Fujiko is one of anime's All-Time Babes.

Lupin III: Mine Fujiko to lu Onna is good—refreshingly so. The first two episodes have been solid, and it's such a relief to watch something that's not in the modern moé style. As much as I love Sawashiro Miyuki, I'm still not sure how I feel about her taking over the role of Fujiko. It seems as if Masuyama Eiko still had the role not that long ago, but I see now that the Detective Conan v. Lupin III movie was in 2009. I guess she couldn't do the voice forever. And as much as I love Horie Yui, Sawashiro Miyuki is definitely doing a better job as Fujiko than HOCCHAN did as Honey.

Ghost hime-cut.

Tasogare Otome x Amnesia is a pleasant surprise. The RSS feed for the scanlated releases of the manga has actually been in my aggregator for ages, although I couldn't remember why I added it. (I've never read a single chapter.) I've seen a lot of comments about how SHAFT-like the show is, but I didn't get that sense at all. That SHAFT jive usually annoys the Bejeezus out of me, but I didn't notice any pretentious, intrusive direction in the first two episodes. So far Tasogare Otome x Amnesia has been entertaining and funny, and this season's resident ghost girlfriend is quite charming.

Not a zombie hime-cut.

Some people dismissed Sankarea because it's a Studio DEEN production. I'm not nearly as critical of Studio DEEN as contempory anime fans seem to be. Studio DEEN is responsible for the best show of all time, after all. Not that Sankarea is at all in the same league, but it does seem interesting and well done. I'm not sure how I feel about zombie girlfriends, but definitely less favorably than ghost girlfriends, that's for sure.

Rally 'round the flag, boys.

Medaka Box is this season's most underrated show. It's underrated because so many viewers are incredibly critical of it, dismissing it as an unworthy product of a post-exodus Gainax. It's possible I am more lenient because of the Gainax badge, but I don't think Medaka Box is bad at all. On the contrary, the show is amusing with a thankfully all right male lead. Medaka herself is very likable, although possibly I'm mesmerized by that crazy shit she does with her eyes. Also, Medaka reminds me of Haruhi, only benevolent.

KAMINA LIVES!

I haven't started this season's Detective Conan yet, but if it's as good as it always is, you can expect it to place about here in the early season rankings. [Edit: Followed by the continuing episodes of the Gundam SEED "HD" re-watching project.]

Love at first sight.

Sakamichi no Apollon is one of those "objectively good" shows. I think it's pretty well done, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'll like it. It's pretty obvious the new wimpy kid and the big tough kid are in love with each other, but I have a feeling the show will pretend to be about jazz and Miss Third Wheel instead all season long.

Social Anxiety Poster Boy.

Tsuritama is also "objectively good," but I can't tell if I'll still be interested in the show after a few more episodes of this stuff. I've got books on Byzantine history I've been meaning to read.

Your sword is showing, lady.

Fate/zero from episode 14+ is about as good as where it left off two seasons ago. I expect it to get even better now that it's free to kill off basically everyone. Anyone familiar with Fate/stay night knows how this will end, but I'm curious how ufotable plans to get us there.

I like Cure March, but that hair is tragic.

I think I was biased to dislike Smile Precure! on general principle, but it's turning out to be pretty good. It could use more brawling, though. Smile Precure! is basically Fresh Yes! Precure 5 except with less ass kicking and less illicit romance.

Nyarlathotep is Top Fuel Asumin.

Haiyore! Nyarlko is good because it is such high-energy, but I'm not optimistic enough to believe it can sustain these levels successfully over the course of the season. If I had to guess, I'd suspect fickle anime fans will start to disavow the show by next season.

Needs more pratfalls and less bitching at each other.

Natsuiro Kiseki episode two was a lot better than episode one. It helps that I kinda like Sphere. Nevertheless, I'm not especially enamored with the drama elements. The physical comedy is pretty good, though, as is the characters' almost casual acceptance of magic.

I wonder how M14 feels about M1A?

Upotte!! is pretty bad, but totally watchable. Hey, sometimes I enjoy following a show just because it's anime. And Upotte!! is very anime.

Hey, they found a way to make Potato-kun worse than usual.

