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This is the second part of my ranking. If you also want to read the first part, click here.

6. Kaiju No. 8

And now we arrive at, arguably, the most popular show from this ranking.

I'll be honest, I had high hopes for this one.

Not because I was a fan of the manga that this was based off of, but mainly because Crunchyroll was hyping this anime up, big time.

When the first episode of this anime came up, Crunchyroll introduced this streaming feature, as well as a countdown, where it allowed its users to watch the anime live, as it was being aired. The countdown was there to let users know exactly when the episode would air, as up until then, Crunchyroll users would have to patiently wait for new episodes to roll in, since there was no exact schedule for when they would appear.

Leaving aside whether these features were any good or not, as the userbase on Crunchyroll seemed to have mixed feedback towards them, it was also a big event.

Crunchyroll was hyping this show up like it was the next Attack on Titan, and I was a bit worried whether it would live up to the hype.

Still, given that it was being hyped as much as it was, I eventually felt compelled to at least give it a shot.

And, well, it's time to let you know of my feelings towards it.

But before I get into that, let's start this ranking off with a brief summary of episode 1, first.

Basically, the show introduces us with a big kaiju attacking the city and with the Anti-Kaiju Defense Force successfully eliminating it.

Kaiju are giant monsters that occasionally attack human cities and are treated pretty much like natural disasters. They are pretty mindless, without any rational thoughts or emotions and they simply seem to wreak havoc around them for no reason whatsoever.

The Anti-Kaiju Defense Force is a military group whose sole purpose is with dealing with them whenever they attack and getting rid of them, while trying to minimize the amount of casualties in the process, as much as possible.

Soon after this particular kaiju is dealt with, Hibino Kafka is introduced. He's a 32 year old single man that works for the cleanup company that has to get rid of the dead remains of kaiju.

He is quite experienced at his job, working quite diligently and fulfilling his tasks very well, but is dissatisfied with the way he turned out to be.

Mina Ashiro is the 27 year old captain of the Defense Force's Third Division and is among the most talented members of said Defense Force. She is renowned in Japan for her work in getting rid of kaiju swiftly and without many casualties, with everyone around her recognizing her for her hard work and accomplishments in life.

She and Kafka used to know each other back when they were young kids, with the two of them promising to each other to become members of the Defense Force once they become older, so that they can fight kaiju together.

Kafka still remembers that promise, and yet he is filled with remorse, knowing that, unlike Mina who was very talented, he had applied many times to join the Defense Force alongside her but was rejected every single time.

Now, at the age of 32, Kafka is too old to be eligible to join the Defense Force, and has to resign himself to living the rest of his life working as a regular and underappreciated cleanup worker, who has to clean smelly dead kaiju corpses for a living, while Mina is treated as an overly competent hero that saves lives.

One day, as Kafka goes to work like usual, he meets up with an 18 year old young man named Reno Ichikawa, who also got hired at the same cleanup company and will be joining Kafka's team in disposing of corpses.

Reno is aspiring to also join the Defense Force, and is disappointed when he hears how Kafka was forced to give up on his dream because he eventually got too old.

After a long day at work where they have to dispose of another kaiju corpse left dead in the middle of the city, Reno informs Kafka that the minimum age eligible to join the Defense Force has very recently been raised, so now Kafka can once again apply if he wishes to.

Kafka is happy to hear this and thanks Reno only to then, out of the blue, have another yoju (a smaller kaiju) appear out of nowhere while the two of them were alone and attack Reno.

Kafka saves Reno at the last second, and orders him to run away from them so that he can call the yoju in while he will distract it.

Kafka grabs the yoju's attention and runs away with it following him, trying his best to survive even though he's a mere civilian, but he eventually gets caught by the said yoju, who tries to eat him.

Reno returns and saves Kafka from the yoju in the nick of time (after having called it in), and they both get saved by Mina and her squad that have been dispatched to get rid of it.

Later on, at the hospital where Kafka and Reno are being looked at after their encounter with that yoju, Reno commends Kafka for saving his life from that yoju and says that he was very cool, and recommends he still give joining the Defense Force one last try now that he has become eligible for it again.

Kafka decides to listen to him and vouches to give it one last try but, at the last second, a flying insect-like kaiju appears out of nowhere in their hospital room and shoves itself inside Kafka's mouth, Kafka effectively being forced to swallow it.

A couple of seconds later, Kafka's body transforms and he becomes a humanoid kaiju, complete with an exoskeleton and the full appearance of a human-sized kaiju, but with Kafka's mind controlling it.

Not knowing that said kaiju is actually Kafka, another patient that was passing by immediately phones the kaiju in, and Kafka is forced to flee from the hospital, knowing that they would be after him, while Reno joins him.

Thus ends episode 1.

So yeah, that's the premise.

Episode 1 wasn't very compelling for me. It felt very cliched and slow and it followed all of the beats that most Shonen Jump anime would usually take.

The whole “old man that missed fulfilling his dream and now is sad” trope wasn't grabbing me at all, mainly because, ironically, I am of Kafka's age, and I felt like the show was insulting me for “being old”.

I can understand the idea of wanting to live a better life, regretting the “road not taken” cliche, and all of that, but for some reason it just wasn't pulling me in.

Not helping matters is the entire premise of the show, too. I'll be honest, I've never understood the whole “giant monsters that attack cities” Japanese thing. I was never a fan of Godzilla, I never understood the appeal to it, and this show wasn't doing it for me either.

I just feel like, if giant monsters that would occasionally appear out of nowhere to attack human settlements was indeed a thing in that world, then society and the nature of cities would be very very different to how they are in our world, since humans would naturally build other types of structures that would be more resilient to such attacks, most likely have underground bunkers and other means of adapting rather than having conventional regular cities with tall buildings that are fragile and easy to get destroyed all the time.

The lack of imagination and world building that this show exhibited, as a result, was turning me off a lot.

Moreover, if kaiju were indeed a thing to exist, I would have many questions like “How did they appear? What do they want? How did they evolve?” honestly I would treat it as entirely new species of animals being discovered and I would want a documentary style breakdown to learn how they work.

The show doesn't do that, though, it treating these creatures as mere monsters to be slaughtered, with no emotion, no habits, nothing of any substance about them. They are just killing machines that are plot devices to get the story going. I found that to be so very unimaginative and boring.

The only thing which was kind of grabbing me, to some extent, was the fact that the show was trying to portray Kafka as having the potential and personality of a true hero.

Even though he has a slow body, is unfit and generally not as athletic as his younger peers, Kafka is shown as having the right personality to become stronger and be willing to put himself into danger in order to save others.

I liked that idea.

Honestly, I was hoping for an underdog kind of story, where the moral would be “If you have the right state of mind and the heart for it, anyone can be a hero, regardless of how old or physically unfit they are”, and it would use Kafka to prove that point. That was my hope, at least.

But no, obviously it wasn't going to be that unconventional.

The first episode didn't even end yet and Kafka had to transform into an overpowered kaiju with the strength to decimate an entire city at his will, and the entire point of “even small guys can be heroes” went right out the window with that. All my hopes were smashed into smithereens, just like that.

I've seen other anime like this one, where the protagonist had incredible powers and had the potential to change the course of a war. Anime such as Attack on Titan, Seraph of the End and others where the potential lied in the protagonist, but ultimately what mattered was his heart rather than his powers.

But what made those other shows stand out was their world building, combined with their story and characters. Here, the world building is almost non-existent. It's all about Kafka keeping his kaiju identity a secret (since he later discovers that he can turn back to his human body at will), deciding to join the Defense Force along with Reno, and then be treated by everyone like crap initially for being old and unskilled, only for him to have to prove his worth to everyone and also, in the meantime, have to save his fellow Defense Force companions using his secret kaiju powers every once in a while.

That's the show in a nutshell, and I feel like this story is pretty much Attack on Titan but diluted into just the standard cliches, with nothing new added to it.

The point of the show was to have cool epic fights, that's kind of the highlight of it, and maybe that could have worked but, again, I've seen the overpowered protagonist trope done before. Given the amount of isekai anime that I've seen, that should surprise no one. Just having an overpowered protagonist isn't doing anything for me, anymore, as I've seen epic fights where the protagonist overpowers his enemies so many times already that I'm numb to it.

And the only show that managed to pull off the overpowered protagonist being overpowered and actually being entertaining was One Punch Man; and that's solely because that show was creative in how overpowered a single punch could be, and it was having fun with it.

Here, the show doesn't even seem to want to have fun with how powerful Kafka seems to be in his kaiju form. It just plays it 100% straight, treating it as this cool never-before-seen idea that will blow our minds, even though this isn't the first time I've seen this, and probably won't be the last time, either.

Another example of this idea done right would be Chainsaw Man, where these ideas were utilized to a great extent but there, at least, it felt like the show was having fun with itself and the fights taking full advantage of Chainsaw man's skills.

Here, it's entirely just “Kafka can do an incredibly powerful punch” or “Kafka is super fast and can evade all attacks” or other such tired nonsense. It was just so lame. I mean, grow a tentacle! Spit firebombs! Turn Giant! Do something original!

And the violence in Chainsaw Man was another point that was keeping me glued, because all the punches felt like they had weight and it was bloody and gruesome on every corner. Here, nothing was registering to me. I was seeing the violence, but there was no gore, no blood, no nothing.

It was just....I don't know, it just wasn't doing it for me.

Maybe had I never seen other shows that did these tropes before, like maybe had I never seen Attack on Titan, Seraph of the End, Chainsaw Man*, One Punch Man or anything like them before, maybe, just maybe, I would have felt like this was original and worth a watch. But as is, I didn't.

After seeing enough anime, this one just felt like it didn't bring anything new to the table. It felt like just another Shonen Jump anime that wanted to do the overpowered protagonist idea all over again, reinvent the wheel but doing nothing to make itself stand out.

Honestly, I just didn't enjoy it.

By the time this show was done, I couldn't muster the power to care.

I know there will be fans of this show, particularly people that don't watch a lot of anime and aren't used to seeing these tropes be overused, like they actually are, and that's perfectly fine. Everyone needs to have their junk food, and I feel like there's value in shows like these, regardless of how cliched and recycled they are.

It's just not for me. The action sequences felt weightless and without any impact, the protagonist that wanted more from his life and became overpowered felt cliched, the constant bonding with his fellow Defense Force cadets was boring, the occasional overpowered minor character was cool but I've seen that done better in Seraph of the End or Attack on Titan (where, incidentally, the characters felt cooler), it was just all around a boring experience.

Would I recommend this show? Sure, if you like kaiju or what I described up until now, you might like watching the show. It wasn't doing it much for me, but I will admit that I am a bit of an outlier, since I watched a lot of anime in my life, so I could immediately sense these recycled tropes and realize how tired it was, but for the average occasional anime enjoyer, I feel like they might enjoy this show more than I did. So I'd say at least give the first two episodes a shot, since I feel like it could be worth your while, and then see what you want to do from there.

And would I watch another season of this show if it came out? Honestly, I think I would, just because season 1 ended on a high note and it does make me wonder where the story can go from there, but I won't be as hyped for it as other people might be.

It wasn't a bad watch per se, but it wasn't as great as Crunchyroll was making it out to be, that's for sure.

7. Gods' Games We Play

And now it's time we talk about some games.

This is another one of those shows that I didn't know what to think of when I started watching them, but I was hoping they would turn out to be better than what they ended up being.

Honestly, while Kaiju No. 8 was the most underwhelming show of this lineup, simply because Crunchyroll kept hyping it up as the next big thing that they had, this one didn't even get that much attention.

Sure, it had its fans, but I felt like most people didn't watch this show on Crunchyroll, and that left me wondering why. But, as the episodes of this went by, I soon realized why that was. And the reason was because this show sucked.

So, what's it about?

The show is about a dragon goddess that woke up from a frozen slumber at one of the poles, and broke free from the ice that kept her there.

Immediately after coming out of her hibernation, the goddess, named Leoleshea, asks to meet the greatest Apostle of that world.

Apostles, in this world, are humans who have received Arise, which is a special power that they become capable of controlling, and which confer that Apostle the right to play in the Gods' games, a series of games that Gods have created so that Apostles can compete in them.

Gods have descended in this world onto humanity because they were very bored and have challenged Apostles to play in the games that they created, so that they can prove their wit and intelligence against them. Any Apostle that loses any three Gods' games will lose the right to play in these games for the rest of their lives.

However, any Apostle that manages to win at ten such games will trigger what's known as a “Celebration”. Nobody knows that this Celebration entails, but humanity has agreed to send their Apostles to compete in these games nonetheless.

Fast forward one year, and Fay, a teenage boy Apostle that's very intelligent and talented, returns to his employer, Miranda, after complaining that he had ended up in another dead end in his search for a missing person.

Fay has been searching all his life for a young girl that he remembers to have been his games instructor, who had gone missing some time ago and whom he had never seen since.

Once he returns to their base, Miranda takes Fay to meet Leoleshea, as Fay is believed to be the best and the brightest Apostle that's currently still alive, as he is a rookie at the Gods' games that he, nonetheless, has already won in three times already.

Fay meets this Leoleshea goddess, only to be completely amazed at the fact that she seems to 100% physically resemble the young girl that Fay remembers having played with during his early childhood and which had instilled a love for games to him since then. Leoleshea resembles the person he had been looking for, his whole life, to his amazement.

The problem is that Leoleshea doesn't seem to remember Fay at all, her acting like this is the first time they have met.

Fay is tasked by Miranda to act as Leoleshea's caregiver, as she is extremely dangerous given the fact that she is a god in that world, and has incredible powers that can destroy the entire human race at her whim.

Fay takes up this task and says he wants to introduce himself to Leoleshea, only for her to ask him not to.

Instead, Leoleshea had devised a game for them to play together, in which they would get to know each other.

The game is like the game of Memory, in which players have to pick face down cards on a table and, for every two cards that they pick, those cards get to be turned face up and then, if they match, then that counts towards that player's score. The player with the higher score, at the end, wins.

This game would be similar, except for a couple of differences.

• Instead of using regular deck cards, the cards used in this game will be pieces of paper on which Leoleshea had written key subjects to introduce yourself with (i.e. "Name" or "Blood type"). Each of these subjects come written in pairs, so if a pair is successfully matched by a player, the other player has to truthfully introduce themselves on that subject
• There is one pair of blank cards which, when matched, allows the player that matched them to ask the other player any question of their choice and they will have to answer truthfully to it
• The cards will be flying through the air in circles rather than being placed on a table, with each card having a different orbit and speed, to make memorizing the placement of particular cards more difficult for both of them
• Finally, unlike the traditional game of Memory where, for each time a player successfully gets a matched pair from their picks, they get to have another turn after that, to have the chance to pick a new pair, this game will not have that rule. Instead, the players will only get one single chance to get a matched pair before the turn advances to the next player, regardless of whether they get a match or not

Using the above rules, Fay and Leoleshea start playing the game against each other, to get to know each other better.

Fay quickly proves to be very skilled, as his memory is so good that he can still remember the exact positions of the cards that had already been revealed previously, despite the cards literally flying in circles through the air.

Using this skill, Fay strategically picks the pairs of cards that allow him to find the pieces of information that he was interested in, about Leoleshea.

Leoleshea, for her part, is also very good at this game and she ends up picking the blank cards pair, which allowed her to ask Fay any question of her choice.

She asks Fay, directly, what his end goal is with being her caretaker and, since Fay is bound by the rules of the game to answer truthfully to her question, he admits that his end goal is to figure out, as a god, why she doesn't just return to her realm and what she's doing in the humans' realm.

Satisfied that he had answered her honestly, Leoleshea stops the game and reveals to him that she had come to the human realm to play games with the humans.

After playing a game of tag with humans in antiquity, Leoleshea had hidden herself underwater but, after waiting for so long, she fell asleep and, eventually, the water around her had frozen over, trapping her in ice for millennia, until she had woken up a year prior to these events.

Now, she discorvered, she is unable to return to the gods' realm as the connection between the gods' realm and the humans' realm is only one-way, which means that she is now trapped in the human realm for the foreseeable future and, the only way for her to return to her realm, is to win at the gods' games as well.

Consequently, she wants Fay, who is the brightest Apostle of his time, to team up with her and for them to play the gods' games together, so that they can win together so she can return to being a god once again.

After hinting that she knows what will happen when the first Apostle will win ten times at the gods' games, and after Fay presses her on to explain, Leoleshea reveals that humanity will get to have a wish granted to them (it's actually any number of wishes, as many as they want, given that the games are almost impossible to beat).

Seeing how Leoleshea wishes to participate in these games and how Fay, himself, had already been playing in them as an Apostle and had already beat three of them, he agrees to team up with Leoleshea (or Leshea, as she agrees for him to call her), and they both embark on a journey to play these games together, as a team. Leshea wishes to win all 10 times so she can return to being a god and Fay wishes to find out why Leshea looks so much like the girl from his childhood that had gone missing many years back.

And so ends episode 1.

OK so, right off the bat, I want to say that, just from episode 1, I feel like this show had a lot of potential.

The story intrigued me, a lot, but there were some small issues that I had with it which, while they didn't ruin the episode for me, they did raise a bunch of flags in my mind, that was difficult for me to ignore.

My biggest issue with the show was Fay. He had all the potential to be a truly genius player, and the show likes to portray him as a prodigy of his generation, however, that already made me worried, since I've always hated the overpowered protagonist trope in isekai anime.

Granted, I know that this isn't an isekai anime but, still, the trope is still unchanged, so that caused me issues.

And yeah, I was right to worry, as the “invincible and incredibly powerful protagonist” trope continued to be a severe problem that hampered my enjoyment of this show, all throughout its first season.

I hate it when protagonists are overly fit and talented in the story, so much so that they never even fear the possibility of losing.

Fay has this uncanny characteristic that he's always optimistic and analytical at all times. He's friendly and always has a smile on his face and he never gives up or show any weaknesses.

While that's all nice and cool, it really caused a disconnect, for me at least, when I just didn't see him as human after a point.

Real humans have weaknesses, they have doubts, fears, insecurities, especially in games where the stakes are so high and when, supposedly, the entire human race is putting their hopes on your success.

The fact that Fay never loses hope, never once doubts himself and is portrayed to always be right and come up with the correct solution to the problem at just the right time, it really made me feel like Fay was less of a character and more of a plot device, rather than anything else.

And the simple fact that he was able to literally memorize the placements of the cards in the Memory game against Leshea, despite the cards literally flying in circles in the air at different speeds, made him look so very inhuman to me.

I don't doubt that there are geniuses with incredible visual memory in this world, photographic memory is indeed a thing, but I feel like even those people would have some trouble in a game like this, yet Fay performed flawlessly at it.

That made me feel like he was more of a robot than an actual human being.

And it won't get any better later on, either.

Fay will simply be treated as the always right hero, that always solves the puzzle at the right moment, with the right solution, all the time.

And again, I've said this many times in the past and I'll keep saying it as many more times as I need to: if the protagonist doesn't worry that they might lose in the face of adversity (the way Fay never worries), then I, as the audience of the show, don't see why I should care about said challenge either.

And that, pretty much sums up this show quite nicely for me: I just don't see why I should care about Fay, nor his challenge.

The fact of the matter is that, also, the stakes are quite low.

Yes, Fay is humanity's best bet at winning ten gods' games, so him winning is something I'm supposed to be in support of, but I really couldn't muster the energy to care at all.

The reason why I didn't care for this end goal is that Fay, hilariously enough, has no dreams or wants that he's fighting for.

Literally, the show says that if any Apostle ever manages to win at ten gods' games, then humanity will be granted infinite wishes, yet, ironically enough, Fay is never shown to have any wish that he wants to be granted.

Leshea is the one that is portrayed as wanting to beat the games, but that's simply because she wants to return being a god (and even then, it's implied in the show that she plays the games more for the fun of it, rather than the sole purpose of returning to her original realm).

One could argue, maybe, that Fay's end goal is to find out why Leshea physically resembles the girl from his childhood, but even that plot point got entirely sidelined after episode 1 was over. Why? I don't know. This was only briefly mentioned again in the last scene of the last episode of season 1, to remind the audience that yes, that's still a thing apparently.

I don't get it.

A protagonist that is just an emotionless husk that has no desires, no fears, no insecurities, but is just a genius that likes to play games just for the fun of it, was not doing it for me.

I was constantly asking myself why I should care.

And the sad answer to that is that I shouldn't. And I didn't.

Some might say that the games themselves would need to provide for the reason to care, as Fay may lose his life if he's not careful in the games that he plays but, it's quickly established that Apostles don't even die in these games; in the event that they would normally die, they instead get teleported back to the human realm and receive a loss in their record. If an Apostle receives three losses in total, they lose their rights in playing in the gods' games for the rest of their lives.

And yeah, Fay losing the right to play in the games would be a big deal, since humanity would lose their most talented Apostle and, probably, never get to have their wishes granted, except for the fact that, again, nobody in this show makes a big deal out of needing for their wishes to be granted, in the first place.

Had humanity been on the verge of extinction, starvation, had Fay been living in poverty or anything like that, then maybe I would have a reason to care and want for him to win the right to have his wishes granted. But that's never done, Fay just plays for the fun of it, not out of any necessity.

That just killed it for me.

And couple that with the fact that Fay now has a literal almighty god in his team (namely Leshea), who can pretty much do anything almost, and the odds became very much stacked against the games.

Granted, the way Fay wins is usually through his incredible wit and strategizing, rather than relying on Leshea helping him, but her assistance was really dissipating any sense of impending doom, seeing how powerful she was.

And Leshea won't end up being his only ally: there will be other girls that join him as well, one that can teleport herself or other people that she had recently touched anywhere she wanted, another that has super powered foot kicks and then another, this time another god, that decides to assist him later on.

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention? Most of Fay's allies end up being girls around his age (or female gods that just look like they are his age). Yep, that's right, this is a harem anime as well.

This show felt sleazy with its fan service, I'm not gonna lie.

It tries to put Fay's allies in dubious positions, exposing parts of their bodies in the weirdest of moments. A good example is how they shoehorn a swimsuit episode, in the middle of a gods' game, for no reason other than fan service.

Usually I'm quite forgiving of fan service in anime, seeing how they are done for my pleasure by definition, but, for this show at least, it just felt out of place.

Like, the entire point of the show was to take it seriously and constantly wonder how Fay and his allies are going to win in the current game, only for that tension to immediately evaporate when the story decides that it's time for a swimsuit scene with the girls because, why not? Those are popular, right?

And, I mean, if the fan service was notable, at least, I might give it a pass, but it's the most held back, watered down, fan service I've seen. Like, they show the girls in bikinis for two episodes, just for a couple of seconds each time, with nothing more than that.

I mean, it's nice seeing them in swimsuits, I guess, but this is by no means groundbreaking. Anime has been doing these types of scenes for decades by now. If you're going to be raunchy, at least be raunchy and push the envelope. Be unique!

The fan service feels almost like a studio mandate, a checkbox that executives behind the scenes wanted to check, just for the sake of doing everything they could to gain even the slightest bit more audience for their show. The fan service had no soul or heart behind it.

I was hoping for there to be some romantic progression between Fay and Leshea, but there is none. The story doesn't feel like it wants to commit to anything serious like that.

Literally, the only reason why one would want to watch the show is for the gods' games in it.

And yeah, I will admit, there are some cool ideas behind the games, like games where you have hidden victory conditions, hidden losing conditions, hidden rules, video game mechanics, card games, gambling games, pretty much anything and everything you can think of.

I do like that the games were getting quite creative, although I do feel like certain times, the game should have been over had Fay just asked Leshea to do something specific that would have shortened the game specifically.

There was this one game, where Fay needed to put a flower on top of a pyramid, where I feel like, had he relied on his ally that can teleport, the entire game should have ended very quickly, but the staff deliberately ignored that to prolong the adventure more.

Another time, there was another game where Fay needed to roll a bunch of 20-faced dice in such a way as to have all of them roll to the number 1 to unlock the next event.

Fay literally admitted that it would take hundreds of millions of times to roll all the dice until they would get to that specific outcome, as rolling dice is supposed to be, by design, entirely random, and there were like 5 or 6 dice there.

And yet, even when the story admits that it's impossible, one of Fay's allies manages to roll those 20-faced dice in the correct way just once, and they got the correct outcome of rolling them all to 1. Like, I feel like the story is cheating, whenever it tries to pretend that it's very down-to-Earth logic based but then it resorts to pure incredible luck like that to advance the plot.

I just....I don't get it.

This feels like another one of those anime that, had I been younger, I may have enjoyed it a bit more, given the focus on games, but as a grown adult, I just lost interest. With low stakes, no real end goal from our protagonist, lack of a plot and the occasional unnecessary and watered down fan service that felt out of place, it just didn't do it for me.

Maybe if I played the games myself, I would have liked it a bit better, but as anime is a non-interactive medium that's very linear, I just couldn't muster the will to care. The story always felt like it was Fay's, not mine, which made me not care.

If a new season of this gets announced, I don't know if I would watch it. I'm not saying I wouldn't, but it would highly depend on my mood when picking the shows. I kind of want to give this show another chance with a new season, but I don't know if I'm willing to spend that much time just to risk wasting it on a boring plot like this.

Maybe I will, maybe I won't. Right now, I cannot say.

8. A Condition Called Love

And we finally arrive at the end of this ranking.

It's safe to say that, since it landed on this spot, this is the show which I dislike the most from this particular lineup.

This show is one for which, if a season 2 will ever get confirmed, I won't watch it, nor do I care much for the source material that this was based off of.

But before I can go into why I dislike the show, I should first start off describing its first episode.

The show is about a 16 year old first year high school student named Hotaru Hinase who, one cold winter day while at a local cafe with her friend, they both witness a messy breakup scene between a girl and her boyfriend named Saki Hananoi, a handsome young man who Hotaru's best friend recognizes as a student from a different class at the same school as them.

Left heartbroken, Hananoi leaves the cafe in silence.

Later on, after Hotaru and her friend also leave and separate, Hotaru just so happens to meet up with Hananoi again, who's still dejected from his breakup and is standing alone, on a bench while having snow constantly fall on him because he had no umbrella.

Feeling sorry for him, Hotaru approaches him and positions her umbrella so that both of them can be under it. In those moments, while looking up at her face, Hananoi falls in love with her.

The next day, Hananoi visits Hotaru in her class, at school, and confesses to her in front of everyone, only for Hotaru to reject him.

After school, Hananoi waits for Hotaru at the school's exit and decides to still follow her when she comes out and, when she asks him why he's still after her seeing how she had rejected him, Hananoi says that he should still give her the chance to get to know him before allowing her to make a proper decision.

Hotaru has a good life with her family and her friends, she's happy with the way things are going, but she has never understood feelings of romance or crushes.

When Hananoi asks her about what types of hair styles she prefers, Hotaru casually says that shorter hair is probably better, just because it's easier to wash.

The next day, Hananoi shows up with his long hair cut short, this being obviously because of Hotaru's previous suggestion, which makes her feel uneasy a bit.

