Potato-kun’s Dungeon Chibi Adventure, episodes 1-3

This sucked far less than expected. I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s the way Our Hero has a healthy home and school life, complete with supportive friends, a cute girl-next-door whose crush he’s oblivious to, and parents who treat him well. Maybe it’s the professionalism of the fully-dressed busty guild receptionist dodging the stereotype. Maybe it’s the way he treats the chibi summonettes as (extremely powerful) little sisters without a hint of lolicon interest. Maybe it’s the slow reveal of why Crush-chan doesn’t want him going into the dungeon. Maybe it’s just the hope that Hot Naginata Gal and friends show up frequently, as promised in the OP.

It’s definitely not the music, production quality, or CGI integration. Or the oversized irises that are often drawn as lifeless circles. Or Kana Hanazawa snorting helium.

(Our Hero might not have a lolicon, but the ED animation does…)

Pom-Pom Girls, episode 2

Cute cheer girls facing cute cheer setbacks. Lead Gal has a touch of PTSD, Best Friend faces a bunch of PT, Fairy Princess sang so badly that Parkour Gal fell out of a tree, etc, etc.

Verdict: so far, Pom-Poms beat Pon-Pons, and I made it all the way through that show…

(Crunchyroll is not quite simulcasting this one; they release it several hours after it airs in Japan)

Trickle-Down Journalism

The Usual Suspects really don’t want an honest discussion about the attempt to assassinate Trump. Accountability and honest reporting are in short supply, which shouldn’t surprise anyone any more. I’m going to give it another 48 hours before accepting most of the fog-of-war “facts”; for now, it’s sufficient that someone came way too close to throwing the entire country into violent turmoil. And, sadly, that an innocent was murdered in the process.

Unrelated unicorn chaser:

Red Cat Ramen, episode 2

This week, Our Helpful Human gets to work the front of the house, and (some of) the cats agonize over how to make her fit in, until they realize that the customers don’t care that there’s a not-cat doing the dishes. If anything, one of them’s jealous that she doesn’t get to work there.

Verdict: It’s growing on me. It doesn’t hurt that Human-chan is cute and secretly stacked.

2 Outta 3 Ain’t Bad, episodes 1-2

(classical reference)

Our Otaku Potato-kun spent the first episode overcoming his fear of 3D-girl cooties, gradually warming up to the idea of having an actual friend with shared interests who just happens to be female, until he sees her perfect cosplay of his One True Waifu. And then his helping hand casts off her top and he gets a handful of S-rank titty. He may never wash that hand again.

In the second episode, Haremette #2 arrives in style as the perfect teen model, with half the bust and twice the legs of #1. After teasingly showing him everything but what’s under her lacy panties, we flash back to their playground past, discovering that she’s been madly in love with His Nerdly Majesty for ten years, to the point that her entire look, personality, and career have just been prep for this dere/tsun/dere reunion. Fortunately, Haremette #1 wants to recuit her for team cosplay, so the jealousy will only go one direction until she figures out that she’s hot for Potato-kun as well.

Note: he gets to see the goodies; we do not, and the covering looks like it would survive a Bluray upgrade.

Verdict: the only value Potato-kun brings to this is acting as a stripper pole for the girls to wrap themselves around. I’d prefer an actual stripper pole. Or an actual potato. Reviewers accusing him of misogyny are revealing more about themselves than about this thinly-written loser.

Side note: Model Gal is lucky her first photographer took rejection well; the lack of assistants in his studio strongly suggests that his motives for approaching her were at best half-honorable. Sure, some of Pompeo Posar’s famous centerfolds were girls he picked up on the street and photographed alone, but this poser was no Posar.

Dungeon People, episode 2

Our New Hire uses her Mad Skilz to help restock the dungeon, after making a save point and showing off not quite enough of her healthy young body. The light bars would normally suggest that you Buy The Bluray, but I don’t think this is the sort of show to go there. Now, if they were to start foreshadowing a Secret Dungeon Hot Springs episode, and revealed that Our Administrative Loli is (much) older than she looks…

Verdict: quite soothing after the shouty cosplay harem.

(actual relevant fan-art; this is unlikely to happen again)

(haven’t watched Spice Of Waifu yet; I’m just not in the mood for it)

Pom-Pom Girls, episode 1

Parkour Does Not Work That Way. Also, how exactly do all the girls dye just the underside of their hair? Anyway, if you can suspend disbelief about schoolgirls whose jumping (and, more importantly, landing) abilities make Chell look flat-footed, this looks like a straightforward underdog sports story where six girls come together to try really hard and overcome all obstacles. So, cute cheer girls doing cute cheer things on the way to a cute cheer competition, while managing to keep their cute cheer school uniforms from showing off their cute cheer panties.

Verdict: I can’t decide if using magical parkour and weird hair to distract attention from the story is a good thing or a bad thing.

