It's challenging to write a review for Frieren: Beyond Spectrum's End S2 because the series is so lacking in content, as S2 is often equivalent to filler or optional fanservice OVAs with no real arcs, other than doubling down on shonenslop like the Divine Revolte mini-arc. It was the same back during the preliminary days of S1 when my review was deleted for "too much humor" because I framed it as if the author were using ChatGPT prompts to write Frieren as a generic, bland, and sentimental fantasy show. But I actually think it's much worse than that now. The author must be using ChatGPT
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to deliberately make his series as dull as possible. If anything, ChatGPT should easily be able to write something more interesting than Frieren, so if the series isn't AI slop, then it would easily benefit from the author handing his story over to the AI overlords.
"ChatGPT make a comedy scene where Frieren cries for three days straight as her party watches in embarrassment, but make sure it isn't funny." I mean, humor is subjective and all, but the timing and forced obnoxiousness makes it difficult to imagine this producing laughter. Same with the chibi bits where Fern is booping Stark. Or a sitcom moment, like Fern and Stark scheduling a "date"; meanwhile, Stark moves around like a sloth because he thinks he's going to get curb stomped by an ill-tempered kuudere. The second half of the show, once they reach the poorly supplied northern lands, has one main joke: "Gee, this bread sure is hard!" Madhouse finds every opportunity to remind us as they drop the bread bricks into bowls or chomp on it. Methode from the Chuuni exam arc returns, and her one character trait is that she likes doling out headpats, set to whimsical music and wonderful lines like, "I love giving headpats to small girls" (imagine if her sidekick, Genau, said this instead, lol); this culminates in an embarrassing scene where she headpats Frieren (the exotic demon waifus that the author keeps killing off are more deserving of headpats than our trash protagonist waifus), Fern pouts in jealousy, and then the two fight over Frieren in a tug of war, with elfblob's butt sticking out like she's about to lay a big ol' elvish fart on Fern. Also, wow, ten whole episodes and a mimic chest hasn't snacked on elfblubber yet? I see the author is really branching out with his humor.
S2 follows the same aimless and episodic slime of life formula that the early parts of S1 were known for before it turned into a well-animated but otherwise mediocre battle shonen. Insipid dialogue around hiking and campfires. A random monster encounter to keep anyone from getting too antsy. Frieren zones out for a flashback to when she was adventuring as one of the four heroes; these flashbacks tend to be somehow related to the present moment, such as when our chump heroes, despite being low on cash, refuse to rake in millions by forming sweatshops to extract all of the magic-nullifying crystals found in episode 2 (have Stark use a long rope to carry the crystal back at least, lol). A bit of cozy nostalgia from some landmark that Frieren remembers, such as the small hot spring that "wasn't worth venturing out for." Oh, and plenty of shots of grandma elfblob and nanny Fern's feet, often served up in lacy nightgowns (the patrician NEET and otaku's fetish). The hot spring was only a foot deep so we'd get treated to another feet shot (even one from Stark for the girls)! Madhouse is spoiling us, UwU.
Somehow this show has been touted as deep and mature, but the SoL is as shallow as ever, driven along with the curious combination of overwrought music, superficial characters and script, and the glacial pacing of an arthouse film, but without any of the merits. The source material is lacking in the first place and is carried greatly by Madhouse's production values, as always. The direction doesn't elevate these moments, there isn't anything insightful being said, any real world building mixed in (most of the "spell building" was all done ages ago in S1), nor atmosphere, and the characters are as derivative as any trio you'd find in a random '90s adventure series, with the exception of elfblob's unusually elftistic perspective because of her advanced haggery. A severe problem when comparing the two seasons is that, yes, S1 was poorly done SoL slop as well, but there were shonen arcs with solid animation and some more plot progression by the end that at least acted as something like "payoff." I'm sure we all expected things would slow down once again, but coming from the latter half of S1 for S2 to again be milking this sloooooow, no-content, haggard SoL of the week formula of hiking sim - huehue funny joke - monster fight - syrupy Stark/Fern moment - elfblob flashback is like having learnt to ride a bike and then regressing to training wheels or a tricycle.
Maybe the most frequent criticism I see about anime is "show, don't tell." That's apt advice sometimes, but Frieren has a tendency to engage in "show and tell," like this is kindergarten or elementary school, and the kid has to present something to the class. This is something you might expect from Dora the Explorer, not the most famous fantasy anime of the decade. Most notable would be the bad food is fun/food is better when you're eating with friends bullshit that every derivative anime pulls to pretend that the characters are growing closer. The whole first half of episode 5 is devoted to this, when a dwarf starts nipping at Frieren's ankles to help him find special beer that he's been trolled into looking for for 200 years that tastes like piss (netting us another corrupt priest drink so much haha joke). "It tastes bad, right? Then it's best enjoyed with friends... I'll make the whole city suffer with me." After the self-help lesson, he holds a piss drinking festival set to LotR tavern music. To add to the repetition, Genau says the bread his dead childhood friend made was bad but laments how he won't get to eat it anymore. Implying the same thing. Then there is an eating scene with the girls, which makes me think: "This bread is hard." "So you mean it's bad?" *Moeblob wipes breadcrumbs off face* "Yeah, but hard bread/bad food is better when eaten with friends. Now, give me headpats." They attempt to mine so much humor out of the sound effects of the bread bricks, but it'd actually be closer to charming if they wouldn't comment on it all the time. It almost looks like a parody, but I know the hack author is recycling stock anime moments like Frieren constantly does.
This author shows this same tendency to not trust the audience in the way the Stark x Fern date is presented. When nothing is happening, Fern will say, "Anyway, this was a nice, quiet place" or "This is such a peaceful, quiet moment." You know, because... the characters are enjoying a peaceful, quiet moment. There's even a part where they say, "Wow, the cloud looks exactly like the dumplings we ate," which is recycled from the much better boob cloud scene In S1. They went from the well-choreographed and animated dance scene that any romance series could be proud of (albeit with better characters, hopefully) and then resorted to this awful date scene between the two. I'm sure a defense will be that the date is meant to be awkward, yet it comes across as lazy and lays bare the emptiness of these two characters. They lack personality, likes, dislikes, perspectives/worldview regarding anything, or opinions. They have nothing to talk about on the date despite traveling closely with each other for many months or years. Not only do they hardly know anything about each other, but we don't know anything about them either. Fern and Stark are basically non-entities outside of their role in this adventure. It's supposed to be a cute, awkward date between a couple who are inexperienced with romance, but there isn't much to work with when the script and characters are this dull.
Nevertheless, as much as I rag on the droning SoL moments or the mundane adventures where our heroes volunteer to help villagers in return for grimoires containing useless spells, the shonenslop parts aren't much better and are arguably worse. One would be better off going UOOOH while watching these sick cuts on Sakugabooru, as many of them look wonderful in isolation. But when considered holistically, the fight scenes are plenty flashy yet lack exciting choreography, tension, or any real drama. I thought the shonen asspulls in Stark and Linie's fight in S1 were appalling, but the big showdown with Revolte was truly revolting, dense with the thickest of plot armor, rife with shameless auramaxxing, and far more illogical than a less serious series like DBZ, a show with escalating craziness every arc and characters who can blow up planets. It's not a good look when your deep and mature battle SoL series has a spine-displacement jutsu to save characters that's worse than when Inosuke shifted his organs to avoid a death blow in Kimetsu no Yaiba. Characters sit there and monologue or ask inane question when they should be fighting, and Fern and Frieren chat while Methode is fighting for her life. The OP Frieren casually sits back with popcorn and risks the lives of everyone. Hey, why not? There are no stakes anyway! The mage battles are cheap, and the authors become bored and auto-vaporize the villains as they sit there like a deer in the headlights. It must be some kind of manga-to-anime timelag that Madhouse left uncorrected. Whatever the case, many of the fights are left unsatisfying as a result.
There aren't many new or returning characters this time. I've said enough about Methode already, but her partner is Genau, who is far more of an emotionless and humorless husk than Frieren ever was in the early parts of S1. That pokerface is unbeatable. Despite his calm mask, he's secretly seething in rage and has a hobby of asking people if they're a "good person," but whatever merits his PTSD traumadump might have, it's undermined at every turn by the silly antics of the waifu trio or the shonen rambling delivered during the big fight. The demons are all one-note, but Revolte has a clownish presence and only lacks clown shoes because he doesn't have feet. Looks like they awoke this prissy thing from his beauty sleep, and he didn't have a chance to take off his nappy-time/BDSM eyepad yet. The piece holding his shoulder plates together looks like a pearl necklace too. This is chuunibyou-tier character design or would better fit in a comedy like Konosuba.
As for grandma elf, there was this CGDCT geology infotainment show called Ruri Rocks, in which a girl with big boobs explains the cycle of rocks moving about from land to sea to volcano and so on: "Their movement is less limited than humans. To us, they look like they're standing still because they operate on a timescale so different from ours. Rocks move on a scale of thousands and millions of years." This instantly reminded me of Frieren because of her being a moron who is oblivious to time (hilariously emphasized in S1 by the cheesy symbolism of Frieren and Himmel divided by a clock tower, with a kneeling Himmel slipping a gold ring onto elfblob's finger, in what is an unspoken marriage proposal--never forget that this series is a forever alone incel x femcel romance at heart), and freaking rocks have more personality, characterization, and character development than she ever did.
Mar 27, 2026
Sousou no Frieren 2nd Season
(Anime)
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Not Recommended Funny
It's challenging to write a review for Frieren: Beyond Spectrum's End S2 because the series is so lacking in content, as S2 is often equivalent to filler or optional fanservice OVAs with no real arcs, other than doubling down on shonenslop like the Divine Revolte mini-arc. It was the same back during the preliminary days of S1 when my review was deleted for "too much humor" because I framed it as if the author were using ChatGPT prompts to write Frieren as a generic, bland, and sentimental fantasy show. But I actually think it's much worse than that now. The author must be using ChatGPT
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Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Jan 21, 2026
Darwin Jihen
(Anime)
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Not Recommended Funny Preliminary
(3/13 eps)
Darwin Jihad's cover looks like a political shitpost cooked up by 4chan, with Handmaid Lucy and her 4-foot-nothing vegetarian hobbit boyfriend (or girlfriend because of the neotenous look and female voice actress) against the world, and the seinentard realism of the series progresses with the same ridiculous edge. The series reminds me of those female monster romance novels, where she is repulsed by the monster but comes to love him. The spurned men who are cast-aside in favor of the physical prowess and inner beauty of the monster then gather with torches and pitchforks to separate the two mismatched lovers (like when the jock shows
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irritation and tsks at those girls who were saying positive things about humanzee or the histrionic head-bobbing and screeching of Lucy's single mother). But humanzee is waaaaaaaay too short for this to be a female fantasy. The author is male, so the bone is thrown elsewhere, and he's more concerned with some nasty moral or philosophical points about evolution and the "animal/human condition."
