They're leaving Bayashiko in the dark on purpose, right?

Midway through Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu 2nd Season (The Dangers in My Heart Season 2), three of Yamada Anna's friends should be familiar faces to the viewer. Anna does have other friends throughout the school, but three classmates in particular form a regular group—one that has increasingly integrated Ichikawa Kyoutarou into the circle over time. So who are these three?

I like that apron.

Sekine Moeko is the one who unabashedly claimed physical attractiveness was the most important quality she considered in prospective boyfriends. Kyoutarou took an immediate disliking to her. However, with Anna serving as their initial mutual "friend of a friend" nexus, Kyoutarou and Moeko have since advanced to the stage where they're also friends with each other, independent of Anna, even if Kyoutarou doesn't necessarily realize it himself.

It's fine, just roll with it.

Yoshida Serina gets the least amount of attention of the three as far as the story goes, but she's observant and insightful even though she doesn't always reveal what she knows. Serina is the one who was uncomfortable with Moeko's casual lie to Anna's mother. She's also the one who noticed Kyoutarou knew which elevator button to press, and where the bathroom was.

It's not easy being Bayashiko.

Kobayashi Chihiro is the focal point for a lot of Yamada-based antics and reaction gags. Of these three friends, Chihiro is the one who is slowest at realizing why Anna and Kyoutarou seem to spend so much time together. I'm not quite ready to call her the dumb one, but I'm certainly not going to characterize her as the smart one either. Also, it doesn't seem to come up often enough, but I'd like to acknowledge that "Bayashiko" is a fantastic nickname. Sure, people refer to Anna as "Dayama" too, but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

I don't mention Witch Gundam until the end.

I started out thinking about doing a "Best Anime of 2023" summary, considered a "Favorite Anime of 2023" post would be better instead, then briefly contemplated an "Underrated Anime of 2023" write-up next before settling on just highlighting a few series I enjoyed without constraining myself to any particular category. And here we are. Don't be afraid of your freedom.

This is the face Anna makes when she overhears people speaking from the heart.

Foremost is BokuYaba (Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu | The Dangers in My Heart), which I'm front-loading because its second season begins on January 7th. Get on it, if you haven't already. This has been a hard sell on occasion because summaries describing it are so misleading. The irony is not lost on me that a series I praise for its authenticity deceives the audience at the outset with misdirection. As I've previously advised, Kyoutarou is not an "edgelord," he's a cringelord. BokuYaba is about the mistakes that occur when people make bad assumptions about themselves and others. Likewise, it's a mistake to make assumptions about BokuYaba.

MVP.

Second, I got to BanG Dream! It's MyGO!!!!! late, but better late than never, eh. I had initially written it off as some sort of Cute Girls Doing Cute Thing show cobbled together as a vehicle for yuri 'shipping, but it turns out to be about DRAMA. Probably, technically, it's melodrama, but that bit when Best Girl Rāna starts backing up the singer (whose pockets may still be filled with rolly pollies) while she's forcing herself to bleed out on stage instead of packing up so everyone can get the Hell out of there? And then Rāna seamlessly transitions to The Forbidden Song that causes the Begging Bassist to go completely mental as The Quitter quits the venue and nearly banishes herself from the hero's party by piling down some stairs? That is some Good Shit right there.

Especially if the entire story includes telescopic sex.

Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia (Insomniacs After School) was a lot better than I was expecting. It's not much of a stretch to imagine a couple of teenagers who spend a lot of time napping together might also fall in love, so, spoilers, I guess. Mostly I'm glad neither of them tragically dropped dead at the end of the anime or some bullshit like that. The manga did end recently, but the U.S. release is still 10 volumes behind, so I'm on the fence about reading it before it's caught up, considering how many other titles I'm still following. What they ought to do is make more of the anime and cover the entire story.

Not one Like!

The IDOLM@STER Million Live! was entirely too short considering how many idols it featured, but at least we got an Umi episode. If y'all ain't heard, I do love me some Umimi.

I enjoyed how nonchalantly Frieren made this decision.

Beyond this list, there are a lot of really good shows that I watched in 2023 that you probably already know about. Like, is it necessary to say I'm enjoying Sousou no Frieren (Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End), or that Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury) was fuckin' great? The former is hugely popular and is continuing into the Winter 2024 anime season, and the latter is frickin' Gundam, so it's not as if anyone is going to forget about it. I certainly won't. Honestly, there is entirely too much capital-G Good anime each year, and 2024 doesn't seem as if it will be any different.

Maybe tomatoes count as a Miorine surrogate.

