2023 Spring Three-Episode Check-In
It’s a lovely season for surprises, mess, and surprisingly compelling mess.
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Anime Feminist Recommendations of Winter 2023
This season had plenty of shows we liked, but only a handful that stood head and shoulders above the rest.
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Sacrificial Princess & the King of Beasts – Episode 1
Rushes through a checklist of upsetting tropes early on in maybe the tamest and most toothless way possible.
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Chatty AF 183: 2023 Winter Wrap-Up (WITH TRANSCRIPT)
Dee, Chiaki, and Peter look back on a season with a lot of mixed bag recommendations!
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2023 Spring Premiere Digest
This is a season of meteoric highs and nightmare lows.
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Oshi No Ko – Episode 1
My feelings veered wildly between “Love this!” and “oh NO!”, settling on loving it. Oshi no Ko powerfully explores women’s emotional labour in the idol industry and more broadly.
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The Marginal Service – Episode 1
Just a bag of police brutality-flavored yikes.
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Dead Mount Death Play – Episode 1
Dead Mount Death Play has managed to put so many conceptual hats on top of one another that it’s come round to being kind of entertaining.
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Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion – Episode 1
Raeliana is a great protagonist, but it’s a shame that the animation production isn’t as good as it wants to be.
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Insomniacs After School – Episode 1
How it fares will depend on a couple of key things: how it handles its love interest, Isaki, and how it handles the theme of mental health and isolation that underpins the whole premise.
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Stella of the Theater: World Dai Star – Episode 1
World Dai Star is interested in the actual process of acting, of how actors inhabit the minds of their characters and use all the tools of physicality and stagecraft to create the artifice of inner life. And it is a joy to watch in this way.
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A Galaxy Next Door – Episode 1
On paper, A Galaxy Next Door sounds like a cliché rom-com where a magic wife fixes a sad boy’s problems. And it very well could turn into that, but this premiere is a lot more charming—and way more relaxed—than its synopsis would have you believe.
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Rokudo’s Bad Girls – Episode 1
There are glimmers of interesting thought here, but not enough to keep the show from collapsing under the burden of its own premise.
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Too Cute Crisis – Episode 1
Do you like watching cute animal videos?