Charlie is what is referred to as a "humanzee." Speculation as to whether hybridization between humans and other apes is possible (or once was) goes back to the medieval period and probably even to the ancients, if we look to mythology. Chimpanzees appear to be the animal that is most similar to humans, and the Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanov attempted to create human-ape hybrids, or humanzees, in the 1920s. Artificial insemination of human sperm was used in an attempt to fertilize female chimpanzees. These experiments were, needless to say, failures. What was not tried, as far as the reports go, was the other way around: ape sperm being used to inseminate a human female. The word wasn't coined yet, but what Ivanov was attempting to do was create a furry, and he could be seen as the grandfather of the sub-discipline of furry zoology. The anti-furry ideology of the Soviets put a stop to his degeneracy by slashing funding, and Ivanov died soon after of a broken heart because he couldn't create a furry waifu. Now, I'm sure many people will think this is really gross, and the author of Darwin Jihad must have realized that because the guy who knocked-up the chimp in this anime was none other than Dr. Grossman (before that, his colleagues joked about the two being in love)! Charlie makes his big high school debut like the cool kid in a Disney show, with everyone checking him out as he heads to his locker, but he's literally an ape. Jock: Monkey boy can't beat my bench press record. Nerd: Ackshually, his grip strength is over 600 pounds. Girls: Uwaaah, he's way cuter than a monkey! Charlie is presented as the fount of reason when butting heads with the nerd and jock archetypes, who are caricatured into the anime-equivalent of Beavis and Butthead, their points nothing but strawmen for Charlie to dismantle, which usually leads to some "shocking" punchline. Why is Charlie even going to a school in a podunk town in the first place, given his vast importance as the first ever humanzee? Lucy (a nod to Australopithecus), the love interest, not only bemoans her "small-minded midwestern town" that she wants to leave, but is shown wearing a Pornhub hoodie in chapter 2 of the manga (cut out of the anime), which is maybe the most glaring indicator of a female being an outsider in fiction and a hint for what's to come. Part of the series is a sexual tension-filled, evolutionary-centered spin on the boy meets girl plot, and this one doesn't slow down for long with a "will they, won't they" scenario. What is probably most telling of all is seeing Charlie's "mother" blush when he mentions having a female Homo sapiens friend. Dr. Grossman would approve, especially if the anime adapts chapter 26. If the art and characters looked more like K-On! or some moe show, then it could at least function as a dry comedy piss take with some much-needed levity and contrast. The hideousness of the art is why you'd think they'd have the sense to refrain from throwing in a fetishy foot shot from Lucy at the end of the ED, like this is some Kyoani moeblob drool fest. Although it's a script/theme-focused series and doesn't need lavish production values, the direction doesn't standout and everything about this westaboo porn is functional at best. The realistic Urusawa-esque art is barely animated mouth-flapping, unless there is some throw-away sakuga moment to show off Charlie's hybrid vigor--speaking of which, if Charlie could beat half-a-dozen cops at once when he was 5 years old, what made a couple of bozo villains think that they could beat Charlie barehanded just because they're buff military veterans? This seems impossible without either way more men or tranquilizer darts. I can't suspend disbelief with villains this incompetent. This is another one of those ridiculous seinentard series that is ultra-serious, superficial, and riddled with on-the-nose social commentary to the point of pretentiousness (see Monster, Orb, Pluto, Vinland Saga). These kind of shallow political/philosophical shows usually have to spell everything out so there is no subtext. For instance, Lucy references Thomas Nagel's essay on consciousness, which speculates on what it would be like to be a bat. The relationship here is clear: Charlie, being half-chimp, doesn't fully understand what it means to be human (resembles autism, lol); similarly, the humans don't understand what it means to be a non-human animal or half-chimp. Since Charlie is uniquely half-and-half, maybe the two can come to understand each other better. In a following episode, Lucy references this essay again, referring to Charlie as her "bat." Yes, we all understood this unsubtle relationship in episode 1, so there is no need to spell it out again in episode 2, especially when this aspect of consciousness could better be explored through meaningful dialogue between the characters. The dinner table debate on veganism and all of the school yard hazing are also fine examples of bad dialogue and clumsy exploration of themes. The other part of the story involves an absurd vegan terrorist group called the Animal Liberation Alliance (they seem to be based on the Animal Liberation Front, which never killed anyone but was notorious for arson), which has claimed responsibility for numerous bombings of meat-serving restaurants and the deaths of many humans. The ALA wants to employ Charlie as a mascot because he is half-human and half-chimp, a valuable cultural icon, and maintains a vegan diet passed on to him from his adoptive vegan parents (the "good" kind, as opposed to the "bad" terrorists). The "empathetic" spider and butterfly moment, meant to show Charlie's nuanced emotions after having said something "psychopathic," is a common enough symbol in fiction, but it takes on a different angle because of the veganism woven into the story. I almost feel like Darwin Jihad is going to put bears (mixed diet and often minimal meat so not as evil) and wolves (very evil dastardly villains) in prison by the end. The main antagonist, Rivera, often has a "Mwhahahaha, I'm a crazy villain" expression, amplifying the cheesy goofball nature of the terrorist group and the cheap black-and-white moralizing this series plays with; in a series that tries to be oh-so-serious, this is a misstep on par with the mature™ Urusawa school of dramatic fiction. Make it believable that this man is a sane person guided by an extreme vision (you're going to have to be sane and intelligent to lead a successful outfit like this), or just go full shitpost. Which way seinentard man? The political climate heats up quickly (you can also catch a glimpse of an "Animal Lives Matter" poster in the OP), and lines are drawn between the vegan minority and omnivore majority: "And right now people are being vilified online just for being vegan." "Vegans like you killed a child because of their beliefs." "Me, I think this terrorist attack came from too much pandering to minorities. We're so scared of offending other religious groups that we can't even say 'Merry Christmas' anymore. Next they'll be telling us we can't even eat turkey anymore." The intention is to conflate paranoia about post-9/11 Muslims and potential for terrorism with a similar contrast of non-violent vegans and terrorist vegans. So the author basically just rewrote that bit of history into his vegan jihad plot. I wonder if the author is vegan? As Lucy ponders, veganism is "about doing the right thing... that's why that kind of terrorist organization was created. Right?" This aspect of the story also bears an uncanny resemblance to the much better Parasyte. A competition between humanity and parasitic organisms is a fine hook, but it's preposterous when your counterpoint is vegan terrorism!
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Nov 7, 2025
Chinmoku no Kantai
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
The Silent Service is a nearly forgotten OVA, filled with lengthy political exchanges and tense submarine battles. It's no surprise Ryousuke Takahashi, who was the perfect choice, stepped up to direct this, as it's a story of a military faction attempting to free Japan from America being its domineering mommy, referring to them as the "world police." People will put that in quotes, as I just have, sometimes intending to dispute the framing, but it's painfully obvious how well the U.S. lives up to the moniker, what with their 800+ military bases scattered everywhere and constant interference in world affairs.
While the character art is ... relatively generic manly realism, the art is decent enough, the naval fleets and submarines are detailed, and the animation is functional, with the effects and action scenes getting priority. Even the score is well utilized, and Mozart is used strategically in one of the submarine battles, making this title a bit more inventive than most submarine fiction. There is a lot of plot armor associated with the Yamato, which makes sense because of nuclear deterrence, Cold War paranoia, and the suspicion that Japan might be manufacturing nuclear weapons in secret. From the outside, it probably looks like Japan as a whole might be behind this conspiracy, rather than it being a factional dispute started by a charismatic submarine commander. There are a few parts where the supposedly "cautious" commander seems too reckless (as noted in the script but not explained too well), casually emerging from the ocean and cruising along as missiles explode nearby. This OVA is crammed as is and heavily plot driven. There's not enough time for character development, but it looks like the two Japanese commanders, who are rivals and opposites, would have a compelling dynamic. Unfortunately, only a fraction of the long-running manga was adapted, guaranteeing a low rating. By unfinished OVA standards, it actually ends smoothly enough, completing the initial arc of the Yamato rebelling against the U.S. and declaring itself a nation that will align with Japan. Still, the adaptation is just a tease meant to entice you into checking out the manga, yet there are hurdles to doing so for anyone who doesn't speak Japanese because the manga is 32 volumes long and untranslated. The general view seems to be politics = boring (okay, that's a fair point, lol), and the events and opinions presented are considered "controversial" by international audiences, so I sincerely doubt anyone will bother to translate this unless they are diehard fans and don't care about how popular it will be. There's a lot of talk about "jingoism," "nationalism," "militarism," etc., anytime such works are made, which is usually intended to be some kind of "that's not nice" non-critique because it goes against the status quo. Begging the question, what should Japan do? The answer seems to always be "remain America's bitch, of course, LOL." Honestly, society is being drip-fed too many Starbucks' soy lattes, so they cannot handle strong, independent Manly Men Doing Manly Things. In these kind of works, Japan is demonized for the audacity of wanting the U.S. military to totally pull out (not a sexual innuendo!). The irony is that a lot of these works aren't even as "extreme" as people say when you pay attention to what is being said between the lines and sometimes even directly. Often, they appeal to world peace but realize militarism is necessary in the face of aggression, for the post-WWII arrangements were imposed by force, and the U.S. still tells them to roll over. In one scene, the two Japanese commanders argue: The Yamato's commander says that they have a duty as a nation (specifically, Yamato, but they are of Japan and hoping to align with them) to not be bound by a superpower. They don't intend to abandon their families or Japan. The Yamato commander even says, "We're going to make the world one nation," much like the post-Atomic Age phrase "one world or no world," which was coined by a bunch of sissy scientists who were wetting their pants over the prospect of exciting missile exchanges. The clear idea meant to be conveyed is that the character is attempting to pave a path toward greater unity and peace amongst the entire world, but America is getting in the way of that. America is somewhat caricatured in this OVA, and the writer expects you to know about American foreign policy without telling you much, such as the U.S.'s globetrotting busybody nagging and forever wars.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jun 29, 2025 Not Recommended
Lazarus is another helping of westaboo porn by courtesy of Shinichiro Watanabe, his stable of writers, and Kidult Swim. The producers approached Watanabe in hopes of replicating the success of Cowboy Bebop with another sci-fi action series, to which he asked if they meant something like Space Dandy. Their response was "No, something more serious." But clearly not much more serious, given the aloof and referential hipster farce that we got. Since Lazarus will likely be compared to Cowboy Bebop because of the director, a similarly gritty visual style, a touch of jazz and other American pop music, and a cover and OP drawing from
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the older title, it is worth making a quick comparison. The Cowboy Bebop English dub was legendary in anime circles compared to the average dub of the time, but a lot of the lines in Lazarus are delivered without much conviction and often in monotone, with Eleina sounding like an actual robot; while I am by no means a Japanese dub purist, it is the superior choice here, even if the authentic westaboo vibe would suggest otherwise.