Continuing from my previous post about Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo Season 2 (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2), I'm gonna go ahead and voice my primary beef with the way the show depicted Suletta's & Miorine's relationship. The short version is the series simply did not have enough episodes to adequately develop it. Or rather, it did, but it would have had to do so at the expense of something else. I suspect this is true of most of the areas that lacked sufficient elaboration for many viewers. (For example, anyone clamoring for more details about Miorine's mother, or about what tomatoes had to do with her Quiet Zero plans.)

It's an act, but can you imagine Suletta doing something like this?

With regard to Suletta and Miorine specifically, nearly all of the slow, getting-closer parts that 'shippers might want occur almost entirely off-screen. Instead, we're treated to multiple instances of Miorine being distant, or cold, or outright cruel, and subsequent cathartic moments when she's realized she has fucked up and makes herself vulnerable to Suletta. All the less flashy (but still critical) incremental bond building occurs during time skips. It relies on the viewer to already be on board with the pairing, and willing to fill in the gaps with "head canon." Actually, not all of it was off-screen. A lot of it occurred during anachronistic dates across contemporary Japan shared on the Twitter.

I guess this counts as a date.

I don't intend to belabor the point about these short vignettes that the @G_Witch_M account posted between cours, but I am serious about how these Suletta and Miorine Japan-tour snapshots are the clearest examples we have of the two actually going on dates or acting like a couple. This doesn't change the groundbreaking importance of their prime-time teenage lesbian marriage, but it is unfortunate that including regular romance material would have crowded out all the other Gundam-critical-type stuff that G Witch barely managed to include.

I heard you liked helmets.

Now that Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo Season 2 (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2) has finished, I should probably capture my concluding thoughts on the series while they remain somewhat fresh. However, I get the feeling that would result in a long blog post, so maybe I ought to break things up into multiple entries despite the risk I might simply lose interest in writing more before completion. Anyway, the first post in this series (?) is about Elnora. If you've been following me on the Twitter, this should surprise you not at all.

Notably, I never stopped seeing Elnora as the girl she used to be.

Many viewers (if not most viewers) seemed to regard Prospera as the main villain of the series. This is not an incorrect perspective, but I think it's incomplete. I take the position that she is both an antagonist and a protagonist. This is not to say that I thought of her as the protagonist—that's clearly Suletta—but I do see her as a protagonist. (Fuck your deuteragonist and tritagonist nonsense. You're reading an anime blog, not a fan wiki.) That's not a controversial position for me to take, is it?

Maybe she'll start calling you Mom without sounding sarcastic.

I'll need to put more thought into this, but my initial impulse is to suggest Elnora embraced the forgiveness aspect reflected in (or constrained by) The Tempest a lot more readily than I expected. Like, she had already forgiven Delling during the scene where she's fucking with Miorine's head to get her to aspire for the Benerit leadership role, right?

I wonder how soon Elnora realized she was going to end up in this chair.

I also found Prospera's Quiet Zero plot to be a lot less sinister than what most people were assuming. (Never mind that I still have no idea what Notrette's original Quiet Zero plan—or Delling's intentions for the project, for that matter—were meant to be.) Now, I'm not part of the "Prospera Did Nothing Wrong" faction, but I do view her actions from a position that is decidedly more favorable to her than most seem willing to adopt. Let's just say I'm grading on a curve.

Asirpa is short.

The fourth season of Golden Kamuy was supposed to finish at the end of 2022. A staff member's death delayed production, and the cours restarted as a Spring 2023 show. As with other long-running anime (well, longer-running, relatively speaking), there's not much I can tell you about this series if you're not watching it already. Read the manga. It's great. I would tell you to start watching the anime, but that's probably a harder sell now that there are nearly 50 episodes (more, if you count the OVAs). You should have started already.

Don't stare. It's impolite.

This is one of those series that does everything well. There's comedy, there's drama, it's wacky, and it's serious. There are a lot of characters, and most of them are mental cases, but you'll also spend enough time with them (well, the ones who don't suddenly die) to appreciate what they've got going on and what motivates them. We already know the anime will cover the entire manga, so it's at least something newcomers can start without worrying about it being incomplete. There are honestly still some rough parts where the scenes or action are clearly difficult to animate, but we're at least well past the immersion-breaking 3DCG bears and fire from the first season.

I appreciate the focus on photography.

I decided to watch Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia (Insomniacs After School) on a whim this season purely because its anichart/anilist synopsis described the series as being about two insomniacs who secretly sleep together in their school's abandoned observatory. [Note: Sleeping together as in both literally napping, not sleeping together as in sleeping together, okay?]