Accel World plummeted in my opinion once I saw episode two and realized the entire show was going to be shounen jive and practically doomed to be wall-to-wall exposition and unnecessarily long, tedious fight scenes.

I wasn't expecting continuity.

Queen's Blade: Rebellion manages to be an abomination in comparison with its first two seasons. I don't like the cast as much, and the entire thing just reeks of terrible. It's a pity, because the plot sounded kinda interesting on paper. However, if the rest of the series isn't much better than the first episode, Queen's Blade: Rebellion will be WORSE THAN COSPRAYERS.

I bet these discs will still be unorganized months from now.

In semi-related news, I'm partially responsible for at least one more To Heart purchase in addition to my own. Brendan writes:

...your recent comparison of Idolm@ster (which I haven't seen) with the original To Heart (which I also haven't seen – yet) was instrumental in my otherwise blind purchase of the To Heart box from Nozomi. Likewise, following the blog and flipping through the archives have led me to a number of shows of varying popularity which I might not otherwise have bothered to research or dig up – chiefly Figure 17 (was sold by the piano solo in episode 4 – I now own two copies, and the show is easily in my personal top five), but also Nanaka 6/17 (bought blind), Piano (bought blind)(may also have been influenced by the AMV "The Most Exciting Thing, Ever, In the Entire Universe"), Pita-Ten, Oku-sama wa Mahou Shoujo, Gakuen Utopia Manabi Straight (would totally buy, having seen it), B Gata H Kei, Chu-Bra, and maybe a couple of others. For all of these, I am grateful to you (even Chu-Bra).

I really need to merge the old archives with the "new" WordPress stuff. This is getting ridiculous. It's been like six years.

Rin, Saki, and Natsumi realize by now that Yuka
with an idea can be a dangerous thing.

I've already explained why Natsuiro Kiseki is my favorite show from spring 2012. However, I didn't mention how shabby the animation looks at times. I'm really surprised to see such lapses from Sunrise, but the show is otherwise so good I'm willing to ignore those faults.

Hey, wait a minute.

I wasn't originally planning on watching Kimetsu no Yaiba, but it is a ufotable show, so I basically needed to at least give it a try out of general principle. Not that Kimetsu no Yaiba bears much resemblance to the sorts of shows ufotable animated before they started doing all Fate all the time. As it turns out, though, Kimetsu no Yaiba is pretty entertaining, despite containing a fair amount of shounen tropes that I generally dislike. I suppose you could regard my enthusiasm for the series despite my typical disdain for such conventions as an indication that Kimetsu no Yaiba has a lot going for it.

They really missed the boat by not using a harmonica for Nezuko's bit.

I do get the feeling Kimetsu no Yaiba is going to run for a really long time. Based on the sort of progress made in the first five episodes, this is going to take a while. Of course, the source manga is still ongoing, so even a two cours anime is probably going to have a non-ending ending. Still, the series is easily in my top three shows of the Spring 2019 anime season so far. Whether it will remain there will probably depend on how much the coming episodes balance scenes of Nezuko booting deadbeats in the head vice how much the show spotlights various irritable boys being angry.

Literally a still frame with a voice over.

Cop Craft and Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) didn't really have much in common aside from airing during the same season. As far as their respective stories went, I was more interested in Cop Craft than in Kimetsu no Yaiba, but there is no question the latter was a better show. This despite the fact that Zenitsu (that panicky orange-haired fucker who shouted all his lines) was annoying as all Hell. Frankly, overcoming that is a testament to how good ufotable can be. Kimetsu no Yaiba looked amazing. It's hard to believe some of its sequences were even possible in a TV anime. Conversely, Cop Craft very much looked like television anime, and one that was constantly pressured to meet timelines. Nearly all of its action sequences had an unfinished quality to them pretty much all season long, and there was a recap episode inserted between episodes nine and 10. Based on how these scenes actually played out—with various shortcuts to substitute for missing animation—you get the sense that Millepensee at least had high ambitions, initially. (See also Wake Up, Girls! New Chapter.)

Pretty much anything I tell you about this would be a spoiler.

