Tag: shonen jump

Animanga Releases of 2026

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New Year, New Animanga

By the luck of the gods, I’ve returned to my post on the same day and I’m not terribly fatigued.

The Year of Cordis Die, the Year of the Snake, the Year CoD S[gunshots]t It’s Respect Out is out, and the Year of the Horse, the Uma 「馬」is in.

I don’t consume Umamusume anything, but it makes the rounds in my favorite spaces, so I can’t ignore it if I wanted to.

Now a bunch of these have been announced yonks ago and were set for debut sometime in December, January or much later in 2026. I can’t really count series that began in 2025 and will finish, at least, a season in 2026, but I will include those that will debut at some point this year. That’s pretty much my only criteria. As such, here’s the list:

  1. The Elusive Samurai Season 2 (July 2026)
  2. Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian Season 2 (2026)
  3. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Season 2 (January 2026)
  4. Akane-banashi (April 2026)
  5. My Hero Academia: Vigilantes (January 2026)

All of these I’ve written about or mentioned in the past, and I hope to do so once again as the respective series’ all continue and when they eventually conclude, at least in animated form since Vigilantes’ manga wrapped up a few years ago. Keep in mind, this isn’t an exhaustive list as I want to see what else will come out this year, but for brevity’s sake I’m sticking with my bread and butter, starting with:

The Light-footed Hojo Prince returns to us with a stern endeavor against the treacherous Ashikaga clan who have since reneged on their deal with Emperor Go-Daigo. I’ve never been prouder to be a manga reader because I can take a wild guess on how far this season is going to go and who will join the previous season’s repertoire of opportunistic samurai. In the last season, the primary antagonists were Ashikaga Takauji, Ogasawara Sadamune, and Ichikawa Sukefusa, joined together in the latter half with the disgraced bandit daimyo Hirano Shogen and the merciless (if fruity) Kokushi of Shinano.

Slight History Lesson: sometime during the Kamakura Shogunate, the position of Kokushi (comparable to a provincial governor today) was established to manage the vast territory of the land. These Kokushi were personally selected by the imperial court, but come the late Kamakura era, they lost favor to the more powerful military/shogunate-aligned Shugo. Their duties typically boiled down to taxation and revenue among their most notable administrative duties, but with the Shugo came the shift from civilian rule to military rule that would define Japanese rule during the subsequent Nanboku-cho period, then to the Sengoku period all the way up until the Meiji Restoration.

I’m not gonna spoil it as heavily but I will say that both Hirano and the Kokushi return as enemies, and personally, being in the military in a support MOS myself, the parts of the manga I’m currently reading touch on more than just the infantry aspect to show that complex military operations are a time-honored tradition. There’ve always been chaplains, communications units (though mass communication is a recent concept), medical units (imperfect and sometimes deadlier than just dying on the field in battle), and others.

As for new enemies that have come on gone by the point that I’ve caught up to, as I recall, they were there near the beginning, but didn’t get a lot of panel time in the manga. The Ashikaga initially allied with the Nitta clan, distant cousins through Minamoto brothers, Yoshiyasu, who was the ancestor of the Ashikaga, and Yoshishige, the ancestor of the Nitta. In real life, only the Nitta stood by Go-Daigo’s side while the Ashikaga double-crossed the imperial court and it happens again in the manga.

For allies to the Hojo and Suwa Grand Shrine, fortunately Tokiyuki has another uncle that doesn’t betray him like what Godaiin Muneshige did to Tokiyuki’s half-brother, Kunitoki. The uncle in question is Hojo Yasuie and there’s something about him that harkens to Matsui’s previous work, Assassination Classroom in a way…

Not entirely sure if its the forehead writing gag or what, but something about him makes me think of Koro-sensei sans tentacles

After him, comes Sasaki Mima, the Kitabatake clan, and Ko no Moronao, not necessarily allies to Suwa or the Hojo (definitely not Moronao), but certainly leverageable as enemies against the Ashikaga. So far, I only see the Kokushi and Hirano Shogen coming back as well as more tasteful shots of Nitta Yoshisada and Prince Moriyoshi. Now, I’ve said before that in real life, the Kamakura never rose after Ashikaga’s betrayal and after that, Hojo Tokiyuki managed to eke out a resistance for the next twenty years until his head was on the ground. We’ve got until the end of the manga to see if Yusei Matsui is gonna do the same thing and I hope to every deity I’m able to pray to that it ends well, not unlike what Aka Akasaka did to Kaguya-sama and Oshi no Ko, allegedly.

Второй:

To tease Masachika Kuze once again, My Hafu-Russian Classmate Who Doesn’t Know I Understand her won me over so much that I regularly check the associated Discord server like the Eye of Sauron. My busy schedule doesn’t allow me to check up on the light novels or the manga as much as I’d like, but I’m not really in any hurry to get a drop on the series like some others. For that matter, regarding animanga, I usually just play it by ear. Not every series I follow gets an anime, but if it does, then great. If not, then c’est la vie.

Of the listings up above, Alya Won’t Stop Flirting in Russian doesn’t have a specific release date for the second season. In fact, it was announced very late in 2025 and we’re definitely gonna get our information through drip feed. Google-san’s swanky new clanker assistant tells me that a section of the second season will be dedicated to a summer vacation arc.

I don’t really have much to add with so little information available. The only thing of value I’ve got is, catch up on the first season if you haven’t already and if you feel so inclined, why not take a look at the source material? I’m not certain if there’s variance between the LNs and the manga, and I don’t think I have the space in my barracks to house all that manga. I barely had enough in my apartment back in New York. Fingers crossed I can build a library of whatever I goddamn want among other things.

This includes a closet’s worth of cosplays.

A Terceira:

I’m taking my time with this one, to be honest. It’s popularity has not waned ever since it was put on Netflix nor even when Viz Media licensed the manga for weekly scanlation. My binge-watcher days are behind me, but I do like the approach I’ve adopted ever since. From looking at others talk about the manga and describe it in a non-spoiler-y way, it’s very much dedicated to a posthumous character’s life when he was a hero. Yeah, I already know it’s Himmel.

My absorption of this series began with a bunch of out-of-context memes, which is still the case with Neon Genesis Evangelion, at least until I finally finish the damn anime and get a move on with End of Eva.

I don’t even know what I’m missing, but it’s absolutely crucial that I watch it all.

Same thing for Frieren. It’s a 2-cour anime for once and I’m certainly gonna watch it to completion and make my Netflix subscription feel known this time. The second season is gonna start in two weeks and is said to have a different director from the first season. AFAIK, Netflix doesn’t plan on moving it away from the platform, but if it does once Season 2 wraps up then Crunchyroll and Hulu and the Banner of Gen Z is always an option.

On that note, I’ve got some catching up on One Pace to do.

四番目：

Of all the anime debuting this year, this was the last I expected to ever get an adaptation, and truth be told, I stopped having expectations thousands of years ago. That’s why I was so surprised when Black Torch was greenlit for an adaptation and I wasn’t the only one to get slapped in the face with that news. The short version here is that a rakugoka practices night and day for a big performance only for the Rakugo Grandmaster to shut it all down in front of a live audience. The budding rakugoka’s dream now becomes to dream of his daughter, Akane Osaki, who will not rest until she’s the best of the next generation of rakugoka.

Mighty big geta to fill, especially since I think Akane-chan is only around 5-foot, and although I haven’t read the manga in ages, I recall there being one hell of a stiff competition between her and her dreams. Maybe one day I’ll play catch ups with this series, advance a bit further in Chihayafuru and compare the two in an efficient way. Ballpark estimate: Q3 2026. Why that time frame specifically? Because.

