Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2026, Week 34]

This season I have been watching....

Goodbye, Lara

Caught my attention initially when I saw people comparing Lara to Suletta Mercury, and honestly, the comparison ain't that far off. It's incredibly cute and endearing so far along with being an interesting twist on the story of The Little Mermaid.

Ghost in the Shell

I am absolutely in love with the aesthetic of this adaptation. I adore weird gremlin Motoko vs the more dead serious version we've seen in other incarnations. This won't be everyone's cup of tea but I am here for it.

The one thing that has surprised me is just how little a lot of the interweaving politics in each episode seems to matter; I started out expecting something of a building or recurring plot thread. I was concerned because the relationships between countries feels fairly complex and I thought I was falling behind. Who's platinum reserves are they and why do they matter, again? But what I've ultimately come to accept is that honestly very little of this actually matters. The platinum ain't coming back, we've moved on to something else. I'm enjoying this show on vibes and philosophy more than the exact nuts and bolts of political intrigue.

Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games

I posted in the past about loving last year's Rock is a Lady's Modesty, and Fighting Games is squarely up that alley. Although with fewer BDSM fantasies and the girls are not as foul mouthed when they get worked up. Anyway, I'm finding this show to be an absolute delight so far.

Chainsmoker Cat

Ok, this show has been... controversial, understandably. There's a ton of humor that is either gross or just kinda low bar. To be honest I'm not really one for fart jokes 99% of the time. But what I appreciate is how Yani Neko interweaves it's stupidity with moments of real biting commentary, or occasionally even something approaching beautiful. Moments that feel genuinely touching that are then swiftly undercut by the protagonist being kind of the worst. It's that emotional whiplash that keeps me intrigued because I feel like I never know what is going to happen at any time.

Honorable mention: I'm in the middle of probably the longest Serial Experiments Lain watch ever. I started back in March, fell off, and am working on it again when my other shows are on cooldown. I still don't really know what the hell is going on in the story. But I really like it especially as a sort of time capsule into what people thought the internet was or could become back in 1998. Also, I now more than ever wish I could lounge around my bedroom with a pair of cozy bear jammies and an old CRT computer screen.

I watched the first 35 or so episodes of Fruit Basket (2019). It feels very much like I'm watching the thing Ouran High School Host Club was made to parody. I liked the first season (especially episode 21) quite a lot. The second season seems to focus a lot more on the Soma family drama with the head being a crazy asshole, and I just don't find myself super interested in that.

Apart from that, I've also gotten caught up on The Elusive Samurai Season 2. If anything it's even wackier than the first season, with live-action puppetry or just straight footage being used for a couple of shots. Overall it's been lots of fun. I appreciate that it can be weird like that without making the weirdness its entire identity like that deer show from two years back did.

I recently watched Andromeda Stories, a 1982 feature-length TV special based on a manga by Takemiya Keiko (most famous for To Terra) and Mitsuse Ryuu (apparently a pretty well-known SF author), and it was pretty interesting.

It's about a planet in the Andromeda galaxy that is secretly being invaded from the top down by machine lifeforms that take over people's bodies and connect them to a network, kind of similar in concept to the Borg in Star Trek, but a few years earlier. However, there is also a group of people from another planet that got taken over by the same machines, fled to this planet and integrated into the local society, and now work to fight against the machines. And their leader is... not the protagonist. Neither of them, as it switches protagonists 1/3 of the way. The first one is Il, a woman warrior from yet another planet who came specifically to fight the machines, but on her own terms. After that she's replaced by Jimsa, the prince of the first empire to get taken over, who was born earlier in the film, has the power to resist the machines and grew up to be the most powerful momma's boy in the world. Needless to say, Il is the cooler of the two.

Now, I can't honestly say this is a great work. The writing is pretty clunky; characters sometime behave inexplicably, there are time where the story tries to make a point, but it doesn't manage to get the framing right, and it has possibly one of the dumbest deaths in fiction history. I'm not a big fan of the bloodline nonsense, either.

That said, if you're at all interested in the premise and have some tolerance for awkward storytelling, I do recommend it. It moves at a fast clip and is never boring, has some pretty cool science-fiction concepts and the ending is quite something. It's a satisfying watch despite its flaws.

Last week, I checked out Though I Am an Inept Villainess since it topped Anime Corner's weekly ranking.

I found it to be a very entertaining watch, though I'd say the Anime Corner voters overhyped it. Nevertheless, I'd be following it for the rest of the season.

I also tried Ranking of Kings. I made it through 14 episodes (out of the 23 episodes) before giving up on it.

If I have to sum my experience in one line (or one picture), it's this:

Like, the animation is decent, and there were some minor twists early on to make the story a tad more interesting.

But that is all. It's just a plain old cookie-cutter vanilla story and nothing more. In other words: it's boring.

It was quite disappointing, considering its high rating on AniList.

Any recommendations for animes on Crunchyroll?

Thinking about cancelling my Crunchyroll subscription, and wondering if there's any to still justify subscribing to.

::: spoiler Some rambling explaining: Most animes I find there are either same-y or bland, either on story, pacing and/or animation, when it's also not an isekai.

Even One Piece feels to be going generic, since animation is starting to feel standardized with others and it seems to be using from the same audio libraries (I am tired of that electricity/crackling sound), and watching the first few seasons making the quality drop even more glaring to me.

Also it's streaming with no DRM-free option to add value even to the blander ones, and the subscribers' store isn't available to my region either. :::

Some of nice finds I had over recent years were With You And The Rain and My Dress-Up Darling, which are over, Suzume which is a movie so not much to extend, Frieren and MHA Vigilantes which both were enjoyable but neither got new seasons yet, and Demon Slayer which I already read the manga out of impatience.

The Zombie Land Saga movie finally came out on streaming, so I watched it recently. It was super good. I love the series, but I've found that I dislike a lot of anime series movies because they just feel like several episodes of a TV show stitched together. This is one of the few that don't fit that description. It feels like a properly structured and paced movie.

::: spoiler End of S2/Beginning of Movie While it's not really a criticism, I found it odd that they retconned the ending of the 2nd season with the ship not appearing at the concert, but instead much later. I think I get why they did it. They probably didn't even have this movie written or planned when they made the 2nd season and realized later that it would make for better pacing for the movie if we started in a calmer time rather than right after the big saga flood disaster. :::

Also I thought they did a good job with the sci-fi stuff. I was totally expecting the aliens to be generic little green/grey men in flying saucers, but they made an effort to come up with something different and fit it into the story.

I'm kind of curious if this is the end of the series or not. It definitely seems like it could be a sendoff, but

::: spoiler ending spoiler The decision to bring things back to status quo with Tae makes me think it feel like it could get continued. Like that feels like a very "We wanted a cool development to happen but we can't change the status quo too much in a movie" kind of decision. :::

I'd definitely love to see more of the show or at least a new thing by the same creative team. I always love good original anime and we definitely don't get enough of that.