Welcome to another general discussion thread! Feel free to use this thread to talk about things you have watched recently, questions you have, or recommendations you want to give!
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Now that Thanksgiving is past, it’s properly Christmas season - and that means it was time for me to pick up Sanda. Seems properly unhinged, and perfect for the month of December. I’ve only watched the first episode though, so who knows whether it’ll be able to keep that up.
I’m also catching up with Sanda. It’s good, but not appointment or binge viewing for me.
The “Santa powers” thing is kinda cool.
I used to play Champions, the superhero RPG, and I can see the translation of Santa myth into superhero powers and ethical codes.
I am just catching up with Shuumatsu Touring, and it’s a heavy take on the travelogue genre (e.g. Encouragement of Climb/Yama No Susume, Yuru Camp, etc.),
The ED, “Glide” by Myuk is good.
I went to the 30th anniversary Evangelion exhibit at Roppongi last week. It was a lot of fun! I’ll make a post about it tomorrow.
I watched tokyo magnitude 8 and was really impressed with it.
Current season:
May I Ask for One Final Thing is still going strong. It feels like the story’s a bit compressed, but since it’s a light novel series adaptation, it’s pretty much either that or the story is told in detail but can’t reach a resolution before the anime run is over, and of the two, I much prefer compressed.
And after a week off for a filler episode that was basically just a grab bag of venerable old anime tropes translated into surreal science fiction, Gnosia is back to adding new layers of mystery to the ever-growing pile without actually resolving anything. The clock is ticking…
Past seasons:
The highlight of the week was definitely Kyoukai no Kanata, which I thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish (the series plus both movies). I liked everything about it, and particularly Mirai and Akihito.
Then I knocked around a bit and ended up stumbling across one of the most awesomely bizarre and goofy things I’ve seen - Henkei Shoujo. It’s a set of five one minute shorts, each of which has the same unnamed girl finding herself in some situation in which she encounters another girl who then transforms into a vehicle. That’s it, and it’s great. The situations are funny and the transformations are epic, satirically fan-servicey and ultimately entirely pointless, all at the same time. It’s just good stupid fun.
Then I started SSSS.Gridman. It’s okay, but it just didn’t quite grab me, and over the holiday, I wasn’t willing to invest enough effort to get into it, and instead just looked for something familiar and comfy with which to wind down, and ended up rewatching Honey Lemon Soda. This was my fourth time through the series now and I still couldn’t say exactly what it is that I like so much about it - I just do. Even with its flaws.
And I think I’m going to go back to SSSS.Gridman. At least for another episode or two.
I found Gridman’s animation jarring and rough with a hype OP and cheesy story. Dynazenon is an overall better production. Gridman Universe is pretty awesome and requires watching both Gridman and Dynazenon for the full experience.
They have some of the best character designs, too.
Despite it being a short, holiday week this past week here in the US, I have been absolutely slammed with work. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to watch any anime for the past two weeks now. So, I thought I might as well provide a bit of a meta update here in the comments.
Year End Awards
I think that for this year I am going to move the 2025 Anime and Manga year-end awards into January (probably late Jan). One of the main points of feedback I got from that process last year is that it felt weird to vote on the awards while the Fall season was still airing. So, we can fix that! I think late January might work better since the beginning of a new season is always busy, so let’s give it a couple weeks to settle down first.
Year End Awards
