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By: Vrai Kaiser July 22, 20250 Comments

Apocalypse Hotel for sure as far as new shows. The episode right before the finale with minimal dialogue was one of my favorite episodes of anime, period. Top notch visual storytelling there, though the last line of the episode was also that much more effective for it. Rock Lady was also excellent, and the story is also explicitly queer on every level and "explicitly" queer for that matter, which I appreciate. Love the music too, Band Maid did a fantastic job. Anne Shirley is cute and fun, even as someone who hasn't read the books, and I adore Anne herself. I do think Davy's intro episode resolved things far too neatly considering he was outright bullying Dora, which barely went acknowledged even, but at least he's tolerable after that episode. To Be Hero X has somewhat diminishing returns writing-wise tbh, with the Queen arc being especially weak, but I do still love the art and animation even if I somewhat miss the mixing of 2D/3D (though admittedly the 2D art looks best anyway). It almost feels more like a loosely-connected anthology right now, and while I'm interested to see where it goes it also has "ambitious mess" written all over it. There's apparently also supplementary material which explains things outside the main story, but if so I don't know how to even access that? And I prefer when the story itself has all the important information rather than needing extra content to fully comprehend everything. For sequels, this season of Apothecary Diaries was definitely my favorite story arc so far. Lots of excellent, complicated women and it has a lot to say about cycles of abuse and trauma. Great plot twists too, and while I called it on some (though those were set up very well), there were others I didn't expect at all. Wind Breaker can be a bit hit-or-miss writing-wise at times, but I absolutely adore the main cast, and Tsubaki is a great addition to it. Their backstory episode was especially good. I also related to Sakura a lot in some of his character development episodes this season.

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