Do I like Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro? No. Do I hate Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro? No.
Do I secretly probably like Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro? Well… I don’t like to be called out like this.
Vrai, Peter, and Caitlin look back at the 2021 Winter season, from egg time to horse girls!
Super Cub captures all the feelings of loneliness and yearning in a beautiful executed premier about a girl and her brand new motorbike.
This premiere had a rough start for me. While I understand the point is to show that Takemichi is going through rough times during his adulthood, it’s difficult to get invested in him because beyond that he isn’t that interesting.
Here we have a series that hits pretty much every one of my buttons: an anime steeped in gothic aesthetics, themes about identity and perception, visual design that makes heavy use of dark silhouettes against vivid colors, and homoerotic mirror imagery.
After literally working herself to death in an office, Azusa takes her new slow existence in stride, and is understandably distraught when challengers start appearing at her door threatening to turn her life into an action-adventure game when she’s content playing a farming simulator.
Oh neat, a complex and melancholy anti-war spec-fic series with a messy approach to social commentary and diversity metaphors. And here I was worried that all my reviews were going to be easy this season!
ReSTART is a mostly newbie-friendly reboot of a 1990s series with good energy and strong yuri subtext… but my God, this show is obsessed with ass shots.
It’s not that the whole episode is a waste of time, although in some ways that’s more frustrating than if it was a complete ball of incompetence. It’s just that some pretty novel ideas are buried in a sea of titties and tonal inconsistency.
This is a stylish adaptation of an equally stylish game, but the narrative will need to slow down its breakneck pacing if it wants to garner an audience outside of the existing TWEWY fanbase.
While there are some bumpy spots that keep this from being an inclusively horny ray of personified sunshine, I did spend most of the episode with a slightly baffled grin.
Saint’s Magic Power, with a listless twenty-something as its heroine, represents a different kind of power fantasy, but it’s a fantasy nonetheless: the power fantasy of getting a job without qualifications or a complicated interview process, of having a “knack” for a new skill and picking it up quickly, and not having to tie your hair back when you do lab work.
Do I want to explore tree-lined old streets looking at antiques now? Maybe. Mostly, though, I want to talk about the unexpected emotional undercurrents that I think will really elevate this cute little hobby show.
There are so many sociopolitical themes that can be explored through anthropomorphic animals, which can make it easier to have conversations about difficult topics that occurred either in the past or present day. As of now, ODDTAXI is sort of interested in talking about that, but it feels more like a low-key mystery that is gradually going to reveal itself in future episodes.
SEVEN KNIGHTS REVOLUTION: Hero Successor has all the good tidbits that make me want to engage, but after three unsuccessful successive watches, I’m not sure if I’m into the plot enough to eventually like it.
Come for the evil organization, Stay for the… well, I guess for the entertainment, if this kind of show’s your thing. As you can tell, it’s… not mine, but hey: maybe you’ll like breast jokes and… ah, breast jokes? Oh yeah, evil, too!
Higehiro has the potential to be a story about an adult helping a teenage girl , but still has too much rom-com veneer for me to trust it.
In a market so saturated with Generic European Fantasy Adventures that it’s practically dripping, it’s nice to see new series that really try to go niche and plumb the depths of more mundane, less-explored aspects of these settings. In this case, I’m very much looking forward to seeing the ins and outs of the fantasy real estate market.
