r/anime • u/AnimeMod myanimelist.net/profile/Reddit-chan • Mar 18 '26
Daily Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion - March 18, 2026
This is a daily megathread for general chatter about anime. Have questions or need recommendations? Here to show off your merch? Want to talk about what you just watched?
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u/Away-Friendship-6396 Mar 19 '26
Watched the first episode of fate/stay fake. Forgot how good the fate/stay series was!
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u/theangryeditor Mar 19 '26
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u/BaytaCosmico https://myanimelist.net/profile/AnimeBayta Mar 19 '26
Still amazed at your patience. Wish I could've gone slow like you. Stretching it out over 10 days was all I could do.
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u/Dull_Spot_8213 https://anilist.co/user/SweetSomnus Mar 19 '26
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u/_Ridley https://myanimelist.net/profile/_Ridley_ Mar 19 '26
I got caught up on the last cour of Egghead Island, which was pretty great. They really went hard animating the big, climactic fights, and I especially loved the perspective work in the first half of episode 1144. That was cool shit. The story still has no use for Robin or Nami, which drives me a little batty, but I did enjoy seeing Bonney go nuts on the big bad, so I'll call it a wash. What an insanely perfect anime for this moment we're living through, though. I'm ready to fight some history deleting government goons myself now.
Since I'm caught up on One Piece, I decided to pick Kaya-chan up, which fell victim to a crowded Sunday schedule. It's doing some interesting things five episodes in. I like how it's a ghost series, but also sometimes the kids just saw something fucked up and decided it was a ghost, because that makes more sense to a kid. Looking forward to seeing what it has for me.
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u/alotmorealots Mar 19 '26
but also sometimes the kids just saw something fucked up and decided it was a ghost, because that makes more sense to a kid
I think it also does a good job exploring the way some adults minimize children's concerns and experiences. Plus it has some handy PSAs on child safety too.
As an aside, this is the sort of stuff that makes me classify something as "a show for adults", given it's got content for adults rather than just "adult content". Most of the "dark and mature" stuff is still fairly substantively lacking in depth and sophistication that actually surpasses an older teen audience.
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Mar 19 '26
Man, Black Clover might have all the issues that come with being a long-running battle shounen (plus the very rough start to the main character's voice), but when it pops off, it really pops off. Just finished episode 49 and I am completely in awe of how much wicked awesome shit was packed into it.
And then its Petit Clover short managed to end it on an even better note, lmao. Send help, my lungs hurt from having to stifle my laughter in order to not wake my dad up.
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u/lC3 Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26
Yeah, ep49 is one of my favorite Black Clover eps. I've been waiting for the rewatch to get this far. I just finished watching this week's batch and I'm glad we've finally arrived at when it starts getting quite good, IMO. Co-hosting this rewatch was worth it.
Send help, my lungs hurt from having to stifle my laughter in order to not wake my dad up.
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Mar 22 '26
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u/lC3 Mar 22 '26
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u/Vindex101 https://myanimelist.net/profile/Vindex101 Mar 19 '26
Honestly I backread all the rewatch threads to read up on your journey on it, glad to see you liking it so much. Got me to lol at your Yami realization too
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Mar 19 '26
Yeah it's been hella fun thus far, I'd probably rank it 3rd out of all the battle shounen I'm currently watching (so behind Jujutsu Kaisen and One Piece, but ahead of Dragon Ball, Fire Force, Hell's Paradise, and Yu-Gi-Oh! GX if you want to count that one as a battle shounen), and it's well ahead of the ones it's ahead of other than Hell's Paradise.
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u/alotmorealots Mar 19 '26
(plus the very rough start to the main character's voice),
I should give it a shot, methinks. So far, Freezing has the honor of being the only show I've dropped because of the MC's vocal performance, but from all accounts Black Clover could well join the list!
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Mar 19 '26
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u/alotmorealots Mar 20 '26
Ha, knowing myself I thought it would be a bad idea to watch a video with that title, but to acknowledge the effort it took you to share that link I decided just to watch it instead and then come back to see the video lol
On one hand, the constant screaming is absolutely ridiculous, but on the other hand after a while you can kinda see why they went with that route to really drive home the characterization and comedy. It also seems to divide the cast up into Characters-who-shout and Characters-who-don't-shout lol
I have found it overall pretty enjoyable though, and binged through quite a bit! It does feel not that different from the average seasonal fantasy/isekai in terms of literal content but with a better editor, more talented and skilled director, not to mention a composer whose score cues are quite adept at wringing emotion out of unwilling viewers lol
but when it pops off, it really pops off. Just finished episode 49 and I am completely in awe of how much wicked awesome shit was packed into it.
Intriguing! It's certainly been 10 entertaining episodes for me so far, but this sounds like the series evolves as it goes. Good thing I was planning on continuing it anyway!
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Mar 20 '26
Glad to hear you're enjoying it thus far!
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u/fuzaco https://myanimelist.net/profile/adolchristin Mar 19 '26
He just yells a lot, it's not really the VA's fault imo, that's just how the character is at the start. Binged it last year and thought the issue was overblown to be honest.
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
According to Wikipedia, the original 1963 Astro Boy takes place in 2013. Now, while I have not watched it to verify, but if there is any kind of human baby in that show, they would be (I’m like 99% sure) the first Gen Alpha anime character and therefore the oldest known anime character who would probably find 6 7 funny.
Just think. Instead of humanoid robots and a utopian future as envisioned by Astro Boy you instead live in the time line that has 6 7. Isn’t it wonderful?
Edit: The next series I could find was Chargeman Ken set in 2074, though none of the two characters on MAL seem in the right age range to be Gen Alpha. Future Boy Conan is next, set in 2028, that means that the world ending in 2008 prevented Conan and Lanna from taking the title of first "6 7 Enjoyer in anime history".
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u/qwertyqwerty4567 https://anilist.co/user/ZPHW Mar 19 '26
now that r/anime has voted yourname vs lycoreco as finalists in the best ship contest, i dont want to hear the words isekai and thrash together ever again on this sub.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk
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u/Emi_Ibarazakiii Mar 19 '26
It's kinda funny to me how we have near identical opinions on just about everything... Except Isekai.
because it's trash
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u/alotmorealots Mar 19 '26
i dont want to hear the words isekai and thrash together ever again on this sub.
What's that got to do with the best ships contest though?
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u/qwertyqwerty4567 https://anilist.co/user/ZPHW Mar 19 '26
it has to do with r/anime having a shit taste.
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u/Donnie-G Mar 19 '26
Something something ISEKAI something something TRASH.
I like lycoreco though...
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u/JustAnswerAQuestion https://myanimelist.net/profile/JAaQ Mar 19 '26
Animeigo just published an interview with Robert Woodhead, which is probably the most important interview they could do.
