The summer’s been a bit busy, so I’ve unfortunately fallen off some of the stuff that I meant to watch and fallen behind on the rest, but I think things are actually settling down now.

For our weekly anime time, my friends ended up picking:

• Senpai is an Otokonoko - an absolutely beautiful look at the complexity of figuring out gender and sexuality with some truly gut-wrenching depictions of transphobia and homophobia, both direct and indirect.
• Elusive Samurai - stunningly animated action (Cloverworks is doing the thing they do) and it has made us hopeful that some of the historical figures might finally get english language wikipedia pages (we keep complaining that there are no resources to look at about how close this comes to the real story, lol)
• Dahlia in Bloom - a bit of the odd one out because it, um, looks terrible and the story is a bit rough as well. We’re enjoying the slow-burn romance (it’s a bit too slow for me, tbh) and pointing at all the weird animation quirks (we were SHOCKED when, after episodes of making fun of horse animation errors, we got an up-close shot of a horse and learned that this world had 8-legged horses the whole time and they didn’t tell us, so those were not errors after all)
• Odd Taxi - I slept on this when it came out because the dialogue felt really stilted to me and I couldn’t get my brain to focus on what was being said, but one of my friends insisted, so here we are. It’s definitely gotten better in the dialogue department, but I don’t really see why people call it a masterpiece, at least not yet. We’ll see.

As for my own shows, I had to make some cuts and I’m still a bit behind on it all, but I’m watching:

• Yatagarasu - This one keeps surprising me with its weird twists, lol. The big one two-thirds of the way through made me go read the manga (I may try to find translations of the novels as well), and I learned that the anime blended the first two novels together into a single story (they cover the same time period, but different characters, as I understand it), and I think the story was much better for it. The manga’s pacing, at least on the ladies’ side of the story, was really janky and the tone felt all wrong.
• How to Become Ordinary - Why is this so cinematic?? I really like all the subtle character moments in this show and the extreme low stakes of (most of) the mysteries.
• Twilight Out of Focus - as far as BL anime goes, it’s fine. It’s sort of endearing how seriously it takes itself and how artsy it’s trying to be, but I don’t know that it works that well.
• Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian - I really liked this as a romance at the start of the season, but I’ve become more disinterested as it’s (predictably?) become a harem anime. I’ll probably finish out the season, but if there’s no romantic progress, I won’t be back for a season 2.

As always, I’m going into the season as blind as possible, though I am tentatively hyped for Ranma 1/2.

Also, I’m not sure if this counts as the new season (or as anime, since it was sort of a slideshow), but here’s my thoughts on the first(?) fall show:

Murai in Love

It only escaped the extreme creepiness of its premise by being painfully dull in all aspects. I’m not one to complain too much about animation quality (I’m watching Dahlia In Bloom this season), but the writing and direction were the things that really dragged it down. I could barely force myself through it (I have my pride as a Watcher of Every Anime, even if it’s meaningless), and it didn’t get even a single nose exhale out of me, let alone a laugh. The one good thing I have to say is that J.C.Staff know how to make pretty people and the ninja guy is definitely pretty. 1/5