People would not put up with this if Nanako weren't so nice.

Senryuu Shoujo (Senryuu Girl) is about a girl who doesn't speak. Instead, she communicates with senryuu poems written on little placards. It works out really well for her, since she either writes super fast or is extraordinarily prescient enough to have suitable responses prepared ahead of time. There's nothing physically preventing Nanako from speaking, as far as I can tell. She just has severe anxiety.

Joshikausei consists entirely of schoolgirls fucking off.

Joshikausei (also written as two words, Joshi Kausei), on the other hand, features a cast of girls (and unimportant supporting characters) who can speak but choose not to. This is a short anime with three-minute episodes—even shorter than Senryuu Shoujo which has half-length 13-minute episodes. Neither the Joshikausei anime nor its source manga have any dialogue at all. I haven't read the Senryuu Shoujo manga, but Nanako is voiced in the anime. We're privy to her thoughts and Hanakana reads all of the cards aloud. This makes Senryuu Shoujo less gimmicky, but it also takes a little away from the show's premise. Both Senryuu Shoujo and Joshikausei are all right. They're uniformly pleasant, but I wouldn't regard them as must-watch shows this season.

It's because Ainz can't close his eyes. He has no eyelids.

As far as gimmicks go, I find Isekai Quartet fairly effective because I'm a sucker for crossovers. Plus, I was already a fan of the Ple Ple Pleiades shorts accompanying the Overlord anime. Isekai Quartet essentially expands Ple Ple Pleiades by adding characters from Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu, Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!, and Youjo Senki for additionally high-wacky antics. I have watched all of these shows, and although I dropped Re:Zero after five episodes, I'm at least familiar enough with the franchise to understand the basic references and character dynamics.

Ram seems okay.

As far as the show itself goes, Isekai Quartet has half-length episodes and is not particularly ambitious. It seems to mostly trust that viewers will enjoy seeing the interactions among characters from different shows they already like. Nobody strays too far from their idiom, and the series is entertaining enough for what it is. Isekai Quartet is surely also an effort to encourage viewers to explore these shows further if they didn't catch them the first time around. Youjo Senki and Konosuba both have movies I want to watch, and Re:Zero recently announced a sequel. I have to admit that I'm amused enough by Ram's mistreatment of Subaru during each episode of Isekai Quartet that I'm considering giving the first season of Re:Zero another chance. If I do, maybe I'll be caught up before the sequel begins. Just as planned, I'm sure, eh, Kadokawa.

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.

I can appreciate a girl who looks down on people.

Somewhat surprisingly, I am enjoying Kono Oto Tomare! Sounds of Life the most out of the shows I'm watching this season. Although my initial impressions were positive, I was still somewhat dubious until Hozuki's appearance in the second episode sealed the deal for me. I suppose if you wanted to distill her appeal down to standard anime cliches, you could chalk it up to the power of gap moé or tsundere conventions, but I do appreciate that she's the only member of this koto club who can play the instrument worth a damn. I'm also glad that her putative love interest in the show appears to be the angry delinquent kid and not Potato-kun.

Yaoi hand.

It also helps that the conflicts between Angry Delinquent and Potato-kun in the first episode feel more like something out of a shoujo manga than a shounen one. (The source material is described as shounen and runs in Jump SQ.) There were some borderline scenes in the first episode that involved clichés I hate, though. Notably, the anime convention where the first person at the scene of a crime is seen by the second person at the scene and immediately assumed to be the perpetrator. (See, for example, Boku dake ga Inai Machi (ERASED).) However, the way this plays out in Kono Oto Tomare! is at least related to preconceptions people have about others and not just the the dumb cliché in its raw form. Luckily, my own preconceptions for Kono Oto Tomare! itself did not bear out and I'll get to watch Hozuki shred for two cours.

Lucky for Potato-kun, Uruka is tsundere, not yandere.

I guess I did know ahead of time that there were two shows with Benkyou ga Dekinai in the title, but managed to forget when the season started. In any event, I had decided to watch Boku-tachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai (We Never Learn: BOKUBEN) and skip Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai (Ao-chan Can't Study!) based on their descriptions, and because Bokuben at least had some people on the Twitter mildly looking forward to it. Well, I ended up watching the first episode of Ao-chan by accident (it aired first) and decided to stick with it.

Dude is literally sniffing his hand after groping Ao's thighs.

After three episodes of each, I'm going to continue watching Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai and I'm dropping Boku-tachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai. I was concerned Ao-chan's little goblin father was going to ruin the show for me, particularly after his antics in the first episode, but I'm relieved to discover the show itself is pretty much a straightforward sex comedy about misunderstandings. One key that allows the show to work for me is that both Ao and her love interest are actually already into each other, and probably should be engaging in activities that might inadvertently help address Japan's declining birth rates, but they're both pretty dense. This is a small (but appreciated) departure from the usual formula where both parties are 100-percent pure. Ao-chan Can't Study! might end up being that way too, since—let's face it—anime is fucking chickenshit, but the show is okay for now. It also helps that the episodes are only half-length.

I guess now she can't get married.

Boku-tachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai, on the other hand, drags. I get the feeling that I would probably be okay with some of its cliches in manga form, because a reader can just blow through at his own pace. But the anime spends entirely too much time on antics I've seen plenty of times before and don't feel compelled to revisit. Most of the show's fans seem to have been fans of the manga first, but I'm not sure how they regard the adaptation specifically. I, for one, could do with less Postmodern Tsundere bullshit. I'm actually even okay with all the characters. I guess even Potato-kun has his own positive qualities, but the show absolutely does not work for me. Frankly, I stopped caring whether these BOKUBEN bonklers manage to study or not. I can't guarantee I won't also tire of Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai too, but for the time being I hope she goes all season not being able to study.

Touma is shorter and has messier hair.

The Spring 2019 anime season features Mix: Meisei Story and Hachigatsu no Cinderella Nine, two fairly different baseball anime. The former is an adaptation of a still-running Adachi Mitsuru manga and an apparent sequel set 30 years after one of his classics, Touch. Although I've only read the first few chapters of Mix, I have read Touch as well as a number of other Adachi titles. I also watched Cross Game, so I'm reasonably confident that Mix is basically guaranteed to be good, although I imagine newcomers to Adachi's work may wonder why everyone has the same face. I'm also counting on at least one tragic character death. Hey, baseball is a cruel sport, okay. I don't know how long the Mix anime is expected to run, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up lasting all year.

TWO HANDS!

Unlike Mix, where baseball has been a part of the characters' lives for a long time, Hachigatsu no Cinderella Nine features mostly neophytes, at least in terms of skill level. It also features a meek, somewhat clumsy girl in an animal-ears hoodie whose initial defining characteristic was anxiety. I was prepared to loathe her on general principle, but I suppose it's a credit to Cinderella Nine that I pretty much regard her as at least "okay" now after two episodes. The show does feel like yet another show where a bunch of girls are all really into something that girls stereotypically don't care so much about, but there are quite a few shows in that vein that still turn out to be very good, so I'm willing to give Cinderella Nine the benefit of the doubt. I'm not expecting it to be anywhere near as good as Taisho Yakyuu Musume or Princess Nine, but I'm hopeful the baseball itself will be better in Cinderella Nine than it was in Princess Nine. (See this earlier post for more on that.)