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Dated 29 August 2023: The Summer 2023 Anime Season So Far

Mie and Komura
Enjoy this apple. Or else.

Somehow, Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta (The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses) is my top show this season. I say "somehow," but I know why: It's because the girl Potato-kun likes squints when she doesn't have her glasses (which is often), and it makes her look angry as fuck all the time. This is a dumb gimmick, but I love it. The juxtaposition between her appearance and her demeanor is so good. More surprisingly, outside of the trailer and first episode that made everyone (including me) assume GoHands was going to commit anime crimes all season long, the visuals have been fine. If anything, I'm sort of disappointed it looks as normal as it does. Maybe Sukimega would be a bottom-tier show during most quarters, but you go to Seasonal Anime War with the shows you have, not the shows you wish you had.

Ageha
Carcinization.

Hirogaru Sky! Precure is only sort of average as far as Pretty Cure seasons go, but it's such a step up from Delicious Party♡Precure that it seems wonderful in comparison. God, they really fucked that one up. Anyway, Hirogaru Sky! has made notable changes to the existing Pretty Cure formula. It has a "blue" lead instead of a "pink" one, it has an adult Cure, and it has the franchise's first male Cure. Nevertheless, despite these departures, the series as a whole seems really...normal.

Misha and Anos
Not even bothering to make a magic umbrella.

Maou Gakuin no Futekigousha: Shijou Saikyou no Maou no Shiso, Tensei shite Shison-tachi no Gakkou e Kayou II (The Misfit of Demon King Academy: History’s Strongest Demon King Reincarnates and Goes to School with His Descendants Season 2) re-started after a mid-season interruption that forced a delay for the remaining episodes of the cours. It's a lot of magic bullshit, none of which seems as interesting to me as the first season's Misha and Sasha content, but I haven't gotten tired of the constant ass pulls yet.

Yohane, Lailaps, and Dia
Dia still sucks, though.

Genjitsu no Yohane: SUNSHINE in the MIRROR (YOHANE THE PARHELION -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR-) needs more music. And where the Hell is SAINT SNOW? C'mon. I mostly like what it's doing anyway. It's had a few twists that are sort of interesting. I'm not sure I'm entirely on board with what the series has planned for what I presume will be a big finish, but I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. The Yohane focus has rehabilitated my opinion of Love Live! Sunshine!! to some degree, but I still think Nijigasaki and Superstar are superior installments overall.

Dated 25 July 2023: The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is not a GoHands atrocity

Kaede
The girl you like is a mental case, Potato-kun.

I am going to go ahead and claim Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta is good, actually. Or rather, it's good for sufficiently unclear definitions of good. I probably can't reasonably claim that The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is objectively good, but it is the Summer 2023 series that I am looking forward to the most each week. Notably, the jarring visual flair associated with GoHands in recent years is toned down considerably compared to something like 2017's Hand Shakers, for example. In fact, I'm going to claim the visuals are my favorite part of Sukimega.

Maho, Ai, and Asuka
Look at how pissed off she looks while casually greeting her friends. This is the best.

Specifically, I thoroughly enjoy how Potato-kun's love interest spends nearly all of her screen time squinting. It makes her appear constantly cross. (This is an actual plot point.) That's it. That's the entire reason and 100-percent of the show's appeal to me. (It's good squinting, Brent!) I do wish the series had more going for it. At least Potato-kun doesn't actively irritate me all the time anymore. Ai being helplessly blind without her glasses is a repetitive joke that mostly makes her appear, ah, not very smart, unfortunately. The romance angle is fine, I guess. It's neither good nor bad in my view. The wall-to-wall angry squinting, however, is world class. Good job, GoHands.

Dated 15 December 2020: I'm probably less likely to watch Wonder Egg Priority if I find out what it's about before it starts

Ai
Every word in Wonder Egg Priority is English, but that combination has no meaning!

