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Show Notes
0:00: Justin and Helen say Happy New Year! Try to stay safe and healthy as we take on 2022.
Fall Anime 2021 Final Thoughts
3:22: Before the Winter Anime 2022 season fully kicks off, Justin and Helen talk about everything they’ve watched and finished this past Fall season. Both agree that as well-rounded as this season was compared to Summer season, it wasn’t quite as standout as it could’ve been. Helen had a few titles she watched and regretted (Ancient Girl’s Frame), but she did drop one show (Taisho Otome Fairy Tale); meanwhile Justin had only dropped Ancient Girl’s Frame at the start of the season, but he did have two shows that he regretted finishing (that hockey idol embroidery beach [?] anime…and the religious isekai??? 32:03).
49:37: The one anime Helen recommends out of this season is The Heike Story, which she loved. Meanwhile Justin has two…technically. Mieruko-chan stood out from most of the Fall anime that ended (1:08:46). Ranking of Kings is the best anime that aired in the Fall, buttttt it’s still not over, so check back for more thoughts sometime in March (1:11:13). You can yell at Justin for butchering King Bosse’s name though.
The Weird News of 2021
1:13:06: The two hosts now move onto the best part of the podcast: the weird news. This time, the most standout weird news of 2021 in one episode! And they both realize a lot happened.
1:13:42: In reality, Teasing Master Takagi-san Season 3 and the film getting licensed by Sentai/HIDIVE wouldn’t be weird news. But having S1 being on and being called by its Japanese name on Crunchyroll/Funimation, S2 being on Netflix, and now S3 being on another service, meaning there will be three different dub versions for this anime, means it just sneaks onto the end of the weird news list!
1:15:40: Usually companies like to make money, so Square Enix delisting Final Fantasy 14 from retailers because too many people were buying it and clogging up the servers is…actually admirable, but also wild and weird.
1:19:50: Meanwhile it’s actually a thing for companies to request take downs, so Shueisha going on the warpath and having stuff taken down on Twitter is possible…except in this case, it wasn’t actually Shueisha doing the takedowns, it was someone who apparently had an axe to grind with someone, and they used Shueisha’s name. Remember, it was so bad one of Shueisha’s artists had to lock their account!
1:21:41: None of us can certainly forget that The Legend of the Galactic Heroes Premium Box Set, which retailed at $799 and limited to 1,000 copies back on August 24, 2018, finally sold out in May 2021…The hosts “struggle” to figure out why now.
1:22:45: We got a manga at one point topping the bestselling romance manga on Amazon…that manga was Dick Fight Island.
1:26:30: Politics and anime has always been a thing…but it has been feeling even more prevalent over the past few years, and last year now had a politician using Attack on Titan for their moronic reasons.
1:28:40: Studio KAI thought they could get away with 7Seeds Season 2 having a similar ED sequence to Beyond the Boundary. Spoiler: they did not.
1:30:49: A production studio created a short anime that was planned to be part of a variety show in Japan. The problem is to make up production costs, they asked the voice actors to buy the DVDs of the anime. And for that production studio, they thought they could get away with it. Spoiler: the broadcast company did not let them get away with it.
1:32:29: Many titles get cancelled every year, but there’s certain types of cancellations that occur that are standard and normal. The isekai revenge manga getting cancelled after one chapter counts as nowhere near standard and abnormal!
1:34:32: Now a show being cancelled after it had its season is also pretty normal, nothing totally weird about it — unless there’s some important backstory to the cancellation. For Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop, which has had a long history of being developed for a live-action work, to be cancelled not even a month after its first season aired makes it eligible as weird news of 2021.
1:37:06: The popular Attack on Titan manga had to be censored to meet Malaysian standards in a magazine. So that magazine ended up giving the titans…some pants to meet requirements.
1:38:41: Justin and Helen are STILL confused as to why TOKYOPOP partnered with…Cracker Barrel.
1:39:21: There are consequences for cheating, as one man found out when he cheated on his wife. All those Yu-Gi-Oh! cards…
1:40:34: Justin is already convinced there will have to be an epic, 24-episode anime that fleshes out the Condom Battler Goro universe instead of the web short that’s been released in Japan.
1:41:36: There’s usually a set pattern on what gets anime or not, and what gets additional seasons or not. If you hear about The Devil is a Part-Timer! getting a season 2 without hearing the back story, it’d feel normal since that was a popular anime. But…it gets a season 2 eight years later???
1:43:42: Kazuo Umezz has not drawn a new manga in 26 years…but starting this month he’ll be doing something new! This is weird news, but it’s actually cool!
1:45:21: Someone will have to let the hosts know how Mamoru the Shadow Protector was received in Japan, since the manga went six years without updating, it got brought back this year, and then it apparently ended. Is it important to note the original adaptation, a light novel, ended back in 2008?
1:47:01: Choboraunyopomi ended Ai Mai Mi at volume 11 this year. This would normally never make it into this section, but her reasons for ending this manga involved a fortune teller…
1:49:04: There’s no way this weird news of 2021 list would not include World’s End Harem. It manages to count as news, streaming news, and weird news because it aired one episode…and then said see you in January!
1:50:23: Does anyone know what’s happened to AnimeTube? Well, let’s just say AnimeTube was a thing, and well, it failed.
1:53:00: Can’t forget that Crunchyroll and Funimation has rekindled their relationship after sometime today last year! …Justin makes sure to yell at AT&T one last time for letting this happen.
1:55:46: Justin and Helen are still puzzled at how NFT’s have spread through major brands over the past couple months. But remember, there was a point this year where the following were used in one headline:
- NFT
- Cryptocurrency
- Otaku Coin
- Isekai
1:57:30: And in final…and the weirdest news of 2021…Tokyo Babylon took the prize. Where does start with this anime?
- Originally, it was found back in 2020 that GoHands referenced a few K-Pop idols and a Volks Doll a little too much, raising a number of concerns.
- It was then delayed from 2020 and planned to air in April 2021 after it was revealed that it was plagiarism and they didn’t get approval to use them as references.
- But then, in 2021, the production committee straight up cancelled the whole anime after they uncovered “more plagiarism” within GoHands’ work. It went from on schedule to straight up cancelled because there was more plagiarism found!
- GoHands, however, isn’t going down without a fight — they’re suing King Records so they can get money from the episodes they did. This has led Helen to hope someone can leak the episodes GoHands did work on, somehow, someway.
2:00:42 & 2:04:12: And while the two were talking about Tokyo Babylon, the hosts realized the entire Ex-Arm experience and the second US case of Omicron being discovered at Anime NYC this past November does actually count as weird news.