A family moves out of Tokyo to the countryside (and the daughters' displeasure). Their new house was used to shoot a horror film, but never mind! That's just a movie. Dad's a horror author, so he's into all that anyway. When our heroes arrive, the house is very nice and only moderately reminiscent of the Overlook Hotel from Kubrick's The Shining.

It's a very CGI anime, but a stylised one that looks a bit like a children's cartoon. There's a supernatural fantasy sequence and someone who says his parents died and turned into flowers. I watched the episode happily enough.

A man forces a woman into a sexual relationship she doesn't want. She's a schoolteacher and he's her student. She doesn't like any of it at all. Thoroughly unpleasant.

It's the latest instalment in an anime franchise dating back to 2010. It's had four TV series, a fifth OVA series and two anime films, not counting this 2021 continuation. I was mildly curious about what it was like. This was a mistake, because I couldn't stand it.

It's based on an otome game, i.e. you're a personality-free female protagonist surrounded by pretty boys to be conquered romantically in the original game. In the anime, Chizuru's just sort of there. (Theoretically, her cross-dressing, sword-wielding, father issues, etc. make her quite aggressive by the standards of the time. To you and me, she's wallpaper.) The boys are fighting non-supernatural vampires (?) and an evil doppelganger Chizuru... sort of, sometimes, when the episode gets around to it. Nothing really happens for a good ten minutes and I was bored rigid.

I'm the wrong person to be watching this, though. I find most samurai boring and I'm not the target audience for otome games. I found the characters boring, with the partial exception for one brief scene of two boys who disagreed on whether or not to kill baddies. "You need to calm down and they can't answer questions if they're dead" vs. "I'll find her myself!!!"

I struggled to get through even ten minutes of this.

Hanakappa eats some beans, then gets put on trial for stealing them. I was amused by his court prosecutor wearing a cardboard box on her head with a hand-drawn face on it, then putting on a different cardboard box to become a prosecution witness.

I think we can infer that Hanakappa isn't very bright.

Baki wants to FIGHT!!! His father also FIGHTS!!! They're both grapplers. So they FIGHT!!!

They have enormous muscles and the duck-faced smile that everyone seems to have in this show, at least judging by the title sequence.

The episode begins with a press conference about a mega-elephant so huge and lethal that its daily consumption would have wiped out the entire ecosystem of an African national park. They sent in the army. They didn't stand a chance. BUT ONE UNARMED MAN STOPPED IT WITH HIS BARE HANDS!!!!

Another winner from Netflix.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. All life in the world came from Him... theoretically. But that's a lot of work, so he outsourced.

I love the idea. It's quite funny. The design team is a bunch of weirdos, each with their own peculiarities and preferences. They brainstorm ideas and create all sorts of prototypes to meet the customer requirements. This is both amusing and informative, teaching me lots of weird true facts about giraffes, red-eyed tree frogs, etc.

There isn't, though, a plot or a story. It's just a comedy Slice of Life that's also educational. I enjoyed this episode, but I don't feel the need to watch eleven more like it.

I knew this was a samurai story, so I was assuming I'd skip it. I started watching it, though, and was immediately interested. Firstly, the animation style is a bit different. Secondly, the story doesn't think samurai are inherently heroic.

A small girl and her father see a group of swordsmen drag a woman out of her house. "The kaburo arrest those who speak ill of the Heike." (Or, as in this case, the dissenter's wife.) The small girl is shocked by the sight of shitheads being shitheads, so one of them kills her father for his daughter's lack of respect. (This isn't even the episode's only example of stupidly proud warriors and their hypersensitivity to perceived slights from small children.)

Then, though, one of the Heike takes in the orphan. (He, like her, has mismatching eyes that give him the second sight.) He's nice. He's dismayed that his family's thugs murdered our heroine's dad, so he makes her a member of his household. Is this a revenge story, or what? Is the girl going to seek vengeance against her own adopted family?

This series is an adaptation of a historical epic from the 14th century that's 800 pages long in one of its English translations. I'd guess that this means our little heroine won't end up being the core of our story, but even so I'm up for this.

This episode shows us Leonidas of Rhodes (born 188 BC), who according to this had no sense of humour and believed militantly in training, training and training. He never missed a day, ever. He's intense and intimidating.

He's not the episode's main character, though. That would be Mao, a schoolgirl who's bad at running because she keeps tripping up. She's negative. "I'm not good at running. I'm doomed for failure. I'm the worst." She decides to give up, but then God arrives with a thunderbolt. Maybe a trip to the year 164 BC might inspire her! (The most magical thing in the episode, though, is Mao's skirt and its ability to preserve her modesty under all circumstances.)

