Mother’s Basement’s hottest trash video for this season just came out. This is another one of those things I always look forward to each season.

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian
2. Anime Trending - Weekly Winner: Makeine
3. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Oshi no Ko

Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.

Three different winners across the three different charts this week. It’s always nice to see some variety in representation in these charts. I think this week marks the first time Makeine has ranked #1 on any of these so far this season.

I have spent all weekend traveling (for vacation this time, not for work). So, it has been a series of flights, layovers, car rentals, etc., but we finally made it to sunny Los Angeles to visit some of my wife’s family. All of that is to preface that I will probably not be very active for this week (or next) because of this. However, most of this past week, I was still able to watch stuff. Also, I have thoughts…

• Trigun (1998) - My wife and I have been slowly chipping away at this series. We are currenly up to episode 13. Overall I have enjoyed it (she has seen it before). However, the humor definitely feels dated at times, especially with how lecherous so many of the male characters are. If Master Roshi or Jiraiya bothered you, then so will this show.
• Oshi no Ko Season 2 - These past couple episodes have been phenomenal. So, so glad this season has been able to deliver after a bit of a slow start.
• Tower of God Season 2 - This season has felt like a letdown compared to season 1 for me. I am up through episode 6 and just don’t feel invested in this whole new cast of characters. The peak of the season for me so far were Khun’s parts.
• Love is Indivisible by Twins - This show has continued to deliver guilty pleasures. Lots of drama, while keeping the actual stakes fairly low. Naori is a pop-culture reference machine though and I can only keep track of half of what she says.

I have had to drop a couple shows for time: Quality Assurance, Plus-Sized Elf, Spice and Wolf, Dahlia in Bloom. I am probably going to try to pick some of these back up again after my vacation.

Glad to have you!

Yeah…that is the actual English title. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like Campfire Cooking in Another World.

“This isn’t going to work until the whole world becomes a better place.”

Man, this line truly encapsulates my feelings trying to talk reason with a certain segment of my country’s (USA) population in recent years. It was especially bad during the pandemic when so many people were trying to tell me how mRNA vaccines are evil when I have years of experience working on them professionally prior to the pandemic. Eventually, I couldn’t deal with it anymore and left my social media profiles behind me and just switched to full lurker mode. That was, until lemmy anyways…

One of the really interesting pieces of this arc in the show is that we are actually seeing quite a bit more of the Tokyo Blade play than we did in the manga. Up until these past couple episodes, I hadn’t realized just how extremely generic of a battle shounen Tokyo Blade is. This is basically just a rehash of a sequence of battles that we have seen tons of places before (saving Sasuke in Naruto, confronting Shishio in Rurouni Kenshin, etc.). So, the way the actual play has unfolded is, to a large degree, anime original. Abiko-sensei should really step up the originality in her next work…

These batch releases mess up the bot since AniList only lists the first episode in its api. If you want episode threads for specific episodes, let me know and I can create them manually.

Thanks!

Often, at the beginning of a show’s run, the metadata listed in the AniList api (where the bot pulls info from) is incomplete or placeholder info. It should get fixed as subsequent episodes air. The bot will come back and edit this post with any updated/changed info each time a new episode airs.

Gigguk’s seasonal Nutshell video just came out. I always enjoy these each season. It’s a bit of a shame he doesn’t talk about returning shows because the past couple episodes of Oshi no Ko have been absolutely phenomenal.

It has to be so confusing for everybody else at school to keep track of this situation. He is publicly hugging both girls, they see/hear him in the stairwell, and now there is a new girl that is a model? This story just might end when the Professor just slaughters all of them.

Well, putting on my community moderator hat for a moment…

Analysis like this is welcome in this community, even if the content being analyzed is NSFW. I would draw the line and remove posts if the focus of the article was more about the NSFW acts/visuals. I am married to somebody with a Master’s in English, so I am always down for a good feminist criticism.