This series becomes a Team Avengers plot and a wacky race to save the world rather than being a moodier episodic offering of smaller and often better-written stories like in CB. Lazarus is semi-episodic in the sense that they are always hunting for Skinner as the days are counting down to humanity's demise. There is hardly any character development or plot progression along the way. Not all characters need development, but there is nothing about Team Lazarus' character traits, perspective, or backstory that make them compelling or memorable. Every so often, there will be some attempt at filling in a past for these dullards, mostly coming from rushed episodes like the one involving the cult or an out-of-the-blue lesbian spy subplot, which complements a prior "yuribait" scene; there is also the drama between Leland and his sister, coming too late to matter, when the world is supposed to be "ending" in a couple of days. The drama is bad to begin with, but it feels like a prank in this context. Spike was supposed to be a stoic, cool character, who knew chop socky, and the intent is likewise for Axel to dazzle the audience with acrobatics and always being the coolest cucumber in the room, though in a far more watered-down and heavy-handed fashion, to the point of being distracting. Usually, the dynamic is that Team Lazarus is trying to fashion an elaborate plan to, say, enter a secured building, but Axel struts right in and cues up a fight scene. "So cool and ironic, bro. Can't wait to see the sick action scenes. Let's gooooooooo!" Yeah, you just need to turn your brain off and enjoy the action, spectacle, and eye candy. The characters and story are z-grade at every turn, and even the visuals and action pale in comparison to the director's CB or so many other anime that will continue to be mentioned again and again after Lazarus is rightfully seen as a dud and forgotten after a few seasons. In the end, what does the animation amount to other than a few parkour scenes with minimal energy and tension and a flashy, emotionless final duel with a schizo? The Characters will goof off for a bit, get a lead, go look for Skinner, and find out everything they did for the whole episode was basically a waste of time. Yet they end up getting a clue by the end. That clue is carried over and explored in the next episode, most of which end up feeling like filler because of this formula, with there being hardly any plot progression until the last 3 or 4 episodes. Many of these leads that they get from going down various rabbit holes are either public information or obvious. For example, they get a lead before they investigate the pharmaceutical company, when that would be an obvious place to check much earlier; a smoking-hot cliffhanger reveal about a character having a connection to Skinner was easily accessible public information, and Team Lazarus being ignorant of this fact was confirmation that they were too lazy to even finish researching Wikipedia before going on adventures around the world. Team Lazarus investigates a bunker that Skinner owned, a drug company, a homeless camp, Skinner's grandma's house for a milk and cookie break, etc. Seemingly any place that Skinner had ever been to is open for investigation, and probably even his elementary school would warrant checking if the series were any longer. The relatively self-contained episodes have plenty of surface level writing about social issues. Whether it is confronting goofball roofie rapists, a rushed episode about cult identity and AI ascending to godhood, the abuse of AI and its potential for creative and intellectual atrophy of humanity, or even the most egregious example of the hilariously cliched social commentary about how the homeless are ignored but to view them with new eyes leads to a Where's Waldo? puzzle of apocalyptic proportions being solved—try not to face palm when you immediately see something that the dunces of Team Lazarus overlook. Part of the worldview of the creators seems to be that the end of the world will be a casual decline with few differences and people going about the daily grind as if nothing changed at all, other than a wistful soliloquy here and there, with the intent seeming to be a reflection of how people confront the political issue of anthropogenic climate change in the present: "People aren't nipping climate change in the bud in the here and now, man, so, like, people are totally cool with the world ending for real, man. It's, like, common sense, man." Oddly, rioting and social unrest are nearly non-existent, even though you would expect people to be razing government buildings or pharmaceutical corporations to the ground for having ushered in the end times. What do they have to lose? Imagine the greater impact Axel's prison break would have if the streets were swarming with rioters who were smashing windows and torching buildings, and the pigs were rushing them with riot shields and batons and falling back on tear gas and water cannons or other crowd management methods. The series' apocalyptic mood would have a more persuasive punch. All we get is a bumbling cop who has many cameo appearances, but he seldom has anything to do other than react to someone trashing a car or having a conspicuous Axel walk right past him, unnoticed; similarly, while governments actually are searching for Skinner, it is easy to forget anyone other than Team Lazarus are sniffing out his stink. The world is simply dead and ill-conceived. Lazarus is a realistic-looking series set in the U.S. and has a trace of that kind of "mature tone" you might get from Cowboy Bebop, but it is like the little kid who smokes cigarettes, drinks beer, and curses to feel mature rather than anything close to actual maturity. Maybe the worst offender when it comes to dialogue is when we get to our first round of banter (I have rendered the dialogue verbatim) with our five mains: "This team wasn't formed for personal gain or profit." "Okay then, what's it for?" "Well... [dramatic pause] We're here to save the world." "Oh? So basically, we're superheroes." "That's cool. We're like the Avengers or something." This is like a masterclass in terrible referential dialogue! as if the Team Avengers vibe (or Isekai Suicide Squad, which is not any better) were not already obvious from episode 1. It seems like they have a quota to fit at least one cringe reference in per episode, as we get "secret agent" and "License to Kill" from James Bond/007 (7 IQ, that is), and we are spooned two helpings of the corny "Uh, layman's terms, please," to tone down technobabble. This is actual dialogue from Lazarus, and the oppressive hentai vibe sums up the experience well: "Don't look at it and just open your mouth. It's proof of our bond. Now swallow it." The problems with the writing are multi-faceted and not limited to the dialogue. One of the silliest things about Axel is that he is a veteran prison breaker who has been sentenced to 888 years and is like a flipping MAPPA monkey who bounces off walls, climbs up multi-story buildings, and is too nimble for the donut-sucking pigs to shoot. He should be in solitary or his hands and feet always cuffed and probably even some kind of other body restraint to keep him in check. There are all kinds of odd moments, like Leland's laughable solution to get past guards by having them foot the cleaning bill; one has to conclude that the writers were desperately struggling to find some use for Leland early on, whose main role otherwise is to play with Tonka trucks and RC helicopters. They easily find a clue at Skinner's house that the police missed without even trying, which is then forgotten about for more than half the series until the slept-on clue provides them with yet another lead. A former professor-cum-hobo known by a member of Team Lazarus just happens to have been a past colleague of Skinner and remembers some useless story about Skinner's grandma that turns out to be a hot lead. Later, Team Lazarus are attacked by a vicious gang in Istanbul and one character yelling, "We want to see grandma Skinner and eat baklava" results in a deus ex machina and plot convenience because this gang happens to know her and immediately become tame enough to roll over and have their tummies rubbed. Axel finds a camera that Skinner left inside of grandma Skinner's apartment in about 10 seconds. The scenes are often conveniences piled on top of conveniences, which should form a mountain by the end. Since a lot of American political hot topics are incorporated, the script is obviously cartoonish, with even the original Gundam from 1979 feeling more mature in its politics. Cutting edge social commentary incoming... "Can you help us find this person?" Leading to the non-sequitur of a minor support character who does not need a backstory: "Hey, listen, I'm a bankrupt transgender woman who went to prison." All of this information could be inferred without dialogue. Then, of course, the black Pirates of the Caribbean extra, instead of asking what that has to do with anything, has to compete and insert his sob story too: "Oh, yeah? Well, back when I was an academic researcher, a guy said to me, 'There will never be a black Einstein,' and it'd be impossible for people like us to win a Nobel Prize [at least 17 blacks have won the Nobel Prize, by the way; it is true that they have not won any in the physics category, which is probably what he means, but this script is still awkward]; so, uh, guess who that guy was... he was actually the dean of the university, and I knocked his ass out, LOL." Uh huh... For social commentary to work, it cannot be this fake and lazily written, and the writer is trying to cram in too many half-baked ideas, poorly inserted pandering, and stereotypical characters who are nothing but some boohoo backstory in the waiting. People will celebrate this as "trans and black representation," but this is abysmal writing, and these are presently not even characters: They are, at their essence, walking political talking points. This is Watanabe's fumbling attempt at engaging with social commentary, like Terror in Resonance or Carole & Tuesday all over again, but many times worse and overdosing on Reddit screeching and uptalking TikTok influencers. Upon arriving at the animal testing segment, I assumed we were going to get a heavy bong hit of social commentary of the week until our eyes went bloodshot, but the writers could not care less about this issue, and I have never seen a more squeaky-clean depiction of big pharma. The year is 2052, which is most likely a reference to Jorgen Randers' book of the same name, who was a co-author of the well-known The Limits to Growth report that was commissioned by the Club of Rome, which is relevant because the environment is the core issue of this series. Our main villain, Dr. Skinner, after a disappearance of three years, delivers a video speech to the masses, which might as well be this: "Although I'm stoked that we finally got a female president—UOOOH #I Stand With Her... Blah, blah, blah, the evil of inequality, war, and cow farts must end, so I will now reveal that the unrealistic panacea drug that I have created was laced with super secret ingredient x and has mutated, and you will all die unless you stop me. Let's play a game! Mwahahahaha!" It is hard to endure these preachy humanitarian Einstein activist/Bond villain plots nowadays, as they just keep getting worse. Hapna, the super drug Skinner pumped onto the market, is basically like Brave New World's cure-all Soma but with a deadly twist. Watanabe's influence was the opioid epidemic, in large part spearheaded by the underhanded Sackler family, who went so far as to pay off medical journals and shill doctors to line their pockets. Instead of this potentially more interesting and complex story of pharmaceutical corruption, we have an evil genius and an incompetent FDA (and every other drug administration in the world) that failed to do due diligence with proper testing and rolled these drugs out immediately. You have to suspend disbelief for an oversight of this scale in what is effectively a global idiot plot. Admittedly, while it might seem ridiculous for so many people to be using Hapna, if you compare it to aspirin usage instead of opioids, it becomes a lot more reasonable, as daily aspirin usage is quite high, the average person probably takes at least one aspirin a year for minor things, and Hapna appears to be at least as potent as opioids but without the side effects or a need for a prescription. It is also cheap. At the very least, a massive amount of the population will die and send the world into further chaos—or maybe I should say actual chaos, since the public takes a "Keep Calm and Carry On" approach to the countdown to death. Even though there are some ridiculous things about Hapna, there are not as many holes in this piece of cheese as quite a few other parts of the plot. It does not help that I predicted cow farts would be a motivating issue by the first episode, and it turns out the reason Skinner embarks on his dastardly scheme is because "The ice in the north pole will melt and be lost forever!" Skinner then whines and goes into hiding once everyone laughs him out of the UN, seething in his hole while he readies his plan. That is right, he has a butthurt hissy fit because the unwashed plebs are not doing anything in response to his soundbite, so his solution is global pharmaceutical genocide in hopes of getting his way. It smacks of Attack on Titans' Eren 2.0, but at least Skinner's balls have dropped far enough to go all the way... There is also the edgy opinion (and a position clearly endorsed by the writers) floating around that Skinner is a good boy, representing the change that humanity needs, but he is effectively punishing the powerless masses of the world, many of whom are too busy trying to make ends meet to worry about such bourgeois concerns. Of course, blame everyone who has no say in the matter instead of governments and corporations. Regardless of what one thinks about this controversial topic, scientists have been casually throwing catastrophic predictions out for years, going back well before the 1960s—global cooling becomes global warming becomes climate change becomes WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE NEXT YEAR! The topic is more complex than the propagandistic way the issue is being depicted. The writer is taking a climate change idea commonly parroted in the present and applying it 27 years into the future. Problems arise from this, however, because the future the writers present is far more advanced than our time, the population is undoubtedly larger, and the carbon and other emissions must be even greater. The cited ice still has not fully melted, and humanity has yet to die in the hypothetical future 27 years from now, even after endless prophesying of doom and gloom. Lazarus is just poorly written fiction, and we should not draw any conclusions from it concerning real world issues, but this plot point not only seems to downplay the political issue from the present that the writer presumably cares about, but it is so ill-conceived that it would probably be more likely to make one question whether or not the whole thing is baloney rather than persuade. But Skinner's shining brilliance and the hokey writing is such that only he can produce a mass-adopted super drug with a hidden kill switch and not only time that with the ice caps deteriorating but accurately predict the occurrence. However, the climate change plot is mostly forgotten in favor of something else by the end, indicating the event was not that pressing after all. It seems as if the writer has no self-awareness when it comes to his pet issue, which is too speculative to make for convincing fiction. We are immediately given dialogue to indicate how you are supposed to feel about the perspective of Skinner on climate change and whatever was presented on his Wikipedia page in this instance: "Sounds like a pretty decent guy." "Sounds too good to be true [Botox bimbo face]. Maybe he was doing some really evil stuff." As if his Hapna scheme were not enough, they have to find some other dastardly deeds in his early life. Oh, he won three Nobel Prizes and donated all of his money to charity. Whoop-de-doo and cue the Community "Ha Gay!" meme. "He was seen giving his seat to an elderly woman on the train... and helping out a homeless person... And there was this time that he tried to eat a sandwich, but then a stray dog took it away from him." "He seems like an all around good person." "The guy's practically a saint." Can I get a barf bag, please? There is example after example of this, and it becomes repetitive fast. I would think this were satire of the left-right divide in the U.S. if not for script cues looking to enshrine Skinner as a saint and ascended master. However, what the script is initially presenting is that everything about Skinner, on the surface, is "good," but that this veneer conceals the evilest of evil bastard geniuses, which is made obvious when you realize Skinner is supposed to be an Anti-Christ figure. The comparison is not altogether different from the sympathetic portrayal of Lucifer/Satan in Paradise Lost, where Milton must have realized the best way to depict a convincing villain is to make him relatable so that you can imagine yourself being tempted to become him or to make the same choices, were your circumstances similar. Hapna is seen as a godsend, an "opium of the masses," yet this wonder-drug harbors the doom of