#Inconsistent art style? Who’s she

[jaguarsoup]

whoaaa it’s my art blog whattt (jaguar actually posts real not clickbait-)

there’s a couple seawings, a rainwing because those are always fun to draw (feat non wof dragon thing), a bunch icewings because I’m working on subtribes 4 them, and then me struggling overthinking wing anatomy again. I should really post that hivewing wing anatomy rant/theory I did because I went crazy for like a week over that.

Various dragon doodles. Mainly done in my German class

[camellcat]

the girl with the fairytale name!!!!

full canvas ≽^˶•ﻌ•˵^≼

[the-galaxy-sys]

Jashtober Day 1: Lunar

Gonna be (trying) to do this but can't promise I'll get every day done :')

[aachria]

The long awaited (maybe? Idk how many of you were waiting for this) SSSBMTY College AU!

Majors in bold

Headcanons in regular text

Notes about the art indented in orange

Luffy — Undeclared

Was forced into school by his gramps. (The university dean. The fucking dorm building all the Strawhats but Jimbei live in is named after him.)(it was this or join the navy.) Takes the most random classes he can. Some of them are advanced and require perquisites and no one knows how he keeps getting into them. Wears shorts and sandals in winter & will run any errand or do any odd job for food. He has a very nice bike he got for free from a garage sale that Franky fixed up. There's a campus wide bet on when and what he'll choose as his major. His bucket hat was a gift from Shanks, the universities World Economics prof. Has a million friendship bracelets on his ankles because Ed makes them when they're stressed. Never has a bag on him. Fights Canadian geese on the way to class, like a fucking maniac. Protected species who?

When I tell you that this drawing of Luffy is the first time I've ever drawn actual feet with toes that don't look fucking ridiculous I need to cheer for me. Why is he a different flavour of boy every time I draw him please. His ass isn't rubber in this universe, of course he's scuffed to shit. Chopper ran out of Spiderman bandaids, sorry bud. Advocate for the Single Piercing Luffy™ agenda, he went and got it done with Ed when they got their helix.

Ed — English major Psychology minor

Took History of Piracy for easy grades & a story idea. Known around campus as that asshole who'll tell you exactly which of your roommates ate your leftovers for $5. Is roommates with Luffy because of a system mix-up when they got distributed. Always wears a Burberry trench coat Nami thrifted for $3 and gave them as a bday gift. Carries everything in a ratty falling apart messenger bag. Them and Luffy filled out marriage papers on a dare, Zoro (who got legally ordained on a dare minutes before) oversaw that, Zoro and Ed filed the papers when they were drunk. So Ed and Luffy are legally married. And they don't even notice until tax season and Jonah, Ed's accounting friend, asks about it.

I need you to ignore the inconsistence with the hands in these ok? Some of them get very nice and normal hands, and others get weird shaped blobs. Sorry Ed, them's the breaks kid.

Zoro — Health and Fitness major Mathematics minor

Literally no one knows why he has a Mathematics minor, least of all him. P sure he walked into the wrong class on the first day and just stuck with it. The most terrifying captain of the kendo team the university has ever had. He's won more championships and trophies in his tenure than the school has in its history, the revenue he brings in from sponsorships and such make them turn a blind eye to his... eccentricities (three sword style. Nobody has stopped him yet, anyone who says it's illegal gets penalized). Has had campus security called on him so often from being creepy when walking home from the gym in the dark there's a poster of him in the security office that says 'NOT ACTUALLY A THREAT. JUST WEIRD AND WALKS WITH PURPOSE.'

Zoro's sword patch on his jacket was designed by Usopp, embroidered by Luffy for a class (shittily) and fixed up and sewn on by Ed. Those docs have seen war. He has put them through hell. He has walked through a fucking river with those things, he superglues them back together every time they break. Franky had to strongarm him into getting the soles professionally replaced.

Nami — Meteorology major Finance minor

All of her clothes are thrifted designer things. Regularly terrorizes Value Village employees. Anything she has that isn't thrifted she gets from the many estate sales she plagues, snatching grandma's entire Chanel collection and all her nicest jewelry. She has absolutely everything anyone could ever need in her purse. Tampons and pads? She gotchu. Extra pens? It'll cost you, but yeah. A curling iron? Sure, why the hell not. She runs the betting pool on Luffy's major with Ed. She also writes a gossip column for the school newspaper and has a podcast she uploads a new episode to every few months. Shows up to every class looking like a supermodel no matter the time. 7am? Perfect. 10pm? Fabulous. Your go-to if you get locked out of your dorm. Has a moped but barely uses it.