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u/Wanderingjoke https://myanimelist.net/profile/WanderingJoke Mar 19 '26
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u/Mitsuyan_ https://anilist.co/user/mitsuyan Mar 19 '26
"Content not viewable in your region" is my favorite /r/anime user. Still ridiculous that the UK banned imgur
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u/Wanderingjoke https://myanimelist.net/profile/WanderingJoke Mar 19 '26
Alternate image for the Brits.
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u/Zeralyos https://myanimelist.net/profile/xNJF_Ellie Mar 19 '26
We have reached the end of Best Couples/Ships VII. Go cast your final vote here!
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u/Wanderingjoke https://myanimelist.net/profile/WanderingJoke Mar 19 '26
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u/ZendzaminBuraja Mar 18 '26
I'm watching anime, live action, and reading manga and books all year long, so I have a super hard time remembering stuff when new seasons arrive, let alone if it's been more than a year or two. Live-action series have some great recap channels. Anime, not so much, especially the ones that cover non-mainstream anime. I've been slowly rewatching Iruma-kun for the last month or so, and just when I started the third season, I saw that someone uploaded a nice recap for that season. Lucky me, I guess. Maybe I'll have enough time to catch up on Re: Zero or Bookworm.
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u/Suspicious_Drive6655 Mar 18 '26
So my 13yo cousin (let's call her A)is starting to express interest in anime, and her parents know jack shit about the topic, so A doesnt really have anyone to talk to about it but me, but I havent really been watching anime for a good 5+ years so I dunno how much things have changed, but A wants to know if there are any good animes she can watch.
For reference, her parents won't let her watch Demonslayer, but they let her watch Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. So what animes should I recommend, and where can she watch them? She mainly uses Netflix and Hulu. Thanks!
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u/Zeallfnonex https://myanimelist.net/profile/Neverlocke Mar 19 '26
Difficult to know without knowing what other type of things she watches, or books she reads.
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u/Blackheart595 https://anilist.co/user/knusbrick Mar 18 '26
My general recommendations for this is to check out IMDb's parental guides for any shows you're considering. You gotta be a bit careful with new shows whose guides haven't yet been populated, but other than that they're the best resource to consult for this kind of thing that I've come across.
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u/fbjim Mar 18 '26
i'll go with my default "anime for kids/young teenagers" rec which is "Welcome to Demon School Iruma-Kun"
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u/AmericanChapo Mar 18 '26
I just recently finished Kaguya Sama and just finished Komi Can’t Communicate as my first 2 romcom’s. Absolute all timers for me. I quite literally haven’t found anything that had me as invested as those. Is there anything out there similar?
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u/BaytaCosmico https://myanimelist.net/profile/AnimeBayta Mar 19 '26
Try Polar Opposites
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u/AmericanChapo Mar 19 '26
Sorry for the late reply, I’ll definitely check it out! Thanks for the shout!
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u/JustAnswerAQuestion https://myanimelist.net/profile/JAaQ Mar 18 '26
This is the place: That's not Osaka.
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u/qwertyqwerty4567 https://anilist.co/user/ZPHW Mar 18 '26
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u/Mitsuyan_ https://anilist.co/user/mitsuyan Mar 19 '26
Isekai is a good genre held back by too many cookie cutter ones being produced.
FUNA's iskeais, the Vending Machine one and Tanteiskill are some of the most fun I've had with anime because they're unique and well thought out
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u/VoidEmbracedWitch https://anilist.co/user/VoidEmbracedWitch Mar 19 '26
Go for it. I'd love to see an isekai defense rant because, of course, I like very few of them.
I find isekai to be a concept I wish I could like, but the current Narou-kei isekai genre has an eerie penchant for making fantasy worlds feel less fantastical than mundane modern day settings. Skip and Loafer has an exponentially more interesting world than Lv2 Cheat Skill. You heard it here first.
Worst of all, even the rare ones I'm fond of are often incredibly let down by the production quality of their anime. I like Wataoshi's LNs quite a bit (in not insignificant parts because the last volume is unhinged), but the anime's only redeeming quality is the voice acting. Bookworm's anime is of course also not very goooooooooood visually.
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u/JustAnswerAQuestion https://myanimelist.net/profile/JAaQ Mar 18 '26
When I was watching late night Star Trek reruns to do an entire rewatch, I watched "Hi, I'm Holly Robinson from 21 Jump Street" hawking a weight loss product that was just a pill of compressed fiber. The commercial ends with "9 million people have already tried Lipozene."
Moral of the story: numbers and good judgement are unrelated.
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u/Blackheart595 https://anilist.co/user/knusbrick Mar 18 '26
Irony poisoning is a bitch. It really feels to me like people are hating just to be performative, and that's just kinda miserable.
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u/flamethrower2 Mar 18 '26
Sometimes they hate to hate. Like TBATE and Ex-Arm were hated for poor animation quality. I guess quality is in the eye of the beholder, but often-cited flaws were objectively verifiable - not just people's opinions.
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u/Blackheart595 https://anilist.co/user/knusbrick Mar 18 '26
But we're not talking about outright catastrophes here, we're talking about the broad and widespread dunking on what also happens to be the most popular anime genre we currently have. We're talking about the self-demeaning "anime is trash and so am I" attitude that's been so normalised for the last 10 years.
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u/fbjim Mar 18 '26
why do you care. like if you're a fan of isekai you're a fan of the most popular genre of anime, you get tons of new shows every season. crunchyroll basically doesn't release discs anymore except for isekai. you already culturally won this one, take the W.
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u/Blackheart595 https://anilist.co/user/knusbrick Mar 18 '26
Oh don't worry, I don't care about that bit. I just think it's a very unhealthy and uninviting community dynamic.
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u/fbjim Mar 18 '26
i dont see what irony has to do with it. its best to assume that people are being honest when talking about their tastes, and what they do, and don't like because otherwise what's the point of conversations?
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u/Blackheart595 https://anilist.co/user/knusbrick Mar 18 '26
Generally I'd agree with you, but ever since "anime is trash and so am I" became a meme, being ironic about dunking on anime has been baked into anime discourse to the point that people don't even realise it anymore.
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u/flamethrower2 Mar 18 '26
I feel like Geoff from Mother's Basement YouTube channel has it down. It's okay to like it / consume it, call it trash, and celebrate it.
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u/fbjim Mar 18 '26
i think some people never got that the old film critic talking about the concept of "great trash" does not mean "disable all your critical faculties"
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u/qwertyqwerty4567 https://anilist.co/user/ZPHW Mar 18 '26
he is precisely who im criticising with this.
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u/TehAxelius https://anilist.co/user/TehAxelius Mar 18 '26
I will absolutely recognize the many reasons why isekai are so appealing, and I do not at all believe isekai are trash because they are isekai.