humanity. Skinner is seen by Lazarus as being like a saint, yet the description of the Anti-Christ in the bible is that he will appear to be good as a means of deception; Skinner is also from Turkey and appears to be half-Turkish, as his first name is the Turkish Deniz. The reason that he is from Turkey is because this is one of the theorized locations for the appearance of the Anti-Christ, and Islam and the Ottoman Empire were commonly enemies of the Christian west. Gog and Magog are associated with end times prophecy, and Turkey is sometimes interpreted to be Magog. There's even a brief, subtle nod linking a prepubescent Skinner to a horseman in Israel, with the White Rider of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse being associated with the Anti-Christ. The name Skinner refers to one who skins an animal, and it pertains to the surface and what is underneath, much like how Skinner appears a certain way but hides a darker nature, though this also applies to certain twists in the story as well. Nevertheless, despite the Abrahamic symbolism, this is not a supernatural story, and anyone concerned with climate change will never be depicted as the real villain in a prominent media production. While Christians often think of the Anti-Christ as an evil figure, he is part of god's plan, and, in that sense, becomes a quite tragic character. To reinforce this tragic element, the scene in Turkey is also heavily symbolic. The red tulip derived from Skinner relates to Islamic and Turkish legends. Leland, by dressing in an Arabic thawb was not just playing the clown for a quick laugh but was meant to look like a "prince," as referenced by the young girl playing with dolls. This scene is a nod to the story of prince Farhad and Shirin. Another similar story is the Battle of Karbala, where the imam grandson of Muhammad, Husayn ibn Ali, dies and is martyred. He is often referred to as the "prince of martyrs." Upon their death, the story goes that their blood seeps into the desert and gives rise to red tulips, a symbol of sacrifice—often carried out for the sake of higher causes. And what could be a higher cause than a 5D chess scheme to unify the population and have the UN enforce the Worldwide Butt Plug Filtration Act to reduce emissions? I'm speechless, and Skinner's transcendent love for humanity knows no bounds. Aside from the reference to Lazarus, the character Christ brought back to life after 4 days, there are other references to Christianity. Axel is supposed to be a Christ figure, which might not appear obvious at first, but he frolics with the "sinners" and dregs of society (we are even taken to a homeless camp on his initiative), much like Christ; Axel is also (involuntarily) doing a good deed for humanity, much like how Christ, um, washed dirty feet, I guess? A minor point is that Axel's good luck charm is a wing, like that of an angel's, supposedly protecting him from harm, with it also being connected to creation; he wears a red shirt, and red is associated with him on the OP and one version of the cover art: The color is evocative of Christ's sacrifice on the cross and the symbolic significance of blood in religious practices. More serious points include the name Axel being derived from the Danish Absalon, which is thought to be a corruption of Absalom, a Hebrew name. One of the sons of King David is named Absalom, and the name means "Father of Peace." Christ is supposed to be descended from King David as well, even if this makes no sense in respect to the supposed "virgin birth"; speaking of which, even the desaturated ED is "pregnant with meaning," as the camera tracks through a highway of seemingly dead bodies, only for Axel to "resurrect" and stand up at the end of the road. The other hint is the symbolic 888-year prison sentence that Axel received. In certain Christian numerological or gematria circles, Christ is associated with this number. There is also plenty of Judaic and Christian imagery as well, such as flocks of doves; the seven angels sounding the seven trumpets of Revelations, each resulting in a cascade of cataclysmic events, until the seventh ushers in the kingdom of Christ; the ugly post-post-modern crucified figure on a building that looks like the cat coughed up the Tower of Babel (on a similar note, a key multicultural location is called Babylonia!); and the dreidel in the introduction, with the letters on the four sides often thought to be associated with enemies of the Jews, such as Babylon, Rome, etc. Christine could be viewed as having a meaning like "follower of Christ," and the name is close to the word Christian. Another notable name is Hersch, the old hag leading Team Lazarus: The name has German, Hebrew, and Yiddish associations and means "deer." Quoting Psalms 42 might be the best conclusion here: "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God." And Psalms 18: "He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he causes me to stand on the heights." Plenty of this could be overlooked because they're squishing it all into symbolism and coded references, but the writers want to make sure everyone absorbs this oh-so-deep message of a battle between good and evil on some level. They give you the secular comic book version by referencing Team Avengers. They also give you the tl;dr religious version: "I swear, Skinner is the devil incarnate..." "Well, if he's the devil, then I suppose that makes us the angels that are going to kick his ass back to hell." *The rest of Team Lazarus groan on their Zoom call.* Ultimately, this is a hokey Abrahamic-filtered eschatological (scatological is easier to say and just as accurate) thriller in the vein of the Left Behind novel series, only it is a mixture of seinentard realism and caricatured political dystopia rather than a fantastical exploration of the Revelation prophecy, the Anti-Christ's plans, and the rapture; the Anti-Christ in LB similarly gives a speech before the UN, but he is a smoother operator than the crybaby Skinner, and the "Tribulation Force," sounding quite similar to a Team Avengers-like entity, is organized to stop him. Other than that, Lazarus has the John Wick guy choreographing fight scenes that look like Jackie Chan flipping around on a spaceship with zero gravity and toppling baddies far bigger than him, along with some zany hijinks along the way that resemble the scattered neo-noir subplots of CB, yet the action is the only remotely compelling aspect of the series, and this new "current thing" kind of political angle is unlikely to age well.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Jun 15, 2025
Ousama Ranking
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Mixed Feelings Funny
Ousama Ranking is well made, as is to be expected from Wit Studio, but the nice guyification of fantasy is becoming a tiresome trend. If it is not a pretense like "gray morality" that rules the day and reveling in vileness, then we are increasingly presented with (basic bitch) layered villains who have the most unbelievable redemption arcs of all time. This results in authors trying to inject a touching backstory into their villain's motivation and having the hero spare or forgive his arch-nemesis, even if what they have done is treacherous, resulting in the deaths of many and the ruination of the kingdom. The
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trend is a strange one because you'll often see the heroes ruthlessly dispatching their world's equivalent of personality-free stormtroopers or goombas without a thought, but for some reason the one giving orders is given a slap on the wrist, which smacks of social engineering, as if those in power are saying, "Yes, okay, we're responsible, but don't be too mean to us for having harmed you."
Probably more than half the cast goes through a totally fake process like this, from "good" to "bad" and back to "good," once they've been forgiven and redeemed, and the young heroes of the cast will forgive like no other, in contrast to the wrath of the mean giant father Big Bosse. That's one thing I appreciate about Kimetsu no Yaiba at least, no matter how soundly it is mocked. It wants you to cry like a baby, and it shows sympathy, or even empathy, but the only mercy granted to the villains is a blade striking them down. OR is the opposite of KnY, with the sob backstories being used to forgive. "Uwaah, young master, I see that your tears shine true, and now I am crying too; oh boohoo, let us all hug and be friends hitherto." To hell with this nice guyism. Forget forgiveness, crocodile tears, and trite moral preening seeping into fantasy. Let the heads roll and rivers turn crimson. The post-modern heroes and villains of today are disgusting. Yes, let us give super powers to a hopelessly naive deaf-mute 5-year-old who talks like this: "UHFHFUU FHUBUFNJFNFJNF CUCUCNUNC," and he can be our moral better and spare everyone. Despite this communication issue having promise for a more dynamic story, most of the important characters understand him with ease or Kage acts as interpreter. When it comes to characters resolving their wicked ways, there are extenuating circumstances for a number of them, but it is not as easy to make the case for Miranjo and causing so much trouble just so she and Big Bosse can go on adventures again. In my estimation, the (spiritual boomer) duo's scheme is practically the equivalent of a man eloping with his mistress and killing off his family for insurance money, then burning the whole kingdom down for good measure, because why not? The machinations and double crossing of various characters early on would lead one to believe the series will culminate in a grand tragedy, but this series has the same toddler-approved soft-pedaling as Disney applied to Brothers Grimm. The conflict can be emotional, there's a decent character dynamic between Bojii and Kage, and Daida acts as a good counterpoint as an initially more arrogant and confident character. Then Miranjo is introduced and goes on to muck everything up. It is believable that Daida would develop a bond with Miranjo in these circumstances of being trapped in darkness and vicariously experiencing what she went through, but the studio did not convey this transition well. The problem is that Daida disappears and becomes unimportant by this point, only to emerge briefly at the end, his mind changed without allowing us the opportunity of working through these changes with him; further undermining his contributions as a character is that he ends up possessed and functions as a different person in many scenes. The focus should have been more on Daida than Miranjo or at least divided between the two. Additionally, it is unfortunate that what starts off as such a unique fantasy by anime standards rapidly devolves into a simple, linear shonen toward the end, starting when Bojii's training with Despa begins. Similar to the unseen developments of Daida, Bojii's transformation into a swordsman is not shown. He becomes a powerful fighter with an abrupt time skip, which is odd considering the slower pace of prior episodes, highlighting the grueling rise of an underdog so effectively. This lack of showing the refinement of Bojii's swordsmanship is a mistake, for it is difficult to believe that he can use a rapier so minimalist as to be a sewing needle for anything other than attempting to mend the copious number of holes and gaps in the badly stitched tapestry of plot and character motivations. Instead, he pacifies foes vastly larger and physically stronger than himself, redirecting their blows, dodging, and poking them until they concede that they have been naughty and beg for forgiveness, which Bojii immediately grants like the good boy that he is. The most fearsome villain conveniently employs techniques that are meant to bleed his opponents out slowly rather than kill them, and you can guess this means a lot of "deaths" are going to be cop-outs or our characters will be revived, and this cheap trick becomes exasperating. Especially with everyone crying all the time, leading to desensitization due to the lack of tension and never-ending tears and snot, if not outright laughter for how absurd the whole arc is. The first half made me think this would be a solid anime if it had a great finale, but it is merely "OK" and leaves one with the impression of vain admiration for Wit's visual acuity to dazzle its audience toward undeserved generosity, much like the concept behind The Emperor's New Clothes, a fairy tale that OR clearly drew influence from, and it shows in the worst kind of way. The other elephant in the room to address is a controversial one concerning colonialism. Is it confirmed that the author is basing the colonial segment on the Japanese colonizing the Koreans? There is no official confirmation from the author, but it makes sense for this historical event to be the influence for the colonization segment of the story. Yet it is also not a direct parallel, given this is a fantasy world, so the historical details are kind of irrelevant (and often distorted in the first place). Historically, colonization has simply been something distinct groups of humans do to other humans, and it is only in recent years that there has been moral hysteria about it. It happened, and every work needing to condemn colonialism or whichever idea is beyond tiresome. Not everything needs to conform to the status quo of the day, which is ever-changing. The thing is, this segment is not necessarily well written, and the way it is used to justify other parts of the script is hackneyed. The idea of a colonizing power benefiting the colonized nation but them being ungrateful or resentful and then retaliating is not even ahistorical. It probably happens in every instance on a small or large scale, and the brutality Miranjo was subjected to is quite realistic. Most people do not want to be colonized, but there are sometimes positives and negatives associated with the experience, and infrastructure and technological developments are often one of the (presumed) positives. Furthermore, we are focusing on the emotionalized perspective of a young girl and her family. As for everyone being forgiven in this series but not the "Korean stand-ins": This would probably be a product of the "older generation," seeing as these scenes were from the perspective of Big Bosse and Miranjo, who chose not to forgive, and there were not any obvious cues to soften the image of the "Korean stand-ins." It is Bojii and, eventually, Daida who become part of a new, more forgiving generation; even the thieving shadow puddle non-humanoid entities are forgiven, so I am willing to believe that anyone and everyone has the potential of being forgiven, no matter how villainous. The contrast in the generations is pretty obvious: big, strong, and mean versus small, weak, and nice. It is basically daddy complex, the anime. In conclusion, the oh-so-controversial "pro-colonization" segment will probably be subverted in the future, leaving egg on the face of those seething over reeeee colonialism, not that I care either way. However, putting all of that aside, the whole point of this brutal scene was to provide a tragic backstory for Miranjo and prep us to feel sorry for her, so we can cry our eyes out for her redemption. Sorry, babe, I know what happened to you was rough, but that does not excuse what you did in the future, so there is a guillotine lined up for you. I mean... there should be, but "Miranjo OMG KAWAII UwU love wins all. She might have done many terrible things to my kingdom, but I am going to make her my waifu." Typical anime. I think this is some kind of fetish where a man wants to be horribly abused by a woman, then reforms her into his wife. When put that way, it bears a similarity to women sending letters to serial killers about how much they love them, except this is a fantastical and presumably more healthy depiction of fetishism. The fact that I have made this comparison numerous times and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the future is a good example of how deeply pussywhipped anime is.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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May 8, 2025
Your Forma
(Anime)
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Not Recommended Funny Informative Preliminary
(3/13 eps)
Is the LN of Your Forma any good? I cannot say. But this is, without doubt, a terrible adaptation. The author is not happy with it either. The way Satelight handled the recent adaptation of Übel Blatt by cutting out the first three chapters was a poor choice, but Geno Studio's director skipped volume 1 of the LN, started with volume 2, and failed to rescript in a suitable manner, making this one of the worst examples of cut content, other than condensing 50-hour VNs into a 4-hour anime. There are possibly good elements to these cuts because back when I was watching Metallic Rouge,
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I was yawning when they were babbling on about Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. This kind of reference might be helpful for the sci-fi novice, but it gets redundant. However, the pacing is too fast and without the proper buildup that would be granted from volume 1, often damaging the characters and leading to scenes and references that are out of place. Certain moments have more directorial and compositional flair to them than is average for slop seasonals at least, but one aspect where the direction is poor is the storytelling, which is often confusing.
