Manga

Been in a bit of a manga slump this past month, unfortunately. Part of the problem is that I feel guilty if I don’t read in Japanese^[1], but also if I do read in Japanese it’s quite slow going. Hope I’ll have more to say next month!

Anime

Seasonal

May I Ask for One Final Thing? (Saigo ni Hitotsu dake Onegai shitemo Yoroshii deshou ka) — MC beats up corrupt nobles with her fists—what’s not to love?

This Monster Wants to Eat Me (Watashi wo Tabetai, Hitodenashi) — After getting horror yaoi last season (The Summer Hikaru Died), it’s time for horror yuri! I had read the first few volumes of the manga before, but the anime is already past that and ooooooh it’s gettin’ real juicy in the last few episodes. Probably the show I look forward to the most every week.

With You, Our Love Will Make It Through (Kimi to Koete Koi ni Naru) — Cute (and surprisingly spicy!) shōjo romance with a furry love interest. The romance has moved a lot quicker than I expected, and it uses the furries to tackle racism and apartheid—nothing too deep, as of yet, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by what it’s covered so far. The viewer ratings on this seem to be quite harsh, but I suspect that’s at least in part due to the presence of furries and the fact that it’s a shojo. I suppose the romance elements aren’t particularly groundbreaking, but you cannot tell me with a straight face that this show is worse than

Awkward Senpai (Bukiyou na Senpai), which I’m also watching for some reason (het seinen romance about a senpai and her new kouhai, not awful but not good, animation is baaarely holding together, wouldn’t recommend).

A Mangaka’s Weirdly Wonderful Workplace (Egao no Taenai Shokuba desu.) — Fairly standard CGDCT workplace yuribait show which follows a mangaka as she navigates her first serialization and her relationships with her editor, assistants, and fellow mangaka. It’s not good enough that I’d recommend it unqualified, but if you like that sort of show it’ll probably whet your appetite, and I’ve been enjoying it well enough.

Spy x Family Season 3 — I remember not liking Season 2 quite as much as Season 1 for whatever reason, but I’m really enjoying this one. Lots of fun moments, and we begin to learn more about Loid/Twilight’s origin story. Anya continues to be a lil’ stinker.

Touring After the Apocalypse (Shuumatsu Touring) — I really, really wanted to like this one. On paper, the premise (two girls on a motorbike journey across post-apocalyptic Japan) should be an easy sell for someone who absolutely adores Kino’s Journey (Kino no Tabi) (2003) and Girls’ Last Tour (Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou). But in execution…there’s just something missing. I can’t find any obvious technical faults with it—animation is solid, characters are likeable, world is suitably post-apocalyptic—but it just doesn’t spark my curiosity, which is something those other two anime achieved masterfully. It may be a technically better put-together show than Awkward Senpai, but Awkward Senpai is something I’ll at least throw on as something to watch while eating, whereas when it comes time to watch Shuumatsu Touring I have to fight the impulse to just watch a YouTube video instead.

Dusk Beyond the End of the World (Towa no Yuugure) — almost forgot about this one because I dropped it within the first few episodes. It showed some real promise with the pilot, but the first regular episode had me raising my eyebrow, and in the second episode slavery entered the picture without any John Brown action in sight, so I cut my losses. We get so few original anime these days, so it’s pretty disappointing to see P.A. Works waste the opportunity on this garbage.

Overall, this is a much, much weaker season for me than last season, where I loved almost all the shows I watched, only dropping With You and the Rain (Ame to Kimi to), and even the ones I didn’t love I still really enjoyed. But I got another excellent yuri show that seems to be doing really well, so it’s not all bad! Please let this be the beginning of a new age of yuri anime…

Non-seasonal

Yuru Camp S3 — sipped on this one here and there over the course of a few months, which I think is a nice way to experience it. Not much to say about it, honestly: it’s Yuru Camp. It’s cozy. If you liked the other seasons, you’ll also like this one. The only negative thing I can really say about it is that, due to the cooking sequences, it’s basically Carnism the Animation, but I personally don’t find it that off-putting.

Cardcaptor Sakura — Been (re)watching on Blorptube with other Hexbears…damn, this show is so good. Amazing OST—there’s so many tracks I want to transcribe and learn I can’t figure out which one to start with. Beautiful art style and animation. So many cute outfits and relationship dynamics! If you wanna revisit your childhood, I’d definitely encourage you to come join us Mondays at 6 PM EST/11 PM UTC/12 AM CET!

New Game! — as Erika said elsewhere in the thread, we’ve finished up Season 1 and are moving on to Season 2! Take note, EgaTae—this is how you do a CGDCT workplace comedy! S2’s got another banger of an OP, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Aoba will handle her greater responsibilities (this is a rewatch for me, but I’ve genuinely forgotten all of the plot).

