Ryou's stepdaughter Tsumugi has an attitude. Ryou thinks she's earning money from schoolgirl prostitution, but we don't actually see her do this, whereas we most certainly do see Ryou paying for the services of other schoolgirl prostitutes. He also takes incriminating photos of himself on his mobile phone and leaves the evidence where Tsumugi can find it.

He decides to teach Tsumugi a lesson by repeatedly raping her, to demonstrate the dangers of rape.

Don't watch this.

The signs aren't good for this one. Googling it suggests not much fan interest and the reviews I've seen are unenthusiastic. The show's episodes are also not in chronological order, for some reason.

That said, though, I quite liked it. Happy to keep going.

A blonde called Sally is wandering through a fantasy world when she finds a rabbit-girl called Frau. I love Frau, from her weird blank rice-ball face to her friendliness, politeness and determination to protect Sally when things turn bad. Unfortunately, she's a demi-human and so is regarded locally as the mortal enemy of humans, but Sally doesn't care about that and is happy to travel with Frau and defend her from bigots.

There are armoured knights, oni with laser-blast eyeballs and walrus-demons the size of trucks that inflict gory splatter kills. There's a surprise ending and a link with a Japanese fairy tale. I enjoyed the whole thing, especially Frau.

A robot girl (model number SCR50000SI FLCapel II) starts working at a planetarium. (Her colleagues call her Yumemi.) She's nice, extremely literal and clearly just software. In her spare time, she'll go outside and try to attract new customers even in an empty street. She also hasn't been programmed to be careful about anti-robot riots and people getting nasty with her because family members lost their job because of robots. She also prints out tickets from her ear.

This episode is a sweet, unconsummated lesbian love story. One of Yumemi's human colleagues is unhappy at first about being saddled with a robot announcer, but ten years later is delivering what's effectively a love confession. (Yumemi gives a polite response in accordance with her programming.) Towards the end, Yumemi's getting a bit past it and probably needs a full system overhaul... but that would reboot her personality and identity. How about a hair accessory instead?

I liked this so much that I watched it twice, then googled it and found to my surprise that it's a prequel to a five-episode 2016 OVA series I'd already seen called Planetarium. That's excellent too, but don't expect a happy ending.

Mirai Kakehashi considers a bit of shoplifting, but decides against it and commits suicide instead. He jumps off a tall building. He had a nice life until he was seven, but then his family got killed and he went to live with an uncle who hated and tortured him.

Fortunately, though, an angel called Nasse saves him. She just wants to make him happy and has some presents to help him achieve this. 1: angel wings. He can fly faster than the human eye can detect and steal anything he likes with perfect safety! 2: he has magical red arrows that make anyone they hit fall in love with the shooter, so completely that they can't disobey his orders and will become his brainwashed slave. 3: 100% guaranteed murder powers.

Mirai correctly calls this not very angelic. I approve of Mirai's moral rigour, although it's hard to like someone so grey and miserable. Nasse, in contrast, will suggest murdering that uncle and his entire family for their money.

The premise is attention-grabbing, as is the episode's Evil Bastard level. (Which is high.) Mirai has apparently been chosen as a God candidate, because he'd lost his will to live. (Is this a sensible deity selection process?) Furthermore, there are other God candidates out there, all with angels of their own, and there's clearly going to be fatal rivalry between them. This sounds quite dramatic and I'd provisionally decided to keep watching the show, but then I did some googling and oh dear. Articles like "Where Did Platinum End Go Wrong?", descriptions like "a sloppy mess", "poorly structured death game, "new depths of incompetence", etc. Oh, and it has a infamously depressing, nihilistic ending that renders it all pointless and is hated like poison by the entire world.

It's from the writer/artist duo behind Death Note and Bakuman, mind you, but for me that's not a draw either. Death Note was mesmerising, but also unpleasant and looking back in hindsight gives me absolutely no interest in rewatching it. I've avoided the manga, for instance.

Probably best avoided, then. But if you fancy a laugh, read some reviews of ep.24. SPOILER: the reviewers won't be in a good mood.

Very simple drawing and Flash-like animation. Nothing noteworthy in the storyline. There's nothing actually wrong with this micro-sode, but it's probably not even worth the minute of your time that it takes to watch.

I went looking for this because I loved the 2022 anime.

It's pretty good. Realistic day-to-day cop shows are the TV industry's backbone, so it makes sense that they succeeded here. (I'd been afraid that we'd get horrible Japanese TV drama acting, but that's also decent. Everyone's completely fine and Tsuyoshi Muro amused me in a bland supporting role.)