The brain dive concept is interesting in the way that the characters are able to probe the subconscious and memories of a subject, sometimes resulting in disorientation for the "brain detective." The idea has been explored in a number of movies and books, but it is not quite as common as I would have hoped for in anime. Older films, like the 1990s Darkside Blues, touch upon this lightly via fantasy; Psycho Diver, a 1990s OVA explores the idea briefly in a dark, gruesome sci-fi world, with the dives resembling a nightmare; Satoshi Kon heavily explored this with far more surreal imagery in his Paprika; and a number of other titles, like Kaiba did similar things, but Id:Invaded, another brain-diving police procedural series, is probably the closest to YF: One brain dive in YF is depicted in a similar fashion, with the "hole" in a character's chest resembling one of the scenes in Id. Thus far, they have used the device to find a few clues, but they have yet to truly take a deep dive into the mind or do anything compelling with the concept. They used a Matryoshka doll as a symbol in the first scene, but there is not much layering or genuine disorientation here, except for what results from production problems. Honestly, I am not sure if I can take a series seriously when it stars a girl named "Bigga." I know that seems like a frivolous thing to take issue with, but that is truly bothersome, and I could not figure out why Bigga was inserted into the plot at this moment, as it seems confusing and irrelevant in relation to the rest of the story and probably could have been incorporated elsewhere. Who even is Bigga, and why should we care? The reason for this weirdness is because the anime skips volume 1, so the various characters lack an introduction, and the same goes for the world. Darya's name is not even used in the first conversation between her and the FMC, but she would have been fully established as a character in volume 1, and we only slowly piece together who she is throughout the episode. A line of dialogue indicates the main duo had a rough start and the FMC is not keen on androids, but that, too, is skipped. As is the apparent conflict between the FMC and Bigga. There is a reference to the FMC's sister as well, which is again in relation to more cut material. It does not feel like a first episode because a proper adaptation would have started with volume 1, and Geno Studio's attempt at skipping ahead is amateurish. Since we started with a brain dive scene, the whole thing had a somewhat hallucinatory, dream-like feel, but it turns out the episode was just normal, and that brain dive scene was nothing other than a quick preview of the duo's brain dive detective work... The event involving the amicus attack on a human is also explored in volume 1, though the exclusion of that is probably not detrimental to the adaptation or as wonky as these other character issues. Maybe they had a good reason to skip to volume 2, but they absolutely needed a rescript. they probably could have done a movie version or a longer than normal episode to cover the most important parts of volume 1 at least, not to cover everything that happened in volume 1 but to establish the characters and other important details prior to S2, if that would even be possible. The dramatic part on the bridge between Lucraft and Echika, after the former used a gambit to make a break in a case but at the cost of damaging their relationship, feels lifeless. It happens in the second episode when it probably would have been more warranted at the halfway point of the series. If we had been exposed to volume 1's material, then we would have presumably had enough investment in their relationship for this to feel better balanced. I can see how this relationship might work with the right kind of chemistry, but the line delivery and emotions are unbelievably flat, like everyone is just going through the motions. There's a clear distinction here between human and android "thinking," which is a part of the conflict between the two, but too much material was cut for any of this to feel fleshed out. The decision Lucraft makes feels like a logical one for a machine, but there is also a sense in which it is not actually that logical and indicates that he needs to be fed more data. There are strange aspects to the writing as well. The design of the android line was based on a human, but they did not look into him for a lead? No one thought of that? If you are going to use your partner as bait, it would be wise if you had people staking out the scene to actually capture the culprit rather than let them get abducted, would it not? If that is not possible, would it not be best to let the bait in on the plan to increase the chance of capturing the culprit? Why not make the brain plugs more secure and not so easy to get access to? Imagine being on a crowded subway car and having someone finger your brain hole 🤢. This whole segment was not well thought out. It gets even worse later on. If you find a dangerous criminal who is already tied up, why would you untie him, except as a convenient and dumb plot twist? Then if we return to the Three Laws of Robotics issue, it is still absurd: Lucraft is an assistant to a detective, and he was programmed in such a way that he could not stop a culprit from choking out and tying up his partner and could not attack the perpetrator so as to detain him, then Lucraft stands there like a dumbass as he is crippled by a sledgehammer? What!? You would think they would be programmed to engage in non-lethal takedowns at least! Suspending disbelief is a demanding task. It does not matter if they introduce some element into the story to justify this scene later on, as it looks like poor writing, and the damage is already done. This part also could have been rescripted to make it more believable, regardless of how it went in the LN. The series is chock-full of B-movie action and thriller writing like this. For atmospheric flavoring, there is a darker tone to YF in some areas. Harold W. Lucraft seems to be a nod to H. P. Lovecraft (with the name Howard being close to Harold and the emphasis on the middle initial) in much the same way Edogawa Rampo is to Edgar Allan Poe. Lexie Carter appears to be another Lovecraft reference, this time to Randolph Carter, as well as the use of butterfly imagery for her introduction, and anywhere else that the symbol is used, being on the dreamy side. This is a sensible and meaningful reference to Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, in light of YF's themes and concept. The university looks to be the center of the android crimes and will occupy a space similar to Lovecraft's Miskatonic university, swamping the plot with mystery and murder. Though this is not a horror series, there are scenes of mild violence and even some surprisingly gruesome synthetic body horror moments. References to Lovecraft seem more interesting here than average because the series is not making lame references in the context of a Lovecraft ripoff but seems to be applying some of his dream and cosmic elements and motifs to technology, transhumanism, human-android relationships, and brain diving, which is a novel spin that could probably produce fascinating overlap. Then, finally, in stark contrast to the potential for atmosphere detailed above, there are the generic-looking shojo romance designs and characters: Lucraft is a "cheeky" ikemen android husbando sidekick to a flat cat lady lead (I am not talking about her cleavage, but she is washboard-flat there too), who cannot have a human partner because she is so advanced in her brain diving that everyone else ends up with fried brains. To add to the weirdness, it turns out the Japanese voice actors for the two leads are married, giving one the impression of watching a bumbling and slow-burn opposites-attract romance: flesh and machine uniting; one reserved, the other outgoing. Otherwise put, the autistic, awkward, and mildly "taboo" romance of two autists from Gimai Seikatsu unfolding, when this is supposed to be a high-concept and psychological detective sci-fi. He is always flashing his gaggy smile, at one point making her blush and resort to behavior practically like the tsundere-esque routine of "It's not like I like you or anything, b-baka!" The suggestion of attraction with a human FMC and male android does not work nearly as well as the other way around for obvious reasons. There are also moments where the android will hope to repair their relationship: "I, too, wish I could dive into you." That is probably one of the most unintentionally vulgar lines I have heard in a sci-fi. Then we get moments equivalent to "Echika-chan, I bought you a little stuffed goat to calm thee. Please take it, my pookie." Now the only thing that remains to be seen is whether or not Lucraft has a vibrating mecha phallus to provide better work-life balance for Echika, but I will not stick around long enough to have the misfortune of finding out.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Apr 10, 2025
Ryuu no Haisha
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Dragon Dentist looks promising at first, with a unique fantasy setup of cleaning mushi cavities and plaque buildup amongst the huge rows of dragon teeth, for dragons are nearly unstoppable weapons, but their one weakness is that they have a bit of a sweet tooth. What I thought might be on the fantastical SoLish side turns out to be a "serious" story of war between two ill-defined sides. The worldbuilding is vague and limited to the mystical and metaphysical possibilities of the dragon's teeth alone. The characters are dull and the script is heavy handed, leaving us without much other than an often appealing aesthetic
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(when the CGI isn't too obtrusive, like in the finale), half-baked themes, and a dragon as a unique micro-world within a world, and one of those grand spiritual-laden conclusions so common to anime. While I try to avoid heavily summarizing a title, it's impossible to talk about what I want to discuss without a large amount of context and plot summary.
