• Aria
• Non Non Biyori
• Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku
• Flying Witch
• Super Cub

Release That Witch.

The only downside is that it only got an 8 episode ONA adaptation, which is just enough to introduce the setting and the principal characters, and get them through their first few crises. The manhua is excellent though.

How in the world did an awful adaptation of an awful manga get a second season?

I could probably name 100 series from the last year alone that deserved a second season more.

IMO, the best episode yet - just pure old-fashioned fantasy goodness - honor and courage and determination justly rewarded. And great animation and even better background music. Lifted me up above the cares of this grubby world for a moment...

This is such a strange series.

I just watched all four episodes today. I had noticed it before, but didn't think much of it, but I caught some buzz, so...

It's just... right now, it could turn out to be amazing or it could turn out to be awful, and I have no idea which. It's juxtaposing so many different things that it seems like it shouldn't work, and it quite possibly won't, but so far it's actually pulling it off.

We have a standard fantasy setting, except that the city is very much not. There isn't a right angle anywhere - even the chairs are crooked - and the buildings look from a distance like they were just hastily sketched in, then when you get up close, they still look like that. And the distant shots look like they came straight out of a cartoon version of a Rio barrio, complete with TV antennas and satellite dishes and window AC units and graffiti.

And the tone shifts from goofball humor to brutal murder to horrifying tragedy and back again, often in the span of mere seconds.

Rein is genuinely an idiot. He's not even genre-aware or just situationally dim-witted or anything - he's a complete and total idiot, though at least a mostly well-meaning one.

Then we've got Lily - the beautiful warrior in her fine enamel and lace battle armor with her beautiful sword... with a bent hilt, who spends the rest of her time as a just-barely partly recovered hikikomori who dresses like an elementary school student.

And Margaret, the vicious, bitter, murderous surviving sister who stares longingly at the knife in her hands and dreams of murdering Lily, then uses the knife to cut apple bunnies for her.

They introduced one villainous leader of the rival guild, only to immediately sideline him for the sinister power behind the throne, which they then immediately killed off.

There's been more brutal death in this already than there was at the same point in Akame ga Kill, AND more goofball humor than there was in KonoSuba.

It's just all over the place, but if it can pull it all together into some sort of recognizable whole, it could be tremendous. Or not. I guess we'll see...

And on a bit of a meta side note - in reading comments on this, I realized that "peak" is no longer the cringiest word on anime forums. It's now "sakuga."

I just binged, straight through with only a break for sleep, an amazing manhwa - See You in My 19th Life.

Jieum Ban has an extraordinary ability: she can remember the memories of all her past lives. After her previous life is cut short by a tragic accident, she sets out to reconnect with the people of her past life in her current one. Will memories of her 18th life sabotage romance in her 19th? Or will love endure across different lives?

The thing is that that's the bulk of the story for 30-some chapters, then it suddenly pulls together some little bits and pieces that have been scattered here and there and opens up to reveal an entirely new, additional plot line. And that's not the last time it does that - IIRC, there are at least three different points throughout the story where it peels back one layer of story and reveals an entirely new one hidden underneath. It's just very well done.

Additionally, the characters are well-written and there's a lot of satisfying growth through the course of the story. And that's done in much the same way - a character might be introduced and come off as very shallow and one-dimensional, then it slowly peels back the layers so you can see deeper and deeper into them and discover that it's not that they're one-dimensional - not even close. It's that they (like virtually all of us) have significant parts of their selves hidden away or guarded by walls. There's much more there - they just don't let most people see it.

And it's a complete and satisfying story, and I strongly recommend it.

I actually wrote a review of it for MAL (the first review I've ever written) just because it's so completely unlike anything else.

The thing that amazes and impresses me is that it somehow manages to be sweet and wholesome underneath all of that. In a way, it's not even raunchy. I mean, it is, and very much so, but at the same time, they're so open and straightforward and honest about it all that it doesn't seem that way. They're just sweet, wide-eyed innocents, falling in love and building a relationship, regardless of whether the topic at hand is sharing an umbrella in the rain or having sex 30 times in a night.

And it makes me laugh regularly, just because, just like this chapter, it'll go along for a while, being normal and sweet and simple and wholesome, then BAM! - it drops something just astonishingly depraved right in the middle of it all. And it's just that much funnier because Ino and Rintarou never break character - again, they're just normal and sweet and simple and wholesome, even though it turns out that they're talking about something astonishingly depraved instead of any of the things one might expect in the same situation in any other manga.

It's like those two families are perfectly ordinary... non-humans. As if unbeknownst to everyone, they're descended directly from the Greek gods or something, so all of the normal human rules just don't apply to them and their appetite for everything, including sex, is insatiable. But other than that, they're just ordinary people, going through all the same things everyone else goes through. Sort of. Though not really. But still sort of...

Suddenly diverting in the middle of her crisis to notice the sock, then immediately going back to the crisis, was both funny and a bit too familiar. As a lot of this manga has been...

That was very sweet.

Nice to see a chapter focused on Himemiya - most of what we've seen of her so far has just been innuendo about her... um... predatory approach to men. Which we still saw here, but with some interesting and touching context.

Well that's boring.

Oh well. Thanks for the clarification.

The look on her face in the last panel just breaks my heart.

I know it's a cliche, but I still laugh at that bit when the male lead is made to look embarrassing in a room full of girls, then the next panel is just the "click, click, click, click..." of pictures being taken.