Your Name (Kimi no na Wa) — watched the Esperanto fandub that Erika hosted, which was an interesting experience! This was (at least) my fourth viewing of Your Name, having seen it in Japanese in theaters once and at least twice in English with other people, so now I’ve seen it in three languages! Don’t really have any others I can compare it to, and I don’t speak the language, but by my estimation it was pretty impressive for a fandub. Can’t compete with the original Japanese, of course, but it’s still a perfectly valid way to watch the movie, and the amount of effort involved to get all the translation, timing, and mixing right is impressive. And holy shit, I’d forgotten just how well the soundtrack meshes with the movie—RADWIMPS absolutely nailed the assignment.

Live Action Adaptations

Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! (Ayaka-chan wa Hiroko-senpai ni Koishiteru) — Very slapstick, but a cute little yuri show—read the manga a few years back on @Cromalin@hexbear.net’s recommendation (hope she’s doing okay…). I mostly watched this with Japanese subs, flipping over to English subs if I got lost. Only watched Season 1 so far.

Western Animation

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic — We’ve just wrapped up season 8—only one season to go! My only complaint is that Maud should be in more episodes. Give Maud her own show!!

The second season of Dress-up Darling is less horny and also more gender than the first.

Im Reading this: https://www.webtoons.com/en/fantasy/miro-in-memory/list?title_no=7780 Gist of it is, essentially, we are following an insurgency against the South Korean government after a period of collapse.

Anime

Finished Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, as well as the second season. I think the first season works better because the episodes have a structure to go off of (hunting ghosts) rather than being freeform nonsense, but it’s also way more mean-spirited in its edginess so I’d actually rate it lower. The english dub of the Poly Twinks in S2 also horrendous, with them constantly spouting zoomer/alpha slang. New Fly Away is a banger, though. C

Got like another 5 episodes into Log Horizon, I love how the way to “train” the new players (who are all children, obviously) is to just send them into a dungeon with vague advice. Apparently Shiroe is a gigabrain genius because he actually tried to explain concepts like aggro while nobody else knows about game mechanics seemingly at all. Rating withheld until I actually finish at least one season.

Manga

Caught up to Rooster Fighter and it’s surprisingly good based on the premise of “what if a rooster was an 80s shonen battle protagonist”. B

Up to chapter 700 of Kingdom, they do be conquering them kingdoms. It’s getting pretty formulaic what with Shin constantly meeting some huge guy who’s like the best general ever and then beating him, but the

was actually surprisingly hype. B

Also up to date with Chainsaw Man, Kagurabachi, Bocchi the Rock, The Elden Ring Manga, One Piece, and a few others I forget.

last month i started writing a very long post about my journey rewatching most of digimon adventure series but my editor decided to not save it so i ended up rage quitting. since i don’t have the energy to write it again, i will just summarize my thoughts on them

Digimon Adventure (1999): enjoyable kids show that has many problems because is a kids show

Digimon Adventure 02 (2000): does an amazing job being a sequel but has very bad writing overall

Digimon Adventure tri (2015+): what is an evangelion fan made a very bad sequel to adventure (hated it)

Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna (2020): second attempt at making grown up digimon (liked this one alot)

Digimon Adventure 02: The Beginning (2023): why does this even exist other than extracting money to the name? 02 characters were more relevant in the previous one

outside of digimon, i have been trying to catch up with some seasonals but i still have a big backlog and very few time

A Mangaka’s Weirdly Wonderful Workplace: cute lesbobait with a very relatable main character (full of anxiety all the time). quite fun but not sure i had followed it if i didn’t followed the manga already

Ranma 1/2 (2025): still hating on this adaptation but i love the series too much to drop it

Chio’s School Road is very anime. 1/3 genuinely fun, 1/3 and 1/3 horny nonsense.

My mom and I saw Chio’s School Road a while ago. We enjoyed it and the fucking Kabaddi Kabaddi and Bloody Butterfly and so forth but yeah you’ve got the right assessment.

Animation with mom

We finally finished Squid Girl season 2 and The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, but still have the respective OVAs to go through. We’re still slowly making our way through Ojamajo Doremi, City the Animation, and the second season of the Ranma ½ reboot. No progress on The Boondocks season 4 as far as I can recall, nor on Steins;Gate. We might’ve seen some more Haunted Hotel but I wasn’t keeping track, in any case we’ve sort of fallen out of that show in favor of Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated, which has been a certified banger thus far. To think I only started watching SDMI because it has an Esperanto dub, right?

