It’s April now, and most shows are over, making way for new ones. I know that many anime studios usually wait until the Fall season to deliver the shows they are most proud of, so what about Winter seasons? Well this year’s one saw the return of Vinland Saga, Tokyo Revengers and The Misfit of Demon King Academy. It has also given us a handful of other lesser-known shows that have caught the eye of many critics. P.A Works’ Buddy Daddies gave a found-family story that totally wasn’t Spy x Family, while Magirevo (The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady) stood out giving a story of two princesses working together researching magic to help one another.
I still feel happy with my show picks for Otaku Theater though, as they each gave me the kind of story I was expecting, and since I wanted a wind-down from the wild show picks of 2022, this was perfect. And now…it’s time to make room for more easy-going show picks.
Tomo-chan is a Girl! Episode 13
So what I thought was going to be a side-story of a Christmas date or New Year’s party turned into something a little more serious. Even with them last week admitting to each other that they like each other, both Jun and Tomo haven’t really thought about the prospect of being boyfriend and girlfriend. As they go on a cinema date I finally understand why I dislike Misuzu and Carol’s poking and prodding so much. It isn’t so much because they want to mold Tomo into the kind of girl they think Jun would like (they were the ones who suggested the cinema date after all); it is more like they can’t really understand the way Jun has been looking at Tomo now that she’s a high-schooler. He wants the intimate moments with the person he likes the most to be special moments for them, and not planned moments by other people.
But the main part of this final episode is when Tomo finds out that her father wants Jun to beat him in judo before he can give his blessings. This is a father who looks out for his daughter, sure, but at the same time is ignorant of how his daughter feels. A father who thinks he knows his teenage daughter more than herself. While the challenge between the father and Jun played out like some final boss moment in the show, I’m still very torn.
The ‘final boss’ is played out like some shounen manga, with the girl cheering her love on from a distance, which in turn gives the guy more motivation to prove himself to her…which is exactly what happens here. Yet it still feels like this whole scene was forced and came out of nowhere. I mean if the father were so skeptical about Jun wanting to go out with his daughter, then why has it taken this long to do something? Could this part of the story have looked better if we saw glimpses of him grunting and being a douche throughout the whole show? That way we would see this ‘final boss’ moment in a better and more believable way.
This acts as an end to the story, unless we get some OVA episodes in the Fall season or something (which is very likely to happen). Tomo-chan is a Girl! has become a very popular and successful school rom-com this season, and I don’t think Lay-duce were expecting it to get this big. It’s very possible that I am just overthinking and overanalyzing this final episode and not taking it for what it is, which is an amusing school rom-com with the happy ending that all of us wanted.
Dorohedoro Episode 12
I remember the friend who recommended this show to me saying to me recently that people who have read the Dorohedoro manga would enjoy the anime adaptation far more than those who are going in completely blind, like me. They’re glad that I’ve finished the show though, and I’ve since told them how I feel about it as a whole. Which is that I’m still on-the-fence about it.
Even with Nikaido finally escaping En at the end, she is still bound by his contract and will at some point return. Also there is the possibility that Caiman may have turned out to be an absolute scumbag. These are all plot points that are visible to us in this final episode of the show, and are probably covered extensively in the manga – of course I will never know this because I haven’t read it, and have no intention to. This also leaves room for a second season too, although the question is whether it will even get one.
The world building and excellent character designs are what drew me into this show, but I know for certain that if I want to enjoy the show in the same way as the manga readers and hardcore fans do, then it will need a rewatch. Not just so I can absorb the story more, but so I can get my head around every single thing in the show. Episodes have been well-paced most of the time, but despite even this, there were moments where I felt lost in the story. Dorohedoro is a show that thrives in absolute chaos, and that is the main draw of it I think.
But even after I finish that rewatch of this show, would I tune into a second season? I don’t know, and when I told my friend this, they understood completely. They agreed with me in that Dorohedoro is not a show for everyone, and is something that needs the viewers’ complete attention in order to enjoy properly. I’m still glad I watched it though, and maybe one day in the future, I’ll load this up on Netflix again.
Season Review
After the weird shows I picked in 2022, I’m glad I picked some that I knew I would normally enjoy this time. NieR: Automata Ver 1.1a is still on indefinite hiatus at time of writing, so I’m technically still watching it. The game fans have always said that it would make an excellent anime, and now that it’s here, I see some of those same fans of the game are still torn on what to think of it, but I think that it’s been a good adaptation so far – the kind of adaptation the fans have been looking for. The art style and animation suits the story, and the anime-only segments that we’ve seen so far look solid. It’s also wonderful that they got the original cast to voice the characters (both the original Japanese and English dubs); it just wouldn’t be right without them.
With the game story how it is, I don’t blame the adaptation writers for being stuck on how to bring it to TV viewers. Several little stories that split off into other directions, with added deep philosophy and humanism. I think that they wanted to make something that would not only please the game fans, but please new viewers too and potentially get them interested in playing the game. Although given what we’ve seen in the story so far (before the delay), I wonder whether A-1 Pictures will decide to make this a multi-season franchise. Then again, given how much of a pain it’s been in putting it out (the outbreaks were out of their control, of course), it wouldn’t surprise me if they decided to make it a 2-cour show and pad the story out that way. Cramming everything in the game into 12-13 episodes just would not work, and I can see that now.
