Chatty AF 235: 2025 Fall Mid-Season Check-In (WITH TRANSCRIPT)
Caitlin, Cy, and Peter check-in on a season jam-packed with shoujo, LGBTQIA+ themes, and ‘90s revival anime!
Caitlin, Cy, and Peter check-in on a season jam-packed with shoujo, LGBTQIA+ themes, and ‘90s revival anime!
Hie thee to Twisted Wonderland, where the villains and their comely houses are the truly noble and those pesky heroes stand in their way. Oh, and a boy from Japan kind of gets accidentally in the middle of things.
It’s a little bit more like a four- or five-episode check-in this go round, but that just means bonus chat!
Move over Beastars: there’s an a new romance to capture the hearts of fans of forbidden love, only it mingles humans AND beastfolk to tell a story about what it means to be human, whether you have fur or not.
In a city where everything from yokai to robots exist, one vampire girl tries to figure out how to properly drink blood from a classmate who never expected their worlds to collide.
GNOSIA transports viewers to the deepest recesses of the universe and a crew trying to find the traitor among them before it’s too late. So far it has all the beauty and gender of the game.
A genuine and engaging premiere about a boy who wants to dance and a girl who loves dance that’s marred by the uncanny 3DCGI for its dance sequences.
Transporting a woman into her own middle-school fanfic makes for a great affectionate parody of isekai stories for teenage girls.
The concept of ninja and yakuza having a hidden war in society’s darkest corners isn’t a cool enough premise to fix a premiere that’s dead on arrival.
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.
Plus-Sized Misadventures in Love is lifting an absolutely herculean task onto its shoulders: selling a fatphobic world on the charm of a cute and confidently fat heroine.
Alma-chan Wants to Be a Family provides what we all need in these genuinely hard times: a low-stakes premiere that is simple, sweet, and well executed.
AniFam, I am pleased to present to you a star rom-com of the season: “useless lesbians make manga.”
A breath of fresh air for its niche, with expressive fight scenes, classmates that don’t feel cartoonishly evil, and a genuine sense of mystery.
A charming trip into the distant future and a apocalypse that’s claimed all societal progress, but hasn’t taken away the simple joy of a cross-country girl’s trip.
This is an exhausting premiere that wants to pat itself on the back for pointing out the tropes it’s wallowing in.
Digimon’s greatest strength as a franchise lies in its character relationships, and this new entry doesn’t seem to understand that at all.
The well-executed elements of the premiere end up overshadowed by fatphobia and the show’s lack of interest in its female characters.
A promising superhero idol premiere that hits high notes but is far from creating the next chart-topping hit, and that’s good for its potential to become something amazing.
One man’s lifelong dream gets centered in a premiere that could be mean-spirited but instead, lets him start down the path to becoming exactly who he knows he is.