Five fairies in human form come to Earth, to spread love and good feelings among all these poor humans. In this episode, Fairy Ranmaru helps a girl who'd been suffering from cyber-bullying. The only payment he asks is her heart, but it's unclear what this means since he has no intention of forming either a romantic or sexual bond with her. (They actually have rules forbidding anything like that, although they're then immediately told that hey, anything's okay if you don't get caught.) At the end, the girl finds a human boyfriend.

Oh, and these "fairies" are also hot boys with muscles who get naked a lot and run a bar together. The closing title sequence is exploding with manservice.

This isn't a parody. The cyber-bullying storyline is dramatic and taken seriously, despite the magical fairy framework that's basically a gender-flipped PreCure. The show means it. Its studio previously worked on Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!, which is ostensibly similar, but this show is clearly better than its predecessor. Playing it straight could be argued, paradoxically, to be funnier. It is, though, laser-targeted at its chosen audience. If you like hot naked boys and you don't mind amazingly silly but straight-faced anime, watch this show. It looks quite good, actually, but wow.

A boy called Will is being raised by a ghost (Gus), a skeleton (Blood) and a woman (Mary) who's allegedly a mummy but I'll be damned if I can see it. Well, never mind. The undead are good parents, actually. Grumpy Gus teaches him magic, the rough and scary-looking but good-natured Blood teaches him combat and Mary's the one who teaches him life skills.

We see Will at three ages: when he's newborn (where's the mother?), at three years old and at nearly eight. He does a thing he's been ordered not to do, which reminds me of folk tales... but in a way that's sympathetic, not annoying.

I like these people. They're nice. I'm not sure where the story's going, but so far it's engaging. Also, so far I haven't spotted any slimy isekai power-fantasy bollocks.

I don't usually follow sports anime, but I enjoyed this episode and I'd recommend it to anyone who likes soccer.

It's about women's soccer, which we're told is in trouble. Viewership is declining and girls don't necessarily want to play it. We meet a schoolgirl who loves the game... but she wants to keep playing in the boys' team when she goes to high school. The standard in the girls' game is too low. Her skills will decay and she'll go backwards.

We see this from both sides of the fence. There are players with talent... and it's rotting away because their teammates aren't particularly serious and just want to play for fun. There are weirdos. There are girls who've given up on trying to play as a team and just play selfishly. There's a useless coach who isn't even watching half the time, although he can actually assess the game situation when he tries. There's a player from Japan's national team who wants to boost women's soccer and is about to return to her old school as a coach. (She's actually the heroine of a prequel soccer manga from the same creator, Sayonara Football, which got an anime film adaptation while this TV series was airing.)

This is great. You don't need to know anything about soccer, although obviously it'll help. Anyone can understand the problem that's being presented.

The art's odd, though. The girls have scary fish faces... but hey, it's a style.

It's very good. Genuinely interesting, whether or not you're into its sport. That episode got me as near as I've got in years to watching all of a sports anime.

It's a rollicking 24 minutes of entertainment. The production values are great. It's bursting from the screen, the animation is full of life and the facial expressions are funny and inventive.

Unfortunately, though, I didn't like it. Fena is about to be sold to a scumbag who's warming up for their "wedding night" with three (more) prostitutes. Fena doesn't like this. Fair enough. She's enthusiastically inventing bone-headed plans for running away, which her friend Angie keeps having to point out are stupid. She keeps forgetting that she doesn't have any money.

"Angie, money is a funny thing. Where there's none, there's none at all. But where there's some, there's lots! So I just need to steal every last penny of that ill-gotten money!"

"Hang on, that's why you put yourself up for auction?"

In other words, then, she's both crooked and stupid. She's cute, mind you. I laughed at her comedy faces when inventing stupid plans. But I don't like her. Otherwise, the episode's splendid and it continues full-bloodedly with lots of action, violence, lovable old blokes, etc. Tempted to give the show a chance anyway, I looked up some user reviews... and discovered that the show's regarded as poorly written and has an infamous ending that you might hate with the fire of a thousand suns.

That's a "no", then.

Why did I watch this? I normally skip these mini-anime. This one's just Shinra and Arthur Boyle talking about some music Shinra's listening to... but it must be admitted that Arthur is a legendary nutter and this could be entertaining if you're into Fire Force.

It's okay. "Animated" on someone's laptop in half an hour.

