, but we’re rushing through the plot points so fast that we don’t really get to hang out with anybody, so I had a hard time getting emotionally attached to any of the characters that they spent more time on in part two. I love the main trio, and then past that, there were a lot of people who I was like, “You seem like you’d be interesting, but I’m not getting enough with you to really know how to feel about you at this point.”

PETER: Yeah, Tanigaki really went through a sudden transformation into a barrel-chested dad. Yeah, I think if you were just watching the anime, the second season might not be that great, basically for those reasons. I definitely intend to read the manga now, though. Knowing some of the stuff they cut out, I definitely want to read it. 

I think the story, in and of itself, is very good. I think a lot of the aspects of the production were limited but very good, all things considered. But in the second season, they did have to jump over some entire stories to get to the big transitioning point in the story in the manga that they wanted to reach.

DEE: There’s a good chance this will run over, but there’s also a good chance that at least one of the Netflix shows we will end up doing a retrospective on. So, Netflix dropped a bunch of shows on us—

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] We’re honestly doing pretty well for end of season, timewise. [chuckles]

DEE: I’m trying to keep us on a pace here! But, again, there are three more shows to talk about at least a little bit here. So, Netflix dropped a bunch of shows on us in the U.S. in the past three months. Caitlin watched all of them for her job over at The Daily Dot.

CAITLIN: [sighs and groans]

DEE: You are truly a trooper. And Peter and I have kept up—

CAITLIN: [chuckles] It’s really hard. So many of them are bad!

DEE: Yeah, I’m glad I’ve only watched the ones that, from what I understand, were actually worth watching. And so, those are the three we were going to talk about here: the ones that we deemed worth mentioning, worth noting for our audience. So, obviously, if we skip something and you folks at home are like, “Well, this one was actually good,” shoot us a comment in the notes and let other folks know about it on the website, as well.

CAITLIN: But also, be aware that I do disagree with you, because in my book these are the only three that have dropped in the last three months that are worth anything.

DEE: Yeah. So, we are going to actually start from the top of the list on this one. This one is the one that came out the longest ago, back in October. Dragon Pilot: Hisone and Masotan, more commonly known as HisoMaso. And I think all three of us finished this one, yeah?

PETER: I’m at episode eight or nine. I didn’t quite get to catch up.

DEE: Now this is the one that I’m pretty sure we have a retrospective planned. We haven’t recorded it yet, but I do think it is something that is on our docket, so we don’t have to spend a ton of time on it here. I like what HisoMaso is trying to do. I think it spends a lot of its second half getting caught up in really obnoxious plot elements before it finally gets there.

CAITLIN: I think it is going for the same sort of thing that The Woman Called Fujiko Mine does, where it pulls the rug out from under you; where it’s like, “Is it really saying this really gender-regressive sort of thing?” and then, surprise, at the end it’s like, “No! It’s not saying that. It’s saying the opposite.” I don’t think it’s as successful.

DEE: Yeah. I would agree with that, mostly because of some of the subplots. It’s another one that’s tough to talk about without spoiling it, which is why I think saving it for a longer discussion for a retrospective is a very good idea here. 

It is a series that is engaging with a lot of sexist assumptions about women in the workplace, obviously specifically in Japanese work culture, but I think the world over people can relate to a lot of what it’s doing with these female pilots trying to exist in a space that is dominated by men and these ideas about women being focused on romance and becoming useless once they fall in love. 

And it’s engaging with a lot of these ideas, and it eventually goes someplace worthwhile with them, albeit clumsily. I’m not 100% sure I liked it, but I would recommend people watch it. Does that make sense?

CAITLIN: Yeah, I watched like two-thirds of it through a second time, and I think it does better in the second pass, where you know where it’s going, because it doesn’t have this discomfort of “Is it really saying this? I think it might be saying this, and I’m not really okay with that.” When you watch it again and you know what it is going for, it’s a little bit like, “Okay, now I see.” But yeah, I don’t know if it is entirely successful in what it is trying to do.

PETER: I honestly have a lot of trouble watching Mari Okada stuff, especially ones that fall into this formula. This is like the third time, I feel like, she’s done this anime, because there was Aquarion Evol, Kiznaiver, and now, where patriarchal figures are manipulating the love lives of people, seemingly for no purpose.

CAITLIN: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, too.

PETER: Oh, was that the same thing?

DEE: Yeah. Now, my understanding of HisoMaso is that this one was more the director’s baby and Okada came in to basically sketch it together, so I don’t necessarily want to— It’s one of those chicken-or-egg things where I think Okada has worked more in the driver’s seat with stories that have this similar structure sometimes, so I don’t know if she always brings that in or if people decide to grab her as the writer because she’s known for doing that kind of thing. You know what I mean?

