Fruits Basket S3 – 8
Amun: This final season is intense. For all the almosts the previous season(s) of Fruits Basket had, it’s all coming together here. We have (attempted?) murder, sex, confessions, backstories…tired of the emotional tease and need some feels payoffs? Here ya go! I’m mixed on the reveal of the Kyo-Honda-mama connection – on the one hand, it’s like a modified childhood friend route – a bit overdone. On the other, the reactions and character’s actions are spot on – this is a show about trauma after all. It’s clear the feels train is barrelling into the station – taking a broader view of how we got here, there have been some overall surprises. Early on in the show, I didn’t really expect Kyo to be the main character, honestly I thought it would be a more Yuki-centered story. The big genderbender was a shock too – and really complicated matters intensely. I thought Shigure would be a sleazeball with a heart of gold – but actually he’s just a sleazeball. If I’m rooting for anyone to get shanked, it’s him. I guess I would have liked to see Akito wield their power over the Zodiac a bit more – they come off as really childish and we didn’t see the sway over the other animal spirits quite enough. That’s pretty much my only gripe though, since this has been a banger of a season. Get your ships in order, hold on to your childhood hats, as we try to land this hot mess and get everyone out alive!
Godzilla SP – 4-5
Wooper: I’m hardly acquainted with any of the characters in Godzilla SP, but I’m hanging in there. The show has ways of making its ultra-nerdy dialogue palatable, whether it be putting scary monsters on screen, cutting to interviews with laymen about the proliferation of kaiju, or enlisting Pero 2’s help to explain difficult concepts to Mei. The two of them were involved in my favorite scene from either of these episodes: a one minute and forty second flurry of text messages between Mei and Yun, with Pero showing up in various LINE stickers on Mei’s end. Showing a text conversation on screen is a fantastic way to lose your audience’s attention (doubly so if it’s about molecular arrangements), but the intrigue of two scientists collaborating without knowing a thing about each other kept me interested. On the other hand, I care about very few people on the periphery of the story, especially the researchers who escaped the massive Radon tank in episode 5’s big set piece. Even if that’s the tank from which Godzilla will eventually emerge, there are at least two degrees of separation between all of those characters and our heroes, maybe more. Every second spent watching them, or anyone not directly involved with Yun or Mei, feels like lost time.
Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song – 10
Helghast: You know, I thought I had Vivy figured out. I thought the last four-episode arc would be another gradual buildup with more Vivy character development until the inevitable finale with a last-minute bullshit insert villain showdown and she would sacrifice herself to save the world. I was wrong. She was the trigger for the AI apocalypse and the opening scene of the first episode should have clued me in. However, Matsumoto not knowing the exact mechanism of the AI Uprising in the year 2161 is a glaring omission on his part for how smart he is and the wealth of information that he has from the first timeline. Still, Osamu meeting up with Vivy in the museum wouldn’t have changed despite the efforts of the Singularity Project in the last one hundred years. For me, this is the most human part of the show thus far. Seeing the flow of time on the meetups of Osamu, Vivy and Matsumoto was something akin to the opening montage of Pixar’s UP but having Vivy working on her problem of the what it means sing from the heart in the form of a song was gratifying to say the least. Except, all good things must come to an end and now lots of people are still dead, but maybe Vivy and Matsumoto can pull something out of their ass to salvage the situation.
Bishounen Tanteidan – 3-4
Wooper: These episodes constitute the end of one mini-arc and the beginning of another, so they were a good way to sample a show that I didn’t have much interest in revisiting. Despite that ambivalence, I thought the hook in the last minute of episode 4 was pretty good – one character seeing something that nobody else can see always leads to a knotty sort of tension – so I’ll keep on with Tanteidan for now. As befits a show about aesthetics, the visuals are pretty nice, but there’s a sterility to some of the backgrounds that I don’t like. Stylized environments like the club room and the casino get a pass, as they’re ostentatious enough to compensate for their digital aftertaste, but the limo ride in the “Twenties” story and the exterior scenes in ep 4 felt like poor hosts for their characters. The characters themselves have great designs (which the OP puts to fabulous use), but everything they say is painfully overwritten; as a result, my favorite is Sousaku, who rarely says a word. I’m feeling mixed on the show overall, but I guess that’s what happens in 80% of cases when you watch seasonal anime at 30 years old.