Would Cop Craft be better than Kimetsu no Yaiba if its animation looked as good? I don't think I can claim that, but I suppose potentially in the eyes of viewers who enjoy police stories with odd-couple crimefighters forced to work together. As far as the Demon Slayer story goes, I'm certainly not intrigued enough to seek out the manga now that the series has ended (although there will be a movie to cover the next arc). The fact I enjoyed it as much as I did is another testament to ufotable's anime adaptation which remained consistently good during its 26-episode run. At a minimum, episode 20 contained probably the best sequence I've seen all year. (I'm referring to the scene that basically everyone else who was watching the show went nuts about.) Unfortunately, the following episode did diminish the impact a bit with what I like to call "bullshit shounen jive," but I'm blaming the source material for that one. ufotable at least kept us astounded for the week.

Nezuko gets to do something.

I enjoyed the first season of Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer) and also thought its Mugen Train movie was good. I'm hardly alone in having this opinion, as the series proved hugely popular, resulting in enormous sales for the manga on which it is based. Similarly, Gekijouban Kimetsu no Yaiba: Mugen Ressha-hen did extremely well in theaters, surpassing Spirited Away to become Japan's box office champion. The movie follows the events from the first anime season, and there was initially some concern the second TV season would pick up from where the movie left off, thus making it required viewing from a continuity standpoint.

You sure about this?

Instead, the Mugen Train movie is being spread out over the first nine episodes of the second season of Kimetsu no Yaiba. After this arc concludes on Saturday, the entertainment district arc will reportedly begin, although I'm unsure how many episodes that will run. Re-watching the movie as television episodes has not been ideal. It doesn't seem as if there are major edits or changes to the ordering of scenes to accommodate the time constraints of television episodes, but the experience seems flawed.

These are some eyebrows.

As far as I can tell, the reason for this effect is because of the weekly interruptions breaking up the impacts of both the narrative and the action scenes. It's a fairly obvious or at least foreseeable consequence of repackaging the movie into a different format, but more pronounced than I anticipated. Nevertheless, I don't think it would have made sense to re-create the entire arc with the television format in mind, so this probably was the best option. Besides, it's not as if the arc is actually bad this way—it mostly just fails to match its own standard.

Y'all are unconvincing girls.

Now that the second season of the Kimetsu no Yaiba anime is past its Mugen Ressha-hen (Mugen Train movie repurposed as TV episodes) arc and has aired four episodes of the Yuukaku-hen (Entertainment District) arc, I'm afraid my interest in the series remains well below the heights reached during the anime's first two cours. It's fine, but I feel as if I'm the wrong target audience.

I do appreciate Sawashiro Miyuki's addition to the series.

This is not unexpected, since my interest in Demon Slayer has always been something of an outlier for me; I don't typically watch or read popular shounen properties. I presume my disinterest with the current arc is because it is building up to its next big moments and it is complementing its narrative journey with the sort of flourishes and gags that I don't care for. I don't know how many episodes remain in this second season, but I believe it is continuing uninterrupted into the Winter 2022 anime season. I'm definitely still going to watch it, and not just because I don't currently have a lot other Winter 2022 shows on my radar. It's just unfortunate I'm not the right person to fully appreciate the series.

Can we just keep Zenitsu unconscious the whole time from now on?

There sure is a lot of shouting and crying in Kimetsu no Yaiba. I don't really have much more to add to my last Demon Slayer post except maybe to be sort of incredulous that we got such an extended backstory for the season's extended-episode epilogue. Not that I should have been surprised by that, as these sorts of delayed backstories have always been part of the show's formula.

Don't try and tell me Nezuko ever brushes her teeth.

Judging from the fan reactions this season, the Yuukaku-hen (euphemistically localized as "Entertainment District Arc") portion of the series was very well received. I can understand why, as the animation was amazing, and the fights hit all of the sorts of beats the people who enjoy shounen jive like. I continue to appreciate the show for what it is, and I do intend to watch Kimetsu no Yaiba: Katanakaji no Sato-Hen (the "Swordsmith Village Arc" of Demon Slayer), whenever that comes out. I wonder if Nezuko will still be biting down on that piece of rope by then, or if she'll have a new bamboo harmonica to play. That rope would get so nasty so fast!