On returning to the present day, incidentally, she "saves" a child from a reversing car that was going so slowly that in practice the child was safe.

It's fine. Nothing wrong with it, except that you (like me) might only be able to find an English dub and so be forced to turn the sound off.

They're still making Hetalia? Good gracious. It's been over ten years. It's funny, but it's also a throwaway gag series and I haven't tried to watch all of it. This series is unusual for Hetalia because it's not looking at history, instead being about all the countries having a meeting (at the UN?) about sorting out Greece's debt.

A few countries act in accordance with mildly obscure national traits. Russia is still being portrayed as mysteriously non-evil, despite one line that could be called mildly sinister by very timid people. I like this show in general, but this episode was very middling and didn't make me laugh.

It looks like garbage. The bland protagonist (Noru) has story-breaking powers and can violate the laws of physics in mid-fight, but afterwards he must recharge by doing timidly sexy-ish things with buxom girls! (There are other recharging methods too, but I think we all know where the story's going with all this.)

The characterisation is thin. There's The Childhood Friend (Emma) whose crush on him is so obvious that it's as if we're hearing a character outline, not a script. There's a Suspiciously Over-Affectionate Little Sister (Alice). The only character worth your time is Olivia, who's been trapped in a dungeon for 200 years and has a carefree attitude to life, plus her voice actress (Yui Horie) is having fun playing her.

It's trash and it knows it. It's a wannabe sexy fantasy that can't even manage the "sexy" and "nudity" bits of the job description. (Mind you, Noru shrinks Emma's colossal boobs, in public, while she's wearing a low-cut dress. Idiot. He's also unnecessarily rude to his father in a way that made me want to see him piss off.) I should abandon this show and flee at top speed... but I gave a second chance to Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World. (Also, there's a moment where this episode has a bit of a sense of humour.)

On the upside, also, it's not an isekai. (Despite featuring a world built on computer game mechanics. Grrrr.) So, in the interests of fairness...

I don't like Noru (or, according to his official romanisation, Noir).

"Could you just say it was you who defeated the Grim Reaper? People would have an easier time believing that it was defeated by the daughter of an earl than by the son of a baronet."

That annoying Guild receptionist, Lola, doesn't believe Noru about something. When asked what she'll do if she's wrong, she says she'll lift her skirt and say 'I'm terribly sorry, Lord Noru'. She's wrong, of course... and Noru holds her to her word. Oi, scumbag. Don't be repellent. Just tell her to forget it.

To my surprise, I found myself liking Emma. She was a cliche in ep.1, but she's much more engaging in ep.2 and I liked her a lot more than Noru. She and Lola instantly dislike each other because they think they're love rivals for Noru (piss off), but towards the end Emma apologises to Lola and offers a handshake to make up and be friends. Emma goes off adventuring with Noru, fights the Big Rabbit and gets depressed when she's not strong enough to defeat it. If I watched this show, it would be for Emma.

Ultimately, though, the show's idea of "sexy" is my idea of "eurgh, fast-forward through this". The panty shots. The ear-nibbling. The fact that Noru is still breathing. Plus, of course, it seems clear that Noru will end up doing naughty things with all those girls in the title sequence, despite poor Emma. No, no, no, nope.

This is a bonus mini-anime (with minimal animation) that was was released weekly on the official YouTube channel. 95 seconds an episode. The first episode involves Olivia telling Noru to kiss her on the lips and... no, I couldn't even be bothered to sit through 95 seconds of this.

The episode starts with Yoshida having dinner with a woman at work. He'd like them to be a couple. She declines, saying she's got a boyfriend that she never mentioned to anyone and that they've been going out for five years.

I don't know if I believe that. I suspect that might have been a polite and somewhat unconvincing excuse, but the key point is that Yoshida's been shot down. He's not even smart enough to wonder whether he's just been lied to. Instead, he goes off and gets roaring drunk to drown his sorrows.

On the way home, a schoolgirl offers him sex if he'll take her home.

This could have got nasty. Surprisingly, it's not. Yoshida acts like her dad and gives her a lot of sharp, intelligent advice. I like the things he scolds her about. A potentially sleazy hentai premise ends up turning serious and interesting. (If you did what Yoshida does here, you'd probably expect to come home to find the girl gone and all your belongings stolen.) I think I've just found a good series.

It's "A NETFLIX ORIGINAL ANIME", so I was expecting trash. And I got it.

The title sequence makes the show look like an unusually splattery Death Game. A schoolgirl (Yuri) is on the roof of a skyscraper. She's trying to phone her parents, but they're unavailable and she can only get through to her brother. Apparently she's in a world where you're not allowed to go down to ground level and there are rope bridges to take you from one skyscraper to another.

