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Dated 31 May 2015: Welcome back, Kugimiya Rie

Dingo and Angela
Angela Balzac shows Dingo how large the pizzas are in DEVA.

The past couple of years have been pretty good for Kugimiya Rie roles, as it appears she has moved beyond the tiny, flat-chested modern tsundere typecasting that plagued her for so long. Notably, she was excellent in Rakuen Tsuihō (Expelled from Paradise) as Angela Balzac (admittedly another tsundere, but fortunately the neoclassical variety). Ordinarily I would not have expected her in a role like this, but she did an outstanding job. The movie itself is also excellent, so I'm definitely buying the Blu-ray when it comes out later this week.

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Dated 1 July 2015: Punch Line sure had a lot more plot than I was expecting

Strange Juice
This bus did not have safety glass.

More people probably would have watched Punch Line if they had banked on its noitaminA time slot instead of its first episode. I know a lot of people were immediately dissuaded from watching the series due to its premise. "A teenage boy develops superpowers whenever he sees panties? What is this ridiculous fan service horseshit?" It turns out the real problem with Punch Line is that it has too much plot. Thus, anime fans who might have enjoyed the time looping, mystery, and conspiracy components of the show but were turned away by an aversion to fan service missed out on the series. Likewise, many anime fans who wanted PANTIES and FIGHTING and PANTIES may have been let down by the more serious parts of the show.

Yuuta
It's because he saw panties.

I belong to the latter camp. While I did not find anything particularly wrong with the Punch Line plot, it brought a lot more complexity to the show than I was expecting. I basically wanted an entire series about Strange Juice doing Strange Juice things and maybe stupid missions assigned by the talking cat ghost. Instead, Strange Juice was barely in the show and I ended up finishing the series almost entirely due to the charm Kugimiya Rie brought to her character, Meika.