I have fallen behind a lot of things this week (find out why in the anime general thread on Monday). However, this is nice and quick to catch up on.

I really like the way we have intertwined the different characters at this point. Also, that kid’s website is so web 1.0 and I love it

Kaiju is able to claim the top spot this week on the chart as Demon Slayer is able to slot in right behind at #2. I haven’t watched either, but it is surprising to see both Date a Live and Mushoku Tensei falling down the chart (Date a Live even had an increase in vote share).

Really well done. Redrawing is like the dark magic of the manga world imo.

So, I have seen several people now in this community mention Tower of God. It is a show I had completely skipped over back when it aired, but since people here are looking forward to it, I decided to try to get caught up real quick before the next season starts so I can join in the discussions. I am working my way through right now and will probably be done before next week’s general thread, so I am going to save my detailed thoughts for that thread but…it has really made me look forward to the discussion threads next season to try to make sense of a lot of things that are not explained. It has been very gripping so far though, with a knack for ending episodes exactly when you want to see more.

This was an interesting little bit of history I wasn’t aware of. Australia trying to use its unique wildlife as a diplomatic tool makes some sense… There are lots of species that only live on the continent due to it long geological history of isolation. However, none of the species I can think of quite match the panda in its blend of public appeal and difficulty to care for and proliferate. It’s not like there is some global collaboration of zookeepers trying to figure out how to get koalas or kangaroos to reproduce. If anything, koalas might reproduce too much.

I also read through the first piece on China’s panda diplomacy as well. I was already somewhat familiar with the story of how the Nixons were able to normalize relations with China partly through the exchange of pandas. Smithsonian has a piece on it. I wasn’t aware of how much the diplomatic exchanges with Japan mirrored those of the US at essentially the same time. It does make sense though since post-war Japan has had their foreign policy so closely aligned with that of the US in the Pacific.

The apps are a good point. The image does display correctly in an Android browser, but doesn’t load in any of the apps that I have installed.

So, I don’t really have a strong opinion here, but I suspect there might be issues with certain things (like gifs) due to the lack of avif motion support in iOS browsers (based on caniuse). I don’t have the means to test this though.

I haven’t watched it, but have seen it described as a delinquent fighting anime in broad strokes. The clips I have seen have shown some great animated fight sequences, and it is one of the shows I missed this season that I am planning on trying to catch up on for the future.

Paging @[email protected] as they have been the one showing up in each of the discussion threads for the show.

For those that are interested in a different perspective on this, not of the publishers, but the translators, Anime Herald actually interviewed several professional translators about this topic. I made a post about it here with some discussion as well.

It’s a good read and the translators are realistic about what is coming:

Zack Morrison (translator): I would say that, like it or not, AI is coming. That genie is not going back in the bottle. And it is improving. The days of Google Translate being a joke are gone. Who knows what AI translation will be like ten years from now? Twenty? Something people need to think about. Hating it is not going to make it go away.

However, at the same time, the companies making use of it are too optimistic about its current capabilities:

Kim Morrissy (translator): Corporations should definitely be more aware of the current limitations of MTL/AI and not see them as a shortcut to reducing labour costs. It’s not just purely a matter of ethics but making people aware that current applications will either see a big drop in quality or require more human labour than they were led to believe.

Meta update:

I was able to automate the wiki updates like I had hoped. I was having a real hard time with the bash scripting needed and making no progress. So, I instead decided to just put it all in a python script. Got it all fixed up in no time after that. If you run into any issues, please let me know.

These threads got posted a day early due to some weirdness in the api the bot uses. I am going to be removing them. Check back tomorrow for the actual threads when the show premieres!

I wanted to follow up on this as I have gotten a chance to dig through AniList’s api to figure out if there is a better way to handle this for the next batch.

Unfortunately, the api only lists an airing time for episode 13 and not any of the other episodes of the batch. This means that rikka will only automatically have the ability to create a thread for episode 13. There is some time before the next batch drops (July 17th it looks like). I am going to poke around with a way to allow rikka to create additional episode threads as requested.

My idea right now is to basically create a special way to request threads via private message that bypasses the usual checks rikka performs, but just for this show. It would make things a little ripe for abuse if there was a bad actor out there, but for just one show, I think I can accept the risk.

I have no doubt that the slower parts of Slime builds to something great. It is a well written story and I have enough confidence in the author to pay off the slow portions. I simply moved on at that point (I think I caught up with the current chapter at the time, and I didn’t want to wait for each chapter). I plan on coming back to it at some point once it is finished. I am in the same boat with Danmachi, waiting for it to wrap up before consuming the whole thing.