Of course I want this show to come back, and when it eventually does in the Spring season (I hope it does anyway…), I can get back into being all deep and philosophical in my reviews of it.
On to season 2 of In/Spectre now, and I think that this acted more like a straight continuation of what we saw in season 1…although how else exactly could the writers do this? While season 1 centered around one gigantic story arc which introduced the story’s main antagonist, Kuro’s cousin Rikka, this second season avoids that and gives us bitesize arcs that all have something in common: love.
Whether it be the Yuki-Onna that falls in love with the down-on-his-luck rich guy, or the grandfather who builds a cursed wooden doll to get revenge on his dead grandson, or the jealous husband haunted by sleep paralysis brought on by the ghost of the wife he murdered, these story arcs are linked together very well. I also thought that it was interesting how even though Kotoko and Kuro are the main characters of the show, they are not the most visible. Even though these are arcs that last for, at the most, three episodes each, we are still given room to get to know these little characters and sympathize with them more. This was something we didn’t really get in season 1, as nearly all of the focus was on Kotoko and Kuro, thus giving us little reason to see anything else.
But about Kotoko and Kuro themselves? Well they finally acknowledge each other as boyfriend and girlfriend…or rather Kuro does; Kotoko has never stopped thinking that way. We see here that she definitely lives up to her reputation as the Goddess of Wisdom. I’ll add something else that is a bit of a hot take: I think it’s good that we don’t get to see any backstory or context of how the two of them came to be what they are here. It’s something that would act more like padding of the story at most, and unnecessary at worst. The arcs in In/Spectre act in the present and now, and flashbacks for Kotoko and Kuro would be more like distractions than anything else.
As for what I thought about season two as a whole? Well it’s been a while since season one, and I’m only able to remember the most important points there. The fact that we get more story arcs here is good because it establishes Kotoko and Kuro far better than what we saw in season one. Back then, there were a lot of times where I just wanted that Steel Lady Nanase arc to be over, but it just kept going on and on until the very end, and by then I just stopped caring. But giving us these bitesize stories make In/Spectre look like a Monogatari-lite show?
That’s something that is never going to disappear I think: many people are going to compare these two shows. It’s plain to see that In/Spectre wants to look like a show of its own, and not give us the wild and offbeat characters and stories we saw in the Monogatari series. Kotoko and Kuro are constants in this show, which is the opposite of Monogatari where a huge variety of characters come in and out. Having those constants means we get to like them and understand them more; in comparison, there were some Monogatari characters who I just could not stand at all (Nadeko, Ougi and Izuko being just three examples). Season two makes In/Spectre look far more like a detective show than what season one gave us, which was too much dialogue for some viewers to digest. Perhaps that’s why people give this comparison; Monogatari episodes are well known for their extremely detailed stories and lengthy monologues. It is a step in the right direction, but whether they will want to make a third season is something I do not know. Considering how well it performed, perhaps not.
Now I’ve already covered the final episode of Tomo-chan is a Girl!, but what about the entire show itself? Well I think rom-com anime shows with tomboys are becoming more apparent now. We got the happy end all the characters wanted and what we wanted, but I think this show tried to give us a rom-com that no-one had seen before. Instead we got the pretty standard rom-com traits that have been tried and tested many times before; some of them still hold strong, while others get tiresome.
It’s good that we get to love everyone in the show straightaway, and no character is pushed aside. Tomo, Jun, Misuzu, Carol and Misaki are all given the space they need and deserve. Also the fact that the show did not go down the road of shameless fanservice and gave us a story with a soul and heart. This was a ‘not if, but when’ kind of story though. While it occasionally veered off into other directions needlessly, Tomo’s road to get Jun to see her as the girlfriend she wants to be to him is a rewarding one to watch. It’s a show that many people will recommend, and now having finished it, I can understand why it has been rated so highly. And while I thought the show delved too deep into the relationship that Carol and Misaki have, the story remains for the most part in the same solid direction.
Tomo-chan is a Girl! used a lot of rom-com show traits we have seen before, but that did not make it a terrible show. I mean just because shows keep on using tried and tested traits, that doesn’t mean they are all bad. But as much as we like to talk about how AI should or shouldn’t be a part of our modern society now, there’s no denying that it is here to stay now. And so something like the Twitch channel Always Break Time comes along, and I won’t lie when I say I was hooked straightaway.
A 24-hour non-stop channel that gives us segments of generated anime characters on their school breaks. It’s something that learns as it progresses, but the three main people (Vaarinia, Tsuki and Yakii) all fit in atypical anime roles, and with more people being added along the way, it can be rather terrifying that this could easily pass off as an average nondescript real school anime show. So shows that carry on with same-old characters and traits aren’t all terrible, huh?
As I mentioned in the most recent preview post, the upcoming Spring season will be the last one I cover here for The OASG. It’s been awesome to write here, but personal life is catching up with me, and I’m also looking into other projects. And so I want this final season here on this site to be one to remember, and I think I’ve picked some good shows that I know I will like a lot. Even the out-of-season one I picked is something I know I’ll love; the fact that I still hadn’t covered it properly is a mystery to me.