The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Extraordinary Young Lady: I both watched this and read through some of the novels, and surprisingly really did not like it. It starts off very strong and then just kind of does all of its premise really poorly after the first book or so. The shows climax is also the third novel, which is just bad all around - I hate the drama building plot device of characters just refusing to communicate and then talking past each other in the dumbest ways possible in general, and that is the entire climax of the anime and the entirety of the story in volume 3 of the LN. Anis and Euphie's relationship after the first book is also just not well written at all in general. The general concept of applying basic scientific methods to magic to carry out industrialization is also just 100% vibes based and not well thought out at all, and even as the characters directly clash with the whole "monarchy is in fact bad, actually, and the aristocrats are almost exclusively the literal worst pieces of shit alive and you can clearly see this" fact of the setting they not only remain implicitly monarchist but go deeper into the myth of noblesse oblige instead of even arriving at a liberal conclusion, including Anis who should really know better given the conceit of the story. Gets points for yuri and some level of class consciousness, but overall can't go above a C and do not recommend.

Dandadan Season Two: Dandadan's back and continues being fantastic, diving right back into the soul crushing misery and horror. Continues having the same content warnings as ever though, with the fresh addition of a whole lot of self harm. Overall easy A, fully recommend.

There's No Freaking Way I'll be Your Lover! Unless...: What if Bocchi the Rock had nothing to do with music and everything to do with toxic, manipulative yuri? What if Touko from Bloom into You was a manipulative sociopath instead of insecure and brainwormed? What if 9/11 was yuri-

I have heard only bad things about where this series goes (tldr it's literally just "what if a straight harem anime was yuri instead but still toxic and bad" from what I've heard), and it's already off to a very uncomfortable start right out of the gate in the first episode. No rating for this one since there's only been one episode so far; I'll withhold judgement until I see how bad it gets for myself.

I watched Castlevania Nocturne and it was a pretty fun slopfest! It feels less gratuitous than the original series, even if the pacing and writing still has some issues (season 2 improves on that, though)

Kind of refreshing to see the French Revolution framed as unambiguously good, and the aristocracy and counter-revolutionaries as villains. It still has some lib brainworms, but explicitly says killing slaveowners is cool lol

Watching Hunter X Hunter for the like 15th time! Showing it to a new friend who has never seen it and we're having a blast

Also, as always, I am eternally watching One Piece

Still reading Hyakkano and we get a new Kanojo this coming week. With 34 we will have officially moved into the second third.

Finished up Apothecary Diaries - shit was solid.

Watching Dan da Dan season 2. Good so far.

I'll report for self-crit for this one, but I am watching the New Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt. It has the spirit of the original - for good and bad.

Before it released, I joked about CITY: The Animation being Nichijou 2... but it is Nichijou 2. I'll miss the original's characters, but this is very promising, based on episode 1.

I'm really looking forward to watching CITY for myself, but I've got a nasty tendency of taking several years to get to anime I'm excited for.

Sick Days Anniemays

I've got a lot of things I can mention, because since the last thread I happened to get sick and spent basically the next two-to-three days binging anime. This included the first episodes of Land of the Lustrous; Frieren; ODDTAXI; March Comes In Like a Lion; SHOSHIMIN; Makeine; Mobile Suit Gundam; 'Tis Time for Torture, Princess; Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei; Bakemonogatari; The Twelve Kingdoms; the third episode of Bloom Into You; the movie Macross: Do You Remember Love; and all the Project A-ko movies (which I streamed on Blorptube, it was a gay old time). I also started Revolutionary Girl Utena while sick, but after the second episode decided I'd rather watch that with my mom; and I restarted the All-Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku OVA, which I quickly finished; and I started and soon finished the final season of Hidamari Sketch, which means I only have the specials of that series left until I've 100%-ed it. I also saw the first episode of I'm In Love With The Villainess while sick, and after finishing Hidamari Sketch, I've moved onto that for my morning anniemays. And I'd say I'm starting to get into it now, it's got a fun main character.

I don't have much to say about my Sick Days Anniemays cause I already wrote about them at the time (day 1, day 2)

Other Anniemays

Mom and I finished Do It Yourself, and I'd say it's a very precious show, I highly recommend it. Mom remarked on how it shows older characters in an active role at one point and how she appreciated that. Alone, I finished Sailor Moon season 1, and I'm nearly finished with the chapters of the manga I've downloaded. Shame what happened with MangaDex recently, incidentally.

Mom and I are continuing Samurai Champloo, Cells at Work: Code Black, The Boondocks season 3, Ojamajo Doremi season 1, and Squid Girl season 2. There's not really much to say about them, we've been slowly making our way through them for months at this point and we're certainly nearing the finish line for some of them. The second half of Samurai Champloo is definitely the half with the most interesting episodes, so I'm glad to be rewatching it.

