A manga I’m following is greenlit

Long time followers of this blog may recall when I reviewed the manga The Elusive Samurai or Nige Jouzu no Wakagimi by Yusei Matsui, the same man responsible for My Teacher is a World-Ending Tentacle Monster?!

The Light-footed Hojo debuted in January of 2021 and I had been following it for months leading up to my first enlistment. Even now I still read it whenever I get the chance and a lot has transpired within the manga. Enough that there’s a whole time skip arc after 3.5 years in publication.

Now I come to report on an update regarding the manga, in that it joins my small but not insignificant list of manga I’m reading that is also getting an anime adaptation. So far, that makes this the fourth time it’s happened, the first three being, Demons Deserve Death, Gyarus of Hokkaido and Immortal Misfortune.

It started with a teaser sometime last year around the same time I actually reviewed the original manga before hibernating until now. With more time to simmer, it was now revealed to us further that the studio meant to bring life to this manga is none other than CloverWorks, the same studio that brought us many a work including but not limited to Bunny Girl Senpai, Spy x Family, Bocchi the Rock, Dress Up Darling, and several of the Fate adaptations.

An impressive repository of series to check out, right? That said, even godly studios have their off times and CloverWorks has made a few mistakes. We can each point to a studio and wonder what went wrong with XYZ and the number one anime to get brutally slaughtered without sound reason is:

An interesting cutesy horror story comparable to that of Made in Abyss, and interestingly another one I skipped over yonks ago to get to other manga I was and am still reading, Boruto and My Hero Academia: Vigilantes being among them.

I did watch all of season 1 when it premiered on Toonami years ago and I was planning on catching up with season 2, but knowing what became of that by word of mouth, to do so would be to waste time spent on other anime that’s worth my time. Namely:

I’ve still not started Season 3 yet, but now that it’s concluded, I can watch at my own pace.

For years since it’s conclusion readers have wondered why The Promised Neverland’s second season was so lackluster and divorced from the manga. I also occasionally try to look for answers and the most I get is mild speculation. I can’t say for certain how tight-lipped studios can be or will be about these sorts of things, especially Japanese studios, but with the news that studios like MAPPA have developed a crunch culture not seen since Team Bondi’s efforts to burn the candle at both ends or ufotable pulling an Al Capone tax-wise, there probably aren’t that many things besides language and traditions that separate Japanese animation studios from western ones.

Having said that, CloverWorks is one of the best studios in production today, standing tall with KyoAni, Pierrot, and David Production, and with more successes than failures to boast, especially in recent memory, I’ve no reason to believe CW will louse this up, even through malice, though a more mature way to look at it is that weirder stories have come from the animation industry and if it happens during the production of The Last of the Hojo, I’m damned sure gonna write about it. Bet on it.

For now, the scheduled date is July 6, 2024. I will save a spot for a first impression.