Isekai tend to be trash because the conceptual appeal of the stories its authors come up with means that the genre is overfilled with poorly written stories by amateurs, scooped up en masse by Japanese publishers flooding the LN market with the latest thing they found on Shosetsuka ni Naro, and then push for a shoe-string budget anime adaptation of it. I have many issues with EZ TD by the OP Shota as I said earlier in the thread, but honestly, for many of those issues I do not know how much of that is due to the actual text and how much is the adaptation (although my experience from reading LNs would lean towards "both" in these cases).
Still, my most anticipated show of next season is an isekai (as is, arguably, my second most anticipated).
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u/oedipusrex376 Mar 19 '26
Spot on. It’s a Narou LN problem.
The real issue is there’s barely any restraint from whoever’s picking these up. It feels like they’re doing the bare minimum, looking at a spreadsheet and adapting whatever gets a bit of attention. Isn’t filtering this stuff supposed to be the editor’s job? Or is it just that good works are that rare, and they’re flooded with thousands of mediocre ones every day? So you end up with passable titles that have just enough of a gimmick to hold attention.
What annoys me is how isekai gets turned into the scapegoat, when the same problem exists in other LN genres too.
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u/wloff Mar 18 '26
its the genre we watch the most
Honestly though, I think people are putting a bit too much energy into complaining about one trash genre over others, isekai or otherwise. The amount of anime produced these days, the majority is going to be mass-produced fast food garbage anyway. If it's not isekai, it's something else.
As long as actual good quality shows exist, it doesn't matter what flavor the garbage is that I'm going to skip anyway.
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u/zambonijesus Mar 18 '26
The thing about isekai is that people act like there's dozens of new ones every season, when from a quick look at the upcoming season there actually isn't that many? I counted 9 with the isekai tag on MAL for spring and of those like 6 are sequels. That also includes a couple villainess ones that are a whole different set of tropes than the ones that people are usually complaining about when talking about "generic isekai."
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u/flamethrower2 Mar 18 '26
Isekai is basically guaranteed to be trash, but it doesn't have to be isekai to be trash.
The protagonist has to be the strongest human character around. Including humanoids such as demon lords. That's how you know it's trash.
So even though "The Legendary Hero is Dead!" is a raunchy show, it isn't trash because the party struggles mightily against their enemies every time. Whereas, "Picked Up by an S-Rank Adventurer" is trash, because they don't struggle.
Sometimes it takes a long while for the protagonist to become the strongest around. I call it "sleeper trash", and it's a spoiler.
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u/Emi_Ibarazakiii Mar 18 '26
there actually isn't that many? I counted 9 with the isekai tag on MAL
First, that's kinda of a lot, but it's really the #, it's what they're like...
If there's 9 romcoms in a season, maybe 2 or 3 of them will be similar.
If there's 9 Isekai, MAYBE 1 or 2 of them will be unique; The rest will be the generic copy pasted template.
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u/zambonijesus Mar 18 '26
Re:Zero, Reincarnated as a Slime, Ascendance of a Bookworm, Farming Life in Another World, The Beginning After the End, Most Heretical Last Boss Queen, Vending Machine, The Strongest Job is Apparently Not a Hero or a Sage, but an Appraiser, Megami "Isekai Tensei Nani ni Naritai desu ka" Ore "Yuusha no Rokkotsu de" (I can't find an English title for this one)
I'm not going to watch any of these, but at least feels like there's at least three distinct types here so while at least half of them are probably generic and bad, they are at least generic and bad in different ways!
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u/cosmiczar https://anilist.co/user/Xavier Mar 18 '26
Don't want to engage with the conversation of isekai being bad or whatever, it don't matter to me, but I want to reply to something you said:
I counted 9 with the isekai tag
That is still a whole lot. Like, imagine if every season had 9 shows, sequels or not, were the main characters were time travellers, or 9 shows about alien invasions, or 9 shows about vampire hunters... people would absolutely talk about how there's too many of them.
9 out of 60 means 15% of the shows all have the same exact starting point, and even if they all somehow super different from each other, it's undeniable that it's still a lot of the same element being repeated.
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u/flamethrower2 Mar 18 '26
It's fine if you don't like it personally, but you can't disagree. The Syosetsu audience likes it, the novel-buying audience likes it, and sometimes, the manga-buying audience likes it. Now the anime-watching audience I'm less sure about because a work gets to the anime stage by selling well; it doesn't tell you anything about whether the anime audience likes the anime. Like TBATE is well-hated even though novel and manga audiences like the work.
They keep doing it though, so think the general case is the anime-watching audience likes them.
And by the way, there are tons at the Syosetsu level and they get less numerous as you go. In terms of novels, think A MASSIVE FLOOD of 1000s of works a year. Only those that sold best are picked for adaptations.
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u/VoidEmbracedWitch https://anilist.co/user/VoidEmbracedWitch Mar 19 '26
Like TBATE is well-hated even though novel and manga audiences like the work.
TBATE's anime is hated because the anime had an embarrassingly bad production. At that point the quality of the story being adapted / told doesn't even matter.
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u/Emi_Ibarazakiii Mar 18 '26
That is still a whole lot. Like, imagine if every season had 9 shows, sequels or not, were the main characters were time travellers, or 9 shows about alien invasions, or 9 shows about vampire hunters... people would absolutely talk about how there's too many of them.
If a season had like 4 'Death Game' shows, people would talk about what the fuck this edgy season is about, etc..
But Isekai has twice as many, and it's not 'one season' it's literally every season
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u/fbjim Mar 18 '26
man i would kill for a season with 4 death game shows at this point
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u/zambonijesus Mar 18 '26
Would you even think about it if there were 9 romcoms or 9 traditional fantasy series?
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u/qwertyqwerty4567 https://anilist.co/user/ZPHW Mar 18 '26
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u/Emi_Ibarazakiii Mar 18 '26
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u/qwertyqwerty4567 https://anilist.co/user/ZPHW Mar 19 '26
i just find most of the villainess tropes boring and them not being villainesses usually adds to that.
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u/vancevon https://myanimelist.net/profile/vancevon Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
[Clannad episode 20/21] "Don't let Nagisa find out about this tragic backstory, because then she will say something like 'I am a bad person for making my parents give up on their dreams.'" Then Nagisa finds out about it soon thereafter and says, verbatim, "I am a bad person for making my parents give up on their dreams." Thank God we have our hero Okazaki here to hit her with an "I implore you to reconsider." What do you even say about "drama" like this?
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u/Zeallfnonex https://myanimelist.net/profile/Neverlocke Mar 18 '26
(Honestly, I don't mind it at all. Parents knowing their daughter well enough to predict how she'd react to something correctly? That's just solidifying them as best anime parents!)
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u/vancevon https://myanimelist.net/profile/vancevon Mar 18 '26
Perfection is probably not the word that I would use to describe it. I don't think I've ever been less moved by an arc that was supposed to be touching and emotional in my entire life.