PETER: Yeah. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an anime really do that outside of Okada. The closest I can think of is Escaflowne.

DEE: [crosstalk] I just wanted to say that I know some interviews and production stuff that made it into English, and the director is credited with a lot of the main push on the story for this one.

CAITLIN: You already know anime is collaborative.

PETER: [crosstalk] Where I was going with that, though, is that this is the one that has made the best use of that. I’m not to the turn like you two are, although I’ve been slightly spoiled. It’s not really the same thing as— I got that feeling even before Caitlin told me a little bit about the ending. 

But I can already sense now that it’s very hyper-focused on sexism in the workplace, and I feel like it’s really focusing on how women’s romantic lives become a subject of criticism for them; whereas with Aquarion Evol and Kiznaiver, I just couldn’t fathom the purpose that they were telling the story for. So, in that way, I think that this is the most successful version of this archetype, whether it’s an Okada thing or not, that I’ve seen in an anime.

CAITLIN: I would say, watch The Woman Called Fujiko Mine.

PETER: Yeah, that’s been on my list. I will eventually watch that anime.

DEE: But I do agree. HisoMaso definitely comes together better than Kiznaiver did, but I have some thoughts about Kiznaiver. Although also—just quick content warning for folks and, I guess, the risk of lightly spoiling something towards the end—there is kind of a Bury Your Gays moment towards the end. There are some sad, tragic lesbians, which I sighed at a little bit. And then, there’s a couple of romantic relationships. One of them is really cute and I love it, and the other one is exhausting and made my eye twitch. 

God, we’ve already spent like ten minutes on this frickin’ show, and we said we’re gonna do a retrospective on it. But clearly, there’s a lot to unpack with HisoMaso. Again, it’s one that I would say, folks, watch unless anything we named here just sounds totally unappealing and a total dealbreaker to you. I think it is trying to engage with some really interesting and worthwhile ideas. It just is kind of clumsy in its execution and drags you through a part in the second act of a three-act structure that is not super fun, especially when you don’t know where it’s going. So, you do have to be willing to push through that, I guess.

Okay, so next one on the list—I put these in alphabetical order, but I’m actually going to do them in the order that they dropped on Netflix… No, I lied. I’m going to save this one since all three of us have watched it. We’ll do Hi Score Girl next. So, Hi Score Girl dropped on Christmas Eve, I think, so it just very recently came out. Caitlin and I have somehow managed to binge the whole thing since it came out, so we can talk about it a little bit. Caitlin, what did you think of Hi Score Girl?

CAITLIN: I think it is a very, very sweet romance as equals for a lot of it. So, there are two main girls. There is Ono, who is a rich girl who goes to arcades as an escape to get away from the pressures of being the perfect rich girl. And there is—what’s the other girl’s name?

DEE: Hidaka.

CAITLIN: Hidaka. There’s Hidaka, who likes the main character Haruo, and she says that she feels most comfortable standing and watching from behind. I really like Ono. She doesn’t speak, which I was a little nervous about at first, but she has a strong, distinct personality. She has her own motivations. So, she is a good, clear character despite not being able to speak or just not speaking. 

Hidaka… She starts off saying, “I have no interests of my own,” but whenever we see her, she is watching Haruo play games. She is thinking about Haruo playing games. Haruo is her entire world as far as we see, and that kind of bums me out. I don’t really care for that.

DEE: Yeah. You finished it, right? We’ve both completed it?

CAITLIN: Yes.

DEE: Okay. I do think that the series tries to show that she genuinely discovers a love of video games through her crush on him, because even when they stop hanging out, she plays a lot of games and gets really good at them. 

But I do agree. It’s like they’re trying to do a thing where these three kids are bonding over a shared love of video games, but because they’re also inserting some romantic elements, there’s always this element of “Does she actually like it, or is it just because she wants Haruo to notice her, so she’s doing everything because of this guy?” So, yeah, I totally understand why that doesn’t sit well with you. 

I think the series executes everything well enough that a lot of the— It’s the kind of thing where when I’m watching it, I just enjoy it, and then when I step back and think about it, I’m like, “There’s a few troubling elements here.” But it’s not the typical anime bullshit where it’s so obvious and surface level that it gets in the way of me having a good time with the series proper, if that makes sense.

CAITLIN: Yeah. No, that makes sense. It does just cut off at a very rude part. Just rude of them to end it where they did.

DEE: Yeah. There are three OVAs planned and I guess the manga’s done, so supposedly the OVAs will finish the series, and I think Netflix will drop those at some point, so you can think of it as “There will be a season two.”