Killers in masks want other people to commit suicide. One cop pushes another cop to his death to be free to commit sexual assault and make Yuri unbutton her shirt. There are swords, guns and sniper rifles. Unless I missed something, Yuri manages to cremate a body with her bare hands. And none of it means anything. Violence is happening because the show wants violence to be happening. It's a pointless arbitrary situation with pointless arbitrary violence against characters we'll never get properly introduced to. I'm sure it's fine if you're in the mood for that kind of trash-diving, but I wasn't.

I admire Higurashi up to the end of Season 5, which had me ditching the series. SPOILER's campaign of serial killing against her friends is stupid. It's also evil and disgusting, obviously, but the thing I can't get past is its stupidity. Nope, sorry. I'm not interested. Technically we've already seen Sotsu's happy ending in Gou, but we also know that lots of friends will die bloodily and pointlessly en route.

Hisato's almost thirty years old and has a younger husband who loves her and wants to start a family. Unfortunately, he makes a bad mistake at work.

"How about working as my private secretary, ma'am?" says his toad-faced boss.

"He seems to be a capable man," thinks Hisato, "but I don't like him. There were times when he kept sexually harassing me, over and over. I have a bad feeling about this offer... but I need to support my younger husband."

She's right. This is hentai. "In exchange for covering up my husband's blunder, he gave me the job of dealing with his sexual needs for the next three months." That's pretty dark, but Hisato's emotional journey makes it darker still.

Weird. Who asked for an OVA bonus episode for a 2018 short series like this? In fairness, though, it's not as bad as I'd thought, i.e. motion-captured VTubers. The original series was quite well regarded by some reviewers (but not me) and had an off-the-wall sense of humour.

In practice, it's horribly rendered cheap CGI girls hanging out together at home. There's an incident with a cockroach that escalates due to one girl's time control powers. (It was a nice cockroach.) Later, we have girls dressed as the Klu Klux Klan in fetching girly pastels. Naah. I don't mind the episode and I'm sure it's quite good if you enjoyed the 2018 series, but I wasn't particularly interested personally.

In fairness, though, the voice acting is quite interesting. There's an amusingly lurid line delivery and girls who are happy to overlap in a way you don't get with scripted dialogue and trained actors.

I knew this was a spin-off, so I assumed we'd be getting a new protagonist and that the main show's heroes (Tatsuya and Miyuki) would be pushed into the background. Nope. It's rewinding the original show to the start and retelling the same events, except from Miyuki's point of view.

Sounds good to me. Tatsuya is too much of a wish-fulfilment super-protagonist to be interesting. Admittedly, we'll be getting a lot more of Miyuki's incestuous desires. (And when I say "a lot", I mean "an absolute ton". It's laid on extremely thick here, with the episode's entire first half being them going on a date together for Miyuki's birthday, being mistaken for lovers, Miyuki being disappointed and embarrassed when she realises that Tatsuya wasn't about to kiss her after all, etc. She also has undressed scenes where she's quietly a bit put out when Tatsuya's unperturbed by seeing her in her underwear.)

If you've been watching this show at all, though, that won't be news. I found the episode amusing and entertaining, so I'll continue.

Official blurb:

"From unraveling the secrets of opening and closing doors to defusing surprise packages more commonly known as bombs, there is never a dull day at the Hololive Production office! Holo no Graffiti follows an eccentric cast of Virtual YouTubers, also known as "VTubers," going about their absurd yet hilarious daily lives, detailing all their cute moments and mishaps."

Actual episode:

A girl with big boobs lies on a sofa and behaves like an idiot because she wants her friends to notice her hair. Those friends do silly things.

The CGI models are quite good, though.

It's CGI animation, but the subject matter's perfect for that. An astronaut on Mars has found a crashed spaceship. It contains dead people, a ghost and some awesome imagery. It's cavernous. It's dangerous for those who don't tread carefully, resulting in a running action sequence that that any Star Wars film would be proud to include.

But it also has a human side, thanks to the cheerful ghost of that little dead girl. (She can squeeze through gaps like toothpaste, but she can also cry and she can't travel too far from her mortal remains.) It's pretty cool. Well worth seven minutes of your time.

It started terribly with a boorish teacher who's either into sexual harassment or just has his head up his arse. What's more, he's played by Kenjiro Tsuda, so I assumed he was going to be important. (He's not. He appears briefly, right at the beginning, then the episode forgets about him.)