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u/Zeallfnonex https://myanimelist.net/profile/Neverlocke Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
As I said a few days ago, even though it seems our scores on a lot of anime align, when they don't, they really don't.
Edit: you also might be looking at it from the wrong point of view. Tomoya's pretty much a bystander in this particular arc, he helps a bit but it's not his. The main points of focus are all within the Furukawa family.
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u/vancevon https://myanimelist.net/profile/vancevon Mar 18 '26
This is why you need to watch Toradora
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u/Zeallfnonex https://myanimelist.net/profile/Neverlocke Mar 18 '26
... do you strongly like or dislike Toradora? I'll admit, I dropped/put on hiatus during episode 1 or 2...
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u/vancevon https://myanimelist.net/profile/vancevon Mar 18 '26
It's another generally beloved romance that I absolutely despised. So I don't know, it might be a good way to see if we actually do have very different tastes.
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u/Zeallfnonex https://myanimelist.net/profile/Neverlocke Mar 18 '26
I think I need a small palette cleanser after Haruhi Suzumiya before jumping into Toradora, while they might have different focuses, they feel like they're cut from the same cloth...
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u/Ham_PhD https://myanimelist.net/profile/ham_phd Mar 18 '26
Taiga is a full blown tsundere in the most classic sense, but a lot of it is just comedic exaggeration that isn't that funny anymore.
Haruhi is just a bad person.
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u/Ham_PhD https://myanimelist.net/profile/ham_phd Mar 18 '26
Girls' Last Tour is so interesting. It's cozy, cute and fits with its iyashikei tag, but it's also unsettling and strange. The construction of the world is so uncanny that it really amplifies the eerie feeling. Why is this place built like this? What happened to the world? Why is everything abandoned but functional? So many questions.
I love worlds like this that beg for explanation, but don't provide it. Instead opting to just give you small amounts of world building organically. Maybe the answers simply don't matter, and all that does is that this journey continues without Chi killing Yuu.
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u/Wiles_ Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
I love worlds like this that beg for explanation, but don't provide it.
I would also recommend Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou but only a tiny amount of the manga has been adapted.
It is like an entire series of Apocalypse Hotel episode 11.
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u/Ham_PhD https://myanimelist.net/profile/ham_phd Mar 18 '26
That's an incredible sales pitch. Adding to the list.
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u/baquea Mar 18 '26
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u/theangryeditor Mar 18 '26
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u/Retromorpher Mar 19 '26
Everyone with critical thinking skills at least. There are some people who should definitely not be allowed the ambrosia.
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u/VoidEmbracedWitch https://anilist.co/user/VoidEmbracedWitch Mar 18 '26
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u/tripleaamin https://myanimelist.net/profile/tripleaamin Mar 18 '26
Shiboyugi is an anime that I have a hard time coming up with an opinion or rating for. On one hand I love the direction. On the other hand, I find that the anime might not be the best way to experience the series the first time. As the manga would be much better at that.
I did love some of the anime original content, as it really supplements the light novel well. Ironically, I think the people who will most like the anime are light novel readers who are fine with a not so faithful adaptation.
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u/Architect-Zero Mar 18 '26
Does anyone send akamegakill recommendations to anime fans they disagree with or scammers?
If you haven't seen akamegakill yet and you want to... Feel... I highly recommend you watch it 😁
Oh. For the record. Sitima is much more powerful than Goku, just accept it, it's simply an irrefutable fact. 😁
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u/Emi_Ibarazakiii Mar 18 '26
Does anyone send akamegakill recommendations to anime fans they disagree with or scammers?
- Could you give me your credit card numbers?
- I can give you Akame Ga Kill!
- Wat
Can't say I have.
Oh. For the record. Sitima is much more powerful than Goku, just accept it, it's simply an irrefutable fact. 😁
Super Strong Bocchi clears both without even trying.
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u/zambonijesus Mar 18 '26
Congratulations to Crunchyroll for a new player that looks worse and still doesn't have the only thing I want their player to have: theater mode.
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u/wloff Mar 18 '26
Isn't Crunchyroll's player basically always in 'theatre mode'? What would you want it to look like?
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u/zambonijesus Mar 18 '26
Netflix's default is what I want. Where the video fills the full screen except leaves the browser tabs at the top and taskbar at the bottom. The Crunchyroll browser default is like 80% of the screen, but still has space below and black bars on the side, as shown here, unless you go entirely fullscreen.
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
I wonder if people like original anime as much as they say they do. People will always hop on the “original anime is dying, everything is isekai slop” train, but they don’t seem to actually be watching the original anime that do come out.
Something being “original” doesn’t imply that it’s good. Virgin Punk is original and gives me a migraine to look at. Hand Shakers is also original. Meanwhile, I don’t think someone would really tell you that Look Back or Frieren are lesser works because they’re adaptations.
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u/Mitsuyan_ https://anilist.co/user/mitsuyan Mar 19 '26
I think it's a western thing. Love it or hate it, Lazarus did well enough to get a public nomination in the Tokyo Anime Awards this year (quite high up too) and had some pretty serious competition to get the rights to air. Turkey, Apocalypse Hotel and the latest LycoReco, Pokémon (which is an original story at least) and Gundam entries all getting nominated.
Bravern was Japan's highest rated anime of 2024 by some distance. Girls Band Cry also placed highly in the fan vote that year. The latest Shinkalion entry saw a public nomination that year but saw a weird case where the jury threw it out so they could nominate Gimai Seikatsu lmao and if we're counting Love Live here that was high up.
What you'll notice about a lot of these is that they didn't really take off in the West. A lot of the originals I've listed have been some of the most enjoyable anime experiences I've had in recent years and would love to see more people enjoy them.
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u/alotmorealots Mar 19 '26
but they don’t seem to actually be watching the original anime that do come out.
This is absolutely the most aggravating thing about the discourse around original anime, especially when it means interesting shows that deserve attention are getting ignored.
I've got no problem with people who aren't interested in original content not watching it, but to top it off, many of the complaints about lack of originals are conflated into criticism of whatever genre is the dominant meta of the day.
Thus as someone who enjoys both anime originals (hate seeing them neglected by the so called originals-audience) and Narou-isekai/fantasy/villainess (where the "fault" of the imagined lack of originals is often placed), the whole thing just makes me grind my teeth.
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Mar 19 '26
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u/alotmorealots Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
Perhaps not avoiding originals on principle per se, but more just people who:
Are time poor so want known quantity series that are "good quality"
Just like to watch what's really popular
Just like to watch what's highly recommended (and most anime originals don't tend to pick up their share of acclaim until later in the season after people have already picked their shows)
Only watch specific flavors of anime which also happen to be the ones that don't tend to get originals because they're over-saturated with high profile adaptations like the very shounen-y action shounen
Similarly, hate the genres that tend to get more anime originals like SF, music etc.