We start with an explosive action sequence between a fleet of dragons obscured ominously by clouds and rapidly decimated battleships. Aspects of the scene look old, so you could point to WWII-era technology, especially given the appearance of the dragon dentist base attached to the dragon that will be revealed once we have been introduced to the dragon dentists in the next scene. There's a feel of early 20th century Japan, before they were defeated, especially with the four-eyes commander looking like an imperial army caricature and being mildly antagonistic with the dragon dentists. All of the dentists and soldiers on this side have Japanese names and are of the same ethnicity. We can see here that the creator presents the dragon dentists as noble, while the soldiers are hardly portrayed other than to be criticized as oppressive. While the backstory is never explained, one might imagine an alternative scenario where Japan was on the verge of defeat in WWII and acquired dragons. For the enemy side, most of them appear to be European, South/Central American, black, and mixed ethnic or racial groups. The enemies shown never appear to be a single ethnicity, like the Japanese dragon dentists, and there's a feeling of a nationalist versus globalist power, the latter being in the most literal sense, with Japan being the last bastion for the former. This gives me the impression that nearly the entire world is the enemy of Japan, with them having the advantage because of their command over dragons, though they presumably hold far less territory and manpower. The premise is similar to Attack on Titan in a lot of ways. For the sake of convenience and the lack of worldbuilding, I will call Nonoko's country Japan and the enemy country Not-Japan (whether "the enemy" comes from one country, multiple countries, or one global empire or some such is never made clear, presumably for the sake of universalizing the events). It follows the commonly seen anime notion of a liberal post-war Japan either turning back the clock to prevent a defeat or regaining respect and dominance and looking to broker peace with the world, while grappling with its own war-like, imperialist, or colonialist ambitions, which is pretty common in the work of authors like Ryousuke Takahashi or Kaiji Kawaguchi. Though we never actually see dragons eat, they accumulate all kinds of nasty creepy crawlies upon their teeth. The three rows of teeth on top and bottom are, of course, giant compared to our heroes, so they use ropes to climb their way to the top, and they plod along the gums of different dental alleyways, shoveling crud into bags, and exploding black cavity-like mushi mobs with their assortment of crimson melee weapons. Every so often, teeth will degrade and crack, and stronger mushi will emerge for them to fight. The process of becoming a dragon dentist involves being absorbed into the tooth, being shown one's death, and not struggling against one's fate. To struggle is to be fully absorbed. To accept it is to be "spat out" and stationed with cleaning the teeth. Oddly, the teeth act as a kind of metaphorical prop, with the cavities and toxic mushi obviously emerging from the dragon's teeth because of the war itself. Soldiers, friends and foes alike, are seemingly absorbed into the teeth upon their death, and those who are available to listen can hear the voices of the dead emanating from them, with the inner chambers of the vast pearly whites acting as something like a purgatory or afterlife or a repository for memories and consciousness. Discarded military equipment pours out of the teeth on a daily basis, acting as more detritus for the dragon dentists to clear and providing a touch of mystery and dread in the same way one might find an abandoned ship upon a mist-laden sea, filled with items of unknown belonging. These strange interactions with the teeth represent the cycle of warfare between the two sides, but without the war, it would still be a place of the dead. The primary reason the dragons need a dentist is because of the "foolish" actions of man, for they debase nature with their ways. The ideal would be for man to be at peace and the dragon to continue its natural role rather than the destructive parasitism of humanity using it as a weapon. Dragon dentists are not even needed for dragons to maintain good oral health (remember that many "uncivilized" tribes have strong, healthy, straight, white teeth without having ever been to a dentist, and it's actually some of our developed habits that make us so dependent on them), and what they do is only necessary because of the horrors the two sides are committing against each other. If the dragon dentists were to abandon their posts and there were a shortage of them, then the Japanese couldn't continue to use the dragons as weapons. This would presumably balance the war between the two sides, which might eventually lead to reconciliation and an improvement in health of the dragons and humanity. This, of course, casts aside whether or not peace is a good choice for the people controlling the dragon. Not-Japan might even double down on eradicating Japan if they were to lose their best weapon, sunk cost fallacy or otherwise. Struggle and war are also a part of nature, and humans being able to better harness resources to inflict more damage hardly changes this. In this sense, Dragon Dentist is another preachy anti-war and environmental film, just like Ghibli, Origin: Spirits of the Past, or Arjuna. It warrants attention that Nonoko's fate is to be killed on the battlefield by a young European soldier with blue eyes and blonde hair, who she says is beautiful. Bernard Octavius (Bell), is a yomigaeri drawn out of the dragon's tooth. The dentists are hesitant to touch Bell and want to allow him to be absorbed into the tooth because of the potential hassle of dealing with yomigaeri, who are something like bad omens, but Nonoko saves him. She also remarks that he is beautiful, much like the boy in her vision, and they look relatively similar. She is predictably assigned to be his trainer and they develop a bond that verges toward romance. This is clearly a nod toward reconciliation between the two sides, for Bell was murdered by his own unit and is estranged from either side, so he could reasonably act as a bridge between the two toward achieving peace. While Nonoko and most of the dentists are dutiful and accept their fate that is tied to the dragon and conflict, Bell thinks they should fight against their fate and he is only ever an ambivalent and clumsy dragon dentist, eventually rejecting the role altogether in the second half, albeit rather abruptly and without much buildup. The central conflict for Bell begins before he meets the dragon dentists and is reborn as a yomigaeri, with him being a ranked officer due to privilege, for his parents were military doctors (it's thematically relevant that they are doctors). The men around him are bigger and stronger. He fits the stereotype of the studious school kid, and they look like chiseled, battle-hardened soldiers. This has historically been a fairly common scenario, where you have officers who are given such a position without earning the respect of their unit (either because of education or family) and would have likely never been promoted to such a role by normal means. Whoever assigned Bell to be the commander of this unit is a moron. One of the soldiers under Bell's command is Blanco, who acts as one of the main antagonists. The name is Spanish, but his origins are unclear, with him being of mixed descent from a likely former Spanish colony or the equivalent for this world. He's one of those mysterious figures who stands in the middle of the battlefield without fear, for all gunfire appears to be deflected, as if some unknown force were shielding him. This is a common trope in nonsensical grimdark war films to comment on fate or something something, though it clearly doesn't apply to Blanco's teeth, for most of them have been knocked out, rendering him as an ugly toothless old bastard any time he opens his mouth. Just as with older caricatures in fiction, Bell is beautiful, and his nemesis is ugly, though the other traitorous villain is granted mercy in appearance and perceived in a more sympathetic light. Hoping to save themselves from the wrath of the dragon, the unit abandons a wounded and unconscious soldier. Bell wants them to save the soldier, but they mutiny. Bell orders them at gunpoint, shaking in his boots in fear. Blanco disarms him, and the unit stabs Bell. Bell would be justified to shoot Blanco for insubordination, not just in self-defense but to establish his authority, for Blanco was coming to disarm him and would not follow orders. What would happen next is uncertain. Would the others kill Bell or fall in line? But it's better than being gutted like a fish. The convenience of the dragon and the gunshot being loud, of course, stacks things against Bell completely because he would blow their cover by firing, maybe resulting in them all dying either way, which is also why they knife him. But Bell's hesitation to shoot Blanco is not because of this practical concern. Bell is stupid or too kind for his own good. Given the situation, it was not a good time to assert authority and not be able to deliver, though his reason for doing so is understandable. Bell is a coward, but that's also not the reason he does not shoot Blanco, per the script. The primary reason is because Bell is a good boy without "killing intent." In the final confrontation between Blanco and Bell, this same situation is repeated, and the thematic coup de grâce is delivered. Blanco and Bell have their standoff, each pointing a gun at each other. Bell could have tried shooting out Blanco's few remaining teeth with his pistol, like that one arcade game where you spray wacky slabs of cartoonish chompers, knocking them down one by one. Instead, Bell now faces Blanco without fear, has no intention to fire, and is shot, but the cavity tentacles kill Blanco because of his "killing intent." The whole production resembles a dream where the scenario was rewritten for Bell to die in a more dignified manner, to have been right to not fire the gun in the past or present, and for justice to have been served, like some cheesy ghost story. There is a large battle at the end with anyone who has "killing intent" being slaughtered by the cavity tentacles. For all we know, those killed might be the bulk of the army for both sides, meaning there would need to be a hiatus to the war, but I sincerely doubt this, and we're given no context to make such a determination. Japan still has dragons, so they are the dominant power. The idea that the cavity feeds off the "killing intent" of man like this is ridiculous and hypocritical. Somehow, the boy who was meant to kill Nonoko is shown to survive, but if he had "killing intent" toward her in the vision (and the visions are shown to be accurate based on the death of Shuuzou, short of some intervention by some unforeseen event, like a yomigaeri being born), shouldn't he have had "killing intent" toward the other soldiers and would also be killed? That's a plot hole, unless we are to believe something contrived, like the pile of corpses formed a shield for him, or he gets off on killing women only. The medics were not being killed because they were simply treating the wounded, so they couldn't have had "killing intent." The same goes for the dragon dentists. The message on war seems kind of nonsensical considering Japan keeps using the dragons for war. Even if you can say the dentists don't have "killing intent," they are undoubtedly responsible for more deaths of the other side than any single soldier with "killing intent." The irony here is how we judge soldiers who are possibly conscripted and forced to kill because of the threat of violence from the state, yet the medics and dragon dentists are presented as a cut above, despite the former keeping these "killers" going, and the latter maintaining weapons of mass destruction. If not for Bell, presumably most of the events of the series would have happened, with Hibana betraying her country, causing the cavity overload, and for Blanco to escape with or destroy the wisdom tooth. The result would have been for the dragon we follow in this story to be taken down by the foreigners and for Nonoko to be killed by the blonde soldier on the battlefield, who is shown alive, rising out of a pile of bodies to smile at the sunset. Bell changed fate and instead of this story ultimately leading to the kind of "come together" reconciliation that I expected or any talk of peace, Japan still has another one of its dragons to continue the war effort against Not-Japan. Bell wasn't even betrayed by his own country. He was betrayed by his own unit. Helping Japan instead of Not-Japan seems questionable because we don't have any comparison of the two sides. Since Bell was from the other side, you can see why I would think this is about bringing about peace between the two, but the other side is primarily an enemy and we don't know why either side is fighting. The production has the appearance of Bell becoming a traitor and sacrificing himself for a waifu, even though that's not the case. Bell never gives a coherent argument for why he does what he does or compares the two sides. It seems like he is choosing neither side by saying that he's not a dragon dentist and declaring war is bad, but what he does ultimately helps the dragon dentists (and, by extension, Japan as a whole). Here is a summary of Bell's various shifts in perspective: "WAAAAH, my unit mutinied and killed me. Oh, this waifu might have sex with me if I stay by her side. I don't want the responsibility of being a dragon dentist and want to forage berries in the woods instead. Oh, no, my sweet waifu needs me. Let me give my life to save Japan and its wonderful waifus, so they can continue to fight against my country with full force." It can be argued that what he did was not for Japan but for the Japanese dragon dentists who have bought into a deterministic agreement to the dragon on behalf of Japan. The conflict between the Japanese military and the dragon dentists is established early on, and the dentists protect Bell from them. Nonoko probably was not keen on being a dragon dentist, except she appeared to be a war orphan living a meager existence, so she went for it. We can imagine a lot of her compatriots are similar. Bell, when he was taking orders from Not-Japan, also seemed to prefer not to be part of the war and both of his parents similarly died as a result of it, then he died at the hands of mutineers for adhering to his ideals. With Bell's first death, he transcends the conflict itself. He is the savior come back from the dead, attempting to enlighten the humble dragon dentists who act according to orders from Japan but actually hold all the power and could resist, if only they could realize their own worth and leverage, just as anyone who goes against fate is called "brave" by Godou, the head dragon dentist. Bell urging the dragon dentists to challenge their fate means to abandon their role as dragon dentists. Similar to how I have mixed feelings about the way they present Bell as turning away from his own side, I can't help but think Bell is a meek Christ figure who comes in like a trojan horse and inspires Japan to give up their one all-mighty weapon and be subsumed by the hordes of Not-Japan. If we're presented with an element of reform to Japan but not to Not-Japan, the whole thing appears unbalanced and unconvincing in its sentiment, as if striving for being stamped under a boot. The ending also is unsatisfying, with Bell comparing a childhood event where his horse threw him into a marsh and left him to drown to Nonoko proudly casting him aside as he dies. The one solace for him is that the horse galloped out of the water and moved on without any concern for his former master, while his waifu obliviously looks around for him now that he is dead, so at least he's getting a few scraps of concern. Hope it was worth it, cherry boy. The final frame is Nonoko descending the stairway of the shrine that houses the wisdom tooth of the dragon, which is a symbol of Japan's pact with the dragon, and she's calling out to Bell to return to the status quo of scrubbing dragon teeth. His importance to her and moving away from the shrine in the final frame could suggest that she will come to reappraise her views much in the same way Bell did, but we're not given anything more explicit than that. An ending where Nonoko acknowledges that Bell could not be found and must have once again died and became reabsorbed by the tooth, using voiceover much in the same way that they had with Bell, would have been more meaningful and probably could have suggested a bitterness that might lead to reform. Bell is the only character with much depth or development, but Nonoko is never given the chance, remaining no more than the waifu who could have been. She didn't necessarily need to be developed as much as Bell, but we should at least see the seed of development planted in lieu of Bell seeding her. There is not enough information given to Nonoko for her to understand that Bell's existence and actions changed her fate and likely that of the remaining dentists; while we are shown the battlefield in her vision, she never acknowledges the battlefield to be the same one, so she most likely is unaware. As the viewers, we know the fate of the dragon dentists is not set in stone, but they do not. It's fixed if they choose to be dragon dentists, but it's not if they abandon the role, which is arbitrary. Why should it be set in stone for going to war versus not going to war? Because the script said so. Dragon Dentist's take on violence, cyclical or otherwise, is naive. The idea seems to be that our characters should embrace their meekness. If we all did, there would be no violence. But there are always the meek and strong, those who engage in violence and those who won't. But if you want a hypothetical non-violent world, then you, other people, or multiple generations will have to do something that this script would deem "bad" to actually achieve that outcome. Otherwise said in a cynical but true fashion, you can't make an omelet without scrambling a few eggs. Something as revolutionary as "Violence is mean, so no violence is allowed" requires "killing intent" and a lot of bloodshed to achieve such an outcome. The setting is intriguing, but the themes percolating around the war story are somewhat muddled and not well conveyed, and the short length was not quite enough to fully flesh out the story, attenuating a lot of the vitality the production might have otherwise had.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Mar 29, 2025 Not Recommended Funny
Re:CUCK -Revenge of the Otakus in Another World- Season 3 is the worst in the series thus far, and the "rocking" OP that has all the smugly smiling characters lining up like they're walking into a capeshit film is telling. The dialogue and characters have always had weaknesses that were masked by the more intricate plotting, mystery, and tension of past seasons, yet with almost the entire cast bouncing off of one another with sassy one-liners and yucky banter in what has shapeshifted into a battle shonen, the series is at its most juvenile: Just look at the Looney Tunes ice skating chase with hammer
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bonks or the 12-year-old DBZ/Superman fanfic writing of one character heading to the moon and back to earth in less than a day.
