Seasonal Anime ImpressionsWinter 2021Part 3Inexplicably anime keep on being released. Where are they coming from? What is their purpose? Are they heralds of disaster? Can there still be hope? Let's find out. [The stuff in italics are the synopses taken straight from MAL]Back ArrowRingarindo is a land surrounded by a wall. The wall covers, protects, cultivates, and nutures this land. The wall is god ... it is the foundation of this land of Ringarindo.One day, a mysterious man named Back Arrow appears in Essha village on the outskirts of Ringarindo. Arrow lost his memories, but says that all he knows is, "I came from beyond the wall." To restore his memories, Arrow heads out beyond the wall, but is embroiled in a battle with himself as the stakes.There seem to be two concurrent narratives (at least until where I watched). Let's call them Mecha-Royalty and Starving-Cowboys.In Mecha-Royalty people keep talking and stuff keeps happening but it all just passes straight through me. The dialog includes too many in-universe terms (=made-up words, if you want to be more critical) and doesn't seem to be saying a lot most of the time. The action lacks tension and stakes.In Starving-Cowboys we have more of a traditional introduction: These people are cowboys and they are starving. Then some food appears from the sky. It's honestly not too terrible so far. The character designs are also neat (as opposed to Mecha-Royalty which has boring character designs as well). But as time went on, more and more I felt bored here as well, stuff starting to pass through me as well and even at first I thought that this didn't seem cool enough to offset Mecha-Royalty.This is not to say that you won't enjoy this; especially Mecha-Royalty is the kind of stuff that I don't like in general even though other people do. But even as far as that goes, Back Arrow doesn't strike me as the most competent techno(/whatever)-babble mecha anime either; all I'm saying is take my opinion with a grain of salt, I'm not really the target audience. But it's not a good show.Dropped after 11' - 5/10Beastars 2nd SeasonSecond season of Beastars.The OP is really cool. While I don't think it can musically win against Wild Side, visually it might just have it beat even though Wild Side's stop motion animation isn't an enemy that's to be taken lightly either.Before we get into the anime proper, a short summary of my thoughts on the first season: It's good. The "gritty" out-of-school, action-y stuff didn't really work too well imo and it was kinda sad to see that get more screen time towards the end when the strongest parts of the show were always slice-of-life and the more mystery-y or psychological-y bits. But the generally great character writing, interesting world and insane production quality kept it all together. (This isn't to relevant here but herbivores (Haru specifically) wanting to be eaten was and is a very weird plot point)So this second season starts out with more of the good bits. Like Yuru Camp yesterday, the beginning immediately pulls you back in (and even to some extent calls back the very first scene of the first season as well). Everything that was good in the first season is still just as good now. And all the things that were bad haven't really shown up yet. Go watch this if you liked the first season or even if you didn't like it (at least if your reasons were similar to mine). That's all I have to say. I'm hyped for snake.Not dropped - 5/10Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka? (So I'm a Spider, So What?)The world where the Hero and the Demon King continue to oppose each other. The grand magic from the Hero and the Demon King cross over worlds and exploded in the classroom of a certain high school.The students who died in the explosion will be reincarnated in a different world. The protagonist, who has the lowest reputation in the class, was reincarnated into a spider. Nevertheless, she adapted quickly to the present condition with strong willpower.This is a story of she who has become a spider trying whatever she can to live.I'm sorry dear reader for being this unqualified to write this blog post: I'm again outside of the target audience for this. But I got opinions regardless.I'm not really one for isekai anime and neither is "self-aware", "meta" humor my kind of thing. Thus I will not continue watching this anime but if you do enjoy these things, I'd say check this out. The rhythm of this show works really well: new situations and jokes just keep coming up without anything being too fast either. The 3D visuals might look like the creation of a bumbling fool when just coming off of Beastars but on a more general scale I think they stack up. There are some weird cinematographic decisions that seem to mostly come down to missing production time (or budget but, as this is an anime, it's probably time) but these aren't too distracting and maybe even contribute somewhat to the rhythm? And also the jokes, while not really my thing, seem competently written.So overall I didn't find this funny or too interesting but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people do.Dropped after 10' - 5/10And these were today's anime already. So all that's left is to answer our opening question: Can there still be hope? Yes.Thank you for reading.

Slug Gardens