Later on, while having another conversation with Hananoi, Hotaru admits that she has never felt romantic attraction towards anyone and, as such, she wouldn't be able to be in a relationship or reciprocate Hananoi's love for her, thus she wants to avoid hurting him by rejecting him.

Hananoi suggests that, her not understanding love isn't an issue and that she should, at least, give a relationship with him a trial just to see how it feels like. He suggests she should try being in a make-believe relationship with him until Christmas, which was already approaching.

Hotaru is unsure about his proposal and doesn't agree to it immediately but allows herself to consider it.

Later on, Hananoi is seen also removing his earrings because he feels like Hotaru might find them too flashy but, when Hotaru suggests that he shouldn't change his looks just because of her and insists that him put them back in, Hananoi reveals that he had lost one of them.

Later that day, Hotaru lends one of her hair pins to a friend while they run around the track field but said friend ends up losing one of the hair pieces there.

Just before they can go on the field to look for the missing piece, it begins to snow outside so the entire field becomes covered in snow.

Realizing that it would be impossible to search for her lost hair pin now, Hotaru decides to leave it and return home.

Later that evening, Hananoi calls Hotaru asking her what the pin looks like, causing her to worry and making her realize that Hananoi was on the track field of their school that night, rummaging through the snow trying to find Hotaru's missing hair pin.

When Hotaru also arrives there and confronts him on this, she reprimands him for not thinking enough about his own well being, as his hands were already frozen from rummaging the snow and she takes him to the nurse's office to take care of him.

Finally, the next day, Hananoi returns Hotaru her lost hair pin, him saying that this time he had waited for the snow to melt before he went again to search for it. In response, Hotaru also gives him his missing earring back, and she says she had found it by the school's vending machine.

Seeing how much he had put himself through just for her sake, Hotaru eventually says that she wants to give dating him until Christmas a shot.

And so ends episode 1 of the show.

OK so, yeah, this show is a slice of life high school romance story.

It's about this girl, Hotaru, who never understood romance and is otherwise very casual and sheepish when it comes to love, and has her discover what being in a relationship actually entails.

Hananoi will be her very first boyfriend and they will have to navigate the realities of being in a relationship with each other, for the first time, despite Hotaru's inexperience.

Honestly, I liked the premise of this show, and I genuinely saw a lot of potential behind it.

The first episode seemed pretty promising and nice, although Hananoi left me with a pretty bad taste in my mouth due to how much of a stick figure he was.

I hoped that as episodes went by, this would improve over time and become less of an issue but, really, it didn't.

This is where I get into my first and main problem with this show: I really dislike Hananoi, a lot.

Historically, I've been very vocal about my stance on main characters not defining the TV shows that they are a part of. I've said in shows like Bucchigiri that even if the main character is a shallow dunce that's extremely and wholly unlikable, that the show can still survive and prove to be a good show, in spite of that, if it knows how to play around it in a clever enough way.

However, Bucchigiri was a comedy at its core, and such a thing was possible for them to get away with because his incompetence and shallowness were used as recurring gags. Even more, the protagonist in that show, despite being a simple minded buffoon, eventually grew to be likeable and overcame his cowardice to become a true hero towards the end, which helped that show immensely.

This show, on the other hand, doesn't have those benefits. For one, this is a pure romance, not even a romantic comedy, so I really have to like the main leads in the show because of that. Why? Because in romance, the audience is supposed to want for the main couple to succeed in getting together, that's the point of it.

Here, Hananoi was actively hampering my enjoyment of the show, simply because he felt like a very troubled and, to a degree, disturbed young man that had a lot of issues that made me genuinely worried for Hotaru's well being when she was around him.

Why?

Well, even from the first episode, Hananoi was triggering red flags towards me all around.

Granted, I will admit that I am a straight man approaching middle age, not a high school girl, so I understand that I am not the target audience for this show, but Hananoi's pretty boy aesthetic was really rubbing me the wrong way even from the very first episode.

Like, the fact that he was very much depressed because of breaking up with his girlfriend, feeling very dejected and standing all alone on a bench while snow was falling, was very natural and I was empathizing with him at that moment.

But as soon as Hotaru enters the picture and tries to be nice to him, he immediately switches gears and falls in love with her; no cool down period from the previous relationship, no remorse for his ex girlfriend or anything like that, he just sees Hotaru lend him a helping hand and then, the very next day, he's in her class asking her to be his girlfriend.

That's very unsettling. And scary.

Honestly, if I was the ex, I'd feel insulted how this man felt so little for me that the moment I took issue with him and decided to break up, he simply decides to go for another girl the very next day.

And it wasn't because Hotaru defended him, or tried to be there for him, it was entirely because she simply held an umbrella over his head while it was snowing. That's all there was to his attraction.

Well, OK, that was weird, sure, but maybe he is simply that flexible and quick to get back up on his feet. You never know.

Then, it's the fact that Hotaru had rejected him, clear as day, but he still chose to wait for her, at the end of the school day, for her to exit the building so that he can accompany her home, even though she had already rejected him by that point, nor were they even friends.

The show glosses over that, trying to make it seem like not a big deal but, really, he's just acting like a stalker at that point; but instead of actually stalking, he's being upfront about it and tries to follow her home. The only reason this worked was because Hotaru did not get creeped out enough to tell him to leave her alone, right then and there.

Then, when Hotaru says what hair style she likes, in response to his own question, and she answers that she likes short hairs, simply because they are easier to wash, the next day this man came to school with short hair, after cutting his long hair, just to appeal to her.

This man has no self respect, no personal identity, no fashion style or wants or desires. He pretty much just wants to appeal to this girl, as desperately as possible.

The anime tries to play it off as him being earnest and diligent but, really, it came across as very creepy and unhealthy.

Like, in proper context, Hotaru didn't even agree to dating him by that point, at all, so she's pretty much a stranger to him, but her saying that she prefers shorter hairstyles because they are easier to wash was enough to cause him to change his entire body image just to appeal to her; and she didn't even agree to be his girlfriend by this point, mind you.

Worse, after Hotaru's friend had lost her hairpin that day, Hananoi was planning on spending the entire night, on that track field, rummaging through the snow, in an attempt to find the lost pin hidden in it for her.

Like....bro, what?!

It wasn't until Hotaru herself showed up and had to knock some sense into him that that stuff that he was doing was crazy that he changed his mind; and not crazy in a charming kind of way, as the anime was trying to play it off as, but crazy in a “this man is mentally unwell” kind of way.

And this was just the first episode, mind you.

There's way more than that where that come from.

Like, there's another episode where Hananoi arrives early for his date with Hotaru. And by “early”, I don't just mean “early”, I mean at least “two hours early”, where all he does is stand there, waiting for her.

That is not how real men work.

And, worse, this sets a very bad precedent because young inexperienced girls who may be single and who are, coincidentally, the target audience for this show (I assume that's the target audience for this), this show will set these unrealistic expectations for a boyfriend to them, so they will then expect for their future boyfriends to arrive two hours earlier before the set time for their date, they will expect for their boyfriends to be willing to change their appearances and looks based on their whims and they will expect for their boyfriends to rummage through snow, at night, looking for something that they had lost because that's what “romantic” means to them.

Make no mistake, I feel like having high expectations for a partner is a good thing that most people should do, but those expectations have to at least be realistic. This show is setting expectations that no normal human being would ever meet, expectations that only the most desperate of stalkers would ever be willing to fulfill.

But, to some extent, I know what the fans of this show will argue. They would say that I'm a hypocrite, that as a straight man, of course I wouldn't understand why Hananoi is so obsessed over Hotaru; it's not supposed to be logical, it's because he's the impersonation of what the ideal boyfriend should be like. He's more of an ideal, rather than a real human being.

And, everyone will argue, and I can see this argument being made, that men also have anime TV series that set unrealistic expectations for women as well: shows like The Helpful Fox Senko-san, where Senko is overly cheerful and helpful towards the protagonist in that show, how she goes above and beyond to make sure that he is happy and comfortable, and that it sets very toxic examples with how selfless and obsessed she is with him in that show.

I get that argument, and I can see a valid point in it.

Because of this, had this been my only criticism of Hananoi, I would have backed down and conceded that this was simply a case of a TV show simply not being for me and moving on.

However, this was not the only unnerving thing about him. As the show went on, he continued to trigger red flags from me, everywhere he went.

Even if you set aside how obsessed and selfless Hananoi is, the fact of the matter is, he has no true character to himself. Outside of being Hotaru's boyfriend, the man has no qualities.

He has no likes, no dislikes, no passions, no dreams, no motivation outside of wanting to please Hotaru. If you take Hotaru out of the picture in this story, Hananoi has no identity to himself.

Hell, the way he is portrayed, I genuinely believe that, if Hotaru were to be caught cheating on him, I am convinced Hananoi is mentally unstable enough to be capable of committing suicide from that. I wouldn't put that above him; that's how much he relies on Hotaru being a nice girl to him.

Some women might find that romantic and a good trait for a boyfriend to have, but I find it highly unhealthy.

But, again, Senko-san is the same in that regard, so we can chalk this all up to it being what an idealized boyfriend in fiction would be like.

Then, there's the fact that Hananoi makes some dubious decisions while he is in a relationship with Hotaru.

For example, there is a small part of one episode where Hananoi, for no reason whatsoever, selfishly decides to put some distance between himself and Hotaru, so that they can keep their spaces (she agrees to this arrangement at his request, but only because she is inexperienced in the romance department).

Usually setting a distance between yourself and your partner is done for a good reason that warrants such measures, but the show never explained why he did that. It was Hotaru that needed to push the boundary between herself and him to end that ridiculous arrangement. Granted, that decision did allow for their love to grow stronger, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a nonsensical and borderline psychotic requirement that had no reason to be there, to begin with.

Or, in another episode, Hotaru and Hananoi are talking, but it's clear that something is bothering Hotaru a lot. When pressed about it, Hotaru keeps it to herself and doesn't reveal what that is to Hananoi.

As they are about to leave the rooftop, Hananoi reveals to Hotaru that the door to the rooftop where they were on was locked, and that they were stuck on top of the school.

During this time, while rummaging through their thoughts, Hotaru eventually reveals what's been on her mind all along to Hananoi.

Then, their friends come up to the rooftop to unlock the door for them, only for them to reveal that said door had never been locked all along. It is then revealed that Hananoi had lied all along, just to buy himself extra time alone with Hotaru, just so she can reveal what was actually on her mind.

Granted, I'm all for talking about your issues with your partner so that you can discuss your differences as much as it's needed, but if my partner told me that they don't want to discuss something, then that would be the end of it.

I wouldn't then decide that I need to buy myself time alone with them, until they change their mind to talk about it.

That's not only scummy, it's downright manipulative in the worst ways possible.

If Hananoi is willing to lie this easily about something, like that door being locked just so he can keep Hotaru there on the rooftop with him, for a matter this trivial, imagine what else he's willing to lie about.

But the main thing which I hate about his character, besides being manipulative and underhanded, is the simple fact that he is extremely unlikable.

He's not just avoiding conversations with other people, he outright is unfriendly towards them.

Pretty much, Hananoi is merely tolerant towards Hotaru's female friends because he has to, since Hotaru does need to have friends, but he's also extremely cold, to an unnecessary degree, towards her male friends.

Again, the anime tries to play this off as quirky, but it's deeply unsettling.

This type of controlling behavior was triggering red flags to me, non stop.

I'd understand it if they were also courting Hotaru, or being unreasonably cold towards her or him, but that's not the case. Literally, one of them even outright says that he cares about Hotaru and he's looking out for her as her friend, and Hananoi treats that as a bad thing.

Like, what the hell is his problem?! He is literally the newcomer into Hotaru's life and yet, after she decides to allow him into her life as her boyfriend, he wants all of her male friends out just because he doesn't like them.

Normally that would be acceptable if there were reasons why he didn't like them, like if they mistreated her, or something, but they were simply looking out for her.

Hananoi is unusually cold towards everyone, tries to act cool and mighty whenever he feels like it, wants Hotaru to not be around her friends, is over imposing on her male friends whenever he feels like it, and is also willing to cheat at games whenever he's making a bet against them (like he did, once, while playing ping pong with one of her male friends).

The more episodes I was watching, the less I liked his character; and that's a problem when he's the main lead in this romance story.

By the time the anime ended, I was genuinely wishing for Hotaru to break up with him. I liked her enough that I was feeling bad for her, for being with this asshole in a relationship. And, mind you, that's not what a romance is supposed to make you feel like.

I will admit, at the end of the day, I was spoiled by other, much better romance anime, like Tonikawa: Over the Moon for You, A Sign of Affection or hell, even this lineup's Grandpa and Grandma Turn Young Again; shows that are far more genuine in their romances, who have characters that love each other without being underhanded, obsessed or manipulative, and who feel clean cut and honest.

Granted, even in A Sign of Affection, Itsuomi was being a bit of an asshole towards Yuki's childhood friend, but that was because the childhood friend was being overprotective and unreasonable; and even then, Itsuomi was still trying to be curt and nice towards him, not like the asshole that is Hananoi here.

I digress.

Honestly, this show didn't do it for me. This feels like one of those romance animes that had good intentions, but got lost along the way because of the male lead.

However, would this show have been better if Hananoi was written differently? Honestly, I think so.

To give credit where credit is due, the show does evolve the romance over time, to a significant degree. I'll still say it's far better than Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie, by a long mile, and it has redeeming qualities.

And, objectively speaking, I feel like the show ain't that bad. It's on the last spot on this ranking because, subjectively, I didn't like it at all, but objectively, it wasn't half bad.

Objectively, I feel like the show is still better than the likes of The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague, simply because the romance does go somewhere, and I feel like the show does talk about important stuff that are relevant; stuff like knowing how to establish rules about your relationship from the very beginning, knowing how to set boundaries in a relationship and how to take things slowly, how to become comfortable with one another, how physical contact is necessary for a relationship.

All of these are important things to talk about and, I will admit, I was surprised that this show took these topics and treated them as seriously as it did. Honestly, it's got good ideas behind it.

It's a shame that the execution was ruined for me, due to Hananoi being the male lead. That, honestly, ruined it entirely for me and, as the show went on, it got worse and worse.

I hoped he would undergo some character growth towards the end and, the show claims that he did, but I really don't see much of an improvement. He did become tolerant towards Hotaru wanting to spend time with her friends over him sometimes (yes, imagine that was a plot point in this show), but that's as far as it went. He was still extremely intolerant and insecure about her male friends being around them.

Honestly, I just don't like the guy. It's as simple as that.

Had I been a teenage girl with lower standards, maybe my opinions of Hananoi would have been different but, as it stands, I just couldn't stand him. And if this show was done with a comedic edge to it, in which they went all out and treated Hananoi like an irredeemable bastard, like in KonoSuba, then I would have liked it way more; or maybe if the show didn't try to put him in the spotlight and pretended like he's a good guy and made him over the top unlikable, like in School Days, then I would have liked that much more.

I'm fine with a main character being an asshole if he either grows out of it, or if the show plays along with it and makes him get his comeupins or, at least, it's being honest about him and showing him for the asshole that he is. This, however, doesn't do any of those, but tries to play it all off as quirkiness.

As it stands, it just feels manipulative, in trying to make me sympathize with, what it looks to me to be, a pretty annoying insecure unstable teenager that has an unhealthy obsession over his girlfriend.

The show tried to make Hananoi appear relatable by showing his tragic past but, really, while I can see that past making him become the unlikable character that he is now, that still doesn't change the fact that he is unlikable, nor does it excuse it to me.

Like I said, if a new season of this gets greenlit, I will not be watching it.

We got 8 new entries to talk about. Let's get to it!

OK so, we're at the end of a new season of animes, and it's time to wrap things up again with a, as is tradition on this blog, with a new post ranking the shows that just ended.

This season has been quite a nice one, and it had a lot of shows that I particularly like. Even the worst ranked show on this list, I can say, wasn't very bad, objectively speaking; I just didn't like personally, on a subjective level.

Overall, I felt very happy with this lineup. This season had a lot of very good stuff and I'm just itching to write about them.

As always: all the shows in this ranking are available on Crunchyroll from Romania. Some of them may be unavailable to other regions of the world, due to licensing differences. Please keep that in mind.

So let's get started with the ranking!

1. Grandpa and Grandma Turn Young Again

This is a very innocuous title.

Generally, most people wouldn't think much of a TV show with a title like that. I certainly didn't, when I first saw the description, on Crunchyroll, for the show.

It looked like a very boring and uninteresting idea, the idea that an old married couple turns young again, and shenanigans ensue. That's a very cliched and overused plotline in fictional media, and I didn't care much for it.

I was absolutely not expecting much from such an entry, especially since Crunchyroll didn't even have a video preview for what the show would be like.

I generally like to use video previews for upcoming TV shows, to gauge what the style and humor of the show would be like, and I tend to avoid watching shows that don't even have that preview on Crunchyroll.

But, even so, even with the lack of such a video preview, and even with the overly cliched premise of the show, I listened to my gut feeling and decided to go ahead and watch it, nonetheless.

Honestly, I am so glad that I listened to my gut.

This show was very much worth watching. Is the premise cliched? Yeah, it is a bit. However, this show proves that, even with an overly cliched premise, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is execution. And this show executed this premise flawlessly.

What's the first episode like?

An old couple are tending to an apple tree orchard that they own when, one day, they find a golden apple on the tree that they had been growing since they were young.

Tempted by the delicious looking golden apple, the couple decide to eat it.

The next day, they wake up young and healthy once again, almost like they are in their 20s (although they still retain the gray hair from their old age).

They are amazed by this development but, still, they decide to go about their next days as if nothing had happened.

The episode then covers the people around them acting absolutely astonished at the fact that they had become young again, especially their adult children who are incredulous at the fact that their geezer parents had become younger than themselves.

Running gags include how the granddaughter becomes overly attached to grandpa, which causes uneasiness in everyone around them, how the now-young-looking-couple absolutely obliterate the competition in a sports festival where there victory seemed already won by the opposing side since they had young people participating for them and other such gags.

That's kind of the gist of episode 1.

This might seem like a sparse summary of episode 1, but that's because this is simply how the episode is structured. Not only that, but all episodes are structured such that they are just a series of running gags, sequenced one after the other.

The reason I'm praising this show as much as I am is because of how wholesome the show is.

The humor is very innocent and simple, where the main idea is that the couple can now do things that they couldn't do before, now that they are young again.

The show explores topics like them playing video games again, celebrating Halloween with their grandchildren, participating in overly exerting sports or physical activities, or even just going on a honeymoon and visiting a new city.

This might seem like it would date the show quite a lot, as it's introducing stuff that feel very specific to this time, but it's honestly surprisingly timeless.

The couple is open to trying new ideas, they never shy away or try to preach how the old times were better or how the youth has lost their ways, as I'm sure less inspired writers would immediately attempt with this premise.

Instead, the show simply jokes about it, but also makes them particularly capable and adaptable to the new times and allows them to be good at things they wouldn't otherwise be capable of doing.

I liked that.

But, more importantly, disregarding the constant gags that run all the time, the show is timeless in a different way, in which it talks about old and new romantic relationships all the time.

The couple, despite turning young again, seem just as attached and happy with each other as they had been while being old, which makes it very nice. There was an idea that was played with, in one episode, where grandma suffered a concussion and temporary amnesia, where she had lost memories of being married to her husband and now grandpa needed to make her fall in love with him again.

It was an interesting idea, that I really liked, and I also liked that the show didn't shy away from claiming that love would happen again, even if they had to start over again.

There are good ideas in this show.

Also, there's another background romance between their granddaughter, Shiori, and another boy from her class that she just happens to be interacting all the time with, Shota.

The show is mostly about human relationships, more than anything else. It talks a lot about achieving your dreams, having regrets over things you never got to accomplish, how timeless romance can be but, at the same time, the fragility of life and coming to terms with one's own death.

Given the theme of family that this show hovers around with, I want to say that the closest anime that I can think of that I can compare to this would be Clannad: After Story, as the two shows seem to draw a lot of parallels.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that this show is anywhere close to being as good as Clannad was. However, the way it talks about life and family feels, if not similar, at the very least inspired to how Clannad talked about these things, in a generally timeless manner.

I respect this show a lot for that.

One last thing I want to say, but this show also had a very nice and profound ending.

The ending was left ambiguous over what it implied, leaving the audience to imagine if it was a sad or happy ending, but I will say that it was done almost perfectly. It left me wondering and even a bit scared, but I am glad that they ended on the note that they did.

I would have liked for them to go the 'sad ending' route, just because I'm a fan of those, but they left it ambiguous to not be overly depressing, and I get that.

Overall, this was a perfect anime that talked about life, romance, family and, most importantly, age. I love everything that this show did and I couldn't get enough of it.

Absolutely worth your time to watch it.

2. Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf

Honestly, I didn't know what to think of this, when I learned that they would be doing a remake of this anime.

For those that don't know, Spice and Wolf is a still ongoing light novel series, being written by Isuna Hasekura, that originally began being published since February of 2006. The light novel series is quite old but it was chosen to be adapted by ASCII Media Works into a manga from September 2007, and later on it was also chosen to be adapted into an anime by multiple studios, which got to air from 2008 to 2009, was directed by Takeo Takahashi (the guy that also went on after this project and also directed Yosuga no Sora, So I Can't Play H!, Rokka: Braves of the Six Flowers, Citrus and some other anime as well) and got a total of 24 episodes and two OVAs animated for it.

So, to put it mildly, this intellectual property is well established. Not only this but that aforementioned anime also became a cult classic and is seen as one of the most influential staples of the romance genre from the anime community, to this day.

And, personally, I did like the anime, although I will admit that I did not finish watching it. I remember watching that anime many years ago, and stopping after finishing the first season (after the first 12 episodes). I planned on continuing to finish it and watch the second half as well, but I never got around to it.

From what I heard online, the original anime never finished adapting the story and left a lot of viewers hanging although, since I never finished watching it myself, I could never confirm this, so take it with a grain of salt.

Still, I was very much surprised when I saw this entry pop up a couple of months ago, animated by Studio Passione and claiming to be a remake.

Takeo Takahashi was returning as the director for this remake as well, although this time having a co-director named Hijiri Sanpei also co-directing along with him.

This was a big thing, and I didn't know whether I was liking the idea of a remake of the original or not. On the one hand, the original anime felt adequate enough and I believed that it was entertaining enough and had enough heart to it that I didn't feel that a remake was necessary in the least.

On the other hand, though, I did eventually drop the original midway through, so maybe it wasn't as enticing and entertaining as I remember it being.

Maybe the remake could fix that?

Either way, here we are, midway through the remake as well, and now I'm going to convey my thoughts on this show and tell you what is it about it that makes it worth watching.

The show starts with a traveling merchant named Kraft Lawrence who's visiting a pagan village to buy some of their wheat and who plans to sell it for a higher price to other merchants.

The village he's visiting is known to have a bountiful harvest of wheat and he also has good relations with them, as he had been a customer of their wheat since many years before and, as such, he stands to negotiate good prices for it.

He enters the village in the midst of a festival that they are having, in which they are celebrating their new harvest while also mentioning Holo, the name of their pagan wolf god who is said to be the reason why their harvests have historically been so bountiful.

After buying some of their wheat, Lawrence leaves the village, planning to travel in the night on his carriage as he is in a hurry to deliver his goods to other towns and cities nearby.

After leaving the village and settling down in the middle of nowhere, for the night, Lawrence discovers a strange girl with wolf ears and a large tail sleeping and hiding in his carriage. Once she awakens, she reveals herself to be the wise wolf Holo, the god that that pagan village worships.

Holo claims she decided to abandon her village, and so she took the liberty of hiding in his carriage while he was passing through.

In disbelief, Lawrence asks for proof that she is the real god Holo, otherwise he would turn her in to the church who would burn her for claiming to be a god.

Seeing no other way of convincing him, Holo eats some of the wheat that Lawrence had in his carriage to transform into a giant wolf beast, who scares him.

This incident convinces Lawrence to return to the pagan village and seek to stay the night there, where he and Holo talk.

Holo claims that the villagers of the pagan village have grown skeptical of her existence and have been losing faith in her over the years, mainly due to the occasional poor wheat harvests that she produces every once in a while, to protect the village's soil. In recent years especially, with the advent of new farming techniques that seem to have bolstered their wheat output, most villagers have started to abandon their faith in her and turn towards the more mainstream faith in the one true god that the church is promoting everywhere.

Seeing how the village she has been protecting over so many generations have become disbelieving towards her, Holo had decided to abandon this village and currently plangs to go towards the north, to a different village where she had been born in, where it's much colder and the winters are longer.

After hearing her story, Lawrence agrees to allow her to travel with him in his carriage for a time, provided she can end up paying for her own expenses.

Holo agrees, claiming that as the wise wolf god, she is more than capable of making profits through her business-savvy knowledge, moreso than most other people, so she can earn her stay by his side.

And so, the traveling merchant Lawrence and the wise wolf Holo become traveling partners, as they travel across the country to make a living for themselves. During this time, they need to avoid attracting attention onto themselves, as the very influential church in that world would surely want Holo burned if they were to ever discover her existence.

Thus ends episode 1.

So, right off the bat, I could very much sense the similarities between this remake and the original anime as well.

Granted, I haven't watched the original in many years, so my memories of it are a bit fuzzy, but I remember it enough that, in broad strokes, I feel like the first episodes match somewhat well with each other.

This show also seems to have a very technical focus towards economics and the life of a merchant, talking about negotiating prices all the time, buying products when they are lower value and selling them at higher prices to make a profit, exchange rates between different currencies, the seasonal values of certain goods and so many other stuff in this area.

I liked that, both in the original and in this remake.

It feels like it makes the world that they inhabit have a realistic feel to it, filling it with a sense of genuine lore that makes it believable.

Moreover, despite this being set in a land that is made to replicate medieval Europe, from the looks of it, it didn't fall for the common temptations of adding magic or quests, dragons or other supernatural entities into the plot in any ways.

After the deluge of isekai anime from recent years, seeing an anime be set in, what looks to be medieval Europe, and yet still resisting the temptations of adding unnecessary superfluous fluff to that universe felt like a breath of fresh air.

In this world, gods are prayed to and believed in by the general folk, but, with the sole exception of Holo, they do not make appearences or fly down onto the Earth, there is no magic or potions in this world, prayers are not miracles in any way but mere chants that have little practical effects and the people feel like they are part of a genuine medieval society. These are all good things that make everything feel down to Earth, almost historically accurate even.

Granted, I know that this is the style that the light novels were most likely going for, as the time when they started being written and set the style for themselves was way before this isekai anime craze and before any of these tropes even became popular to begin with but, still, it's refreshing seeing this type of world building.

And, for what it's worth, I also liked seeing all the humans in this world. They all felt realistic in their portrayals, all of them having genuine emotions, wants and needs and also affiliations and loyalties.

Honestly, this is what I liked the most about this anime: it's its sense of grounding in a medieval setting. There's no magic, no quests, no treasures, no kingdom wars or demons or demon lord fights, no enchantments of buffs or skills or levels or any of that; just life as a merchant trying to make money for yourself.