Nami's bag is a large Prada Gallaria Saffiano bag, which I painstaking drew to accuracy down to the colour even though it still looks ever so slightly different, because Nami is a big purse girl. The compass rose necklace was a going away gift from Nojiko when she left for uni. I think her haircut is so cute I love her sm. Don't pay any mind to how fucking disheveled half of their lineart looks next to her pls.

Usopp — Graphic Design major

Not a member of the archery club, but shows up enough he’s in all the team photos. Was originally the designated driver, had a pretty little mini van they called the Merry, had one of those fucking fuzzy dice hanging mirror things in the shape of a sheep’s head. Got in a bad car accident and she got totaled by some jackass in a red Honda Civic. Dating Kaya, who’s a nursing student. They barely see each other because she’s so fucking busy and half the students are convinced the girlfriend Usopp is always talking about and calling is fake. The Strawhats have a dnd campaign that they run every other week, Usopp DM's. On weekends he works at an axe throwing range and holds the record for most bullseyes in a row. They have his picture mounted on the wall.

Usopp's necklace is the old key to the Merry, and he engraved his belt buckle for a project. I cursed his ass with the giant fuck off portfolio bag because those things are so big and unwieldy. The people in his program's studio never clean their paint up properly, that's why he's covered in it. Advocate for the Usopp With Gages™ agenda. God he is such a cutie patootie.

Sanji — Business degree

Literally grew up working in a restaurant, he’s only going to school to get the degree so he can open his own and also because Zeff threated to castrate him if he didn't get a higher education. Cooks basically every single meal for the dorm, since it’s just the Strawhats (it's a new (old it's old and was refurbished. Everyone assumed it was haunted.) building that they just dedicated to Garp. Has no other residents yet). Him and Zoro fight so much in their shared room half the time he ends up kicking him out and making him sleep in the community room lmao. He just shows up in half the culinary classes because he hates the business ones so much, the one time someone tried to tell him to leave he cussed them out for a full ten minutes while gesticulating wildly with a knife in hand. They never tried that again. Saw one of the profs berate a young lady for wearing a dress shirt to class because it’s impractical and proceeded to take that personally. Yeah he wears three piece suits to all his classes, he could still kick you ass in ‘em. Shut up. Volunteers to show around foreign exchange students because he can speak at least 4 foreign languages fluently. Is it to woo pretty French girls with his charm? Wouldn't you like to know.

I could not draw Sanji in a decent pose for the life of me, his ass was just not having it. He's got one of them really nice leather messenger bags with the lined pockets and filigree, he's very proud of it.

Chopper — PreMed

One of the few Strawhats who regularly sees Usopp’s reclusive girlfriend, and is very confused as to why people think she isn’t real. Still a literal child (is 15 still a child? Yeah that's like barely a teenager), a goddamn prodigy and got in with an incredibly good recommendation from the best doctor in the country, who just so happens to be his adoptive mother. He’s literally too cute for anyone to question that, plus he’s the sharpest tack in the damn class. He knocked his front tooth out ages ago (it was an adult tooth) but he's too fucking busy to get an appointment to get it fixed, just adds another layer to his babyface. Nice girls keep asking him if he's here to go see his parents or older siblings, he's endlessly infuriated by it and Sanji is endlessly jealous. Saved Ed from choking to death in a Domino's parking lot the first time they met, he dropped his pizza doing it so they bought him another. The rest is history. Does not feel cold, wears chunky boots year round. Got them reflective ass eyes like a deer, no one has ever taken a good picture of this child. He looks fucking possessed in his school ID.

TELL ME WHY I ALMOST FORGOT TO DRAW CHOPPER. I finished drawing Franky and was like "gee, only Brook and Jimbei to go! Good for me," and then I had to pause while looking as the picture of the group I was semi-referencing for heights n shit and was like "OH FUCK THE CHILD—" He's so cute tho. He's giving lil baby Goro Akechi. The argyle sweater vest and Timbs were a must, so was his hockey boy haircut. Matching backpack and tie for the win. Oh and the freckles, Chopper with freckles is everything to me.

Robin — Has a million hyper specific degrees. Currently earning her third doctorate.