And lastly:

In Dragon Ball Z announcer voice: Last time on My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Knuckleduster had fought well against the Queen Bee Quirk puppeteering his daughter, Tamao’s, body. With the parasite dealt with, what is next for Knuckleduster, Koichi Haimawari, and Kazuho Haneyama? Find out now.

Going off of memory from the first season, Knuckleduster saved his daughter who was a host for the Queen Bee Quirk. In the manga, he vanishes for a time while Koichi and Pop-Step continue the investigation for the designer drug Trigger… in Japan. In the manga, Knuckleduster gets a lead that a distribution site could be Hong Kong, so he goes over there to dish out some two-hit justice not seen since Inspector Tequila saved a hospital full of newborn infants.

嗰個寶寶唔知，但係佢救咗龍舌蘭督察。[Hopefully Google Translate has improved over time.]

Tangentially related to Knuckleduster’s past, a sycophantic villain attempts to emulate the man even down to the scar on his face and it unleashes a new flavor of hell. And here my memory of this arc starts to break down. I remember how it’s resolved and Knuckleduster’s secret, but out of respect for you, the reader, I will not reveal it until the second season concludes.

The year just began, and this list is probably gonna get an update come springtime. The list of topics I have lined up so far only goes to the first week of April, set to be added onto by March ideally if life doesn’t get funny by then.

Final note: an honorable mention:

July.

2025 Year in Review and Topics Left Uncovered

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Holiday wrap up

Hope everyone is enjoying their holidays, to include Boxing Day for my British and Commonwealth subscribers, I know you pop in a couple times a month. I am currently on leave right now, seeing family in New York until January 2, so the first post for 2026 will be delayed most likely until later the next day. So this Boxing Day will be spent reflecting on pieces of entertainment that I consumed in 2025, even if it was older or not necessarily released this year.

I won’t be using any particular order or any kind of ranking system. This post is gonna be a free-for-all, so look forward to video games, TV series, movies, and animanga all in one post. For the video game front, the FPS genre suffered a devastating loss earlier this week with one of the founders of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, Vince Zampella, losing his life in a car crash in Los Angeles. His work, along with that of Jason West, heavily influenced the trajectory of the FPS genre and the gaming landscape from spearheading the modern warfare concept up until he and West were unceremoniously booted on trumped up charges. Nevertheless, neither man was deterred and got back on their feet with the likes of Titanfall under EA.

1970-2025

Further hurting CoD was the mediocrity of CoD: Black Ops 7’s release last month. If ever a case was to be made in favor of delaying CoD’s dev time by a year or two, this is it. Overuse of AI, nostalgia bait, the weird decision to make the campaign a coop feature, and an unacceptable recycling of old assets pushed the fandom to pressure Activision-Blizzard to slow up on yearly releases. Even the multiplayer wasn’t up to snuff in many players’ eyes due to the aforementioned marks against the whole game. In 2019, the channel Knowledge Husk published a video examining the history and a trajectory of the franchise with hopeful, cautious optimism. It precedes the official release of the Modern Warfare reboot so it shows its age there. After over seven years, the topic needed to be revisited, which it was, by our friends at The Act Man and the Angry Joe Show.

Channel: Knowledge Husk

The game hub updates with each release, but thankfully I filled my time with the likes of World at War, Black Ops 1 and 2, and the original Modern Warfare trilogy. Nothing against the modern games, but these were at a time when CoD didn’t worry about courting controversy. It knew what it was and what it was doing back then. Speaking of games that offered subpar content, I happened across a forgotten ninja game for the PS2 called Red Ninja: End of Honor.

So many tropes are present and unfortunately wasted, I feel

It’s about a kunoichi who is hired to protect the Takeda clan during the lordship of daimyo Takeda Shingen. Japanese history time: the daimyo or feudal lords were the equivalent of vassals to the shogunate, with the land to manage and the samurai class as retainers to keep that land from falling into enemy hands, which was the hallmark of the Sengoku period until the early 1600s when the Tokugawa clan won out. In some cases, daimyo and samurai clans hired ninja clans to spy on their enemies and remove any image from your head about what they might’ve looked like. Ninja, or shinobi, typically dressed like commonfolk, peasants, farmers, merchants, artisans, and some even had the skills to sell the idea that they were what they claimed to be. It’s also worth noting that they were more loyal to their masters than the people they hired. See the Ashikaga clan and Ashikaga Takauji for more details.

Kuoichi or female ninja didn’t exist IRL, but have become a staple of popular media, especially in properties like the Naruto franchise. This game features a kunoichi named Kurenai who embarks on a revenge quest after her father was killed by the Black Lizard clan. Like the ninja of old, she pledges undying loyalty and even uses the typical ninja tools from popular media from kunai to string weaponry to blow darts to poison arrows. In nearly all media, the shinobi almost always have few armaments or protection compared to the bushi they were fighting. So stealth mechanics are ideal in a game like this, which is something I’m not against if the controls work and in this game it was knocked down because of that. Precision is desired in this game in order to complete the platforming sections and of all the platforming games I’ve played, this was the first one that demanded the player to cook omelets with a broken skillet.

The game demands precision while giving you nearly none to work with. Flimsy and cumbersome controls are the game’s worst aspect and yet the game’s plot is fairly interesting. I plan to go over it in more detail come the new year, say February, as I’ve had the time to recover from its god-awful platforming, but taking the plunge once again for review’s sake is gonna be interesting. I’m still near the beginning of the game as of this writing, and while I don’t wanna be too harsh, it encouraged me to play God of War 2005 again.

I love bearded Kratos, but sometimes I miss that preposterous Spartan jawline

In lighter news, an animanga series that I’d been following since debut years ago and had wrapped up its first season last year has been greenlit for a second season for 2026. (^v^)

It’s The Elusive Samurai or Nige Jouzu no Wakagimi or 逃げ上手の若君 or The Young Lord who Excels at Running Away. The second season is set to release in July 2026, around the same time as the first one. So that’ll be saved for the week of July 2026 for a first impression and a full review once all the episodes are out. At the risk of jinxing its production (unlikely since this is Clover Works at the helm), let’s it escapes the fate of One Punch Man S3.

You deserved so much better, Caped Baldy

Reading a little further in the manga, the group eventually hides in plain sight in Heian-Kyo/Old Kyoto where they find another to join them in the form of Sasaki Mima. Next to that, the coming battles against Ashikaga allied forces commences with a few familiar faces, notably Hirano Shogen. Specific spoiler incoming, if you’ve ever seen the meme of the woman headpatting some children with a photo of her in uniform denoting a past as an equivalent of a Class A war criminal (i.e. Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, Tomoyuki Yamashita, Masaharu Homma, etc.):

Specifically this meme template

This is exactly what Shogen has become in the penultimate chapters I’ve read up thus far. A past of slaughtering people, selling the children in slavery (hinted at times to be of a sexual variety interspersed with that of menial labor), ravishing helpless women across the land, and having the audacity to offer hollow prayers to Lord Buddha; clearly, it weighs on him in a couple panels, but not as much as a trip to Jigoku. Even after reforming his behavior and refining his battlefield technique to actually be useful against an enemy that can fight back, it doesn’t do much for him all things considered. Does make for an interesting battle on the page; now we just need to wait to see it animated.