And, the economics being talked are genuine and they are dumbed down in a way that I feel like most laymen without degrees in economics can follow without much issues. I liked how accessible the story was.

But, aside from that, this anime is mostly a romance between Lawrence and Holo. And, to put it bluntly, I liked the chemistry that these two had.

Granted, there are some cliches that pop up every now and then, like betraying your loved one when you're desperate, which I don't particularly like.

Still, I like how they played Holo's wise wolf personality in this anime, as they make her very cunning and clever, somewhat manipulative even when she needs to be, while also staying loyal to Lawrence for helping her out.

Lawrence himself isn't a stick figure either, as he learns over the travels to be somewhat more selfish when the time comes and also learns how to better negotiate with people that he interacts with, as well as adapting to hard and difficult situations.

Really, there is character growth in this show, and I liked both of them a lot.

Granted, my one complaint about this show is that the romance is quite slow, and I feel like there are times when I feel that it's unnecessarily stagnant even, but I'll be waiting for the second half of the show before I can make a proper call of how this will end.

Overall though, this was a very fun and, for the most part, entertaining anime.

Do I regret seeing it over the original? Honestly, I don't. I never planned on dropping the original in any ways, it just so happened back then, but now, I definitely won't be planning on dropping this one, and I still plan on finishing through all of its currently airing episodes.

I don't know how this remake is planning on adapting the entire plot, seeing how the light novels are still ongoing, and probably won't stop being published any time soon, but I do hope to see a proper conclusion to our characters' struggles and a final happy ending to their love story.

Here's hoping for a nice ending, for the next half of this story.

3. KonoSuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World! (Season 3)

How could I make such a ranking without Konosuba making it in the top 3 spots?

Truthfully, I wasn't sure how to rank this show and Spice and Wolf, as they were pretty much tied in my head this season.

I enjoyed these two shows almost equally, so it was very difficult for me to pick one over the other.

In the end, I had to make a choice, and I chose Spice and Wolf over this show but it was very close, I'll say that.

When's all said and done, it came down to which genres I like more: romance or comedy, and that's how I made my choice. Spice and Wolf was not a very good romance, but it was a romance, nonetheless, that had a lot of other good qualities to it, whereas this was a very funny comedy.

However, if I were to reverse the ordering of these two shows in this ranking, I wouldn't necessarily find it wrong, nor would I cry about it.

Honestly, I could talk about Konosuba right now, since I've never addressed the show in my rankings before outside of Megumin's own spinoff but, really, who doesn't know about Konosuba already? It's among the most popular isekai of all time, and for very good reason.

I'll just very briefly try to describe episode 1 of season 1, just to give you a hint of what the show feels like.

So, in episode 1, this teenage guy named Satou Kazuma ends up in the afterlife talking to Goddess Aqua, who tells him that his previous life as a boring NEET had ended abruptly when a large truck almost ran him over, the scare of which gave him a heart attack in the moment and caused him to die on the spot.

Aqua laughs at Kazuma's misfortune, and acts disparaging towards him knowing that he was a shut-in with no social life in his previous life but offers to reincarnate him in a parallel medieval world filled with magic and monsters, where he has to defeat the Demon King as an adventurer.

After deciding on the specifics of this arrangement, Aqua tells Kazuma that he can take with him anything of his choice to the new world, that might aid him in his quests.

Seeing how disrespectful and mean Aqua was to him, Kazuma makes the 200 IQ decision to choose her to bring with him, which prompts Aqua to be replaced from her role of overseeing the afterlife with another goddess who promptly teleports them to the new world.

As such, Kazuma now has to defeat the Demon King of that world to bring peace to it and also to attain a great deal of money and fame for himself.

However, he soon realizes that despite forcing her to come with him because of his decision, Aqua seems to be pretty useless in this world, as she seems to have only very limited healing magic abilities and knows some party tricks to entertain mortals with.

Seeing how useless Aqua is to him, Kazuma decides to take matters into his own hands and register as an official adventurer in that world, forming a team with Aqua, in the hopes of at least earning enough money to be able to buy food for themselves, much less defeat the Demon King.

There's more than happens in the first episode but that's pretty much the main gist of it.

In short, Kazuma has zero knowledge of how to be a good adventurer, is very poor because he started out in that world with no money on him and has only a bunch of low level skills like “Steal”, that allows him to steal items from a different person, as well as having very high luck.

Aqua, his companion, has very limited intelligence but a lot of fortitude and specializes at healing but is overall quite selfish, reckless, and dumb (and also an alcoholic). Moreover, she had lost her status as a god when Kazuma had chosen her as the item to bring with him, which means that they have to defeat the Demon King now for her to return to being a god again, which is obviously what she wants now.

And so begins their journey together, at defeating the Demon King of that world.

That's the summary of it.

Honestly, there's a lot of stuff that happen after that, especially once Megumin and Darkness also enter the stage as new companions, but I won't go much into details. Suffice it to say, this isn't as much an isekai anime, as it is an isekai parody, more than anything else.

Yes, sometimes this show takes itself seriously and yes, it has good action sequences from time to time, but almost everything in this show is played for laughs.

Kazuma is selfish and a scumbag, at the end of the day. He isn't the ideal hero by any traditional meaning of the word, except that he is very adaptable and reliable most of the time.

His party is even more useless than him, which makes a lot of the adventures that they go on end up in very humorous situations.

The show makes fun of a lot of isekai and fantasy tropes almost every episode, with its selfish but still endearing characters and its tongue in cheek humor.

This season, the show will cover various arcs of the story, most important of which is Kazuma finding an infinite money making magical item, himself getting kidnapped by the princess of the kingdom and becoming her “big brother”, and a new arc concerning Darkness and her noble origins.

There's a lot of stuff to discuss but, I am glad to say, the colorful cast and the charming wholesome humor make a great and very welcome comeback once again.

I already mentioned how, in my previous review of KonoSuba: An Explosion on This Wonderful World!, Megumin's spinoff TV series, I found the humor to be a bit lacking and repetitive, and how I longed for the return of the main cast into the story.

Well, here the main cast did return and, boy did I miss seeing them.

The humor made a nice return to form, almost every joke landed quite a lot, with new improvements this time, with them making fun of arranged marriages in the nobility, the innocence of a child princess that gets to be body-swapped with Kazuma and, last but not least, Kazuma unlocking the ability to change voices at will.

Needless to say, a lot of chaos ensues.

There's not much more I can say about this show that will do it justice.

I will say that I feel like this season was more plot focused than the previous ones, which lent itself to fewer jokes, sadly, but the jokes that they do do are very funny and worth staying for.

I also would have wished for more romance moments between Kazuma and his love interest but those got sidelined in favor of the plot. Oh well.

Still, if you liked the first two seasons of Konosuba, there's little reason why you wouldn't like this one as well. All the charming moments are still there, the wholesome humor and the quirky characters make a full return, and it was such a treat.

It's worth seeing.

4. Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation (Season 2, Part 2)

And today we'll be covering the second half of season 2 of this TV show, in this entry.

You can read about my thoughts of the first half here.

This is simply a continuation of that, as nothing much changed about the pacing or the story of the show since then.

I'm not going to talk much more about Mushoku Tensei, as I personally feel like it's among the most renowned isekai anime in existence, and most people already know about it.

This second half of season 2 continues with Rudy's journey after finally deciding to marry the love of his life.

Before the marriage can happen, though, he needs to secure himself a house for their family. Then, he has to think about children with his new wife.

But as most things go, trouble eventually rears its ugly head even during these happy moments of his life, when Rudy will receive an ominous letter informing him that his mother was finally found, many years after she had disappeared during the mass teleportation incident, but she needs to be saved.

During her rescue, another character from the past will reappear, and Rudy will have to make many difficult decisions along the way.

So yeah, that's the general gist of this second half.

Season 3 was already announced as well, so I'm also looking forward to that too.

Honestly, this season was pretty satisfactory, all things considered.

I disliked the slow pacing and the fact that not much was happening, in the beginning, because I thought that things were starting to look up for Rudy and were becoming quite boring overall, seeing how now he needed to settle down with his wife and look forward to a new life as the head of a family, but that quickly changed when the letter informing him of his mother was received.

So yeah, there's more story to be told.

To some extent, I did dislike that there was even a continuation after the first half of this season, as I felt that they ended on a very good note, with him deciding to marry who he decides to marry, he already fixed his health issues that he was concerned about and he had gained a place at a prestigious university.

All things considered, I thought that was a good place to end on.

Especially given the small side quests that seemed to become prevalent in this second half, in the beginning, I felt that most of this was just an after story, and I was getting bored, since I felt like the meat and potatoes of Rudy's life had already been covered and detailed.

But, apparently I was wrong. There's way more than needs to happen, and I'm happy to say the story took me by surprise at how dark and gloomy it became, towards the end.

Granted, the plot became a bit cliched at some points, here and there, like how Rudy got the news about his mother at the worst moment possible, how he's the only one that can save her, how he arrived just in time to save a particular recurring character, at the very last moment and how said character falls in love immediately with him.

There's a lot of that that I found to be cheesy.

Then, there's the fact that the show suddenly decided to go in a different direction than what I wanted, and went with a harem route.

Don't get me wrong! I don't dislike harem animes, nor do I have any issues with them, but this felt like it was ruining, what could have been, a very sweet and nice love story. Rudy was already married and happy, he already had a child on the way, the fact that the story needed to shoehorn in another love interest in the middle soured my mood quite a bit.

And the reasoning for it taking that direction also felt very weak and unjustified for me.

I don't know, I kind of dislike the direction that the plot is heading in. Had the show ended at the first half of this season, I would have been more than satisfied with the story and would have considered it perfectly serviceable.

As it is, it feels like it's adding unnecessary fluff just to appeal to a particular demographic.

But I digress.

The ending didn't fully rectify any of these flaws, mind you, but it did leave me impressed that it, at least, left things on a down-to-Earth note.

Usually stories like these want to end on a happy, overly sugary note, trying to be as saccharin as possible to leave the audience overly satisfied. I appreciated that the show pulled back a bit and said “No, that's not how real life works”, and left us on a sober ending, instead, where there is a component of a happy ending, sure, but a lot of things were left uncertain and heavy losses had been incurred already.

What I like the most in this story is the fact that all the characters feel human, relatable, flawed and even selfish, at times, but never to a degree that's unrealistic. I like the heavy conversations that they have, how difficult certain moments are and how sober and honest certain life lessons can be.

Overall, I feel like the show did what it needed to do. I do regret seeing the story go in the direction that it did, as I hoped it would end at the place where I felt was most fitting for it to end at, but I do understand the need to continue the story to tie up the loose ends that remain hanging.

Overall, outside of Konosuba, this still remains my favorite isekai anime of all time, and I will contend that it's among the best implementations of the genre, that I've ever seen. It's absolutely worth a watch.

5. Viral Hit

It's time we look at a show about fighting.

Generally, I'm not much into anime TV shows that cover fighting as their main selling point, but I'm personally glad that I still gave this show a look.

This is an animated adaptation for a manhwa that's being released as a web comic.

The author for this manhwa, Taejun Pak, is also known for a different manhwa titled Lookism, which I heard was semi-popular in South Korea.

I don't read manga in general, much less manhwa, so I don't know much about Lookism personally, but, with that said, this show is pretty cool and I like the direction that it took.

So, let's talk about episode 1.

Yu Hobin is a high school student that always gets bullied in his class by a guy named Pakgo and his cameraman, nicknamed Snapper.

You might think “Why does a high school student need a cameraman?”. Well, the reason is because Pakgo is a famous Newtuber (Newtube being this world's version of our YouTube) and he's trying to make a living for himself, and uses Hobin in his videos to attract an audience. Secretly, Hobin is being bullied to appear in his videos as a willing participant but, behind the scenes, he's effectively treated as a slave and he makes no money out of it.

We later find out that Hobin's mother spends her entire time in the hospital, being treated for cancer.

She's fighting for her life against the cancer but the treatments that she's undergoing are incurring hefty medical bills that Hobin has to cover.

As an only child with no father (or, at least, his father is never mentioned in the anime), Hobin is forced to make money working as a part time employee for a fast food restaurant.

The low wage that he receives barely covers for his mother's medical expenses, and he's constantly struggling to survive and is in desperate need for more money.

One day, after hearing how much money Pakgo is making from his Newtube career, both Hobin and Snapper decide that they should make their own channels to start making money.

Pakgo tells Snapper that he is incapable of doing this, though, as he's still technically a minor and, as such, he cannot legally have a bank account to have his videos' revenue sent to.

Knowing that his parents would not allow him to use their accounts, Snapper decides to, instead, rely on Hobin and use Hobin's mother's bank account, instead.

Not wanting to suffer more bullying from Pakgo, Hobin agrees, and sets up a new Newtube channel for Snapper and also connects his mother's bank account to it, without her knowledge.

At some point, later on, while Hobin is working on his shift at the fast food restaurant, he makes casual conversation with a coworker around his age named Choi Bomi.

Hobin has a crush on Bomi, but he keeps that to himself.

Pakgo comes into the restaurant with his smartphone live streaming everything to his Newtube channel and then, to gain popularity and also to ask Bomi out, he comes to the counter of the restaurant where Bomi asks for his order and he then claims that his audience is asking him to challenge her.

He gives her a picture of a large burger that she'll have to make for him in half a minute and, if she cannot fulfill this challenge, she'd have to give him her phone number as a penalty.

Not wanting to be rude to him, since he's a customer, but also troubled by the prospective of having to give him her phone number, Bomi is visibly distraught, which Hobin picks up on.

Not wanting to make her go through this ridiculous setup, Hobin takes it upon himself and does his best to fulfill the challenge in her stead, successfully making the burger that Pakgo had requested in 30 seconds.

Thus, Bomi did not have to give Pakgo her phone number.

Bomi is happy about this and she does appreciate Hobin's assistance.

Later on, at Hobin's house, Hobin has Snapper come over and use his desktop PC to live stream a video game Let's Play for the Newtube channel that he had set up previously.

While Snapper is making the content at the desktop, Hobin is in the kitchen making him food, at his request.

Hobin laments the state of his life and how miserable he is for being used by everyone around him, especially since Snapper isn't paying him any money for everything that he is doing for him and his new channel.

As he walks with the ramen that he had made for Snapper to the living room, Hobin trips on the power cord for the PC, while Snapper was playing, and also accidentally pours the hot ramen on Snapper, which enrages him.

Hobin apologizes for everything, but Snapper starts beating him up, yelling at him for tripping on the power cord and causing the PC to shut down, which abruptly ended his live stream and caused him to lose significant revenue.

At one point, Snapper says that Hobin's clumsiness is why his mother has cancer, which finally pushes Hobin over the edge and angers him enough that he finally decides to fight back and start hitting Snapper, turning their squabble into a full on brawl in his house.

The next day, Hobin wakes up to a phone call from Snapper in the early morning, with Snapper yelling at him to delete the video of their fight from his Newtube account.

Hobin is confused at first, since he had not recorded, much less uploaded, their fight to the internet.

Snapper claims that the live stream had recorded their fight through his desktop's webcam but Hobin doesn't understand how that could be since he had accidentally tripped on the power cord and disconnected it, last night.

That is until he realizes that the power cord that he had tripped on wasn't the desktop's power cord but the monitor's power cord, which was the reason for the screen going black and fooling both Hobin and Snapper into thinking that it had turned off and the stream ending when, in fact, the desktop continued to be on all the time and the live stream continuing to go on in the background while they fought.

Realizing this, and knowing that only he had the password for that Newtube account (as he had been the one to set it up for Snapper), Hobin listens to Snapper's request and attempts to delete the video, until he realizes from the comments on the video that he made a very large sum of money, just from that one video, because of the high number of views that he had gotten.

When Snapper returns to school, he realizes that everyone around him is making fun of him, as the video of his fight with Hobin had already become viral and everyone is now aware of it.

Tragically, Snapper now discovers that the pecking order in their class has changed, and he is now the runt of the class, since no one can respect him anymore after taking a beating from the lowest loser like Hobin. Not even Pakgo is willing to defend him anymore.

Enraged by this state of affairs, Snapper later confronts Hobin and asks for half the revenue of that video, but Hobin refuses, since he is in full control of the money, due to the fact that the money is in his mother's bank account.

After another fight between the two of them, Snapper eventually tries to reconcile with Hobin, and makes him an offer: rather than fight for that one video like they were already doing, he proposes a collaboration between the two of them: Hobin would become the star of their Newtube channel and be featured in all the videos and Snapper would simply be the cameraman and the producer for their videos (since he already has experience in those fields and the recording equipment, for having worked already as a cameraman for Pakgo).

Snapper initially proposes a 9:1 revenue share between him and Hobin, respectively, hoping that Hobin would agree to it, as he had always done up until then, and also hoping that this would restore the pecking order in his favor.

Hobin, however, finally grows a spine and refuses.

When realizing that his proposals don't work, Snapper keeps changing the split until it reverses to 1:9 instead, to which Hobin finally agrees to.

The pitch of their new joint channel will be Hobin calling out bullies and fighting them, since that has already proved successful when Hobin had fought Snapper and becoming a viral hit.

And so starts Hobin's attempt as a fighter against bullies.

So ends episode 1.

So yeah, that's the pitch.

To tell the truth, I found this to be an interesting start to what seemed to be a fresh idea.

Generally, I haven't seen many animes talk about school fights that much, so I've found this to be quite a nice and original idea.

Of course, I did watch Bucchigiri a while back, which I already talked about here, but while that show is about fights and is also very action packed, Bucchigiri focused more on gang fights while this show is more one-to-one fights, instead.

I'm not the biggest fan of the underdog trope in animes, but I will commend it when it's done well, and here I feel like it's been done well enough.

I will praise this show for keeping things simple and making the character not become an overpowered god like I was initially afraid it would do.

Hobin is initially a very weak character, who is extremely malleable and has trouble even against the lowest thugs. And, even as the show progressed and he became stronger, he still encountered enemies that were constantly more difficult to deal with and were causing him issues, making him feel uncomfortable and even wonder if he would win.

I like it when the opponents keep becoming more and more difficult to deal with, and this show did it in a realistic manner.

Moreover, I also appreciated how down to Earth this show was with its fights. It never went cartoon-ish with it and it still kept things simple and easy to follow. The show will also explain what techniques Hobin used to become better in fights, how he strategizes how to deal with specific opponents and fighting styles, and how he deals with each situation on a case-by-case basis. The analytical focus of the fights and how he plans on handling them was quite intriguing.

It's from this show where I learned a bit about Taekwondo and about sumo wrestling, how to fight a regular thug or how to fight multiple people at the same time. It's got good lessons and, while I cannot vouch for how realistic any of these lessons are or how practical they are to follow since I'm not a fighter myself, they did appear to have a genuine feel of authenticity to them, to the extent where I feel like regular people can use the stuff they see here and put it to good use in real life (although I'm definitely not suggesting you should take fighting lessons from a fictional TV series, by any means).

There were issues that I did have with the show, though, such as how lawless the world that they were in appeared to be, or how very cliched and one dimensional all the villains in this show were.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect for minor characters to care about what the protagonist is doing at any point, especially if they are strangers to him, but in this world it looks like every random stranger on the street wants to take your money at any moment's glance. Or how the school was fine with a lot of stuff where the students could pretty much beat each other up with no consequences whatsoever.

Like, doesn't law enforcement exist in this world? Or any kind of authority for that matter?

I know that the story calls for Hobin to have to defend himself, but it feels kind of ridiculous how everywhere he goes, there's someone around the corner that wants to steal his money or ruin his life forever and he has to fight them.

And then there's the issue with how the internet is portrayed. I know that, to some extent, there is a certain feel of novelty when thinking that being a content creator on YouTube can give you a lot of money, and that is indeed true for a minority of people on the platform but, realistically, I find it genuinely hard to believe that anyone could make a career out of fighting bullies on YouTube. There's a very good reason why, when you go there, you don't find that many videos of that type of content, and that reason is because YouTube uses demonetization on videos that contain violent content, especially fights which are from real life and wouldn't be staged.

Had Hobin's channel been real, YouTube would have immediately demonetized all of their videos, if not outright deleting his channel altogether for the kind of content that he's making.

Given how even swear words aren't allowed on YouTube videos without the algorithm significantly punishing the video makers for it by removing it from the recommended section, I find it unrealistic how actual real fights would become popular on it, at all, especially to the extent where someone would make a lot of money out of it. That just doesn't happen in real life.

Then, there's the issue of how certain content creators in this story do some horrible things, on stream, live, and seem to get away with it, such as beating people up on stream and, at one point, even putting a girl's life in danger from a prank that almost caused her to be hit by a car. That type of stuff would be enough to get people arrested in real life, had there been any semblance of consequences in that world. And even if the police wouldn't get involved, with the current online climate of cancel culture being a thing, real audiences are extremely unforgiving for any type of content that's actually morally reprehensible in this way. If a video maker would be shown to bully someone in real life, and their audience became aware of it, his subscriber count would go down the very next day and no amounts of apologies or pretend crying is gonna be enough to save his channel. His persona would forever be doomed on the internet, from that day onward and his social media will be filled with negative comments that will stick with them permanently.

Basically, this world is too lawless and forgiving, is what I'm saying. The internet isn't the wild wild west nowadays, like it used to be. This type of stuff wouldn't fly in modern times.

But aside from these inconsistencies, I liked the story.

I liked the friendships and relationships that Hobin managed to build over the course of this story and, to some extent, there were some opponents which got to be humanized a little bit, and the story tried to show their side of the story as well (although I still think that most of the bullies in this show are very shallow).

Overall, I think this was a good watch. There were times when I was on the edge of my seat, wondering how Hobin will recover from that, or how he was gonna win when all the cards were stacked against him.

I think the show is good, and worth a watch. As far as slice of life action shows about fights with an underdog trope go, this one is definitely a good one, and I would recommend for people to watch.

I'm definitely up for a season 2, if one were to ever get announced. 🤞

This is only part 1 of this ranking. For part 2, click here.

This is a continuation of my ranking of my thoughts from the first part, which you can find here.

8. Meiji Gekken: 1874

From this point on in this list, there's quite a dramatic drop off in my enjoyment of the shows that I'll talk about.

Up until now, I considered the aforementioned shows to be quite entertaining and above average in almost all regards; some I consider to be masterpieces even.

From this entry onwards, that's not the case anymore and while, I still personally find this show to be slightly above average, I do believe it might not be as enjoyable for everybody. It wasn't as amazing for me as I originally hoped it would be, at least.

As you can probably guess from the title, this is a historical anime.

Honestly I've never been much of a fan of anime TV series that are set in historical periods of real life.

I've always found history as a boring subject, and because of this I tended to avoid shows that are based on it.

Now, whether this anime is an accurate retelling of historical records of this time period, I do not know. I don't know much about history, much less about Japanese history, so I am in no position to say whether this fictional retelling of past events is true to what really happened or if it's just a fictional re-imagening that took a lot of creative liberties.

Given certain episodes from this, I'm very much leaning on saying that they took more than just a couple of liberties when telling this story, but I still respect this show for trying to keep itself very grounded into reality and trying to at least replicate the real world to a significant degree.

I've read on comments from Crunchyroll talking about the realism of specific scenarios, particularly about how authentic some of the weapons in the show looked to their real life counterparts, and how the anime staff did their research very well when deciding how to construct each episode.

But before I go any further, let's talk about episode 1, shall we?

Long story short, the episode opens depicting the Boshin War of 1868 to 1869. It starts out with a battle happening where samurai from the Aizu Domain fight against armed government forces that try to take over a specific stronghold.

One of the samurai, on his death bed, has a final talk with his best friend, another samurai named Shizuma Origasa, where Shizuma tries to encourage him to stay alive, even though it is futile. The dying samurai asks him to look after his sister, Sumie Kanomata, who also is Shizuma's fiancee.

Sumie had disappeared before during a massacre of women perpetrated by a samurai named Masaomi Kuramoto. Shizuma promises to his dying best friend that he will find Sumie and protect her, wherever she may be.

Fast-forward to 1874, and we learn that the Boshin War had concluded with the Imperial army winning and the various shogunates that have been rebelling being defeated.

However, there is still tension in society, with a lot of unrest now that the samurai had their roles and lives turned upside down and are now subservient to a government that doesn't recognize their previous status.

The story now follows a slightly older Shizuma who is now working as a rickshaw puller to earn an income, as he services customers all around town while still looking for Sumie in his free time.

As Shizuma goes about his day like normal, he, one day, gets confronted by the police, who suspect him for being involved with a recent attack on the Minister of the Right, Iwakura Tomomi. This is because the actual culprit behind the attack had ridden in his rickshaw and set him up as an accomplice.

Shizuma, realizing this, escapes the police and now becomes a fugitive, ending up in the position of having to clear his own name before he gets captured and arrested.

Meanwhile, in a nearby gambling establishment, a young grey haired man with an eyepatch named Kyoushirou Shuragami, enters this establishment for the first time, and without any hesitation, manages to prove that the employee there that was responsible with rolling the dice was cheating, bringing great shame to the establishment.

As he is about to exit after causing that ruckus, he is confronted by henchmen working there who are ready to attack him, but he quickly disposes of them by proving to be a very competent and skillful swordsman, as well as being helped by three mysterious allies, a young archer named Dario, an old man named Genshō that uses chemical vapors to induce hallucinations in others and a large muscular man wearing a fox mask named Guen.

Later on, Shizuma manages to track down the man that had set him up, a man named Takechi, and during a gun confrontation with him in which Shizuma uses his old samurai skills from the past to fight him (and barely managing to survive from a gunshot to his chest), he and other police forces manage to subdue and defeat Takechi, clearing Shizuma's name.

After having seen his impressive skills in battle, the Chief Superintendent of the police force offers Shizuma a job to work for the them.

And so ends episode 1.

The anime has a fairly simple premise, although there will be a lot of sword fights, gun fights and discussions about politics, subterfuge and betrayals going on.

There will be many other characters that will get introduced over time, some that might seem like complete wildcards with no allegiance at all, such as a foreign spy that investigates the various schemes going on in the background, another skilled swordsman wearing round spectacles and an underground criminal that works in the opium export business that wishes to bring back the glorious age of the samurai and to topple the current government by causing an uprising of the samurai.

Needless to say, the plot gets very political very fast; and very complicated.

Usually I'm not a big fan of these types of shows, especially given the fact that this is a very cut and dry action TV series with at least one fight every episode and with a thick story with a lot of characters, each with their own goals and agenda.

Simply put, I had to recall every episode what each character was scheming, what their ulterior motives were and who they were working for.

Couple that with the fact that most of the action, while very neatly animated and well executed in principle, felt fairly grounded into reality and was done intentionally to look realistic, up to the point where you were constantly reminded that, despite this being animation, they were clearly holding themselves back from making the sword fights look too flashy, in order to retain a sense of realism.

While, in principle, that's a very commendable decision, it wasted a lot of the potential that this show had as an animated project. The animation looked very nice and well done but you felt like it was held back to look very accurate and simple for the sake of not going over the top.