Very mysterious and sexy. Mature student who occasionally gives lectures in the archeology program when she has free time. Owns a motorcycle but barely rides it. How is she not in debt after so much schooling? Don't fucking ask if you want to live. Is that why she lives in the dorm building? Do. Not. Ask. She and Luffy attend the same Theology class, no one knows how Luffy is passing with such good grades, but Robin is adamant that he doesn't take notes or borrow hers, and takes to having the same scores as him with grace. Child actor on one of those show like Barney (but not Barney dear lord) or Reading Rainbow and people only knew her as 'that kid with the creepy fuckin stare.' She was a meme a few years back, they called her the devil child. Every time someone asks her about it she just says she has no idea what they're talking about while giving them the creepy stare.

Women with Big Bags truther, right here. Robin deserves to be put in a suit. Goddamnit, get that woman in a suit!

Franky — Has a bachelors of Engineering, a bachelors of Architecture, and is earning his (water specific) Architecture degree

Currently the groups designated driver (after the tragic death of the poor Merry) with his supped up SUV, the Sunny. How do all the Strawhats fit inside? The power of love, obviously. That car will NOT fucking move if even one of the seatbelts is undone. Made Ed and Luffy wedding rings after he found out they accidentally got married. (Only after laughing for a half our straight, almost passing out, and laughing again. Then he cried for another hour about how beautiful it was.) He sometimes works as a nude model for life drawing classes on campus. Half of the the Strawhats have, in one way or another, seen him in the buck. Has knee braces from an... incident... with a train when he was younger. Now he volunteers at KidsAbility and has a shift on the campus crisis/suicide hotline. Huge advocate for mental health services at the school. He lives in the dorms for the ✨experience✨. Even worse than Luffy, mf wears booty shorts in the dead of winter. He's constantly dressed like It's laundry day. One of those guys from a famous Vine when he was younger that just gets stopped while he's walking so people can go "TRAMPOLINE VASE GUY??" (Iceberg was recording. I love Iceberg.)

Yes Franky is wearing an I ♥ MILFs shirt, what of it? It was a gift. Drawing him was an exercise in struggling with the pompadour and getting uncomfortably close to drawing Syndrome. Yes, he's cold all the time. No, he will not stop.

Brook — Literally no one knows. Something music related probably.

Fucker has been around forever, there’s old ass profs who swear to god they went to school with him and he hasn’t aged a day. Regularly plays local bars and cafes. Doesn't own a cellphone, he can literally only operate rotary phones. Computers confuse the shit out of him. Knows nothing about pop culture or recent events, but is up to date on everything in the music industry. He sometimes helps organize the old library archives because he's somehow the only person who understands the system they're organized in. Sometimes he'll just namedrop a famous singer/band he's either played with, done karaoke with, or done background vocals/instrumentals for and you have to guess whether he's telling the truth or just saying shit. There's a campus wide betting pool (run by Nami and Ed, go figure) on whether he's a vampire, ghost, time traveler, or Dorian Gray in disguise. Prepares the questions for 70s night pub trivia. Every time the Strawhats plan a ghost hunt he's busy, then at the end they find out that all the paranormal shit they've been experiencing is just him running his errands. It's happened at least four times.

Is Brook off-putting enough? I was trying to make him off-putting. He swears up and down the neck tattoo was gotten on a dare by Elton John, what, you gonna question a man who looks like he stepped out of Coraline? The skeleton gloves were a gift from Ed.

Jimbei — Has already graduated as a Marine Biology major Political Science minor and is taking both a Gender Studies course and a Peace and Conflict Studies course years later.

Teaches martial arts at a local dojo on weekends and volunteers with the martial arts team on campus. Robin helps him organize protests on weekends. He's good buds with a lot of the faculty and gets invited to after work drinks regularly. He helped establish a program that walks people who stay late at the library to their dorms when he was first a student that's still going strong to this day. Lives off campus and has the Strawhats over for BBQ on long weekends. Literally the only time the Strawhats eat food not made by Sanji. The Grill Master™. Somehow holds some kind of record or high score at every single bar/pub in town. Knows every single mailman and janitor by name. MVP of the catch and release fishing club, helps plan all of their trips.

