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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!
Just finished seeing Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe in IMAX and I'll avoid spoilers since it only just came out in the US, but I'll say that a lot of this movie is definitely a slow burn, even compared to the first one. Animation is top-quality as usual, especially during the fights, and musical composition and song choice is excellent. If you saw the first, then you'll enjoy this one a lot too. If you haven't and also aren't familiar with Hathaway's story from UC, go watch those first otherwise you'll have no clue who or what's going on.
I been binging Witch Hat Atelier and I'm astounded at how cohesive a story it is. I have consumed only gacha stories for a bit, to the point I forgot how incredible a good story can be. The characters are clever, strong, and personable. Every tiny detail comes up again like a bullet. The world has so much thought and love into it, as does the magic system.
It is quite whimsical, as appropriate for a child-protagonist. This manga tries hard to awe you with wonder and joy, and it lands wonderfully. The protag and her friends are super super cute, as are their grown-ahh adult mentors, they are super cute too.
Speaking of the mentor characters, they never fail to be competent, which is semi-unusual for a child centric story? I wish to be as wise and caring.
If I must complain of anything, it could only be that the artist draws Coco's "hypothetical evil form" too pretty. It makes me wish she did go bad, and that's bad! Oh, on that note the art is superb, made pause agape several, several times.
Overall, 10/10. It does everything right, to a level I didn't even know could be done.
The final volume of The Princess I Loved in My Past Life is Now a Middle-Aged Dad released yesterday, and I got and read that. It was a very short series (only 3 volumes total), but it was cute and humorous. It wasn't particularly deep or innovative, so don't go in expecting a multi-layered romance, but the art is nice, the characters are cute, and the series is short enough that the relative one-dimensionality of the characters doesn't wear thin.
As an aside, it is also how I learned that same-sex marriage is still illegal in Japan apparently, crazy.
I binged My Dress-Up Darling this past weekend. I really liked it. Nice change of pace from the usual Shonen. I appreciated that the MC had that anime type of obsession over Hina doll crafting. And that skill set and passion carried over into costuming and crafting. It was that passion and his open-mindedness that Kitagawa fell in love with. I thought that was really cool. Their interactions and feelings felt relatively natural for teenagers and maybe specifically to Japanese teens, but I don't have experience in the latter.
I read that the last part of the story could be compressed into a movie. But no confirmation on that or a final season yet. I'm hoping we get an announcement this year