That and also the show had no opening sequence, and the ending sequence was just a text scroll, with no animation to show. This might seem like a nitpick, but in the world of Japanese anime, a proper opening is a huge deal since that's usually the part of the episode that gets fans the most hyped up. The fact that this show did not have an opening at all was a huge letdown for me.

In fact, a lot of things about this project felt unconventional, such as episode lengths running longer than normal. Usually, an anime episode is between 21 and 25 minutes long. This show had episodes that went on for almost half an hour each, which is quite unusual for this medium.

Clearly this was treated as a special project that was doing its own thing and the staff working on it probably treated it as an outlier among their works.

Either way, while this will sound like an odd thing to say, especially given the fact that I am 31 years old, but I feel like I am genuinely too young to properly enjoy a show like this.

The very cut-and-dry action sequences, the (perceived) historical accuracy of the show and the complex story that focused so heavily on social uprising, revenge and betrayals made this TV series feel like the type of show that was geared towards people that have an affinity towards historical dramas and shows with complex plots, which I would guess is geared towards an older audience, potentially the boomer type of crowd.

While I cannot say that I didn't enjoy this show at all, I feel like I'm slightly a bit too young to properly appreciate all of its complexity and nuance, since I'm sure there are many tidbits in each frame of animation where the staff probably put in a lot of attention to detail with regards to historical accuracy (such as the aforementioned focus on the weapons that the characters were using).

However, I did consider this to be a fine show that is worth the recommendation, especially since there are actual deaths and touching reunion scenes in this show that moved me emotionally when I witnessed them.

There are consequences for actions in this show, and seeing characters die (especially good guys), gave a lot of weight to what was going on, especially once you bonded over those characters onscreen.

So, would I recommend this one? Honestly, if this is the type of show you'd enjoy, I'd give it a shot.

Hell, even if you aren't into historical dramas I'd still give it a shot. I never liked these types of shows and even I had something to gain from watching it, so I feel like this might be up your alley even if you don't particularly enjoy this category of fiction.

If nothing else, I'd encourage you to give at least episode 1 a shot and see for yourself if you'll like it. If you manage to finish it and find it interesting, chances are you'll like the rest of the series as a whole.

9. Metallic Rouge

Boy, where do I even start with this one?

I guess I'll start this off with talking about episode 1.

Far into the future, the human race won a war against a group of aliens known as the Usurpers, using for combat androids manufactured from technology from a different alien race called the Visitors.

These androids, called Neans, require a liquid substance to be injected into them regularly, called Nectar, which keeps them functioning and alive.

Moreover, Neans have what's known as the Asimov's Laws programmed into them, which practically prevent them from ever willingly hurting human beings, allowing humanity, after the war with the Usurpers, to effectively enslave Neans and use them as mere tools.

The story focuses on Rouge Redstar, who looks like a regular teenage girl that works as a newly-hired assistant for famous singer Sara Fitzgerald, who lives in a Martian city.

Their life seems mostly peaceful, as the media and the news currently focus on a string of seemingly random killings of two Neans that have happened lately by another Nean that they dub the “Red Gladiator”.

Nobody knows the identity of the Red Gladiator yet, nor his or her reasons for the killings.

Later on, Sara is seen injecting Nectar into her body, proving that she is a Nean in disguise.

Using this information, a human girl named Naomi Orthmann, who's currently working undercover with Rouge as an informant, determines that Sara must be, in fact, Viola Keane, a Proto-Nean and member of the Immortal Nine, a group of highly advanced Neans that were the progenitors of all the other Neans that are in existence.

Another member of the Immortal Nine, Joker, interferes and dispatches of the mechanical bird that Naomi was using to spy on people, forcing her to meet up with Rouge in person, for the first time, to relay her findings to her.

It's then revealed that Rouge has always been, in fact, the Red Gladiator all along, and she's been acting as Sara's assistant all this time to get close to her to investigate whether she is a member of the Immortal Nine. Now that she determined that she was, she attempts to kill her, like she had already done with two other members of the Immortal Nine before her, those being the killings previously reported on by the news.

The two do battle while Joker acted as a spectator before escaping by himself, before Rouge could chase after him too.

After defeating Sara, Rouge and Naomi move on to their next target that they plan to kill.

Such ends the episode.

OK so, right off the bat, you might have questions about this episode. Questions like “Why is Rouge killing members of the Immortal Nine?” or “Why is this Naomi human helping her do that?” or “We didn't see Sara do anything wrong. Is Rouge just a serial killer?” or “Why isn't this Joker also fighting Rouge if she's after all of the Immortal Nine, including him?”.

These questions will all be answered across season 1.

OK so I didn't like the first episode, going into it, because I thought it was very cryptic.

Sure, all first episodes have a lot of work to do. After all, it's their job to present the world, introduce our main characters to us, build up atmosphere but, also, it has to stand up on its own with a proper episode twist, a villain and a proper wrap up.

I get it that that's a lot of things you have to do in just one episode, and I understand why not every TV show can pull it off well enough.

But, the main problem wasn't that the first episode simply didn't have the time to do all of that in an organized and coherent manner. No, the problem was that this episode had plenty of time to do all of that, it just chose not to do it.

In fact, a lot of the aforementioned questions don't get answered in the second episode, either.

It's not until the third episode rolls in that we learn that Rouge is working for Ministry of Truth vice-director, Jean Yunghart, and that he's been the mastermind behind Rouge and Naomi's killings all along.

And still, even then, we still don't get an explanation of why all of them are doing all of this until much, much later.

The Immortal Nine themselves are also shrouded in mystery, with some of their members acting evil and behaving like regular villains, but with others acting like regular Neans that just try to live their lives and end up getting killed anyway for no good reason, just like Sara.

I like the angle that this show attempted, of trying to appear morally ambiguous with its protagonist, Rouge, not giving away whether she's the evil one or not all this time, but this didn't help me connect with her in any way.

The problem that the show has is that, for all the plot twists and world building that it does, it intentionally tries to make you ask a lot of questions all the time about our characters and their backgrounds, essential questions like: why is this character doing this? Or why are they planning that? Or what is this other character scheming? Or how did these events connect?

And the show revels in you, the audience, not knowing the answers to these, as it just teases more and more stuff at you each episode, until finally revealing the plot in the last 3 couple of episodes.

Honestly, when I said that I was too young to be enjoying shows like Meiji Gekken: 1874 because I thought they were too cut-and-dry serious historical dramas that would only appeal to a boomer crowd, I also think that I am too old for a show like this, where this type of enigmatic and scrambled plot that's constantly broken into puzzle pieces is presented to me from the beginning, and then it drip feeds me new information every week to help me piece them together into a whole.

This type of plot, I know for a fact, I would have enjoyed back when I was a teenager or younger adult, back when I liked to solve complex stories and figure things out for myself, but now, as an adult approaching middle age, I simply don't have the patience to bother with any of this.

I want my shows to spoon feed me everything I need to know from episode 1: who the characters are, what their backgrounds are, why they're doing what they're doing and why should I care. Anything less than that and I'll get annoyed.

This show, not only did it not do that, but it kept throwing more and more information my way, and presenting valuable information via random flashbacks that were intentionally scrambled just to tease me that there's stuff that I don't know.

This type of stuff I just hate.

Some people might say that doing out-of-order flashbacks and constantly keeping essential plot points hidden adds to a show's presentation and it makes it risque, but I personally just find it gimmicky and lazy.

A good story doesn't need to be scrambled or pieced together. It simply stands on its own legs, if it's good.

Jumbling it around and splitting it into pieces so that the audience constantly has to remember every single detail, especially across weekly episodes where a lot of detail gets forgotten naturally just wasn't doing this any favors for me.

And, honestly, after watching the entirety of all its 13 episodes, I can even say, the plot isn't even that complicated. Sure, there are a lot of details to it but, now that I think about it, it's really very straightforward. There was really no need to scramble it up like this show did, and the fact that it did get presented in such a broken way only detracted from my enjoyment of this show. If they showed Rouge's past and talks with her brother from the very get-go, I, at least, would have gotten emotionally invested, perhaps, and I might even have cheered for her to commit some of the murders that she ended up doing.

Then again, maybe not, as even after I learned all the details from the story that I needed, I still didn't even know if I wanted to root for our protagonist.

Especially in the later episodes, when all the cards are down and you know most of the relevant stuff about the plot, you end up asking yourself “Is Rouge actually doing the right thing here? Maybe I should really root for the bad guys, instead”.

I know that that's probably what the show makers were going for, in the first place, but this type of storytelling removes any emotional investment that I, as an audience member, can have, because I just become fully impartial to the conflicts going on. I never became particularly invested in one side or the other, I just didn't care.

And that's a problem when you reach the final episode of the show and you still don't know who's in the right and who isn't.

It is unconventional, I admit, but also not very effective at making me care.

Oh and don't get me started on the ending of this show.

The show was supposed to be Studio Bones' 25th Anniversary, and they decided to make this, from scratch, as a celebration.

This show has no source material, much like Delusional Monthly Magazine, and is an original anime, from top to bottom.

Whereas, in the case of Delusional Monthly Magazine, that ended up working in its favor because it meant that it didn't have to work within the context of a particular story that it had to adapt faithfully and it could just make up whatever it wanted, on the spot, allowing for some of its non sequitur jokes and gags, for this show, it meant that the scriptwriters could become fully unhinged.

That might seem like a good thing, but Jesus, when you get into the last 3 episodes, you will be amazed how forced certain plot twists will appear.

There's a plot twist about who the Puppeteer has been all along, a plot twist about a specific character actually being a very important Nean and not a human, a plot twist about a certain character actually being another character's father, a plot twist about who was pulling the strings all along, a plot twist about how this hidden villain planted a trap into this program that was supposed to doom everyone but then another plot twist inside that plot twist about how that got resolved by Jean, in the last seconds, because he overwrote something to prevent it from happening.

The plot just becomes more and more convoluted with plot twist over plot twist, almost as if it was a meme and the scriptwriters were just asking ChatGPT “Hey, what else can I add to this script to amaze our audience”, shoe-horning in all and even the kitchen sink in those last episodes just to leave an impact.

I have never seen a TV show be as desperate and insecure about its own plot, that it ended up with such a pathetic display of constant plot twist salad.

I simply don't get it.

This show just felt like a passion project that was either spoiled by too many cooks in the kitchen, or too much by studio heads demanding that the scriptwriters add in hundreds of ideas from studio notes, one after another.

Midway through the show it felt average and mediocre, to be fair, me asking myself whether it was worse or better than Meiji Gekken, but towards the end it turned into an incomprehensible mess of ideas, all strewn about in incoherent mixes, tossed and turned to make the audience remember this experience forever, almost like this was the last show that the human race would ever see and they wanted to desperately stand out as much as humanly possible.

Suffice it to say, I was unimpressed.

The only good thing, I can say, stood out about this show were its two main characters, Rouge and Naomi, and them working off of each other. That's it.

Rouge is a bit naive and Naomi is a smartass. They work very well off of each other and I feel that this show would have been so so much better, had it just been about these two in a slice of life comedy or something.

Really, that's all you needed. I know that the studio heads at Bones probably thought that their 25th anniversary needed to be something way bigger and more grandiose than that, but in the process of doing so, they kept adding so many ingredients that it spoiled the dish entirely, at least for me.

There's something to be said about the “Keep It Simple, Stupid” idiom that so many engineers use. The scriptwriters of this show could take a lesson or two from that. Or maybe it's the studio heads, I don't know.

Either way, though, I can't say that I dislike this show, nor that I wouldn't recommend it.

Honestly, the show still had a lot of potential and even if it squandered everything it had built up in the end, I'd still argue it's still worth a watch.

And especially if you're into “It's so bad it's good”, you have to see this show. It's amazing how bad it gets towards the end. The crash that it had in the last 3 episodes is something to be remembered for, almost like Darling in the Franxx was. Hell, I'd even say that this ending might be worse than Darling, because Darling's ending felt at least coherent.

This was such a fantastic crash. It was a crash, but it was fantastic nonetheless.

10. Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable!

And we finally reach the end of this ranking, at the very bottom.

Honestly, this was a fun batch, overall, and I want to say that I thoroughly enjoyed most of the shows on this list, even the lesser ones.

This, however, is the only exception to that.

I do mean it when I say that, up to this point, I would recommend all of the shows on this list to people who are appropriate audiences for them, as I can easily envision at least some individuals that would enjoy them.

This show, however, is the only one I wouldn't recommend to anyone; nor would I watch a second season of.

Let's look at a breakdown for the first episode before I go on.

16 year old Tsubasa Shiki is in the process of moving to Hokkaido, waiting in a taxi to arrive to his dad's home.

Tsubasa transferred school in the middle of winter, due to family reasons and now he wishes to move in with his father in Hokkaido, abandoning the life he used to live in Tokyo.

Before the taxi could reach its destination, though, Tsubasa asks the driver to stop so that he can continue on foot to his dad's home.

While he walks through the heavy snow, he meets up with a blonde gal named Fuyuki Minami.

He asks her for directions, she kindly obliges but warns him that if he intends to continue traveling by foot, the journey would take him 3 hours.

It's at this point when Tsubasa realizes that he had gotten off too early from the taxi, and now he's stuck very far away from his destination, with no other taxis around to take him there.

Fuyuki suggests that he should wait with her there, for the bus to arrive, as the bus should take them to the town that he needs to reach.

The two of them engage in idle banter, during which Fuyuki learns that Tsubasa is moving from Tokyo to their town, which immediately impresses her.

She didn't expect for a city boy from a place as large as Tokyo would want to move into their small town but, when asked if he finds the folk there in Hokkaido to be lame, Tsubasa answers that it's the opposite, and that he finds that place to be quite relaxing, compared to Tokyo.

She also learns that Tsubasa will attend the same school as her, which makes her happy.

After waiting a bit more at that bus stop, Fuyuki gets annoyed that Tsubasa was deep in thought, ignoring her unintentionally, so she pulls a prank where she drops a small amount of snow underneath his jacket. In response, he cries in pain from the sudden cold snow and this prompts Fuyuki to start laughing at him from him being startled. She ends up almost crying from the laughter and Tsubasa, when seeing her pretty face during that, accidentally mutters that she's pretty, which immediately embarasses both of them.

The next day, Tsubasa is introduced in his new class, he walks over to his desk and then, soon after, he discovers that not only did he end up in the same class as Fuyuki, but he also has his desk next to hers.

Fuyuki kindly helps him out by lending him her blanket to keep himself warm during class (because apparently the classroom has no heating despite it being winter), she asks him to walk her home in return for the favor and then, while they're walking together from school with her flirtatiously hanging onto his right arm, she even invites him to come to her house, the next day, so that she can learn more stuff about Tokyo from him.

He accepts, the next day comes, and more lewd shenanigans happen at her house, as Tsubasa is constantly nervous for being in a girl's room alone with her, she mischievously changes in very revealing clothing that embarrasses him, he pulls out a Blu-ray movie for them to watch together, and, during the said movie, Fuyuki falls asleep on the bed.

There's a bit more that happens but, bottom line, that's the gist of it.

In a nutshell, Fuyuki is a very forthcoming and extroverted gal that gets very clingy to Tsubasa all the time, makes dirty jokes or mildly inappropriate remarks that constantly leave him blushing and Tsubasa just absorbs them in a bashful manner; rinse and repeat this every episode.

Honestly, while I know that there are people that like this type of romantic comedy, I'm at a point in my life now when this type of stuff just doesn't phase me like it used to.

In all honesty, the fact that the show has gals as its heroines is the only unique thing about it. And yes, I said “gals”, plural; which means that Fuyuki will not be the only gal in this show. Two other gals will come in future episodes.

While that did give me the fear that this will turn into a sleazy slice of life harem anime that's gonna become unhinged, honestly, that would have been a genuine improvement rather than what we got.

As I already said during my 2023 summer animes ranking when I talked about TenPuru: No One Can Live on Loneliness, I don't mind ecchi anime when they're done right. I understand that the ecchi genre has its haters but I'm not one of them.

However, I do expect for ecchi TV series to do at least something mildly unique or at least risque in the process, to push boundaries and cement some form of an identity for itself.

This show doesn't do that.

While Tenpuru was at least funny and unhinged in more ways than one, this show was oddly very grounded into reality and played it straight for almost all of its runtime.

Not only that but it was very restrained in the jokes that it did and, for one reason or another, held itself back in a lot of ways.

For one, nudity is nonexistent in this. You can't see the heroines naked at all. Excessive skin ship boils down to just Fuyuki clinging onto Tsubasa's arm while he gets flustered and nothing else.

There's only one single sex joke that I can remember off the top of my head from this show, which is when Fuyuki and Tsubasa are inside a snow fort and Fuyuki says stuff that implies that she's having sex with him. And any other attempt at ecchi that this show has just boils down to boob or skirt shots from the perverted camera angles (and no, not even panty shots, just regular skirt shots where you don't see anything).

With the lack of interesting ecchi going on, I thought that maybe the harem component might make the show more interesting, but even that didn't go anywhere. The other gals that appear in future episodes immediately friend-zone the protagonist to oblivion, which means that there's no prospect of a proper harem even in the slightest.

I have to wonder, what even was the point of the other gals if they weren't even gonna play a part in the romantic comedy? The only way I can answer that is that, I assume that their sole purpose was to pad out the story, as there wasn't enough material with the two main characters to carry it to any significant lengths.

Honestly, calling this show a harem is both misleading and an insult to harem anime as a whole. This isn't a proper harem, it's a diet harem at best (i.e. something that tries to look like a harem on the outside in trailers and in the opening/ending but isn't actually one).

Some might say that the fact that it's not a harem plays in its favor, because that means that there's a potential for a proper true romance route between Tsubasa and Fuyuki that can play out without any interference from others. And yes, there is that potential.

The problem is, that potential is squandered by the fact that these two are very very generic character types, and their chemistry together, while it does exist, is fairly underwhelming.

Tsubasa is the nerdy city boy that gets flustered over the slightest amounts of physical contact with a woman of his age, he's very mild mannered and a gentleman but outside of having good grades at school and being good at playing the piano, he has no discernible talents or skills that come in handy outside of just being friendly to others. That's his character in a nutshell.

Hell, he himself mentioned in a monologue in the first episode that others back in Tokyo found him to be boring, and I can absolutely agree with that. He is a very boring character that doesn't go through any growth or development during the show. He just does the bare minimum to become friends with the gals, but has no distinguishing personality or doesn't do anything that sets the plot in motion in any particular direction. If anything, things in this show happen to him, not because of him; or at least, nothing of any real substance.

But he isn't the only issue that I have with the show. After all, Tsubasa is far from being the first bland protagonist in a slice of life anime TV series, and he certainly won't be the last.

After all, the main reason I decided to pick up this show in the first place was because of the gals that were featured in the trailer. I wanted to see how an anime was going to handle their character types and I really wished for a proper depiction of some rowdy female characters that would rock the boat at every turn (spoilers: I didn't get that).

The gals in this show are....very mild, to put lightly. Sure, they are all beautiful characters that wear short skirts during winter, have long painted fingernails and wear makeup all the time, but that's really all that sets them apart from the other female characters in this show. Other than that, they aren't loud, rude or delinquent in any way, shape or form. Hell, one of them is even a top model student in her class. Another is just a stereotypical shut-in gamer girl that's very quiet when around others.

Arguably, the closest to a true gal that we get to see is Fuyuki herself, who kind of acts like a rebel on rare occasions, like how she's late for class, she has mediocre grades, or how she eats during class.

But really, that's as risque as the show is willing to get with her. She still is very friendly, kind and supportive of her friends, works hard and tries to make others happy. Despite the show trying to portray her as a non-conformist, there's nothing really rebel about her, as a character, outside of the aforementioned shallow discrepancies.

The best character I can compare her to would be Marin from My Dress-Up Darling, since the two seem to have very similar personalities. And guess what? In that show, Marin was never considered a delinquent by anyone, and that's why I find it odd how Fuyuki is technically considered a gal in this show, despite them being essentially the same character.

I know that the term gal technically only refers to a fashion subculture, and not necessarily to the fact that one's a rebel or delinquent, so I can't say that it's false advertising per se, but I still felt a bit betrayed by this.

A hypothesis that I have is that, the author of this story realized that the gals aren't really that rebel to begin with, but instead of trying to fix them by making them rowdy and rude, the author chose to rather make the male protagonist, Tsubasa, be even safer and blander so that, by comparison, they just seem to be ruder.

In doing so, I feel like this backfired on Tsubasa, who now seems like such a generic and colorless character that it's not even funny.

Sure, Tsubasa is a kind and friendly character that, had I known him personally in real life, I might have wanted to befriend him, but that doesn't make for an interesting character worth being the center of a story of.

Couple that with a severe lack of ecchi antics, non-existent harem and very watered-down sex jokes that happen only occasionally, and make most of season 1 be about their school life (which I always detest in slice of life shows), and I was genuinely getting bored out of my mind while watching this show.

It just wasn't doing anything for me.

Watching this show was only making me wish that I would watch better and funnier shows with this premise, like Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro or re-watch My Dress-Up Darling that had similar character archetypes, but which would surely have more chemistry and more interesting dynamic (and who are also, coincidentally, available on Crunchyroll).

The only time I genuinely felt like this show had something worthwhile to show was during its second to last episode, when Fuyuki takes Tsubasa to Higashimokoto, a local cherry blossoms-filled park where they had beautiful sceneries of blooming cherry blossoms during spring.

That episode was, simply, beautiful to watch, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Still, it's what, I would argue, is the only good episode from this entire first season, and whether it's worth it to watch all the episodes leading up to it just so you can watch it too is debatable. I would argue it's not worth it, but I'll let you decide that for yourself.

I was hoping that maybe the last two episodes would be the turnaround point for this show, where it hopefully becomes interesting or even, dare I say it, good, and that the cherry blossoms park visit was leading me to believe that this might actually be the case.

But no, it didn't become good even after all of this. It threw us another cliche just at the end of that episode, suggesting that there would be a sad ending to this series and trying to make itself look sophisticated and deep because of this.

I'm not going to spoil what the cliche is, but I will say it's one of those endings that you see better anime have, and they would do it to leave a slightly bitter taste in your mouth, as a life lesson they'd teach.

Honestly, I didn't like that, since that cliche has been overused before but, at least, I respected that it attempted to teach that particular life lesson.

But then the final episode rolled in and, while I can't spoil what happens, I'll say, they even managed to squander what little potential they had with that type of ending, by bringing in a cheap cope out plot twist that, while I didn't see coming, cheapened the entire experience to a level that left me feeling insulted.

It's the type of cope out that I only believed satires would try to pull off, not genuine romantic comedies.

Needless to say, I was very much done after that final episode.

Honestly, this show had already cemented its place as the lowest ranked show on this list before the final episode even arrived, so it's not like that cope out did any more damage to it than it already suffered before, but it felt like a final insult to me, a last “Fuck you” on the final date to spite me for no particular reason.

I'm done rambling now.

Honestly, I don't recommend this show to anyone. While the second to last episode was very beautiful and I can genuinely feel that a lot of work and talent were put into it to give it the sense of quality that it achieved, I still would argue that it wasn't enough to warrant watching this.

The main characters are bland, the ecchi is held back a lot, the supposed harem is just filler and the boob shots that it has just gives it a shady overall feel to it.

The only way I see anyone watching this and actually enjoying it is if they have never watched a slice of life romantic comedy in their lives before and wanted to try this as their first experience of that nature. It might entertain them enough, seeing how this would be the first time they'd see these cliches play out, but it would certainly not be very memorable.

And if a season 2 were announced, I won't bother with it.

Time for another ranking, ladies and gentlemen, and this time this will even be a top 10 ranking.

Well, sort of. It's a top 10 ranking in the sense that this will have 10 entries ranked from best to worst but, with that said, I have only watched 10 TV shows and no more.

This season I've watched 10 anime TV series concurrently, and boy was it a huge hassle.

The only days of the week when I had nothing to watch were Tuesday and Friday. Every other day I had to watch at least 1 episode every evening (on Saturday I had to watch 3 episodes from 3 different TV series).

Suffice it to say, I was a bit exhausted every week trying to keep up with all of this content, but I am happy to report that, despite the overwhelming quantity of episodes that I had to regularly keep up with, almost all of the TV shows I have watched were pretty damn good.

Honestly, given the volume of episodes I have consumed these past 3 months and their high quality, I will say that this winter was enough to warrant my yearly Crunchyroll subscription already; and keep in mind, the year just started. This is only the first season of the year. We still have the spring, summer and fall lineups waiting for us.

All I can say is that I'm very excited for the future. We're off to a very good start this year.

But enough about that! Let's get to the ranking!

1. The Apothecary Diaries (Season 1, part 2)

What is it with 24 episode animes and always ranking among top places?

Clearly studios put a lot of effort into shows that they decide to give a second part to.

This blog post will be about the second half of season 1. If you want to read about my thoughts for this season's first half, you can check them out here.

This season will continue on with Maomao's role at the Imperial Palace.

She will continue to solve mysteries for Jinshi and all the higher ups there and, interestingly enough, we will also be introduced to her past and learn about her parents this time around, as well.

She will be involved in new cases, this time covering the death of the palace's metalworker who passed away without imparting crucial knowledge about his craft to his three sons but who did pass them on seemingly random items through his will, a mysterious explosion at one of the warehouses in the palace, an odd task that a higher up strategist named Lakan will give to Jinshi to procure blue roses for a ceremony during a time when roses are out of season and, the most interesting of all, a well planned first degree murder where an agent will try to kill a high ranking official of the palace by meticulously planning multiple steps along the way and trying to make it seem like an accident.

Needless to say, there's a lot of good stuff in this second half.

If anything, I'd even go so far as saying that this second half is even better than the first half, as it got even more creative with the mysteries that Maomao now has to solve.

Granted, the issues which I highlighted for the first half also apply to this second half as well, mainly the issue that Maomao is a Mary Sue in this story.

She continues to solve everyone else's problems through her intelligence and deduction skills, she continues to be humble about it and she continues to be the center of this story.

However, like I mentioned before, these aren't really big problems anymore since, thankfully, the mysteries and their twists overshadow the fact that Maomao is always the one that figures everything out, every single time.

That, and in combination with the ancient Chinese theme of the show, makes this particular TV series a big departure from many other anime.

Overall, I'm a big fan of this show. I adored it so very much and I am so happy to have found out that a new season of this has been announced to air in 2025.

The show was very interesting and creative with its story, the visuals were very appealing and high budget, the music pleasing and, most importantly, the show knew how to make things beautiful when it needed to.

There's a particular scene that I'm thinking of, in the last episode, when Maomao practices dancing in a dress that she had received from a courtesan. I can't talk too much about it without spoiling stuff, but I will say that that dancing sequence, under the lightning of the moon, was very well animated, fluid and expertly designed to appeal to the eyes.

It was, in simple terms, one of the most beautiful scenes I've seen this season; a genuine treat to my vision, and a highlight of how beautiful Maomao's character can be.