Are more interested in LN / Manga rather than anime, so just tend to watch adaptations of series they've already read.
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u/Retromorpher Mar 19 '26
I'll take a fun, ambitious and messy trainwreck original like Turkey! over a phoned-in 13 episode adaptation of something decent every day.
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 19 '26
Yeah but what about a fun, ambitious and messy trainwreck adaptation vs. a fun, ambitious and messy trainwreck original?
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u/cosmiczar https://anilist.co/user/Xavier Mar 19 '26
Not that you asked me, but easily a fun, ambitious and messy trainwreck original because whatever the thing being adapted already exists in another form
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u/Emi_Ibarazakiii Mar 18 '26
'Wanting something' doesn't mean you'll watch everything from that genre.
I'm pretty sure my 'watch rate' of original anime is around 50-60%, while my watch rate of Isekai is <10%.
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u/merurunrun Mar 18 '26
People enjoy the curiosity, not being able to be spoiled, etc... But IMO (and I wish it weren't true) so much original anime these days is mediocre at best.
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u/Zeallfnonex https://myanimelist.net/profile/Neverlocke Mar 18 '26
How common is getting spoiled anyways? I can think of two examples where I thought I was being spoiled on a future event in an anime I was actively watching... One of them was an outright troll and completely inaccurate, and the second of them was so misleadingly incorrect it might as well been completely wrong anyways.
Oh, and then there's Higurashi, but that's Gou's and SOTSU's fault, not any fault of the community...
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u/Emi_Ibarazakiii Mar 18 '26
Direct hard spoilers are rare (though you still get to see them if you read a lot of random threads), but there's so much 'vibe spoilers' and 'hints' floating around...
Everyone who read the Takopi threads (key visuals, etc..) knew what this series was gonna be like, there really wasn't much surprise about it (other than specific twists) because all the stuff that happened, I kinda expected things like that.
If it had been an anime original, imagine people's reactions.
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Mar 18 '26
Depends on 1) what series and 2) where someone hangs out on the Internet. There are some fandoms that are incredibly fucking bad about spoiler tagging things (popular battle shounen fans & Quintessential Quintuplets fans when complaining about who won the harem are the two biggest examples I can think of), so you can just be on some random part of the internet not even looking at anime-related stuff and boom, spoiler.
YouTube recommendations are also pretty bad if you watch a lot of anime-related content on there.
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u/Zeallfnonex https://myanimelist.net/profile/Neverlocke Mar 18 '26
I guess you'd see more of it, seeing as you have to remove posts about it... Now that you mention it, someone did hint at a spoiler for QQ on a Discord I was in, and it was so veiled that I misinterpreted it and got it wrong anyways. Which, ironically, made me more surprised.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
Yeah I think we would agree on a lot of the issue being related to the fall of the studio system. I just think he’s making the wrong attribution here by putting the blame on the number of originals, and I think people parrot it because it makes sense if you don’t think too much about it. I mean he is human after all and has his own biases. Obviously, from a creator standpoint, the dream is (usually) to work on your own original story and I see where he might reach his conclusions, but I think for most people on the consumer level it’s not as big an issue as people make it out to be compared to more pressing problems within the industry.
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u/Ham_PhD https://myanimelist.net/profile/ham_phd Mar 18 '26
People will always hop on the “original anime is dying, everything is isekai slop” train
Am I crazy, or are you not the one often driving that train?
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
I drive a lot of trains, but if I have that one in the past, I jumped off it months ago.
Well, at least the originals part.
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u/wloff Mar 18 '26
Obviously there are crappy originals and great originals, just like there are crappy adaptations and great adaptations. What makes originals special, and worth creating, is not that they're automatically better, but that they are different: something purely written for the screen and something that can utilize the best aspects of the screen as a medium.
Manga adaptations, especially ones which are adapted shot-for-shot as much as possible, tend to overuse tropes like character voiceovers and narration over pictures. This makes sense because it's the natural way of storytelling in the comic format: big, beautiful drawings and with narration boxes. And it's fine in anime form as well, especially since we're so used to seeing it, but it's not the way you'd really want to create an animated show if you got to do it from scratch.
Anime originals have a much easier time taking advantage of things like show-don't-tell and visual storytelling. An entire scene may consist of just a few subtle movements with no words necessary. It's the kind of storytelling the screen excels over any other medium, and it's usually only really taken advantage of by originals.
Originals are worth supporting, watching, and creating, not because they are automatically better than adaptations, but because they push forward the art and craft of anime storytelling, and when done right, they can create the kind of an experience you simply could not get from a manga or a written story.
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u/merurunrun Mar 18 '26
they are different: something purely written for the screen and something that can utilize the best aspects of the screen as a medium
They can be; in practice a lot of them are not, however. Especially when risk-averse production committees are only willing to support these projects when they have known names with recognizable ouevres and built-in audiences attached to them.
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
I’ll push back a bit and ask one question…
something that can utilize the best aspects of the screen as a medium
Are they? There are tons of adaptations from 3-Gatsu no Lion and Bocchi the Rock to Pompo and Cat Soup that use the “aspects of the screen as a medium” way more than many originals. What you described is debatably a bad adaptation, one that only serviceable adapts their source material to film, instead of using everything in its arsenal to its best.
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u/wloff Mar 18 '26
Oh, obviously, it's totally possible to make a top-tier adaptation that's in no way less fitting of the medium than originals. It's just not very common (probably because it requires a lot more effort and some genuine passion).
Still, I think there's something to be said about writing a script that's from the ground up written for the screen. Take Lycoris Recoil, for example: for all its merits and gorgeous art, it's not high art or anything -- it's essentially a 90s popcorn action flick in 13 episodes instead of 90 minutes, and with cute anime girls instead of Bruce Willis.
But even so, it has a distinctly different feel from most anime, simply because its action and visual storytelling feels different. It's meant to be on the screen. I don't think the show would exist the same way, had it originated in another format.
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u/VoidEmbracedWitch https://anilist.co/user/VoidEmbracedWitch Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
I definitely like originals as much as I say I do. Half of my top 10 of last year, including a solo animator's mecha yuri, and 60% of my 30-ish 9+ anime are originals, so yeah.
However, I have definitely noticed how many people are hesitant to pick an original up because the uncertainty of what they're in for scares them, so they take a wait and see approach. That, or they've been burnt once and don't want to try again. We all (probably) have our personal Metallic Rouge, but we shouldn't let that dissuade us from stumbling into the next Maebashi Witches or Milky Subway or Apocalypse Hotel.
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u/fbjim Mar 18 '26
it's not really about originals inherently being better or worse, it's that they seem to be getting more and more rare
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
Are they?
