What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

The announcement of the third season of Oshi no Ko spurred me on to finally watch the second season after letting it spend over a year in my backlog. Looking back, my anime progress has been especially slow this year, but I'm grateful that I found a good opportunity to pick up where I left off in the end.

I'll be looking forward to finishing the second season and then getting right into the sequel which will be airing not too long after (or possibly already airing if I'm slow). I've also found there to be a lot of other interesting adaptations and continuations to keep an eye out for next year, so I'm eager for those as well.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Started a rewatch of The Ancient Magus' Bride while I wait for the absolutely stacked Winter 2026 season to start. I really love how magic is portrayed in this world: it feels very natural, as magical creatures, phenomena, and spells never feel immersion-breaking, but also believably interwoven into a modern world and society. Magic exists everywhere, even in cities with modern technology, but is invisible to those without the gift or training to perceive it. Mages and sorcerers aren't constantly training to become stronger and battling each other or facing off existential threats, but rather just deal with small magic-related requests as part of their day-to-day work, and otherwise live normal lives alongside everyone else. Magical creatures themselves simply exist like any other living beings do - they don't have to serve any purpose to drive the story forward, though a number of them do have useful powers that do help the protagonist. The soundtrack also puts in a huge amount of work to enhance the atmosphere - it makes brilliant use of piano, woodwinds, and strings in most scenes to convey playful, gentle, and somber moods, but when they break out a flashier scene then the brass gets to show off, but still in tandem with the other instruments to maintain that magical theme. There's some vocal tracks made just for certain scenes as well and I can't really describe how they fit accurately, but they're beautiful tracks that'll stick around either in your head or your heart.

Also, I always watch this Christmas scene from Ping Pong the Animation every year. Even out of context you can sorta feel what's going on, it's a great scene from a great show.

Merry Christmas, watch Ping Pong and Ancient Magus' Bride.

Still working through Kaguya-Sama: Love is War manga! Nearly done with Vol 18. There's 22 edit: 28 total, so I'm nearly done still got a good amount to go with the Manga in general, and while I'll be sad to see it go I'll be excited to see the end!

I've really enjoyed this rom-com immensely, the romance parts are cute and well developed, and the comedy is my exact humor taste, after learning the mangaka is apparently a notorious shit poster I realized why I enjoyed it so much as that's my ideal jokes. I feel like the manga also does a great job of handling mature topics (eg sex and sexuality) wrt it's high-school cast, in ways that are realistic to how high schoolers actually act and think about it without being weird or fan-service-y.

FLAG

Watched this after seeing the review in this weekly. I'd never even heard of this show, but it turned out to be interesting stuff.

• In terms of vibe, it's definitely the anime equivalent of seinen manga. Yeah, there are cool 'real robot' mechs and even a decent amount of action, but the real substance of the story is not spoon fed to the audience - being an outsider vs belonging / participating, the power of imagery vs the imperative to protect it and so on. I dug all of this!

• On the other hand, the presentation of the story almost solely through camera lenses (those of its two protagonists, the on-board cameras of the military, etc) got old for me very quickly. Yeah, I get that it ties in with the themes of the show and is meant to give it a Blair Witch kind of verisimilitude, but it ended up feeling really disjointing to have to sit through someone going through a menu on their camera between each cut. I wish they would have at least cut out those transition parts.

Sakamoto Days

If you can picture Anzai-sensei from Slam Dunk as John Wick trying to retire and live a quiet life with his family, only to constantly have other assassins, mafia and so on mess with him, you've pretty much got the picture.

When you've got Sugita Tomokazu as a comic badass, his earnest but dorky sidekick and a vaguely Chinese martial artist heroine with a terrible accent starring in a Shounen Jump action/comedy, it's hard not to draw the obvious comparison to Gintama - and in many ways, the vibe (and even the comedic roles and timing of the main characters) is similar, although some of the latter's sharp wit has been traded off for better animation.

Easy and fun watch.

Banana Fish

Checked this out after seeing the clips of the terrible AI dub and thinking the animation looked pretty decent (turns out it was done by Mappa).

It's an interesting one. All of the stuff I was expecting is in there - action, shoot-outs and crime - but in equal parts, it's also a dark drama with a heavy focus on the relationship between the two male leads. Although there's nothing too graphic, the story really doesn't pull any punches when it comes to things like sexuality and child abuse. It's all presented in a remarkably frank way which I think is not uncommon in Western shows, but quite rare for anime.

I just finished watching Twisted Wonderland, and read Helck a while back. Both the anime and manga of Helck are finished, but the anime ends before the manga does. It gets kind of dark later on, but has a happy ending if you can get through it. I also read Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun, it's a lot of fun, and I'm thinking of watching the anime. The new version of Pokémon is much more plot heavy than the last one, and the villains are much more threatening than Team Rocket.