Maybe I'm just nostalgic for life without light polution.

As it turns out, there's not very much napping in the show. I guess that would make for a boring series if the leads are conked out all the time. Although it occurs to me there is at least one anime that's literally just a girl sleeping, ain't there? Anyway, what Insomniacs After School is really about is two people who are clearly into each other taking their sweet ass time figuring it out. It's a pleasant show despite the typical arms-length romance. I find the leads engaging, and the characters in the supporting cast are personable.

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

I do think Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia focuses too much on the male lead's point of view. Ganta has significant hangups that shape his path through the story, but Isaki is a more interesting character. Initially, it appeared she might be one of those tragic love interests who dies of some sad anime disease, but this prospect seems less and less likely the more we learn about her. I mean, she still could drop dead, I suppose—I don't know how the manga is playing out so far—but it's not as if this is a Key visual novel, so I think she'll be fine.

Figure it out, you two.

Isaki and Ganta totally should be sleeping together more, though. Even if it's purely platonic, Insomniacs After School has them literally acknowledge that crashing together gave the two of them some of the best sleep they've ever had. I guess the series needs to stall to prevent the story from turning into documentary about making star babies in the observatory.

It's a good thing you made it to the shuttle on time.

The manga is currently 13 volumes long and still ongoing, so maybe this is one of those shows that really needs a second cours in order to really get going. I don't encounter a lot of discussion about the series, though, so I'm not exactly optimistic about the likelihood of getting more later. I definitely do want more, though.

Being confident helps.

No one who has been following the previous installments of Dr.STONE NEW WORLD (Dr. Stone 3rd Season) should be surprised it's still entertaining for basically all the same reasons. If there are criticisms to levy against it, they'll probably relate to how fast science is advancing. Or, I suppose more accurately, how fast production is advancing. There are no quality control problems or time constraints in the story that prevent the characters from designing and constructing whatever marvel is necessary to overcome the latest predicament. Everything just works. And that's okay! This is not a series about the 99-percent perspiration part. It's also consistent with the other feats regularly displayed.

Kohaku knows what she's doing.

Frequent readers of this blog (and of my grousing on the Twitter) may recall I regularly complain about tropes and storytelling conventions that I broadly describe using the pejorative "shounen jive." I don't have strong opinions about this from a taxonomic perspective, but my general sense is I'm perfectly fine with it (if what Dr.STONE does even qualifies as being shounen jive) providing that it's done in this way. I guess what I'm saying is I'm unsure if I regard Dr. Stone as the exception to a style of anime that I typically don't like, or if I like it because it does not adopt the elements I disfavor. In any case, the anime is still good, and the story seems to moving along well, and you should start watching it (from the beginning!) if you ain't started already.

Relax, it's only water.

If you don't count Cure Grandma or the various "other" Cures, and ignore whatever the deal was with Cure Earth, then Cure Butterfly is the oldest mainline Pretty Cure. She's only 18, but she's out of school and has a job, drives a car, and spends every waking moment on the verge of despair. Wait, not that last part. Actually, she's super genki and sort of doesn't seem like an adult at all. Do adults like her really exist? Maybe I'm asking too much of my made-for-children magikal girl show.

I wonder if Tsubasa and Syrup will get along.

There's also a boy Cure now: Cure Wing. He's fine. He's the youngest of the group, and he's technically a tubby bird who spends most of his time quietly doing tubby bird things instead of being a loud brat or something. He's WAY better than any of the dudes from Delicious Party♡Precure. I know the natural thing to do is compare Cure Wing with Black Pepper (spoilers: Cure Wing is better), but you have to remember there were a whole mess of other male characters in Delicious Party♡Precure who were way worse than Black Pepper.

I like your luggage.

Anyway, I'm getting off track. Ageha is an old friend of Mashiro (Cure Prism) despite their four-year age difference. Until now, she has just sort of been hanging around minding the magic baby while the Cures were busy. She finally became Cure Butterfly in episode 18, but there wasn't really any build-up to this, nor any indication there was anything necessarily preventing her from becoming a Cure much earlier. The deciding factor seemed to be she just wasn't needed as a Cure until now.

Ma'am, your slip is showing.

Still, she's a welcome addition, even if the novelty of having a (barely adult) adult Cure will quickly get overshadowed by actual-adult Nozomi's return when Kibō no Chikara ~Otona Precure 23~ begins in October. I'm sort of hoping ol' Dream and Bunbee ended up as co-workers in some fresh corporate hellscape. Maybe they spend a lot of time getting plastered together while bitching about their jobs.