I struggled with him. I struggled hard. That's a man who went his whole childhood with a horrendous underbite and only got it fixed once he was an adult. Ed gave him the fishing lure earrings out of guilt after he brought them on one of his fishing trips and they fell in and nearly capsized their boat. IT'S A REUSED PLASTIC BAG JIMBEI IS RESPONSIBLE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT—

[ayyyvivi]

Hi I’m back :3

This piece was a lot of fun to make and for while I was absolutely hating it. I’ll probably end up hating it by the time I wake up and start seeing the details I could’ve added but at this sleep deprived moment I’m happy with the way came out!

I wanna to say thank you to the peeps that liked and reposted my work my last piece got a lot of attention and it makes me happy to see that you guys liked what I made

I decided to maybe use these post to explain how I came up with it since I saw someone mention they liked how I went through my art process so I shall be putting some description on my work from now on >:3

For this piece I wanted to make Miles swing through the city in that pinkish sunset vibe from the movie but I wanted to make it a bit different than my other sketches of him going about New York and I guess different meant a backpack that was swung in a hurry and all his stuff flying out of it! I tried putting as much detail as possible for his stuff flying out even a hidden Gojo ψ(｀∇´)ψ

The buildings were a pain to make I’m still not entirely sold if I like them or not. And I tried to add lots of texture to Spider-man’s suit so it wouldn’t look so bland. My friend had mentioned to me that she likes it a lot better when she can see an artist brush strokes and it being blended makes things kinda flat and since then I feel like my drawings have looked a lot nicer! I guess I’m still getting used digital after drawing traditional for so long

OH! I should mention I’m really inconsistent with my art style for while I would panic because I know something artist must have is some kind of style for people to notice who the work comes from. Im kinda not like that I like being all over the place and I enjoy drawing in all types of ways so I know rn my work looks similar to Spiderverse but depending on how I’m feeling things can change so I guess my art style is being constantly inconsistent! Honestly this kinda gets more for during Halloween when I do my one inktober stuff so stay tune for that!!

If you guys got questions or suggestions on who you want me to draw next let me know! I know someone mentioned they wanted Spider-Gwen with a wolf cut so maybe I’ll do a quick sketch of that

[creaman]

—BECAUSE KUNG FU PANDA 4 KILLED MY GRANDMA, OKAY?

To preface, I watched this movie and I'm genuinely tweaking right now so I had to write down a very brief (lie) criticism on this film — which you should boycott, by the way.

Starting with the things I liked, before briefing my primary points of criticism:

Po's Character Regression

Po and Zhen's Dynamic

The Chameleon

I'd also yap about Lord Shen and the death of the art style and the entire narrative and pacing and use of the staff of wisdom but my therapist says being such a hater is 'unhealthy' or something. My heart is full of hatred.

SPOILERS for the entirety KFP4 for the 2 people who care.

KFP4 undermines and ignores the previous three movies — Unwriting character developments, outright removing the Furious Five, straying from the character design philosophies and is completely inconsistent with the established lore.

Things I Liked About Kung Fu Panda 4

The Chameleon's character design

Visual gag in the Tavern where Po uses a recently thrown axe as a hat rack (made me laugh)

When Mr. Ping did this:

so cute! the little heart!

Po — Character Writing

Po, as established in the previous movies, is confident in his abilities and identity — he’s learnt inner peace, he’s matured as a character. However, in KFP4, his character has completely regressed. He’s immature again (such as KFP1, possibly worse) and says verbatim, “only knows kicking butt and taking names” — UNLEARNING inner peace and insisting that “…being the Dragon Warrior is all I know.”

It’s childish, and sort of Hotel Transylvania-esque.

Which isn’t helped by the comedy, the dialogue — a large chunk of which are jokes in the style of:

Master Shifu says something philosophical

Po quips off of it / doesn’t get it (i.e. Whoa!! beat I don’t know what that means.)

Oh, it’s great, yeah, very tolerable. Po’s shenanigans are normally reeled in by the presence of the Furious Five who are generally more serious in nature, creating a much needed balance in the dynamic — So without them, it’s just Po becoming increasingly obnoxious and insufferable with every consecutive quip throughout the screenplay.

Po and Zhen — Character Dynamics

[No more graphics sorry I'm too angry]

As if it wasn’t obvious that Zhen was going to be the next Dragon Warrior the second she was introduced.

Zhen, as a character, has no depth besides being a quippy thief. She quips, she steals. This character has no motives — it can be assumed that the writers intended on a ‘change of heart’ thing, but she isn’t established as evil, her working for the Chameleon is written as a (albeit poor) twist reveal.

By which point, her taking either side wouldn’t make sense, given that she has shown no loyalty or attachment to either Po nor the Chameleon.

