2025: My First Quarter in Anime
Apr. 1st, 2025 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAs the new year started I was intent on getting back to the anime Blu-Rays I’d only just begun in the first days of October before breaking my hip. With family staying at my place afterwards to provide considerable and welcome assistance, watching anime on any screen larger and less private than an iPad had got to feeling awkward right away. Once I’d started making trips to and from their home so that they could keep meeting appointments of their own, that didn’t help either. Returning to those shows, my thoughts also turned to some Blu-Rays that had just come in, if in some certain way just to “get them out of the way now rather than leave them lurking in the pile.” Around that point, with schemes in mind to watch two episodes a week of some longer series, what wound up giving was any intention of seeing new titles streaming. The problem there was that I started thinking how sometimes not very many sour dismissals tossed into reaction threads to end-of-the-season reviews will nudge me away from trying to form my own opinions or just dampen my own best efforts at that. There does seem a threat of “always expecting the worst when it comes to recent anime.” It wasn’t until months later that I happened to wonder whether there’s that much difference between “a three-month-old series you gather you’ve been granted an all-clear for,” “a three-year-old series that’s still being mentioned but you haven’t quite found time for yet,” and “a three-decade-old series you suppose is worth watching because Discotek just licensed it, and they know what they’re doing...”
Getting back to Albegas represented something more than just returning to an early-1980s super robot anime I’d watched one episode of three months before. I’d seen its first two episodes almost five years ago as “official YouTube streams”; it had taken a bit longer for Discotek to license it than certain speculations had estimated back then. Years before that I’d been aware there’d been plans, at least, for that particular anime to be “localized” into the third Voltron. Decades prior to that in turn, I do remain convinced that one day in the 1980s I saw toys of that Voltron, a “mighty robot” formed from three humanoid robots (but stuck with six arms in the package art), on the shelf in the Co-Op hardware store in my home town.
When I’d seen the sample episodes of Albegas, what bits of knowledge I’d picked up since the 1980s had left me thinking it was a more traditional and perhaps more conventional super robot anime than Golion or Dairugger XV, set resolutely on Earth and in a lightly futuristic Japan. (With impressions those old toys were labelled “Voltron II, Defender of the Middle Universe,” it was easy enough to imagine anything “foreign” that couldn’t just be cut out being passed off as
“a different planet.”) It had amused me to discover the three smaller robots had started out as school projects thrown into battle against an alien invasion, then repaired and rebuilt by the scientific genius who also happened to be the father of one of the three teen pilots. That that pilot made the team one-third female, rather than one-fifth in the two anime that had made it all the way to becoming Voltron, had been interesting enough; Hotaru came off pretty well so far as female giant robot pilots went. A non-upgraded school project robot in the form of a sort of giant gorilla piloted by a big galoot had me thinking all the way back to Mazinger Z.
There might not have been many more surprises to the series beyond those two preview episodes. The opening theme mentioned that the three robots can combine in six different ways, their combination scheme not being that complicated. Each combined robot is said to be tailored for a specific environment, but there’s only a stock footage sequence showing one of them being combined from the small robots (the others just sort of fade out that robot and fade themselves in), and that robot happens to be the only one that wields the big (presumably to have become “Blazing”) sword delivering the finishing blows. The bad guys figure out who the pilots are sooner than they track down the secret base and spend a lot of time launching schemes to try and trick or otherwise interfere with those pilots. (That one of the enemy field commanders has a certain resemblance to the helmeted, purplish-skinned minions of Dairugger did get my attention given all the comments over the years about “unrelated anime series tacked together to reach syndication length.”) All in all the series did have definite goofy parts to it, and I just sort of accepted an impression the people who’d made Voltron had backed away from having to deal with “localizing” it. However, I found myself still enjoying Albegas as it was. Having bumped into certain quibbles and difficulties with recent viewings of some other super robot series watched via Discotek discs, my improved feelings here were quite welcome.
