I know that the season has passed already. By quite a bit honestly because I am writing this when the Spring season has literally just started. At the same time, I don’t think I would be able to write about these shows on their own posts.The way that my time being able to write is kind of waning all the time and the slower pace of my blog this year, I don’t think I would be able to get around to these shows either. So these are some of the remnants from Fall 2022 that I couldn’t watch because I was already watching a lot of stuff that I liked.

Those shows being: Do It Yourself, Bocchi The Rock, and Akiba Maid War. Three shows that I watched after the season ended and enjoyed quite a bit. I do not know if I can really get into a lot of detail with them here, but I want to write about them because they are just a lot of fun in their own ways. Going to end this preamble now and start talking about these shows. 

Bocchi The Rock

I’m going to say it right now, this is a good show. I don’t get the hype as much as other people, but I do find it vastly relatable. This is a show about the nervous Bocchi finally started to live her dream of joining a band and mentally suffering for it. Especially when the other cast members: the smart drummer Nijika, the trouble maker Ryou, and then ever energetic singer and second guitar Kit, are such good friends to Bocchi and they have a lot of fun doing outside activities or performing as a band.

So there is some relatability with Bocchi as she struggles to find her voice that isn’t just online as GuitarHero. Slowly she does break out of her shell. I’ve felt a lot of the stress that Bocchi has felt recently in a community band because two of the lead trumpets are not playing in our June concert and that means I have to step it up a bit and it’s stressful. While I can get that itself, I do not think that using very creative mix media sorts of approaches to showing Bocchi’s dissociation from the world around her worked as well for me as it did for others.

But it’s wonderful to see anime like this being creative and those moments not taking away from the rest of the anime. The music, direction, and animation are some really good highlights of this show. I also really enjoy the cast quite a bit too. That is a few reasons why I really did enjoy this show and I am curious to see how Bocchi’s life changes at school and music career wise now that Bocchi rocked out at a concert in front of her peers. There is a lot of possibility with this show moving forward and I can’t wait for season 2. 

Do It Yourself!!

What a wonderfully comfy show with, once again, great characters. This show feels like it had a lot more going on then Bocchi the rock thematically but also had its main protagonist being a girl who is a bit of a pathetic girl in a different sort of way. But the thing is this show explored its cast a lot more then Bocchi but did it in a natural way that showed so much progress as we went along. Yes, I am saying this about a show focused on a DIY club where the crew spend a lot of time trying to find funding and wood for a tree house project. It’s really good and so underrated.

Serufu is the kind of clumsy character that ends up in the nurse’s office everyday because of some random accident she got somewhere in her day. Or multiple times during the time. She also has an imagination that runs away from her, still needs to learn how to use power tools without hurting herself, is very smart, and I can keep going. But she is also the kind of character that has some charisma that can get people together. Whether that is for concern for Serufu’s safety or maybe it’s her personality, but it works in the show’s favor in some great ways.

Plus, this show is just so much fun. With some actually showcases of Do It Yourself work from professionals and people just knowing how to use normal power tools. Most of the cast gets their time too because they are all so well fleshed outIn the world where drones fly around and schools of high level technology exist showing how outdated using hand tools is, Do It Yourself shows how people can had fun just building something with their hands and how great it is in a community building sort of way. It’s incredibly well thought out and realized too. I really love this show. 

Akiba Maid War

I enjoyed this show so much. Just tell me about how Akihabara maid cafes and yakuza gangsters could be combined and I am there. Tell me there are episodes of anime referencing things like Ashita no Joe and just brutality with cuteness as a facade and I am even more into it. Akiba Maid War is such a piece of art. Somehow the youngster Nagomi and the other thirty with a huge bloody background, Ranko, join the Pig Cafe. A struggling cafe at the bottom of the food chain and it’s fantastic.

It’s such an interesting dynamic to see the experience of Ranko who is protecting her Pig Cafe that is always just barely chugging along with positive eyed Nagomi. I mean, there are other cast members like the scummy manager Yasuko who is pure trash in a good way and the others that are pretty classic maid cafe stereotypes with guns. Each episode in the first half are these sort of one off schemes in order for the Cafe to keep running and those are great. Each one causes Nagomi to get more and more disillusioned while Ranko just continues to be bad ass.

Then the real plot kicks in when the pig cafe makes a big stink during a competition and everyone wants it to be destroyed. First it’s an older gang member from the competing group that wants to destroy everything about it. Then the leader of the group the pig cafe works for wants them to be destroyed too. I do not thing Akiba Maid War lands the ending it wants to have in an insightful as it wants to be, but the maid wars did end after this one encounter and society in akibara can continue to live here. Still, it’s all great fun. 

Conclusions and Possible Future Posts Like This

So yeah, there are still a lot of gems from fall 2022 and possibly other seasons we haven’t seen yet that possess a lot of cool energy and stakes. I feel like each one of them deserves a mention for other people to look into. Especially since seasonal anime doesn’t just go away once a show has ended. A lot of talk might do that, but these shows stick around on streaming services for other people to watch later and I don’t think people should skimp or forget about these shows so easily then just passing mention. 

In the future, I will try to write more posts about newer shows that aired, but I finally got around to watching finally like this. There is only limited amount of time to watch shows in a season and I feel like talking about these shows outside of their seasons can be valuable in their own rights. At least in general perhaps. Maybe not just for me but for other people too if other people wanted to do that as well. Lets see how that goes.