Shield Hero 2, episode 1

Welcome back to The Grooming Of The Raccoon Child-Bride, AKA Banished From The Bow Hero’s Party, The Insecure Cutie Joined The Other Guy’s Platonic Slave Harem To Become Strong Enough To Impress Her Crush.

In which Our Shield Hero gets roped into a side quest and the stakes quickly escalate from “train the noob girl” to “take on a giant army of monsters”. They don’t waste a lot of time recapping anything, assuming that if you’re watching this you pretty much remember the story and all the players.

RPG Real Estate, episode 1

Crunchyroll delayed announcing their license of this show until Tuesday, one day before the premiere. It didn’t actually get a series page until Wednesday morning.

How is it? Cute girlsmoeblobs doing cute thingsfan-service.

Seriously, this is our first sight of Our Wizard Heroine’s new city:

(that’s their boss, by the way)

And as soon as she walks into the agency, she finds Our Ambitious Priestess chasing Our Childlike Half-Dragon around trying to get her into some clothes. Not long after that, strategically placed soap bubbles protect the secrets of the women’s bath.

(picture is unrelated)

Skeleton Knight, episode 1

I never want to see or hear the OP for this show again. I also never want to hear the ED song again, but I’m willing to look at the CGI model of the busty elf chick until there’s some decent fan-art.

Apart from a few aspiring artists eager to gang-rape the entire female cast, there’s very little on Pixiv right now, which is surprising for a series that has 10 light novel volumes and 10 manga volumes. Of course, since the first episode opens with Our Skeleton thwarting a gang rape with inches to spare, and then shows the extended dance mix ten minutes later, it’s easy to see where they’re getting the idea.

So consider this shot of the ninja catgirl a unicorn chaser.

(don’t know what episode she’ll show up in)

Oh, what happens? Eh, guy wakes up in a fantasy world as his ridiculously-OP avatar, geeks out over it, slays monsters and bandits with insane ease, and cheerfully starts his career as an adventuring suit of armor hiding his skeleton-body. I know there’s more to it, but that’s what they led with.

Demon Girl Next Door 2, episode 1

Absolutely nothing unexpected happens in this episode.

That is, I expected it to pick up right where it left off and be just as good as the first season, and I got what I expected.

Goodwill hunting

The local Goodwill is doing home pickups again. Which is good, since the POD arrives in about a week and I need to stage all the things that are going into it, and figure out if everything else fits onto the truck. They showed up this morning and took everything I had out for them, including the elliptical. They said they’d even take the gun safe if they had advance notice to bring a pallet jack, so if I don’t find a local buyer who knows how to move it, I’ll schedule another pickup as soon as I clear a path.

On that note, it turns out that it cost me nothing to switch from a 12-foot truck to a 16-footer. Less convenient for gas, restaurants, and parking, but an extra ~6x4x6 for free is worth it.

I’m still counting on the cleverness of the packing company at using the entire volume (~7x15.5x7.5) of the 16-foot POD, primarily in not crushing the sectional sofa under a pile of boxes.

I don’t think I’ll need to take the half-dozen boxes of manga that I just found in a closet, though. 😁

Move-in necessities

I’ve got a confirmed installation date for a 600/35 business cable line with five static IP addresses after I arrive with the truck, so I can work from the new house as soon as I unpack my OpenBSD router and wireless. Which is good, since I’m doing a Jira upgrade the following weekend. I could have sprung for 1000/35 and still saved a great deal of money compared to my current Comcast Business line, but I’m actually thinking of getting a second line at some point through their residential service, so I can completely separate work and home traffic.

Upsell A Helper

One of the packing/unpacking partners PODS recommends is HireAHelper. I booked them for both, setting a reasonable unpacking date based on how long they say it should take to get the POD from California to Ohio. The selected sub-contractor contacted me through the site the next day asking if they could move it up a day. Um, no?

Then they called me today on a fairly bad line, saying they needed to review a few things, and proceeded to try to upsell me a handyman, a home warranty, a security system, and an Internet connection. All of which I’d already taken care of. I haven’t decided if I’m going to just cancel now and tell HireAHelper why, or think about it until I get the confirmed delivery date for the POD.

Start Dates

Netflix has Komi 2 set for a three-week delay, so the first episode will be April 27th. Shield Hero 2 starts Wednesday the 6th on Crunchyroll. Demon Girl Next Door 2 starts Thursday the 7th on HiDive. So the three shows I plan to watch require three different subscriptions.

Checking HiDive’s schedule revealed that Iroduku just moved over to that service, so if you have a subscription and haven’t watched that one yet, do. Recommended for international air travel, or maybe that was just me.

How A Magical Queen Saved The Kingdom With A ‘Days Of Future Past’ Gambit, episode 26

Inevitably, this was the talkiest episode in both seasons, as Our Retired King explains his reasons for handing over his kingdom and his daughter in the first episode. And this was the short version of the story, lightly skimming over the queen’s history leading up to Our Realist Hero’s arrival.