To be brief, I could form a sense of how some at the start of this year might be intent on taking in the lightest, fluffiest, most charming, pleasant, and escapist stories they know of. In emphathising with them, though, I was left wondering about my own thoughts of getting back to the Attack on Titan anime after a good many years, just because the very end of that ominous action show had come out on home video over here at last. I was conscious that the series, along with starting off as something that had seemed to break out to a somewhat larger audience than “anime fans,” had wound up being accused of running off its tracks in later years, something that can seem more than familiar with long-running domestic stories.
One thing I do have to admit there, though, was that I’d got to reading Hajime Isayama’s original manga before watching the anime, aware of the comments it was a “story over artwork” kind of experience. (Some early drawings had offered enough awkward carefulness that I’d thought of 1980s black-and-white comics needled by a long-running online feature, “Stupid Comics,” although things had improved a bit with practice.) I’d then gone so far as to finish the manga, even if, in looking back at my records, I realised I’d done that just a bit earlier than that specific stretch in 2020 when it had been easy enough to half-think there might be dangers in “waiting for later.” I suppose it had been easy enough too to realise why some people had had problems with where it went and what it alluded to, and yet those thoughts hadn’t consumed me.
On returning to the anime, too, I could keep thinking that even if Attack on Titan had shown up more than a decade later than “anyone accepts anything they see starting off” might seem to have applied for me, I did remember that sense of how surprising it had felt to me that there could still be such a thing as a “breakout anime” at all. Certain impressions, accumulated from the sour takes of a previous day, just might have had me supposing some unfortunate quantity of anime had reacted to tough times and retrenched to what safety (and guaranteed audience in Japan) might be provided by their characters having safe havens in contemporary Japanese high schools. “The only recent series that bothers with anything even like the elaborate invented worlds that used to bring in wider audiences,” so those impressions continue, “is Strike Witches, and that’s got different problems.” (The impressions might even stretch to a few admissions that Sound of the Sky did have an elaborate setting too, but there the complaints just involved how that show’s own issues involved a purer form of “moe.”)
While I remembered how everything had ended, and how the anime I’d watched the first time around had left off back when things weren’t so complicated, some things about the experience did manage to surprise me again. The giant-killing action stayed visceral. At the same time, I’m conscious I haven’t gone very far beyond where I left off with the anime before, only beginning to open some DVDs included with a few of the manga volumes (which didn’t get around to bringing all of the “special episodes” over here).
When the latest expensive “quasi-import” release of a Demon Slayer plot arc wasn’t accompanied by anything cheaper, I did wonder if an experiment had ended, with executives somewhere in the Aniplex structure (tucked into the larger Sony structure) having concluded to their satisfaction that the residue of people like me, who’ll still buy anime on disc but for who cost is an object, don’t contribute enough profit to make up for the hassle of also releasing low-margin product. All in all, though, this didn’t seem to bother me all that much. At some point, perhaps even while the episodes for the plot arc in question had been streaming, I seemed to have gathered the impression the series was wearing out its welcome among other fans, that the old comment that Demon Slayer was a very ordinary “shonen action” manga elevated above its rightful station by sumptuous animation was coming back in greater force.
Before I had altogether detached myself from the series, though, an economy release did get scheduled months after the deluxe version. I ordered it, but wondered all the same if whatever detachment I’d already developed would turn out a real problem. Opening the economy release as much to “get it out of the way” as anything else did seem an inauspicious starting point.
The “Swordsmith Village” plot arc began pretty much the way its predecessor had, with a double-length opening episode and the plucky protagonist Tanjiro recovering in his demon slaying organization’s hospital. His familiar sword-wielding companions (whose varied schticks do seem to have wound up part of the series wearing out its welcome) are packed out of the story on different assignments as he’s sent to the secret village where the special swords of the Demon Slayers are forged. A few more episodes establish that setting (including how every swordsmith wears a bizarre but apparently traditional Japanese mask), and then some formidable high-ranking demons show up (I seem to have missed the explanation of how they found the village after fixating more on the elaborate process that obfuscated Tanjiro’s own sense of the route there), and it’s pretty much relentless action from there. It perhaps might have stayed exciting enough to not altogether wear out its welcome for me, even if there was a point where I pondered how one of the Demon Slayers who happened to have been around for the crisis, one of the few female members of the force, seemed to be stuck mopping up small fry and that despite her character design including her cleavage hanging out of her mostly unbuttoned uniform tunic and shirt. Following that point, though, she did get to demonstrate her full sword-fighting prowess. The production of Demon Slayer is approaching the conclusion of the manga, even if I’m now waiting to see if another economy release of a lightweight plot arc will show up months after the expensive “quasi-import.” One other thing I can mention, anyway, is noticing a sticker of Nezuko, the little sister of Tanjiro turned friendly yet mute demon, on the coffee mug of a coworker. When I found the chance to ask her about that, she explained her teenaged son had got her watching that anime among others.