I’m not saying there’s no such thing as redemption, just that even if you pay your dues, there’s always going to be one group or gaggle of people who’ll curse your name til the end of days. In real life and in fiction, the road to forgiveness is long and winding. Just ask this man:

Personally, redemption relies heavily on the severity of the offense and personal conviction. Proof and consistent evidence that the offender wants to be a better person going forward, while admirable, would still need regular checks to confirm they haven’t relapsed. How long this would last, I’m tempted to say for life like what 7th Hokage Naruto has with Orochimaru, but in his specific case, Orochimaru can create synthetic bodies of himself to jump into each time his mortality creeps up on him so Naruto’s problem becomes the next Hokage’s problem, i.e. Shikamaru’s.

The buck stops at war criminal levels. Hangman, firing squad, guillotine; fastest way to hell is the one to be taken. The anime stops right after the first confrontation between Tokiyuki and Shogen, so I’m certain the second season may stop after the second time we see Shogen or a bit after that.

In the gaming space, a not-insignificant portion of my time has been taken up by Victoria 3, Zenless Zone Zero, and the trio of Lewdtroidvanias I wrote about before. For Victoria, I main Japan, Germany, and the U.S. for the historian in me with Russia thrown in for good measure. I’ve been able to get the Empire of Japan going, but RNGesus doesn’t make the colonial aspect very easy. Praiseworthy, but after some updates regarding the Iberian kingdoms, it’s gotten even tougher than I recall, so I’m up for a grind.

Speaking of which, ZZZ has newer banners to round out the year and I’ve gotten lucky enough to avoid the cat Nekomata until recently.

Then again, she has a past as a cat thief (no pun intended) so I should’ve expected this at some point during my pulls.

For progress in the Lewdtroidvania front, with Midnight Castle Succubus, looking online for guides was a big help. I found all the girls and nearly all the crowns and finally saw Beatrix as a succubus.

Should’ve known the transformation also meant waiting 20 minutes for the honkers to pass before the rest of Bebe showed up, I guess.

More upgrades, health, a powered up form and I’m at the final boss who’s putting up even more of a fight than the final one to unlock the alternate map that I’m at right now. Thanks to the guides, I’m ever confident I can get through this. And while I’m at it, power through the other pixelated NSFW titles with that knowledge I’ve acquired.

Lastly, Red Ninja’s impression didn’t just leave me retreating to Greek God of War and The Suffering. That game and Tactical Bacon Productions had me returning to a specific Zero Punctuation episode from 2009.

Channel: The Escapist

In the beginning, one of the showrunners of Unskippable was dared to review a game called X-Blades in the same manner and interestingly, the game was featured on Unskippable itself and that show’s purpose is to take the piss out of video game intros. Through this, I bought X-Blades and its sequel Blades of Time to see whether it is Like God of War But. Yeah, the tower of content ain’t coming down and it ain’t gonna be finished whatsoever.

I plan on covering animanga releases slated for 2026 after everything is settled and I’m back from leave. I’ve so far only kept tabs on Featherfooted Daimyo, so I know I have even more to look forward to for the year.

Interspersed with my day job army-ing. Yay…

On a final note, one of my computers, an MSI Katana 15 B12V, has a key that works intermittently. The E key which has left me to hot key the copy-paste function to type just this post. A nuisance that I haven’t been able to fix, and I fear having to replace the thing to return to form. I have the old Acer Nitro 5 despite it sputtering to life much slower than before the SD Fiasco of ’24 and for all its faults, OneDrive still has all my precious files so nothing is lost, but for how long, I dread the day when I have to restart everything from scratch.

Tiberius ain’t ready (ToT)

On Dragon Ball Z

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Cha-la! Head Cha-la!

Last week, I gave an update on the extremely slow progress for One Piece. Given my situation in the Army and routinely driving weekly to do a training exercise, it sounds like I wouldn’t be able to do anything entertaining even if I wasn’t on a training exercise, but there’s a hell of a lot of down time that gives me my pick of the litter. There were the usual series I still had listed for viewing as well as the occasional movie that YouTube lets me watch for the small price of a skippable advertisement for a product I care little about. One such movie:

The impact of budget is often lost on the audience. This movie’s lack of funding was why they used coconuts… no evidence though that it explains the sparrow.

While One Piece has had me looking for One Pace (which is still lengthy in its own right given what the team is working with if the Discord server is what clues me in), Dragon Ball Z had been dubbed over ever since its western debut. Looking at simultaneous dubs today vs dubbing done even 15 to 20 years ago, it puts into perspective how long it took back then to translate everything well enough to give us a dub, passable or stellar. These days, finding a budding voice actor or even a newcomer is easier than it used to be. From the outside looking in, the talent manager/agent is either becoming a thing of the past or is fighting for the middleman position it now shares with social media.

Legacy and up-and-coming voice actors are all on Twitter and BlueSky now. Some are content creators outside of screaming their lungs deflated into a microphone, others are elsewhere in the entertainment industry, and the rest are varied. Why mention this? Mainly to show that the constraints that plagued animanga 40 years ago are largely a thing of the past, but in the case of the Dragon Ball franchise, fans would’ve went from waiting years to hear it in English to simply looking up where to find the VHS tapes, then the DVDs, then the Blu-Rays and eventually subscribing to whatever streaming service has your choice of show for a limited time.

Call me a monkey like Frieza because I have a bunch of s[monkey screech]t to fling, especially at these jokesters.

Dragon Ball Z was tied to Funimation in the west very close to the beginning, and the relationship hasn’t changed even after Funi got eaten by Crunchyroll as of late. It’s initial dubbing and runtime were extraordinarily long. This plus its content may explain how it became a staple in Latin America, but good luck selling animanga drama to an American or Canadian. Matter of fact, the reason Latin America loved animanga before the Anglophone world did can best be explained in this video:

Channel: Get In The Robot

The crux of this video is merely that with upwards of 90% of Latin America being subject to authoritarian dictatorships and military juntas or some other kind of government sponsored violence against itself (which ropes in the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and other Asian countries that have a similar story to Chile, Brazil, Peru, Panama, and the others), the ridiculous plot points, dynamic battles, and Shonen-/Seinen-style romance stories were easy as hell to sell. Plus the changes made from Japanese to Spanish and Portuguese were left largely unchanged.

Eventually, though Dragon Ball would come to America and Canada and more than once. As stated earlier, the first round of dubbing kept the original episodes and dubbed them, but to mark the 20th anniversary of the western world’s reception of the Dragon Ball franchise, it was dubbed again with the subtitle Kai.

Like One Pace and Dragon Ball Z: Abridged, Kai recuts the anime and pretty much shortens the pace substantially. The original run of DBZ in the 1980s in Japan and its English version in the 90s, had an episode count of 291. When Kai came around, it cut the episode count to 167 episodes. Both of these include not just the three major sagas of the Z arc of the Dragon Ball manga — Saiyans, Frieza, and Androids — but also the rise of Majin Buu. Likewise, the original longer Dragon Ball Z had all those main arcs, stretched out, but also had filler arcs.

You could include a bunch of nonsensical, non-canon filler arcs back then as the manga would still be in serialization and several volumes in as soon as the animators were drawing the first cels of the first few seconds of the pilot episode. In contrast, when it comes to animation in the west, the storyboard and production phases would be planned out over the course of months for a weekly release schedule. Depending on the series it can last between 10-13 episodes or 20-26 episodes. Same goes for anime, though rather than batch release series, they’ve truncated the average run time from over 22 episodes to 12-13 episodes at best. There’s a wider discussion to be had about the treatment of animators, which gets away from the point of this post while also using secondary and tertiary accounts, but that’s best saved for another date. No guarantees, though, I’m not a Sith.

