Eat more carbs.

Through 17 episodes, Delicious Party♡Precure is fine, thanks to a well-understood formula that such a long-running franchise can reliable draw upon, but there's not much else going for it. It's starting to look like Delicious Party is going to end up closer to the HappinessCharge side of the scale than its predecessor, Tropical-Rouge! Precure, for example.

Take this job and shove it.

Still, 17 episodes isn't particularly far for a weekly series that runs all year, so perhaps the show will turn things around. There are a few aspects that reduce my optimism in this regard, though. Significantly, it turns out the adversary who eventually switches sides to become a Cure herself has been under some sort of mind control the whole time, so she never really did anything wrong. How they fucked this up, I have no idea.

Gentle's outfit is so good.

Enemies becoming friends has been a Pretty Cure staple from the beginning. But the cliché continues to work because viewers still care about character growth and redemption arcs. Taking this agency out of Amane's actions reduces her motivation for joining the Cures to one mostly predicated on undeserved guilt. It's not her fault she was stealing recipes. She wasn't even any good at it!

I don't know if it's better or worse that Black Pepper's battle costume looks silly.

I'm also not a huge fan of the male characters in Delicious Party♡Precure. This is an area where the franchise has not excelled. I'm sure there are viewers who enjoy Rosemary and Takumi and find their contributions to be important and satisfying, but I sure don't. It's not uncommon for Pretty Cure to include prominent male protagonists in various guises, but nothing about these two make me think they are necessary or valuable so far.

Sera, what are you even wearing?

This has been developing for a while now, but the quality of Detective Conan episodes seems to have declined. I haven't examined this closely, but I suspect there are significantly more anime-original episodes now. It's probably also not easy to further advance the ostensible main plot in satisfactory ways given how absurd it is. It's one of those things that works best as an anime setup when left unchallenged.

Amuro is in both of these spinoffs.

Disappointingly, there were also a couple of recent Detective Conan spinoffs which are sort of terrible. Meitantei Conan: Keisaku Gakkou Hen (Detective Conan: Wild Police Story) runs in place of regular Detective Conan episodes and features tales of some of the side characters from the main series during their time in the police academy. It's not unwatchable, but it's certainly not good, even as a series intended for small children.

This car looks pretty good considering how often it gets fucked up.

Detective Conan: Zero's Tea Time ran on its own and consisted of six half-length episodes centered around Amuro. It, like Wild Police Story, is an adaptation of a spin-off manga, but I found its six episodes entirely pointless. I guess they were better than the Wild Police Story episodes, but I can only imagine Amuro has a lot more fans than I realized. Hopefully, it at least made some good people some money.

Life sure is great.

Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku (Akebi’s Sailor Uniform) is a show that encourages adopting a positive attitude. It promotes the idea that if you embrace optimism and do your best, things will work out better and your life will be filled with amazing moments that create wonderful memories. It's not a bad argument for a series to make. There's a place in the world for these sorts of perspectives, and you'll find it in a countryside that's always gorgeous and not at all filled with countless biting insects.

Every swimming segment was really good.

Aside from that observation, I don't have much to add to this end-of-season wrap-up post, except maybe just acknowledging that it was one of the best shows from the Winter 2022 anime season. It turned out much better than I was expecting. I guess I should also point out that I am aware some viewers had a much different opinion of it, with some even taking an especially negative stance towards Akebi-chan.

Now you're just showing off.

In this regard, I suspect some of the more visceral responses probably reveal more about the internalized reactions some viewers experienced—and their discomfort reconciling them—than anything about the Akebi-chan series itself. Over the years, I've come to understand my more oblique way to conveying ideas can be unnecessarily unclear, so I'll just say it plainly this time (hopefully without implying that those who aren't getting it are obtuse).

Actually, you know what? I changed my mind. I'm not gonna spell it out.

Best Girl.

I'm pleased to report Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru (My Dress-Up Darling) completed its first cours with a solid finish, capping off a remarkable run well ahead of whatever expectations I may have had prior to starting the series. I'm by no means alone in praising the show as the best from the Winter 2022 anime season, so I'm hopeful we'll see a second cours at some point.

Things I know about Nowa: She has great hair, and is purportedly freakishly strong.

In addition to the factors I've mentioned in my previous posts, the small cast also worked in its favor. I was sure the childhood friend who bitched Wakana out years ago was going to appear at some point, and similarly expected at least one arc involving Marin's friends getting into her business. The fact that neither of these things came to pass is a credit to the storytelling in KiseKoi and the attention it gave to Marin's point of view as her romantic feelings grew.

These are some fireworks.

My Dress-Up Darling consistently defied expectations in these small ways throughout the season, but their impact in the aggregate is considerable. I hope authors and directors of future works take note of this phenomenon. You'd expect a story should need entirely original, novel ideas to gain this benefit, but Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru demonstrated simply not following familiar tropes to their specific expected destinations can be enough to transform scenes that would otherwise have been unremarkable.