I returned to the Urusei Yatsura remake. The block of episodes marked by a second opening and ending theme were still pretty much “two stories per half-hour”; this kept up the lively, good-looking energy that had appealed to me about this new take on the established story starting off. It also meant I was still thinking back to how the first episodes of the original anime had got my attention, and how that had wound up contrasting to a certain sense that older series had, at some point after turning into “one story per half-hour,” come to feel a bit stretched and languid (although I can at least imagine being told “that just means you got to where Mamoru Oshii stopped directing it.”) Even this accelerated pace through the story still meant sampling the manga, and I could get to thinking there were still a lot of “here’s another wacky character” introductions squeezing out stories where the established characters bounced off each other. That, perhaps, just might have made the moments rarer, or even feeling like “they’re there because they have to be there,” when it becomes clear that “there is something genuine between Ataru and Lum,” which had come to hold everything together on some fundamental level with the original series for me. As I finished the Blu-Ray collection I was conscious it wouldn’t be that much longer until the remake’s second half would also be available on disc. There, however, I was also left contemplating all the episodes of the original anime I still had to watch (which ought to include a single story I remember someone showing at my residence back in university), to say nothing of volumes of the manga remaining to be read.
The thought of getting to some back-catalogue series streaming did move into my mind as I backed away from any thought of watching anything brand new. There, though, my thoughts wound up settling on one of the oldest series on Crunchyroll, and as that series was lengthy it did wind up occupying two of my limited number of viewing slots for each week. I’d sampled the first episode of Minky Momo during a whistle-stop stunt tour of sixty years of half-hour television anime. Before the “fansubs” of that lengthy series were completed, there was a surprise announcement of it streaming (even if this did pretty much now get in the way of it being licensed by Discotek). I wound up accepting what opportunity we did have. Minky Momo is a different sort of “magical girl” series than they are now, but the sheer variety of roles Momo magically grows up into to save the day in various ways offered some genuine interest. As I’d noticed with the first episode, there was a sort of “cartooniness” to the character designs of older people at once different from “expectations of anime” and “absolutely anime” once I’d thought about it. What very little I know about the series Dr. Slump somehow came to mind, and a thought or two about the original Urusei Yatsura anime too. Aware of a certain infamous moment still lurking ahead in the series I did take some note of the amount of merchandise in it, from Momo’s accessories and animal companions to how she’s a preteen who just happens to drive a little red car pulling a big rainbow-sided camper; the car can sprout helicopter blades, dock in the camper’s roof, and fly off to wherever the story demands, with the whole thing called the “Gourmet Poppo.”
With having started watching new series streaming having gone by the wayside, I did wonder a little about Blue Box continuing. There’d been at least one “well, I didn’t get why anyone else would be impressed” comment towards it in the end-of-the-season reactions. I was able to tamp back my uncertainties and keep watching, though, and my interest did begin to pick up. We did get a little more insight into what the romantic interest Chinatsu is thinking, and even a bit of girls’ basketball on screen. More than that, though, the rhythmic gymnast Hina starts pushing back against any sense she’d already lost out in the romantic competition by not having been introduced as an option that way straight off. That she gets treated to a big chunk of the opening and more or less the entire ending sequence got my attention too. A resolution to all of that did hit in the last episode; where things can go from there or maybe trim back to I don’t know. I did happen to spot the first two volumes of the original manga in the area bookstore and start buying the series; on the other hand, there was an announcement the adaptation would continue following its last episode.