The Winter 2021 anime season is going to be a busy one. Not only are there a mess of sequels coming out, there are also a fair number of anime-original offerings for anyone exhausted from years of light novel adaptations. One such show is Wonder Egg Priority from CloverWorks which recently released a PV but offered basically no other information. I know it features a character with heterochromia and there is at least one dekochin, but I'm otherwise entirely ignorant about it. However, I am curious enough to watch at least the first episode, and it seems likely the anime will at least look good.

Elisha
I guess this post is getting the "Girls With Guns" tag.

The promotional material for another original anime, Back Arrow, features cowboys and giant robots. These are not things I associate with each other (well, there was Bakuretsu Tenshi years ago), so there's the potential for some originality here. It's reportedly going to be at least two cours and I'm reasonably confident Bones isn't going to just half-ass this project. It looks like it has a fairly large cast, too, and I spotted Ueda Reina's name associated with the show. The combination of these factors are enough to get me to at least check it out. The PV could use more robots, though.

Shadow and Reki
Prince of Stride: Alternative at least had Hanakana supporting its racers.

Among the remaining original anime offerings, I'm almost certainly going to ignore all the ones about idols. I'm also staying away from the GoHands project which looks suspiciously like another secret sequel to Hand Shakers. You're not getting me twice, fuckers. On the upside, there is a racing show called SK∞ (SK8 the Infinity) about dudes skateboarding down into a mine shaft while beating the shit out of each other. It probably suffers from not-enough-anime-girls syndrome, but it might turn out to still be entertaining anyway.

Dated 4 March 2019: W'z is the Hand Shakers sequel I never knew I wanted

Yukiya
Totally normal background.

To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure I want a Hand Shakers sequel, and I'm already nine episodes into it. In any case, nobody else seemed to know ahead of time that W'z was going to be a sequel until after the first episode aired. Even now, it's unclear to me whether GoHands specifically hid this information or were just really bad at promoting the show. I suppose I could have guessed, since W'z shares the extremely garish 3DCG style found in Hand Shakers, although I find it much less visually jarring now than I did in winter of 2017. Whether this is because the franchise's aesthetic has improved or whether I've just developed a tolerance for it, I have no idea. The way the show looks is pretty much the only reason why I'm watching it, incidentally. I certainly don't care for the setting or the plot or the characters.

Haruka
You are way overreacting, Haruka.

In fact, there's not even much of a cohesive plot to speak of through nine episode. There are some unifying themes, and a number of points that the show continues to re-emphasize, but nothing I consider engaging. The characters are about what you ought to expect, if you remember how they were in Hand Shakers, although there are some semi-amusing changes to a few of them that occurred during the timeskip between the two shows. As far as the new characters go, well, Haruka is doing nothing to make herself endearing. The dumb side plot about her unspoken feelings for Potato-kun is crap and does W'z no favors. She's been entirely dead weight. I'm watching W'z so you don't have to, but if you're at all curious about what this, uh, visually arresting show is like, absolutely start by watching Hand Shakers first. It might be WORSE THAN COSPRAYERS but at least it doesn't have Haruka.

Dated 20 March 2014: Seitokai Yakuindomo can go on as long as it has to

Tsuda, Hagimura, Shino, and Aria.
It's not easy being Tsuda.

Seitokai Yakuindomo sort of reminds me of Detective Conan because both shows are reliably good with very infrequent bad episodes easily offset by occasional great ones. This is quite an achievement for SYD since it relies very heavily on the same battery of jokes. I guess it's similar to Detective Conan in this respect also, since Detective Conan relies very heavily on variations of its formulaic structure.

Hagimura
Did you think Dreamcast or Debian?

I think I could happily watch Seitokai Yakuindomo indefinitely the way I can watch Detective Conan indefinitely simply because the characters are so pleasant and the anime itself so good looking. I suspect after a hundred or so episodes, I'd prefer half-length episodes, though. There are still a great many SYD four-panel comics that I haven't yet read, but they don't have that certain GoHands flair or backing vocals by Triple Booking. It's not the same.