Anyways, that's it for this blog post. See you again for season 2 of this masterpiece (assuming it will be available on Crunchyroll too).

2. The Witch and the Beast

This one should be fairly straightforward, honestly.

Simply put, this is a very entertaining show, but the main reason that I enjoyed watching it as much as I did was simply due to the fact that this is the very first gothic anime TV series that I've seen in a very long time.

Before this, the last goth anime that I watched, I believe, was Pupa from a full decade ago, and even that wasn't a full fledged TV series, but rather a collection of TV shorts, which had only 5 or 10 minute long episodes (I can't remember which).

Far more recently, I did play a visual novel called Ballad of an Evening Butterfly, which is also in the gothic style but isn't even an anime (although it is a Japanese product).

To be clear, I find it kind of surprising that I haven't encountered more gothic themed anime over the years, until now; and a bit disappointing.

Now that I got my hands on this, I feel a bit better about it.

Then again, maybe the word gothic isn't particularly fitting for this show, as the style of the show, the visuals and the characters are by no means inspired by the fashion trend of that name. When I say gothic, I'm talking, specifically, about the style of story telling, the motifs of the show and the dark, sober nature of it. I'm referring to its ties to gothic literature rather than anything else.

But let's first discuss about what happens in episode 1.

A conspicuous duo of a tall handsome man carrying a large coffin on his back, named Ashaf, and a blonde young woman companion of his named Guideau arrive, one day, in a town that has a dark history.

They are in search of a witch, a powerful woman with an elongated lifespan and very potent magic powers, and have heard from rumors going around that this particular town houses one.

As they're gathering information from the folk there, trying to find this witch, the town is attacked by a giant shark with legs that's destroying the buildings, only for the said witch to arrive and use her magic to defeat the beast and save everyone.

This particular witch, apparently, has a good reputation around town, her having acted for the past many years as a sort of guardian towards everyone there, using her magic towards everyone's benefit and protecting the town from monsters and the like.

Because of this, everyone there love her and support her.

The duo is suspicious of all of this and Guideau, there, goes one step further even by outright attacking this witch, whose name is Ione, although she only defends herself.

This infuriates the townspeople, who start yelling at Ashaf and Guideau for attacking their protector, and the two have to flee from the crowd.

Later on, as a group of young women arrive at Ione's manshion to have a party there for an anniversary, Ashaf and Guideau arrive there as well, and warn Mary, Ione's apprentice, that something is very suspicious about everything there and that things might not be what they seem at first glance, effectively telling her not to fully trust Ione.

There's a bit more going on in that episode, and this particular conflict gets resolved, but I don't wish to spoil this episode for you.

Generally I'm fine with spoiling the first episodes of TV series that I talk about, just to get the point and plot across as well as I can, but this time I'd rather not talk too much about what happens at the end.

Suffice it to say, there is more than meets the eye.

Looking back at that episode, after watching the entirety of season 1, I genuinely feel like that episode is arguably the least interesting of the entire season.

This isn't to say that that episode is not representative of the series as a whole, but merely that I find the villain and the outcome of it to be quite lackluster and unimpressive, although, to be fair, it's meant to act as an introduction to the show's formula and nothing more.

Said formula can be summed up as this: Ashaf and Guideau travel to a new town looking for a witch, they get involved in some magical shenanigans happening there that may or may not be caused by a witch, they solve the problem, they move on to the next town. Rinse and repeat.

That's the formula for most of the show.

Admittedly, there will be episodes that won't focus on that duo, but on other members of the Order of Magical Resonance (specifically I'm talking about Phanora and Johan), but for the most part, this is about Guideau and Ashaf's story.

Guideau and Ashaf basically act like the order's problem solvers, effectively solving any problem that is of a magical nature, for other people.

What I like most about this show is its world building. And there's a lot of it.

This world, that's meant to look like 18th or 19th century Europe, has a lot of things going on in it: from necromancers reanimating human bodies either legally or illegally, to demon swords that have the power to destroy the world, to executioners sent by The Global Holy Church to execute witches that are malevolent (or not), to much much more.

This world is very rich in background and lore, and I like how well fleshed out these concepts and ideas are, in this story.

The motifs of the show are also refreshingly dark, with the show talking about betrayals and trust, corruption of love, the macabre and exploitation of the helpless, and just, simply, the ugliness of human nature.

I also like the main characters, who I find to be very colorful and work well, off each other.

Guideau's backstory is quite interesting, and I do feel sorry for her, knowing what had happened in her past. I find it very logical that she developed a severe grudge against witches after what had happened to her.

With that said, I appreciate that the show wasn't as simple as just being “All witches are evil and should never be trusted”, like the first episode seemed to imply at first.

Future episodes will mix things up a fair bit and will show benevolent witches that simply get roped into a lot of trouble, simply for being a witch.

But what I like most about this show is that it is particularly dark in its story, going in areas that would make a lot of people uncomfortable, but never becoming gory or exploitative when doing so. It's dark and gruesome, but in a tasteful and even poetic manner, which I find very refreshing.

Also, to make this clear as early as possible: this show is NOT a horror TV series.

It has elements and scenes that play up the horror genre a fair bit but those happen very seldomly and the show tries its best to emphasize on action and thriller elements even from episode 1, moreso than anything else. With that said, it did have some moments when I felt genuinly creeped out to a significant degree.

This is the type of dark thriller that I wish more anime TV series would adopt, but for some reason I don't see this nearly as often as I would like.

The style and story make me uncomfortable, but in a good way, the action is quite exciting and heart pounding, and the world building is exquisitely done.

This is a perfect example of an anime TV series that's only 12 episodes long (at least as of the ending of season 1), but that's perfectly serviceable.

It had a very good and interesting story to say, it said it very well and the execution was immaculate.

The ending left me wanting for more but also made me satisfied with what I already got.

Sure, I will be very disappointed if a season 2 never continues this story, but I feel like, even if a season 2 never gets produced, I will never complain for having watched season 1. It still left me with a very pleasant taste in my mouth.

For the record, in case you were wondering, this is among the few shows I would not recommend children to watch. Like I said, it doesn't get very gory or sexual in any way, but the themes and suggestions for what might happen or had happened, are pretty gruesome nonetheless. This is one of those shows that, if I had to use the US movies rating system to rate, I'd probably classify this as a genuine PG-13 kind of TV series. It's dark enough that children shouldn't watch it, but not so dark that would scar teenagers.

3. A Sign of Affection

This one shouldn't surprise anyone that knew the anime lineup for this winter.

I'll be honest, I can easily see many people complaining that this is a “woke” anime that is highly overrated, critically acclaimed but that's too hard leaning towards inclusiveness and political correctness, to an extent that annoys them.

I know there will be that subsection of people that will talk smack about this show just because of that and, for what it's worth, I'm not going to bother to deter those people from doing that.

However, personally, I'm usually very critical of shows that try to use that strategy to their advantage and, for that reason, I like to think that I'm quite good at noticing that type of manipulation before it takes any hold over me.

But, with that said, I'm not going to pretend that I didn't absolutely adore this show.

Yeah, it's a politically correct show, I agree with that. It is an inclusive show that talks about deafness and the people that suffer from it. That's just the way it is.

If that, alone, is enough to bother you, chances are you're not going to like this show. As such, my suggestion would be to not watch it.

As for everyone else that stays around, let me just say, this show was a blast to watch.

I know that different people might have different feelings about a TV show that talks about disability and some might feel uncomfortable about this particular subject. I understand that and I can see where those people are coming from. And, if the show tries to use such subjects to gain a following and manipulate its audience into liking it just because it does talk about deafness, I'd honestly feel disgusted and give it the bashing that it deserves.

However, I never got the feeling that I was being manipulated by this.

This is a slice of life romance anime, at its core, and everything in this show genuinely felt like I was getting to see a glimpse into Yuki's life. Nothing felt manipulative about this. It was simply a show that was telling the life story of a deaf person. That's pretty much all it was about.

But enough about this! What is this show about?

Well, to put it simply, the show is about a newly enrolled college student named Yuki Itose, who suffers from congenital hearing loss. Her condition makes her practically deaf, although she uses hearing aids on her ears to at least become aware of some environmental sounds around her, even though she still cannot hear people's voices or make out almost anything from them.

She makes a friend in her class a girl named Rin Fujishiro, who helps her take notes during it.

Yuki, due to her disability, cannot hear what other people say to her. Because of this, she uses sign language, lip reading or, sometimes, writes notes on her phone to speak to others. Due to her disability, she also never speaks at all.

One day, while traveling by train through the city, Yuki encounters a man that tries to talk to her in, what she assumes to be, a foreign language. Since she doesn't understand what he's saying, she's trying to tell him that she's deaf but, thankfully, another young man nearby assists her and gives the stranger the directions that he needed.

This young man that helped her is a 22 year old named Itsuomi Nagi, and Yuki recognizes him because she's seen him before in the Cultural Exchange Club that Rin also attends.

Yuki thanks him for his help and Itsuomi quickly picks up on the fact that Yuki cannot hear.

He becomes very interested in her and, reciprocally, Yuki herself appears to be touched by his kindness.

Later on, Yuki and Rin talk at college, where Yuki shows Rin a picture that she had taken of Itsuomi's face, and Rin quickly idenfities him from that. She tells Yuki that Itsuomi works as a server for his cousin at a local cafe and bar and that he, from the money that he makes there, travels a lot abroad as a hobby.

Rin picks up on the fact that Yuki seems to have a crush on Itsuomi after that brief encounter on the train that they had, and suggests that the two of them should visit that cafe where he works at during his shift so that she can meet up with him again. Rin, herself, has a crush on the owner of that establishment, Itsuomi's cousin.

Together, they decide to visit the bar, have a couple of drinks together and Yuki gets to know a bit more about Itsuomi there and, at the end of the day when the bar is about to close, Itsuomi offers to escort Yuki to her house, as it's late into the night.

The two of them walk together to the train station that would take Yuki to her house, Yuki gets to be protected by Itsuomi from an incoming car that she hadn't noticed due to her deafness, and the two begin to split up when they get near the station.

But just before they can split up, in response to Yuki's text message to Itsuomi's phone that reads “Do you think the world is a big place?”, Itsuomi responds with a “Yeah, it's huge” and then also sends a “Let me be in yours”. That last message touched Yuki so much that she begins making outward gestures of happiness to Itsuomi by waving to him, which makes him smile.

Thus ends episode 1.

While, on the surface, this episode might seem very mild and even boring, the way it is very nicely animated, the attention to detail given to each frame and the beautiful background music which enhanced the experience were expertly done, on every level.

This show gives attention to detail to a lot of stuff, from the clothes which are seasonally appropriate for every character, to each gesture that they have, from simple facial gestures like smiling or frowning to animating their hands when they make hand signs.

Oh yeah, that's another detail that I liked about this show. I cannot speak to whether the hand signs that they were making were accurate to real life, but they definitely seemed genuine, to a significant extent.

It amazed me how sincere they tried to make the hand sign communication be.

Couple that with stunning colorful visuals that they give to Yuki whenever she seems happy or ecstatic and this show made me fall completely in love with it.

Oh yeah, and despite being adapted from a romance manga which, as I previously said, are normally very slow and boring when it comes to relationship progression, this show thankfully doesn't share that problem. If anything, I'd even say that the romance between Yuki and Itsuomi progresses a bit too fast in this show, in my opinion, which is the first time I've had this problem in anime. That was a very pleasant surprise, and I cannot overstate how happy I am that this show actually made progression in their main couple, by moving them through the process of intimately holding each other, to dating, to kissing. This made me feel like I was watching a mature show, telling a mature story about mature characters.

This is in contrast to other manga-based romance stories where, when they get adapted to anime form, it takes an entire full season for them simply to hold hands together.

Oh yeah, and Itsuomi and Yuki's romance isn't the only one that this show covers. It will also include to show romantic progression between Rin and Itsuomi's cousin, Kyōya, and even a third romance story between two of Itsuomi's friends that he had known since high school, Ema and Shin.

Granted, the two other stories aren't as well fleshed out as the main one, but it's still a nice touch to give us these perspectives into these characters' lives.

This is, in essence, a slice of life drama with strong romance overtones. It had just the right amounts of drama, comedy and romance to make me completely satisfied and it made me genuinely surprised how much they managed to cover in just twelve episodes.

The last episode, which I'm not going to spoil, had a very beautiful scene of blooming flowers that I have to say, was perfect to showcase how human and relatable Yuki is, that allowed me to connect to her character on a more personal level than I can describe in words. And yes, the flowers were stunning to look at, despite being drawings in an anime.

While I hate to use the term “whimsical” when describing a TV show, I genuinely believe that that's the most fitting word that I can use for this particular instance. And while this show was still not enough to dethrone my absolute favorite romance anime of recent years, Call of the Night, it might actually have gained a place in my heart as my favorite romance anime that's available in Romania on Crunchyroll (Call of the Night isn't on Crunchyroll, as far as I know).

Obviously I can't say for certain if it deserves that honor since I haven't watched all the romance anime on this particular platform to compare it to, but, as of right now judging from the current shows that I've finished watching on it, I'll say that it's my most favorite one out of all of them.

Honestly, I can't even say that I wish for a season 2 of this show. Season 1 was so expertly crafted that I fear that if a second season were made, it might not live up to season one's standards and ruin the experience for me.

I know that that fear is unjustified, but it's still a fear I have. Still, if a season 2 does get announced, and if it will be available on Crunchyroll as well, you can be sure that I'll watch it, nonetheless.

4. Bucchigiri?!

OK so, despite this and A Sign of Affection being literally adjacent to one another in this ranking, there's a huge gap between them in terms of quality.

This show doesn't even hold a candle to it, and I'll be the first one to admit, I think that I cannot emphasize enough how big this gap is.

This show has been very polarizing on Crunchyroll, as far as I've seen in the comments.

There have been people that liked it enough and thought it was OK, and others that think it was complete trash.

I'm in the former category, obviously, and I think that, while it had its flaws, it also had a lot of good things going for it.

Let's start out by describing episode 1.

Arajin Tomoshibi is a teen that's returning to his home town to live, once again, with his mother at her restaurant.

He's moving schools and, while hoping to impress all the girls in his new class on his first day, realizes that the class that he will be learning in is filled to the brim with strong bullies that look very much ready to beat his ass up.

While running away from them, Arajin ends up stumbling upon his childhood friend, a friendly and very strong young man named Matakara Asamine.

Matakara tries to be helpful and acts very kindly to Arajin, who responds with being cold towards him, though.

It seems that Arajin has had a falling out with Matakara, in the past, although that's not explained very much.

This particular town has two main rival gangs that live in it: Minato Kai (of which Matakara is already part of) and Siguma.

Arajin immediately falls in love with Mahoro, who is literally the only girl in his class.

Mahoro is a gorgeous young girl that's used to getting things done by using her charms.

Later on, Arajin gets to be chased by the NG Boys, a smaller third party gang that's roaming around town, and he is chased up until he enters an old local abanadoned shrine.

There, he stumbles upon a small toy handgun which he tries to use on the guys that were pursuing him, only to miss them and have the rubber bullet hit him in the head, leaving him unconscious on the floor and prompting his pursuers to leave him alone.

Upon waking up, Arajin triggers the bullet that's now stuck to his head to emanate a strange smoke around him, that morphs into a large flying apparition of a muscular man.

This apparition says to him that he's a genie and that his name is Senya. As he's been summoned by him, Senya wishes to grant Arajin his wish.

Arajin proclaims that he wants to lose his virginity to Senya, only for Senya to answer that he cannot grant that wish, but that they can, instead, merge their bodies, if he wants to become stronger.

Arajin leaves the shrine, confirms that other people cannot see Senya at all, and returns home.

Senya talks to Arajin about becoming Honki people, that pertain to a local legend about people that attain great power by training in the art of unarmed hand-to-hand combat.

Arajin doesn't believe in this legend, thinking of it as mere childish delusions, and instead of focusing on that, he decides to invite Mahoro out on a date.

Mahoro happily agrees to go out with Arajin, making him happy.

As they are out on their date, a strange muscular young man with green hair and piercings called Marito, approaches Arajin and Mahoro, trying to pick a fight with the former.

Marito is the leader of Siguma, which also means that he's the strongest fighter in their gang, and that he has business with Arajin.

Arajin immediately chickens out and tries to pull Mahoro away from him but, surprisingly, Mahoro pulls him back and asks him to fight for her, as she reveals to him that Marito is actually her brother, who's there to beat up her new “boyfriend”.

Marito proceeds to beat the living shit out of Arajin, who takes it because he's very weak, which only disappoints an onlooking Senya, who was hoping for Arajin to be stronger and be able to defend himself.

But as Senya is about to leave permanently, Arajin's thirst for life awakens as he's being beaten, and he proclaims to everyone there, while drawing from Senya's power, that he wishes to lose his virginity, before summoning Senya's strength to punch Marito incredibly hard, so hard that the boy collapses onto the street.

Thus, Arajin the newcomer, defeated, in one blow, the leader of the Siguma gang, one of the toughest gangs in town.

Thus ends episode 1.

Yeah, this show is crazy.

I can see why people hate the show, mainly because the main character is pretty much a simp for Mahoro.

He pretty much does everything that she asks him to do for her, without ever questioning why she does the things that she does.

Also, the fact that Arajin is very cold towards Matakara, who's constantly supportive and trying to reignite their old friendship, only serves to make this show's fans hate him even more.

I get that complaint about this show.

Still, with that said, this show is a prime example of how a series can have a very shallow and unlikeable protagonist and, even in spite of that, still be very good and entertaining. The protagonist doesn't make the show.

And I had a real blast watching this show.

From the funny antics that Arajin's mother constantly has about her boy losing his virginity and becoming a man, to a recurring gag in every episode in which Arajin's wimpy school teacher ends up going into a shady establishment where he keeps paying to meet up with a woman named “Jasmine” where it's never shown what they do (at least not until the last episode), to the constant fights between Minato and Siguma and all the subversion that a third party will enact in order to subdue the both of them, to the literal deterioration of Arajin's and Matakara's friendship, this show had a lot of good things in store for me.

I cannot overstate how much I loved the very simplistic shallow-minded characters.

All the characters in this show are so flavorful, so colorful and so unique, that I love them; from Marito becoming obsessed with Arajin from being punched by him, to Kenichiro also becoming enamored with him, and even Mahoro being completely obsessed with her brother, there's a lot of shenanigans that you can expect from this show.

There's so much personality to this show that I simply loved it.

My one complaint that I have about it is that the show became a bit cliched towards the end, particularly the last episode, where it played out very by-the-numbers and very predictably, and also it was a bit too happy-go-lucky then, with too many problems just getting resolved out of blue, just because the script needed to end all the arcs in a convenient wrap up.

But, I cannot emphasize enough that the show also has good drama in it, so much so that, in the second to last episode, when I saw a specific character beat one of his former friends up after falling into the dark side, that moment was so well done and so gut wrenching that I felt genuinely impressed, how well the show managed to manipulate me.

Sure, certain things are a bit cliched, and this show does suffer from common Shonen Jump tropes, like the protagonist just drawing enough power from Senya at the last moment to win, or about old grudges that come back to life in unexpected ways and stuff like that.

But overall, I really enjoyed this.

I appreciated that the protonist, Arajin, was just a simple asshole punk with nothing noble or impressive about him, how he started being a small and pathetic wimp, but eventually learned to stand up for himself and grow strong when he needed to fight for his loved ones or his friends.

Its these types of character growths that I really appreciate.

And the end, let's just say it was cliched but satisfying nonetheless. The end was the weaker part of this show, I feel, but it got the job done and it was perfectly serviceable.

Honestly, if you like fighting animes that are a bit cliched but still mostly action packed and funny at the same time, you'll probably enjoy this quite fine. Just be aware that you'll have to stomach a very unlikeable protagonist for a very large portion of this show, so that's something you need to be aware of.

And seeing how this is an original anime, with no source material to draw from, I very much don't think this will get a season 2, as they wrapped pretty much everything already.

If a season 2 will get announced, though, I will watch it.

5. Delusional Monthly Magazine

This is going to be a strange entry.

In fact, this is the strangest anime in this entire ranking, by a long shot.

I know that there will be many people who will read this and ask themselves Really? That show is on here? and roll their eyes when they see this entry.

Honestly, I don't know what to tell you.

Yes, this entry is here and yes, I will be talking about this show.

I know that many people probably looked at the preview for this anime and didn't know what to think of it. Hell, I, myself had no idea what to expect after seeing that preview.

Normally, when that happens, I check episode 1 and see if it's my cup of tea or not, but even that didn't help matters in this case.

The show, intentionally so, is weird; very very weird. And it does its best at trying to be both a memeable but, more than just that, it also tries to be a very fun time.

I'll be honest, I decided to give it a chance even though episode 1 left me bewildered and, now that I fully finished season 1, I think that that was for the better.

So, what's this show about?

28 year old Taro Suzuki is single and is trying his best at finding a romantic partner for himself, even going so far as to enroll in a matchmaking company to find the woman of his dreams, even though he still seems to be completely out of luck.

His insistence on quitting his job as soon as he finds his match and then becoming a stay-at-home husband while his would-be wife earns an income might have something to do with women's general aversion of dating him, perhaps.

One day, while Taro is walking through the city, he stumbles upon a, I don't know how else to put it, green leprechaun dressed, science obsessed, 18 year old man with corns in his shoes named Goro Sato, who's looking for the Moso Monthly Science magazine office, a popular magazine that talks about supernatural phenomena around the city, to talk with the staff there.

Unbeknownst to Goro, Taro is actually part of the editorial team for that magazine. However, Taro fails to tell Goro this because, for some strange reason, Goro seems to emanate a very strong supernatural aura around his body that makes Taro nauseous while being next to him. Due to this, Taro just tells Goro where the editorial office for that magazine is, just to get rid of him as fast as possible.

Goro thanks him, finds the building of said editorial office but, it turns out that the building actually is a small cafe.

There, Goro meets up with a 10 year old boy named Jiro Tanaka, who has secret healing powers, and his dog, a male dog named Saburo who seems to be able to understand human speech and barks whenever someone asks him a question.

Turns out that Jiro is also part of the editorial staff for said magazine despite being very young. They, along with Taro, all work under the guidance of the mysterious and constantly away editor-in-chief Catherine Sue.

When the entire staff of the magazine are together (i.e. Jiro, Taro and Saburo), Goro asks them whether it's possible for them to write up an article in their magazine about the Mo Continent, a legendary ancient continent that is said to have hosted an advanced civilization that perished a long time ago when the Mo continent sunk into the ocean.

Various artifacts and ancient manuscripts exist around the world talking about the continent, although most people nowadays think of it as no more than a legend.

However, Goro reveals that he has been working for some time as a scientist at a nearby research institute and that his research on the Mo continent hints at the fact that the continent and its ancient civilization might actually have existed, in the past.

To prove this, he extracts from his backpack a small piece of an ancient rune, which Goro calls a MOPart.

The staff seems skeptical of Goro's claims and, because of this, they are unwilling to go along and publish an article about the Mo continent in their magazine.

Seeing how he didn't manage to convince them, Goro leaves the cafe, only to suddenly begin being chased by random shady individuals in trench coats for no apparent reason.

Soon after, on a phone call from Catherine, the staff back at the cafe are instructed to, by her orders, go along with Goro and publish his story about the Mo continent, leaving Taro and the others without a choice. How she even knew about Goro and his story, seeing as how she wasn't even there to hear it, they don't know.

They hear a large explosion that shook the cafe, though, go to investigate it and then, at the site of the explosion, they coincidentally meet up once again with Goro, who's still in the process of being chased by a huge group of people.

Goro runs up to them, causing the group of shady people to start chasing all of them as well.

They suspect that the reason that Goro is being chased to begin with is due to the MOPart in his backpack.

While they are struggling to get away from their pursuers, the MOPart from Goro's backpack just so happens to fall out and hits Taro on the forehead, which triggers a strange transformation scene in which Taro turns into a large, muscular, humanoid bipedal tiger.

The tiger goes on a rampage, attacking their pursuers and warding them all off, before collapsing due to exhaustion and reverting back to Taro's usual human form.

Later on, back at the cafe, Taro is recovering from severe body aches and claims he has no memory of ever transforming in the first place.

They wonder what that was all about before, out of nowhere, Goro arrives at the cafe once again, proclaiming that he doesn't work as a scientist anymore and will, from now on, work as part of their editorial staff for the magazine.

Thus ends episode 1.

If the synopsis that I just wrote looks very strange and random, the reason for that is that this show is, by design, very random.

It tries its best at being unpredictable in the episode and usually it succeeds quite well.

It feels like the entire script that the episodes are composed of are intentionally made of non sequiturs that are added in just to confuse the audience.

There is, however, a formula to each episode: the staff hear about a paranormal event that happens around their city, they go to investigate it in an attempt to publish an article about it and it turns out that the occurrence is due to a new MOPart that was causing the strange phenomena, one way or another.

Along the way, they will encounter enemies that will try to steal the MOPart from them.

The basic idea behind the show is that all supernatural phenomena usually have scientific explanations behind them (if you can accept the fact that ancient parts of a stone rune from an ancient civilization have other-wordly properties to them is, actually, scientific).

Yeah, the show is weird, and you might wonder “Why does Taro transform when he's hit with Goro's MOPart?”, or why do random people want the MOParts anyway? What is the truth about the Mo continent, and why does Jiro have healing powers, or why can Saburo understand humans? And why is Taro capable of sensing supernatural auras around others?

All of these questions will be answered this season and, really, the ending of this show was surprisingly well done and answered pretty much all the things I was wondering about the plot.

And yeah, this show tries a lot to be as memeable as possible. There are times when you know, deep down, that a specific scene is animated entirely so that people can clip it and share it online as a meme background.

I don't hate it for that; if anything, it makes it establish its own identity even more.

And the constant mysteries and enigmas of the show were quite effective, as each episode I was constantly asking myself “But why did this character say this?” or “How did this even happen, exactly?”. And, to give credit where credit it is due, the show explains why that is, sooner or later; maybe it won't explain something in this episode but it will do so in a latter one, instead.

But, most importantly, I like this show for being funny and having seemingly random but well timed jokes all around.

The show does its best at trying to be light hearted, and I can respect it because of that.

Out of all the entries on this list, so far at least, this is the first show that doesn't take itself very seriously and tries, instead, to have fun with itself.

And I can respect that.

Sure, sometimes not taking oneself seriously can seriously hamper my enjoyment of the show. This, thankfully, isn't one of those times because, while the story feels like it was made as a second priority initially and the episodes feel more comedy-driven than anything else, the comedy is there and the jokes are funny; random, yet funny.

And the story, while taking a backseat to the comedy and the random nature of the show that tries to make itself be appealing to the internet, will come back. In fact, towards the last episodes the plot comes back in full swing, and a lot of the questions that you were probably asking all throughout will suddenly begin to be answered little by little, one by one.

I liked that.

Sure, the show has some flaws, and the formulaic way that the episodes were getting, talking about paranormal when, in fact, it was almost always because of a new MOPart, was getting annoying.