The movie artificially strengthens their bond by having Zhen start opening up about her backstory out of nowhere for no reason but they have done nothing to grow closer to each other.

Small tangent, her backstory is exactly what you’d expect it to be with no subversions or even emotional weight. Woe is me I was so small and hungry I had to steal to survive. Glossed over in about a minute.

The majority of the dialogue between Zhen and Po is spoken exposition — explaining how powerful and badass the Chameleon is, explaining how ‘we have to go here to do that’ and ‘this place was cool until the Chameleon did such and such’, and the rest of their time together is spent engaging in filler chase sequences and fight scenes.

The Chameleon

Where do I even start…

This is where it becomes apparent that the movie relies heavily on telling rather than showing —

She is the weakest villain by far, not only in universe but as a written character; which is particularly disheartening because I genuinely adore her character design and feel as though a shapeshifting character has great potential.

The movie artificially inflates her power by insisting through exposition that this is the most capable antagonist thus far (lie).

The audience is TOLD by Zhen and various restaurant patrons that the Chameleon is a powerful shapeshifting sorceress and that she 'dominates the city' whilst the film does nothing to showcase this.

'Dominating the city' meaning letting her henchpeople run amock and bully the civilians just like Lord Shen's wolves in KFP2... uninspired.

I just realised they didn't even give her a NAME what the FUCK is going on

She describes HERSELF as ruthless, clever and unsentimental when comparing Zhen to herself.

She says HERSELF that she’s “Stronger than every opponent you’ve ever faced.”

Let’s see what vile reprehensible things she’s done, shall we?

Gently push someone down some stairs

Her first appearance is through Zhen’s exposition, as opposed to the dramatic and memorable entrances of the previous villains. Her motives or character aren’t established until the final third of the film. She doesn’t even FIGHT anybody until the final third of the film; and even then, her fight sequences are uninspired and she never really poses a real threat. (She goes down in two hits.)

That being said, WE CAN STILL SAVE HER GUYS WE CAN STILL GET HER OUTTA THERE I'M COMING FOR YOU CHAMELEON I'M GONNA DRAFT YOU A PROPER BACKSTORY AND MOTIVE AND YOU'RE GONNA BE THE MOST THREATENING VILLAIN THUS FAR

There's a scene after the climax of the film where all the kung fu masters and previous villains from the spirit realm bow to Po. I'm not going to provide my thoughts on this because I fear I may burst a blood vessel. Good day!

Closing Statements

To put it simply, Kung Fu Panda 4 was my Megamind 2.

The film rejects its predecessors in every way. It really feels as though they brought in somebody with no prior knowledge of the franchise to direct the movie.

It's a film that relies heavily on telling rather than showing — banking on the previous three movies to carry it through the box office.

It's just really disheartening to see studio execs turn one of the best franchises into a safe sequel cash grab and regress every character's development.

Nevertheless. I do adore the chameleon's character design so I might do my own take on her character.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no fairy godmother, there is no tooth fairy, and there is no kung fu panda 4.

[genericpuff]

Rachel's art regression actually makes me so sad because yeah she always had problems with anatomy but at least her style used to have personality back then

It's actually so fascinating to look at her older art because on the one hand, to her credit, she was INCREDIBLY prolific, she made SO MUCH STUFF to the point that we're STILL finding new stuff all the time, it's actually really impressive; but on the other hand, she also clearly didn't really have a focused direction, she was kind of just trying different things waiting to see what would stick, and eventually LO was what won the lotto. But unlike previous works where she could pick them up and drop them at her own time, she was contractually obligated to LO and it forced her to meet crazy strict deadlines, so I think in a way (at least in my opinion from what I've been able to glean looking at her work from the past several years) she almost lost a lot of what she was capable of doing back then because she proceeded to spend all of her time for YEARS working on LO.

I do think she'd be fully capable of returning to that older art style, but the reality is that that style also, like LO, existed through inconsistency. She was always trying and doing different things and you can tell a lot of it was rooted in both trial and error + indecisiveness. As much as she's talked about "streamlining" the production process of LO in previous interviews, it's also very clear in its inconsistencies - as well as her older work which was also inconsistent, for better and for worse - that she never actually learned how to streamline. Unlike artists who you can at least look at and understand they have a "process" that they follow every single time, she just does not seem to have that.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it worked well for her when she was doing freelance and standalone illustrations / conceptual art. The "personality" in her work back then was her just messing around with things and doing whatever looked good, and it often paid off through beautiful illustrations and concept designs.

