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What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
Re:ZERO S3 - I've written about it before and my opinion hasn't changed. This season the mystery part of the plot got sidelined in favor of some action heavy scenes. The pacing was poor and I don't watch Re:ZERO for the fights so I'm rather disappointed, 5/10
Flower and Asura - It's about kids in broadcasting club. Initially, after hearing it's from the author of Hibike! Euphonium and studio Bind, I had rather high expectations, but the show turned out to be quite average. While the production quality was good, the plot felt somewhat random at times and the season ends in a weird place. A lot of the time was spent on introducing rather wide cast, so maybe if it was released as 2-cour anime, it would made more sense, but as it is it's 6/10 for me.
Beyond the Boundary - It has great production quality, as expected from Kyoto Animation, and at the beginning the show is fun and interesting but the ending is disappointing and doesn't provide any answers. I thought that maybe the sequel movie would have a proper ending to the story but no, it has the same structure as the series and ending doesn't make much sense to me. 6/10 for both.
I read through what's released of Pokémon: Festival of Champions. It gets a little too edgy in places, but wow, what a goddamn love letter to the series and a brilliant homage to earlier segments of Pokémon Special. Something that's kinda missed with Pokémon nowadays is that Kanto started off rural and at times dilapidated, isolated, or barren; Special was based off the monocolored Red and Green games, where there was a ton of empty space. People leaned on Pokémon to just do regular everyday things, and the whole journey felt lonely at times - which made the Pokémon presence helpful for characterizing the whole team. In the kinda Poké-globization over the years technology got better, every town is urban and built up, friends and people are abound... Festival of Champions brings a lot of that rural feeling back, and the loose story structure lets Sambo jump around RBY or even other game events to tell whatever part of that journey he likes.
It's also nice seeing Pokémon go off-model to give em a new spin. I like the fan stuff he incorporated too.
major story beat spoiler, mild character/pokemon spoilers
[Karen's Umbreon is like some cross between an imp, Monty Python's Killer Rabbit, and The Judge from OFF.](https://imgur.com/a/36yjD9w) It's fuckin terrifying, and it's appropriate for the typing and theming of the match when the Eeveelution line is typically so cutesy in regular sources. Such a remarkably good break to have it more faithful to its dark type to become so conniving and opportunistic. Also love how they wedged Karen's famous line in to the narrative of that chapter.The plot revolving around Raticate's death almost crossed into a little too much fixation on a goofy fan theory, but it's neat that the author just wrote a bit backwards whenever he needed to give some extra weight in the present. The way Green's maladaptive response is starting to seep into resentment from his team is fantastic.
Love the ~70 page chapters, too. The stories feel like they has room to breathe. Really adore this and hope Sambo gets to tell his full story.
Anyway, once I finished that I switched over to Yotsub&! since my son is turning 2 and I figured I could use some ideas for keeping him occupied. Looking forward to getting assassinated by my child. That whole chapter killed me.