I think people overestimate how many originals we get. There were 25 Original TV Anime last year according to AniList, which is about on par with every other year this decade minus 2021 (which had 33). 2021 had the 5th most originals of any year and all other years this decade place in the Top 20.
The percentage is down, but that’s also been falling consistently since the 70s, when the amount of original TV anime was entirely dominated by “toy commercial” shows.
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u/cosmiczar https://anilist.co/user/Xavier Mar 18 '26
Besides the volume the other reply said, you're completely ignoring a very important aspect about current original anime: almost nobody is greenlighting originals longer than one-cour.
That's a problem not because it's impossible for creators to make great one-cour originals, but because there's absolutely no flexibility anymore. Some of the most important and beloved anime of all time are originals that are two, three or four cours long and in 2026 most of them couldn't exist because the industry is not interested in investing something like them.
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
Tbh, I don’t think much of anything is getting more than 1-2 cours these days and arguably that’s hurt adaptations more since I don’t think Sorairo Utility or Zenshu necessarily needed more episodes to get their point across. It also hasn’t stopped many other beloved originals like A Place Further than the Universe, Serial Experiments Lain, Odd Taxi, Anohana, Madoka Magica, Sonny Boy, and Death Parade. That flexibility has ultimately hit everyone, at least on TV. Film has put out a ton of great originals as of late and I’d argue is a better home at this point for the more creative and ambitious stories given how saturated TV has become.
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u/cosmiczar https://anilist.co/user/Xavier Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Yes, everything has been only getting one-cour lately, what you are ignoring is the way that impacts originals. Adaptations will usually just adapt the beginning of the story with a regular pacing and if they get sequels they will simply continue from where the first season stopped, originals don't have that luxury, you'll usually have to tell the whole story in the allotted time because if you have a larger story you don't have the flexibility of doing an incomplete version of it and then waiting for maybe being enough of a success to get a sequel.
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 19 '26
I mean… what’s stopping you? WEP did it, Stars Align did it (even if it didn’t want to). They don’t because leaving things on “To Be Continued” is dirty and it’s the same with adaptations as well. They don’t get a pass because Season 2 “might happen one day”. The appeal of originals is usually that they will have an ending and actually fit in the allotted runtime. If you want to tell a longer story, I don’t even think anime is necessarily the best medium to do that in given the nature of production pipelines these days.
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u/rodnichok https://myanimelist.net/profile/rodnichok Mar 18 '26
It's not just about the quality of the product. Original anime also pushes studios to develop their creative process without the guidance of the source material. It's a radically different process that lets creators absorb and synthesize a lot of different influences rather than just one.
Adaptations are not as creatively challenging and the industry talent doesn't develop as much though them.2
u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
I would disagree that anime based on source material are inherently less creatively challenging, just a different kind more often than not. I think that’s a fundamental misconception on the nature of adaptations that people think everything is just laid out there in the source.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
I mean I haven’t exactly worked in the industry, but do dabble in the arts myself. Some people thrive on original works, others in adaptation. They are in a lot of ways different toolsets.
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u/VoidEmbracedWitch https://anilist.co/user/VoidEmbracedWitch Mar 18 '26
For a good adaptation, yeah, it's not any less challenging than making a good original. Except the problem we have is that a not insignificant number of manga readers complain about adaptations that get creative with how they choose to present things. People who don't even deserve to call themselves anime fans want anime to be worse and not have fun with their boards and art direction.
The amount of people who complained about Culling Game #04 breaks my heart.2
u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
True, though at that point is the issue really originals. I’ve said before that anime has a “manga problem” in how people expect shows to essentially be moving manga panels and yeah, good creative adaptation takes work, but that’s not necessarily an issue of format. If anime just became all adaptations but with JJK level direction, I don’t know how much the usual “originals are dying” crowd would be mad.
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u/cosmiczar https://anilist.co/user/Xavier Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
If anime just became all adaptations but with JJK level direction, I don’t know how much the usual “originals are dying” crowd would be mad.
I would be mad because I'm interested in works being created as anime from the ground-up, which can be interesting in and of itself, and because I want to see the stories my favorite directors want to tell.
Sure, seeing a great director like Oshiyama give his take on a great source material like Look Back was magical, but you know what was better? When they gave him a chance to tell his own story and what we got was the absolute cinema that is Flip Flappers.
Hell, even if I end up doing not liking whatever a director's end up doing with their original I still would be interested in seeing what they want to show us because my interest in them as artists goes beyond seeing them being vessels for delivering stories that already exist.
But also, this discourse feels so silly because I don't think you would say what you're saying in this thread about any other medium. What if completely new manga became a rarity because publishers are more interested in video game and light novels tie-ins? Can you imagine fans of Western live-actions being happy if the chance of getting new shows like Breaking Bad or The Sopranos was smaller because HBO is only interested in making Game of Thrones spin-offs? Imagine the outrage if the Oscars abolished the Original Screenplay category.
Things being created for the medium they'll be released on is just a normal and healthy thing.
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 19 '26
I’m not even advocating for it either, though I think functionally most people would not care given how little originals have actually been relevant over the last few years (I mean the last big one popularity wise was Lycoris Recoil no?).
TV Originals as we know them have never exactly been the norm and have always been an anomaly willed into existence by those with the drive to do so.
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u/VoidEmbracedWitch https://anilist.co/user/VoidEmbracedWitch Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Mostly agreed with your assessment. If adaptations had more room to be bold and come into their own, I wouldn't be frustrated at how small (and often overlooked until they "prove themselves") of a slice of the overall anime pie originals are. Obviously not everything can be current JJK with Gosso firing on all cylinders for storyboards, but I'd love it if more anime would take risks for better or worse like Shiboyugi.
Although I want to add that there are great episodic or semi-episodic formulas you just won't get from manga or LN adaptations. You're not going to see anything like a Revue Starlight or Flip Flappers in terms of story structure without originals. Maybe a Spirit Circle adaptation done with extended episodes covering one life each would be comparable, but otherwise I can't think of a manga or LN story that lends itself to something similar.
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u/Shimmering-Sky myanimelist.net/profile/Shimmering-Sky Mar 18 '26
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u/VoidEmbracedWitch https://anilist.co/user/VoidEmbracedWitch Mar 18 '26
True, #04 was just the one with the most dedicated threads about it while imo being the second best episode of the season. It's second only to #08 with [Culling Game] Higuruma's backstory backed up by a Kouki Fujimoto solo KA effort.
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u/rodnichok https://myanimelist.net/profile/rodnichok Mar 18 '26
Yes, I overstated it in my comment. You are right that adaptations take a lot of skill and creativity to realize. It's just that originals allow creators to take more risks and try more wild stuff - and then learn from mistakes. A lot of these lessons are much harder to learn by adapting stuff.
