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12 Days 2020, Day 12: A Year of Comebacks
In a year where I actively chose to experience the anime of yesteryear the anime industry seemed determined to meet me halfway. This year had an awful lot…
12 Days 2020, Day 11: Magia Record and the Shadow of the Predecessor
Magia Record’s first season ends with a visually impressive fight between two characters from a different story. This unfortunately feels emblematic of the show as a whole, it…
12 Days 2020, Day 10: Popotan’s Left Behind Children
Popotan is a series with a handful of interesting ideas which it never commits to quite enough to be genuinely good. Occasionally it comes close though, with one…
12 Days 2020, Day 9: The Nice Power Fantasy of Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear
Isekai stories as a genre are pretty much inherently rooted in power fantasies. It’s a genre built around wish fulfillment, the idea of being able to escape the…
12 Days 2020, Day 8: Penguin Musume, the MAD
Penguin Musume♥Heart is one the most aggressively 2000s anime I watched this year. Essentially a protracted love letter to the anime and otaku culture trends of the era,…
12 Days 2020, Day 7: Saint October World
Sometimes you run into a series that by most metrics it’s hard to call Good, but which ends up being enjoyable anyway. Saint October is very firmly in…
12 Days 2020, Day 6: Short Awards 2020
As is now something of a tradition for my 12 days posts, day 6 is our 5th annual Short awards. Every year I use this day to highlight…
BanG Dream!, BanG Dream! Girls Band Party!, BanG Dream! Girls Band Party!☆PICO, Eagle Talon, Grand Blue Dreaming
12 Days 2020, Day 5: A Tired, Terrible Princess
After spending the first third of this post series trapped in the 2000s it’s time to take a break and acknowledge that I did in fact watch some…
12 Days 2020, Day 4: Micro-Ninjas? Himawari’s Nonsense Escalation
You say that as if it’s not all that unusual Himawari! is a series with a lot of weird escalation going on. Another entry on the list of…
12 Days 2020, Day 3: Milky Rose
I continue to be a sucker for mascot Cures apparently. Continuing my long long trip through the 12 years worth of Precure that aired before I got into…
12 Days 2020, Day 2: Nagasarete Airanto – Rainy Day Friends
One recurring theme of this year’s dive into forgotten series of the 2000s has been series which,. while I could definitely see their strengths, didn’t quite click for…
12 Days 2020, Day 1: A New Old Decade.
Well it’s that time of year again, when I decide that, after a full year of producing almost no writing, it’s a good idea to try and produce…
Trying to figure out Higurashi Gou: Watadamashi-hen edition
Something something 2020 So here we are again, another arc finished and a pile of new factors to consider. This one felt like getting a lot of new…
Trying To Figure Out Higurashi Gou: Onidamashi-hen Edition
So Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni has been one of my favourite pieces of media ever since I started getting into anime in general back in 2011ish. For…
“See You Tomorrow” – Death and Separation in Figure 17
All right 12 days was fun lets get right into the new year with… Wait… What do you mean it’s the middle of March?! Maybe some day I’ll…
12 Days 2019, Day 12: Heybot and the Sunday Prison
You didn’t really think we’d be getting through this year’s posts without this show coming up did you? Today we’re going to talk about endings, fittingly enough. As…
12 Days 2019, Day 11: “Here and now, something only we can do” – The Value of the Impermanent in Manabi Straight
Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight is a series that has been on my plan to watch list since like, 2011. I definitely should not have slept on it for…
12 Days 2019, Day 10: Graduation – the Existential Desolation of Sega Hard Girls
So this year I hit a bit of a milestone; 500 finished anime. While ultimately pretty arbitrary and not indicative of anything much it’s still a big number,…
12 Days 2019, Day 9: Michiru and Kaoru
My many rambling trip through the early Precure entries continued this year (I really need to start getting through more than one per year or I won’t be…
12 Days 2019, Day 8: Symphogear’s Swan Song
Have you ever seen a series just doing a victory lap? Symphogear’s finale felt like that in a lot of ways. With the existential threat of Shem-ha being…
12 Days 2019, Day 7: If you Die in the Granbelm
Granbelm was one of 2019’s biggest surprises, I had no idea what to expect going in and it ended up being my favourite new series of the year.…
12 Days 2019, Day 6: Short Awards 2019
Well this is the third year in a row I’ve done this so I guess it counts as a tradition now (technically it’s the fourth but I hadn’t…
12 Days 2019, Day 5: Granblue Fantasy and Deviation in Adaptations
Way back in the long forgotten era that was the 12 days of anime 2017 I wrote a piece on how Granblue Fantasy’s anime adaptation was at its…
12 Days 2019, Day 4: Recontextualizing a Hero, Adol Christin in the 90s
So last year I ended up replaying the entire Ys series on Nightmare on a whim, it’s one of my favourite game series and playing them all so…
12 Days 2019, Day 3: “Because I’m the Hero” – Prescribed roles in Endro!
Yesterday we looked at how two different anime utilise a similar character dynamic, today we’re going to talk about a show which directly uses those dynamics as part…
12 Days 2019, Day 2: An Angel and a God – Character Fascination in Comet Lucifer and Kyouran Kazoku Nikki
So another sort of vague self imposed rule I apply for these is to only write one post about any specific anime, in order to maintain some variety…
12 Days 2019, Day 1: Tactical Bread Delivery
Here we go again. For the fourth year in a row I’m taking part in the 12 Days of Anime. As always I’m keeping the theming kind of…
Granbelm Episode 13: A Better World
So here we are, at the end of Granbelm. While for the most part I’ve loved the show a lot there’s always been an edge of caution to…
Granbelm Episode 12: A Thousand Years
This episode managed the improbable feat of actually making me feel sorry for Suishou. So that’s impressive. She’s always been more of a force of nature than a…
Granbelm Episode 11: Goodbyes
As the final showdown with Suisho draws near, Granbelm took some time off for a picnic. The show’s “everything important happens on the night of the full moon”…
Granbelm episode 10: Dolls
Well this is late but what the hey. My excuse is that a lot happened in this episode and I needed time to mull it over (it’s acutally…
Granbelm Episode 9: Truth
Somewhat obviously for an episode putting Suisho at the center of things there was a lot of deception at work this episode. These lies were also coupled with…
Granbelm Episode 8: Absence
This week’s episode was heavily focused on the gaps left by things that aren’t there anymore, and how the absence of something can be just as revealing as…
Granbelm Episode 7: Hot and Cold
The inevitable showdown between Anna and Shingetsu finally became unavoidable this week, and the show didn’t pull any punches. While not a single long battle like Nene’s the…
Granbelm episode 6: Chasing the Ideal
Weirdly enough that’s sort of novel these days. I apreciate the show continuing to not be suffering porn. Nene got over her loss last week surprisingly quickly, tracking…
Granbelm Episode 5: A short girl’s long fight
This episode was one long drawn out battle and it was spectacular. The show’s always looked good but they definitely went all out this episode. Beamspam happened, big…
Granbelm Episode 4: Teaming up
As expected this week’s episode was fairly Nene centric, although not necessarily in the way I’d expected. Rather than having her act as the central figure of the…