Go on, Shizuka, curse the bitch out.

I started watching Idol Jihen (Idol Incidents) because Ueda Reina is in it. Unfortunately, she's not in it much, although the OP suggests there will be more to her character later. The show itself is all right, but just barely. It frankly plays out like a rejected Aikatsu! arc, which is fine for a few episodes, but maybe not enough for a whole season. I was also expecting the entire Diet to consist of idols, but instead the idol parliamentarians are just various members of fractured idol-based opposition parties trying to challenge The Establishment comprised of old, unpleasant, corrupt politicians and uncaring corporate assholes.

Rocket Nerd promotes her vision to her hallucination.

Idol Jihen has its moments, but through seven episodes there's only been one episode I fully liked (the one with the gosurori ghostbuster), but that was mostly due to execution. I am a bit tired of the constant struggles against Old People. The show falls flat when it tries to present these battles in a semi-serious fashion involving such weapons as Children's Feelings. The show is much better off when Old People instead get swayed by idols doing idol things and everyone realizes how much better off the world can be after their idol epiphanies. Well, at least the OP and ED are catchy.

So that's what Gabriel's hair looks like brushed.

Gabriel DropOut is a sort of clever "cute girls doing cute things" show and about what I expected from Doga Kobo based on my impressions of its previous shows. There are huge gaps in my familiarity here, so don't give too much weight to that assessment. The setup behind Gabriel DropOut involving a former Angel School star turned lazy deadbeat is amusing, but is basically still just one joke, so the show started losing steam well before its mid-season mark.

Dude sure loves gears.

I started using The Cosmopolitan Prayers more than 10 years ago as a metric to measure the lower limits of tolerably bad anime. Long-time readers will recognize the familiar invective, "WORSE THAN COSPRAYERS" which started out somewhat facetiously, but evolved to become a standard I've applied regularly where appropriate, albeit usually for shows I've quit watching. Through the first third or so of the current season, I'm somehow still watching the following three shows which fall below the Cosprayers Line of dubious quality: Masamune-kun no Revenge, Seiren, and Hand Shakers.

Dude has really long fingers.

No, not the teacher who is a succubus. She's just another Christmas cake virgin, same as practically all female teachers in anime. (P.S. Spoilers.) I'm referring to the male teacher, who is perhaps the rarest of anime creatures: The adult male lead in a harem comedy. Or, more specifically, he is an adult male anime character who behaves like a goddamn grown-up despite being the lead in a harem comedy.

Well, at least he can keep it together when people are watching.

Demi-chan wa Kataritai (Demi-chan Wants to Speak, localized as Interview with Monster Girls) certainly is a harem comedy. After only three episodes, one character has already openly expressed her affection for Tetsuo (a biology teacher in his early thirties), a second character stated the same privately, a third character just isn't being up-front about it, and the fourth simply hasn't been properly introduced yet. Nevertheless, he's sincere when he claims his interest in his non-human students and co-worker is purely academic, and calmly interacts with them without any of the usual carrying on you get in harem comedies. This is a sharp contrast to, say, Potato-kun in Seiren who is insufferably spastic as he struggles with his adherence to the Otaku Virtues. (It turns out Seiren is...not a good show.)

Please don't name your snow daughters Yuki.

Nevertheless, Demi-chan is still a harem comedy, and it's pretty clear the teenage vampire, dullahan, and "snow woman," as well as the adult succubus all (or eventually will) pursue Mr. Takahashi as a romantic love interest. This has caused some viewers to express (at least on the Twitter) a bit of discomfort and/or displeasure with the direction the show is taking, even though it's all but assured there will be zero development on any of these routes. C'mon, it ain't that sort of show, okay. Nobody is going to bend Kyouko over a kotatsu while her head is in a different room.

This is not the Koi Dance.

There is one additional thing: It seems some viewers feel inspired to critique the show from a considerably more "woke" perspective than I use, but I think this tendency also results in the adoption of a perversely opposite position from what was perhaps intended. In particular, I've seen a few people discuss Kyouko, the dullahan, as a disabled character. To me, it is openly racist to presume dullahans are presumptively inadequate or compromised compared to humans. Treating dullahans as dullahans instead of as "disabled" humans is the difference between treating ajin as minorities instead of treating them as "abnormals," in my book, even if you're using the politically correct term "demi" instead.

Shouldn't she be wearing some goggles?

On its face, Youjo Senki (The Saga of Tanya the Evil) should be absolute light-novel garbage. According to those who have investigated the source material, the original light novel really is the sonorous trash you get in these sorts of reincarnation stories. The actual execution, though, is surprisingly deft. And while its appeal is somewhat niche, it does appeal to me, and it safely stays out of the uncanny valley of military anime. Notably, the air battles are quite good, and are a great deal more satisfying than what we got from Brave Witches or Strike Witches. It's easy to accept this is the way witches and warlocks might fight, particularly when one is clearly stronger than the others.

Duckface.

However, there's still the issue of Tanya's backstory. Through two episodes at least, there's not really a compelling reason why she needs to be a reincarnated Japanese salaryman. I can at least appreciate that the flashback to her previous death was executed in a clever way. Then again, at this point, just not getting hit by a truck sort of qualifies as being somewhat clever by default. Possibly the story will actually include Tanya's past life's corporate experience as a way to improve her chances on the battlefield, but I'm not expecting any sort of Moshidora epiphanies. Really, trying to make a Moshidora connection to Youjo Senki is tenuous at best, and I confess I only bring it up here and in the title of this post so I can pretend to casually mention I read an 800-page Peter Drucker book from the '70s in 2011 for a baseball anime which hardly anyone watched. Good times.

Maybe Seiren will just be about Hikari sitting on things.

Remembered mostly for its Battle of the Best Girls, Amagami SS was an all right 2010 harem comedy with an omnibus gimmick. That is, the series as a whole consisted of multiple short parallel-universe story arcs reflecting the Amagami game's different routes. This was a structure also used by, uh, Yosuga no Sora. I guess I liked Amagami SS and its sequel Amagami SS+ Plus all right, despite containing some high-level bullshit. They at least had reasonably charming girls. Potato-kun, though, was a pretty unremarkable putz, and it was not at all clear why any of the girls (aside from Rihoko, I suppose) were into him. I can only assume every other dude in that school was a cretin like Potato-kun's pervy friend.