Ahh… this brings back memories.

Relena Peacecraft was my very first anime crush.

Since Makeine ended and nothing caught my attention this season, I’m back to browsing and binging the past, and just finished up one of the best series I’ve watched in a long time - Heike Monogatari.

I just happened to come across it on a stack and thought it looked interesting, so I watched the first episode and was immediately hooked. It wasn’t until I saw the Science SARU logo in the closing credits that I realized it was Yuasa (though in retrospect, I probably should have from Biwa’s character design).

The art design is astonishing - a perfect fit for a Japanese historical epic - with backgrounds that look like tapestries and foreground details that look like woodblock prints. It’s easily one of the most visually satisfying anime I’ve ever seen.

The story and characters are sort of underdeveloped, as should be expected from trying to condense a sprawling historical epic into 11 anime episodes, but it doesn’t feel incomplete. It’s as if all of the missing content from the much larger and more detailed original epic are spread so evenly throughout the adaptation that everything that’s there fits neatly together and manages to tell the story anyway.

And the way it’s framed - having the narrator of an epic story of a clan brought down by their own arrogance and cruelty that was popularized by biwa singers be a biwa singer who started off with every reason to hate the Heike but who slowly came to love them in spite of their significant flaws - is brilliant. Biwa is perfectly placed to witness the story as it unfolds, and perfectly suited to recognize both their flaws and their virtues, and the inevitability of their fall.

I don’t know how popular it was with westerners when it was released, so I don’t know if I’m just stating the obvious, but my impression is that it’s one of those that’s not so much underrated as underappreciated - that it’s well regarded by those who have watched it, but that that’s fewer people than it deserves. Thus this post.

You’re faulting a series for a problem that exists because of assholes.

Every medium has its instances that are provocatice or scatological or otherwise offensive.

The difference with anime is that there’s a group of assholes who base part of their identities on their purported superior taste as evidenced by the fact that they hate anime, and there’s enough of them that they’ve formed a fairly significant circlejerk. And they latch onto things like this to which to point as supposed examples of the medium as a whole, while self-servingly ignoring the other 99.9% of stuff out there.

So yes, in a sense, there is a problem with the fact that things like this exist, but the problem isn’t really simply that they exist, but that there’s a fairly significant group of assholes who can and will dogpile on that fact.

If you want to blame someone or something for the problem, don’t blame the series - blame the assholes.

When this was announced, I read part of the manga, then part of the LN original, and thought it might be good. I don’t normally watch currently airing anime, but I was keeping an eye on this. And I finally dove in and caught up on it last week.

This episode highlighted pretty much everything I loved about the series as a whole.

Anna is awesome. Let’s get that out of the way first. She’s easily my favorite FMC in years. And she was especially good in this episode. It’s just been so pleasant to watch her and Nukumizu get so comfortable with each other, and it was nice to see that in full flower in this episode. And I couldn’t help but laugh when she lost her imaginary boyfriend to an imaginary rival.

Kaju is awesome too, and it was great to see a lot of her in this episode.

And the senseis. I would’ve liked to see more of them all the way through, but at least they got a bit of extra screen time in this episode. They’re both interesting characters in their own right, and they have a great dynamic.

Chihaya was especially good in this episode too, even though she only got a few seconds. She’s been a pleasant surprise - she just looks so sweet and naive, and she’s so very much not.

Overall, the only criticisms I might have of the series are that a couple of character quirks were a bit too exaggerated (Komari’s stutter and Yumeko pretty much as a whole) and that it seems like very little was really settled. The pacing wasn’t really a problem in and of itself - I actually quite liked it - but it means that we need at least another season, and preferably a few more.

Overall, I was very impressed, and this was a good cap to the season, assuming another season is coming. Without another season, it’ll be a bit disappointingly incomplete, but even then, it was a good slice of life.

That was more my impression, but I don’t follow ratings or reviews much, so wasn’t sure. I just know that I rarely see it discussed, but pretty much universally positively when it is.

Is ODDTAXI underrated? If so, then that definitely. It’s just quality all the way through.

And Estab-Life: Great Escape. Yeah - it’s sort of contrived, but it has so much heart and tells a satisfying story. And Equa is wonderful.

…the company’s efforts appear to be yielding results, as evidenced by the successful takedowns and ongoing legal actions against major piracy sites.

I just wonder who they’re trying to convince here.

There have been piracy sites on the internet pretty much from day one.

And the biggest ones have gotten taken down pretty much from day two.

And new ones keep popping up.

I think the closest I’ve ever gotten to that was Rurouni Kenshin, at… let’s see… 95 episodes. That was many years ago.

A few years back, and I honestly have no idea why, I watched about 75 episodes of Fairy Tail (less than half of its run) before I burnt out on it.

There’s a few standard things I’ve watched that clock in at about 50 or 60 episodes - FMA and Brotherhood, DanMachi, SAO, Initial D and the like.

The vast majority of the things I watch seem to only last one season, or occasionally two.