Happy New Year, and welcome to Anime Rants! Late in 2022, on my Wix blog, I wrote a post that reviewed the anime series I watched that year. You can view the post here if interested. I also gave out unofficial “awards” to certain anime series to express my opinions in a fun way. This year, I decided to do a similar post and create a tradition. I’m day off schedule, but it’s not too late to do a “2023 In Review” type of post.
Welcome to Anime Rants! The seasonal anime for Winter 2024 will start within the next week or so. Compared to usual, I will be covering fewer shows for my episode reviews. There just aren’t many options that interest me this season. Regardless, I’m fairly excited for the ones that I chose.
Welcome back to Anime Rants, where I’m catching up on recent episodes of The Apothecary Diaries. In the 12th episode, Maomao takes a temporary job entertaining men as a courtesan. This anime is loosely based on the Ming Era in China, so I decided to do some very light research into Chinese courtesans of the Ming Era.
Mononogatari: Malevolent Spirits is a 2023 anime focusing on clans of Saenome (exorcists) who mitigate threats posed by wandering spirits. It’s similar to Twin Star Exorcists in terms of the style of exorcism. The type of spirits that we deal with in this series are Marebito, spirits from other realms who possess objects in the human world. Once they have latched on to their identity as that object, the Marebito becomes a Tsukumogami, a powerful spirit who can assume a humanoid form and use supernatural abilities.
Welcome back to Anime Rants! Today, we have the second post in a blog series full of Fruits Basket discussion. This anime has a lot to say about psychological trauma and abuse. But this anime is not “dark” in the same way as a show like like Neon Genesis Evangelion. I enjoy grim, hopeless explorations of psychology sometimes – but at other times, I want to see themes of hope and healing.
What if mythical creatures – like werewolves, phoenixes, and yehtis- were real and interbred with humans? In that scenario, you might end up with a world like the one in The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague. While there are still many “normal” humans, a decent portion of the population are humanoid “descendants” of fantastical creatures. The male main character, Himuro, is descended from Yuki Ona (‘Snow Woman”), a Japanese spirit of snow and ice.
The first episode of A Sign of Affection (Yubisaki to Renren) is titled “Yuki’s World.” It was released on January 6th, 2024. This new anime is about a young college girl (Yuki) who is completely hearing-impaired. It’s a romance anime targeted at the shoujo demographic.
Hello and welcome to Anime Rants! Today, I’m reviewing the first episode of the new third season of Blue Exorcist (Ao no Futsumashi). In the future, I won’t cover each episode individually. Rather, I’ll take 2-3 episodes at a time every few weeks. To start off with, however, I felt like writing a “first impressions” post to respond to the pilot episode. Draw your swords and tuck your tails in, because it’s time to fight some demons!
A hundred years in the future, on a colony on Mars, humans are helped by Neans – extremely human-like androids. Despite the fact that they seem as sentient as humans, the Neans are at worst an enslaved race, and at best a group of second-class citizens. To preserve this order, Neans are programmed so they cannot harm humans. They also cannot survive without a daily dose of “Nectar,” a mysterious injectable substance.
That’s right – I finally started watching it! Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is an unexpectedly good fantasy anime that started in Fall 2023, a bit later than most other series from that month. Because I knew nothing about it until halfway through the season, I didn’t cover any Frieren content on my blog. Well, now that changes.
I didn’t include Solo Leveling in my list of shows to watch for Winter 2024 because, quite frankly, it sounded like just another boring fantasy with overused elements. But since then, I haven’t been able to avoid hearing the hype all over the internet. I want to see if Solo Leveling lives up to all the praise.
I was a fan of BL and yaoi for many years, but I basically despaired at these genres in anime since 90% of them are extremely problematic. But recently, a good friend of mine introduced me to a few anime series that are classically danmei (Chinese BL, basically). It was a new experience for me since I had never watched a donghua (Chinese animation) before. Now, I will share my thoughts on two shows I enjoyed: Mo Dao Zu Shi (The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) and Tian Guan Ci Fu (Heaven Official’s Blessing).