Maybe I am a Sith because I think this is absolute horse s[neighs]t.

Every time I watch Dragon Ball Z anything, I default to the Kai dub because it was my introduction to the series on TV, though not exactly my introduction to the series. That came from the PS2 version of the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai, released in North America in 2002.

If I were Dr. Strange and I wanted to find a universe where Dragon Ball wasn’t also a video game for s[blasts]ts and giggles, I would be so short of results that the debt collectors would’ve broken my legs ahead of time.

I was probably able to do it at a young age, given that I went back to watch Naruto from halfway through the Chunin Exams arc, as well as Shippuden from start to finish in order to get up to a certain plot point mentioned in passing in Boruto, but to be honest, the original run of Dragon Ball doesn’t jive that well with me. Many who were around at the time can easily go back to that dub or even the sub if they prefer, but I’ve been living off accurate adaptations of serializing manga and light novels. The comparisons between DBZ original and its manga would drive me nuts and there’s no steering wheel down there.

:D

I don’t care what anyone says, whether I’m missing something hilarious in the filler arcs or if their importance is lost on anime these days. I fully understand that that’s the case now. Not that all filler is a waste of time, but rather with anime adopting the seasonal model in the mid-2010s so to speak, there’s no need to chain the animators to their desks and keep them drawing until their hands bend in eight places.

I’m exaggerating, not every animation studio is doing that, but abridged series, official and parodical, show that there’s no need to rush the release anymore. For Kai, I may be an artist, but I’m not an animator and I don’t have an intimate knowledge of recuts, but my limited experience with video editing shows that it’s a bit more complicated than simply removing a few scenes or adding some. No matter what Team Four Star would have you believe. This may harken back to my lifelong difficulty of absorbing massive amounts of information in one sitting, which was why I hated school, but I’d rather watch the Kai dub a hundred times than try to get through the original uncut Dragon Ball Z. And not just that, I’m certain the human mind isn’t designed to or supposed to take in so much information so shortly. I can tell you the plot of some things I’ve watched or played even years after the fact if I’m interested, but speedrunning a series is how I miss some details. I like to absorb everything I can at my own pace, which is why I generally view animanga in a non-straightforward, nonlinear method. I need to let it simmer before I start serving the soup.

I’ve watched the Kai dub at least twice now because of this set up so I’m glad I can say that this works for me. The absence of filler arcs distracted me less and the rigid focus on adapting the manga this time around was easier to follow. Having said that, if you’re cut from the same cloth as I, you may find it easier to hunt for the Blu-Rays or pirate and torrent, especially now since “buying ain’t owning” anymore. And definitely the Kai dub so less time is wasted stretching a single frame or scene for longer than it needs to be.

Shame no other studio officially recut its long ass anime into shorter episodes before it gained traction in the last decade or rewatching original Naruto would be so much easier than it is now.

At least there’s guides to help pick apart the canon from the filler.

One Piece Progress: One Pace

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An update on a declaration

Some time last year, I made a bold declaration to give some older anime series a rewatch, namely Giant Pirate Adventure and Space Monkey Mafia. I was able to watch Dragon Ball Z’s Kai dub on the Internet Archive from start to finish, at first before leaving for the Army, and again while in. For One Piece though, I made mention of its pacing problem before which kept me from watching it as consistently at first. Following that, I looked for the One Pace recut to do away with all the half-isode runtime that was standard practice at the time, if you’ve ever watched orignal Naruto, Bleach or the original cut of Dragon Ball Z.

I’m still in the process of completing One Pace after getting back into it from the insistence of a fellow soldier whose exposure to the series is more personal. So far, I’m on the Drum Island arc. Yeah, yeah, snails pace and all that.

But I am rediscovering what appeals to so many about Luffy’s adventures. The core of the series is merely to search for the legendary treasure of the legendary Gol D. Roger: a posthumous character who took the location of his treasure with him to the grave.

There was something about Luffy seeing the execution platform that evoked several images and emotions. The most powerful pirate in history was caught and killed by the Marines, never revealing the location of his treasure, but sprinkling breadcrumbs for other ambitious pirates to follow. The risk of capture and execution is still present, but let’s think critically about what the pirates and the Marines means in this world.

To some of you reading, this may bring up things Hasan Piker has said about One Piece before being “pro-socialist, anti-imperialist” in design. I do see that talking point, but I personally don’t agree with it, since you can be anti-imperialist without being pro-socialist. Getting away from that, though, One Piece does have a slant against an oppressive government as seen in this clip:

As I’ve stated, I’m not that far into the anime, but so far, looking at what Gol D. Roger did to get himself executed by the Marines is a question worth asking. This isn’t me saying he was a good guy. Going by his design, and just from what I can extrapolate from the openings, he doesn’t seem to be very different from Blackbeard or Henry Every or, one of the worst pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy, Black Bart Roberts.

Still following along, albeit, much less closely. It’s a monster series that’s still being released and even repackaged in 3-in-1 omnibus volumes after 28 years in serialization and counting. Not as massive as JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but it’s a contender for longest-running series next to Sazae-san and any soap opera/telenovela still on the air.

Maybe because of how long it is, I can make this a yearly thing. Perhaps by September next year, I’ll be nearly done with the Fishman Island arc.

Actually, since I talked more critically about One Piece this time, I think I can put my analysis of Dragon Ball Z in for next week.

Sex Critics Review Otherworldly Female Creatures

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Speak, penis, for you have the floor… and the p[nyan]y.

My reluctant review of F[crash]k You! Actually F[horn]ks You Into the Harem ended with a mention of another series that was pushing the envelope, so much so that it took Funimation three episodes to realize it might as well have been hentai. And looking at it’s content, I really wanna go back in time to Funimation’s as of yet unclaimed office, stare the big boss/manager/whatever in the face and say, “With a premise like this, what were you expecting? Raunchier KonoSuba?”

No matter the intention, learning about this led to a Streisand effect in the animanga community, whereby, those who weren’t watching it yet, checked it out to see why Funimation would choose not to continue airing a current anime series. Once they saw why, it made sense.

If I was in charge of a streaming service, I’d put this behind an older teen or 18+ section. Simply change your user settings to be able to view hentai and ecchi freely and voila! Enjoy your culture, ladies and gentlemen.

The premise is simple: a fantasy world where every monster girl is available and about 90% of them work in a legalized sex industry, Stunk the human and his bestie Zel the elf embark on an adventure to f[crumble]k every monster girl they can find. Shortly after their quest begins, they meet an angel named Crimvael who has both sets of genitalia, but defaults male to lessen the confusion when being addressed by others. And wouldn’t you have it, the little angel is the most well-endowed of the three. It’s like Team Four Star’s take on Krillin, smacking him around all throughout the Abridged Dragon Ball run until finally giving him the golden ticket in Android 18.

A typical episode begins with the trio heading to a brothel under the ownership of a type of monster girl, they ask for the services and perhaps through power of Post Nut Enlightenment, their reviews of the girls read like Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy at times. Aiding your prostate apparently brings out the poet when describing how well (or poorly) these girls use their bodies to help the reviewer reach a satisfying climax. Not the first or last time such an observation would be made, as PornHub comments and the Zenless Zone Zero community can attest.