Amun: Despite being older than Wooper (and a bit further in the series), this show works far better than it should for me. It’s as though Nishio Ishin learned all the right lessons from Medaka Box – and made a better, mirrored version (despite a somehow sillier premise). How often does that happen?! Agreed that Sousaku is the best though.
Spoilers: We do finally get the Big G at around the last third and well, you can already tell what it’s going to be with that.
Now for other shows:
Back Arrow was largely just shouty, deafening noise in its latest episode with the fight against Rudolph. What I didn’t expect though was Zetsu sacrificing himself, making some Kamina-ass speech to his fleet in the process, to seemingly take him out through a move that probably would’ve made Gurren Lagann blush. So they just took him out with 3 episodes left to spare? I still don’t like that Back Arrow is still in his angsty, destroyer phase however in spite of that, so we have an excuse to do another battle with Kai (nice Bruh cameo though), and then Shu, who seemingly died in ep19 suddenly comes back in the most WTF manner possible. Just what?
At least I got to see Bit combining both the Granedger mech with the DaiRekka to form an even bigger robot called the GranRekka lmao.
So yes, Moriarty’s White Knight arc is almost the same as Harvey Dent’s story in The Dark Knight, even all the way down to Whiteley’s family killed thanks to that blackmailer Milverton, and on the verge of snapping before he tells William to put him out of his misery. So they even did the “you either die a hero” shtick as well. Damn, what a depressing end to this arc though. Not that I’m complaining though. Up next is what appears to be a take on A Sign of the Four, featuring Watson’s fiancee, Mary.
It’s clearly obvious just how much more interesting the fairy plots in Fairy Ranmaru are compared to the human storylines, as despite an interesting conceit (a nursery teacher is being bullied by the rich school principal), it remained awfully dull and one-note compared to things like Uru threatening to choke Homura, the still dubious nature of the fairies’ mission or how the rogue fairy Chilka has some connection to Ranmaru. At least I got to see the shota fairy in a bind complete with clothes-melting acid.
Mars Red was just okay over the past two episodes, but I’m hoping that things pick up now that Kurusu reunited with some of his Code Zero comrades (including the reveal that Suwa was a child vampire), and that last scene with Maeda suggesting something happened to him. So maybe we’ll finally get that theatrical tragedy that we’ve been waiting for since the premier! (or not…)
Additional thoughts:
After hearing about Digimon Adventure:’s 50th episode being a “final” battle (or an “Ultimate Holy Battle” as they describe it) against Milleniumon that ended up being just like all of the other mindless battles in this series (villains have no motivation, we assume they’re evil only because they’re framed and described that way, everyone but Tai and Wargraymon get sidelined, looks really pretty to distract you, etc.), I think I made the right call to drop it by episode 30 at the end of last year, and watch that Dragon Quest adaptation instead. And to think there’s 16 more episodes of this shit left.
For how “faithful” Tokyo Revengers is to the manga, it sure is incredibly dry and boring however. How low our standards have fallen if “being faithful” and not rushing/cutting anything are considered positives for adaptations nowadays. Although with manga sales booming from this series, it seems like people don’t even give a shit about this blandly directed adaptation.
If they like it it is their right. Seems to me that you are the only one with “standards” and if you hate it that js fine. There are ither shows you can watch you know. No need for you to shit on others for liking something you dislike man.
Helghast, I’m not convinced that Vivy’s singing was the original cause of the war. In the first timeline, there was no singing of her song. I believe that someone linking her song to the AIs going berserk is an attempt to troll Vivy or make her suffer. As you know, this show likes to present something as happening for X reason, and then it turns out it was an entirely different reason why something happened after all, such as with Estella supposedly crashing the Sunrise Hotel, with Professor Tatsuya being married to Grace when he actually was with a lookalike he had no affection for, and with Ophelia committing suicide.