More of this would have been better.

I am going to caveat this by acknowledging first of all that Ousama Ranking (Ranking of Kings) was never actually capital-B Bad. However, I am hard pressed to identify another show with greater distance between how much I enjoyed it at the beginning and how disinterested I was by the end. I'm sort of appalled, to tell you the truth. Anime War Crime Tribunal provides a spoiler-heavy examination that covers basically every issue I had with the series, although I'm more negative about the problems overall.

He's not going to be big enough for her.

I feel as if I must be overlooking shows that genuinely collapsed, but I suspect those examples that escape me at the moment likely showed less initial promise. Ousama Ranking, at a minimum, had a solid start (that admittedly started declining towards the end of its first cours). I did already mention that I was sick of all the fighting. Well, it went on like that during the second cours, but then the monkey's paw curled, the fighting stopped, and it got even worse. As I understand it, the source manga is still running, so maybe the story gets good again. The very end of the final anime episode did open the door for that possibility, but I'm in no hurry to revisit Ranking of Kings in any capacity for the time being.

Congratulations on not being dead.
P.S. Spoilers.

To tell you the truth, I sort of forgot 86 Eighty Six season 2 two had delayed its final 2 two episodes to March 2022 Two Thousand Twenty Two. I mean, things were sort of tense when we last saw our characters, but it totally could have just ended the season where it was. I would have accepted a cliffhanger-ish ending and an indefinite wait until the next cours, whenever that happens to be. I mean, I think it's reasonable to expect there will be another cours at some point. The anime seems pretty well-regarded, and I've warmed up to it as well, despite some initial misgivings.

Congratulations on not being dead.
P.S. Spoilers.

86 is at its best when it's exploring how its characters relate to each other and to their shared experiences with war. These aspects of the series are much more compelling than how it depicts the war itself or the dynamics of the societies involved. This is not necessarily because I find many of those elements unrealistic, but rather more because I'm not invested in their outcomes. I'm not particularly invested in most of the characters either, but the series has devoted enough time to developing them that I can at least appreciate their emotional resonance.

They're not panties, so it's not embarrassing.

Through nine episodes, Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru (My Dress-Up Darling, also KiseKoi for short) continues to outperform even the most optimistic expectations I initially had for it. Two factors are primarily responsible for how it has accomplished this. First, it is sincere about its subject matter. Second, the series subvert clichés, even though it's mostly doing it in only small ways.

Marin has good hair.

With regard to the first point, I can't claim to know anything about cosplay, but KiseKoi seems earnest about the subject. The anime's instructional segments also seem framed to be accessible, informative, and sort of encouraging to neophytes who may have an interest in getting into cosplay themselves.

There is fan service, but that's not what makes KiseKoi good..

Concerning the second point, I'm pleased with how My Dress-Up Darling presents common anime tropes. There are a lot of scenes with setups that are extremely familiar to anyone who has watched a lot of anime. However, they end up playing out differently from the norm. This is not to say KiseKoi is subverting these conventions, but it's remarkable how simply executing them in ways slightly differently than usual makes all the difference.

It's not easy being anime.

To some degree, the success Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru achieves by simply doing things right is an indictment against all those other anime that end up being mostly mediocre because they seem to embrace shortcomings viewers regard as avoidable. Well, maybe My Dress-Up Darling is an example of how good an anime can be as a result of doing small things right. I should probably also mention the romance part of the series, since KiseKoi, you know, is a romantic comedy after all. However, I'm going to wait and see how it all progresses and just state, for now, that the anime is also handling this aspect well.

I don't know why Komichi doesn't have more uniforms or do laundry more often.

Saying Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku (Akebi’s Sailor Uniform) has a lot of fan service is not exactly a controversial claim now that we're eight episodes into the season, but I don't mean it as criticism anyway. Rather, this is an indirect segue to acknowledging the series is beautifully animated. It's remarkable how consistently gorgeous every shot looks, honestly. In particular, the setting is so exquisitely detailed it's basically pornographic.

I mean, look at this house.

In light of this, I suppose it is not exactly inaccurate to suggest the Akebi-chan no Sailor Fuku anime provides so many lingering shots examining its characters' bodies considering it basically does this for everything else in the show. Whether or not this makes it lewd is subjective, but I'm hardly the first person to comment on the sort of framing that pervades the anime. I've not read the source manga, but I have encountered claims the anime is toned down in comparison, so I'm pretty confident in concluding there is something there.

"Come with me if you want to live swim."

Like I said, none of this is meant as a criticism. The show is legitimately entertaining in addition to looking fantastic. Akebi's Sailor Uniform (like My Dress-Up Darling) has pleasantly surprised me with how good it is. This might not be the deepest-stacked anime season, but it's not a barren one either. Even though I don't believe I'm in the target audience for something like Akebi-chan, it's appealing enough that I enjoy it anyway. Oh, and I assume that "100 friends" thing was made up for the promotional materials or whatever. It hasn't come up at all.