Surprisingly, they did not announce a third season, and left a bunch of threads dangling with a vague “we’ve come so far, let’s keep going” New Year’s closing scene.

(picture is unrelated due to lack of interest by fan-artists)

Kuroitsu, episode 12

In which Our Agastia fends off a hostile takeover with the aid of massive spoilers, Our Former Temp Minions prove that their promotion was not a mistake, Our Blader once again reveals his greatest weakness, and Our Kuroitsu blows her cover.

Here’s all of the decent fan-art I could find of Our (Evil) Heroine:

…and some screenshots from last week’s episode:

Side note: so far, merging Funimation into Crunchyroll has not resulted in an increase in streaming capacity. Trying to watch this on a Saturday afternoon was pretty painful, with frequent quality drops and pauses.

So the real April Fools joke here…

…is that people thought it was a joke. Yes, the company that makes the catgirl-paradise Nekopara games really is making the doggy-girl game Inupara, despite releasing the trailer on 4/1.

The power of the algorithm

Browsing through featured recently-added movies on Starz, I found Concussion, starring Will Smith. 😁

(demi-chan maid cafe is unrelated)

(classical (NSFW) reference)

Realist Hero, episode 20

In which the great sin of Our Over-Cute Over-Scientist is revealed, and Our Princess On The Mantelpiece finally goes off. And Our Realist Hero was actually not expecting her to sign on as the latest fiancée.

(unrelated, the queen of Chupacabra did not marry into the position…)

Kuroitsu, episode 6

I’d like to take this opportunity to praise Akashic, leader of Our Evil Organization, for her culinary skills and fashion sense. I’d also like to thank Our Tsundere Of Black Company for coming up with an excuse to get Our Wereservicewolf back into her battle suit. This episode brought to you by the term 賞味期限. Oh, well, that explains why she shows up in the credits but not in any of the team shots.

Also, Our Part-Time Minion Agency actually has a name! And Our Temp learns an uncomfortable truth about the business. (side note: this may be an anime-original character; she’s not in the scanlations that are up to the idol story in episode 4)

(disappointed chocolatier is unrelated)

Realist Hero, episode 19

I expect a great deal of talking in this show, but this week’s massive infodump by over-cute over-scientist Genia Maxwell, which takes up pretty much the entire episode, had the most annoying delivery of any show I’ve seen for quite a while. I can’t pin the blame on seiyuu Konomi Kohara, because her Chika voice never wore out its welcome. I have to think the director pushed the more annoying button a few too many times.

(fan-art for this show? hah!)

Kuroitsu, episode 5

Wolf-service, ho! Cat-ho, service! This week, Our Monster Development Department survives its greatest challenge yet, only to face The Tsundere Of Black Company. Meanwhile, Our Temp tries vainly to escape the clutches of Part-Time Villainy, taking solace in a brief moment of victory.

(mermaid is unrelated, but there’s always room for duckies)

“…clearly you need to pay someone to do it for you!”

Realist Hero, episode 18

This week, a courtoom drama with a side order of Deus Ex De Principatibus. Also, trope evaded.

Advice to Our Realist Hero: when your two (known) fiancées show up in your bedroom half-naked to ease your burdens, let them. At least get them stripped the rest of the way to compensate us for all the talking.

(“related fan-art is hard for me, let’s play Pokemon!”)

Kuroitsu, episode 4

This amusement-park episode brought to you by sparkles and speedlines, because the animation budget is just as tight as the monster-development budget. Also, Our Monster-Loving Researcher puts the power of idols to good (evil) use.

(how sad is the fan-art situation for this show? these were the best I could find that weren’t part of a sequence that included badly-drawn hardcore porn)

(…and I really looked!)

Jargonfail

In a wonderful example of the difference between specialized technical jargon and the ordinary meaning of words, the Chinese Pixiv artist 行 之LV uses the word 事前 (same meaning in Chinese and Japanese: “prior; in advance; beforehand”) to tag pictures of scenery with no humans present.

Everyone else on Pixiv uses it to mean before sex, often by mere seconds.

Unrelated,

There is a god. Took him long enough.

Small Favors

The trip to Ohio for the-closing-that-didn’t-happen wasn’t a complete waste. The birthday party was great, the snow was decorative but didn’t interfere with my flights, and I used the points on my Amazon card to buy the remastered Bluray sets for Project A-Ko and Bubblegum Crisis. I skipped the complete Nuku-nuku box set; RightStuf has it priced too high, plus shipping. Ditto the $99 Interspecies Reviewers box, which appears to have finally made it to these shores.

