Current affairs have meant most of us have been stuck at home, doing…what some of us do anyway, and that’s watch anime, or livestreams, or whatever is your streaming service of choice. Disney Plus will be arriving in the UK at the end of this month, and so that’s another one in the long list of services for me to maybe get. But I highly doubt Disney would acquire any licenses for seasonal shows…although I didn’t expect one of my own major terrestrial channels to get licenses either (Channel 4), and look what they’ve gone and done.
Anyway, I hope all of you are doing what’s been asked, and keeping good hygiene, and not panic buying. These are some strange and unexpected times, and we should remember that we are all in this together, and politics should mean nothing right now. A virus doesn’t care about politics after all.
Asteroid in Love Episode 10
A new year, and a new look for the Earth Sciences Club. That made for an interesting episode this week, as two first-years arrive and decide to join, each for very different reasons.
Chikage Sakurai is Mikage’s younger sister, and so knows too well how enthusiastic the others are, as well as what each of them have gotten up to in the past year. She shares her sister’s hobby of geology, however what interests her more is something called geomancy. Geomancy is a sort-of mix of geology and fortune telling, and there’s more about it here. Yuu Nanami is someone who has shaken up the club already, but…in a good way. While in the past, the club has just formed into two groups (astronomy and geology), Nanami is more interested in another Earth Science: meteorology. She even went to the school’s cultural festival last year and commented on how lacking the club was, and how it didn’t really explore any other kinds of Earth Science. I mean, there’s also oceanography, climatology, ecology, paleontology, geophysics…ah, I could go on. For Nanami, her interest is more personal, when she tells the story of how her family suffered from a flood.
Even with these two new interesting characters, which I hope we’ll get to see more of in these remaining episodes, episode 10 of Asteroid in Love is simply more Earth Science hi-jinks. Nothing wrong with that, of course. What would a new episode be without our yuri guardian, except…well, she’s all grown up, cut her hair, and become Suzu 2.0. It’s Misa’s influencing, you see; after Suzu confessed last week, Misa gave her some advice to take better care of herself and those around her. I’ll say, this haircut suits her.
In/Spectre Episode 10
I’ve enjoyed the current story of the idol coming back as a vengeful spectre and causing havoc, but I think that it’s starting to take its toll on me now. Even with this singular episode offering us many how’s, where’s, and why’s, I’m starting to get a little tired now, and I’m just longing for it to wrap up. Sadly, I think that just won’t happen until the very end…another two weeks.
In this week’s episode of In/Spectre, Kotoko introduces a lot more fictional scenarios in the hope of making Steel Lady Nanase disappear, some of which she suspects might be true themselves. They all include the idol’s father killing himself, pinning the blame on her and making her vengeful in death, as well as her older sister making up some elaborate scheme with someone else to spread the rumor themselves when she suspects that she didn’t die from those steel bars.
As I say, the story itself is pretty darn good, and so I just think that we have had just a little too much dialogue and not enough action here, and by action, I mean visual scenes; from Kuro and the Steel Lady fighting, to flashback stories of her dying and the days and weeks before and after her death. Maybe it is just me, but I believe that some viewers’ attention would have been drawn better to them than all of this highly detailed dialogue.
…or maybe I’m just comparing this show to the Monogatari series again, like I seem to do every week; I just can’t help it. I want to find reasons to really like this show, but at the same time, I want to find reasons to really hate it. Maybe I just expecting a little too much when I began watching this…
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! Episode 11
…I know for sure that I was expecting a bit when I began watching Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! It’s the Science SARU touch that does it to us, just like that KyoAni touch, or that SHAFT touch, or that Trigger touch. There are certain things we expect to see in everything they make, and we spend our times looking out for them. It’s just like playing bingo, really.
Well, this new project of the Eizouken team still doesn’t seem to going anywhere, as Midori’s head is coming up with even more ideas, frustrating the heck out of Sayaka, who wants something put down in paper and not just Sayaka; others in the school are itching for a final story. I’ve said in a past post that I was looking for a episode that I could call a ‘Midori episode’, just as Sayaka and Tsubame have had. Well I know for sure that this week’s surreal mess is definitely Midori’s episode.
We’ve known ever since the start of the show that Midori’s mind tends to wander…a lot. She can think of one idea, but after seeing something new the next day, another idea takes precedent. The show doesn’t really call it anything like ADHD or something, and I think that we shouldn’t immediately assume anything like that about Midori. This episode just portrays her as someone who has social anxiety issues, is afraid of making friends, and has no problem living life as a hermit. But it is this ‘coexistence’ that she develops from middle school to where she is now in high school that becomes a theme this week, and what ultimately drives her to commit to an idea 100%. It’s a crazy story, but it works.
With this committed story comes some more problems for Eizouken, the main one being the decision by the Student Council that no club in the school is to accept any outside donations.
The ending for this show should be an interesting one. Now that they have a committed idea (finally), the final episodes will just cover the process to make their short into something to put on a DVD and publish…with or without the Student Council’s approval. But I trust Science SARU to make this already great show have a great finale.
Azur Lane Episode 11
This news came a week or so ago, but we had been expecting the final episodes of Azur Lane to come out in March sometime, and so here they are – episode 11 this week, and episode 12 next week. This penultimate episode tested me…in that I actually had to remember what happened in episode 10. In the end, I just had to go and re-watch it. My memory is terrible.
So…at the end of the last episode, Akagi was still missing-presumed-dead, Kaga was about to snap because she lost her precious onee-sama, Ayanami is still stuck at the Azur Lane base but has started to get a bit of Stockholm Syndrome after being there for so long, Enterprise is still the annoying emo girl full of self-pity, causing Belfast to snap herself and make her take better care of herself, and after receiving so many defeats and setbacks, the Sakura Empire have just about had enough and want to end the feud. So what’s changed since then? Well for starters, the animation looks a whole lot better. We definitely got some bad vibes from our antagonists and we could really feel them right down in our bones (which is a good thing, right?). As for the plot, well it remains as trash as it was right from the start. However I think that because of these new events that are happening, some of the characters we have grown to dislike (out of sheer annoyance) are that much better than they were.
I still think the Azur Lane fans will be very happy to not only see this show come back, but to see some improvement in the animation.
Flying Witch Episode 11
Phew. A lot of shows to watch at the end of this season, and I still have Flying Witch to talk about. Episode 11 centers around two things. One is the magical newspaper from ‘the other side’ that witches regularly get. Akane gets one herself, and so it’s rather strange that Makoto hasn’t got one herself; perhaps this means she still has a lot more to learn when it comes to being a witch…she is still just a trainee witch herself. The other thing is…a whale. A whale that arrives in the sky, as reported in the magical newspaper.
I know that I’ve said that these slice-of-life episodes of Flying Witch all tell charming little stories of witchcraft and such, all set in the countryside. I wonder whether this show would have been just as successful and likable if it had a beginning-to-end story, as opposed to what it has now…and my answer is no. We love this slice-of-life show because of its witchcraft theme, and at the same time, we love this witchcraft theme because it isn’t set in a beginning-to-end show. Hey, did that even make any sense? Tell me in the comments if it didn’t, haha. Well…it makes sense in my crazy head.
Also, I think back now to when I was thinking about what out-of-season show I was going to watch in the following season, and I put Flying Witch on the list despite having seen it already. Guess I just wanted an excuse to re-watch it…and I got it, of course, since this show won in the poll by a landslide. So I’m very glad I got the chance to watch this again, and look at it in better detail.
