I'd already decided not to watch this (in 2019), but this is 2020. So let's take a look.

King Gilgamesh in ancient Mesopotamia is an egomaniac who absolutely loves himself. He dies, but unfortunately will still be alive in the underworld. Our heroes go there, while discussing this with people in the future in front of computers that can scan and watch the underworld thousands of years ago. In, uh, "real time".

There are gods and Fate Servants (i.e. famous people rounded up to FIGHT!!!! because, um, wow cool), but all of them have their powers nullified in the underworld.

There's Mesopotamian theology and silly gate scenes.

It seems impressively mental, but nah.

It looks quite funny, if you like Fate/Grand Order. Cute girls turn out to be evil bastard bosses who send their magical Servants into deathmatches, or else just open trapdoors under their feet and drop them to their death. The alternative to mass Servant-icide was a pay cut! There's fanservice (a swimming competition that in practice is mostly just swimsuits), a tiny furry molester who gets repeatedly killed and a general lack of seriousness.

The Fate uber-franchise did a similar parody series about ten years ago for Fate/stay night (and Tsukihime), called Carnival Phantasm.

Unfortunately, though, I don't watch Type-Moon these days, except for Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya. Parodies work better if you have some level of interest and awareness of the original.

I sort of vaguely liked Season 1. It's a shounen anime about fire fighters with superpowers, undead spontaneous combustion people, wicked conspiracies and total idiots.

This episode is a reintroduction for new viewers, so its middle section is a BIG FIGHT where everyone gets their turn in the spotlight. A giant infernal goes on the rampage. This doesn't really mean much, but it does its job.

The episode also contains non-fight material, though. The girls of Company 8 go shopping for the sake of Lieutenant Hinawa's terminal dress sense. Then, later, the boys get intense and a bit judgement-impaired about posing for the Fire Force's annual nude male calendar. This is funny, as is Arthur's idiot introduction. It's a good episode, actually.

I had trouble with this one. It's charming, quirky and unexpected, but wow... those two. Bad life decisions R Us.

So, there's a boy who's unfortunately called Nasa. (His parents forgot that the USA has a space agency of that name.) Our hero is an idiot whose overconfidence leads him to miss a year of school (after claiming that he's the greatest and can't fail) and walk in front of a truck. In fairness, I laughed at Nasa's attempt to ignore near-fatal injuries.

He also decides to skip high school, despite coming top in his exams.

Tsukasa is immeasurably more intelligent and practical than Nasa (not hard), but she has worrying taste in men. To be precise, she decides that she likes Nasa, after knowing him for barely five seconds. She also makes a life decision that.. um, well, (a) definitely shouldn't be made that quickly, and (b) probably shouldn't involve Nasa. (His grounds for acquiescing to that decision are even shallower and dumber, incidentally.)

Good grief. I'll keep watching for now, but it remains to be seen whether I can stomach these characters for 14 episodes (and a second season's coming).

Nope. I can understand that a teenager's brains would probably evaporate in this situation, but here they've evaporated a little too completely. There's a key conversation or five that doesn't appear to be happening.

Food-based anime don't work for me. Clearly this is my personal problem and they must have an audience somewhere, but I don't get it. Characters will have raptures and orgasms (in this show, literally) over the food they eat or make. They talk about food. They make food. They eat food. They can't shut up about food. That's why I dropped Kirakira PreCure a la Mode.

Anyway, this week our heroes are having a competition on the beach. This means bikinis and, in one scene, buxom girls in vibrating massage chairs. The rest of the episode is about food.

Fruits Basket is great and everyone should read it. Or watch it. Or both.

Honda Touru is an airhead with an infinite capacity for selflessness and being nice. The Soumas are a family of involuntary shapeshifters, which causes them problems like "being comedy idiots" and "having distressing backstories". They love Touru. Everyone loves Touru, except for the Prince Yuki Fan Club who resent any fellow schoolgirl who gets too close to their beloved (nay, worshipped) classmate.

This is a Yuki Fan Club episode, which is good news. They're funny, because they're nutjobs. That said, though, one of them's capable of self-awareness to the point of hidden self-hatred.

We also have Yuki getting to know his new colleagues on the school's student council. Naturally, they're Souma-level whackos. This is funny too, although there's a throwaway moment to suggest that the vice-president might be mildly sinister (as well as lazy, annoying, terminally flippant, etc.)

It's an entertaining episode, but not without depth as well. Recommended.

The animation style made me wonder if this might be another Yamishibai horror anthology. It's not, but it's not dissimilar. A schoolgirl can't swim, but there's a lady selling sweets that'll let you swim like a mermaid!

These sweets come with instructions. It's important to read these properly. Guess what.

Incidentally, my wife brought one of this series's original novels back from Japan last month. Apparently they're good.

The core narrative is a retelling of the Arabian folk tale, Zarqa al Yamama, but with a more family-friendly ending. (In the original, the enemy gets to our heroine's tribe, kills every man in the camp, tears out Zarqa's eyes and crucifies her.)

Unfortunately, there's also a redundant framing story, as if the producers were nervous of their own old-fashioned material. It's a modern city with skyscrapers, flying robot taxis and solar plants to get energy from the sun. (They look like metal flowers.) None of this means anything, because granny's about to tell the children one of her folk tales!

The show's a co-production between Saudi Arabia and Japan. That's an interesting fact, but nah. I'm not the target audience anyway.