Hozuki is still Best Girl even though she's nice to people now.

The second cours of Kono Oto Tomare! Sounds of Life continues to satisfy with its steady stream of people being judgmental assholes. That bit from the first cours where smug douches jump to conclusions based on false accusations and totally unfair assumptions reappears here, but still manages to avoid crossing into irritating territory. It's a fine line, but I like how the show doles out the inevitable comeuppance and vindicates the accused.

You're okay. Try not to drive into a hedge.

I don't know how the source material is paced, but a bunch of characters are piling into the show as of the most recent episode, presumably in a rush to work in all the bits related to the upcoming competition before the season ends. This does work to its detriment, but it's the sort of thing I'm willing to excuse since the sum of the parts totals favorably. I'm not expecting further episodes of Kono Oto Tomare! after this season ends, but I'd watch more.

Well, this hasn't changed at all.

Surprising almost one one, I'm sure, there are not a lot of plot-specific episodes of Detective Conan. Rather, there are probably readers who may be legitimately surprised to hear that Detective Conan even has a plot. Even though most episodes of the show do not feature any continuity, the anime-original ones are notably inferior to the non-plot-specific episodes that at least still derive from the source manga. I can usually tell when an episode is an anime original, mostly because the mystery's contrivances will be stupid instead of merely silly, and oftentimes characters will do something perplexing simply because the action more easily advances the story from point A to point B. Basically, I'll be watching an episode, and something will happen to make me think it's an anime-original one, and when I check later it will turn out I was right. In fact, I'm not sure I've been wrong yet.

I'm pretty happy Hayashibara Megumi continues to have regular appearances, even if Ai seems sort of bored.

Having a greater ratio of anime-original episodes in Detective Conan now is perfectly understandable, seeing as how the anime has nearly exhausted the available cases from the source manga by this point. One of the secondary impacts, though, is that this means I can no longer reliably use Detective Conan as my control. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, I started rating shows by episode as a goof years ago, but then the chart kept growing and now it's just one of those things I guess I'm going to continue doing indefinitely. But I also can't assume that my rating standards will remain consistent from season to season and year to year. Hence, I used Detective Conan as my control, theorizing that I could count on such a long-running show to remain pretty much as good as it ever was. Therefore, how much better or worse another show's rating is relative to the average Detective Conan score for the same time period would offer a reliable check on quality beyond the numerical scores themselves. This is probably no longer the case if there are more anime-original episodes of Detective Conan now, and assuming the anime-original episodes are not as good. I guess I'm going to need to come up with some other form of sham metric now. Alas.

Idol activities are no joke.

One of my pet peeves is people who insist on watching sequels without catching up on previous seasons first, just so they can feel like they're part of a current wave of hype. I'm expecting to see examples of this in January when the second season of that Quintuplets show starts (5-Toubun no Hanayome 2). Likewise, Magia Record: Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magica Gaiden may generate enough attention that newer fans who haven't seen the original anime (from nine years ago already!) and/or its movies might want to jump straight in without catching up first. Naturally, I'll discourage that practice. However, at the same time, I'm enjoying Aikatsu! On Parade even though there are literally hundreds of older Aikatsu! episodes that I haven't seen, to include the entirety of Aikatsu! Stars and Aikatsu! Friends.

As nightmares go, this don't seem so bad.

However, I am a sucker for crossovers, so the prospect of seeing Ichigo, Aoi, Ran, Akari, et al. return is a gimmick I can't ignore. Unfortunately, it does mean that the Aikatsu! On Parade episodes that feature idols from Stars or Friends go underappreciated, since I'm entirely unfamiliar with their characters. I do find this validates my stance against skipping ahead to watch sequels without being caught up, despite the hypocrisy of disregarding the principle when it suits me. And I guess to be fair, I absolutely do not expect anyone interested in watching Toaru Kagaku no Railgun T next season to watch all the Index and Accelerator seasons first too. Additionally, I also don't know if the upcoming Madoka anime even shares continuity with the original. Being caught up is potentially not really necessary there either. Just don't try and tell yourself it's okay to watch Heya Camp△ without watching Yuru Camp△ first, fuckers.