The episode's actually about a girl called Hori and a boy called Miyamura. They're both a bit different from how they are at school. (The gap is fairly negligible with Hori, but big enough for people not to recognise him with Miyamura.) Miyamura ends up coming to Hori's house every day, to play with her lonely little brother. (Their family's out of the country.) I liked them all. Miyamura and Hori are already starting to get a bit possessive of each other, although Miyamura has some confidence issues that end up with him getting rightly yelled at by Hori when one of their classmates asks Miyamura's permission to ask Hori out.

It's funny and charming. I hope it doesn't plunge head-first into idiot romantic misunderstandings, but I enjoyed this episode. The show was a hit, for what it's worth, and it also got a live-action TV drama. There's a chance that I might tentatively give the latter a whirl too.

It's so faithful that it feels like rewatching the anime's first episode, with the same plot beats, dialogue, etc. The actors aren't taking the piss. It made me laugh. I'm sure the series will be enjoyable and I've got no particular reason for not watching the other episodes. I don't think this episode's adding anything the anime didn't do, but there's nothing wrong with that.

Kubota Sayu and Suzuka Ouji are the two leads and they're fine. Suzuka's been given a startlingly luxuriant mane of shaggy hair, but this helps you believe Kubota's inability to recognise him when it's tied back. (Even I had to look twice and I'd seen the whole story before.) Also, the child actor playing Kubota's little brother is okay and doesn't destroy his scenes.

Admittedly, this episode has those romantic crossed wires that also made me hesitate in the anime's first episode. Ishikawa asks Miyamura if it would be okay to ask out Hori, so Miyamura gives his blessing and Hori doesn't take all this particularly well. The good news from the anime, though, is that we can assume that the later episodes won't be doing that. (Dunno if this live-action series will get as far as Hori's fetish, mind you, but let's hope not...)

Nothing wrong with this. It's sincere, humourless and is mostly concerned with monsters, swords, bows, battles, etc. There's a violent rebellion in the capital of the Kingdom of Hortensia, in which the king is killed by a werewolf and his children go on the run. Years pass in this opening episode alone, so those children grow up a bit and have to go out and defend themselves. There's a battlefield.

So far, it's very male. (Which, in fairness, is historically accurate.) No significant female characters yet, but the closing title sequence promises some. There's quite an assortment of fantasy monsters, including bizarrely a PreCure-style fairy that says -moru at the end of all -moru its sentences -moru. That broke the mood a bit, but maybe we'll get lucky and someone will kill and eat it.

Anyway, it looks fine. I used to read lots of this kind of thing.

It's another wank isekai where the hero can do anything and there's no drama. What's different, though, is that this one's about government policy rather than sword-wielding heroism.

Our world-slipped hero had been planning to be a civil servant. Snatched to another world, he finds that he's about to get handed over to Country #2 in lieu of financial tribute that's allegedly unaffordable for Country #1 (which summoned him for that purpose). He starts talking about fiscal reforms and financial management, so they make him their new king and give him a royal fiancee. The problems he faces include selling (well-chosen) national treasures, food shortages and a refugee crisis.

Theoretically, this is good. I like this kind of thing. It's certainly better than meaningless fights between a stupidly overpowered protagonist and assorted baddies who never stood a chance against him. Unfortunately, this is still a light novel adaptation that's making life too easy for its hero. He's the king! He's got a fiancee! (These happen so offhandedly that he didn't even ask for either of them.) The previous king is a bit of a joke who doesn't always understand long words. Our hero faces no opposition throughout the episode and doesn't really have to lift a finger.

Naaah. Sod that. That said, though, Season 2's first episode in 2022 was a big improvement and nearly made me backtrack to start again from the beginning.

I quite enjoyed Season 1 of this in 2018, although I probably shouldn't have. It's got lots of boobs, boobs and fantasy girls fawning over the ridiculously overpowered hero... but with the twist that the rude, ultra-macho "Demon King Diablo" is actually a socially incompetent nerd who's incapable of interacting with other people (especially women) except by fooling his own brain by role-playing. In other words, his "I'm so badass" persona is actually a front for a timid loser. This was funny.

This week, he meets a priestess on the run from the Church and its paladin assassins. She also decides that he's God. Diablo doesn't want to start a fight with the all-powerful Church, but he eventually decides that it wouldn't hurt to accept a new quest to escort a priestess to Zircon Tower. (And her boobs. She has big boobs.)

I've heard a lot of bad word about this second season, but what the hell. I'll give it a go.

Otarou and his friends are grime, slime, dirt, muck, etc. This doesn't bother them. They discuss the meaning of "rubbing dirt in your face" and decide that it's probably a compliment. Something to do with skincare.

Calling these visuals "animated" would stretch the meaning of the term, but I enjoyed this episode.