D[clank]ks out, tits out, spurt like a faucet and cover in baby batter, rate us on Yelp, hope to clean your fluids off our floors again… but would you believe me if there was more than an absurd number of fetishes in this series? The culture of individual monster girls plays a significant role to some degree. For instance, minotaur/cow-girls have the biggest breasts and their speech patterns are cattle-influenced; the succubi are so extremely depraved that they can f[pop!]k you to death; fairy girls are predictably Tinker Bell-sized, so good look trying something remotely kinky; elf girls are all GILFs by default due their aging process compared to human beings, etc. etc. etc.

This also leads to a few dark moments in the series. Away from the brothels where penises get played with like any other toy, sometimes venues make a strip show of things. Venturing into even more inappropriate territory sheds light on a certain episode involving egg-laying. And that’s the most I’ll reveal about that episode. Another moment involves them making a sex doll in the shape of their bird girl friend and tavern waitstaff, Meidri. After the men take their turns, word gets around and let’s just say arms and legs don’t bend in three places for a reason.

Yeah, it begins on a funny note and evolves into WTF?! over the course of its twelve episodes. The manga is apparently still going on and it has two light novels. Competitive Harem Rapist still outmatches it by it’s sheer gratuitous sex and sexual assault scenes (everyone sins in that goddamn anime!!), but an animanga based around sex work and the various girls that can be found in the Red Light district… outclassed or not, I’d give it a watch. I saw it through to the end in 2021, and it’s worth a rewatch, especially for the opening:

Channel: mediafactory

Knowing what ecchi is now, it’s nice to see the ones that helped push the envelope, no matter how they age.

F[slash]k you, *un-Kagura’s Your Bachi*

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Memes prove that the joke wrote itself

We return once again to a currently serializing manga slated for an anime adaptation in the near future. The manga in question debuted in September 2023 and was licensed for western serialization by the likes of Viz Media: Kagurabachi.

Created by up-and-coming mangaka Takeru Hokazono, it follows the story of a young man on quest for vengeance after his swordsmith father is murdered by evil sorcerers and his seven Enchanted Blades are stolen from their home in the mountains. Not exactly the most unique story, all things considered, but I’d be the last to say it’s aping something along the lines of Demon Slayer as far as inspiration goes. Young boy lives with family in the woods has life flipped-turned upside down when screeching plot device orphans him. Though, that’s the point of divergence for Magical Sword Journey as Kagurabachi merely gifts the protagonist with dead parent instead of demon imouto. Also, the protagonist is older than Gonpachiro Kamaboko being 18 instead of 14, so Hokazono can put more wild s[tenchu!]t in the plot, and boy does he.

The protagonist of Let’s Go Get My Dad’s Enchanted Swords is Chihiro Rokuhira, made noticeable by an all-black outfit consisting of a blazer under an overcoat, one of the few remaining katanas at the hip that wasn’t stolen by the antagonists, and a giant scar on the left side of his face.

The manga alone gives me the impression that the goal wasn’t about originality but instead just writing an epic action tale of vengeance because Hokazono’s a grown man and no one besides the legal system can tell him what to do. The antagonist faction is a group of sorcerers known as the Hishaku, a small but formidable force in bed with other factions like the Sazanami Clan of sorcerers and the Korogumi Yakuza group, the latter of these felt typical with the Yakuza becoming more involved in supernatural phenomena in Japanese media as of late. Pick your favorite example, mine has to be MHA’s Shie Hassaikai.

Like many villain groups, the combined might of the Hishaku, Korogumi, and Sazanami is primarily based on ignorance, but the main connecting element extends beyond the magical blades of Chihiro’s father, Kunishige. The main plot device is a little girl named Char Kyonagi, the last in a line of regenerators. No matter who nabs her, they have the key to immortality in their hands, and the traditional Shonen trope is to protect her whilst searching for the swords and making sashimi out of Kunishige’s killers, which does happen, though Chihiro’s general attitude in the manga is so cavalier that I can’t help but imagine most anti-heroes from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The unsmiling, scarred visage of this edgy 18-year-old is a contrast to the similarly themed BLACK TORCH and its cocky, but confident 17-year-old animal lover and learning that Hokazono took inspiration from the likes of John Wick and Quentin Tarantino films shows that this was a deliberate choice.

Cross cultural pollination strikes once again, first through Disney Company’s namesake meeting with Astro Boy’s creator, then through Hirohiko Araki’s manliest 1980s playlist and now with this green mangaka enjoying western cinema. Part of a cycle that is guaranteed to keep on turning like a dharma wheel. All of what I’ve been writing so may make it sound like I’m taking the piss out of the manga and thanks to memes like the one below, you could get the wrong impression that the manga is far from good.

However, the meme tourism has done a bang up job boosting its numbers globally. Sitting at a sexy 2.2 million copies in circulation and growing, it isn’t every day that memes bring something to popularity. The “ah… eto, bleh!” meme from 1995’s You’re Under Arrest has found a new life online, and 2019’s Joker made even more famous the set of stairs in the Bronx, to the chagrin of many natives, myself included at the time. With the internet and animanga going hand in hand over 30 years strong, something like this is almost guaranteed to happen again in the future.

The manga is currently at over 80 chapters and I’ve only read six so far. For my assessment, although there’s nothing concrete about an anime adaptation, it’s put together like it needs one. The manga panels of Demon Slayer only go so far but with Ufotable flexing their tax evasion with artful animation, and CloverWorks doing the impossible by overloading the color palettes on The Elusive Samurai in nearly every scene, the animators’ fingers will look like nubs with dried blood as they bring this dark fantasy manga to life. As it stands, the studio tasked with conducting the anime will be CyGamesPictures, responsible for bringing us Umamusume, Princess Connect! Re:Dive, and Zombieland Saga. With how dark and broody the manga comes off as, it makes me think of all the graphic novel panels from Max Payne and the overall vibes I’ve gotten from Silent Hill 2 clips.

At least the themes match. Max was able to lie to himself for two-and-a-half games before it came crashing down like an absinthe hangover in the final installment where he found himself pulling a look that would’ve gotten him mistaken for a South Florida kingpin in 1986. Looking it over now, we haven’t really had a lot of dark animanga that’s been able to stand the test of time. The closest examples that come to mind for me are Berserk 1997, Elfen Lied, and Akame ga Kill, three critical series where only a chosen few have plot armor, but it’s treated less like a luck stat and more like a discipline that slips away as easily as muscle memory.

As much as I love the influx of Kawaii Sugoi characters being as dangerous as cotton balls, I’ve gone on record saying that variety is the slice of life and I’d like to see more dark series get their own. I’m fully aware they exist, but with so much animanga defaulting to lightheartedness as of late, few other series get the attention they need. It also doesn’t help that Seinen is overlooked in favor of Shonen usually for not having heart-pumping, corpse-reviving, zombie-apocalypse-beginning action scenes, and Seinen and Josei are where more of the mature storylines exist.

I know better than to say darker series are few in number, and while I’d rather the tourists not barge in and ruin it with their holier-than-thou moralitybabble, it would help some if there was a bit more marketing. It helped yonks ago on Crunchyroll/VRV when they were advertising Golden Kamuy and I think it can help here. Thankfully, the memes have helped propel both it and its mangaka to fame, so perhaps in the future we’ll get even more dark manga to join the rest of the lineup getting anime adaptations these days. I don’t even care if the endings are happy or not so long as they’re fulfilling reads. The expectation for Kagurabachi to reach new heights and have a lasting legacy is clearly there, and I wanna see where it goes in the next five years or so.

