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.

Chio's School Road ep 12 spoiler

Circa 19 minutes into episode 12, a girl’s skirt blows up as she’s going commando, and her “affair” is censored by the long vowel mark in まーん (written vertically and in context meant to be understood as a drawn-out clipping of a vulgar term for a vulva)

That was just one of those moments where I thought, “Yup, I really am watching this with my mom, OK”

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.