But that sort of approach doesn't work so well when you're trying to do a long-form comic with unique characters and a distinctive art style which is being worked on by multiple different people. Something like LO demands workflow consistency and a production pipeline with steps to follow and standards to practice, and that's not something that Rachel has ever really been good at, even before she started LO.

[crooked-wasteland]

It's been so odd seeing Ghostf*ckers currently sitting at 7.9m views two weeks later despite the boost of Hazbin's launch and the other episodes not doing anywhere near as bad; anything you feel might've factored into it?

I've mentioned it before, but I am happy to explain my perspective again. I obviously don't have the complete picture in front of me, so it's really only a grain of salt. More of a thought experiment than anything else.

For starters, the spike in views following Hazbin was a predictable boom and bust situation. There is a give and take with different styles of streaming, specifically around the trickle or binge models. More people will watch a series that is available to be binged vs one that is still in progress. Like some people who wait for the entire season to drop before picking up a new show. These sorts of drops see huge initial views, but people stop talking about the shows much faster.

The overlap of cultural impact as well as financial success makes Binging content appealing to the finance people, but the real money comes from maintaining cultural relevance. Which is why binge releases are generally criticized, especially by artistic people.

On the flip side, episode by episode releases, especially those like webcomics and web series need to maintain a sense of consistency to retain an audience. There must be deadlines that are achieved relatively consistently. It's even more important for content that is hosted on algorithm-heavy platforms like YouTube. It's why most content creators have an upload schedule to maintain their algorithms and promote their channel being recommended.

This is especially important on social media platforms because, generally speaking, only 10% of your audience are actually subscribed. While YouTubers don't get paid based on their subscriber count, it's used similarly to viewership. A channel like Mr. Beast has deals with mainstream studios like Amazon because of his subscriber count, in junction with the number of views he accrues.

The 10% active subscriber count is actually seen as a general positive so long as your views stay around that number, because it means others are being recommended your channel outside of your base. Once you get stuck in your "base" you're waiting for that thing ice to finally break. It means no one is discovering you and your legitimately risk losing everything. Most often from stale content, people becoming bored or disillusioned with what a creator is creating. And having no fresh eyes on your content, you will disappear in the algorithm eventually. For some people it means they can still survive just fine doing the same old things, for others (usually those who see the money before the art) it means the loss of everything.

The issue with inconsistent uploads is a major one that Medrano actually beat in the first season. The Vivziepop channel was so infrequently uploaded on, episodes being posted essentially the moment they were done, and yet Medrano maintained 35 M - 50 M views an episode (until Ozzie's which topped out at 28M before Hazbin Hotel, Medrano's first attempt at writing for the series).

So what I mean to say with that information is Medrano actually succeeded against the odds for the first season. She should have faded into obscurity, but the support for her show was legitimate and beat the odds of an inconsistent uploads schedule. I was never subscribed to her channel and didn't have Twitter until this year, but I would search Vivziepop every 3-5 months and usually saw a new episode had been uploaded in the last week to a few hours prior.

So while this is anecdotal, I'd argue that it was the general norm at the time. Reaching 35M when you only have 8.6M subscribers necessitates genuine effort of the part of the watchers to seek out the content themselves. And that's a good thing. You want people to be motivated to seek out your content on their own volition.

With that said, it explains all the possible, and probably, issues being had.

1) Upload Fatigue

Since viewership has fallen, Medrano has been posting more frequently to her channel. Mostly low-effort Vlog content that her main base is legitimately not invested in. People who love musicals and Broadway would recognize the low quality musical fodder Medrano creates. Animation fans, meanwhile, are not interested in celebrity actors being friends with Medrano.

That sort of content is what you see on Adin Ross' channel. If you don't know who that is, think Andrew Tate, but somehow more pathetic. The TL;DR is that his claim to fame was playing a video game with LeBron James' son. That's not what most people are really interested in, unless they carry the same fundamental psychology of the 'Man-osphere" or conservative grifters.

Additionally, these videos don't hit that 10% subscriber base. With 10.4 million subs, her lowest performing videos should still hit at least 1.4million views. Her major sale videos (Halloween and Valentine's mainly) still see this proper 10%

But the Vlog videos...