Early parts of Re:LOLI feel like they're set at a kindergarten because of all the lollygagging with lolis, upping the ante for the baby talk moerot like never before, until they're sent to nap time because of how long the battles are. Looking to the latter half, episode 14 is a contender for the worst episode of the franchise. At least half of it's a sluggish, pointless flashback consisting of information the viewer either knew already from the White Whale arc or didn't need to know. The forced drama and crybaby antics here look like a parody (except they're dead serious) of a soap opera. Re:SNOT has led me to realize how important animation and composition are for crying scenes in particular. A raw closeup of grandpa Astrea ugly crying all of his dignity away, with the tears practically looking like icicles stabbing him in the eyes because of how static the shot is, cheapens everything further. The sappy music is the rotten cherry on top. The director embraces the author's clumsy melodrama and makes it even more obvious, when an adaptation should try to diminish these issues rather than double down on them. There are also a few added characters and developments outside of the main plot and battles: There are new rambling villains, with Wrath being like a Diet Petelguese but with a poorly concealed identity, and the reveal will undoubtedly be butchered by the ridiculous melodrama. Liliana is a bard, who looks exactly like Trixie Kong, with a hackneyed filler backstory that she dumps on us in the middle of a battle because we just needed another flashback to Re:TARD the pacing. For the character with the most bloat in Re:BARF, there's Garfield boasting of being a "Gorgeous Tiger," the unconvincing "trauma" of having Elsa stalk him as a figment of his mind (as opposed to the more appropriate Subaru), a generic quest for vengeance, and a sappy backstory and "must protecc" side plot. We could have done without most of this, and it's hard to imagine anyone being moved by his portrayal, as the main reveal undermines any developments to his character from the Sanctuary arc and is embarrassing. There are cliche things with great execution in many cases, but this is told without any real craftsmanship. Most other characters aren't worth mentioning. Although not as expressionistic as other examples of weebish heroes, like Dandadan's Ken Takakura and his removable pork and beans, Subaru is perhaps one of the most well-rounded pathetic, simp, doormat, zero-to-hero archetypes to emerge from the collective consciousness of the otaku. Which is not to say that Subaru is a good character, but he represents all the trashy wish-fulfillment, otaku pandering, and "Just Like Me" syndrome cases, and Re:REEK distills it all into one of the stinkiest, please-change-out-of-your-Adidas-track-suit-that-you've-been-wearing-for-several-years-straight-and-take-a-bath packages. It's all there. A NEET with no confidence, who sits around playing video games and does unspeakable things with grill figurines, dies and is isekaied into a world where he is quickly thrown waifus and responsibility far more desirable than what he'd ever find back home. That's not to say Subaru's rise is without considerable effort, for Re:CUCK isn't the easiest of power fantasies, at least at first. Furthermore, while he is OP, it comes with a cost: He is a loser who fails over and over, soaking up the pain and rage of the otaku like a suffering messiah as he works through the elaborate plot like a puzzle and makes things right with the help of his reset hacks, various mommies of his harem course-correcting and pulling him up by his bootstraps, and numerous higher-status males who come to respect him and blow smoke up his increasingly smug and annoying ass. An obvious undercurrent running through the series has always been Subaru's self-loathing, relative uselessness compared to the other characters, the constant tone of "You're pretty awkward and not very reliable, but I can see how hard you try," and whiny insecurities. Of course, because of the "reset by death" hack he achieves great things. Re:CUCK is ultimately about the reformation or redemption of the NEET otaku, but since being a cog in the machine is not particularly inspiring, we're instead treated to an exciting fantasy world, adventure, and lots of waifus. The meeting of Emilia and Subaru in S1 of Re:SIMP, which has him ascending from would-be stalker to white knight by means of a plot convenience, goes something like this: Emilia: Boohoo! Oh, if only I could reform the kingdom and end discrimination against half-elves like me. Subaru: That sounds like a great cause, Emilia-chan. Tell me, does your hypothetical society discriminate against otakus wearing Adidas track suits, by any chance? Emilia: What's an otaku? Are those the vegetarian hobbits with smol Peepis that I've been hearing about lately? Subaru: Ahahahaha... forget I asked *Subaru shifts his beady eyes*. I would be honored to help as your knight, milady *Subaru kneels and takes Emilia's hand, his long, thin, forked tongue slithering out with a hiss*. It appears quite a bit of that redemption is underway by S3 because the tone is now much lighter, whereas S1 sometimes felt like a horror series, for it dripped with Subaru's despair (okay, that was probably just the waste seeping out of his track suit), reveled in crushing suspense, and what seemed like perpetual dying and resetting. By contrast, S3 has all the characters appearing to respect Subaru, and even though ikemen like Julius used to roast him on a spit (at least he got in his "loli tsukai" line in this season, which is equivalent to little girl user/tamer/wielder), they're now brothers in arms, if not outright bromancers. A number of his waifus had tsundere traits, yet almost all of that has vanished, with even Ram probably eventually getting the tsundere-to-deredere pipeline taming treatment in future installments. Subaru, unsurprisingly, gets the kindest, most unconditional, mommy-like moeblob of all time, Emilia, who can see his inner beauty beneath the track suit, as his main squeeze (any moeblob who will not accept him unless he takes off his track suit is trash!). There are a few reasons why the tsundere archetype is popular. One is because they are more difficult to tame, and the other reason is because the more beta society becomes, the more desire there is to be treated like a doormat. But I think the other thing to note is that even when the tsundere kind of likes or even begrudgingly comes to love the MC, when she's being mean to him, there is a subconscious knowing that the little rat bastard deserves every kick to the balls and wounding of his pride that he gets. There's almost none of that here, even though he deserves it for being such an insufferable MC; spare the rod, spoil the child! Nevertheless, Subaru is on his way to becoming one of the great men of Re:CUCK's world and acts like a smug bastard put on a pedestal and worshipped. I'm sure he'll go down in history for his laughable "Okay, everyone, listen up. I'm a loser and totally pathetic compared to all of my allies, but even I'm managing in this struggle, so you can too" speech. Then he's like, "Don't make fun of me... I know it's a bad speech... Uwaaaah..." And his allies are like, "Nuh uh, that was amazing, Subaru-sama." While it's a matter of taste whether one wants a series that's on the darker or lighter side, the author doesn't handle the latter quite as well. Just look at his villains. They are unhinged baby-eating psychopaths on meth, cocaine, and caffeine, all at once. There's the gruesome device of dying to reset the story. Subaru is quite troubled throughout much of the series. Many of the characters are exposed to trauma to the point of crumbling under the weight of a psychotic break. There was an outlandishness to the scenarios because Subaru would end up having to correct the most dire of outcomes and navigate through a labyrinthine and ever-changing plot, and we got to see things from different angles that added dimension or information to characters and events that we wouldn't acquire otherwise. The device is used a few times early on in S3 and is soon forgotten, without even the slightest tension of it being utilized again for most of the run. Part of why this season is so lackluster is that there was once a greater sense of mystery and more attempts at creating atmosphere, yet all of that fades away as a result of S3 being like a long-form version of a battle shonen film. The formula for films of this type is even more subpar than your average TV shonen because we're introduced to new villains without much, if any, development or backstory, everything is usually rushed and shallow, and these films rarely rise above being action fanservice. To seal the deal, we even get to see Subaru suddenly become a poorly dressed Indiana Jones, tripping villains and swinging across rooftops with his whip. Very quickly, rivalries form or various characters pair off to either overcome a challenge or because they have some kind of counter to one of the villains. The worst part about the various characters being paired up against the villains is that it, again, sounds like a puzzle meant to be solved, just like the way the reset was often used in the past. It would have been more gripping had they failed because of uneven pairings, leading to Subaru dying and realizing a need to rearrange the parties so they are better matched. There could probably be more insight into the villains this way, since we would get to see them be victorious at least once or more. There are too many battles going on at once for anything to be well developed. Even though several of the villains had been introduced prior, like Gluttony and Greed, none of them had many scenes or much to their characters, not to mention that content was cut for the adaptation. Petelguese stood out with his unhinged monologuing, and that's pretty much the course taken with all of the villains, yet the scenery chewing has ceased to be that amusing. None of the villains receive as detailed of a portrayal or an appropriate amount of time like Petelguese did, who we even got to see prior to his induction into the cult. There are hardly any insights into these villains as we watch the battles unfold. Going into this, what do we really know about Gluttony, for example, other than he made a few of Subaru's waifus forget things? We don't learn anything else about him until nearly the last episode, when the anticipation for his fights would have been greater if his scenes had been incorporated earlier into the series, and there's no reason this couldn't have been restructured more because most of the fights are occurring simultaneously. Even if you set aside the lack of resetting, the plot structure is less than ideal, and the finale is extremely rushed. But once you understand how the formula works, you'll realize that there's no chance for any of the main characters to die or for Subaru to use his reset by death, completely dissolving any tension or interesting progression for most of the season. If you reset in relation to one of the several ongoing fights, you have to reset all of them, and that's a hassle, which just emphasizes the laziness of this season's approach. The most important fight of Re:CUCK S3 ushers in the ultimate NTR and Revenge of the Otakus experience. As if to provide foreshadowing, there's a scene where Subaru is driving the carriage and Otto and Emilia are having a friendly conversation in the back. The ever-insecure Subaru almost drives off the road at numerous points for our first dose of cuckold comedy. To make this component hit below the belt even harder, there have been a few tweaks to the character design, but they are most obvious with Emilia because she is the main heroine and temporarily a damsel in the worst kind of distress: the dreaded NTR event! In past seasons, when there was regular conflict between Emilia and Subaru, the eyes were sharper around the edges (tsurime), but they are now much softer and rounder (tareme). The result is that she appears more innocent and docile, has an increasingly generic "girl next door" moeblob feel, and she has lost any mystique she had from earlier seasons and is just Subaru's boring trophy. They also apply a blush effect that makes her look like she's in heat and dtf, heightening the impression that the Archbishop of NTR's Peepi is looming over her like a sword of Damocles. Then we get to the main course of ball-busting suspense, for the Archbishop of NTR swaggers in and abducts Subaru's elfblob to take as his waifu. Of course, the Archbishop of NTR has like 72 virgins already, and I imagine his cowering harem will subtly convert to Subaru's outer harem once his nemesis bites the dust. The contrast here is supposed to be that the Archbishop of NTR is the most tyrannical and perverse scumbag, while Subaru is gentle and noble. If you look past the initial dominance of the Archbishop of NTR, in a sense, he's like the most narcissistic and smug otaku who plays multiplayer video games with cheat codes (invincibility hacks), collects waifus (note that the virginity check is something of a red herring and these waifus are purely objects of another sort), and goes on endless monologues on message boards about how incredible he is, all leading to him being an NTR hentai super villain. He is the most obvious mirror held up to Subaru; the Archbishop of NTR is essentially a villainous Subaru with unlimited power and no character development. Most isekai and otaku-centric shows at least