Mom and I have not seen any episodes of The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan in the past month.

Much more exciting is the anime that ma and I have started watching in the course of the past month: Steins;Gate and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The former has been on my planning list for ages, and it is indeed pretty nifty; Evangelion was contrarily one of the first anime I ever saw, I described watching it as a "rite of passage for a would-be anime fan", and I've been trying to get my mom to watch it for ages. Eventually she gave in, despite not liking her previous exposure to Eva (namely the first rebuild movie). Apparently mom's only motivation for watching 1995 Eva with me at first was that she likes Spike Spencer, but within a few episodes she's ended up honestly hooked on it. We've just gotten to the part where Asuka is first introduced.

By myself, I started the Shaman King reboot because I've got a coworker who likes it. I can't say I'm a huge fan after two episodes, but I'm watching it with Norwegian subs and Japanese audio description, and I'd say there's value in that alone.

I also watched one episode of Futari wa Precure this month, just because I had a hankering for it. I've been contemplating showing Precure on Blorptube so I haven't really been watching it by myself much. God knows that if you start watching six episodes of Precure a week you'll probably never run out.

Blorptube

On Blorptube, I've finished showing Once Upon a Time... Space and have moved on to Once Upon a Time... Life. It's very fun watching ...Life because we've got a regular in the chat who's apparently an expert on like biochemistry and stuff, so she gets excited or points out the mistakes and so forth. Her enthusiasm for the subject is infectious. ...Space had some garbo audio mixing, and it wasn't really a show that I remember from my childhood in the same way as ...Life, and I think that's probably part of why my watch sessions for ...Space tended not to get that much attention. People seem to find ...Life more interesting. Curiously we can't find out who did the English dub voices, but we still make jokes about the white blood cells being Boers. There was also some osteocyte settler-colonialism in one of the episodes. That was something.

Stalin has finished showing Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water on Blorptube and moved onto Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. At this point I can't really afford to stay up that long after 2 AM so I really only get to watch these shows sporadically, but I made sure to stay up for the finale of Nadia, despite the fact that I'd already seen it not too long ago. Stalin and company also watched the Nadia movie, but I want to watch that with my mom, and it was way too late anyways, so I skipped that. Gundam doesn't really seem like my thing, at least not yet.

Manga

I finished the volumes I have of Aria and Yotsuba& so I don't really have any manga in Japanese left to read. They're both very precious manga that I highly recommend.

As mentioned, I'm nearly done with Sailor Moon in Esperanto. Very good learning material, you can find it on esperajxo.net.

I haven't really looked at Russian Cardcaptor Sakura in the past month.

I read a bit of The Daily Lives of High School Boys, which is a manga I've had for a very long time but still haven't finished, I guess I just don't find it as interesting as I'd hoped it would be.

On the other hand, I did finish Welcome to the NHK, and yeah, it's certainly a manga I felt kind of awkward reading out in the open. It's got as many moments that make you say "d'aoughh" for the main character as "what the hell is wrong with you?!"

Mom and I finished the first volume of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken and we both agreed that a story about anime production really works waaaaay better as an anime. So we won't be getting volume 2.

I managed to get a hold of a huge collection of Ranma ½ books in Norwegian. It's basically my first time owning physical manga in Norwegian (not that there's much digital manga in Norwegian, either), and it's also my first time reading manga "backwards" since I was a little kid reading what I'm only just now realizing was just a manga-style comic written by an Anglo^[I'm referring to David Hutchison's Oz: The Manga] to begin with.

...Yeah, remember when manga were mirrored so as to not upset the delicate constitution of the fragile Westerner accustomed to reading comics from left to right? Sheesh. Even when I was a little kid reading my first ever manga I knew that was some ol' BS.

In any case, Ranma is very fun, and despite being a book for children in a language I've used my whole life, it's still introducing me to new words and phrases — or making me think stuff like, "You know, I don't think I've ever heard a single person say pønske since I was like 12."

But the translation is very obviously using English as a "middleman language", which I find a little bothersome. シャンプー is called Shampoo rather than Sjampo, for instance; and {風林館高校|ふうりんかんこうこう} is called — I kid you not — Furinkan High School or Furinkan High, rather than something sensible like Furinkan videregående or Furinkan VGS. For that matter, ～さん is translated as mister (at least in reference to male characters), and I'm just like... Either leave it as -san or render it as herr, because mister already means "loses" in Norwegian, and I just find it very weird to be using English honorifics in the middle of an otherwise Norwegian text for no discernable reason.