Am I Actually the Strongest? – Episode 1
Am I the Strongest might be the weakest isekai premiere in a long, long time, and that’s saying something.
Am I the Strongest might be the weakest isekai premiere in a long, long time, and that’s saying something.
My Tiny Senpai continues the small girl tall guy trend by…doing exactly what you expect of a series like this.
What? You’re telling me this generic orphan who was always a bit of an outcast secretly has a supernatural family legacy and gets to go live on a cool island? Neat! I wonder if he has a grand destiny he’ll reluctantly have to fulfil, too!
All the summer 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!
There were about five times in this extended premiere that I said, out loud, “I can’t believe it’s still going!” It doesn’t help that the characters move and act like cardboard cutouts. What went wrong?
Alex, Vrai, and Toni shine a spotlight on one of the best modern yuri available, its genre commentary, and its cast of lovable disaster girls.
Classic shoujo has a hard time being exported, especially in the Anglophone sphere, and in pop culture discussions it’s generally been reduced to a subpar category of comics when compared to the high-praise shounen manga are known to receive. However, her value as a multifaceted artist and storyteller should be valued as much as other prominent authors from the ‘70s and ‘80s.
NEJIGANAMETA’s manga Ladies On Top is a cute, sexy josei romcom about the crushing pressures of heteronormative gender roles. I know, the emotional trauma inflicted by society’s narrow expectations about acceptable masculinity, femininity, and sexual desire doesn’t sound very cute or sexy, but trust me when I say Ladies On Top weaves these themes together effectively with its fluffy romance.
Tanjiro’s got that moralistic determination trait/defect common in many of my Shounen Sons (™), but what makes him different is a clear and consistent decision to choose kindness toward others, with a pang of deep sadness and forgiveness that outlines it. When holding it up against the other leading boys in the same genre, this particular “brand of nice” feels different. But what is the difference in Tanjiro’s “nice” compared to other shounen protagonists—and why isn’t it more common?
While Lum herself unquestionably remains an anime icon, looking to the different ways she’s depicted in the older anime versus the new can shed some light on changing attitudes to the genre and archetype she’s so nicely embodied over time.
Caitlin, Cy, and Toni celebrate the 10th anniversary of a cult classic and dig into its portrayals of women, motherhood, and the question of transformative justice.
Hotaru’s story represents the tension between our desire for comforting narratives of disabled people healing and the reality of disabled life as shaped by capitalism and the limits of our bodies.
Akane-Banashi, a manga about a young woman coming into prominence in the world of Rakugo, has one of the farthest possible premises from the shounen standard, and yet it uses the tropes of shounen effectively to convey the emotional stakes of the story.