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Anime has many tropes and traditions that are found in most shows. Character types and settings are the most common recurring story elements, but one of the most fun is the almost obligatory beach or pool episode.

Anime beach and pool episodes are often filler content between story arcs. Recently, though, writers have been weaving them into the main plots. The episodes almost always feature the characters frolicking in the water, and they typically feature a lot of fan service. But the best beach or pool episodes also develop the characters during their summer escapades.

Related: 10 Fan Service Anime With Lots Of Plo

“The Summer, The Beach, Youth, and Ghosts” (Sailor Moon)

Usagi Tsukino, Rei Hino, Ami Mizuno, and Luna decide to train on the beach one day in Sailor Moon. Though Usagi expected a relaxing vacation, the group instead finds themselves in a haunted seaside resort. This particular episode...

Invocation of My Demon Brother. “The key of joy is disobedience.”—Aleister CrowleyLucifer has risen. Kenneth Anger is, terrestrially at least, no more. Of the Hollywood that once was, Kenneth Anger was one of the few unsentimental remnants—never nostalgic and always captivated by the present. He leaves behind an aura of gothic glam and a string of sacrilegious, unselfconscious films. In the Bible, Lucifer—etymologically, “the light bearer”—was cast out of heaven for plotting against the supreme creator, that divine auteur. In Hollywood, Anger shed light on the ambrosial decadence that accompanied the rise of the film industry, whose mythological dimension he both captured and incarnated. To Anger, Hollywood was a sort of maternal womb, the amniotic element whose sinister luminescence he chiseled like a baroque sculptor. In his cinema, there is a visible adherence to the superficial gloss that made commercial films so profound. He was able...