Melida is still not as yellow as Alice Synthesis XXX

I had low expectations for Assassin's Pride because of its synopsis: "Kufa is a noble born to a duke's family who is sent to tutor a young woman named Merida. If it turns out that Merida has no talent with mana, Kufa is secretly instructed to assassinate her." It also looked to be super-chuuni, but I gave it a chance anyway, though, because sometimes I'm just in the mood for super-chuuni bullshit. It turns out the first episode at least had visually neat aspects suggesting the people making the anime were not just phoning it in despite the show's light novel origins.

Assassin's Pride sure likes its angles.

Since I'm not familiar with the source material, I wasn't actually expecting Assassin's Pride to be a magic-battle high school show of the sort we used to see all the damn time before the current wall-to-wall isekai trend. I legitimately assumed this was going to be some high-chuuni "I must protect her" nonsense with the lead characters constantly on the run or something, perhaps a la Innocent Venus. On the plus side, the various battle tournaments shown thus far have advanced quickly. Still, I hope there's going to be more to the story than this, even though the show is surely destined for a non-ending ending after a single cours. Ordinarily, I would have just stopped watching a show like this, but the start showed enough of a spark that I'm optimistically hopeful there will be more of that sort of thing, thereby making its remaining episodes worth watching.

I'm disappointed none of them shoot left-handed.

I'm being pedantic by arguing that rifles, by definition, have rifled barrels. The guns in Rifle Is Beautiful (officially known as Chidori RSC or Chidori High School Shooting Club, depending on who you ask) are light-based, don't shoot any sort of projectiles, and accordingly do not have rifled barrels. (I mean, I guess they technically could, but it would be pointless to add rifling to the barrel of a light-based gun except to shut up nitpicking anime bloggers.) As far as the show itself goes, this is yet another anime where high school girls get really into a thing. In the best-case scenario, you end up with something phenomenal like GIRLS und PANZER or Yuru Camp△. Below that, Bakuon!! and Sabagebu! set really high standards as well. Honestly, these sorts of shows should count themselves lucky just hitting the C3-bu, Minami Kamakura Koukou Joshi Jitensha-bu, or Two Car tiers.

Tsubasa kicks Mikaze's ass.
P.S. Spoilers.

As far as Rifle Is Beautiful goes, the show is basically fine. Through the first four episodes, I don't find any of the characters particularly memorable, but I am impressed by the show's attention to detail. I'm reasonably familiar with guns, but I'm entirely ignorant about the sport featured in this anime. It seems to be real, though. Notably, the sport itself in Rifle Is Beautiful sounds much more difficult than how it's been depicted thus far. If you've done much shooting from a standing position, you'll appreciate that it can get rather fatiguing fairly quickly. Even assuming these light-beam rifles are significantly lighter than, say, an FAL, maintaining precise hits on a tiny target with a 1mm bull's-eye 10 meters away for the duration of a 45-minute match is no joke. Incidentally, Rifle Is Beautiful is also noteworthy in being one of the few shows I can name off the top of my head featuring a marksmanship competition of any sort involving guns. There was one in Stratos 4, many years ago, with characters using Howa Type 64 battle rifles, but Stratos 4 is also basically a perfect anime.

Nakajima Megumi and Orikasa Fumiko are both in this, incidentally, for those of you who care about that sort of thing.

I am more tired of isekai anime with male protagonists than I am of isekai just in general, so I'm willing to give Honzuki no Gekokujō - Shisho ni Naru Tame niwa Shudan o Erandeiramasen (Ascendance of a Bookworm) more chances to prove itself than I normally would. Although I liked the fourth episode quite a bit, I'm not especially impressed with the show as a whole so far. Even with regard to the fourth episode I enjoyed it mostly because Main's efforts—which were doomed from the very start—went to waste. It seems the usual tendency in these isekai jobbies is for the resurrected protagonists to use their superior knowledge to smugly dominate the simple folk around them, so it's nice to see things go tits up once in a while despite their best efforts.

