“Women’s tennis is not for failed male athletes.”
— Martina NavratilovaThere's gotta be a pony in there somewhere!
New anime series I’m going to give a shot:
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After School Dice Club (funimation): three high school girls play European board and card games. Ep 1: Marrakech. Highlight: class rep girl sports red half-rims.
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Ascendance Of A Bookworm (crunchyroll): reborn as an adorable moppet in a world without books, Our Heroine starts making them herself. Ep 1: creepy wizard uses drugs and magic to discover the secret origin of the adorable moppet.
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Azur Lane (funimation): a bountiful harvest of bountiful shipgirls. Ep 1: 95 seconds of blah-blah before they even show a girl, then all of them at once in the OP. Really feels like it’s only for people who already know a lot more about the game than the 95-second explanation they just gave, and have a large checklist of girls who must appear. I’ll give it at least until Belfast shows up. Quote: “war, war never changes”, sigh.
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BlackFox (crunchyroll): masked ninja girl battles the forces of evil in a future world, with a series logo that looks suspiciously like a Grendel mask. Ep 0: origin story, in which Our Hero is briefly introduced as an adorable ninja moppet, only to grow up offscreen and come home just in time to experience a tragic loss that leads her to swear revenge on two creepy guys.
No, wait, this isn’t a series at all, and the “preview episode” I watched earlier this week is no longer available. It’s been replaced by a 90-minute movie. -
Didn’t I Say To Make My Abilities Average In The Next Life? (crunchyroll, but not up yet): during her reincarnation into another world, Our Heroine wishes to be average, but didn’t specify average what. Most promising element: series composition by the same guy who handled Endro!.
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High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World ([crunchyroll] (https://www.crunchyroll.com/high-school-prodigies-have-it-easy-even-in-another-world)): seven seriously-overspecced teenagers who more-or-less run modern Japan crashland in a fantasy world and proceed to take over. Ep 1: four minutes of blah-blah about how awesome each one is, followed by what’s sure to be only the first of many opportunities to show off their mad skillz. They opened with two pairs of giant boobs, though, so it can’t be all bad…
Saturday Update
Gave Cautious Hero: The Hero is Overpowered But Overly Cautious (funimation) a shot. The OP song was so bad I skipped over the credits, which is never a good sign. The in-your-face trope-awareness and self-conscious wackiness was… discouraging, to put it kindly. It would have been less awkward to have signs popping up that read “laugh now”.
Looks like Average starts Monday.
Unicode Is A Hate Crime!
Now that hysterical idiots have declared the “OK” hand gesture a symbol of hatred and white supremacy (seriously, what do these imbeciles smoke?), the only rational response is to take away their computers, tablets, and smartphones, because they can be used to inflict imaginary pain and anguish on other idiots.
After all, if you ban 👌, only outlaws will have 👌.
The depth of my concern for this nonsense is best expressed as:
🎻 🎶ain’t that a shame🎶
(and if you can’t read this, clearly the fascists have already won!)
They had me at hel-lo!
The producers of “High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World” (crunchyroll) certainly know how to set the mood with the opening scene:
Interestingly, the official web site has a full English translation.
I've got wood for your sheep...
After School Dice Club, in which cute girls do cute things with board games.
I think they’ve got me with this one…
Ecchi-na no wa ikenai to omoimasu!
“If I were going to write an isekai series…”
“Transported Into A Fantasy H-Game As The Comic-Relief Sidekick, I Keep Getting Kidnapped By Villains And Molested By Their Kinky Minions, Only To Be Rescued By The Hero Just As They Get To The Good Part”
I thought about designing another book cover to go with this title, but most of the potentially-appropriate art on Pixiv is a little too explicit, and it would end up behind an NSFW tag anyway…
So, has anyone written an “accidentally transported from one isekai to another one in a different genre” series yet? Y’know, like the clumsy, busty elven priestess who gets adopted as the mascot of a squad of space marines.
Cop Craft 11 & 12
Episode 11: cops do cop things, shallow allegories do shallow allegorical things; Our Heroes outnumbered, a wild villain appears!
(in the final scene)
Episode 12: talk-talk, talk-talk, talk-talk, fight! voiceover, decision, and…done. Our Heroes ride off into the sunset, to adventures that will never be animated.
The mostly-straight adaptation of the first novel was good. The chainsaw-and-superglue attempt to race to book six as the finale, not so much. Honestly, they used the middle novels and the supporting cast so little and so poorly they’d have been better off jettisoning it all and focusing on Our Heroes versus Zelada.
Focus. That’s what was missing. The vampire story from book two? Interesting, but nonessential, with dangling plot threads that went nowhere. Tirana’s undercover work and cute whore girlfriend, which was apparently anime-original (replacing her going undercover as a schoolgirl and losing a completely different friend)? Some nice character development, ruined by the baffling decision to completely ignore Tirana’s justifiable thirst for revenge, start the next episode as if nothing had happened, and put her into the cat’s body for an episode and a half. And then suddenly we’re in book six, and as that story starts to unfold, they break it up with a clip episode. WTF?
The alternative, in the hands of a good team, would be to build on the source material and set up the confrontation with Zelada for a second cour. Do the cop stuff, do the wacky stuff, flesh out the supporting cast, and leave the audience demanding another 13 episodes.
So much potential, so sadly wasted. I’m not sure it even works as an ad for the novels, although the first few episodes got the whole set into the top 20 on Amazon Japan briefly. Since then, book 7, originally scheduled to come out in September, has been delayed, and doesn’t show a release date.
Dear Amazon,
If I buy Echo Frames, Echo Buds, and an Echo Loop, and sit in a car equipped with an Echo Auto, will they all misunderstand me the same way?
More seriously, will they all fight over the Bluetooth connection to my phone, rendering their functionality non-deterministic?
Also, is it just me, or does the name “Ring Stick Up Cam” sound like something to wear in case you get mugged?
[Not buying the glasses, by the way, because I hate the way thick plastic frames look on my face. Not buying the earbuds, because I have Ankers, and they’re pretty good. Not buying the ring, because it’s huge. Not buying the smart oven, for the same reason I don’t want a gas range that has WiFi: fire bad. Also not buying the Studio, the Show, or the Glow. The Flex has potential, since it replaces the common hack of mounting a Dot on an outlet, but I won’t buy one unless you offer a trade-in on earlier-generation devices; they still work, so why buy more?]
