2024 Summer Premiere Reviews
All the summer premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place. We’ll update the chart as new series become available, so be sure to check back in the coming days for more!
Feature Category
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Powerful feelings, intimacy and sex in Joseimuke anime
The way sex is represented in media can be one-note, draining all the eroticism from the experience. If we want exciting variations on the representation of sex in media, it seems to me that joseimuke (media intended for a female audience) anime are optimal mediums for representing the erotic aspects of sex.
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The Villain Edit: Dissecting how Oshi no Ko evokes real-life tragedy in its depictions of harassment and reality TV culture
Oshi no Ko spends a few episodes examining the harsh way that people who participate on reality TV can be treated, especially online. In this way, it shines a light on an issue that people who don’t watch much (if any) reality TV have probably ever considered. But what does the way it goes about this mean for its overall message?
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Autonomy, aliens, and a study in female character agency with 16bit Sensation
16bit Sensation is (unfortunately) a useful case study for what we talk about when we talk about character autonomy, active versus reactive characters, and how a narrative suffers when the agency of its female protagonists gets reduced.
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BanG Dream! It’s MyGo!!!!! and the value of letting female characters suck
This show ended up being a standout, not just in the BanG Dream! universe but in the realm of idol/music anime more broadly. What really stuck with me was the way all of the characters, with one in particular, were allowed to showcase the full breadth of human emotions in a way that this genre doesn’t always allow.
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2024 Spring Three-Episode Check-In
A quarter done already? This is one oddball spring, though there are still some standouts worth investing your time in.
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2024 Spring Premiere Digest
Licensing frustrations aside, there are a number of titles to look forward to this season.
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2024 Spring Premiere Reviews
All the spring premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place.
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Crunchyroll fails to meet industry standards for Closed Captioning
Despite having a near-complete monopoly on the anime streaming industry in 2024, Crunchyroll does not offer closed captioning for the majority of its English dubs.
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Who is Granted Personhood? Frieren’s demons and the trouble with the “inherently evil race” trope
This story about immortality, grief, and the importance of emotional connections is interrupted by the presence of blunt, strawman villains who exist not as characters but as plot devices to show the “humanity” of the protagonists.
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The Consequence of No Consequences: Mushoku Tensei and excusing sexual violence
Any story that wants to explore this darker side of humanity must be willing to explore how doing horrible things affects the world and people around you, or it risks trivializing the true horrors of the darkness it depicts.
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Immaturity and Impunity: Performative Masculinity in Baki the Grappler
Despite its enthusiastic embrace of playful exaggeration and dramatic pageantry, Baki the Grappler shouldn’t be written off as mind-numbing entertainment for the masses. A critical analysis of Baki as contemporary anime, and a part of pop culture more broadly speaking, can help us all better understand how performative masculinity functions—and why it is so potentially dangerous.
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Unlovely Complex: Social Justice, Misogyny, and the Lovely Complex Dub
The way this writer, a member of the dubbing team, talked about the show and his inability or refusal to unpack even its most basic themes spoke to the sort of misogyny that pervades critical analysis, in which female characters and creators don’t get even the slightest grace for being messy, imperfect beings.
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Cyborgs and Identity in Cyberpunk, from Ghost in the Shell to Cyberpunk Edgerunners
Identity is a complicated subject; the ways we can reflect, parse, and better try to know ourselves are nearly infinite, while the ways we can convey that to others effectively are not. Usually, we are limited in how we present by the economic and social pressures of our society. The cyborg challenges its fans to ask themselves: if what makes us people isn’t as concrete as flesh and blood, then what other unshakable, unchangeable truths about ourselves have we been wrong about?
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2024 Winter Three-Episode Check-In
This has been a season of reversals so far, with strong premieres stumbling and wobbly starts finding their stride. Check out the shows in need of a second look!
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2024 Winter Premiere Digest
Get out of the winter chill and enjoy some cozy food and cool ladies.
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2024 Winter Premiere Reviews
All the winter premiere reviews in one easy-to-find place. We’ll update the chart as more series become available, so be sure to check back in the coming days for more!
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The wasted potential of Death Note’s women
In the hands of a writer who isn’t so brazenly disinterested in writing them, the women of Death Note—Misa, especially—easily have the potential to be the most interesting characters in the deeply iconic series. But as it stands, they’ve been massively shortchanged by writing that presents plenty of fascinating story elements for them, but that never get explored.
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Love Y’all: Lonely catgirl seeks decently written anime polycule
While there is a rise in polyamorous romance in Japanese anime and manga, I must regretfully report we still have a ways to go.
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SHY, Stardust, disability, and the double empathy problem
Shy’s embrace of a Double Empathy Problem framing reveals larger tensions in the struggle for autistic self-determination, both allowing a deeper understanding of the process of Stardust’s self-conception and also revealing the limits of the mainstream culture’s understanding of “empathy.”