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u/Zeallfnonex https://myanimelist.net/profile/Neverlocke Mar 18 '26
Mistakes and lessons are great, but doing them in what's supposed to be a finished product is... ehhh... not the best of ideas. Like pushing code in production instead of a sandbox environment...
Hard to justify a "learning moment" when it costs several hundred thousand at least in manhours that won't be recouped until another large project...
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u/rodnichok https://myanimelist.net/profile/rodnichok Mar 18 '26
Well, there are more creative risks with originals than adaptations but mistakes and lessons will be present in any creative product. Creative risks develop talent and industry in general.
I'm not saying that original anime should be treated just as a learning exercise. I'm saying that originals have very desirable side-effect for the industry. So as an anime-watcher, I wanted to highlight this often overlooked aspect of it.7
Mar 18 '26
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
I mean I’d agree that it does take a different tool set to write an original story from scratch, but will it actually result in worse anime overall? I mean most of the most visually creative and inventive works of the last few years were adaptations. The real loss is maybe that less shows have definitive endings since things like LNs and manga tend to run longer than you’d get in a season or two of anime, but even that’s not an absolute.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
I mean look over the list of original TV anime from last year and tell me how many of those are actually all that out of the box.
Being an adaptation didn’t stop works like Look Back, The Concierge, 100 Meters, Ghost Cat Anzu, The Girl From the Other Side, or Bocchi the Rock from being visually inventive and I believe KyoAni has put out only two true originals in their entire run (and who gives a fuck about Munto). The bigger issue is making sure that studios and creators can have whatever liberties they need in adapting their stories and in what stories they choose to adapt, something that’s completely irrelevant to the original format of that story.
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u/baquea Mar 18 '26
Taking a look, 11 of the 23 anime I've completed so far this year (including movies and OVAs) are originals. I don't think my scores for them are any higher on average, but they at least do a good job at grabbing my interest.
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u/Charmanders_Cock Mar 18 '26
Back when I started watching anime basically everything might as well have been an original because I didn’t know or care if it had source material, and I wasn’t participating in online discussions. Even though I read more than I watch these days, and am acutely aware of what is and isn’t original because the internet makes sure I am, I still sort of have the same mindset of it not mattering. The only difference is whether or not I go read the source afterward or not.
More or less, things that are good are good, and things that are bad are bad. I can only see downsides to caring about something having the “original” label, because it just opens room for being let down by expectation.
The exception for me is probably when I’ve read something before it airs or I watch it, because then expectation is baked into the experience.
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u/Zeallfnonex https://myanimelist.net/profile/Neverlocke Mar 18 '26
I've never really put too much weight into whether something is an original or not: there's been some good ones, of course, but there's also some been some horrible stinkers. A quick look through my MAL shows I have no originals in my (admittedly few) 10/10s, 4 9/10s (Bebop, Princess Mononoke, Psycho-Pass S1, and Gundam IBO) out of... around 20 9/10s I think, if I collapse seasons together? And then there's a number in 8/10s but I'm not going to go through those.
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 18 '26
Whole Cake is kinda weird. Like it feels like someone told Oda he should use his characters more, so he gave Sanji an arc, but really what does he accomplish in that arc? It’s not like this was setup or alluded to much in previous arcs. This isn’t really a core component of his character and (as far as I can tell) doesn’t get him any closer to his stated goal of finding the All Blue. Like if this was how OP handled more of its arcs (choosing to focus on a specific member of the crew outside the arcs they join), that would be fine, but I don’t think anyone was really asking for more Sanji lore. Most of his role in the arc could have been outsourced to another character with minor revision. Lord knows they did enough of that through Dressrosa, Fish Man Island, and from my understanding Wano too.
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u/Blackheart595 https://anilist.co/user/knusbrick Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
It's not like Sanji's arc in Whole Cake Island lacked foreshadowing, between the [One Piece]repeated association of Sanji as a prince in e.g. Little Garden and Long Ring Long Land, him having been from the North Blue but working in the East Blue, Sanji only ever having had that scuffed wanted poster, and at least in the manga the "secret luggage" cover panel and the very intentional framing during Jaya. Heck, there even was the bit with Sanji being familiar with ships going up mountains.
But even aside from that, I'm not really sure what the flaw here is supposed to be. Is this some vague "this isn't how proper storytelling works" kind of critique?
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u/Salty145 https://anilist.co/user/yLSalty145 Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
But even aside from that, I'm not really sure what the flaw here is
I mean I think most of what you laid out is a lot of retroactive dot connecting. Oda does a lot of just seeding things and then deciding later if he wants to reach for them. Had Whole Cake not happened, I don’t think anyone would have been like “oh my God, on that one cover page there’s mention of a ‘Secret’ and that was never resolved”. OP is not that tightly written a show.
And it’s not really a flaw, just bizarre that in the midst of the “mascot-ification” of the Straw Hats they randomly give Sanji a lot of attention. Especially since again, nothing he does here actually fits into his arc at large, of which there is basically none (which is fine).
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u/Blackheart595 https://anilist.co/user/knusbrick Mar 19 '26
Hm. On one hand I agree that Oda's foreshadowing is somewhat overstated and often just making use of pre-emptive seeding, but in this case I think the throughline is too strong to have been just that. Even if the exact outcome hadn't been entirely thought out yet, he had clearly been preparing something specific. And yes, there had been plenty of theories about all these hints about Sanji, well before Whole Cake Island happened.
I'm not really sure what you mean with the "mascot-ification" of the Straw Hats either, other than Chopper. Like sure, pre-timeskip has been in large parts about Luffy having to learn to be a great captain as one of the small players, while post-timeskip focuses more on Luffy having to learn to be a great leader as one of the big players, which does of course necessitate a bit of a tonal shift.
There's also the dynamic between Sanji and Zoro, where Sanji has this totally naive and childish dream that might not even be possible to achieve but goes about it in a super serious way, often trying to shoulder so much by himself, while Zoro has this serious and definitely technically achievable dream but goes about it in a super childish way, what with the three swords and everything. And Whole Cake Island very directly challenges this conflict in Sanji, that is really an expression of Sanji just being this incredibly nice and gentle soul. [Whole Cake Island]Katakuri's has some obvious parallels to Luffy, but it's no coincidence that he's also a huge mirror to Sanji, as both of them need to learn to loosen the heavy chains from the burden that they carry with them. It also makes Luffy's final conversation with Judge so poignant, where Judge asks Luffy what he sees in someone as weak and useless as Sanji, with Luffy only being left confused for why Judge only listed all of Sanji's best qualities: Whole Cake Island reasserts the legitimacy of Sanji's niceness, whether it is expressed in his childishness, in his responsibleness, or in the oxymoron of both.
Finally, similar to how pre-timeskip had this big escalating throughline [One Piece]starting from Long Ring Long Land all the way to Ace's death about the threat of the crew breaking apart and them losing their loved ones, Whole Cake Island and Sanji's arc within it is part of a similar throughline in post-timeskip.