implicitly interact with the idea of a redemption story, but the way these two characters are paralleled is a riot. The "7 deadly sins" are obviously meant to be a reflection of the MC's bad traits that he's working through in some sense, but the author lays it on really thick: He writes a story where Subaru (author/otakus) meets Emilia (crush) first and can goof up and have infinite resets to win her over and save the day, and he's such a well-meaning, dedicated simp that she falls for him. Then the author depicts the Archbishop of NTR (bully) as the villain responsible for using and abusing his many conquests (harem). You can tell the author is attempting to process his trauma of the high school bully cuckolding him by dating the girl of his dreams, dunking his head in the toilet, and stuffing him in a locker. The author simply reverses everything as part of his Re:CUCK -Revenge of the Otakus- plot. Finally, Subaru is so amazing and good that he has Reinhard (Chad), who he constantly notes is better than him and how inferior he feels next to him, save the day and step aside so Subaru and Emilia can be together. The author takes this fiasco so far that he finetunes the mechanics of Reinhard's sword draw to serve the double-edged purpose of enhancing the shaming of Regulus and making the later Astrea character arc more emotional, yet the latter is squandered because the author writes such contrived melodrama. Subaru spends most of his time in fights against the Archbishop of NTR shaming and talking down to him, cavorting around like a mooning monkey, screeching insults and flinging poo simultaneously. I've never seen a better example of a fight devolving into a glorified shaming ritual than this, and I can almost hear the author crying from the catharsis of having finally gotten the better of his bully through words in a popular LN series. If the author had put as much effort into plot and characters as he did shaming this one villain, then S3 could be a masterpiece! Subaru and Emilia's interactions with the witch cult, even when there should be "bombshell reveals," don't lead to any deeper insights or effective beats. The worst part is how they shot themselves in the foot by being so judgmental and spiteful with writing cues here, while being overly forgiving elsewhere. We know that the witch cult are villains who will eventually all be captured, reformed (Subaru needs to pad out his harem, after all), or killed. We're all flawed and grapple with these "sins," yet the witch cult brings out the absolute worst in an individual. We've already seen the transformation of Petelguese from a normal man into the monster that he became. All the leeway they give to Subaru and how we're supposed to feel sorry for him... well, isn't Regulus just a shade of Subaru at his lowest but with immense power to act out his most depraved fantasies? Regulus and the entire witch cult are really tragic figures, and the way they present this, with all the exploitative glee of gawking onlookers gathered around the carnival freak show, is a disservice to the themes and storytelling thus far. In a lot of ways, the power fantasy is far, far more pathetic in this segment of Re:CUCK than your average isekai where the MC is simply OP, and S3's naked, warts and all, writing makes it even more ridiculous.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Mar 7, 2025
Gimai Seikatsu
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings Funny Well-written
Sister fucker series, stepsister or otherwise, tend to be tropey trash, but this is a slippery sibling slide that has an arty pretension and few, if any, of the typical tropes associated with this taboo subset of the romance genre. Given the lack of consanguinity or even long-term brother-sister roleplay, it's questionable if one should call this taboo at all (the tourist doth protest perhaps), instead acting as a sort of silly framing device to have them enter a role that is oddly intimate yet acts as a barrier to a relationship, though their apparent autism and insecurities act as more of a barrier than
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their respective roles.
Just to give an example of their modus operandi, let's look at some dialogue: Right out of the blue, in a bizarre and humorless non sequitur, with the only context being a brief exchange about how laundry should be divided within the household, the imouto blurts: I don't adhere to strict gender roles, so I don't want to assume that you're not into wearing panties and crossdressing. MC: Huh (my thoughts exactly)? Imouto: UwU, onii-chan, your eyebrows are shaped so nicely. Do you get them done at the salon? Maybe you should crossdress (I would add a teehee, but she doesn't strike me as having enough of a sense of humor to laugh). "Don't you think it's hard to force all sexual difference into just two categories?" While I could blame this on western politics worming its way into Japanese media... Seriously, does she have a crossdressing fetish and is trying to get her step-onii-chan to play into her kink? Or maybe she's a rotten-to-the-core fujoshi? Perhaps the author has a crossdressing fetish that he's insecure about? "But still, prejudice leads to discrimination." Time to turn the channel to Gundam. Using this as anything other than a fetishy joke is something I can't take seriously. Either way, it's not how I'd imagine even an autist would break the ice. Then again, I've known enough autists to think that maybe this is a believable discussion, and I should simply accept it as a character quirk that defines the character study. Anyway, it's a shortish scene that leads to growth of the relationship, so it's not all for naught. Another tiring strand of dialogue delivery is the constant back and forth about doing favors (not the fetish fuel kind, get your mind out of the gutter, this is a wholesome rather than Peepi-oriented show!) for one another that the couple have. "I want to show my gratitude for what you did for me." "But I've done nothing to receive your gratitude." "No, you did a lot for me." "Well, maybe just a little, but it's not really that much." And they go on and on, comparing what each one did for the other, haggling all along the way to see who can scratch the other's back more, and it has me thinking, "Shut the fuck up!" This aimless blather will go on for minutes at a time! One of the most awkward scenes of all is the autist in the elevator scene, which is somehow stretched to an excruciating 2-3 minutes (in a 23 minute episode, no less!). Sometimes people insert umms and ahhs or interject with relatively useless lines when talking so as to gather their bearings and figure out what to say, and I feel that's what the staff are doing with this hemming and hawing. Perhaps there's a way in which it seems fitting for the characters, as they express their concerns for the other and simultaneously downplay it as if to avoid getting too close, but it's not a very good use of time in a script. They're both pretty stunted, with her being far more so and failing to understand anything that isn't conveyed in a blunt way, for, in relation to literature, "I can never really understand how the characters feel and all that stuff." Not only does she win the award for the most humorless poker-faced fujoshi, but she can't read a room to save her life. I think it's safe to say that she's on the spectrum, and her onii-chan is either much less on the spectrum or is introverted and emotionally restrained enough for people to suspect he is autistic. It's additionally hilarious how obvious the animal inserts are when it comes to different scenes representing the characters or aspects of them. Like the constant shots of fish. I believe there are only 2 fish in the bowl! Tell me these two kids don't feel like the gold fish heading to the rim of the bowl and blowing you a kiss, in all their autistic, fish out of water, glory! They'll cut away to two birds flying, and so on. This is a common motif in fiction, but it seems absolutely hilarious here. I think with how slow it is and how bottled up and uncomfortable they are when expressing themselves that it comes across as more obvious and hysterical. As a crude exaggeration of the kind of symbolism this show dabbles in, maybe they'll head to the zoo, and when he's thinking of how he loves her, it'll show two animals copulating. It reminds me of that Naked Gun comedy movie where he's driving, and he's upset because he misses his ex-wife and says, "Everywhere I go I see her and can't get her out of my mind." Then it cuts to a shot of two farm silos close together that look like a pair of tits. And he's like, "See what I mean?" The more depressive and alienating (relative to anime) art film sensibilities and light experimentation often reflect the state of the characters adequately, and there are a few commendable parlor tricks here and there, along with decent, well-balanced composition (when it's not using grotesque rule of thirds composition) and great directing, considering what little there is for the staff to work with. Might even give off a feel similar to select cinema verité or John Cassavetes at times, though relying on more crafty techniques than is the norm for those. Cinematography takes precedence over animation, and this is pretty obvious even from the first frame, where the camera is slowly panning over a bright city and the FMC in what appears to be an elevator, featuring multiple rack focuses used more dramatically than tends to be the norm in anime. Usually, when it's done at all, we rack focus between two different characters, with each having an important line, but this is done in an intensive mood-setting and emotional way. Even though the diary segments mostly relay information we already knew or could infer, the kind of nostalgic imagery used to convey the character's more honest inner thoughts was a compelling shift away from the static angles and alienating minimalism of other scenes, representing a stiff formalism that gives way to a looser stream of consciousness. The music could be syrupy at times, but the sound design is well above seasonal standards, and there's a pleasant blend of ambient, piano, and a sparser amount of choral elements, which combines fantastically with the imagery, mood, and emotions. It's somewhat of a barebones or bargain bin arthouse romance and depends on you caring about these characters or being invested in a kind of character study romance, and it's easy to be indifferent. Still, as an autist character study romance, the artsy independent film feel and aesthetic strongly reinforce the relationship, making this a commendable effort from a directorial standpoint. It's like the staff figured out how to make the series as autistic as the characters, contrasting their controlled and carefully calculated behavior and mannerisms with turbulent outpourings of their inner feelings that they cannot hope to express!
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Mar 5, 2025 Mixed Feelings Spoiler
Penguin's Memory is what you would get if Terence Malick made an anime parodying Deer Hunter and various other gritty American-made Vietnam war films, but he has the built-in challenge of not using rambling diary-esque voice overs and to use penguins from shitty low-class beer commercials as characters. Many of the shots and the way they represent the main character's (or others') internal state are great at various points, but maybe half of the shots appear to have less thought put behind them or are standard fare. For fans of Malick, it should prove to be an interesting viewing experience, but it's definitely in the
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"poor man's" (or poor penguin's) category by comparison.
The consistent post-war depression is interrupted hilariously via the romantic interest of the main, as she engages in a Dr. Moe (if this weren't such an obscure title, Dr. Moe would be a sensational meme, given how widespread moe has become in anime) certified Moetown hit of an upbeat nature, and the inclusion of a pop song at random is certainly jarring. Anthropomorphic romance (aka furshit) is on the gross side, and all of these penguins look fat, if not obese, and nearly the same. The penguins are used for marketing purposes, which variably clashes with the tone of the film or enhances it with a touch of humor. The story feels contrived in its intense compression and even uninspired but basically well told for what it is. Can't believe the plot developments at the end. He goes PTSD psycho in a scene reminiscent of Taxi Driver. The main acts in self-defense and has a sympathetic witness but the verdict is guilty before a court? This judgment is made even more absurd by the most emotional part with Chico! Am I suppose to judge the main as "wrong" or "corrupted by war" or some other pretentious low-t drivel based on the direction of the story or the main's complex? Guy's rampage was alpha, totally justified, and he did nothing wrong! It's about as cool as watching the vigilante film Dirty Harry and making jokes about film critics Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael, who had typical elitist sympathy for the criminal over the victim, being dead. Overall, it's a ridiculous sequence, even more so for the writer's judgment. Yet it's a decent-enough film, that hits the right notes much of the time with its understated emotions and soul searching, flawed and forgotten though it may be.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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