I really liked this analysis of a hentai series!

lust is an emotion equally impactful to the human experience as any other and art that focuses on it isn’t inferior for doing so

This is a great way to express this. Lust and sexual desire can have a tremendous impact on a person’s behavior, so it doesn’t make sense to downplay those emotions in the course of building complex, well-developed characters. You think Helen of Troy would be remembered today if she didn’t have a “face that launched a thousand ships?” At the same time…

short-form anime that requires a full sex scene every episode due to genre conventions

This can be tough to get past for a lot of people and, I must admit, I probably won’t watch this show. So, that makes me even more appreciative that you did and then proceeded to share some interesting bits.

This episode was visually stunning. They say that the eyes are the window to the soul, and nobody does eye animation better than this show. The expressiveness in how they convey the emotions of the characters by changing how they animate the eyes is super impressive. There were at least two instances this episode of them literally animating fireworks going off in a character’s eyes.

One thing I really like about Akane’s backstory here is that up until this point in the story I had assumed that she got deep into psychology in order to better understand her characters to help her acting. However, what we really find out is that she studied up so much in order to better understand her idol, Kana, lashing out at her in what became an extremely formative moment for the young Akane. The fact that it helps her with her acting (and Aqua-sleuthing) is merely a coincidental side benefit.

Her years of experience and psychoanalysis have led to this moment with Kana. It is like Akane has come out of her acting hyperbolic time chamber ready to fight the big boss…only to find out that they gave up already. I can understand how immensely underwhelming and disappointing that would be. @[email protected]

There were so many great visuals this episode. Practically all of the Akane/Kana showdown is told either via flashback or visual metaphor. We don’t really see what the audience sees here, we see things like the moment that led these two toward this path:

Or, we hear their inner monologue as their out-of-character personas act out their feelings:

This show has been a visual feast from start to finish, and I cannot wait to see what this play’s final act is going to look like.

Lots of takes that I agree with here. 7th Prince last season turned out way better than I thought it would be, despite some real sus stuff that goes on. Similarly, Delicious in Dungeon’s second cour was way more engaging to me. Once things started to get higher-stakes and more life and death I paradoxically had a lot more fun because I was invested more. The fight they had at the season midpoint was phenomenal.

As for this season, I agree that Oshi no Ko started out really slow. However, they have really paid off the slow start with some great moments. The episode 6 climax was so great and took the manga to a whole new level. Also, I have had a similar experience with Nokotan. Some jokes land, others don’t. However, they throw so many jokes out there that it manages to keep me watching. It reminds me a bit of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in that way (especially all the vignettes in the most recent episode).

I have mixed feelings about Yuki in Alya. On one hand, I find her easily the most entertaining character in that show. On the other, if I actually knew Yuki in real life, she would be the most annoying person in existence. She isn’t a character as much as an expression of the author’s desire to shake up the world they have created just to see where the pieces land. She flirted with fourth wall breaks early in the show and pretty explicitly broke it in the most recent episode in the bathroom.

Finally, I feel like I should try to check out Makeine at some point. The synopsis didn’t really grab me before the season started, but I have seen lots of praise for it and it has pretty consistently been climbing up the different charts as the season has gone on. The shows that climb consistently like that tend to have the quality to back it up as opposed to series that just jump way up for a single episode before falling back down.

Alright, you got me to go back and read that waaaay too long synopsis. This is definitely not it. There are tree themes/characters in the story, but not like OP describes.

Great job finding that! I started reading the synopsis, but then realized that it was crazy long. Kudos to whatever fan was dedicated enough to write such a long synopsis, but I couldn’t stick around and read the whole thing.

No wonder I couldn’t find it searching for anime, this is a French animated movie.

Sounds like a mix of nature and tech. I haven’t seen this movie, but one that seems to kind of fit based on the wiki plot summary would be Origin: Spirits of the Past.

Made in Abyss has upside-down trees, but nothing else about that series matches up really.

Good luck in your quest!