Weekly Anime Watches: 11/26/18

Yay Thanksgiving Break! It was so relaxing. I got to spend a lot of time hanging out with my parents I haven’t seen in a few months. Also had an Apple Cup party to celebrate the two largest and vocal college football teams in the state of Washington playing against to each other. That was so much fun…even if my team lost.

Let’s talk about some anime though. One show ended this week and I am finally free from it! Also, I didn’t watch my usual older mech shows this week. Instead, I caught up with Tsurune. It seems interesting so far. Older mech shows will be back next week.

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-Seasonal Watches-

Golden Kamuy S2 Episode 6

Very good episode that plays to all of Golden Kamuy’s strengths. The first half involves Tankigata, Inkarmat, and the young boy finally meeting up with Sugimoto, Asirpa, Ogata, and Shiraishi. They immediately go to an Ainu death celebration to send the bear’s soul to the after. That was a lot of fun and established new chemistry and character moments between Golden Kamuy’s ever evolving cast. Then we go to the depressing stuff with Ogata’s backstory. He was born from a general’s mistress that left her behind, so he killed her since his mom was broken and always cooking Ogata’s favorite meal in hopes he returns. Then Ogata shot his step brother during war time because he wanted to get a reaction out of his father, and even murdered his father and make it looked like suicide. Very emotional stuff that I am not sure was placed properly. Then again, I don’t know when backstory things are supposed to be told and/or placed.

Thunderbolt Fantasy S2 Episode 7

A lot of crazy things happened in this episode so it’s hard to keep track all of it. Not that everything that happened was rushed in anyway, but sometimes it takes a couple rewatches in order to get everything. The bigget things that happened was our female villain, the princess of cruelty, getting more and more seduced by her sword, glasses cop finding out that Lin is the Enigmatic Gale and using that knowledge to support his own goals, Shang and Lang separating after Lang was frustrated with Shang being too kind and caring, Lang encountering and even fighting our princess with the sword with his eyes closed, and then the battle being ruined by glasses cop and Lin’s entrance. A lot happened, but it still makes sense. That and the over the top nature of the show was lost. Remember that everything is balanced when you try to make everything as strong as possible instead of weakening things for ease of use and fairness. That’s all I got to say.

Space Battleship Tiramisu S2 Episode 7

I really love how non sequitur this show can get sometimes. Especially when it can take a concept of Subaru writing his own manga for the Tiramisu to vent his frustration. Finding that everyone loved it on the ship, he took it to a manga magazine in which the editor he meets goes on and on about how he wanted to be a pilot. I love how everything just naturally flowed and went more and more off the wall over time. Then the second part was Subaru and our jock pilot fighting the enemy in non mech combat on an enemy spaceship. The episode ends with Subaru in a clothing store wanting the manager to hurry up and once again, I loved how the show went there somewhat naturally. This week was just full of complete laughs for me. All good stuff.

Run with the Wind Episode 8

Well, that was an eventual and drama filled centered on what happened after the track meet. Kakeru has a tantrum because he isn’t as fast as he wants to be, Prince orders a treadmill, and Nico questions whether he should keep running because of the way his body is build and that is everything worthy of note in this episode. Now, all Kakeru can focus on is getting faster and there must be a more backstory centered reason for this, because nobody is obsessed about just running faster unless you are the flash fighting against the reverse flash. Even Haiji is acting more along the lines of a coach and telling Kekaru to cool his jets and that there is more to running then speed. I hope next week is the backstory episode, because Kakeru’s highschool level drama can be incredibly tiring and I want to know why he is like this.

RErideD Episode 12 (final)

Well that ending was exciting? No actually. No, it wasn’t. After twelve episodes of whatever this show, RErideD ended with what can be defined as a whimper. Basically, Yuri and Derida go to the chamber where Mage is in status, Mage wakes up with some of her memories gone, Derida and Mage go the past to fix everything, and then the future is good because the war was stopped. That’s it. Oh, Mage and Derida get married for some reason despite their age distance; so that is a weird development that just happened. The best thing I can say after all of this is at least RErided has a conclusive ending that shows where everyone is. Not many series even get that. I still wonder why I continued putting myself through this punishingly average experience. I guess it was for Yoshitoshi Abe, Well whatever, I don’t have to deal with this show anymore.

Karakuri Circus Episode 7

Well, this episode was exciting because a lot of things happened too it. The episode cuts back to Narumi beating up puppets in front of the hospital. A lot of his attacks and how he spoke scared the children around him, but through this scene he declares himself as a shirogane in order to fight the midnight circus to prevent more kids from getting Zephon disease. Yeah, that’s a little convoluted isn’t it? It all makes some more sense in context I assure you. Probably. On the other side of the world, Shirogane makes a friend! I mean, her friend is a female knife thrower by the name of Velma that is hired to kill Masaru, but that gets resolved in some capacity later on. Especially since Masaru’s expressions look exactly like Velma’s dead brother. Siblings are powerful after all. Very touching episode this time. Still, I wonder where all of this is going. Narumi’s side has a story element to it but how will Masaru and Shirogane’s story line up with Narumi’s? I’m kind of interested.