It isn't surprising that the video focusing on the fans being seen with Medrano and her friends would be the most watched, because of this mindset of piggy-backing self-worth off of someone else's name.

So for the fans that actually like the show, or at least want to support the series, are now being hit with a ton of videos they don't care about. Which can and usually does result in a loss of subscribers or your subscribers turning off their notifications for your channel.

2) The Show Left it's Base

Hazbin being aired on Amazon introduced many people to Vivziepop. There is a sense of quality that one expects from a big name like Amazon, regardless of how most of their shows they directly fund are not that great. But with the series leaving it's base, it offers new fans while threatening, and definitely delivering, a complimentary spike in criticism. Many people who would have accepted a subpar web series are going to be far more harsh of a show with a studio behind it.

With more voices discussing the issues of the series, it teaches people how to identify sub-par content and a lot of those people will lose interest in it once they realize the show isn't actually quality.

There are far more videos discussing the issues with Hazbin than there are of Helluva Boss for this reason, but once the luster is removed from one, inevitably it will impact the other.

3) The Story Sucks

This is obvious as we see more fans becoming less enthusiastic about the story. A badly written show can and will still be loved by those who love it. But it has become more obvious that the writing isn't subversive, just negligent. The characters aren't complicated, they are puppets. The creators aren't creative, they are regurgitating tropes without substance. The emotions are hollow.

But worse than any of that is that the show is contradictory to itself. Which makes the show feel unreliable, but that leads to the last point:

4) Medrano Exposed Herself as an Unlikeable Person

Medrano's description for Apology Tour exposed her to her YouTube base. YouTube is a place that craves authenticity, to the point they have manufactured it. There is a right and wrong way to be on YouTube, and the right way requires a ton of accountability, even when you probably don't owe anyone it. But accountability is something you must have on the platform, and Medrano was a bit too personal in how she made excuses for Stolas while not playing an even hand towards her main character.

That sort of attitude, fictional or not, will result in people turning their back on you. People have lost their whole channels over the same attitude. And the way Medrano handled it was responding to her twitter fandom criticizing the show, letting everyone know she doesn't see anything wrong with the behavior being expressed.

And that doesn't really sit well on YouTube. Not in the communities she's trying to cater to.

And like I said, this is all with a grain of salt as I can't say for certain. To be safe I believe a little of all of these play a role in Medrano's decline, but all of it is just my opinion.

With that said, to see such a steep decline of almost 50% of your audience, while knowing that many of those who are still fans are viewing each episode about 1-2 times a day for about a week, that means 2 in every 5-7 views are the same person. So 8M, while respectable for the platform, is a huge blow.

[mari-lair]

Shit I might want to read this, it looks cute. What is this?

I am assuming you're talking about the manga with a cute art style, the one with this trio, which I love dearly

If so, I am very sorry Anon, my blog is misleading propaganda. None of these three are the protagonists, or even sidekicks to the protagonist, they are either stuck as a gag character for half of the manga, pushed to the side, given an antagonistic role/a role that have a diferent belief from the mcs, or all of the above simultaneously.

This is not their story.

They do eventually get focus, there is a reason I have grown attached to their arcs more than the protagonist's stories, but I am aware most people do not vibe with them. Many actually hate these three. They aren't the heart of this story. If you read this manga, rest assured it won't be for them.

So let me try to give you a more accurate idea of what the story is about without any major spoilers/details.

The manga is called "Toilet Bond Hanako-kun" which is a strange mainstream translation considering "suicide boy Hanako-kun" is the more accurate one. Very different vibes between those two translations, right? That's how the manga feels too, it is a mix of strange and goofy and 'oh, shit got dark'.

The story takes place in a fantasy world where supernaturals and ghosts exist and the trio in the spotlight are these three goofballs!

The red eyed girl is our main protagonist, Yashiro Nene, she is in love with the idea of love, a true hopeless romantic!

She attracts trouble and have a wild imagination, easily getting stuck inside her own fantasies as a form to both find strength and avoid tragedies. She is an insecure but very kind soul with a lot of hope in her heart, but she is not that smart. While she does have her moments, if you dig strategy stories and logical characters this story isn't for you, it's more about whimsy and vibes.

The boy with the cap is the main lead and our titular boy "Hanako." He is a ghost, more specifically a supernatural, which are ghost whose soul got corrupted for staying in our world instead of moving on once they died. He is also the main love interest. A mischievous morally grey spirit with no self-love, no hope, and a lovely mix of being apathetic and caring too much. He is dangerous, selfish, awkward, and possessive and he hates it.