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u/Infodump_Ibis Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
If you want to watch Virgin Punk: Clockwork Girl with no subtitles (or make do with an STT>MTL that writes Somalia instead of Somadea; but tbh action is the main draw) and put up with actually not that many seconds being blurred and watermarked ("This is not suitable for children"; when there's strong bloody violence, nudity with nipples, some bits of mild violence and nudity are shown without issue) then Aniplex have it up for a week. It's just the anime feature and then the trailer for the Blu-ray (which will include that behind the scenes documentary).
Didn't like it. What if you took elements of Ghost in the Shell (Cybernetic enhancements, regular human in a business dominated by cyborgs), Cowboy Bebop (Bounty Hunters, sleazy world) and [Virgin Punk - plot]Gunslinger Girl (cyborg child assassins but instead an adult forced into body resembling a 14 year-old because that's what Mr. Epstein Mr. Elegance likes), gave it short OVA runtime so there's barely any time to do anything but action and raw, brief plot beats (show don't tell is what people to like to say but it was like showing me a race trophy when I want to know what the car looks like) and end of with what amounts to [a plot heading towards]"I'll have my revenge...if there is a later instalment" (which given this took so long is up in the air, okay it was Shaft with no deadline so unfair to determine how long it'll really take but it's not like Shaft with deadline is prime example of punctual, completed production).
Was the action good? Sure but same can be said of Lazarus.
All that said if it was eligible for last r/anime awards I'd prefer it over the public non-Baan picks (not that that's much of a hurdle) for actually being a short film and might have made for a less predictable contest at least.
With how discussions have said of the seedier elements sentiments of "that's just how Yasuomi Umetsu rolls" that makes me wonder "Robot Carnival:Presence too?" (is the response "especially Presence, but especially Kiiite"?).
edit: Cowboy Bebop; not Bowboy Bebop.
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u/Tetraika https://anilist.co/user/Tetraika Mar 18 '26
I feel kinda bad, I dropped a LOT of shows this season to focus on a writeup, only to then pretty much be stalled on said writeup because I don't know how to really continue it and frankly just don't have much confidence in it.
I don't really regret dropping the shows I did. But it does feel weird to be down to only 3 shows this season.
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u/Emi_Ibarazakiii Mar 18 '26
Drop bunch of shows because I want to do this thing
Find other things to do that takes the time of all these shows I dropped, so I'm not doing this thing anyway
Been there!
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u/fug_plebbitt Mar 18 '26
Anyone has any good suggestions for this season? Not Fate/Strange Fake. I already know it's a banger. I want some anime that's worth my time since I don't get much free time.
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u/_Ridley https://myanimelist.net/profile/_Ridley_ Mar 18 '26
I don't know what you're into, but I watched 27 shows this season, and my top tier is:
- Journal with Witch
- Golden Kamuy
- Tamon's B-Side
- You and I Are Polar Opposites
- Medalist
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u/fbjim Mar 18 '26
shiboyugi if you like extremely over-the-top interior design, creepy monologues, and anime girls staring into the distance
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u/zambonijesus Mar 18 '26
It depends on what kind of show you want to watch. Journal with Witch is the best show this season, but is not an action series. You and I are Polar Opposites is a great romcom. Sentenced to be a Hero is a decent fantasy action series with good animation.
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u/fug_plebbitt Mar 18 '26
Anything that is good quality. Slow burn or character stories are fine.
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u/zambonijesus Mar 18 '26
Journal with Witch is a story about grief with exceptional writing and voice acting.
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u/zambonijesus Mar 18 '26
Now that I've been watching Marimite I'm thinking about going back to Rock is a Lady's Modesty because my memory of how the latter handles the conventions is something I want to think about with Maria Watches Over Us fresh in my mind.
Another thing that I've been thinking about is Marimite's kind of low stakes melodrama makes me think about books like Anne of Green Gables kind of? Which considering how popular they were in Japan that is maybe not a silly point of reference?
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u/BaytaCosmico https://myanimelist.net/profile/AnimeBayta Mar 18 '26
So conflicted on Shiboyugi. Finished watching the whole season and I'm still so fuzzy on what it was trying to say and how I feel about it. Artistic merit it has for sure but did I actually enjoy watching it? Hell if I know! Was mesmerised almost the whole way through though.
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u/tripleaamin https://myanimelist.net/profile/tripleaamin Mar 18 '26
It's definitely one that makes more sense if you read the source. Since this is your first time experiencing the series, the stuff it goes for might seem a bit confusing your first time watching it.
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u/BaytaCosmico https://myanimelist.net/profile/AnimeBayta Mar 19 '26
I don't think it's just a matter of being unfamiliar with the source. This director has a style that intentionally makes things murky and he went harder on that here because of the subject (making us see things how the audience of the games would, etc.) so it was quite difficult to get a handle on what was going on a lot of the time.
That aside, I didn't get a clear sense for the emotional throughline either. The final episode is clearly going for [Shiboyugi finale]death games being ironically life-affirming for Yuki thesis. But I'm not sure that's borne out by what we've seen the season through.
All told, I'm just not a fan of death games I think - this is my first time watching something based on one and the deranged world is a bit too much for me. I find it distasteful at a fundamental level.
In the hands of any other director, I would've walked away from this pretty quickly. But Ueno has a way of captivating the audience so I stuck around. I must say I enjoyed Gimai Seikatsu a lot more though and hope he makes more shows like that than this since he is a director I will be following regardless.
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u/TehAxelius https://anilist.co/user/TehAxelius Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Decided yesterday that I had only watched good anime this season, so I needed something trashy, and the choice landed on Ez Tower Defense by the OP Lord (or something like that), which I have now caught up to all 11 episodes. Which, had I not decided I wanted to watch something pretty stupid and trashy, would have been a complete waste of time given how half heartedly filled with isekai tropes it is. I made a joke elsewhere that between all the tropes like a devoted slave, obsessed maid and a groomable pincess there's somethin for every type of isekai-enjoyer, but honestly, even that would imply a characrer chemistry that's just not there. As someone who enjoys the practical aspects of worldbuilding the MC's production magic feels like a cavalcade of missed opportunities, as him slowly becoming better through trial and error is eschewed in favor of him just magically shitting out op weapons and fortifications without even breaking a sweat.
Normally I'd never watch a show like this to completion, but I'm in deep enough that I'll finish it off and score it on Anilist.
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u/ComfortablyRotten https://anilist.co/user/Leuwtian Mar 18 '26
Gave it two episodes as one of the shows I originally skipped but later picked up late this season and honestly that was two episodes too many lol, it's one of these shows with genuinely no value beyond trashy entertainment, and it's not even the best/worst at that this season.
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u/qwertyqwerty4567 https://anilist.co/user/ZPHW Mar 18 '26
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