CAITLIN: Yes. Netflix is good about getting the OAV continuations and bonus episodes and stuff.

DEE: Mm-hm. So, we should still get more of it. My biggest—I guess I’ll go ahead and critique—point of concern with it is some of the physical violence elements did not sit super well with me. Because on the one hand, I think it’s trying to play it off as comedic slapstick, but then you’ll also see Haruo with a bloody nose or a noticeable bruise on the side of his face. 

So, it takes away the sense of weightlessness that slapstick comedy should have and makes it feel like he’s genuinely getting beat up. And I don’t care for that in fiction in general, regardless of the genders of the characters, so anytime that came up, it was like a record scratch for me.

CAITLIN: Yeah. No, that’s true. That is totally fair.

DEE: There’s one scene where they get into an actual fight with each other that I thought was pretty well done, because they’re also 13-year-olds being thirteen.

CAITLIN: Yeah. [laughs]

DEE: And so, I thought that one scene was pretty good because it was a good way of showing these two kids, who, again, aren’t in a relationship—they’re just friends squabbling. That, I thought, was pretty well done. But any other time it came up, it was kind of discomforting for me. So, just a note for folks at home that that might be an issue, as well. Overall, though, I thought that it was a cute little video game-based rom-com.

CAITLIN: It’s sweet.

DEE: I’ll definitely finish it when the OVAs drop, so I’m curious to see how the story wraps up.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

DEE: Which brings us to the final show on our list and one of my personal favorites of the year: Sirius the Jaeger, the campy vampire hunter series set in 1930s Tokyo and then also Russia. I really enjoyed this one. Y’all finished it. I think I was the highest on the team, for sure, on this one, but I think you guys finished it. I think you had a good time with it at least.

PETER: [hums dubiously]

CAITLIN: I think I gave it 3 or 3.5 stars.

PETER: Out of five?

CAITLIN: Out of five. Which is middling-to-good. It’s more than I give most Netflix anime.

DEE: [triumphantly] Ha-ha!

PETER: Beatin’ the curve!

CAITLIN: Yeah. My feeling on this is that it is pretty. It has a really good ensemble cast that is really underused.

PETER: Oh yeah.

CAITLIN: Yuliy is not a particularly interesting character, but also, he’s very pretty. And I love how extra the vampires are. If you’re going to do ridiculous early-20th-century urban fantasy, then you’re gonna have to just go wild with the vampires.

PETER: My feeling was, though, I liked the earlier vampires and then they got replaced with a not-as-good vampire. The early vampires were like those blooded nobles, haughty asshole types who thought they could hang with the vampire hunters and thought they were the most genetically superior race. And you kind of got those lines from the new guy that comes later.

DEE: Oh, you totally get that from Yevgraf. Yevgraf is a vampire supremacist, hardcore!

PETER: The other one’s more fun, though, because they were more—

DEE: [crosstalk] He enslaves colonial peoples! [chuckles] Sorry. I have some thoughts about the metaphors.

PETER: Yeah. I thought they were the fun, haughty Victorian noble vampires, and then you get replaced with carnival vampires, which was him and his weird vampire twins and guy-with-the-bowl-cut vampire. I thought that the first two vampires were much more fun than the villain-villain. 

Obviously, I didn’t like it very much. [chuckles] I tweeted something like “I think it’s got an amount of fun stuff only matched by its dedication not to use any of it.” I feel like the most boring thing in the show was Yuliy, and he got all of the time rather than the other vampire hunters, which were all more interesting than him and all got backstories introduced just so that they would do nothing with them.

DEE: I did get the sense that Sirius was one of those shows that was maybe initially conceived of as two cours and then they had to mash it down into one.

PETER: That would make a lot of sense.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

DEE: I’m not 100% saying that is what happened, but it does have that feel. That having been said, I think the way it was mashed down works really well, but that was also because I was into the Tragedy Brothers.

CAITLIN: [chuckles]

DEE: I have very particular tastes, and the director Masahiro Ando keeps hitting all of my very particular tastes.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Yeah, the thing is that this is a big ball of things Dee likes.

DEE: It is! I love paranormal camp. God, there’s a train fight. There’s like two episodes of a train fight! I love train fights!

PETER: But they only fight when the train’s stopped.

DEE: No, they fight when the train is moving. They totally do.

PETER: [crosstalk] The zombie guy… Doesn’t he break the train and it stops and they fight?

DEE: Yes, the zombie, Frankenstein, he eventually breaks the train, but there’s several scenes of the fighting while the train’s in motion. Ryoko jumps a car. She’s so good!

CAITLIN: [chuckles]

PETER: Oh, the girl?