When The Apothecary Diaries was being talked up in full-blown end-of-the-year reviews, I did start to wonder if I might overcome how its premise involving “imperial court intrigue somewhere very much like antique China” hadn’t really grabbed me starting off long months before. (It had been overshadowed by Frieren back then, although the year-end reviews had revived certain complaints about that full-blown fantasy feeling less impressive to many in its second half as much as including comments about the gathering strength of the other series in contrast.) At some point after starting it at last I reminded myself my distaste for “imperial courts” springs far more from science fiction works that seem to shrug and suppose that an inevitable future development; a “historical series” was easier to accept. As for the “apothecary” herself, Maomao was as interesting a main character as the comments had suggested. Being abducted and sold to “the rear palace” doesn’t seem to be permanent, but Maomao’s resolve to keep her head down the better to keep it on her shoulders lasts only until she overhears some imperial infants are sickening. Once a well-placed eunuch picks up on her attempts to offer anonymous advice, Maomao winds up tasting for poison (and it just so happens she’d already enjoyed building up her resistance to assorted poisons to the point of bandaging one arm to cover marks left by that) and solving mysteries. At one point she even dusts for fingerprints, although she doesn’t quite get to the point of their use in identification. I’d also taken note of her being challenged early on to make an aphrodisiac and searching storehouses for the raw material for chocolate, which has much more of an impact on the people who happen to sample it in the story than it does in these more jaded days. At that point I decided it wasn’t quite fair to say the series was set in “ancient” China, but did come to imagine certain “you’re taking this little detail too seriously” comments, and also consider “pipeweed” and potatoes showing up in The Lord of the Rings. I wound up interested enough in The Apothecary Diaries that when I happened to see the original novel translated in my area bookstore, I bought it and started reading it while still watching the series. (I did try to read in portions small enough to not finish the book first.) The story in print did seem to enhance my recollections while keeping the adaptation feeling decent with its visual spectacle, and I just happened to see it mention potatoes itself at one point.
I did manage to fit two movies into my schedule, and both of them happened to involve mecha. Importing the Blu-Ray with English subtitles of Macross: Do You Remember Love? did mean confronting a known quantity once more regardless of this being above-ground at last, although I might be mellowing towards its extensive redesign work. The sheer novelty of seeing “mecha at the movies” could have been a big part of why I got a ticket for Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX -Beginning-. Even if I’d happened to stumble on the twist beyond its trailer before having a chance to see the movie, the sheer brazenness of everything was kind of amusing. I did wonder if I hit some narrow sweet spot of sufficient Gundam knowledge to take in what I was seeing and an attitude relaxed enough to accept it, though, to say nothing of a potential balancing act ahead between “commentary on what’s come before” and “developing the new characters.”
Getting back to Albegas represented something more than just returning to an early-1980s super robot anime I’d watched one episode of three months before. I’d seen its first two episodes almost five years ago as “official YouTube streams”; it had taken a bit longer for Discotek to license it than certain speculations had estimated back then. Years before that I’d been aware there’d been plans, at least, for that particular anime to be “localized” into the third Voltron. Decades prior to that in turn, I do remain convinced that one day in the 1980s I saw toys of that Voltron, a “mighty robot” formed from three humanoid robots (but stuck with six arms in the package art), on the shelf in the Co-Op hardware store in my home town.
When I’d seen the sample episodes of Albegas, what bits of knowledge I’d picked up since the 1980s had left me thinking it was a more traditional and perhaps more conventional super robot anime than Golion or Dairugger XV, set resolutely on Earth and in a lightly futuristic Japan. (With impressions those old toys were labelled “Voltron II, Defender of the Middle Universe,” it was easy enough to imagine anything “foreign” that couldn’t just be cut out being passed off as
“a different planet.”) It had amused me to discover the three smaller robots had started out as school projects thrown into battle against an alien invasion, then repaired and rebuilt by the scientific genius who also happened to be the father of one of the three teen pilots. That that pilot made the team one-third female, rather than one-fifth in the two anime that had made it all the way to becoming Voltron, had been interesting enough; Hotaru came off pretty well so far as female giant robot pilots went. A non-upgraded school project robot in the form of a sort of giant gorilla piloted by a big galoot had me thinking all the way back to Mazinger Z.
