I think every single person on the planet should read Yotsuba&! It's a world treasure.
It's not my personal favorite though - that would be The Voynich Hotel. I just love everything about it - great characters, funny as hell, great stories and even a great ending.
Some honorable mentions:
It was... not good.
Everything about the story is potentially awkward - the MC is an awkward loner, the FMC is a literal robot, and their love is awkward on multiple levels - not only is it weird and unsettling in-universe, but they're both just bad at it - not really equipped to express love.
But in the manga, there's a charm that shines through, mostly because they're both so earnest and determined. Even though it's strange and awkward and even though they're not very good at it, they're going to make this work, and they do.
The anime somehow failed to capture that charm, so all that was left was the awkwardness.
Marked - sorry it took me so long to get back here.
And yes - no love triangle, which is good.
And in fact, it struck me with this chapter that a lot of what I appreciate about this is that their budding romance is a lot of the point, but it's not an obsessive focus, either in the story or in-universe. It's not this endless fretting and drama and rollercoastering of so many romances - instead, it's just a thing that's sort of naturally and quietly unfolding, and almost in the background. It's just pleasant and sweet.
This is surprisingly impressive.
I didn't expect a lot going into it - the characters and the situations are pretty tropish - but it's all done very well, with very expressive art and enough little story and character details to make it stand out.
Definitely looking forward to more.
Good for her.
An is terrific.
I think the new boss is going to turn out to be a good character too. He seems just the sincere, fundamentally kind but no-nonsense type - just right to cut her a bit of slack or kick her butt a bit, depending on which she needs more of at the moment.
Hmmm...
It seems as if she's actually being sincere for once, but at this point, I don't know if that's even possible - if it's not the case that she's lived in her lies and manipulations for so long that it's literally impossible for her to do anything else.
You're faulting a series for a problem that exists because of assholes.
Every medium has its instances that are provocatice or scatological or otherwise offensive.
The difference with anime is that there's a group of assholes who base part of their identities on their purported superior taste as evidenced by the fact that they hate anime, and there's enough of them that they've formed a fairly significant circlejerk. And they latch onto things like this to which to point as supposed examples of the medium as a whole, while self-servingly ignoring the other 99.9% of stuff out there.
So yes, in a sense, there is a problem with the fact that things like this exist, but the problem isn't really simply that they exist, but that there's a fairly significant group of assholes who can and will dogpile on that fact.
If you want to blame someone or something for the problem, don't blame the series - blame the assholes.
Yeah - An is likely going to do more to bring her out of her shell than anyone or anything else has or could have.
On another note, and as is the norm with this series, all of that stress and drama surrounding the phone call - waiting for it but also dreading it, panicking when it came, stumbling through the conversation, then being exhausted when it was over, was painfully real to me. I know every bit of that all too well.
All sorts of possible flags there, but nothing definitive.
When this was announced, I read part of the manga, then part of the LN original, and thought it might be good. I don't normally watch currently airing anime, but I was keeping an eye on this. And I finally dove in and caught up on it last week.
This episode highlighted pretty much everything I loved about the series as a whole.
Anna is awesome. Let's get that out of the way first. She's easily my favorite FMC in years. And she was especially good in this episode. It's just been so pleasant to watch her and Nukumizu get so comfortable with each other, and it was nice to see that in full flower in this episode. And I couldn't help but laugh when she lost her imaginary boyfriend to an imaginary rival.
Kaju is awesome too, and it was great to see a lot of her in this episode.
And the senseis. I would've liked to see more of them all the way through, but at least they got a bit of extra screen time in this episode. They're both interesting characters in their own right, and they have a great dynamic.
Chihaya was especially good in this episode too, even though she only got a few seconds. She's been a pleasant surprise - she just looks so sweet and naive, and she's so very much not.
Overall, the only criticisms I might have of the series are that a couple of character quirks were a bit too exaggerated (Komari's stutter and Yumeko pretty much as a whole) and that it seems like very little was really settled. The pacing wasn't really a problem in and of itself - I actually quite liked it - but it means that we need at least another season, and preferably a few more.
Overall, I was very impressed, and this was a good cap to the season, assuming another season is coming. Without another season, it'll be a bit disappointingly incomplete, but even then, it was a good slice of life.
Since Makeine ended and nothing caught my attention this season, I'm back to browsing and binging the past, and just finished up one of the best series I've watched in a long time - Heike Monogatari.
I just happened to come across it on a stack and thought it looked interesting, so I watched the first episode and was immediately hooked. It wasn't until I saw the Science SARU logo in the closing credits that I realized it was Yuasa (though in retrospect, I probably should have from Biwa's character design).
The art design is astonishing - a perfect fit for a Japanese historical epic - with backgrounds that look like tapestries and foreground details that look like woodblock prints. It's easily one of the most visually satisfying anime I've ever seen.
The story and characters are sort of underdeveloped, as should be expected from trying to condense a sprawling historical epic into 11 anime episodes, but it doesn't feel incomplete. It's as if all of the missing content from the much larger and more detailed original epic are spread so evenly throughout the adaptation that everything that's there fits neatly together and manages to tell the story anyway.
And the way it's framed - having the narrator of an epic story of a clan brought down by their own arrogance and cruelty that was popularized by biwa singers be a biwa singer who started off with every reason to hate the Heike but who slowly came to love them in spite of their significant flaws - is brilliant. Biwa is perfectly placed to witness the story as it unfolds, and perfectly suited to recognize both their flaws and their virtues, and the inevitability of their fall.
I don't know how popular it was with westerners when it was released, so I don't know if I'm just stating the obvious, but my impression is that it's one of those that's not so much underrated as underappreciated - that it's well regarded by those who have watched it, but that that's fewer people than it deserves. Thus this post.