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#2 Chobits

a tale as old as time: a roninsei finds a robot in the trash and activates her by pressing the switch in her pussy, kickstarting a beautiful ecchi story full of learning and adventure. its fun for the whole family!

in all seriousness, chobits is a lot less of an insane porno adventure and a lot more a fairly normal slice of life where our boy hideki goes to class, goes to work, cleans his home, has to do laundry, has to go shopping, is completely and totally broke, and meets people with various life problems that range from dead robot wife to eloping with their teacher whose husband forgot she existed. this is all supplemented with the existance of everyones favorite animecore heroine, chii, who is a beautiful newborn absolutely normal robot having to learn basic facts of life like what words are and that you should probably wear underwear.

in the background a fairly typical clamp plot unfolds, taking over the plot only in the last few episodes when its time to put a bow on this entire experience and call it complete. its a show you can enjoy if you like clamp or can earnestly laugh at ecchi jokes, but the fact its shockingly good natured makes me go easy on it. the relationship between chii and hideki is quite unbalanced and questionably romantic (like clamp loves them, ha ha. ha. ha.), but at the end of the day that imbalance is never exploited and hidekis good nature is only emphasized as the show goes on.

"its a show you can watch if it seems like a show you would want to watch" - nikola oiyum, 2025

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2025 media thread #1 Mr Mallow Blue

mr mallow blue huh... this is the first manga i read fully in japanese (with some help from the fan translation for lines i wasnt 100% sure about) but despite that it was not a difficult read because the story prioritizes repetition in vocab for emotional emphasis and doesnt use particularly complex vocabulary... im very happy that i read it in this way since a lot of the charm comes from how the characters are navigating their own identity and view of the world which can be particularly difficult to convey adequately in translation.

this is very much a shoujo drama, the focus is the developing dynamic between the main cast and the main plot is directly influenced by how they feel about eachother and how much theyre (not) willing to admit it. i really do enjoy aoi (27 year old man who loves cute things who spends most of the story as a teenage girl) and minazuki (award holder for guy who loves throwing himself under the bus for the sake of others so much he developed an illness about it) and their insecure bumbling towards eachother has been a wonder to watch. you know it says something when a story has a yandere4yandere lesbian couple where one of them has hundreds of crossed out pictures of the other taped to her wall and i care about the moe boygirlfriend guy more.

despite being a bodyswap story between an adult man and teenage girl it does not care at all about acting insecure about its own setting and trying to cover it with atlus-tier no homo jokes. ostensibly discrimination does exist in their world but the writer cares more about the way those people are uniquely fucked up about interpersonal relationships rather than having outside pressure about their romantic interest be the main driving force. it has a nice balance of flashback scenes which set up the events that led to the establishing incident of the story, and the sequential main story of the cast trying to navigate the weird surroundings they found themselves in.

the art is beautiful, especially the color pages. the expressions are great, i really enjoy the combination of eyelashes and eyebags that the mangaka draws because it makes everyone look like theyre at the end of their rope, which is how i remember highschool feeling as well. it would be worth reading just for the art but luckily the story is a refreshing take on a tried and true formula too... the manga isnt finished yet, theres one volume to go and im excited to see where the road will end up... if aoi and minazuki dont end up together i will break something though

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from Where Is My Place in the World? Early Shōjo Manga Portrayals of Lesbianism

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coming as a shock to absolutely no one, hunter x hunter is still really good. the one thing that surprised me, after all the image-dense shows ive been watching, is how direct and simple hxh is with its visual style. what you see is what you get, literally. even the fights are incredibly down-to-earth and explain exactly what is going on and why, requiring pretty much no effort from the viewer. such a style fits the pacing and length of the series though, and i doubt that a work such as this could ever exist in a different style of storytelling.

^now that i think about this, it does have a very similar writing style to fate/stay night lol. so i guess nasus 'fsn is a shonen' thing rings pretty true. excited to see the fate/shoujosei heaven of fragments of sky silver and lord el melloi, and seinen pits of hell (positive) of f/extra ccc

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please save my earth

after being hit by a truck and magically transported into a world of fantastical whimsy, the year 2022 has been determined to be the rare and elusive "reincarnation" class, and will now consider its raison d'être exploring works with themes of rebirth, memories you dont know what youre supposed to do with, and the tragedy of what one has to give up to be someone that others will consider a person they're familiar with and close to.

which is to say, without trying to be funny about it: ive only seen 2 episodes but this thing is pretty good. the topic of reincarnation and finding your place in the world is great. i know were all supposed to be hating on it because isekai is popular now but that shit is genuinely so good.