There might not have been many more surprises to the series beyond those two preview episodes. The opening theme mentioned that the three robots can combine in six different ways, their combination scheme not being that complicated. Each combined robot is said to be tailored for a specific environment, but there’s only a stock footage sequence showing one of them being combined from the small robots (the others just sort of fade out that robot and fade themselves in), and that robot happens to be the only one that wields the big (presumably to have become “Blazing”) sword delivering the finishing blows. The bad guys figure out who the pilots are sooner than they track down the secret base and spend a lot of time launching schemes to try and trick or otherwise interfere with those pilots. (That one of the enemy field commanders has a certain resemblance to the helmeted, purplish-skinned minions of Dairugger did get my attention given all the comments over the years about “unrelated anime series tacked together to reach syndication length.”) All in all the series did have definite goofy parts to it, and I just sort of accepted an impression the people who’d made Voltron had backed away from having to deal with “localizing” it. However, I found myself still enjoying Albegas as it was. Having bumped into certain quibbles and difficulties with recent viewings of some other super robot series watched via Discotek discs, my improved feelings here were quite welcome.
To be brief, I could form a sense of how some at the start of this year might be intent on taking in the lightest, fluffiest, most charming, pleasant, and escapist stories they know of. In emphathising with them, though, I was left wondering about my own thoughts of getting back to the Attack on Titan anime after a good many years, just because the very end of that ominous action show had come out on home video over here at last. I was conscious that the series, along with starting off as something that had seemed to break out to a somewhat larger audience than “anime fans,” had wound up being accused of running off its tracks in later years, something that can seem more than familiar with long-running domestic stories.
One thing I do have to admit there, though, was that I’d got to reading Hajime Isayama’s original manga before watching the anime, aware of the comments it was a “story over artwork” kind of experience. (Some early drawings had offered enough awkward carefulness that I’d thought of 1980s black-and-white comics needled by a long-running online feature, “Stupid Comics,” although things had improved a bit with practice.) I’d then gone so far as to finish the manga, even if, in looking back at my records, I realised I’d done that just a bit earlier than that specific stretch in 2020 when it had been easy enough to half-think there might be dangers in “waiting for later.” I suppose it had been easy enough too to realise why some people had had problems with where it went and what it alluded to, and yet those thoughts hadn’t consumed me.
On returning to the anime, too, I could keep thinking that even if Attack on Titan had shown up more than a decade later than “anyone accepts anything they see starting off” might seem to have applied for me, I did remember that sense of how surprising it had felt to me that there could still be such a thing as a “breakout anime” at all. Certain impressions, accumulated from the sour takes of a previous day, just might have had me supposing some unfortunate quantity of anime had reacted to tough times and retrenched to what safety (and guaranteed audience in Japan) might be provided by their characters having safe havens in contemporary Japanese high schools. “The only recent series that bothers with anything even like the elaborate invented worlds that used to bring in wider audiences,” so those impressions continue, “is Strike Witches, and that’s got different problems.” (The impressions might even stretch to a few admissions that Sound of the Sky did have an elaborate setting too, but there the complaints just involved how that show’s own issues involved a purer form of “moe.”)
While I remembered how everything had ended, and how the anime I’d watched the first time around had left off back when things weren’t so complicated, some things about the experience did manage to surprise me again. The giant-killing action stayed visceral. At the same time, I’m conscious I haven’t gone very far beyond where I left off with the anime before, only beginning to open some DVDs included with a few of the manga volumes (which didn’t get around to bringing all of the “special episodes” over here).
When the latest expensive “quasi-import” release of a Demon Slayer plot arc wasn’t accompanied by anything cheaper, I did wonder if an experiment had ended, with executives somewhere in the Aniplex structure (tucked into the larger Sony structure) having concluded to their satisfaction that the residue of people like me, who’ll still buy anime on disc but for who cost is an object, don’t contribute enough profit to make up for the hassle of also releasing low-margin product. All in all, though, this didn’t seem to bother me all that much. At some point, perhaps even while the episodes for the plot arc in question had been streaming, I seemed to have gathered the impression the series was wearing out its welcome among other fans, that the old comment that Demon Slayer was a very ordinary “shonen action” manga elevated above its rightful station by sumptuous animation was coming back in greater force.
