Everything is filtered through the male lead’s patronizing perspective, trapped in an internal monologue that oscillates between musings about the springtime of youth and crude comments about his friends’ boobs.
The premise is fun, but the big emotional climax feels unearned – and risks playing into the very tropes the show could be deconstructing instead.
You can build a villainess story with the same plot progression and sense of conflict, it turns out, by simply giving your protagonist visions of a dark possible future rather than making her a reincarnated gamer.
This show is off to a good start, and I’m patiently seated at the dinner table to see how its central relationship progresses… and to see some actual monster cooking!
Maybe you’ll enjoy this if you love the trope where anime characters go “tsk… but… how is that possible? My power levels are so much higher than yours!” while glaring, wounded, up at a quietly cocky protagonist.
These episodes unfortunately throw so much information and stimulus at you that it’s hard to get a grip on what all this means or why it matters.
Food Court takes us truly back to basics for a “girls doing stuff” anime: no club setting, no central hobby or special interest, just girls hanging out and shootin’ the breeze.
Detectives These Days is playing on a particular fantasy: a man yearning for his adolescent glory days feels he’s over the hill, but a hot young girl pulls him out of his slump and put his fractured ego back together.
Any interesting elements are mushed down by the conventions of the fantasy harem genre that the series is awkwardly fitting itself into.
It has some big shoes to fill, coming from the same creator as Laid-Back Camp, and it makes a strong start as a hobby show.
Maybe I can’t ask Food for the Soul to singlehandedly cure my existential dread, but I do have high hopes for it as a PA Works original.
On one hand, this is fairly standard “refusal of the call to adventure” stuff. On the other, there’s a gendered element that gives this a different dynamic.
It’s clearly cooking with all the usual ingredients of a cyberpunk police procedural.
When money is a key motivation, ethics and the greater good are quickly abandoned. This theme is apparent in Season 1 of the anime, bubbling away ever-present in the background as Kana learns the magical girl trade, but comes to the forefront in subsequent material when the manga really starts to dig into the politics of the magical girl business.
The gremlin girl lead is charming enough to carry what could have been a fairly bland meta-humor fantasy concept, and I have tentative yet high hopes for the show going forward.
There’s a slightly surreal, fever-dreamy quality to this episode that means basically anything could happen and I’d say “sure.”
There’s nothing more Halloween-grade horrifying than a fun supernatural slice-of-life premise cursed by an obnoxious protagonist.
The show wants to do fan service capers but it also wants this character to read like a cutesy child and, arguably, represent the protagonist’s childhood. This is, as I’m sure you can imagine, a deeply uncomfortable combination.
She’s his mum, and his housekeeper, and will protect him with her life, but she’s also sooo clumsy and sooo hot and she just needs him to take care of her.
You can absolutely joke around about gender, drag, and attraction without stepping into awkward transphobic (or transphobic-adjacent) tropes, and if it can do that, honestly, All-Guys Mixer could be cute. At this early stage, I have no idea how it’s going to navigate all the ideas it’s playing with.
