Rottcodd

Ah... I wasn't familiar with either of those manga and assumed you were asking for thrillers, which I couldn't help with. But I see elsewhere on the thread that you say more comedic...

Pani Poni is a classic of the genre - there's never any telling where it'll go next.

Mitsuishi-san is Being Weird This Year is an unhinged romance.

Curiosity Killed the Schoolgirl is earnest nonsense and determinedly follows its stories no matter where they lead (and also has a terrific artstyle).

I’m almost sure it’s her master’s last game. Yuki will lose an eye and will receive one from her master along with a wish to win 99 games.

Yeah - that's pretty much exactly my prediction too.

Food shouldn’t be a problem. People can survive quite a long time without food.

Well yeah, but in the folktale, it's not about starvation or anything - it's just that the Tanuki tricks them.

I can easily see how the vast majority of the players die but would it be really considered so significant?

Right - that's why I assume there's going to be something more to it - something even worse than a lot of people dying - because it's remembered as "a bad one."

Okay - I rewatched the entire run up to here, and have a bit better idea what's going on.

There's a scene in an earlier episode - I forget which now - in which another veteran mentions Candle Woods to Yuki, and says she heard that that was a bad one. But it doesn't seem that she's aware that Yuki was in it - she just refers to it as if it's a landmark game - as if the history of the games can be divided between before Candle Woods and after Candle Woods.

The Tanuki and the notion that Tanuki's lose to rabbits is from the folktalke Tachi Tachi Yama, in which a Tanuki tricks an old farmer couple into eating a stew made from their children. That doesn't bode well for this game, and the fact that the rabbits have to survive for a week to win.

I still can't find a reference to a folktale about rabbits and stumps. The closest I can find is a sort of sequel to the White Rabbit of Inaba in which the hero is trapped and dies in a split tree, which I guess might sort of count, but he's not a rabbit - he's the hero who saved the rabbit in the original story. I dunno...

I noticed in rewatching the series that in the early games, Yuki's eyes are both blue, and it's only later that they shift to heterochromatic - one blue and one gray. I suspected that this game might be the dividing line, and sure enough, there's a scene at the beginning of this episode when they focus on Yuki's eyes and they're both blue, but then there's another brief scene later in this episode that's apparently after this game, when she's sitting in a chair watching film of the game, and specifically of a conversation with her mentor, and in that one, her eyes are heterochromatic.

And as I also sort of suspected - during the scene when Yuki's mentor is talking strategy with the rest of the serious veterans, they focus on her eyes closely enough to see that they are in fact gray.

The next episode is going to be brutal.

Sure enough - I guess I blinked and missed them.

And as a bonus, that's an especially good chapter.

I was sort of surprised to see new characters introduced in this manga. I'm pleased - one of the things I like best about Souichiro Yamamoto is the seemingly endless interesting characters he creates and the skill with which he has them interact (and in fact that's exactly why Kunoichi Tsubaki is my favorite of his series). But I guess I had just come to assume that he wasni going to do that with this one - that he had made a deliberate choice to stick with just the main three plus a handful of team members no matter what. But here they are, and they're already terrific.

And on another note, I suspect that Nagisa and Himemiya (and maybe even the entire club) already know about Ichinose's birthday, and she's about to have her heart warmed.

I'm pretty sure Ink has some deep dark secrets, but I think she's also a sincere ally. She just hasn't opened up yet.

Kind of interesting to see the guild receptionist get some focus. I assumed she was just an irrelevant bit character, but it's looking like she's going to get at least some development.

I like this series more with every episode.

Not one but two beautiful Nekozane double page spreads!

Mmkay...

So we've now gone back to Yuki's sixth or seventh or eighth game. And is that her agent as the 95 game winner? It's sort of hard to tell when most of the character art is just lineless cel-shading. I'll have to go back and rewatch the earlier episodes (something I planned on doing anyway).

I tracked down the tanuki reference (and kachi-kachi yama), but I can't find an explanation for the stumps. I assume it's also part of a folktale.

Interesting that the rabbits are all veterans and the stumps are all rookies, except for Moegi. That puts the focus on Moegi (quite starkly in fact), and I sort of suspect that that's something that wasn't done just for the purposes of the story, but was done in-universe - that part of the currently hidden reality is that the producers of the games have deliberately focused on Moegi for some reason.

watching a predator befriend its prey

Exactly.