Before I had altogether detached myself from the series, though, an economy release did get scheduled months after the deluxe version. I ordered it, but wondered all the same if whatever detachment I’d already developed would turn out a real problem. Opening the economy release as much to “get it out of the way” as anything else did seem an inauspicious starting point.
The “Swordsmith Village” plot arc began pretty much the way its predecessor had, with a double-length opening episode and the plucky protagonist Tanjiro recovering in his demon slaying organization’s hospital. His familiar sword-wielding companions (whose varied schticks do seem to have wound up part of the series wearing out its welcome) are packed out of the story on different assignments as he’s sent to the secret village where the special swords of the Demon Slayers are forged. A few more episodes establish that setting (including how every swordsmith wears a bizarre but apparently traditional Japanese mask), and then some formidable high-ranking demons show up (I seem to have missed the explanation of how they found the village after fixating more on the elaborate process that obfuscated Tanjiro’s own sense of the route there), and it’s pretty much relentless action from there. It perhaps might have stayed exciting enough to not altogether wear out its welcome for me, even if there was a point where I pondered how one of the Demon Slayers who happened to have been around for the crisis, one of the few female members of the force, seemed to be stuck mopping up small fry and that despite her character design including her cleavage hanging out of her mostly unbuttoned uniform tunic and shirt. Following that point, though, she did get to demonstrate her full sword-fighting prowess. The production of Demon Slayer is approaching the conclusion of the manga, even if I’m now waiting to see if another economy release of a lightweight plot arc will show up months after the expensive “quasi-import.” One other thing I can mention, anyway, is noticing a sticker of Nezuko, the little sister of Tanjiro turned friendly yet mute demon, on the coffee mug of a coworker. When I found the chance to ask her about that, she explained her teenaged son had got her watching that anime among others.
I returned to the Urusei Yatsura remake. The block of episodes marked by a second opening and ending theme were still pretty much “two stories per half-hour”; this kept up the lively, good-looking energy that had appealed to me about this new take on the established story starting off. It also meant I was still thinking back to how the first episodes of the original anime had got my attention, and how that had wound up contrasting to a certain sense that older series had, at some point after turning into “one story per half-hour,” come to feel a bit stretched and languid (although I can at least imagine being told “that just means you got to where Mamoru Oshii stopped directing it.”) Even this accelerated pace through the story still meant sampling the manga, and I could get to thinking there were still a lot of “here’s another wacky character” introductions squeezing out stories where the established characters bounced off each other. That, perhaps, just might have made the moments rarer, or even feeling like “they’re there because they have to be there,” when it becomes clear that “there is something genuine between Ataru and Lum,” which had come to hold everything together on some fundamental level with the original series for me. As I finished the Blu-Ray collection I was conscious it wouldn’t be that much longer until the remake’s second half would also be available on disc. There, however, I was also left contemplating all the episodes of the original anime I still had to watch (which ought to include a single story I remember someone showing at my residence back in university), to say nothing of volumes of the manga remaining to be read.
The thought of getting to some back-catalogue series streaming did move into my mind as I backed away from any thought of watching anything brand new. There, though, my thoughts wound up settling on one of the oldest series on Crunchyroll, and as that series was lengthy it did wind up occupying two of my limited number of viewing slots for each week. I’d sampled the first episode of Minky Momo during a whistle-stop stunt tour of sixty years of half-hour television anime. Before the “fansubs” of that lengthy series were completed, there was a surprise announcement of it streaming (even if this did pretty much now get in the way of it being licensed by Discotek). I wound up accepting what opportunity we did have. Minky Momo is a different sort of “magical girl” series than they are now, but the sheer variety of roles Momo magically grows up into to save the day in various ways offered some genuine interest. As I’d noticed with the first episode, there was a sort of “cartooniness” to the character designs of older people at once different from “expectations of anime” and “absolutely anime” once I’d thought about it. What very little I know about the series Dr. Slump somehow came to mind, and a thought or two about the original Urusei Yatsura anime too. Aware of a certain infamous moment still lurking ahead in the series I did take some note of the amount of merchandise in it, from Momo’s accessories and animal companions to how she’s a preteen who just happens to drive a little red car pulling a big rainbow-sided camper; the car can sprout helicopter blades, dock in the camper’s roof, and fly off to wherever the story demands, with the whole thing called the “Gourmet Poppo.”