This plan should have been a non-starter. It's difficult enough trying to cram a manga collection on an Ikea shelf.

I get the feeling that after these initial setbacks, Main is going to start smugly lording her knowledge of modern technology and techniques over these townsfolk more aggressively now that she's not constantly on the verge of dying. I don't know where any of this is going, since Honzuki no Gekokujō - Shisho ni Naru Tame niwa Shudan o Erandeiramasen so far seems to be genuinely about a woman's attempts to introduce books (and literacy) to this backwater where she was resurrected. Well, I say resurrected, but it's more like she hijacked this poor kid's life. Seeing as how introducing books and literacy to her new world could take more than a single lifetime to accomplish, maybe Main will still succumb to Key AIDS and this Japanese lady's spirit will move on to hijack the lives other other little girls, one after another. Not that I think Ascendance of a Bookworm will actually be some manner of bibliophile metempsychosis horror show, but I think that ought to at least be on the table.

The most powerful swords are the ones without blades.

I am counting on reports from the Twitter that the War of Underworld arc of Sword Art Online: Alicization will be mostly Kirito-free for all of the next cours and a third of the final one. Based on how the AIDS "Mother's Rosario" arc and the Gun Gale Online spin-off panned out, I'm expecting to enjoy this quite a bit. For one thing, I already view Alice Synthesis Thirty pretty favorably, even though it's mostly because she sounds like an old sourpuss instead of a teenage girl when she talks, and because I think her armor's yellow and blue color scheme works really well—never mind that I sort of dislike UCLA.

I wanted to see unattended Coma Kirito fall off Alice's dragon.

After a perfunctory recap episode and two proper episodes of Sword Art Online: Alicization - War of Underworld, the anime seems to be off to a good start. True to SAO form, there sure are a lot of sneering assholes among the various unimportant characters. I'm okay with it, because Lalatina is entirely too resilient for any of these scrubs to fuck with, and I don't really care if random schmucks are dicks to Kirito for no reason. Honestly, I don't even know what War on Underpants War of Underworld is even about (so far it is about playing a Goblin Slayer simulator on easy mode), but it sort of doesn't matter as long as it's at least indirectly about Alice being very yellow. She sure ditched that eye patch rather fast, though.

Potato-kun, are you wearing capri pants on this expedition?

The actual story and lore associated with Fate/Grand Order is incomprehensible to me because everything I know about it comes from secondary or tertiary sources such as people on the Twitter talking about the game, or from its fan art, or from people on the Twitter talking about the game's fan art. And while I have a semi-coherent understanding of the original Fate/stay night game, the currently airing Fate/Grand Order: Zettai Majuu Sensen Babylonia (Fate/Grand Order: Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia) anime is so removed from those origins that what I do know doesn't help at all. Compounding the problem, the anime seems to be adapting the seventh major arc of the FGO game, so there's an implied understanding that viewers should be familiar with the equivalent of six previous seasons. After the prologue and two proper episodes (plus the Fate/Grand Order -First Order- OVA), I'm still sort of lost.

I can't rule out the possibility Marisa stole Ishtar's shit.

Thankfully, it seems recognizing references or knowing all the lore is not strictly necessary to enjoying the Fate/Grand Order: Zettai Majuu Sensen Babylonia anime. For one thing, it looks fantastic, and is probably the first solid example of a show where I can clearly identify 3DCG elements without having any of it bother me at all. (Okay, the lions bother me a little bit.) For example, flowing water actually looks as if it belongs in the same world. Additionally, the action scenes are entertaining, albeit rather busy. There is a lot of shit going on and a lot of cuts that seem designed to impress via fancy animation. Well, they are fancy, and I am impressed, but I think I'd prefer a less frantic style. Really, though, these are minor complaints on my part at best (even the stuff about the incomprehensible lore). As a matter of general principle, I'll almost certainly continue to watch Fate/Grand Order: Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia for as long as it runs, providing it periodically features Ishtar doing Ishtar-type things.