Except that we keep getting these little flashes of Kohaku realizing that this is something different - that he's feeling things for Yoi that he's never felt for anyone before. But then just when I'm about to relax a bit and wholeheartedly cheer him on, the predator reappears. And 'round and 'round it goes.

This series caught my attention the other day, and in poking around to try to gauge whether or not I wanted to watch it, I read this thread, and wondered what might make someone "anxious" about it.

I caught up on it last night, and now I know. Sort of.

I can't entirely pin down the reasons why, but this is an oddly stressful series. It somehow goes beyond a standard failure to communicate - it's as if they don't even speak the same language.

And in some ways, Kohaku is an unusually dangerous shoujo romance MMC. The norm for the ikemen lead is that he only appears to be a self-absorbed player and he's actually a decent guy from the start. But Kohaku really is a self-absorbed player, and it's just that he's started to realize that he could be something better.

And as far as that goes, Yoi is at least somewhat safe from his worst impulses, at least when she's not paralyzed by a sense of weakness, since her instinct is to immediately drop into prince mode and stand up to asshole guys.

But then that's another source of stress, since Kohaku is sort of like an infant, just barely starting to feel his way around this newfound world of actually caring for a girl.

I don't know - it still feels like I can't quite get a grip on why it's so stressful, but it is. I like it all in all, but still...

Current:

Shiboyugi - even more symbolic than past episodes, to the degree that it's not even entirely clear what happened, though some assumptions can relatively safely be made. And the mystery deepens around the agents - I assume they're a key to the background and the hidden motive and meanings of the games, and likely to Yuki's story.

MF Ghost - the formula is wearing a bit thin.

Roll Over and Die - I was especially impressed by this episode. This is shaping up to be interesting and satisfying.

Champignon Witch - I just caught up with this one last week. I'm still not sure about it - it's promising, but sort of vague. And I hate Claude with the fire of a thousand suns, which makes it sort of difficult to enjoy. Still though... it could turn out pretty good, and I like the basic premise and the art style.

Trigun Stargaze - better than last week's episode, but still unsatisfying.

Scum of the Brave - finally stated the obvious connection between Yashiro and Jougamine, and finally got some movement in their relationship, and not a moment too soon. This is a sort of turning point for this anime. It was starting to feel like it had lost its way, but it might've found it again.

You and I Are Polar Opposites - another excellent episode. This series is pure pleasure.

Journal with Witch - the end was a weird combination of awful and hopeful. It was so hard to see Asa like that, but it's progress, and it pulled her out of that pointless and self-destructive rage. And I realized that there's a sort of meta-moral in this series. Makio doesn't have the foggiest idea what she's doing - she's entirely out of her element as a sort of surrogate parent - but she's doing an overall fine job of it, and her secret is simple - she's honest and respectful.

In the introduction to the novel Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut wrote that a student had written him a letter and told him that he'd figured out the underlying message to Vonnegut's novels - "Love may fail but courtesy will prevail."

In Vonnegut's own words:

This seems true to me — and complete. So I am now in the abashed condition, five days after my fifty-sixth birthday, of realizing that I needn't have bothered to write several books. A seven-word telegram would have done the job.

Seriously

I have to wonder if the author of Ikoku Nikki read that and took it to heart, or independently discovered the same truth.

Anyway - along the way last week, I rewatched Tsuki ga Kirei(As the Moon, So Beautiful), as I'm prone to do with series that unexpectedly impress me that much, just to re-experience it and see if it holds up. And it did - it really is very good. The only fault I can find with it is that the animation is generally only mediocre (though I do quite like the character designs).

Then I finally found it in myself to watch Season V of Danmachi, which was broadly what I've come to expect.

longish Danmachi rant plus spoilerish season details

A season of Danmachi is such an exhausting experience. It follows the same pattern every time. First, it introduces the "villains" (quotation marks because some number of them are going to end up shifting allegiances to Bell and the Hestia familia at or slightly before the end), who are entirely vile and loathsome and utterly without redeeming qualities. And they all are, entirely, every time. They're never brave or honorable or motivated by lofty ideals or anything like that - they're exclusively arrogant and cruel and utterly foul, and fill me with rage every time. And Bell, at that point, is a frustratingly meek, whiney and entirely incompetent child. So the villains have free reign to create an ugly situation, which they do. Then Bell finally tries to stand up, and gets his ass handed to him, and away we go. From there on out, it's just a whirlwind of hopelessness and failure, as the villains prove to be unstoppable, and while Bell is finally at least putting up a fight, he's just getting pummeled, over and over. Then along about the second to the last episode of the season, through some miraculous combination of the power of friendship and a last-minute power-up, the tables finally turn and then Bell curbstomps whoever he needs to curbstomp in the middle of the last episode, so there's some time left at the end for a happy and satisfied coda. And sure enough...

