Rena and Shion originally appeared in direct counterpoint to the then-oversaturated moe tropes of the time; however, what began as subversion would become an archetype all of its own, for better or worse.
It’s a lovely season for surprises, mess, and surprisingly compelling mess.
This season had plenty of shows we liked, but only a handful that stood head and shoulders above the rest.
Rushes through a checklist of upsetting tropes early on in maybe the tamest and most toothless way possible.
Dee, Chiaki, and Peter look back on a season with a lot of mixed bag recommendations!
This is a season of meteoric highs and nightmare lows.
My feelings veered wildly between “Love this!” and “oh NO!”, settling on loving it. Oshi no Ko powerfully explores women’s emotional labour in the idol industry and more broadly.
Just a bag of police brutality-flavored yikes.
Dead Mount Death Play has managed to put so many conceptual hats on top of one another that it’s come round to being kind of entertaining.
Raeliana is a great protagonist, but it’s a shame that the animation production isn’t as good as it wants to be.
How it fares will depend on a couple of key things: how it handles its love interest, Isaki, and how it handles the theme of mental health and isolation that underpins the whole premise.
World Dai Star is interested in the actual process of acting, of how actors inhabit the minds of their characters and use all the tools of physicality and stagecraft to create the artifice of inner life. And it is a joy to watch in this way.