I skipped Season 1 of this, so I wasn't expecting to pick it up with Season 2... but it seems fine. Nothing wrong with it at all. It begins with a brief glimpse of Mizuno Souma at work (he's a fireman), but he's soon off on holiday with his girlfriend Fujihashi Ryou. They see the stars, they kiss and they shag. It's all thoroughly harmless and romantic. There's dialogue like, "By the way, when did you fall in love with me?"

There's a tiny bit of mystery and some bloke at the cliffhanger who I presume is meant to pose some bland threat to our lovebirds' relationship, but I'm also not expecting a serious derailment.

Within the first sixty seconds, we've met a buxom naked girl. She hugs the bewildered hero, saying she loves him and wants to marry him. Uh-huh. It's going to be one of those anime, is it?

Seiichi is an isekai hero who used to be fat, bullied and unpopular (except later in the episode with the classmates who actually praise him). God sends his entire class to another world and invites them to form groups. No one accepts Seiichi, so now he's in a jungle on his own. He'll find a Fruit of Evolution that turns him thin and handsome. A big pink gorilla falls in love with him. No attempt is being made to hide where that naked girl will end up coming from.

In outline, all this is okay. In practice, it's a bit annoying. Seiichi is played by Hiro Shimono, who also voiced Zenitsu in Kimetsu no Yaiba (aka. my most unwatchable character in anything). He has unfunny comedy with the gorilla. He steals. (From monkeys, yes, but these are clever monkeys who make valuable-looking things.) He chooses to fight a level 120 monkey when he's level 1 and is surprised when it's stronger than him. He wins a fight so unconvincingly that I couldn't work out how that happened even after rewinding to watch it again. He whines that evolution hurts. (You're gaining superpowers. Shut the hell up.)

He also gains lots of powerful skills far too quickly. This is common in anime, mind you, and I've had a problem with it elsewhere too. I think it's because I used to play old-fashioned pen-and-paper RPGs in which this frenetic skill gain would be obscene, whereas I presume their computer game descendants throw far more upgrades at the players. So that's my issue, I suppose.

Even if you're looking for a harem isekai, you can do better than this.

The 2019 Fruits Basket adaptation reaches its end! It's taken two years, but at last we're about to get there. (Although I see 2022's scheduled to have a related anime called Kyouko to Katsuya no Monogatari. Dunno what that is. Well, we'll see.)

Frankly, even now, I still prefer Akitarou Daichi's 2001 adaptation of the same manga. This is still strong stuff, though. Kureno annihilates Touru by goes into detail about his revelations from the end of Season 2. (She drops the DVD. I wanted her to pick it up and at least give it to Kureno, even if he never watches it.) There's more of the charming relationship between Touru, Arisa and Saki.

We also meet Akito's mother, Ren, and learn that Akito might not be the show's big bad after all. (They're both vile, frankly, but we're going to be learning how Akito got that way.)

The show's still good. I've already watched eps.1-50. Of course I'll continue.

Once upon a time, there was a wonderful VR MMMRPG that could replicate all five senses, generate real-seeming NPCs, sing, dance, etc. This was a pain in the arse and everyone hated it. People don't play computer games in order to experience realistic pain, etc. (This is in the episode's opening info-dump and, in fairness, that's quite good.)

We then follow the adventures of an unlikeable guy named Hiro. He does the following:

(a) when being shaken down by thugs, he gives them money from his wallet and only later realises that he gave them a 10,000 yen note. He'd meant to give them something smaller.

(b) Hiro thus doesn't have enough money for the latest Sad Nerd VR Game Release, number 22! Visiting other shops in search of this game, he tries a lost armpit of a shop, where the cashier rants about why these computer games are a rip-off for losers. She then says, "I've got your new release for you!" Hiro thinks this is suspicious in itself, but he pays another 10,000 yen. It's the wrong game. It's a completely different one and ten years old. Furthermore, even a glance would have shown that he was buying the wrong thing, since this one's box doesn't have the correct cover art and instead is black all over. Hiro paid 10,000 yen without looking at his purchase.

(c) having paid all that money, he plays this game. In the virtual world, he meets two game characters who say they're his childhood friends and are aghast when he says he wants to leave the city. It's super-dangerous. There are monsters everywhere. Couldn't he help them pick apples as he'd promised? Hiro works out that this must be some kind of tutorial, but never wonder if the apple-picking might be part of a tutorial quest. Instead, he remains fixated on immediately doing this thing they're begging him not to do, starts a fight and ends up killing one of them. Accidentally, sure. Besides, even before that, he'd been being rude.

Absolutely no way.