MHA Vigilantes Anime So Far

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Been a while since we’ve done one of these

Out-of-schedule topics haven’t been a thing on this blog in over two months since I wrote about BLACK TORCH rising from the grave. The next topic will cover an anime I was really on the fence about watching, so take this one as a calm before the storm, so to speak. And thankfully one I’d been looking forward to for years.

I’ve written about this manga before in the past, so here’s the cliffnotes version: college student Koichi Haimawari doesn’t fit the bill to be an officially licensed hero and so moonlights as Nice Guy in his neighborhood, as a sort of friendly neighborhood Spider-Man sans the tragic death of a popular brand of rice. One night, he and wannabe popstar idol, Pop-Step get jumped by a roving band of misfits and saved by this universe’s answer to Batman with a dash of Frank Castle sprinkled in.

Keep in mind, that that’s how the manga begins. The rest of the story covers a pivotal plot detail in the main storyline involving the Shie Hassaikai Yakuza’s use of an experimental Quirk-altering drug called Trigger, used to boost an individual’s Quirk to often disastrous results. The main tell that someone’s been using it is through their tongues, leaving them stained black from overuse. The main structure of Vigilantes is that the Pro-Heroes often can’t or (according to Stain) won’t stop smaller slice-of-life crimes as they’re expected to, so vigilantes tend to pick up the slack though under the cloak of darkness because vigilantism is illegal.

The hero system in this universe is used to denote what makes a villain, not a hero. Strict boundaries are put on heroes to stay within the law and legal limits, but villains and vigilantes aren’t bound by the same obligation. Even though a vigilante can cover a hero’s blindspots, not all of them subscribe to the same heroic ethos that binds most ordinary Pros so the legal system sees them as villains too, even though vigilantism birthed this same system. This is explained by one of Koichi’s senpai, Makoto Tsukauchi.

I’d highlight these as spoilers, but they’re more an explanation of the hero system as portrayed in all MHA media, adding nuance to a picture portrayed as black and white. Obligatory, honorable thieves, untrustworthy law enforcement; we’ve seen it all before, but to apply to superheroes tilts the picture significantly. The anime debuted last month and as of writing this is currently at eight episodes.

I cannot say for certain how many episodes or seasons it will have, but considering the cultural phenomenon MHA has become as a franchise in the last decade, it’s more than just a welcome addition to the franchise as a whole. It also fills in a few missing plot points from the original as a prequel set two years before Midoriya and Bakugo step off for UA High.

Going off the first episode, the anime opening follows the art style of the manga sticking closer to its western comic inspiration than the original does. Observe below:

Channel: TOHO Animation　チャンネル

Studio BONES doesn’t miss a beat. Establishing shots of all the characters present, stylistic choices and art direction to fit them all with their appropriate themes – Koichi is shown using his Slide and Glide Quirk with the animation beginning with All Might and ending with Knuckleduster to show he’s gonna be different than his idol; Pop-Step dancing first with silhouettes of herself before they’re supplanted with fans who take heavy inspiration from Cyclops and Wolverine especially; and Knucklduster appropriately left an enigma for an upcoming reveal that manga readers already know. I made a promise not to spoil anything until we get there, so my lips are sealed and I will not ruin the surprise. The internet’s gonna lose it, I swear on it.

It sets up the anime well and I once again have to come to terms with simuldub. Growing up, most anime would take years to dub in English, let alone a different language from Japanese. Nowadays, thanks to social media, budding voice actors can contact dubbing studios, showcase their talents and through some other methods the public won’t see, they may be considered for certain roles. Voice actors have more insight into how this works, so don’t look to me for gospel in this aspect. I’m not a voice actor.

For what it’s worth though, the English VAs get the tone of voice really well. Kudos to their director. Confession: I was imagining the voices of Koichi, Pop, and Knuckleduster to be some variation of Todd Haberkorn, Kari Wahlgren, and Christopher Sabat respectively, though that may just be my own fantasy. Natsu Dragneel, Haruko Haruhara, and Piccolo walk into a bar… well, that’s just a fanfic now, but the manga gave a lot of leeway to imagine their voices until they were confirmed. Instead of legacy, the industry is giving rise to new faces. They don’t exactly have any household recognition yet like the aforementioned, but the grind of voice acting should put them on the map for future projects.

Credit: u/LolyHumter, r/TrashTaste

Characters this time are more varied and complex being on the older side. In the case of Koichi, with him being in college as opposed to high school, he’s shown to be much less insecure of his Quirk than Deku was. Granted, he wasn’t Quirkless at the outset, but we see the differences in a protagonist with a recently acquired Quirk and a protagonist who was born with one. Also being older makes him somewhat more humble in my eyes. Deku still has admirable goals, but I recall in the first episode how foolish several people thought he was wanting to be a Quirkless hero, until All Might saw him in action. I like underdog stories as much as the next guy, but there’s something refreshing about a character who doesn’t think about their powers all that much, merely using it as another tool in their arsenal.

Pop-Step is written completely differently than Uraraka. Not wanting to be a hero for the sake of her family or thinking that much about heroics on the whole. She already uses her Quirk for impromptu concerts so it’d be a bit ridiculous of her to try, although in the Vigilantes storyline, she technically is one by proxy. As the youngest one, she’s in high school being hinted at being around 16 or 17 years old (despite what some online have been saying, especially concerning her choice of costume).

Those tights are an anime addition. Beneath that in the manga it’s all skin. The manga art shows more funny enough.

Lore-wise, this was her choice, but character design-wise, sometimes you gotta look at the writers and wonder…

But why get anal (no pun intended) about character designs? Manga readers know that Midnight used to look like this:

This costume design caused lawmakers to rewrite acceptable costume laws. If it wasn’t for that, a good portion of her career would be even more scandalous than it probably already is.

Kazuho Haneyama is instead very tsundere-coded. She’ll lend a helping hand and use her online influence to implore her loyal fans to keep a keen eye for Trigger users and encourage them to stay away from it. I’ve talked before briefly about my thoughts on East Asian idol culture, but if there’s an argument in favor of it, it can positively influence followers of a certain idol to raise awareness where it’s necessary. So Kazuho means well, but the tsuntsun comes out a lot when in close proximity to Koichi who unfortunately falls for a lot of the same traps that most would in his position when next to a tsundere. But she at least didn’t become the same type of Shonen female the genre’s been stuck with for decades.

I’m not as hostile to her as others have been, but Part I left a lot to be desired.

Finally, there’s Knuckleduster whose backstory is so heavy it needs to be shipped on a transpacific cargo ship. So keeping in line with where the anime is, he’s a dark gray character who lives up to the Batman comparisons even more than he lets on. Not to mention his first encounter with Shota Aizawa – better known as Erasure Hero: Eraserhead – shows that even pure adrenaline and energy can leave even the Pros tapping out for a breath of air. Coupled with the rest of his screen time and that brief encounter with just Aizawa reveals a few things about them. 1. Next to his first encounter with Koichi and Soga Kugisaki, you get more clues that he’s done this type of thing before, most likely in a past life; 2. The Pros shouldn’t rely so much on their Quirks for work, because they’ll eventually meet a villain or worse who’ll give them a run for their money (see the Paranormal Liberation War arc for more details); 3. Without endorsing his methods, Stain has a point about the Pros. Save for All Might, far too many heroes never know what they’re up against until they meet a Sisyphean endeavor, like the War arc in the main series.

On a final note, this post should be even more persuasion to check out the series in whatever medium you see fit. It’s still airing on Crunchyroll as I write this, so if you have the means to do so, check out it there. Or if you can’t or won’t for personal reasons (I won’t judge, and I can’t considering what I’ve been talking about for the better part of two-and-a-half years), you already know what I’m gonna say.