Bloom Into You Episode 8

While this episode was still pretty solid from a character and story perspective, the direction was boring this week. The end result was episode eight of Bloom Into You was lacking. The first part of the episode and a little bit of the last bit was centered around Yuu and Sayaka learning to see eye to eye. For some reason, they are having trouble handing off the baton to each other during the relay race. The rest of the episode is Yuu trying to find a way home at school when she doesn’t have an umbrella. Of course, Touko has an umbrella and they have some adorable moment as Touko walks Yuu home. Yeah, I love these two together.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 5 Episode 8

I always love that how strange and inventive from JoJo’s Fights are. Especially this episode which revolves around two people fighting each other on top of a semi-truck with the drive who doesn’t even want to be there. Mista is fighting against an opponent who has the stand capability of controlling momentum and energy. Mista’s stand ability of guided bullets allows him to able to defeat this annoying opponent. Mista’s backstory is inserted into this where he was just a character who was floating around the back alleys until he joined Bruno’s gang. I am loving this cast of characters more and more as time goes on. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is just fun.

SSSS.Gridman Episode 8

Akane’s smugness is on full display in this episode. She brought her new model kaiju to school to show the Gridman team what they are up against. Yup, that happened. By telling them that she is attacking the school festival with it because she hates it, the Gridman team is at odds about how to deal with the situation. Rikka wants to appeal to Akane’s humanity in order to not attack civilians and Utusmi thinks they should just fight the designated monster, so they break apart from each other. After Rikka talks with Akane and Akane tells Rikka she was built to be her friend, Rikka jumps on board to the fighting option. Yuuta provides the more human way of fighting by putting Gridman out first to scare the locals, then the fight happens when Gridman combines all the assistants and beats the monster easily.

I wonder how Akane is feeling right now. Either way, this was a fun episode with some realistic teenage drama, but it does make me question why the school would have a festival if Akane created the world in the way she wanted to. I know they talked about some students voting for it, but that doesn’t seem right still. Still, this episode feels like a set up for Akane’s eventual fall. She is playing all the cards she has on hand and she isn’t getting anywhere. Either the alien Alexis is going to push Akane even harder or something more horrible is going to happen. Wonder which this is show is going to go for.

Double Decker Episode 10

Considering the fact that Doug is still in the hospital and out of duty because he refuses to do paperwork, we get an episode centered around a hospital. This would just be a relaxing episode, but it gets heavier when inevitable deaths and Anthem being used to heal hopeless case patients is put on the line. For example, a simple and annoying thing likes boy trying to pay off girls to go on dates with his dad, so the boy’s dad doesn’t go out in the way that this boy things of him as pathetic. It’s truly heart-breaking stuff and it gets worse when Anthem has the possibly of healing dying patients but at an extremely high cost to that patient’s humanity. This episode was heart breaking for me because seeing the dad deciding to die as he is felt so like a lot of situations I’ve lived through recently. I cried….at the airport. *sigh*

-Binge? Watches-

FMA 2003 Episodes 34-38

I am beginning to understand how the back part of FMA 2003 works. The plot itself just doesn’t matter because the homunculi already told what they are trying to do and they are just taking the time to make sure it happens. The homunculi want to be human and they need a fantastic alchemist to create a philosopher stones to do that and they are still trying to make sure that happens. The result is that the show is just going to be filled with individual character vignettes. This time, we got character episodes about some part of Lust’s back story, some fun focus on Mustang’s crew, Ed and Al’s relationship, and some other characters that aren’t important but add more depth to the world. That isn’t a bad way to go about any of this, but that means that there isn’t a lot of good plot threads and logic connecting them together which can get incredibly frustrating for me at times. Oh well, I guess we can just see where this all goes and hopefully ever make sense towards the end.

Tsurune Episodes 1-6 (will move to episodic reviews next week)

I’m surprised about how nice and warm this show is. So far, Tsurune’s drama is very puddle deep but I think that is for the better. It’s an anime that is more focused on characters getting together after having some little bits of conflict of interesting. Kyudo is the reason why this group of guys and those three girls who don’t get any enough attention get together as a group and we learn more about the ancient art through different scenarios, but Tsurune is more character focused then event focused if that makes sense. Yes, the group is going to be having a competition and there is a rival team that is being developed, but I doubt there will be a huge sense of rivalry between the two teams being presented like most sports anime. (I guess I don’t have a vast knowledge of that though.) Kind of excited to see where this one goes as it continues onward.

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