Yeah, I have read the source, so I am only going to talk about what we have seen up to now. The anime is ahead of the manga at this point, and characters can change over time. Makoto is about as late a bloomer as you can get. He gets flustered any time he sees some exposed skin or a woman makes an advance on him (the brothel, the medusa, Hibiki’s new outfit, the students that propose to him). In the past he had even blasted Mio and Tomoe with magic to escape them as they made an advance. So, his kind of fumbling around about what to say to Mio this time is a tamer reaction than we have seen from him in the past at least.

As a side point though, I do understand not being able to see past the fact that the person you are considering becoming intimate with was at one point a giant spider that came close to killing you. That would be traumatic. It certainly was for Hibiki’s party. However, an “invincible” dragon that proved to not really be a threat? Where do I sign up?

These threads have been great. It’s a preview of what is hopefully to come as more people are active in the community. I usually try to quickly binge a show in the slow week or two during season transitions, I might try to quickly binge Tower of God (workload depending). If I get to, I would try to write about it in the weekly threads and would probably pop up a couple episodes into the season once I get caught up. I am hoping that my workload will be fairly light over the summer since the project I am working on is based in the EU and it seems like the whole continent disappears for the summer. Something about having worker’s rights and vacation time? Idk…

In any case, here’s to Season 3! Thanks for the fun chats!

50th time confessing and getting rejected? Well, you are halfway to becoming Aijo Rentarou. So, hang in there buddy!

So, I assume that having his heart explode won’t prevent him from being just fine after he leaves this world?

I was glad to see Tia kick some major ass this chapter, but also heartbroken when it showed how she did it through tears. I have no idea how to make it happen, but if Tia doesn’t end up happy somehow, I’ll throw hands.

The teachers all sitting in on her basics class reminds me of the Feynman Lectures. Richard Feynman was asked to teach a series of intro physics courses at Caltech. However, as time went on, fewer undergrads showed up, but were replaced by large numbers of grad students and faculty. They are collected in a series of books and are extremely famous within the field.

popularity charts

Looking at the charts that zabadoh posts is a good idea. Here is the most recent post. The JP twitter list shows that Tsukimichi has about as many twitter followers in Japan as 7th Prince does, a show that just aired for its first season, compared to the second season/third cour of Tsukimichi.

Looking at the other chart (MAL + AniList) gives an idea of the following in the English-speaking world. On that chart, Tsukimichi has about as many followers as Wind Breaker, another show that just aired its first season.

So, overall, not a tremendous showing for Tsukimichi. Again, surprising that this gets an immediate season 3 announcement. Perhaps there is some merit to the “some rich person likes the series” theory you had.

Slime

I haven’t watched this show at all to be honest. Instead, I read the manga basically up to the content covered by this season (based on what I have seen of the discussion during the episode threads). I basically stopped reading at this point though, so I sympathize with having trouble finding the motivation to go on.

closing thoughts on the season overall

I think the season had some ups and downs. I personally really enjoyed the beginning of the season where we got the stories of the heroes that was cut out of season 1. However, I do sympathize with anime-onlies that were confused/frustrated that these characters aren’t why they watch Tsukimichi. Their stories kind of come out of nowhere if you aren’t familiar with the source.

After that bit of filling in the blanks left by season 1, moving to Rotsgard, the story really slowed down and I think it probably could have been done better. There were opportunities to make things a bit more exciting through here that were just passed up. Classes/fights with the mist lizards could have been more exciting. The tournament arc started ok, with the student fights being exciting, but then the fights against the monsters felt extremely boring. There were lots of politics happening during this sequence, so I understand they chose to focus on that, but I feel they could have helped balance it out a little bit by slimming down conversations and adding in a little more action. Also through here, they mostly cut the backstory of Ilumgand, which is a shame. Without his backstory, he is just an asshole rather than more of a victim of circumstance that was preyed upon.

Then, finally, the last section of the season where Makoto and Shiki are summoned by the Goddess to save Hibiki. From here on out it was fantastic, and was a great way to end the season. Just like the first season, the show runners really know how to end on a bang. I wish there was more of the Kaleneon, Left, or Lancer fight, but I think the show chose to focus more on Sophia/Makoto, which is probably the right call if you have to make a choice.

I thought of you when I saw this announcement and was curious what your thoughts were going to be based on what you have written in the episode threads. Out of curiosity, I checked out what reddit was saying and, to summarize, it’s not good.