It's based on a manga about Japanese policewomen, written and drawn by an ex-policewoman. That's why it's fantastic. It's full of true-but-weird stuff I wouldn't have expected and jokes at the police's expense, usually because they're incompetent, childish, unmotivated, etc. I found the anime fascinating... and this live-action drama is a very faithful adaptation. I approve. (They've taken material from episodes 1 and 8, but the choices are intelligent and the stuff they've brought forward fits very well with Kawai wanting to quit the force.)

Besides, this show's episodes are twice as long as the anime's, so they'll end up covering more material.

I prefer the anime. The live-action show feels more conventional, since the world's full of amusing live-action cop shows. Also, its loud cliche detectives who play up to all the hard-boiled stereotypes are in danger of just looking like the stereotypes (although that's mostly their ridiculously tall and admittedly quite scary boss). The live-action director underlines certain visual clues so much that it suggests a lack of confidence in the TV audience's intelligence. The two shows' visual framing is different and I prefer the anime's stronger focus on cast close-ups. Finally, I'm apprehensive of the suggestion here that Fuji left her high-flying detective role due to a traumatic incident, which to me doesn't seem Fuji-ish and makes me wonder if the TV show is just setting up a TV cliche. (If that's also from the manga, though, I apologise.)

This is still an interesting, entertaining show, though. Certain moments are funnier in live-action (e.g. Kowai's "kowakunai" attempted approach to a perp) and the cast already have good chemistry. Happy to keep watching.

The main character (i.e. the show's token female) falls off an observation platform at the start of the episode and should have plummetted hundreds of feet to her death. This happened because a boy surprised her by saying "hello", but he catches her. Neither of them treats this as noteworthy and they both just go on with the scene. Also, the boy's dressed up as Sherlock Holmes and he can't stop calling everything beautiful, including himself.

Sherlock then takes Token Girl to meet the other Pretty Boy Detective Club members, in a school club room that resembles the Palace of Versailles. Generally speaking, the pretty boys appear to be a bunch of self-absorbed tossers and show-offs of the kind you'd get in an otome romance game. They're not bad people, but they are annoying and I wanted to fast-forward through any scene in which they spoke. The whole thing's pretty silly... but it's based on a novel series by NisiOisin, the writer of the Monogatari series (which I hate) and the animation is by Studio Shaft (who have a track record of explosively original visuals and relatively little interest in the script).

In fairness, this show will probably be more interesting and self-aware than you'd guess from its title. It's also far too goofy and camp to be anything like the pretentious, long-winded Monogatari. Even so, though, it's not for me.

It starts with anime schoolgirls playing in the World Cup of Ice Hockey. Japan and Canada are tied on 4-4, but can the girls swing the game in the final minute? They all say "THE BONDS OF OUR HEARTS!" and score a literally last-second goal. My main impression was "massive cliche". After that, though, they do an idol performance. What the hell? Piss off.

After the title sequence, though, the show settles down to be about the members of a school embroidery club. Nothing happens. It's just slice-of-life, with chat and banter. Two sisters disagree on how to eat strawberries... but then they all decide to play ice hockey!

Also, the end credits card has 22 girls posing for the camera. This anime is part of a mixed-media project that includes a mobile phone game.

No. Absolutely not. Even had I been a fan of sports anime, this one's going out of its way to seem cliched. While also trying to be an idol anime and a slice-of-life schoolgirl show with a school embroidery club. The episode's second half is more like a straightforward sports anime, with training, an ice rink, etc. but personally I wasn't interested in that either. Watch this if you're a forgiving/relaxed fan of sports anime and intrigued by the rarity value of one about ice hockey. Personally, I see no other reason to watch this.

Season 1 of this show was rightly praised to the skies. The critics were falling over each other. It's very good indeed.

Season 2, on the other hand, gets trashed by everyone. It sounds as if the anime crashed and burned... but I'm going to watch it anyway. I want to see where the story goes, even if that takes me down the the toilet. This is a show about children who are trying not to get eaten. I like those children.

I should probably also read the manga, though. Twenty volumes. Hmmm. Well, it's a best-selling series that won the 63rd Shogakukan Manga Award in the shounen category, so I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy it...

Cute stop-motion cars are stuck in a traffic jam. They make guinea pig noises. It appears to be for small children, but it's also adorable and I'll definitely be watching all the episodes. (I used to own guinea pigs.)

I could live without the stop-motion people inside the guinea pig cars, though.