It's the seventh and, I think, final season of Jewelpet. I remember Season 6 as another "girls go to idol school" show, but this appears to be about magical girls. The Jewelpets (super-cute cartoon animals) can do magic and help their friends, albeit often in an amusingly rubbish way. They'll tidy up the room by making one-fifth of its contents jump into a rubbish bin (while the remaining four-fifths tries and misses). Offering to make pizza for dinner, they conjure up the uncooked ingredients.

Incompetent Magical Jewelpets isn't a bad gag, actually. They also get transformation sequences and turn into girls. Meanwhile there's a real human girl whose father's a detective and whose older brother wants to prove that "science is superior to magic!" This means he's an annoying twat in a show where a magical Disney castle has been hovering above the town for the past seven years, although it must be said that it wouldn't be hard to out-perform these Jewelpets.

It's a mildly amusing show. I laughed at Disneyfied cartoon critters doing macho mountain climbing, for instance. The "send me to sleep!" request is worth a smile too. However it's still tooth-rotting candyfloss, coloured like a box of crayons and with no meaningful drama. Very much for the kiddies.

I chose this because I wanted something to make me smile. Bingo. Loved it.

A boy (Asahi Kuromine) loves a girl (Yoko Shiragami) and wants to tell her how he feels. "Is there anyone who doesn't have a secret?" Heh. The first half of the episode is about Asahi's rather adorable belief that all his friends don't already know, because he's got the kind of face that might as well be a billboard for all his innermost thoughts. This is very funny. They talk him into going to Yoko to make a love confession, saying it'll be worse for him in the long run if he doesn't get the inevitable rejection out of the way.

They're good friends, but no, not the world's most tactful. "We'll comfort you after you've been rejected!" Asahi then walks in on Yoko's secret and I fell about laughing.

Most of the rest of the episode is just an Asahi-Yoko conversation. What's cool about it is that it's silly and funny, but also revealing of sadness and loneliness. It's heartwarming comedy, but it has some weight underneath. At one point Yoko quietly cries.

Now Asahi of all people has a huge secret to keep. In fact two, actually. He never did do that confession properly. I'll be watching the hell out of this. In fact, I'm thinking of buying the manga too. However the closing credits had several girls, so there's still plenty of room for the series to degenerate into annoying harem stupidity...

Three schoolgirls have a dumb conversation about the French Revolution. Pink Girl is so stupid that it's surprising that she keeps remembering to breathe. Yellow Girl is the mediator. Blue Girl knows about history and gets irritable with people who don't, yet somehow isn't intelligent enough to stop talking to Yellow Girl.

This is a study group, followed by some cooking. They're also animated in really cheap CGI. I watched the next episode to see if the show might get better, but it didn't. The only difference was that the idiot jokes involved the composition of the Earth's atmosphere.

There's a second season in 2016. Good grief.

It's a shame. Everything I hear about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure makes it sound great. It has ludicrous, knowingly over-the-top stories, dialogue and characters. The manga's been running for some stupid number of years and its story has covered over a century so far, including vampires, macho camp, life-or-death battles of Rock-Paper-Scissors and more.

However I can't get into it. The show rejects me. This is my second attempt and both times I've been unable to get past the musclemen and their macho dialogue. I'd have been fine had the cast all been schoolgirls. Or out-of-work waiters. Or old age pensioners in wheelchairs. Or even slime blobs from Mars that can't stand our gravity and can only survive in rock pools by the sea. ANYTHING. PLEASE. Just not these Fist of the North Star rejects who look like muscles piled on muscles with extra muscles on the side, plus a face on top. They squint into the distance. They get angry and grab your shirt if you say that there's someone they wouldn't be able to beat in a fight. They start fights with their allies simply because that's how badass they are.

I don't care about them. I see a jeep driving through the Egyptian desert with these people and I immediately start wondering if there's something better on BBC2. The only female character in this episode is a blink-and-you'll-miss-her cameo girl lying helpless in a hospital bed on a different continent, not expected to live more than two weeks.

The title sequence is all about macho men with huge muscles. Oh, bloody hell. A dog shows up and farts in someone's face, but it can be calmed down with coffee-flavoured chewing gum. There's a water monster in the desert that's reasonably original, but it's still just another fight. The end. I'm no longer interested in even trying to get into this series, although apparently it has a large female following due to its 90% male cast, who provide copious eye candy if you're so inclined. (Apparently the manga's 6th and 8th story arcs have significant female characters, though.)

I'm sure the show's good. I believe all the praise everyone says about it. I just can't help losing interest as soon as its cast meet my eyes.

It's Season 3 of a boys' love anime, with the first two seasons having come out in 2008. That's a good sign. Unpopular shows don't get revived like that. This show's fans like it a lot, but you've got to overlook some creepy jealous behaviour from almost everyone.

Misaki Takahashi is starting his fourth year of university and he's been living in "Usagi" Akihiko's flat for three years. Usagi's an award-winning writer and Misaki's significantly older lover (31 vs. 22). He's also scary. He's much bigger than Misaki and will lean right over him, saying things like "I'd lock you up in a world where you can only see me and not like anything or anyone else but me." He's very aggressive sexually and he tries to ban Misaki from doing anything that doesn't involve him, e.g. meeting friends. Personally I'd call that abusive behaviour, although you could also argue that it's genre awareness, since almost the entire cast is hot, male, gay and somewhere on a scale from "flirting" to "near-rapist". (I said "almost" because there's also a married couple with a baby.)

Is Usagi a yandere? I'm not sure, but I wouldn't put it past him. Saying you'd like to lock up your boyfriend can't be a good sign. (He also smokes in the house, even though Misaki doesn't. Personally I'd be drawing a red line at that alone.) As it happens Misaki doesn't take Usagi's threatening behaviour seriously and just tells him to stop being silly, but even so that's a boyfriend I'd expect most people to run away from.

Everyone's jealous, though. Usagi's just the scariest example. Misaki's like that too, albeit more passively. "Usagi smiled! At someone other than me! He's having fun talking about things I don't know about! Why am I annoyed and angry and anxious?" And then there's the confusingly named Mizaki, who imposes himself as an unwanted permanent house guest, wants to get inside Usagi's pants and openly menaces his near-namesake. He likes inflicting painful handshakes, for instance.

The episode isn't all unhealthy behaviour, though. Misaki's brother Takahiro doesn't know that Usagi and Misaki are lovers and so is talking about Misaki soon having to move out and get a job. You can't stay a freeloader for ever. In other words, they have to think about the future. Usagi's instincts are to tell Takahiro everything, but Misaki freaks because he can't handle the idea of coming out of the closet to his brother. Meanwhile there's a charming scene elsewhere of Misaki stumbling upon a fellow otaku and geeking out with him.

Absolutely not. I'm not going near this. I wouldn't mind so much if the story seemed to realise how sinister it was, but I'm pretty sure this is just the mangaka's personal tastes and fetishes.

"I'm the only one you need to value."