That said, there were, as always, some good moments. If nothing else, there are few things I enjoy more in the series than seeing Hestia turn badass, which she did very satisfyingly in this one. And Haruhime's really coming into her own, as is Lili. And Welf got a good moment. And Ryu confessed, which I didn't expect at all. And broadly, it was sort of nice to finally get a season built around Freya, since they've been dropping hints about her since the beginning.

The thing that most stood out to me though is that Freya has got to be the shittiest love goddess ever in the history of gods and goddesses.

And now I'm off to check out Love Through a Prism...

I was already intrigued by this one after Endmaker's post, since I appreciate vanilla shoujo romance, but impressive backgrounds too? That bumps it up to next on my list.

I'd tend to guess too that it's something conceptual. At this point, I expect that I won't figure it out and will be surprised when (if) it's revealed, but then it will fall neatly into place and make perfect sense.

I keep thinking this series can't possibly be as good as I've come to believe it to be - that I'm somehow building it up in my mind in the time between episodes. But then another new episode will drop and prove again that it really is that good.

I can't even really pick out anything specific to comment on, since it was all so good - Asa's lonely rage, Makio's crunch time distraction immediately replaced by genuine concern, Emiri's help and Sensei's unexpected but sensible relief to find out she was only skipping, Shingo's perfect support, Makio's unwavering honesty, and of course Asa's breakthrough.

Everybody cares and everybody pays attention and even though none of them really know what they're doing, they sort it out anyway, and it touches me like almost nothing I've ever seen before.

Making progress. They've both moved up to the point at which they actually have some hopes and even some expectations. They're sort of feeble, like flickering candle flames, but for them, that's a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Razlo the Tri-Punisher of Death? Seriously?

It was actually fairly decent until then. Vash's defiance of Knives was impressive (much better than his capitulation last episode) and Elendira appears to be starting to figure out that Knives is just a power-mad psychopath who actually couldn't care less about his "brethren." We're moving toward the showdown, and it'll be interesting to see how the alliances shape up.

For me, this has now graduated from "better than I thought it might be" to "actually pretty good in its own right."

It's still an unusual combination of genres - sort of intrigue/yuri/CGDCT/action/SOL - so it's likely not for everyone, and it's not groundbreaking by any stretch, but it's consistently entertaining and the overarching plot is coming together nicely.

Dein's backstory was a bit of a surprise, but it goes some way toward explaining how he operated with relative impunity. And Ottilie was a good, and amusing, addition to the cast, and hopefully to Flum's party. Plus I'm sort of weak to twin drills, and especially in red.

And most importantly as far as I'm concerned - I'm already looking forward to the next episode.

Meh - hot blood, masculine pride and a childish complete failure to understand romance. The formula wears a bit thin when they're not in the cars.

We're 2/3 of the way through the season and they haven't even started the next race, which means that we'll only get to see the beginning of it, and will have to wait until about 2028 to see the finish.

The formula wears a bit thin, or at least drags on too long which sort of works out to the same thing, even when they are in the cars ...

Lots of symbolism and not so much meat in this one.

Still trying to sort out the role of the agents - Yuki's clearly set her up before this game, but when Yuki confronted her, she sort of dodged the accusation with that "all I can say is that we support you girls from the bottom of our hearts" line, then the camera focused clearly on her for the first time and we got to see how strongly she resembles Yuki. That can't be a coincidence.

I'm starting to suspect that I'll have to read the LN if I want real answers.

Yeah - that's why I said "apparently last."

That said, I'm mostly hoping it's over because I'm prone to vicarious embarrassment and after hanging on for so long, I just have no more hope that it's going to redeem itself. It appears that it really is sincerely as stupid as it kept distractingly appearing, and I feel bad for whoever's responsible for it. They just need to slink away quietly and pretend it never happened.