We saw the first episodes of FLCL, Sailor Moon R, and Milky Subway, but are yet to continue them. Sailor Moon R was the biggest hit among these; I’m willing to guess SMR is going to be a K-On or Eva situation, where my mom didn’t like it the first time but became a super-fan the second time.

We also saw the short films Puparia and Pendulum. They were neat.

Animation on Blorptube

Garg’s continuing to show Cardcaptor Sakura and it continues to be as fun as I remember it being. As for my own watch parties… We’re finishing season 8 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic tonight; each season of MLP:FiM has been a blast week after week. I showed the Esperanto fandub of Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, which was a great movie and a great fandub. I also showed The Magic Reedpipe, Abraskil’s Adventures, and the Gora Samotsvetov episode “Sheydulla the Lazy”, all animations based on the mythology of the Caucasus and all fun. The Magic Reedpipe especially is a great stop-motion film. I’m still showing Fireman Sam and that’s also still quality stop-motion fun.

When it comes to fanime, I showed Elemental Goddess the other day. Only Redcuban1959 showed up for it, but we still had a good time even if it was just us two. I have to wonder why the fanime watch parties have been so “couch-y” after the first one — is fanime really something that only Cuban and I care about?

Anyways, Elemental Goddess was better than expected but not as good as I’d hoped. Cuban liked it a bit more than I did. We started ranking the five fanime we’ve seen, and that ranking might be something I’ll share at the end of the year; maybe I’ll find time to show some more fanime before the end of 2025 so we can make it a top 10, huh. Progress on my own fanime I’m making is slow but still progress — I don’t think I’ll stick with the conlang gimmick after the first episode, because that’s really the thing that’s slowed the work down the most.

The Norwegian dub of The Secret of Cerulean Sand is now on my list of things to show on Wednesdays, though I haven’t actually seen it yet. Being another Jules Verne based anime about 19th century kids building flying machines makes it seem like the forgotten younger sister of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, so I’m looking forward to seeing Cerulean Sand and if it actually holds up. I’ll need to retime the subtitles, though, which is going to be a bit tedious.

Animation otherwise

I finally finished Land of the Lustrous; it was a good un. I started watching Tesagure! Bukatsumono (abbrev. Tesabu), which is the 11-minute-per-episode show that Yaoyorozu was doing before their breakout hit of Kemono Friends. Tesabu has also been fun, but the subs on episode 2 are borderline illegible. I ended up showing Tesabu to my mom and I’m not sure if she wants me to only watch it with her or if I can watch it alone or what. In any case, it’s charming low-grade 3D CGI animation, very tongue-in-cheek humor, and a LOT of it is adlibbed, so it’s a good time overall.

I gave Madoka Magica one more shot but I’m still not really feeling it three episodes in. I’ll come back to it another time. I’ve seen some more Avatar: The Last Airbender but it’s starting to be a few days as Futari wa Precure has once again become my main alone cartoon. Precure is getting pretty toyetic with Porun and these frickin rainbow bracelet thingies, but I don’t mind. Precure is joined by Maison Ikkoku, which I decided to get back into last night as the Gilbert O’Sullivan song “Alone Again” — which I first found through a Maison Ikkoku soundtrack compilation — was stuck in my head. Coincidentally, the episode I saw last night happened to be the very one where the OP switches to “Alone Again”, which was neat.

Edit: Apparently it’s ONLY episode 24 that uses “Alone Again” as the OP fuckinnnn why though

With AernaLingus I’ve been watching New Game. We finished the first season and the OVA and have moved into the second season. It’s been plenty of fun. The new OP has some sakuga in it for real.

I visited some relatives recently and saw an episode of Mystery Lane as well as the movie K-Pop Demon Hunters while I was there. Mystery Lane is a 3D CGI kids’ show, it’s not for me; K-Pop Demon Hunters, on the other hand, kicked ass, and I’m not even into K-pop. I also showed some of my younger cousins Star vs the Forces of Evil, which was the first time I’ve seen the first episode since I was myself a young’un, and the first time I’ve seen the show in Norwegian. It certainly holds up, and I look forward to showing SVTFOE on Blorptube once we’re done with MLP:FiM.

Manga

My mom and I finally “finished” Non Non Biyori, except that we skipped a few volumes in the middle. Will we ever get those missing volumes? Who knows. What will we read now? We’ll have to wait and see. By myself I’ve been continuing The World of Narue, and after finishing the third volume I’ll have to find something else to read, too.

I’m only watching Spy X Family this season. And I just read weekly mangas/manhwa. Just waiting for Winter 2026 which is packed with the good stuff.

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video