Meanwhile, here are six cute train girls doing cute train things:

Shy 2, episode 2

First half is a standalone school-mystery story, with Our Shy Gal hanging out with a new girl we’ll probably never see again. Second half introduces another new girl, but this one’s a keeper, since she’s in the credits. Teru and Iko lead her through a montage of fun things to do, until the foreshadowed petty crime spree breaks the spell and leads Our Slashy Runaway Rich Girl to make a few confessions. And then A Wild Ninja Appears.

By the way, when they hang out together in street clothes, Teru’s definitely the butch in this Obvious Oblivious Yuri Couple.

Verdict: more non-super time like this, please; they need to build up enough goodwill to make it past the Kufufu that is sure to infest the plot soon.

Robo-Waifu, episode 2

So, Our Domesticated Waifu is too short to reach the sink without a footstool, has high-powered solar-panel hair and a built-in mini-fridge/heater, all of which suggest she’s not originally designed for household use. And yet, mere moments after it starts raining, she’s down to 15% battery life and collapses on the ground. If it weren’t for the magic hair, she wouldn’t even have been able to walk to the park and back in the first place, and yet claims that carrying a heavy backpack full of cooking supplies would not affect her range at all.

In other words, her capabilities are completely plot-driven, and make no sense whatsoever.

Verdict: I stopped watching after the collapse. Dunno if I’ll pick it back up.

(…and I’m outta here!)

Pom-Pom Girls

Delay of cheer. Two hours late for the “simulcast”, Crunchyroll just put the stub page up.

I’ll use the pon-pon girls as a placeholder…

Meanwhile, confirmed for the fall season…

• Shangri-La Frontier 2
• Gun Gale Online 2
• Isekai Loner: teaser says “super shouty”, source says “Incomprehensible OP Hero”, site says lots of cute girls, J says “fan-service screenshots with sound muted, maybe”.

(Apothecary Diaries 2 is “sometime in 2025”)

Red Cat Ramen, episode 1

Our Human Girl gets hired as back-room support staff at a cross between a ramen shop and a cat café. That is, the cats run the place, and the customers are there as much to see them as to eat the food. The human’s primary job is grooming the cats to reduce the amount of hair that gets into the food.

Not much to it, really, but it’s not angsty or shouty, and they’ve hired some familiar voices for the cats. Boss cat sounds exactly like gruff detective Kei Matoba from Cop Craft, which may be too distracting for me. The waitress is voiced by Rie Kugimiya, and the shy tiger by Saori Hayami, but neither performance does much to make the characters interesting, which I blame on the writing. Surprisingly, Our Human Girl’s voice is brand new to anime, and does a good job of making her appealing.

Verdict: I wasn’t expecting much, and it didn’t deliver much, but I made it all the way to the end.

Dungeon People, episode 1

Simplified Cute Girls Doing Simplified Cute Things In A Simplified Cute Dungeon. The minimal art style is straight from the manga, with the dungeon’s CG nature mostly being revealed by the camera movements. In a twist from the usual formula, Our Thief-Class Heroine is the emotionless one, while Our Legal-Loli Dungeon Boss is ultra-perky. Their voice actresses are also subverting expectations, with their most recent visible roles being Shuna/Marcille/Animalia and Lavine/Romantica/Lady Black, respectively. M.A.O will be along soon, along with some very familiar male voices (1, 2, 3, 4).

Verdict: off to a good start.

(…not necessarily in a good way…)

Shy 2, episode 1

(please don’t suck, please don’t suck, please don’t suck…)

There’s a faint whiff of Kufufu at the end, but this episode is so full of reminders of who Our Heroes are and what they do that the only thing that actually happens is Shy shying shyly to a shy reporter. Also, An Ambiguous Katana Girl walks on stage, and a previously-unmentioned American bull-themed hero gets stirred in as if he’d been there all along.

Verdict: this week was pretty empty, and I keep looking at the action shots and thinking Shy could really improve her costume with a high-leg cut. Not optimistic, but I’ll give it a chance to actually do something next week.

(I stopped collecting Shy pics when the first season fell off the cliff, so here’s a reminder of seasons past)

The Spice Of Waifu, episode 14

New season, new OP and ED, and more active flirting between Our Partners. Dude, when your wolf-waifu says she’ll share a bed, you say yes; pay no attention to the food-budget excuse she makes.

Rest of week…

• Wednesday Thursday: Red Cat Ramen
• Friday: Dungeon People
• Saturday: Robo-Waifu
• Sunday: Pom-Pom Girls

How quickly will they fall?

Second biggest trainwreck of the season

The New Gate looked cheap and uninspired, but they failed to meet even my low expectations, as I checked out the final episode and found the laziest, sloppiest character art I’ve seen in years. Every face was drawn differently in every scene, and none of them were good. The story was terrible, and even the busty harem gals weren’t reliably appealing.