Unpopular Nerds become Preppy Rebels or Anime Rebel Without a Cause

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A misnomer since it’s a manga as of writing this

Let me know if this sounds familiar, a shy, nerdy girl with a nonexistent social life in middle school redoes herself come high school into a gyaru and becomes the cock of the walk at school with an expanding circle of friends. Quick! What am I describing? A new and circulating manga or an R-rated doujin by Shindo L?

Dark jokes aside, I couldn’t help but draw the comparisons in the first chapter, but delightfully and thankfully, the subject of this manga isn’t about an adolescent girl being coerced into becoming the town bicycle by cliques of parasites. Instead, the manga on the table is a wholesome slice of life appreciation for the gyaru subculture, something I’m intimately familiar with as regular readers may know.

The manga is known as No Gyaru in This Class by Shigure Tokita. I’ve recently wrapped up the eighth chapter and there are currently 20 with many more to follow going forward. Halfway through this brand new manga, there are three central characters: Mirei Nanase, Yushin Mamiya, and Subaru Raisaka. All three were completely different people before the transition to high school — Nanase was a straight A student who put all of her experience points into being the best student in the class at the expense of a social life; Mamiya was in a similar boat; and Raisaka had put all her experience points into sports and fitness.

All three coincidentally chose to remake themselves and get more friends in high school, which puts this manga in the same boat as Komi Can’t Communicate based largely on the main characters’ goals. So far, I haven’t seen either character mention their previous lives in middle school prior to their transformations, though Tokita likes to have fun with the characters in the chapter covers.

I’ve already explained the gyaru subculture, so those who are paying attention may have already spotted the misnomer in the title. The nuances of Japanese popular culture require a reframing of the word “rebel” in this context. It’s not unheard of for Japanese schools to police students’ appearance, even in regard to hair (even though some Japanese have naturally light brown hair), so going purely by this definition, Nanase, Mamiya, and Raisaka are all rebels. In Mamiya’s case in particular, he tried to reimagine himself as a tough guy, but from what I’ve seen and how he’s portrayed in the manga, the tough exterior does nothing to hide his true nature. Nerdy and intellectually gifted he may be, he’s always been a softie, thus inducting him into the Soft-Hearted Brawler trope, though only on a technicality. It’s still early and we’ve yet to see Mamiya throw hands, unlike others who fit this trope.

As for a character who could potentially fit the trope better, Raisaka was previously manufactured like the average anime tomboy complete with the short hair, energy, and fitness levels to match. Comedically, she’s surpassed Usain Bolt when it comes to speed and may just be strong enough to bench press Manhattan Island. If Mugi from K-On! was a different person, she’d probably react like this:

As a gyaru in high school Raisaka is extra taciturn, or she may have already been that way. Either way, the turn around for all three to becoming these flashy new kids on the block is a day-night difference. I’d give to be the one person who recognized either one of them and said, “They’re the last I would ever expect to turn out like that.” High school slice of life may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I’m enjoying this one quite well. It does well to turn several tropes on their head and the ones that remain in place are executed decently enough to keep scrolling on the screen.

Will this get an adaptation? An OVA? Will it continue on for years? I’ve since retired my Nostradamus powers so I won’t comment on any of that. As far as first impressions of Tokita’s works go, Reddit holds this mangaka in high regard based on other series they’ve done. The fact that one of their manga is being mentioned on this blog at all pretty much guarantees a recommendation, not to fans of their work who would have already started reading once word got around that a new manga was in the works, but to newcomers like myself who want a break from all the heart-pumping, mouth-watering Shonen action. It’s a fun manga about reinventing oneself for their own benefit and getting rewarded with friends and good times. One could argue that the characters are merely lying to themselves and each other for this radical change, but to be fair, no one is really lying about anything and they wouldn’t really need to. Honest characters never have anything to hide or if they do, they do it very poorly. I haven’t gotten to that point in the manga, and while I did say I’m not going to be making bold predictions, I see one of two outcomes: they each reveal what they were in middle school, or they don’t say anything because it doesn’t matter in the long run. There’s really only one way to find out and to that end, Manga Plus, Shonen Jump, and other unconventional manga hosting websites have the series in stock, so you have your pick of the litter, though as with many things, exercise caution.

The Bleach Spin-Off that (sorta) Disappeared

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Shame its a one-off

Sometime in 2018, Bleach mangaka Tite Kubo released a one-shot manga known as Burn the Witch, starring two lead female MCs: Ninny Spangcole and Noel Niihashi.

Kubo expanded further and added more chapters in October of 2020, and in March of 2021, it was given a three-episode OVA the length of a movie when combined. On the left in the picture above is Noel Niihashi, a surprisingly well-rounded kuudere and I don’t just mean her uncanny appearance to a capital letter P from the side. Oppai is truth > flat is justice. Don’t let her surname fool you however; though a romanization of an existing Japanese surname, her connection to the land of the rising sun lies in her creator and, in lore, is merely surface level. Like Ninny, she’s a Londoner who’s never even set foot in Japan, but is so in love with the country that if she woke up in Wakayama would have a heart attack seeing the kanji on all the street signs.

Credit: Twitter @9431116

This fanart of her as a Shinigami from Bleach is a great representation of her both in another canon and if she activated her inner weeb past her name. On the right of, there’s Ninny Spangcole, a flat is justice tsundere who tsuns more so than she deres, moonlighting as a singer as her cover. Together, the girls are witches under the organization known as Wing Bind, whose mission is to control flying dragons, hence the name.

Fantastic reading, 10/10. Noel is best girl. I recall keeping track of the upcoming OVA adaptation in the latter half of 2019 and watching it all in full subbed, and as much as I default to dub, I have to come to the defense of subs this time around. Not because I thought the English VAs did terribly or didn’t have a good voice coach, but because of the direction the dub went. On a whim, this came to mind and I decided to look up the dub on YouTube and what made me despair so hard was that the English dub failed to acknowledge the UK as the setting.

I’m not exactly asking for a cigarette-breathed Cockney cocking about, but the manga did such a good job of translating and Britifying the dialogue as shown by the slang. Knickers, mostly, but its the dead giveaway that we’re in London. And sadly the only giveaway as it puts the story in London, but doesn’t do too much with it. A not insignificant portion of it retains its Japanese-ness in the setting and style in some subtle ways. My exposure to contemporary British culture is limited at best, but with some movies like the Three Flavours Cornetto and shows like The Inbetweeners, The IT Crowd, the original The Office and several others, it’ll probably be the closest measuring stick to use to assess the Britishness of a property and in just that department, Burn the Witch is underdeveloped.

I still fully endorse and recommend it be given a read. Even if it’s missing some generic British accents at best to really sell it, it does a good enough job connecting it to Bleach. Yeah, this spinoff is connected to the same property with Noel and Ninny being part of the same Soul Society as Ichigo and crew, just its western branch in London while the eastern branch is in Tokyo.

It’s funny, I initially intended for this to be a rant about the accents in the English dub, but on reflection, it’s not that big a deal. It’s not the first anime to use Americans (majority Texans) to voice non-American characters — you know who you are, Black Butler and JoJo Parts 1 and 2.

I’m kidding, I digress.

As far as recommendations go, consider Burn the Witch as something extra if you’re a Bleach fan, or if it’s been a while since you read/watched Bleach or haven’t touched it at all, then you don’t really need the strongest connection to Bleach to enjoy it. The Soul Society connection is only shown in a single panel/scene anyway. Easy to miss or brush off.