But all the stories were creative, such as the story of a mysterious masked man that would suddenly appear out of nowhere on the highway while skating, or about another story that's all about a popular man that keeps having troubles with large swarms of cats that appear outside his house every night and causes issues to him because he's very allergic to them.

The show was just fun, and I really loved it.

And, in case you were wondering, no, Taro won't be the only person in this show that will transform; there will be many more.

Exactly why the characters that transform can do so, in the first place, that is another mystery that the show will explain, in due time.

But I think I've rambled enough about this show for the time being.

My guess is, as usual, just give the first episode a watch. If you'll like the humor from it, you'll most likely like the whole show as a whole.

If you find the weirdness and randomness of the episode off-putting and undesirable, chances are you won't like the other episodes either.

6. Sengoku Youko

Well, might as well get this show out of the way as well.

This is one of those shows that, again, I can see a lot of people praising and calling it a “hidden gem”.

A lot of comments on Crunchyroll called this show underrated, and that it's a shame that it doesn't have bigger of a following.

Honestly, I really don't know what to say to that.

On the one hand, I do agree that the show is above average and is executed somewhat well, and that it probably didn't get as big of a following as it should have.

On the other hand, though, even I didn't enjoy this show as much as I expected, and that's for a multitude of reasons.

But before we get into any of them, let's talk about this show's episode 1.

During Japan's Eiroku period, a swordsman-in-training young man named Shinsuke Hyoudou is plotting to attack a group of bandits that have been causing travelers issues for the past months to acquire glory for himself, only to be beaten to it by two strange travelers: a seemingly very young looking blonde fox girl named Tama and her younger brother, a young sage named Jinka.

Jinka uses talisman sorcery to defeat the bandits very quickly and easily, and this prompts Shinsuke to decide to follow them for a bit.

He gets discovered almost immediately by them, though, and helps them by revealing to them the hideout of the main bandit group, nearby.

Tama reveals herself to be a fox spirit, a youko, a wise being of immense spiritual power and wisdom, that lived for a very long time, and who wishes to bring order and peace to the world of humans. To that end, she and Jinka travel around, enacting justice to all those that are wrongdoers.

They quickly figure out that Shinsuke is just a swordsman that's training and who's trying to make a name for himself by defeating bandits, but he still decides to join their group in dispatching of the nearby bandit threat.

After a confrontation with said main bandit group, it's revealed that their leader was actually a katawara helmet controlling a human puppet all along. Katawara are otherworldly creatures, inhuman beings of great strength.

To combat said threat, Tama bites into her hand to draw blood and then allows Jinka to drink from said blood, activating spirit transformation which turns him into an incredibly fast and strong superhuman, that immediately disposes of everyone there.

After dealing with that situation, Shinsuke decides to continue following Tama and Jinka around, seeing this as an opportunity for him to grow stronger.

At an inn where they are staying in, for the night, he encounters a man that describes, in fear, about a terrible giant beast that he had encountered previously, which the Dangaisyuu there immediately identify as Shakugan, a katawara of immense power. The Dangaisyuu are an order of demon hunting Buddhist monks of great spiritual power, who are quite renowned around those places.

Jinka, who idolizes katawara and hates humans despite being a human himself, has issues with the Dangaisyuu monks' decision to pursue and hunt down Shakugan, but before him and Tama could extract any more information from the monks about Shakugan, they are attacked by him and forced into combat.

Thus ends episode 1.

Now, let's get a couple of things out of the way, first.

Despite this being on 6th place on this ranking from best to worst, I really don't hate, nor even dislike this show.

In fact, I find this show to be quite entertaining, on more levels than one.

I like this show's world building. There's a lot of stuff in this world that are nice, but given that this is about a period in Japanese history that's a really long time ago, you can probably guess that there are a lot of constraints about what that world can contain.

Obviously this isn't to say that this TV series tries to be particularly historically accurate, given that we have cursed swords with magical abilities, demons of gigantic proportions that wreak havoc on the land and talking beasts of myth, as well as gods of the land, but it does at least offer some grounding into a semblance of reality, knowing that this took place in the distant past.

In the same veins where I don't see many anime fans talking about Inuyasha as being a particularly good anime that recreates historical Japan, I don't see this show very different from that, either.

This show is pretty well executed. I liked a lot of the ideas that it had, and the ending of part 1 was stunning, to say the least.

Studio Whitefox seems to choose among the more interesting source materials to adapt into animation, and they did it again with this property.

Between this and Re:Zero, I will say that I'll choose to watch Re:Zero any day of the week, but I can safely say that both are quite entertaining.

However, you may ask, now that I said all of this, how did this entry get so far down the list?

To put it simply, the shows that got a better ranking than this one were just that much better. Simple as is.

There may be some of you who will roll their eyes when reading that, thinking Really? Delusional Monthly Magazine was a better show than THIS gem?, judging me for placing that above this, and I can understand your skepticism.

Simply put, I can see a lot of people thinking that, and I will contend that I really needed a lot of time to think this through for myself. However, this is simply the result that I came up with.

The first three spots in this list (i.e. Apothecary Diaries, The Witch and the Beast and A Sign of Affection) may not be masterpieces in the classical sense, but I genuinely feel like they are as close to genuine pieces of art as you can get, and I wholeheartedly don't feel like this show even comes close to them in terms of quality. So putting this below them in this ranking was pretty much a given.

And as far as Bucchigiri and Delusional Monthly Magazine are concerned, that's a bit more debateable, although I will still defend my stance on this.

Maybe, in terms of objective quality, one may be able to make the argument that this show is higher quality and infinitely more interesting, and that it deserves a better spot than both of those two. Really, I'm not going to defend them when talking about which show might be the more competently made and interesting one.

Even in terms of music and animation, I can see many people say that this one is better than those two, as well.

But this ranking isn't about quality or any objectivity whatsoever, it's about my subjective experience of how much I felt like I enjoyed them, as a whole.

And, from that perspective, I will defend my decision on saying that I liked those two more than how much I liked this show.

Why?

Because, as far as Bucchigiri is concerned, I found the characters to be more interesting and relatable than in this show, a lot more vibrant and colorful. Sure, Bucchigiri had a lot of unlikeable characters in it as well, but just because a character is unlikeable doesn't mean it's poorely written. In fact, I'd say that the amount of character growth that the protagonist of Bucchigiri went through is way more than the amount of growth that Shinsuke went through in this first 13 episodes (which isn't to say that he didn't grow at all, but merely to say that he didn't grow as much).

Also, the story of Bucchigiri felt way more dynamic and interesting in terms of plot twists compared to this show, where all that the main characters do is just travel. Sure, they end up fighting a lot of characters along the way, but outside of defending themselves from said attacks, they don't do much else.

In Bucchigiri, the characters go through way more drama and twists.

And say whatever you will about how nonsensical Delusional Monthly Magazine was. The fact is, I laughed so much during that show and how creative all the episodes got, compared to how much I enjoyed the fights here.

I'm not going to say that Delusional Monthly Magazine put in harder work into its story than this show it in its story, because I don't think that is the case but, at least, I enjoyed the comedy and the surreal nature of that show way more than the bland historical Japan that this show had.

That and also, I think it's easier and requires way less effort to make a comedy work, because all you have to do is to tell funny jokes, compared to how much you have to put in to make a serious show like this work.

The serious show is gonna have to focus a lot more, and for a very good reason, to have an interesting plot and very well written character development, just so that it can compare, in terms of enjoyment, to a comedy where all it had to do was be original in its jokes.

It's not the same thing, obviously, but comedies can work for far less effort, in my opinion, than non-comedies. And this show, even though it tried a lot, didn't do enough to make itself stand out.

It barely has an identity. The fight sequences, while intriguing and very well animated, are pretty standard otherwise, in my opinion.

The characters, while they do go through significant growth even throughout season 1, don't become particularly interesting, nor deep. In fact, with the exception of Shinsuke and maybe Jinka, I really can't say there's been much character growth, at least as far as the first season is concerned.

The world building, to be fair, did a lot of heavy lifting to make me like this show, and they did put a lot of effort into it. That's the one thing I can say I absolutely loved about this show, was that it had a significant amount of world building that was done semi-decently.

And the story, well, that's a mixed bag. The ending of season 1 was very well done, and I can say I absolutely loved it. In fact, the last 3 episodes of this show really turned it around and made me respect it for being unconventional.

With that said, though, anything before episode 11, with the possible exception of a particular character death in episode 7, was very standard and boring.

Really, if I had to say one complaint about this show, it's that the first few episodes really didn't grab me, at all.

I couldn't care any less about Shinsuke and his quest to become more powerful, nor about Tama's plan of making the world a better place.

I liked their characters, but not enough for me to care much about them.

It wasn't until that the world building grabbed me and made me interested in everything that was going on that I started to care, and even then only marginally, until a particular character died in episode 7.

It was only after that that I started to say “You know what? Maybe this show is worthwhile”. And, even then, it was only the last 3 episodes that really drove the point home that the show had potential.

Basically, what I'm trying to say was that, this show is good, it has potential and it's definitely above average, I will concede on those points.

But, as far as the first season was concerned, it really was a slow grower. It grew on me, for sure, but had I dropped this show during episode 6 or earlier, I wouldn't have felt bad about it. The fact that I stuck with it was what allowed me to see its potential, but boy, did it take a long while to get there.

All in all, I am curious about it now, and I will absolutely want to see how the story will move, going forward, so I will stick with it.

It's just that, when I think about people saying that this show is underrated, I'll always say that, even though I don't like it, it is underrated for a good reason.

7. The Foolish Angel Dances with the Devil

Oh boy, I can see a lot of shipping fanfiction stories derived from this show.

This one's a bit odd, I'm not gonna lie. Its sense of humor is a bit wacky, and I can see some people being turned off by how over the top it is but, personally, I've found it quite charming.

This is among the three romance TV series that I watched this season, the other two being A Sign of Affection and Hokkaido Gals are Super Adorable!. While this show couldn't hold a candle to A Sign of Affection, given that that show was absolutely a masterpiece in animation, I won't even attempt to compare it to that. Still, it was an overall enjoyable experience, and I would still recommend this show to any newcomers that are fans of romantic comedies.

So, what's this show about?

Long story short, Heaven and Hell have been in a raging war against each other for a long time, with angels having the upper edge in the battle against demons. Humanity, for its part, exists outside this battle, unaware of their existence, as a complete third party that's independent from them.

In order to bolster morale of Hell's troops, a male demon teen named Akutsu Masatora is sent as an undercover high school student to the human realm, in order to find a charismatic human that he can ally himself with to take back to Hell and have him rally up their army.

He transfers into a regular high school class where he meets up with a beautiful blonde girl named Amane Lily, whom he immediately falls for due to her beauty.

Later during that day, as he is walking home from school, Akutsu just so happens to walk into Lily on the street again.

Lily suggests they should go out for a tea together.

In the process of walking together, Lily almost gets hit by an incoming truck but Akutsu manages to stop that from happening by suddenly turning into his demon form and stopping the vehicle just in time, saving her.

In doing so, he gave away the fact that he wasn't human, to Lily.

They run away together from the scene and then, in a local park where they were alone, Lily inquires about Akutsu's demon form.

Seeing how the cat's out of the bag, Akutsu tells her the truth about the waging war that his race has against angels, and admits to her that he wishes to take her to Hell with him as the charismatic ally that he wanted to recruit.

Lily, at first, appears worried about this, since this is all very new and sudden to her.

Akutsu tries to hold back and let her make a proper decision by herself but, soon enough, Lily summons long magical chains around Akutsu and ties him up with them, out of nowhere.

Akutsu is very surprised by this development but then, realizes, embarrassingly enough, that Lily was an undercover angel all along, who had also been, coincidentally, sent to the human realm, in her case to hunt for demons.

Realizing that he had blown his cover to his enemy, Akutsu tries to fight her and avenge another demon that she had revealed to have exorcised a bit earlier that day, but is overpowered by her angel powers and gets chained up again.

Amane initially wants to exorcise him too, as per her mission but, when realizing how powerful he is, she changes her mind at the last second and decides to, instead, enslave him using a special magical collar of her making to force him to work for her in her mission to hunt demons.

Apparently Akutsu is capable of sensing other demons when they are nearby and so, with this power, Amane would be able to find other demons more easily to hunt down.

Akutsu, naturally, is resistent to the idea of betraying his own race by working for an undercover angel but, seeing how he has no choice in the matter and not wishing to be exorcised as well, he concedes and gets the magical collar that allows Amane to control him with, put over his neck.

Now, the demon Akutsu will have to assist the angel Amane in her mission of hunting demons, at least until he finds a way to free himself from her shackles.

That's the synopsis for episode 1.

Many comments on Crunchyroll were saying that the first episode of this series was the weakest out of all of them, and that people who dropped this show because of this episode were missing out, as the show gets better over time.

Honestly, I don't agree with them at all. In fact, I'd argue that this episode was a very good example of the style that the show was going for.

The plot twist of the episode, which was that Amane was an angel, was a nice one and I've found it quite unconventional, as an idea.

Still, even in spite of all of this, the show worked on a lot of levels.

It's got an interesting premise but, most important of all to remember is that this is a romantic comedy at its core. And the romance, unsurprisingly enough, focuses on Akutsu and Amane's relationship.

Because yes, they are enemies to each other, and this is highlighted by the fact that Amane forces Akutsu to betray his own kind in her favor, but the fact that they have to work together is a good excuse to have them spend time together and get to know each other more.

I also liked the premise, as Akutsu, despite being a demon in nature, isn't in any way evil or mischievous at all. He's just simply a hard working guy that wants to help his race in their war against the angels.

Amane, despite being an angel, is actually very deceitful and cunning and, predominantly, prideful.

She enjoys seeing Akutsu, her enemy, suffer defeat by her and she lavishes at the sight of controlling him and keeping him under her foot.

Initially I was worried that Amane would turn out to be straight up evil, and I was also curious about Akutsu and wondered how he would reconcile the fact that he has to betray his own race because of Amane's control.

While I won't spoil what happens next, I will say that I liked the direction that they went to make their fractured and seemingly impossible relationship, work out in the end.

And I also have to say that, I absolutely loved the chemistry that these two have with each other.

Once all the cards are on the table and their undercover personas are revealed for what they are, their genuine interactions and dynamic are very fun to watch.

The show also is quite original in its jokes, albeit with a very strange humor.

For example, at one point, both Akutsu and Amane decide that they will try to outsmart each other by seducing them. As such, Akutsu goes to great lengths to appear as manly and gentlemanly as possible, while Amane has to act all bashful and girly and cute all the time, despite both of them being enemies to each other (not to mention very prideful and stubborn). In parallel, the show depicts two boxers engaging in fights against each other on the ring, symbolizing each character's struggles.

The jokes they have to make to make this dynamic work were quite original and very funny and creative.

And also, I really like that the show didn't resort only to sex jokes all the time, like I was scared it was going to do.

Sure, there are the random innuendos that the show plays with, from time to time, even in episode 1 but, to give it credit, all the jokes are done in a tasteful manner and they are very creative. Even more so, it also has other types of jokes, as well, playing different gags, such as with their overly serious teacher being bald, Amane being overly cruel and sadistic despite being an angel, or Amane's and Akutsu's friends always being around the corner to accuse them of being a couple, even though they'll always deny it.

And the action sequences for when Amane and Akutsu do get to fight are pretty engaging and suspenseful, always leaving me wondering who would win.

But, with that said, the show is not without flaws.

Particularly towards the end, I felt like it got pretty cliched, with a villain that mistreats Amane and forces Akutsu to come out to protect her, how Akutsu loses control of himself and unlocks new powers when seeing Amane get hurt, how Amane has to knock his senses back into him etc.

This type of stuff I really dislike, since I've seen it before in other romances and, chances are, I'll see it again many more times again.

I think the last time I saw a similar trope done was in a show called Vermeil in Gold, back during the summer 2022 lineup. Vermeil was a much more cliched and, in my opinion, worse, show than this one, but it still played the same beats towards the end.

But this show made up for its lackluster final arc with its last episode, where it compensated for it with a nice and sweet ending that made me happy.

I won't spoil the ending but I will say it made the experience worthwhile.

So, would I recommend this show?

Well, it depends. Its comedic style is a bit out there and it is over the top when it tries to be funny, which might put some people off. Personally I've seen shows with even wackier senses of humor, so this didn't bother me too much but I can definitely see others having an issue with this.

I'd recommend giving the first episode a shot. That's a very good showcase of what the humor would be like for the rest of the season.

If you can digest the first episode, with all its humor and still end up liking it, chances are you'll like the rest of the episodes as well.

If not, consider a different show of the same genre, maybe.

This is just part 1 of my ranking. For part 2, please click here.

This is kind of a follow-up to my previous blog post about the history of DRM, which I wrote here.

What I want to talk about in this blog post is which video-on-demand providers decided to not use these mechanisms for their content.

The basic gist of what I wrote there was that copyright holders of popular media wanted a means to protect their content when distributed to consumers digitally, video on demand providers wanted technical solutions to provide such means of protection and make a feasible business model out of it and tech companies wanted to solve these issues in various ways.

Long story short, they all had their dreams come true via the development of three concurrent technologies for protecting digital media: Apple's FairPlay, Microsoft's PlayReady and, last but not least, Google's Widevine.

These three pieces of technology is nowadays used to protect, behind the scenes, all video media that's copyright protected but which also reaches your screen.

They are the foundational building blocks that enforce copyright in a mostly transparent way.

Now, let's talk about enforcement, as not all video on demand providers use these technologies in equal capacity.

Technically, to enable the usage of these technologies in an agnostic way, the W3C introduced a new web standard called the Encrypted Media Extensions (which introduced the requirement for web browsers to include some form of proprietary decryption components, even browsers that had been traditionally open source).

By the standardization of this technology, all web platforms had a common and stable API to call from their client-side Javascript to interact with the underlying FairPlay/PlayReady/Widevine protection facilities in order to initiate and maintain a secure channel to transfer copyrighted video content through the internet.

Since this particular standardization back in September 2017, it was pretty clear that video on demand services had a stable future ahead of them.

Netflix, which had already been proven to have a successful business model by that point and was already an extremely popular platform even back then, was reaching revenues that were quite impressive.

Many other video on demand platforms were already quite well established, by this point, which was already a good indicator that this EME tech being standardized was pretty much inevitable.

However, there were those people that had issue with this: the free software crowd.

Free software, as a social movement, was always about promoting open source and the ability to contribute and share your changes with the world at large, as much as possible.

The free software crowd never liked the idea of forcing proprietary components into web browsers in order to keep them compliant, as that would go against the very principle of what they argue the open web should be.

But, as I said in my previous blog post, the open source dilemma was a huge one and, realistically, there is no way to write a web browser that's fully open source but which also is supposed to allow for hiding of digital data that's copyright protected and very valuable.

To do so entails that anyone that has some experience with the programming language that this web browser is implemented in can very well take the source code as it is, change it to bypass the security measures that are implemented in the vanilla browser, re-write the pipelines that the protected data are supposed to go through and change them so that you reconstruct a video file from the stream instead, dump said file on your desktop and then, “voila!”, just like that, you have an unofficial fork of that browser that can steal the video contents from Netflix and dump them in mp4 files on your desktop and then share that file with the world at large.

Nobody wants that.

And so, even though this decision displeased the free software crowd by a lot (so much so that, the same day the EME tech was officially standardized, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an open letter of resignation from the W3C), the W3C made the difficult decision to standardize this technology anyways in order to prevent third party media plugins (e.g. Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight) from re-emerging into the scene as necessities to use Netflix or other video-on-demand providers.

Web browsers that were historically open source but still wishing to remain fully web standards complying (such as Mozilla's Firefox) ended up with having to devise clever workarounds to provide the needed functionality to their userbase. Mozilla, for example, figured out a way to do this by simply piggybacking on Google Chrome's existent proprietary Widevine CDM solution and simply utilizing this as a plug-in to their, otherwise open source, web browser. And, to still keep their free software promoting user base happy and not have them cry foul and yelling that Mozilla is “polluting” a free software browser with proprietary nastiness, they added a checkbox in their browser's settings that allows the end user to decide whether to enable the Widevine plug-in or disable it completely. Disabling it would mean, obviously, that video on demand providers would have no way to create a secure communication channel with the Content Decryption Module on the end user's device (since there is no CDM to talk about at all) and, thus, there would be no way to secure the video content, which means that sites like Netflix would simply refuse to let you stream from them, even if you were a paying customer.

Obviously, this meant that most people that still use Firefox kept that checkbox enabled, so that Widevine would remain as an installed plug-in and be constantly enabled. After all, who doesn't want to watch Disney+ TV shows on their computer?

Well, maybe this won't surprise very many people, but I am a hard-boiled free software advocate myself and I've always been very adamant about the web needing to be as open and devoid of proprietary technologies, as possible.

Given my very puritan stance on this matter, it should come as no surprise, dear reader, that I was among the very few Firefox users that kept said checkbox unchecked, and so I had no Widevine CDM to speak of installed on my Linux system.

This meant, effectively, that video on demand providers like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and so on would detect the lack of a proper CDM in my browser and, obviously, they would refuse to stream any content to me, because there was a very real risk that I would then copy said video and allow others to pirate it from me.

Needless to say, I was a bit unhappy with the current state of affairs. Still, I wasn't willing to compromise, and I genuinely believed, deep down, that video-on-demand as a business model was doomed to fail and that it was the root of all evil, as it was causing the advent of more proprietary solutions that were parasitizing a pure and virgin web.

In my quest to find video on demand on the web to consume but which did not require me to enable the proprietary CDM in my browser, I ended up with three video on demand platforms that I had to choose from: Crunchyroll, HIDIVE and Wakanim.

Before you say anything, no, I wasn't specifically choosing anime services to watch; it just so happened that these were the only services that did not require me to have Widevine enabled.

All the others (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max etc) automatically detected my lack of a CDM and would give me errors when trying to play any stream on their platforms whatsoever.

Those three were the only services that I could use (although, with Wakanim, even this might not have been the case, as I couldn't even reach the point where I could play media on it).

Wakanim

Wakanim is the outlier because I simply couldn't use it at all. For whatever reason, whenever I tried to use their website, the website presented itself in Russian to me.

I've encountered situations like these when a website tries to auto-detect my location based on my IP and then decides to auto-translate their entire page to whatever language it thinks I speak as a means of convenience.

The only issue is, I'm not Russian, nor do I know or speak Russian whatsoever. I've been born, raised, and am currently living in Romania. So the website auto-translating itself to Russian was quite a hindrance to me.

Normally, a rationally designed web platform would still offer the end-user the possibility of correcting these types of errors by giving them a language selection menu to select a different language from the current one. But no, of course it wouldn't be that easy. Apparently the programmers that worked for Wakanim decided that their platform was too perfect to need such a fallback and that such bugs could never happen on their polished little website (spoiler alert: it happened, to me at least).

So, with Wakanim, at least, I really can't say whether it would or not allow for playing protected media without a CDM installed. From what I read online, supposedly, you can actually download the video series that you purchase from their platform, in an unencrypted format, so you can then play that media on any player of your choice, offline.

If that were true, I would have been mighty impressed and a big fan of. It would mean that there's really no point in employing a CDM and encrypting the data stream if you're just gonna gift-wrap the protected content to your customers anyway.

I guess we'll never know now, since they've been discontinued since November 2023.

HIDIVE

Oh, good ol' HIDIVE. It's very funny to think that the entire reason why I initially chose to become one of their customers is because I could use their platform without needing to install proprietary components in my browser to watch their videos.

My relationship with them was a short lived one, as any of those that follow my anime blog already know (specifically, the blog which can be found here).

If you don't know, long story short, I made a subscription to them back in early 2022, watched a couple of their shows that were pretty fun (like Tokyo Mew Mew New, The Executioner and Her Way of Life, Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte and many, many more) but eventually, at some point during April or May 2023 I think, they suddenly and abrutly stopped servicing Romanian customers on their platform. You can read more about that over here.

Eventually I decided to mask my location using a VPN to appear as if I was from a different country so that I could still stream from them but, when the time eventually came to renew my yearly subscription towards them, I decided to cancel and never look back.

In the end, I liked the fact that they don't force a proprietary CDM down your throat in order to stream videos from them. And if you're also anti-proprietary DRM and want to support video-on-demand platforms that don't require them too, then you might like them.

Personally I cannot, in good conscience and with my self respect intact, continue to financially support a service that discriminates against me simply for being from Romania, so I choose not to continue giving them money (I know that it's not a personal matter and that they just made a financial decision to stop supporting Romania, I get that, but I still find it insulting nonetheless).

Crunchyroll

Finally we came to the last one in our list. Please be aware, though, that what I'm about to write is a, mostly, historical piece about how things were back at the time.

For a long time (I don't even know since when but it's been the case at least since I joined them), Crunchyroll has somehow allowed you to stream their content without actually necessitating to activate the Widevine CDM in your web browser.

I don't know if they've ever officially supported that, since as far as I can tell, their website always warned that you should enable it to have it work, but unofficially, if you kept it disabled, either intentionally or unintentionally, the page you'd load would warn you that you need to turn it on but, eventually, the video would still load without any issues.

Yes, that's right. You used to be able to watch Crunchyroll videos entirely unprotected, no CDM required, at your leisure.

That. was. AWESOME.

Key words being “used to”.

At some point in the past (I think late 2023?) they've patched their Javascript implementation and now their website correctly detects whether you have the CDM disabled or not. If you do have it disabled it doesn't allow you to stream anymore.

So this obscure workaround doesn't actually work anymore, as of the posting of this blog post.

I am tremendously sad by this outcome, I'm not gonna lie.

Crunchyroll, the last bastion of hope that I had for a free web has betrayed me, and now I am forced to enable my Widevine CDM again, just to watch Crunchyroll videos again.

Conclusion

I know what many people are going to tell me: it's selfish of me to want for streaming services to disable the only means that they have for protecting their content just because of my personal puritan ideology of hating proprietary software.

I get it, I really do.

That's why, in the end, I decided to still keep my Crunchyroll subscription.

Because, even though I'm unhappy with how things turned out to be, I realize that what I want is pretty much impossible to implement: I want full complete control over my own hardware and everything that runs on it (i.e. the free software philosophy, in a nutshell) but I also want to be able to stream copyright protected videos through that hardware as well (which requires at least some proprietary closed-source components to implement the necessary protections).

This is a contradiction that has no solution. In fact, this isn't even a technical dilemma, the way I always thought of it, but merely a philosophical one.

The only way to reconcile on this is to make some compromise: either I give up on streaming media on my PC entirely and embrace a fully open and free software ecosystem, or I decide to allow media streaming on my PC, in which case, I have to install at least some proprietary software to allow for its protection and copyright enforcement.

Ultimately, I made the decision that any weak willed individual would make and I eventually caved in and enabled the Widevine CDM. It was a choice, a painful choice, but a choice I needed to make.

Some might argue that it was the wrong choice and, to be honest, I wouldn't necessarily even disagree with them. Compromising on one's own ideals because of convenience is never an easy pill to swallow, but I did.

