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

Just finished the new season of Castlevania and it is honestly the best anime in memory. Indescribably amazing and I cannot imagine a better animated interpretation of mini-boss and final boss fights.

I dropped Blood Blockade Battlefront yesterday after episode 6. On paper it should be precisely my kind of thing, but in practice I found the characters hard to care for, the fights felt less like fights and more like random skill expositions (and even then I found the skills very boring), the story and pacing is all over the place and very hard to follow and I really don't like the early 20th century esque setting. I did really love the comedy though. Bummer.

Aside from that I'm still watching Naruto, albeit I'm now in the really long filler part (ep 142) so I'm taking it slowly on that front.

To replace Battlefront I'm planning on trying to catch up with the times a little (I tend to watch and play older anime and games the most), so I'll just try a few new anime until something sticks. Will give Kemono Jihen a shot first, though I have a bit of a bad feeling about it (looks like a bait and switch kind of show).

EDIT: Kemono Jihen is good.

Finally finished Ergo Proxy last night. I'm left with something between vague disappointment and mild confusion, as well as a lingering aftertaste of clumsily-handled potential. I recognize that I'm not familiar enough with Western philosophy to catch most of the references that are sprinkled throughout the show, and I knew that going in... but as much as I wanted it to, it never engaged me enough that I'd want to do the extra work to peel the layers of the onion. I've started reading some post-viewing analyses, and they all state it's a show that you can't properly understand or appreciate on the first viewing, but you'd have to pay me to sit through it again.

As with last season, I've been watching one show per week, and this week has me watching 86. The animation is pretty cool, I think, and I like the character designs perhaps more than they merit. It hasn't really done anything to grab hold of me, but to be fair, I've only seen the first two episodes. I'm pacing myself.

So far I like that it's not afraid to tackle difficult subjects, but it seems like it's making them out to be light easily solvable problems - "If only they'd all listen"! I'm hoping that there's going to be better lessons to be learned as the plot continues.

That being said, I think that the characters and the relationships they have will be the most compelling part of the show. I don't think I've seen anything exactly like the kind of relationship that seems to be building between the leading male and female characters, but the entire squad seems to have a lot to offer in terms of personality.

Other than that, I have somehow been convinced to read the Konosuba light novels. I've never read light novels before; I didn't really get much of the appeal. But I really liked the anime and these happened to be available in English, so I decided to buy one.

It's... good? It's funny, that's for sure. It's kind of amazing how much reading it feels like watching the anime. The writing is very terse, and I don't know if that's because of the author's style, the English translation, or if that's just a trait of light novels in general. If the latter is true, then I can understand the appeal of the metagenre.

I don't know if I'll buy the next one just yet. They're cheap, yes, but at the same time, they don't have a lot of content; the text is big and has wide margins, and to be frank it would seem that it's written specifically for kids. It's been a while since I curled up with a novel, but this isn't the kind of thing I would typically read.

Edit: it looks like the third episode of 86 is where it starts getting interesting.

This season, I've only been watching My Hero Academia. This season's been a bit slow, story-wise, but showing growth to a bunch of side characters has been nice!

Tower of God is finally back with new chapters! I've also been slowly rereading the webtoon, trying to savor it a bit more than I did on my first read.

Just finished the first season of Konosuba. I think this is the second anime I've watched in full, First being Seishun Buta Yarou when it released. I want to get more into watching anime and felt Konosuba was gonna be a good place to start.

My impressions have generally been:

I assumed anime-s look like this, with hard and flat lighting and I didn't expect much in the way of special effects. Perhaps slice of life animes look more like that since they don't need the graphics (yes I know nichijou exists), but Konosuba doesn't a lot of the time, and has pretty great graphics. There's also CGI/3D models of stuff sometimes, which I felt was done fine in Konosuba but I can imagine that being a point of debate, which I've heard it sometimes is.

Seeing the origin of all the running gags I remember from when I browsed r/animemes is pretty nice.

I'm pretty sure I remember some anime YouTuber saying Kazuma's character flaws is sometimes being an asshole and that makes itself clear from time to time.

My experience of Episode 9 (the one where Kazuma doesn't have his dream) was mostly me cringing alongside darkness.

A habit I have is of trying to predict what happens next in the show which I think I derive from when my watch some hastily chosen Netflix original or reccomendation, but I've found somewhat counterproductive in the more action-packed episodes, and will probably try to avoid that next time.

This is a more general habit of mine but I often went from taking a week or 2 between watching episodes to watching a few in a row. Maybe a bit counter-productive to watch anime irregularly like that but not sure.

I'm not entirely sure what's the next anime I'll watch, but some options I put high on the list are Demi chan wa katarikatai because I liked the setting of demi girls trying to live normal lives, rewatching Seishun Buta Yarou because I kind of forgot most of what happened, probably because I watched it while on (I think) a hostel in a far-away city. I might watch Blend-s, another anime known for memes.

Watched Whisper of the Heart a Studio Ghibli movie from 1995, was very good. The depiction of daily life in particular is masterful.