They apparently ripped through the source material at a ridiculous pace (covering at least 9 manga volumes; the light novels haven’t been licensed, so I don’t know how many of those, or which they used as their source), cutting deep into the bone, so whatever original thoughts went into the books were the first things to go.

(FJB’s debate performance was waaaaaay out in front on this award)

Found more Irish…

When I built the family tree years ago, there was a lot less data on Ancestry.com, so I hadn’t traced my Mom’s family as far. Looking into it now, with people having paid to get access to international records, it turns out that Thomas McGrath arrived in Maine about the same time the McCausland brothers did, and he was Catholic. And his emigration may not have been by choice (I’d need a premium membership to read those records). Or else they were all just fleeing the 1740 famine for literally greener pastures.

So I’ve got both regular and unleaded Irish in the tank, and both sides ended up moving from Maine to Ohio over 200 years ago. If my dad’s mom hadn’t been Manistee Polish, I’d be pretty exclusively Native Buckeye back to at least 1820.

[The Tenka Seiha season rundown is out; it’s not late, half the shows premiered early…]

Robo-Waifu, episode 1

The good news is that they skip straight to the premise, with Our Lonesome Loser having already adapted to the presence of Our Kitchen Appliance, and jokingly commenting that she’d make a great wife. The better news is that when she deviates from programmed behavior in a way that convinces him she’s taken him up on the offer, it does not devolve into complete cringe. It would be, if in the light of day it had turned out that he’d imagined the whole thing and was clearly losing it from loneliness, but her behavior continues to change in more obvious ways that are not covered in her manual.

Verdict: this could go either way, heartwarming or suck. But at least she’s drawn in a way that discourages it from turning into straight-up robo-porn. The trouble with Chobits was that Chii and the other persocoms were so realistic that they could fuck, turning the story into a half-baked allegory about pure love; Mina’s obviously artificial body (with non-sexy attachments) doesn’t even speak through the mouth. Also, he bought her used, so keep dodging that bullet…

(Nobody does robo-waifus like Sukabu; also witch-waifus, engineer-waifus, …)

I Eat Kaiju, fin

In the end, it comes down to the power of heart. And a hot childhood friend. To no great surprise, Our Cored Hero wins in the battle against his other self, and is allowed to live to fight another day. Which will be soon, because we close with Naughty Number Nine abusing his Roomba and monologing about his next goal.

PS: everyone wants to get stronger. Junior to protect him, Tsuntail to stop him if he loses it.

Verdict: well-done, even if the team is still filled with people I don’t care about. And it did well enough to continue. Eventually.

I will not be watching this…

“What the world really needs right now is a new Ranma 1/2 series”. And yes, there are people in the various forums looking forward to claiming it as “trans representation”, sigh. Yeah, if you think Ranma is trans, you’re definitely a few springs short of Jusenkyo.

Shame I’m not in Japan…

Okay, that’s usually the case, but the frequent promotions for Molesting Magical Girls bode well for the future.

Train’s Last Stop, fin

Dirty little secret revealed: Reimi is not a natural blonde. This was not a carpet/drapes revelation, simply a flashback to their childhood. The dark skin’s real, though.

The CG-heavy train chase filled with oddly-whistled deus ex zombie had me worried, but getting the band back together for an emotion-driven teenage-girl reconciliation worked for me. And it didn’t hurt that Our Tiny Hot Doctor grew as well…

Level 2 Cheat Boy, fin

The Big Battle was, as they say, Super Easy Barely An Inconvenience, between Our Retired Demon Lord’s secret weapon and the hot-springs staff’s gimmicked yukata, freeing up the rest of the episode for everyone to hold hands and bathe in the most Bluray-proof nude scene of the season.

Here’s how it should be done:

NSFW

How To Raise a Wolf-Waifu, episode 13

Epilogue to the gold-smuggling story, and a fond farewell to Our Cuddly Shepherd, who ends up bonding with an under-the-weather Holo over their shared opinion of Lawrence. Next week should get new credits for a new story arc.

Won’t get a chance to visit…

They’re trying to swing the travel budget at work to get me a week on-site at my team’s office in Belfast, probably in September. Out of curiosity, I reviewed the work I did years ago on Ancestry.com to see where my Irish ancestors lived. It looks like Andrew McCausland was in the vicinity of Carnteel Parish, County Tyrone in the mid-1600s, and his pregnant widow Sarah moved to Derry, where son Robert was born. Robert went back to Carnteel to find wife Hannah, but they lived out their lives in Derry (there was apparently land involved). Their son Henry emigrated and found wife Elizabeth in Kennebec, Maine. Their daughter Jane married Seth Greeley, and after raising their children, they lived out their lives in Maineville, Ohio.

This, by the way, makes them Planters aka Scots-Irish, which even centuries later is “problematic”.