Still, it is because of this decision that I still get to watch Crunchyroll streams to this day, and maintain my anime blog as well.

So I guess at least some things worked out, for better or for worse.

Still, I can't help but wish for a better world: a world that maybe copyright holders decide to be more trusting of their consumer base and would allow them to watch their media without having to devolve to such barbaric and convoluted processes just to prevent piracy.

Because, as many people have shown in the past, DRM is nothing more than additional hoops that are added to discourage piracy. It does not guarantee that piracy will never happen.

And time and time again it's been shown that pirates, for better or for worse, will get their hands on said protected media one way or another, through various means, and the end result is always the same: DRM just acts as a minor impediment in the grand process of breaking the protection schemes.

The people that always end up suffering the most when DRM is added to products are the lawful consumers.

Time to talk about DRM again.

Naturally, most people don't care much about this topic, and I'm sorry if another blog post talking about DRM might seem very boring and too technical for you, but I really need to get this off my chest.

With that said, I'll try to keep this as simple and easy to understand for non-technical people as I can.

So, let's get started!

A bit of background on DRM

So, what is DRM anyways? DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and is an umbrella term used to refer to any technological means of enforcing copyright over digital information of any kind. Examples of digital information that are usually DRM protected are music, books, video games and, of course, video files.

Since copy-pasting a file in a computer is as simple as doing a Control + C, Control + V on it and, just like that, you have an exact copy of it without having had to pay any amount of money for a second copy of it, DRM was invented to stop the user from being able to do just that, for the sake of enforcing copyright restrictions.

There are many schemes that have been invented (and reinvented) over the years to do just that, one of the most popular known ones being Apple's FairPlay technology, that is implemented on macOS and iOS. This tech was used historically for protecting music that was distributed over the iTunes store (and still is), but was also extended for protecting ebooks too, as well as video and other media.

Microsoft also tried their hand at this and came up with the PlayReady technology, a similar proprietary tech that is used primarily for encrypting copyrighted video that gets streamed to devices running the Windows family of operating systems (especially on Microsoft's own brand of web browsers, particularly Microsoft Edge).

These pieces of technology are needed in the modern day world simply because, if they did not exist, it would be trivial for anyone to steal digital information passing through their computer. Simple tools like Wireshark (which are free, by the way), would allow anyone with a Netflix subscription to capture the network packets coming from Netflix servers and reconstruct the video file that would represent any TV show or movie that you wanted to get a hold of.

Once this reconstruction process would be complete, you, as a simple Netflix customer, would have in your possession a digital copy of the episode or movie in question and would then be able to share it illegally with anyone of your choice.

It is for this reason that Netflix and other video-on-demand platforms have been employing the aforementioned technologies to protect their digital content and bar computer users from misusing their privileges to enable software piracy.

Why is this a problem?

Now, on paper, DRM sounds quite fine and dandy and, for all intents and purposes, it can be seen even as a necessity in a modern digital age.

After all, how could you, as a movie studio or a musician, ever feel comfortable to distribute your own work digitally to your customers if there was no protection in place to prevent them from illegally copying your work and then distributing it freely to others against your will?

After all, piracy means loss of money to you, doesn't it?

Well, here's where we get into murky territory.

While it's easy to think in black and white terms like that when you're the owner of your own work, it gets complicated when you have to really think about how to prevent people from copying over information when that information has to go through untrusted computers.

Because, at the end of the day, anything that can be shown on a computer, whether it's a book, music or video, has to come down to being a long series of bits. Because, deep down, that's the only thing that computers can work with: digital data.

And, also, that data, in order to be useful to a customer that pays you money, has to go through his own hardware: his CPU, his GPU and, eventually, reach his display or his speakers. A song can only be useful to someone if it plays on his speakers, a video can only be useful if it gets played on his monitor etc.

So, regardless of how you spin it, this protected data, somehow, has to travel through the medium of the internet and eventually reach hardware that is a customer's, a customer that may or may not have malicious intentions of illegally copying it for his own needs.

The inherent problem that I'm trying to highlight here is that, in the end, the data has to reach untrusted territory, and be processed by untrusted hardware.

How can this be resolved when any piece of hardware can be tampered with, physically? How can one guarantee the safety of a piece of data if it has to pass through a CPU that can be made to run an untrustworthy operating system on it?

Well, there is no easy answer to that question. Theoretically, the answer is it's impossible but, then, that would be quite problematic.

That answer would cause a lot of issues, least of which is the fact that video on demand, as a business model, would be effectively impossible to implement if that were the colloquial answer to this dilemma.

Oh, you want to make a business out of streaming copyrighted content to computers all over the world that have an internet connection? Well, TOO BAD. It's technically impossible to protect said data from being illegally copied by malicious technically savvy actors and so, well, you can't make a business out of that. Sorry.

Imagine if that was the case! Netflix, as a business, wouldn't exist. And TV shows and movies would remain only in the world of TV and Blu-ray/DVD releases. That would be a very sad thing indeed.

But wait a second! I just mentioned Blu-ray and DVD, didn't I? Home media, as a concept, has been a very lucrative industry for many years and, even that, in theory, relies on giving customers access to copyrighted digital data and letting them view that at their leisure.

Blu-ray, by definition, allows a customer that had purchased the Blu-ray disc of a particular movie or TV show, to watch said movie or TV show on their own TV, which is technically untrusted (since any piece of hardware can be tampered with).

So, if Blu-ray could do it, why can't video-on-demand platforms?

The breakthrough (sort of)

Multiple things had to happen at the same time to make Blu-ray, as a piece of technology, become possible.

For one, digital transmission of video streams had to be locked down entirely.

Ever used an HDMI cable? Or a DisplayPort? That's digital video transmission and everything going through those cables has to be encrypted.

The exact name for this encryption technique is known as HDCP, which stands for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection and it was invented back in 2000 by none other than the Intel Corporation (initially for DVI and later expanded to include other kinds of physical links as well).

Nowadays HDCP is used behind the scenes by pretty much every piece of hardware in existence.

Any type of graphics card will, at the very end of the processing pipeline, encrypt the video stream before it sends it out on the physical cable so that, no matter what that cable is connected to, it will only receive encrypted data (and when I say graphics card, I also mean integrated graphics as well).

But how can a TV or computer monitor read a video stream that's encrypted?

Well, before the encryption even begins, there's a special kind of key exchange that happens, and that kind of exchange is only possible if the TV or monitor in question has its own kind of key burned into its own hardware that is, inherently, trusted. The exact type of exchange is complicated and is designed in such a way as to not leak trusted key material to untrusted parties. I won't go into detail of how this is done but, if you're up to the task, you can read up on the details here.

In addition to this, the trusted keys that have to be burned into monitors or TVs had to be buried into microchips that are difficult to extract data from.

Physically this is not impossible but it requires specialized equipment and knowledge to reverse engineer these keys.

This is to say, to circumvent the problem of How can you protect copyrighted information that has to go through untrustworthy hardware, the solution engineers came up with was Simple! Just design all hardware in existence that has to handle such information to be trustworthy.

This is to say, make an authentication scheme that cannot be spoofed very easily to ensure that sensitive information doesn't get sent out to tampered hardware, bury sensitive cryptographic materials that such schemes rely on in microchips that are very difficult to tamper with and, finally, whenever data has to exit such trusted hardware and has to travel through physical links whose integrity cannot be guaranteed, encrypt that information before it has to travel through said links so that only trusted hardware can decrypt it back to a readable form.

So, how did Microsoft and Apple implement a solution for video-on-demand providers? They designed their FairPlay and PlayReady protection schemes to make use of these hardware technologies by enhancing their respective operating systems with the capability of creating secure write-only pipes that have special anti-tamper protections built into the very kernels. Such pipes would have sensitive copyright protected information travel through them, which, in practice, just means that this information gets encrypted as it gets passed around from one memory area to another (much like how a VPN encrypts your network traffic as it travels from one point to the next) and only the hardware parts that need raw access to that information has the means of decrypting it. Everything else would just see encrypted gibberish.

To make this possible, TPMs had to become widespread (as they are designed to be trusted by default and also handle sensitive information), drivers for graphics cards had to be enhanced by video card manufacturers to support these protection schemes, and much more.

Ultimately, the end result of all of this was a very complex system with many many moving parts, where many giant tech companies had to agree to multiple standards and had to come together in their engineering efforts (among of which were Microsoft, Apple, Intel, nVidia, AMD, Google; pretty much all the big names that you can think of) and, in the end, it resulted in a highly advanced protection scheme whose sole purpose was to enforce copyright over digital data.

And, after all these efforts, we had a technological means of guaranteeing to video-on-demand providers that their data could be safely handed over to secure machines running secure operating systems, that would run secure hardware handled by secure signed proprietary drivers.

But wait! What about Linux?

Oh right, of course things couldn't be that easy! Open source just had to make things complicated again!

You see, dear reader, in this world of security through proprietary secret technologies and encryption schemes implemented through locked-down TPMs or proprietary drivers that nobody can inspect the source code for, there exist those people that want to run only free software, open source software; there exist operating systems whose very kernel can be modified by whoever has the technical knowledge to do so and can be changed to do whatever they so desire. And doing that requires no reverse engineering or hardware tampering whatsoever.

In such a world, you may wonder, how can such data be protected, if the operating system can be modified by anyone in any way?

It would be one thing if the web browser ran directly on the video card and web developers could interface against a secret API from Javascript to access the proprietary underlying drivers to encrypt media, but that's not how anything works.

The web browser runs from the context of an operating system. The operating system runs on a CPU. In order for data coming from a Netflix server to be protected against illegal copying, it has to be passed over from the web browser process to the video drivers (since we're talking specifically about video content now) through system calls, and then the video drivers have to take it and encrypt it and then pass it on to the monitor link.

It is at this point where the data has to be passed over from the web browser process to the video card drivers where it is vulnerable to being copied.

If the kernel is truly open source and a hacker can manipulate its source code to make a modified malicious version that can steal any data that gets passed over during this time and extract the unencrypted bits, then it's all over.

What's even worse is the fact that there are versions of graphics drivers that are also open source, made by third parties unrelated to nVidia or AMD or Intel, who cannot be controlled by them and who publish the source code for their work as well. These drivers can very well be rewritten by anyone skilled enough to copy the data when it is still unencrypted and dump it into a file.

These issues are very pressing and, honestly, this is where we get into the grey area that nobody likes to talk about.

In a world where nobody cares, the solution that most engineering companies would come up with would be “just ignore Linux users” and that would be it. “Since we cannot ensure a secure pipeline for copyrighted data from the web browser to the physical wire that goes to the monitor, we cannot trust the operating system at all. As such, let's not support it” and that would be the end of the discussion.

What this would mean would be that Linux users would be left in the dust, and Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO max and all these other platforms would simply refuse to service them, as none of them would be willing to hand over their copyrighted video data to such untrustworthy platforms.

Thankfully, this is not the case.

Widevine to the rescue

And here we come to the end of our story. The hero that saved Linux and made video-on-demand streaming possible to it was none other than a company that wanted to provide a means of securing data from the context of a web browser.

Widevine Technologies have been making a name for themselves in the area of protecting digital content from 1999 onwards, being among the most famous companies that enforce content protection on various platforms.

In 2010, the company was acquired by Google, who was very well aware of the necessity of acquiring their tech.

The problem with the aforementioned PlayReady and FairPlay technologies is that they were proprietary and relied on special support from the underlying operating system to work.

PlayReady would only work on Windows and FairPlay would only be accessible from the context of Apple's own ecosystem of operating systems.

This posed a problem to Google, since they wanted to make a cross-platform web browser that would the same across all operating systems (namely Google Chrome).

To make Chrome work correctly, it would, in theory, be possible to maintain different code bases for each separate operating system, but that would be an unnecessary amount of extra effort to invest into a means of protecting digital data.

Instead, Google sought to obtain a universal solution, a one-size-that-fits-all glove that would be agnostic to the operating system that it ran on and, would additionally work well on Google's own operating systems, namely the Linux-based Android and ChromeOS environments which lacked the aforementioned protection schemes.

As such, Google realized that it only made sense to acquire Widevine Technologies as a response to this necessity, and integrate their solutions into Google Chrome and Android ecosystems, which lacked them.

“But how can an open source web browser like Chromium ever be able to encrypt data in such a way that's impossible to be bypassed by hackers who can just change the source code? And how can they protect such data from a potentially hostile tampered operating system?” you may ask.

Well, the answer is a fair bit complicated, but, to put it simply, Google had to do a lot of patchwork to get there. But, it's Google. At the end of the day, they had more than enough money and engineers to throw at the problem.

The way they did it for the Chromium project was to simply not make their solution available there, at all.

If you use a pure version of the Chromium web browser to watch Netflix, you'll quickly find out that it simply doesn't work. That's because Google could not reliably implement such a solution into an open source project, lest it invite the open source dilemma that we already talked about.

Instead, they implemented it only for Google Chrome as a proprietary plugin-in dynamic library who does all the heavy work duty of both encrypting and decrypting the media streams in a closed proprietary environment that's very difficult to reverse engineer.

This is known as the Widevine CDM, and is only a small part of the whole Widevine infrastructure that's behind the content protection that's needed.

As this CDM is just a dynamic library file on the local file system, in theory, it is possible for a malicious party to simply disassemble it and extract its inner functioning, analyze it, and figure out how it does things (and this has happened before; I've even read up on a now archived Github page how one user attempted to do just that).

At one point in the past, the way this CDM did things was by using RSA encryption to decrypt video content that was being sent over the wire to it.

Basically, the CDM had its own public-private RSA keypair burned into the library, with the private key very cleverly hidden in some .data section in the library file. Whenever a protected content stream was to be initiated, the Chrome browser would load the proprietary plug-in, the plug-in would send an exact copy of its public key in clear text to the Widevine server that was on the other end of the internet connection, the server would check against its database of trusted RSA keys to see if it was trusted and, if it still was trusted at that point in time, would start encrypting the protected data stream using that public key and send the encrypted data to the browser over the internet. The CDM would then use its associated private key to decrypt the stream back to its original form and then display everything from the context of the web browser as a video feed.

Simple, easy and very elegant.

That was how it was done at one point. Since then, especially after this information got released from the guy that reverse engineered it, I imagine Google engineers updated the method to something else now.

The point is, there exist many different ways to do it, and, as hackers reverse engineer the Widevine library to keep finding out how it works, Google has the resources to find new ways of protecting the content, in a constant cat-and-mouse game of trying to evolve a solution to protect digital video feeds.

“But wouldn't a tampered host operating system defeat this? One could just inspect the RAM memory of the Widevine CDM and access the raw decrypted data directly, if they were skilled enough”.

Yes, yes they could. For this reason Widevine has such a thing as protection levels. Because, unlike Windows or macOS, the Linux operating system that runs in the background cannot have its integrity guaranteed in any way, if Google Chrome detects that it's running on such an environment, it considers this to be in an L3 (i.e. protection level 3) context. This is the least secure context and it is, for this reason, considered the highest risk one.

Within an L3 context, all operations are done in an unprotected memory area by the Widevine CDM, and this is considered low security. For this reason, most video-on-demand platforms only hand over low quality streams to such an environment, content that, even if it were illegally copied and then distributed via piracy, would only lead to marginal financial damages. I forgot exactly what type of restrictions this has, but for Netflix, if I recall correctly, I think they send out only a maximum of 540p quality streams to such environments (either that or 480p or 720p, I can't remember which). Such low quality streams are considered low-risk enough that even if they were sent over to insecure channels, the amount of damage they would do would be limited.

The next level up would be L2 protection, in which video decoding and encoding is done in an unprotected environment but cryptographic operations are done securely. This is where Google Chrome running from the context of ChromeOS would be (sometimes, ChromeOS might even support L1 protection even). Technically ChromeOS is also Linux, but it's treated in a special way, because the operating system is heavily modified by Google to be locked down intensely against tampering, and its own source code is not published online (there is the open source ChromiumOS project that ChromeOS is based off of, but it's only an approximation of the real thing, as ChromeOS modifies it using proprietary means very heavily, much in the same way that the Chromium project is only an open source approximation of Google Chrome).

Inside the L2 context, most video-on-demand platforms would allow for content streaming up to 1080p, as it's very unlikely for memory inspection tools to be available in such environments for hackers to tamper around with.

Finally, there is the L1 context, that's only available on modern hardware that use TPMs and hardware-protected video decoding to ensure the availability of a secure pipeline to send copyright protected information through. This is a 1:1 equivalent to the aforementioned PlayReady and FairPlay solutions, where data protection is guaranteed on every step of the way through the pipeline, from the browser until the data gets displayed on the monitor/TV.

This level of protection can only be guaranteed only on the latest versions of Intel and AMD CPUs (that have TPMs incorporated in them), you have up to date device drivers that ensure that the hardware can handle protected data and the host operating system is guaranteed to not have been tampered with in any way (usually by integrity checks and ensuring that the boot loader of the device is locked, if possible).

From the context of Widevine, this is usually only possible on the latest Chromebooks and on Android devices (smartphones, tablets or smart TVs) that have never had their bootloaders unlocked (and always on iOS and iPadOS devices as well).

In such environments, the security guaranteed is so high that there are no more limits with regards to the quality of the content being shown. This is considered the maximum level of security that Widevine can afford, equivalent to the PlayReady and FairPlay schemes.

And so, thanks to Widevine, Linux as a whole now supports protected video playback (albeit L3 level but still).

This is a continuation of my thoughts from Part 1. If you haven't read part 1 yet, you can check it out here.

7. I Shall Survive Using Potions!

OK so, I want to start off this entry's rant by saying that I don't particularly like bashing on anime, nor do I do it to gather fame or infamy from it.

The reason I make these blog posts is to talk about the anime which I find to be particularly entertaining and fun to watch and give them exposure so that I can increase their audience a tiny little bit, as well as warn people to avoid watching particular shows that, I feel, are a waste of time.

As such, the reason I'm about to talk about this show isn't because I hate it or that I care much about it, but simply because I feel like it is a waste of time and I'm trying to be helpful towards others by telling them to avoid it.

With that said, let's get on with the episode 1 synopsis.

Kaoru Nagase is a young white collar office worker that's trying to live a peaceful life in Japan when, suddenly, one day, she dies from a rift between worlds that just so happens to spawn in her city.

In the process of doing so, her mind and soul are salvaged by the God of the Earth, a being who's responsible for all the people on Earth and who also is responsible for closing the rifts that randomly appear on Earth to make sure that they don't destabilize the fabric of space and time.

This God apologizes to Kaoru for not being able to close the rift in time to save her, and he is incapable of turning back time to bring her back to life in her world.

However, what he does do is that he sends her soul to Celestine, another God that overlooks the world of Reverie to reincarnate her into her world, instead.

Kaoru agrees with this arrangement but has certain conditions for Celestine now that she's about to be reincarnated in her world. One of the conditions is that she should be able to create drinkable potions with the effect that she desires (whichever that is at the time), she should be able to make that potion appear in any container of any shape or size of her choice wherever she wants it to appear, she should be able understand any language, spoken or written in the world, and that she should also have access to a mystical extra-dimensional storage room of infinite capacity where she can teleport anything into and out of, at her will.

The goddess Celestine uses her goddess powers to make all these wishes come true, until Kaoru makes one final request before her reincarnation begins, and that is for Celestine to become her friend for life.

And so, with all of these conditions fulfilled, Kaoru gets teleported into the fantastical world of Reverie, a medieval world of swords and armor, where everyone worships the goddess Celestine as their one true god.

She is incarnated into this world into the body of a young girl, where she learns that she is capable of understanding even the languages of animals, due to her condition being fulfilled of being able to understand any language.

And so, with the power to create infinite potions of any effects she desires at her disposal, Kaoru sets off to start a brand new quiet and peaceful life for herself.

There's a bit more to the plot of episode 1 but I'll stop here since this is the only thing of the episode that truly matters: the setup.

Now, let's get down to business. In theory, on paper, this sounds like a good plot, definitely not ground breaking or grandiose but a fairly standard isekai plot to get the story moving forward.

When I first watched episode 1, I was intrigued, even though I've been historically very critical of isekai anime in general, so this was already starting out with pretty low bars set for it, from my point of view at least.

But as time went on and I watched episode after episode, even by the low standards I set for this show, I was becoming more and more annoyed.

And no, I don't mean just disappointed, I mean genuinely annoyed by how generic and unimaginative this story felt to me.

By halfway through the plot I was ready to just give up on this and drop the show entirely. In fact, had I not hosted this blog, I absolutely believe that I would have sincerely stopped watching this show halfway into it.

But I didn't, and the reason for that is because, foolishly enough, the show annoyed me so much by that point that I absolutely wanted to write a negative review of it on this blog, to let people know how terrible it was.

And since I hold the belief that you shouldn't review a TV show until you've watched all the episodes of its current season, up to the end, I had to stick with it until the very last episode.

And boy, was it a rough ride.

All I can say after finishing season 1 of this show is that I have not felt as angry and disappointed by an anime in the past couple of years, as much as I had with this show, with the only exception being Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie. And yes, that's including all the other isekai animes I've watched too.

To call this show mediocre would be a disservice to the word “mediocre”. This goes beyond that.

Hell, this show is absolutely bad, in the truest sense of the word. Not bad because it teaches bad morals or that it encourages violence or unhealthy behavior, but bad in the sense that it's extremely ungodly superficial on all levels, to an extent that I find insulting to me, as the audience for it.

This show lacks depth, is my complaint about it. It's as shallow as a puddle made up of only a single layer of water molecules.

Why am I saying this?

Well, let's start with the very beginning: Kaoru herself.

She's the protagonist of this story. She is a strong willed young woman, cunning and intelligent, resourceful and reliable in pretty much all situations, with a sharp tongue but a good heart, always young and with a cheerful disposition that's always willing to make new friends but who, deep down, also wishes to establish a quiet and peaceful life for herself in this new world.

If that's not the perfect description of a Mary Sue character, then I don't know what is.

If the thesaurus had pictures in it, the picture for the Mary Sue expression should be of Kaoru's very face.

The show treats Kaoru as the perfect problem solver, the helper of all humans in this world, the one that can solve any problem of any person, regardless of difficulty, without making absolutely any mistakes in the process.

That's who Kaoru is.

If this sounds like a boring character that has no room for character development in it, then you know why this show feels so horribly boring for me.

Kaoru never needs to learn anything, because she's already perfect. The only thing the show tries to counterbalance her perfection with is by saying that she has a very sharp and scary glare, that intimidates others. That's it.

And her glare is moreso used for comedic effect in this show than anything else. It barely plays any role.

Basically she's the perfect main character. That's all there is to her.

You think she's wrong? Well, too bad, because the show knows that she's right! And it will always side with her, no matter what.

I don't want to be the one to say that a show's depth goes only as far as its main character's depth, since I don't believe that to be the case, but boy does this show really try to make me think otherwise.

Kaoru also has this very critical tongue of nobility or of any people with a lot of influence, in that world. Whenever she sees anyone using their authority for bad purposes, she expresses her disapproval very publicly and calls them out for it.

Hell, even if nobody did anything wrong, she will still call out nobility and criticize it harshly merely for even considering the prospect of herself adopting a life into it, just because she thinks that life as a noble woman would be very stressful and full of restrictions which she doesn't like.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with a lot of the things that she says, in theory at least. The problem is that there's no nuance to it whatsoever, she just speaks whatever comes to her mind and blurts it out in the open, without suffering any consequences for it.

Oh yeah, that's the other thing I absolutely detest about this anime. There are no consequences for the things being said in it.

Just because Kaoru has a very sharp tongue and all but downright insults nobility and the royal family in this universe, she doesn't get to be punished for her words at all because she's right about everything that she says and so she can get away scot-free with anything.

Yeah, if you're anywhere over the age of 18, you know that that's not how the world works.

You shouldn't need me to tell you this but, as it goes, insulting authority does have real life consequences, usually pretty grim ones, mind you.

Granted, there are scenes in which she runs away immediately after making her scathing remarks over nobility, implying that she did fear for her life, but she still somehow gets to escape the castle and run out of the city without so much as a scratch on her. How did the guards let her out? Who knows.

I have a suspicion and my suspicion is “plot armor”.

Or how about another scene, in which she's in front of clergy, talking about the goddess Celestine, about how she's seen as a miracle bringing angel, of all things, and yet she denies these allegations and saying that she isn't an angel of any kind and that Celestine is just her friend and they are just best buddies together. Oh and also she insults the goddess Celestine which, may I remind you, is the goddess of their entire planet, by saying stuff like she's not as well-endowed as the statues that they sculpt of her, along with other blasphemous comments that I'm sure, had this world had any semblance of grounding into reality, would have meant that Kaoru would be burned at the stake for heresy.

Or how she wouldn't need to listen to nobility or the king of the land due to her promise to goddess Celestine that she wouldn't misuse her potions, and that promise cannot be broken because “religion is absolute”.

Lady, I'm pretty sure your head would be on the ground if you even dared to say “No” to a real king, especially because of a flimsy excuse like “I made a promise to Celestine and I don't want to break it since we're BFFs”.

This is in contrast with a good show like The Apothecary Diaries where the protagonist, Maomao, is fully aware of the consequences of her words, and because of that, she's smart enough to know when to speak up and when to hold her tongue.

There was even a scene in that show in which Maomao had a monologue that said something along the lines of “If I speak my mind here, the emperor would have me killed”, which is absolutely true. That gave that show a semblance of grounding into reality, because speaking up against authority, even when you know you're right, will mean your death.

This show, on the other hand, either doesn't understand how authority works, or it just blatantly ignores it for the purposes of the plot.

Yes, speaking up against authority is important in life, that's a good lesson to teach, but there's always a proper time and place to do it. Doing it recklessly, like the way Kaoru does it in this show, especially in a medieval fantasy world like that where power is very much abused in various ways, would normally lead to her public execution. The plot just chooses to pretend that that's not the case and that she's right to speak her mind because “that's just the right thing to do”. Blow me!

Kaoru's perfection extends pretty much to everything she does, but honestly, it all boils down to one of two things: either Kaoru is doing something amazing with her powers like making a potion that's going to bring people on the verge of death to a healthy life again and impresses everyone around her, or she insults nobility or some kind of authority, calls them out, leaving everyone in shock at her and being like “How can she say that?! That's so unorthodox!”. That's it. It's one of these two scenarios playing out, one way or another.

Rinse and repeat that for 12 episodes and you've got a show.

Oh yeah, her potions are pretty much miracle givers in this world. It doesn't matter if you're on the verge of death, like if you've had your heart pierced by a sword, a single potion of Kaoru's will cure you and bring you back to life.

Really, these potions work by video game logic, in which it doesn't matter what debuff effect or disease you're afflicted with, just take one sip from that flask and you're as good as new.

The fact that anything in this world can be cured with Kaoru's potions makes even the smallest semblance of repercussions and life threatening conditions like disease in it, feel like just minor inconveniences that can be handled with just one sip.

Really, there are no consequences for anything in this world. As long as Kaoru's on your side, you can beat anything.