With having started watching new series streaming having gone by the wayside, I did wonder a little about Blue Box continuing. There’d been at least one “well, I didn’t get why anyone else would be impressed” comment towards it in the end-of-the-season reactions. I was able to tamp back my uncertainties and keep watching, though, and my interest did begin to pick up. We did get a little more insight into what the romantic interest Chinatsu is thinking, and even a bit of girls’ basketball on screen. More than that, though, the rhythmic gymnast Hina starts pushing back against any sense she’d already lost out in the romantic competition by not having been introduced as an option that way straight off. That she gets treated to a big chunk of the opening and more or less the entire ending sequence got my attention too. A resolution to all of that did hit in the last episode; where things can go from there or maybe trim back to I don’t know. I did happen to spot the first two volumes of the original manga in the area bookstore and start buying the series; on the other hand, there was an announcement the adaptation would continue following its last episode.
When The Apothecary Diaries was being talked up in full-blown end-of-the-year reviews, I did start to wonder if I might overcome how its premise involving “imperial court intrigue somewhere very much like antique China” hadn’t really grabbed me starting off long months before. (It had been overshadowed by Frieren back then, although the year-end reviews had revived certain complaints about that full-blown fantasy feeling less impressive to many in its second half as much as including comments about the gathering strength of the other series in contrast.) At some point after starting it at last I reminded myself my distaste for “imperial courts” springs far more from science fiction works that seem to shrug and suppose that an inevitable future development; a “historical series” was easier to accept. As for the “apothecary” herself, Maomao was as interesting a main character as the comments had suggested. Being abducted and sold to “the rear palace” doesn’t seem to be permanent, but Maomao’s resolve to keep her head down the better to keep it on her shoulders lasts only until she overhears some imperial infants are sickening. Once a well-placed eunuch picks up on her attempts to offer anonymous advice, Maomao winds up tasting for poison (and it just so happens she’d already enjoyed building up her resistance to assorted poisons to the point of bandaging one arm to cover marks left by that) and solving mysteries. At one point she even dusts for fingerprints, although she doesn’t quite get to the point of their use in identification. I’d also taken note of her being challenged early on to make an aphrodisiac and searching storehouses for the raw material for chocolate, which has much more of an impact on the people who happen to sample it in the story than it does in these more jaded days. At that point I decided it wasn’t quite fair to say the series was set in “ancient” China, but did come to imagine certain “you’re taking this little detail too seriously” comments, and also consider “pipeweed” and potatoes showing up in The Lord of the Rings. I wound up interested enough in The Apothecary Diaries that when I happened to see the original novel translated in my area bookstore, I bought it and started reading it while still watching the series. (I did try to read in portions small enough to not finish the book first.) The story in print did seem to enhance my recollections while keeping the adaptation feeling decent with its visual spectacle, and I just happened to see it mention potatoes itself at one point.
I did manage to fit two movies into my schedule, and both of them happened to involve mecha. Importing the Blu-Ray with English subtitles of Macross: Do You Remember Love? did mean confronting a known quantity once more regardless of this being above-ground at last, although I might be mellowing towards its extensive redesign work. The sheer novelty of seeing “mecha at the movies” could have been a big part of why I got a ticket for Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX -Beginning-. Even if I’d happened to stumble on the twist beyond its trailer before having a chance to see the movie, the sheer brazenness of everything was kind of amusing. I did wonder if I hit some narrow sweet spot of sufficient Gundam knowledge to take in what I was seeing and an attitude relaxed enough to accept it, though, to say nothing of a potential balancing act ahead between “commentary on what’s come before” and “developing the new characters.”