Chatty AF 188: 2023 Spring Wrap-Up (WITH TRANSCRIPT)
Vrai, Alex, and Peter (with a guest appearance by Toni) try to cover the wealth of excellent titles in the 2023 Spring season!
Vrai, Alex, and Peter (with a guest appearance by Toni) try to cover the wealth of excellent titles in the 2023 Spring season!
Hurting for summer shows? Your backlog’s about to be spoiled for choice.
Vrai, Toni, and Peter try and fail to keep their discussion of a packed-to-the-gills season to a reasonable duration!
It’s a lovely season for surprises, mess, and surprisingly compelling mess.
Rushes through a checklist of upsetting tropes early on in maybe the tamest and most toothless way possible.
This is a season of meteoric highs and nightmare lows.
My feelings veered wildly between “Love this!” and “oh NO!”, settling on loving it. Oshi no Ko powerfully explores women’s emotional labour in the idol industry and more broadly.
Just a bag of police brutality-flavored yikes.
Dead Mount Death Play has managed to put so many conceptual hats on top of one another that it’s come round to being kind of entertaining.
Raeliana is a great protagonist, but it’s a shame that the animation production isn’t as good as it wants to be.
How it fares will depend on a couple of key things: how it handles its love interest, Isaki, and how it handles the theme of mental health and isolation that underpins the whole premise.
World Dai Star is interested in the actual process of acting, of how actors inhabit the minds of their characters and use all the tools of physicality and stagecraft to create the artifice of inner life. And it is a joy to watch in this way.
On paper, A Galaxy Next Door sounds like a cliché rom-com where a magic wife fixes a sad boy’s problems. And it very well could turn into that, but this premiere is a lot more charming—and way more relaxed—than its synopsis would have you believe.
There are glimmers of interesting thought here, but not enough to keep the show from collapsing under the burden of its own premise.
Do you like watching cute animal videos?
The possibilities are endless but sadly it’s obvious this show isn’t heading in that direction.
This show is bad in an interesting way, in that it reveals the interfaces between sexism and capitalism. Just go with it.
Magical Destroyers is simultaneously A Lot and very little at all.
Fantasy allows us to ask exciting, imaginative “what if?” questions, like “what if this guy punched a wizard in the face? Would that be funny or what?”
It’s a supernatural comedy first and foremost, but that silliness is grounded in characters that feel like characters rather than one-off jokes.