See? Told you she was more than a kuudere, and the fans didn’t even have to touch her like NGE and the Rei Chiquita memes. Also, if you’re still on the fence on the one-shot, this article can give you more insight.

Will there be a continuation or elaboration on this series in the future? Time holds the answer. For now, it’s best to see it as a passion project in the short term. Some one-shots do go on to have more interesting lives and afterlives and my optimistic side sleeps at night dreaming of a world where Burn the Witch continues while my realistic side knows that predicting the future is the most useless thing to do these days. You don’t even have to turn the news on it, the news turns you on… non-sexually, you weirdos.

Who knows? If an old blog post of mine has new relevance thanks to recent events, then the sky’s always been the limit.

Revenge of the Shield Bro or Oops, All Lolis

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What Went Right and What Went Wrong

I’ve said before that I don’t make a beeline for Isekai. I don’t love or hate it, I’m just indifferent and for a while I was curious why so damn many anime fell under the Isekai genre as of late, but looking at the goings on in Japan, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. The same could be applied to much of the rest of East Asia, all things considered. There are still a few Isekai that I enjoy and stop me if these sound familiar: KonoSuba, Overlord, I have plans to watch The Saga of Tanya the Evil, Gate, and probably Re:Zero if more people shut up about it. Technically, I got the gist of what to expect from all of these thanks to the Isekai Quartet parodying all of them.

But it’s no substitute for all of them. Watch the originals or read their source material if you haven’t already.

If we use technicalities, Btooom! counts as the fifth Isekai I’ve ever seen. The Rising of the Shield Hero is one of the earliest I’ve seen at the height of its popularity and according to my watch history archived on Crunchyroll, it was about a month before the pandemic was declared as such. Thank goodness I had something to hold me over until the vaccines were made available. It had a decent starting premise for an adaptation of a light novel from 2013, and wound up living up to its name.

It begins with a college student, Naofumi Iwatani, visiting his local library and thumbing through a magical book that puts him in another world with three other people from alternate versions of Japan. Now that I’ve written that, it took me ’til now to realize that Isekai can be looked at from a multiverse lens than from a reincarnation lens. Anyway, our four noble heroes are awarded four weapons: spear, shield, sword, and bow with shield being the most maligned of the four. For further malice, Naofumi is cursed to team up with what becomes a major antagonist in the series: Princess Malty S Melromarc.

Worse Azula here starts off okay, but after a stay in a motel, she wrongly accused Naofumi of sexual harassment and assault, which burned a hole through the internet at the time due to the ongoing MeToo movement as it was getting hijacked by the worst people we’re forced to share the world with. In a prophetic scene that brings me to the Depp-Heard trial, Naofumi pleaded his innocence, but the kingdom he pledged to serve is a matriarchal society, and using that card to her advantage, she had him stripped of his prestige and ousted, momentarily marked as the Devil of the Shield.

A different series would’ve turned him into Kratos without the family-killing dynamic.

With only a few people to rely on, Naofumi continues on honing his shield skills, and controversially buys a slave. In this world, there’s two types of people: human beings who have the rights and demihumans, blanketly any humanoid with slight anatomical differences, most commonly of the kemonomimi variety, which is applicable to the Thirens of Zenless Zone Zero. This particular slave is a raccoon girl called Raphtalia and I firmly recall the internet falling in love with her for being a reliable companion and most importantly not f[Ore wa!]ng Malty. Even I loved her at one point.

Over the course of the anime, Naofumi occasionally runs into the rest of the dumbasses he was gonna serve the kingdom with, taking snide remarks on the side and dishing them out whilst also proving himself to be more capable in more than just shield tactics. Slave or no, Naofumi taught Raph how to fight as a swordswoman, and act as the offense to his defense. Later, he purchases an egg from which we get a character known as a Filolial named Filo, who can transform between bird and human form; her human form being a loli, which seem to be attracted to him in the same way a planet is attracted to a star. Finally, in the first season, there’s the second princess, the much nicer Melty Melromarc, another loli.

Credit: u/FurySnow47, r/ShieldHero

Guess all the MILFs were taken? Not all of them, though, there is still Queen Melromarc who was conveniently absent until the second half of the first season.

Fortunately, she’s absolutely nothing like her daughter and (spoilers) retries her and her husband, the king, for their harsh treatment and high crimes and misdemeanors on the throne, about to be executed until Naofumi does what most responsible heroes would do and stays their execution in favor of a more humiliating punishment, renaming Malty to “Bitch,” and the king to “Trash.” The first season doesn’t end there, but for loads of people watching, myself included, this was a definite highlight for characters who treated the protagonist like dirt all this time.

Due to the recency bias, an old 3×3 of mine has it included.

This was in August of 2021, one of my earliest Reddit posts. I do still like some of these series, and in the case of Shield Hero, its first season started strong and went demonstrably well. Where does it falter? By most accounts, season 2 is where it starts to fall.

I didn’t watch it due to the reputation it was carrying as it went on and I was too busy looking for employment as well as working with an extremely slow Army recruiter (2022 wasn’t my year (-_-)), but as I understand it, season 1 started strong, season 2 fumbled it but picked it up, and season 3 did better than season 2’s beginning. I don’t think I’ve said it before but I don’t really plan any of my anime watches out. I definitely watch anime, but I don’t set anything in stone; I just follow my whims. I put more planning in the blog topics than I do in my anime “watchlist,” so I won’t say whether I’ll see for myself if Shield Hero S2 is as bad as it says, but more like if I so choose, I’ll have this video linked below to keep in mind:

Channel: LunarEquinox

But my expectations are already nonexistent so aside from all of you dear readers, who else do I need to tell this to?

I enjoyed the first season for what it was at the time. Looking back, if I’m being honest, Naofumi doesn’t have the makings of our modern definition of a hero, he’s written more in line with the old Greco-Roman classical heroes, like Hercules/Heracles or Theseus or basically Kratos from God of War 2005. He’s not the most selfish or intimidating or morally conflicted character, but the cards he’s been dealt and the people he serves makes him question whether he should quit and what good he’d get out of it aside from a good night’s rest for once. Instead, rather than wait on quests to pop out of nowhere, as a white mage of sorts, he doesn’t really need combat to showcase his heroics; when the other heroes leave to claim their rewards, Naofumi stays behind to deliver medicine and sanctuary to the shaken populace, fitting and expected of a shield. See what I did there?

This is probably the first time I’ve felt conflicted recommending a series. Guess we’re transitioning into the S[oink]t That Exists that Makes me Pissed arc, and while it’d be more fitting for a blog meant to present unconventional opinions, I rarely do such a thing. For this series, I don’t recommend you watch as I recommend you experience the series. Season 1 and season 3 are the cleanest they’ll get, but season 2 might be left to the Pick Your Poison method. Can you stomach the reportedly poorly presented first half or would you rather spare your eyes and delve into the light novels? Maybe that’s your approach if you choose to give it a watch. It’s far from the first light novel adaptation I’ve written about, but it’s one with a complicated legacy after 12 or 13 years on the shelves. I don’t recommend going in with a judgmental or comparative mind as thinking about a different series in the viewing of this one may ruin the experience for you. Rather, what you should do is go in as blind as humanly possible and judge it on its own merits. It’s got light novels, manga, and the anime’s 4th season is supposed to release this year. Hopefully, the 4th one doesn’t ruin anything any further… or worse!