Easiest Alpha Ever

Another thing I did while stuck in my hotel room in Ohio watching the snow was play the new Pokemon Legends: Arceus Switch game. It’s not a true open-world game, between the frequent proximity-triggered cutscenes and the fact that you can’t go directly between regions (you have to teleport back through the hub region, which doubles the loading-screen time), but it’s a fresh take on the formula.

One of the new features is that some of the pokemon populating the world are red-eyed mutant “alphas” who are larger, higher-level, and may possess special powers or a posse. If you’re patient and clever, you can often catch them by sneaking into position and ramming a pokeball where the sun don’t shine, but usually it’s a tough fight that takes out half your party.

Except for the alpha Magikarp, who only knows Splash.

Quid-pro Ho

The free Covid tests that the Brandon regime is shipping out via the US Postal Service were purchased from China. How long did they spend on container ships stuck off the coast, or were they all shipped by air at a premium?

Oh, and they require temperature-controlled storage, so shipping to anywhere that’s, say, cold in the winter renders them unreliable. Specifically, prone to false negatives.

Since they delayed the release of episode 3 of Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department, I watched the second one again. The folks making this really do love the genre.

Realist Hero, episode 16

It’s really, really hard to make an interesting episode that’s nothing but wrapping up the diplomatic negotiations that started last week. It’s necessary to develop Julius, Jeanne, and Maria for later events, and set up the long-promised reveal of the loophole Our Realist spotted in the big treaty, but that doesn’t make it fun.

Worse, it doesn’t adequately signal that fun is on her way, ready to turn his plans upside down. While people often criticize adaptations for bringing haremettes into the story early, I think this one would have benefited from a few more scenes with her. Just having Julius ask about her once isn’t enough to really remind people that she showed up briefly last season. You’re left with “oh, look, it’s that other girl from the opening credits!”.

(picture of incoming fun is unrelated)

Realist Hero, episode 14

It’s very talky, recapping the first season and picking up all the plot threads, but it’s supposed to be, because the whole point of Our Hero’s success is that he thinks his way out of trouble and then kingsplains it all to his retainers and future wives (who are, of course, proxies for the audience). The OP promises that the rest of the wife harem will come online this season.

Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department, episode 1

AKA “Girl Genius & Wolfgirl versus The Red Tape”.

There’s a clear affection for classic tokusatsu/sentai tropes here, and some decent scenery-chewing performances. Also some Buy-The-Bluray censorship of Little Miss Wolfservice.

(wolfgirl is sadly unrelated; “Dear fan-artists, get to work”)

World’s End Harem, episode 1

This sounded pretty terrible last season, so the only reason I was interested in seeing the first episode was to find out why it got yanked and rescheduled as soon as it started to air.

Apart from making my brain hurt with a premise that makes even less sense than The White Plague, they managed to come up with the most obnoxious Buy-The-Bluray censorship ever. I don’t know if it was added since last season’s attempt to air the show, but it’s just ugly, a pixelated black scribble across the screen.

Episode TL/DR: it’s like they stole the script from a SQUEEZ game, but left out the zero-G jelloboob animations and the penetration-cam.

Long version: the busty flat-affect chick who behaves like an android but apparently isn’t tells Our Hero who’s conveniently a medical genius that he was woken up from a five-year cryo-nap because he needs to knock up as many women as possible to repopulate the world with boy babies who’ll inherit his immunity to Teh Virus that wiped out almost all the other men and hopefully they’ll all grow up to be scientists and engineers because not enough women majored in STEM so their post-scarcity economy has completely broken down and his insistence on saving himself for the missing childhood friend that it took him 20 years to almost confess to is stupid and wrong and nobody knows why artificial insemination doesn’t work but for some reason 5 billion desperate women aren’t willing to tie him down and force-feed him viagra and his little sister has grown up into a really tasty piece but I’m sure they won’t go there and by the way all the remaining frozen cocksickles including his big brother will expire in about a year so quit yer bitchin’ and get on with the shtupping.

It’s, um, not good.

(in the Big Mac of life, Our Hero is the special sauce)

…and if you go looking for SQUEEZ game promo videos, most of them are so censored that you can’t figure out what’s happening, but some of these mirrors still work for downloading the original Honou no Haramase Doukyuusei demo video. It’s from 2007, but I suspect their final games in 2016 weren’t much different.

It is hilarously NSFW.

Upcoming as in “they both start on Saturday”…

Realist Hero 2

Unlike some other recent series I could name, this one did a reasonable job of adapting the light novels without degrading into randomly-selected scenes and highly-compressed infodumps.

(picture is unrelated but ducky)

Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department

Giving it a chance for four reasons:

4. Director: Testament of Sister New Devil

3. Series Composition: Cat Planet Cuties

2. Art Director: Astra: Lost in Space

1. half-naked wolf-girl

Sadly, she doesn’t always dress like Liru, but the promo picture has promise.

The return of Best Girl Beelzebub!

Eventually, as a second season of Killin’ Slimes and Collectin’ Cuties has been greenlit.