I've complained that other isekai anime have RPG-like mechanics which make their world feel shallow and video game-like, because of that. But this show doesn't even have that, as there are no skills to have, no leveling up, no experience grinding, no stats to worry about.

There's nothing of the sorts. It's just all about “Do you need a potion? Well I've got the perfect potion just for you!”. Rinse and repeat.

There's no world building, no fleshing out of the culture, no anything. There's no history or explanation over why the people of that world worship Celestine, there's barely any mention about geography (although conflicts between nations does come into play at one point), there's no magic or spells to talk about, no demon lords or dragons to fight, no magical items or treasure, no nothing.

Or maybe there is, I don't know, the plot is just too busy talking about Kaoru and how perfect she is.

It just keeps trying to find new ways to conflate her importance more and more before her ego would reach the size of the planet that she's inhabiting.

Like, there was a prince in this world that was trying to find a consort for himself. There are all these women that wished to be his brides, but once the prince heard Kaoru talk and her intelligent brain, she's the one he had to marry.

It doesn't matter that she is a peasant, the fact that she doesn't look that impressive and has the body of a child in that world, or that she has an ugly glare, she just has to be the one, even when Kaoru absolutely says that she doesn't wish to marry him because he's not her type.

And despite all of this, he cannot find a different woman to court because “she has to be the one”, up to the point where he has to obsess over her and become almost like a stalker. I couldn't believe it.

The prince of a nation is incapable of finding a better woman than Kaoru. He needs to become a lowly stalker just to even find her. That's just....I'm out of words.

Or, if that's not enough to boost her ego, what if I told you that Kaoru stopped an entire army that was invading from a foreign nation all by herself, by using exploding potions that destroyed all their supplies and left them with no water to drink in the hot summer?

Yes, you heard that right, she stopped an entire army just with that strategy.

If I had to suspend my disbelief any further for this show's sake, my disbelief would be in a fucking coma.

Oh and, about the exploding potions that were used as weapons, if that sounds like a bit of cheating considering that all her powers were supposed to do was to create potions out of nothing, you're in for a treat! Because this show is not above using cheating to make ends meet.

Kaoru can pretty much conjure any physical object out of nothing, as long as it can be used either as a potion, or a “potion container”.

What this means is that she can pretty much bring forth any object that she needs, whenever she needs it. Don't believe me?

How about a time when she created an amazing sword out of nothing, for the soldiers to use in the war. It's funny, because the sword isn't really a sword, it's actually a potion container, according to her, even though it's not made out of glass, it's not breakable, it pretty much looks and functions like a full fledged sword.

Or how about when she incapacitated an entire platoon of enemy combatants all by herself, by merely spawning poisonous potion liquid inside their very bodies, that made them fall to the ground in pain. Yes, she can apparently do that. She doesn't need to actually have the people drink her potions for them to take effect, she can basically just create the potion liquid inside their bodies from the very beginning, against their will.

Convenient, am I right?

Oh but don't worry, the soldiers didn't die! They were just incapacitated. We wouldn't want to have something as dark as death in our anime, even though it's a fucking invasion of a country onto another. Blow me!

Or how about when she generated a horse carriage to transport her with, by using the same reasoning as before, that the “carriage is merely a fancy looking potion container”. Blow me!

Or how about she can create a configurable sci fi-esque gold detector out of thin air, because, you guessed it, “it's just a potion container, obviously”.

The amount of cheating this plot does to further the story and make Kaoru solve other people's issues is so mind blowing, I felt dirty watching it.

There's thinking outside the box and using what you have to your advantage, and then there's outright cheating. This is cheating.

The author just didn't know how to give Kaoru more ways of being useful so they twisted her potion-making powers into something entirely and utterly unrelated to it.

I'm sure, if Kaoru wanted to, she could spawn a fucking gun too, from thin air, just because “it's a potion container”. At this point it wouldn't surprise me, nor would it be any bigger of a stretch than what she already did in the anime.

Oh and about that death thing? Yeah, this show likes to do fake outs too, as if it didn't stoop low enough already.

There are points in which Kaoru's allies would normally die for her sake, but thankfully she's just there to stop them in their tracks. “This character was stabbed to death? Potion!”

“This character is about to die from a high fall? Teleport them from the fall into my item box (her extra-dimensional storage room)! No biggies.”

Blow me!

And even when big events are supposed to happen, they are treated with the most modicum of importance they deserve. “Oh, this foreign nation is about to invade us? I'll destroy their army!”

“Oh, I just died from a supernatural event and I need to be reincarnated into another world? Oh well, shit happens. Doesn't matter that I won't get to see my family or friends ever again. I'll just start my life in another world anew!”

Yeah, in the first episode, after she died, the god that preserved her soul gave her the chance to visit her family and friends in their dreams one last time to say her farewells before she will be reincarnated in another world, and they all treat it as if she was simply going to move out to another city.

I get it that they now know that she's fine and that she'll have to move on to a better life but, at the same time, even her parents were fine to seeing their daughter tell them that that will be the last time they'll see her. That's not realistic at all.

The fact that death, in this anime, is treated like stubbing your toe is infuriating to me. There's no gravity to actions or dramatic impact with regards to anything.

Imagine if I stabbed you to death and, in your last moments, you told me “I forgive you, because now I'll move onto a better life”. Even as your murderer, I would feel like that was cheap.

This show was too scared to have any drama whatsoever in it, much less death.

I get it that you want this show to be about Kaoru being amazing and you're leaving out anything unpleasant like negative feelings and pain, but that just confers your show a feeling of even more shallowness than it already has.

Even if you'll point out to me that shows like The Apothecary Diaries also have a Mary Sue protagonist in them, and they also replay the same “She's amazing for solving everyone else's problems” type of formula in them, I'll still argue that it's a night and day difference between that show and this one. Why?

Because yeah, Maomao is a Mary Sue, that's true. She is highly intelligent, skilled and reliable at every turn, that's a fact. However, the difference is that in that show, the focus isn't on Maomao. She is the protagonist of the show, that's true, but the focus is on her actions and deductions, on the mystery solving and the ripple effects that they have on the political climate of their environment. Maomao is just a small cog in the larger than life machine that is the Imperial Palace, and that scale shows (not to mention that that show also had actual death moments and heavy debates about the importance of life and one's own limits, which this show is too scared to have).

Here, everything is about Kaoru. It's not even about her actions, it's all about Kaoru as a character, how amazing she is, how good and kind hearted she is but, most importantly, how critical she is to everything else around her.

She isn't just one cog in a larger machine, she is the entire factory that manufactures all the machines. Everything happens within her sphere and she is the god of the story.

Because she doesn't need to plead for her life when insulting the prince of a nation, she doesn't need to ask for forginess when she talks shit about the goddess of that world to the clergy, hell, she feels like she's entitled to bargaining for powers when she's in front of an almighty deity that controls an entire universe in her hand. Because yeah, she doesn't fear authority nor consequences, she just feels entitled to do whatever the hell she wants, without a thought for consequences.

That's just stupid.

Oh yeah, and the one thing that Kaoru can do well in this world, besides making miracle bringing potions, is impart smart business knowledge. That's her thing, that's what impresses everyone around her, how business savvy she is.

It doesn't matter that she's talking to people whose entire jobs is handling national economies and who probably studied and trained years of their lives to doing their jobs, she just imparts one piece of advice like “Lower taxes, so that people can have more money to afford buying things to boost the local economy” and that is enough to change the fate of the entire nation, amazing them with her incredible wisdom. Blow me!

I think the premise of this show is that medieval people are dumb as hell and they would have their minds blown away if they ever met any Average Joe from our time that traveled to them, because supposedly we're more intelligent than them, but that sounds and feels like an incredibly insulting take.

There were incredibly intellingent and highly skilled people in medieval times as well, people who, despite not having some of the knowledge we have, would surely be better at their jobs than a random outsider that used to work as a white collar worker trying to impress them with her “modern” knowledge.

I can't anymore, my hands are tired of typing. This is the longest rant I've had in a long time, and I cannot believe how much steam I needed to let out.

This show pissed me off, not just because of how mundane and shallow it is, but because of how much of a waste of time it proved on being.

Don't get me wrong, any anime is technically a waste of time as well.

Whenever you watch a TV show, you're wasting time out of your life, time that you can use in productive ways to improve it instead. That's simply a fact.

But the point of a show is to entertain you, and to mask away the fact that you're wasting your time on it, or at least to make it worth it. It's supposed to impart knowledge to you, make you have an emotional reaction to something, make you gasp at a specific plot twist or, at the very least, make you feel like you've spent your time on doing something worthwhile.

This is the first show that didn't do that for me.

I was painfully aware of my life slipping away from me, as I was wasting time watching its episodes, and I was becoming depressed. This is not what's supposed to happen.

In all the other entries on this list, I've felt at least some semblance of quality to their entries.

I actually felt shocked when I saw a specific kiss happen in Girlfriend, girlfriend, feeling amazed that the plot progressed the way it did. I felt genuinely heartbroken when a certain character died in SHY, which genuinely brought me close to tears. And I actually did feel shivers run down my spine at the ending of Stardust Telepath. Despite being pure works of fiction, all these shows managed to pull those feats off, and I appreciated that. They touched me in ways I could never otherwise describe and I felt that my time spent on them was worth it.

This show did not do that. It's the first show I felt that I absolutely wasted time on, as it had no impact on me whatsoever. The illusion that I'm doing something worthwhile while watching it ran out and I could see it for what it was: a time waster.

New episodes of this show would come out on Saturdays in my country, alongside new episodes of The Apothecary Diaries and that contrast in quality was so jarring I genuinely found it funny.

Every Saturday, I would go out of my way to watch these two shows back to back and ask myself “What did I Shall Survive Using Potions! do wrong this time that The Apothecary Diaries did right instead?“. And, truth be told, when comparing and contrasting these two shows, you can learn a lot from their differences.

The only thing that this show did better than The Apothecary Diaries at, is the fact that this is a family friendly show, almost to a fault.

The Apothecary Diaries, despite its overwhelming superior quality, is not particularly kid friendly, especially considering the topics of certain episodes about death, suicide, murder and politics.

Granted, I don't think children would necessarily be scarred if they were to watch an episode of The Apothecary Diaries, simply because the show is very restrained in how graphic it becomes, but I do believe that it would bore them out, because it's methodical, slow, dialogue heavy, and it revolves around politics and medical mysteries, topics that usually don't attract attention from kids.

In contrast, this show is colorful, simple and very upbeat and happy-go-lucky, a quality that, to its merit, it exceeds at. As such, I can definitely see kids under the age of 18 and especially under the age of 14, absolutely enjoying this and loving it for its mindless pandering to popularity.

With that said, I don't believe this show would be popular with adults. The moment you become old enough to understand how the world works, you'll look at this show and realize that it's just superficial fluff that tries to teach morals about how one should be and act in the face of injustices, but which also has no real depth or forethought of any kind. It's just preaching and using cliches for the sake of preaching and using cliches.

Watching it for growth and personal development as an adult is no more pointless than a malnourished man, on the verge of death, that suddently eats the frosting of a cake for sustenance (just the frosting, with no cake inside). You'll like the taste and look of it, but in the end you'll be no better off after eating it than how you were before it.

You'd have just had wasted time.

A blog post talking about the history of the privacy-focused Tox protocol.

Background

After the 2013 Snowden US government leaks, it's no secret that many people, including those from the general public, have become quite uncomfortable about the topic of government surveillance.

Up until then, there was always an air of acceptance among everyone that the government was spying on them and that, most likely, all digital communications were being harvested by it somehow, but nobody gave the thought too much thinking.

Well, Snowden changed this and, in the wake of publications of classified materials that showed just how much the US government was eavesdropping on everyone, including domestically on US citizens, it became clear that the idea of being spied upon suddenly lost all its humor in the public's eyes.

Programs such as PRISM became part of the public consciousness and technologies that many had taken for granted, such as Skype, became the target of much distrust all of a sudden.

People were suddenly concerned about their online privacy, and felt betrayed by the revelations.

And so, as a consequence, in June 2013, the first commit was published on github by a user named irungentoo, a commit for a repository named toxcore.

And so was the Tox protocol born.

Design goals

The protocol, in its infancy, strived to achieve some very straight forward goals:

1. It was supposed to be entirely a peer-to-peer protocol, meaning that unlike many other instant messaging protocols devised up until that point (such as Whatsapp, Signal, Telegram etc.), the tox protocol will not rely on any central service at all, outside of the barebones bootstrap nodes which would be used to get the ball rolling

2. It would be an end-to-end encrypted messaging system, meaning that the only players involved in the conversation would be the ones that would have the means of decrypting it

3. Once a contact's friend request is accepted, the two clients would immediately connect directly to each other, without relying on any relays or intermediaries whatsoever (except if any of the contacts decides to use Tor to mask their IPs for additional privacy)

The Snowden leaks revealed that the main reason digital communication was prone to being eavesdropped on was that the most famous and common instant messaging communication programs relied on servers to relay the messages between the participants. This means that the NSA only needed to go to the server operators to convince them to handle these messages to them, either voluntarily or via use of legal coercion.

So the Tox protocol solved this dilemma by simply getting rid of servers altogether. You can't easily spy on everyone if people are directly connecting to each other to talk, without central intermediaries.

A good analogy is the advent of telephone companies. It's easy for the government to spy on phone conversations because, ultimately, there are only a handful of phone companies in any country, so they just need to compromise all of them and then they can access the phone conversations of millions of people. This is possible because all these millions of people rely on just a handful of companies for all their communication.

The less companies there are to compromise, the easier it is for the government to breach the service.

Drawbacks

The idea, was a good one. There were some caveats though.

Who came first? The chicken or the egg?

The main issue that hampered Tox's growth was the fact that Tox, by design, was very privacy focused.

Yes, in theory, you could use your real name as your tox profile account's name, you could post your email and phone number in your tox details as well for all your contacts to see.

But, in practice, most people used an anonymous username that was very difficult for others to guess. Moreover, the protocol didn't even mandate for the registration of an email address or a phone number. Basically, the protocol allowed for full anonymity at all times.

This was by design like this.

The issue with this was that there was no easy way to find your friends even if they also used tox.

There was no directory where you could search people by name, email address, phone number or even tox username at all.

Instead, if you wanted to talk with someone over tox, you first had to share your Tox ID with them, which is this long 76 character long hexadecimal string, that they would then use to find you over the internet and send you a friend invite.

Once you accepted the invite, your tox client would connect directly with theirs over the internet, negotiate a secret encryption key with them and then use this to encrypt all your communications with each other.

The key would only exist on your device and theirs, never leaked to any third party at all.

Needless to say, this was a cumbersome process, and it made finding new people a complete and utter hassle. Not only this, but it opened the door for a chicken and an egg dilemma, because if you needed to securely talk with someone, you first had to give them your tox ID (or they had to give you theirs) over a secure private channel before you even started talking over tox.

But in order to do that, you needed to have a private trusted communication channel between the two of you already to send the tox ID through, so what even was the point of tox if you already had that?

Offline messages? What's that?

Another, glaring shortcoming that the tox protocol suffered from, due to its server-less architecture, was the lack of offline messaging functionality.

Skype, Teams, Signal and all these other instant messaging platforms have servers that are, inherently, trusted by all the clients by design.

Servers might not seem like that much of a huge deal, but it allows for useful features like offline messaging to happen without having to overly engineer a very complicated solution.

Basically, if Bob wants to send Alice a message over Skype, for example, but Alice is offline at the time, Bob can send the message, the message gets recorded and timestamped by Skype servers which are, by design, always online, and then Bob can do other things in the meantime, even go offline as well, knowing that the message has been sent.

Now, even if Bob may have gone offline in the meantime, Alice may come online, connect to a Skype server and, as soon as the server sees her coming online, it remembers that Bob had tried to send her a message when she was offline, and sends the message to her now.

Bob doesn't need to be online for any of this. The Skype server did the job for him behind the scenes. This is what's known as offline messaging.

Tox doesn't have servers, though, so none of this is possible.

I'm sure, technically, this can be done in a peer-to-peer application too, if you put enough thought into designing a clever solution.

As long as there are other peers for you to connect to, you can engineer a solution in which they store the message themselves, instead of relying on a server, and relay it somehow to Alice when she gets online, but then you have to design a propagation protocol so that the message is kept alive while peers come online and go offline randomly, make sure that a malicious peer doesn't just flood the network with bogus offline messages meant to DoS all other peers and other such nonsense.

The point is, designing a solution that doesn't rely on servers is not easy and tox just decided to take the easiest approach out: just avoid supporting offline messages entirely.

What this means is that in Tox, if you wish to send any of your contacts a message, both you and the contact in question have to be online!

Sure, tox can hide this fact by queuing the message locally on your computer, waiting for your contact to come online to send it to him but, if you decide to shut down your computer during this time while they're still offline, they won't be getting your message while your computer is shut down, even if they will come online in the meantime.

Basically, all your offline messages to your contact will ever be sent to them only during the brief period when both you and them are online at the same time.

This makes people who live on opposite sides of the planet, and who have huge time zone differences between them, very difficult to communicate with each other over tox, as one is usually offline sleeping while the other is online, and vice versa.

Worse, if you have an urgent message you really need someone over tox to read, your only recourse is to keep your computer online and not sleeping at all times, until they get online, for the message to be delivered.

This is not only a huge waste of power but, many times, it's impractical. Basically, in order to mitigate the lack of servers, communicating parties have to turn their clients into servers themselves.

And, not only this, but because Tox is a trustless protocol by design and peers are designed not to trust each other, even if they are directly communicating with one another, a message that is being received by Alice at a later time than it was when being sent by Bob (i.e. an offline message), gets timestamped by Alice's tox client as the time of it being received by Alice, not the time it had been sent by Bob to Alice.

Or, in simpler words, if Bob sent Alice a message, but Alice was offline on Tox for an entire week afterwards so she couldn't receive it, when Alice does finally come online on Tox and receives Bob's message, the message is recorded in Alice's client as having been sent at the time Alice came online, not a week prior when it had actually been sent by Bob.

This is because, Bob could have hacked his own Tox client to lie to Alice about when he had sent the message, in which case his client could claim that the message had been sent a month prior, or even a year prior. Without a trusted third party server to corroborate the sending event, Alice's client has no way of knowing if what Bob's client says is true, nor can Bob's client even prove that he had sent the offline message at the time he claims he has and not earlier or later.

As such, in Tox, the offline messages you receive from a contact are timestamped on your end as the time you actually receive them, not at the time your contact claims to have sent them to you.

This is the issue with software that's inherently distrustful by design. You always end up lacking features that software with trusted servers have.

Have more than one computer? Sucks to be you!

Oh, this one's a doozy.

You know how, on Skype or Microsoft Teams, you just have to login to your account and then you can send messages from literally any internet-connected computer at your disposal?

Like, let's say you send a message to your boss on at work, close your computer to go on lunch break, and then, while you're gone and eating, you decide to see if your boss answered by just logging into Teams via your phone and check.

You can do this because your Teams account is stored somewhere in a database and, regardless of where you connect to Teams servers from, whether it's your work Desktop machine, your Android phone or your grandma's laptop, the servers are always the same and the database that they use to store information about you is also always the same. Only the Teams clients are different.

Well, Tox only has clients. It has no servers, no databases, no anything.

Basically, if you want to share your Tox conversations across machines, you're pretty much out of luck.

OK, in theory, there's nothing in the Tox protocol that prevents a Tox client from somehow implementing a solution to synchronize conversations across multiple computers using peer-to-peer technology. Maybe someone, someday, will actually implement this and I'll take my words back.

But, in practice, I've personally never seen this done.

Only once did I move my qTox profile from a Linux laptop to my Windows desktop by copying the profile folder on a thumb drive and, thankfully, everything went smoothly and without any bugs whatsoever. That way, I've effectively moved my encrypted Tox conversations across machines.

However, it's worth noting that, at least back at the time, this wasn't officially supported by qTox, meaning that it could have very well not worked. Or, even if it did work, a future update could make it not work anymore.

Basically, if you want to use Tox on multiple computers, the official fully supported way of doing it, is to just generate a new Tox profile on each and every one of them. And that means you'll have to re-add all your contacts across all of them, every one of your contacts will have to accept a separate friend request for each computer you use tox on, your friends will have you listed multiple times in their contacts list, once for each of your computers and, even with all of this, none of your chats will be synchronized across your devices, meaning that different computers will have entirely separate conversation histories.

This.IS.A.NIGHTMARE.

If you ever wonder why the Tox protocol was never successful, it's not because it was buggy or it lacked advanced features; it's because, by design, it couldn't implement some of the most basic features that most people expect by default from any instant messaging app.

Its greatest strength, the fact that it had no servers or central database, was also its downfall: no servers means no simple way of inter-device data syncing, offline messaging or central user directories to add friends from.

This is why Tox failed

Lack of support for niche Linux distros for certain Tox clients

This is more of a niche thing, as most software doesn't support Linux anyways, but the user base that most Tox clients pandered to, was the privacy oriented, corporation hating, free software loving Linux community.

Sure, there were Tox clients that were geared only towards Windows too, but those were very rare.

So you'd think, given their primary user base, that many client developers would go out of their way to ensure good support for most distros. Well, you'd be wrong in thinking that.

Or at least, I was wrong about this with a tox client named qTox.

qTox was one of the more popular clients out there, and it was my client of choice because it had the widest operating system support of all clients.

So, naturally, that was my first choice for a client.

I also have to point out that I'm a Fedora linux user. I use Fedora Workstation as my daily driver on my personal laptop, and I love this OS, with all its flaws and shortcomings.

One day, I upgraded to Fedora 36, as that was the latest release at the time and then, as usual, I went ahead and enabled RPM fusion repositories on my system.

Then, from RPM fusion, I installed qTox on my system.

Well, wouldn't you know it, I was getting an error upon trying to start the program.

The error? A library called libvpx.so.6 was missing on my system. Of course, I didn't get this error message while trying to start qTox normally from my launcher, I had to try to start qTox from the terminal, just so that I would get a printout on why it was failing to start in the first place on the console.

Well, wouldn't you know it, apparently Fedora 36 upgraded its system libraries and instead of coming preinstalled with libvpx.so.6, as qTox seemed to be expecting, it came with libvpx.so.7 instead, which was entirely different.

I mean, I know RPM Fusion was a third party repository and that people shouldn't expect much quality control from stuff in it but, isn't the entire point of a package manager that it was supposed to solve dependency issues like this?

And yes, I tried creating a symbolic link named libvpx.so.6 to libvpx.so.7, expecting it to work out of the box, but it wouldn't. The program would still crash immediately upon start-up with an even uglier error message.

The point is, while Fedora is indeed a bit niche, it's still one of the most popular Linux distros on the planet. You'd think the development team for qTox would try to pre-emptively fix issues like these before people would make the upgrade.

And, for the record, I didn't do the upgrade the exact day Fedora 36 came out. I usually wait a couple of weeks before I upgrade, so they had more than enough time to sort this out. The fact is, they didn't care.

Granted, qTox is just one Tox client. Their development team doesn't develop c-toxcore or any of the many other Tox clients on the planet, so they are just one party at fault here.

And, despite this issue, qTox also offered an AppImage that worked out of the box so I could continue to use qTox even after this.

But still, it's disheartening when you realize that this is the type of bugs you encounter quite often when trying to use Tox.

The titan has fallen

With all of these shortcomings, and without obvious technical solutions in sight, the Tox protocol has seen an excruciatingly slow but painful death.

It bled users year after year, as more and more privacy focused individuals sought to use other software suites that promised privacy but which also offered the benefits of centralized services, like Signal.

Don't get me wrong, I despise Signal as much as the next person, and the fact that I still have to have a phone number in order to use the service is extremely infuriating. But, at the end of the day, Signal is easier to use than Tox. And that fact is simply indisputable.

Couple that with the fact that Signal also is open source, much like most tox clients are, and you really have no reason to prefer Tox over Signal.

As time went on, developers, for one reason or another, started abandoning their tox projects, one after the other.

People simply didn't seem to care about peer-to-peer protocols anymore and, as the Snowden leaks were slowly fading out of the general population's consciousness, so too did the volunteers working on the myriad of tox clients all around the world.

And, after many years, the most popular tox client out there, qTox, had its official repository on github frozen, with the developers leaving behind a message that they're planning on abandoning the project.

Keep in mind, there are still many tox clients out there, and the main project, c-toxcore, the one that actually implements most of the functionality offered by Tox, is still maintained to this day.

But c-toxcore is just a platform-agnostic library that implements the Tox protocol itself. A library is worthless if you don't have front-end clients to expose its functionality.

That's what all the tox clients are supposed to do. Now, qTox is abandoned, so that's out of the question.

If you go to the Tox protocol's wikipedia page, you'll see a table with the most popular tox clients out there, as well as a column in that table mentioning whether they're still supported or not.

And, at least as of right now, most clients reported on that page are said to have been abandoned.

The most popular Tox client still being maintained right now is one named Toxic, a C client implementation relying on the Ncurses library. Issue with this one is that it's reliant on Unix functionality, meaning that it doesn't work out of the box on Windows.

Sure, technically savvy people can go out of their ways to make it work on Windows, either by compiling the source code using Cygwin or maybe using the Linux subsystem for Windows that's available under Windows 11 but, at the end of the day, most normal people won't go through this stuff when there's Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack and many other alternatives available at their fingertips.

qTox was the last Tox client that still supported Windows out of the box and now that it's also abandoned, a large portion of desktop users will don't have the option anymore to use Tox, sadly.

Sure, this is a huge loss for Windows users, but it's an even larger loss for Tox, as now, a lot of people won't even consider using the protocol anymore, since they won't be able to use it to communicate with friends and family that do use Windows.

The protocol itself is maintained by the previously mentioned c-toxcore github project, which only maintains the library that does all the heavy work behind the scenes and which is used by Tox clients.

The library's latest stable version, 0.2.17, as of the posting of this blog post, was published more than a year ago at this point (13 months, to be exact).

The developers never said that it was being abandoned too, but, personally, if a piece of software doesn't get any updates for more than a year, I really start to wonder if it's still being maintained.

Technically there's also another Tox client that supports Windows called yat, but as of the writing of this blog post, I tried installing it myself and all installation links lead me to a website called www.lovecry.pt that seems to be down.

I also tried to reach that website a week ago and I didn't have any success back then either.

So yeah, I'm not getting my hopes up anymore.

At this point, I'm convinced the Tox protocol is either destined to die sooner or later, as nobody cares about mass surveillance anymore to go through the hoops that is using Tox, or, best case scenario, it becomes a protocol mainly used by third party clients that work only on Unix operating systems and used by a very niche community of privacy focused nerds.

For the past decade that I've been using it, I've never heard anyone mention Tox in day to day conversations, as an alternative to Skype or Discord, and now I'm more than sure I never will.

And with the advent and promotion of the federated communication protocol Matrix, there's even less of an incentive for people to seek out Tox nowadays.

In the end, one really has to wonder: how long does it take for a project to die?

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