DEE: My biggest gripe is that they didn’t give Ryoko anything to do in the last arc, because she’s awesome.

PETER: Yeah, I was going to say… She fell in love at first sight and then follows him across the world so that she can throw him a katana right before he goes to the last battle, and that’s all she does.

CAITLIN: I wanted to see more scenes between Dorothea and Ryoko.

DEE: Right? The scene between the two of them is really good.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Those two were so good together.

DEE: There’s a lot of really good background elements. Anytime you have a show that is only one cour, there’s always that sense of “Were these characters actually fleshed out, or were they just window dressing?” And with Sirius, what I like is that I get the sense that every character had a distinct personality, backstory, motivation, and we only got to see it in snippets because we had 13 episodes to tell the story. 

And I loved the snippets we got of the supporting cast, especially Dorothea and Ryoko. So, I hope the show is a smashing success and we get a season two or a movie or something, because I would love to hang out with these characters some more.

CAITLIN: I don’t think it was that successful, though.

DEE: Well, maybe if I shout about it enough, it’ll become successful!

CAITLIN: [laughs]

PETER: I would like an OVA like you described, where it’s just the vampire hunters and Sirius is off being God somewhere, so it’s them traveling around…

DEE: [crosstalk] Spoilers! Gosh!

CAITLIN: Listen, if we tell Natasha that there’s brothers that you could sort of ship together, Natasha will get into it.

DEE: [crosstalk] Oh my God.

PETER: [crosstalk] “Sort of?” What do you mean “sort of?”

CAITLIN: [laughs]

DEE: You can cut this out of the actual podcast. You definitely can ship the brothers together, but… [pained] please don’t.

CAITLIN: [cracking up]

PETER: Did you see the— Literally the last pose they’re in together, that’s romance bait.

DEE: I mean… You’re not wrong, but—

PETER: He’s holding his hand.

DEE: I see them as brothers who were separated tragically and love each other so much. And I feel like we’re spoiling a lot, so I don’t know how much of this we need to keep and how much we should cut. 

The other thing I really liked about Sirius is underneath all the paranormal camp and the family feels—which are two things I like very much—it is also pretty unequivocally like, “Fuck colonialism and xenophobia.” It’s messy and over-simplistic about it, but I was worried when it set the story in the 1930s and was about evil vampires coming from overseas that it was gonna go some troubling directions, and I think it pretty explicitly went the other way with the story. 

And I think there’s some debates to be had about how successfully it accomplishes some of that, but overall, I really liked the direction that it took that undercurrent beneath all the goofy vampire fights and bombastic action sequences and whatnot. Also, it just looked really good. It’s a really good-looking show.

CAITLIN: It is. It’s a pretty show.

PETER: Definitely looked good.

DEE: So, I liked it a lot. I’m going to keep telling people to watch it, with the understanding that there’s quite a bit of graphic violence. So, if you’re not into bloody limbs flying off, it won’t be up your alley, obviously. But I really liked what it did with its story overall. And I support Masahiro Ando in all projects because he keeps making shows that are very specifically what I’m into, so thank you, Ando, for that.

PETER: They’re the Josei Next Core? Get it? Like Dee-core?

DEE: [crosstalk] Yeeees! I get it.

PETER: Yeah? Ha-ha.

DEE: I get it. Yeah.

CAITLIN: [groans]

PETER: Thanks.

DEE: [laughs] We’ve broken Caitlin with our terrible, terrible jokes, which I guess is as good a place as any to stop, because I do believe we are out of shows to talk about at this point. Anything else folks want to say as we wrap up our fall season?

PETER: Black Clover episode 63 was lit and everyone should watch it.

[Laughter]

DEE: Just that one episode, though, right?

PETER: Well, that one in particular, but yeah, watch the whole thing, too.

CAITLIN: I feel like overall this was a pretty weak season.

DEE: I think the good stuff was really good and there was really nothing else worth talking about. Does that make sense?

CAITLIN: Yeah.

DEE: Like, Bloom Into You was incredible. SSSS.Gridman was really good. I think we all— Well, Caitlin, you dropped Zombie Land, but we were all very pleasantly surprised with Zombie Land. It was one of those seasons where we wound up with quite a few shows on the recommendations list. I think everyone had different things they were into, so I thought that made it kind of an interesting season.

PETER: A lot of stuff is continuing, too, so we really weren’t talking about it here. Well, we talked about JoJo, but then there’s Slime, which has been very good for an isekai.

DEE: “For an isekai.” I like the little asterisk there. [chuckles]

CAITLIN: [chuckles]

DEE: Okay, I’ll go ahead and play us out. Ah-hem. I just needed a sip of water. Okay. 

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