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voice of cards demo

havent finished it yet. or gotten particularly far into it really. it does have some high-level modern polished drakenier vibes though. which means its pretty much handcrafted for me personally. i kind of hope they completely anihilate the whole "stereotypical old-fashioned rpg" thing soon though since it has sort of been done to death.

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dragon half

pretty run-of-the-mill over the top rpg trope parody ova. despite its regular unmemorability though, the gags were funny, the animation was nice, and the smoothness with which the style managed to switch between the more "realistic 1993 anime" style and potato chibis was very satisfying. it seems like the 77 chapter manga has more of an overarching story, but the two OVA episodes felt like a proper taste of what the world has to offer. still, probably better to just watch slayers.

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angles and shots and characters standing by their lonesome with the perspective either flat against the ground, forcing the world to seem two-dimensional, or angled downwards, revealing everything to be devoid of life (companionship feels more fitting in this context, but both feels true. especially in the final shot where almost all the people weiss could be emotionally vulnerable to are quite literally portrayed as inanimate objects).

i also like the thorns being used to symbolize weiss pushing everyone away, even though its a bit on the nose. everything in the show is on the nose though, which feels fitting to both weiss "revealer of unprecedented mental illness without even noticing" schnee, and also to rwby as a whole. it is a show that deliberately and with glee plays character theme songs that reveal their deepest darkest agonies at any possible moment, after all.

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i dont have the vocabulary neccessary to describe how i feel about the artistry of mawaru penguindrum, but i can do the best with the ones i can verbalize...

there is some sort of feeling that comes from existing in a world so lush with life and detail as someone who believes himself to be singled out for your sins.

the lushness of haphazardly arranged scenery elements brings forth a certain undescribeable feeling. the fact that all the scenes without himari in it are set in huge empty rooms truly drives home how empty kanba and shoumas lives are without her.

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as if meeting the ghost haunting my dreams in waking hours i ask myself if this is a story already known too well the roles so different, i the mentor, her the child like a play loved by many, given new life the actors metamorphosed, the ending unchanged

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on death and immortality

so many artists seem to believe they only have one chance to explore a theme they care about deeply, and once they've shared that piece of themselves they have to carve it out and move on to something else. that no one wants to read about the same thing a second time.

but, isn't the repetition itself art? if it's love, you can't show it only once. if it's fear, doesn't it stay with you forever?

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appleseed ova

a world in which the few humans who survived ww3 live in a 'utopian' city with all their base needs and desires met, yet, for whatever reason, 'terrorist' organizations who are trying to destroy such a world keep appearing.

the city the story takes place in, olympus, is seemingly the last city left on earth after war destroyed everything else. some people have survived and wander the deserts surrounding the city, and sometimes get rescued and given the safe and comforting life they've always dreamed of. for others the artificiality of it all is evident, and they're unable to adapt to such a lifestyle. with 80% of the population being biological droids who have been manufactured to find life in such a place perfectly natural, many humans become isolated and driven to the edge.

so basically it's... a story about the true and horrifying loneliness of living in a metropolis. seeing yourself as someone upholding the very structures which chain you, but not knowing if it's the right thing to do. it seems like it's what everyone else wants you to do. but mostly it's about cool guns and mechs and shit.

the story itself follows two members of the police force whose job became to stop a friend and deserter from shutting down the AI system that's keeping the whole city running. it's not much, but it's (dis)honest work. the writers seem to care a lot about making the characters seem like people, having exciting action and casual worldbuilding, which they accomplish incredibly well for an hour-long OVA. it felt like a great taste of a series i'm interested in looking into more thoroughly later. definitely an ova i would actually recommend to other people.

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puni puni poemii

they forgot that it's not enough to have 20 jokes per minute, they also have to actually be funny. some of the static shots and backgrounds were pretty nice but the animation in general felt lacking. at least it feels like the people working on the anime were having fun, even though i wasnt.

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demonbane ova

certainly a thing that exists. considering the source material is something i know on the level of "it's that thing made by nitro+ with the art i like that i should probably read sometime", the plot was pretty easy to follow, so i guess it was meant to function as fancy advertisement rather than something for real fans of the visual novel.

i really liked the early 2000s 3d mech animation with the overly smooth rendering and framerate 10x higher than anything else in the show. that's about it.