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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!
So, I started chipping away at anime again with my Tower of God free month, and finished Eizouken, which was great, and Magia Record, which was... not.
Spoiler Ramble on Magia Record S1/PMMM
The pacing sucks, and the thing that made Madoka the defining show of the Dark Magical Girl genre (for better or worse) was the pacing. In Madoka episode 3, you knew that Magical Girls died when their soul gem cracked, in 6, you knew that they could become witches if they were overtaxed, in 9, you knew that all this has happened before, and in 12, you know that this will never happen again.Magia Record is a little more conventional in that episodes have a character meet/join/adjust to the party, and we learn what makes them tick, but it's stuck using all it's powder on episode 11 of 13, revealing the twists to the younger Magical Girls, leaving the big twist of this series, "why can the girls go to and from their witch forms as a power up" as something the bad people made for an evil plan.
And I don't get the villains either. They read as heavily coded as a facist cult for the self preservation and liberation of Magical Girls from their disposal fates, but that is ostensibly a good goal for good people. So in order for the audience to confirm, "yes, they are villainous," they're also mysterious jerks who pick fights with the team for cleaning up witches and rumors. If they were a Witches rights group, or they explained they wanted to tap them for power, or we could see what exactly their plan was in Season 1 instead of cameos of original series characters and name dropping Walpurgisnacht, we at least could have had something here, but see the pacing problems above.
I get that the original Madoka was lighting in a bottle and we are probably not going to get anything like that again for a bit, and maybe the story plays out better in the format of a mobile game, but that's why they call it an adaptation and not an oral retelling. Tighten the pacing, less cameos for cameo sake, and have the bad guys explain their MO, because that mystery is just confusing, and then you might actually have something.
Someone recommended Haikyu to me, that popular volleyball anime. I'm a few episodes in, and it's alright, I guess, but I think I'm not as into it as she is.
Kakegurui XX. Started it a while back and binged the latter 8 episodes recently. It's so good and over the top and I can't wait for season 3...aka XXX? I hope not?