The blond one is Minamoto Kou, an exorcist who never exorcised anything, he is a kind and insecure guy, not very smart logic-wise but his emotional intelligence is surprisingly good (bad habits aside). He is selfless to the point of concern, and starts out determined to be Hanako's eternal enemy but they become besties by accident. He is desperate to help, very determined, very impulsive, very easy to trust. Horrible at being an exorcist.

The friendship between these three is very sweet. You feel like it will be a generic love triangle on their intro but no, they all care about each other. Romance may be a big thing in this manga but this trio are besties.

The humor can be hit or miss, sometimes it's so silly or dry that I love it, but sometimes it's passes my bar and becomes overly exaggerated. Some of the gags just don't land (at least to me), and if you think about the story too much, is not hard to find inconsistencies, but the main sell of this manga is character comflict, which is usually real good, and the supernaturals elements/stories which are the main events of the manga. All the supernatural stories are amazing.

I don't want to spoil the powers and rumors and tragedies but here are some 'vibes' of the supernatural elements.

It is a rollercoaster of cool ideas and vibes and creative ways to explore the wishes and fears of the characters.

A lot changes through the story, this trio won't be the main dynamic forever but it is the heart at the start, and the supernatural stuff is strong during the entire manga! So if the pros sound better than the cons, go check it out!

You can read it: here

[folliesoftheforest]

The Follies of the Forest

What is Follies of the Forest?

Follies of the Forest is an original collection of stories and art by your's truly! It's really just alot of self indulgent storytelling that kinda grew into its own beast (pun ENTIRELY intended XD)

I've added some basic info and FAQs below!

Who are the characters in the icon?

Glad you asked! I'll give a basic rundown of the three main players in this little odyssey, as well as basic gist of the story 😌

The King (He/They/It): The King is an old forest fae that had long since died, and was laid to rest in the remains of their forest dwelling, that is, until a certain someone somehow stumbled onto their resting site...

Sebastian Damascus "SD" Braddock (He/Him): A mythology professor and long time friend/housemate to Shop. He stumbles onto an uncanny section of the woods one day while gathering data and samples for class, awakening something that would change his life forever...

Shop (She/Her/They): A freelancer and long time friend/housemate to SD. She's mostly along for the ride, easy going yet brash, she sticks to SD's side like glue as the two try to figure out just what in the world is going on...

Ok, so what's the setting? Why does it feel like there are some details missing?

So that's where things get a little interesting, in my opinion at least. My writing style focuses way more on character interactions, rather than world building, so there are bound to be inconsistencies or plot holes or just, missing pieces in general. That's not to say that there's no world building at all! But there is a level of suspension of disbelief that may be needed to enjoy what I write ^^' I'm always improving, so I hope you can enjoy this all the same!

Are there any content warnings I should be aware of before reading?

Well, as with anything, there will always be something or another that one person might like that another person might not, but I will try to give warnings prior to each story, but overall, there is alot of peril and fear in a bunch of the stories, but nothing too extreme (which again, is a subjective thing)

Can I send in asks/submissions?

Absolutely!! I love getting feedback on my little passion project! If anything, it would only help push me to continue to share more and more!

[sy3ra]

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ lovestruck!

𖤐 description: love-struck/lovestruck (adj.) experiencing intense feelings of romantic love for someone; besotted or infatuated.

𖤐 ft. lovestruck/lovesick! satoru × yuji's sister! reader (fem)

𖤐 content: lovestruck/lovesick! satoru, fluff, sickeningly disgusting fluff, the gojo satoru falling in love, wholesome, feeding my delulu rn, cringe and cliche sorry, reader is described as very beautiful, almost angelic (the things lovestruck! satoru can see lol), reader is yuji's big sister here (obviously an au)

𖤐 author's note: my writing style is so inconsistent i'm so sorry, everything's just based on my mood lol & my grammar sucks. anyways i'm terribly down bad for a lovestruck satoru so, i'm bringing y'all with me. (p. s. reader is well versed in arts and crafts and runs a small business in australia)

(author from the future: heyy, since y'all agreed that i should post this piece of crap rotting in my drafts, so here it is! so sorry for the late post, i've been busy with school.)

masterlist | requests

reblogs are appreciated!

☆★☆★☆★☆☆★☆★☆★☆☆★☆★☆★☆★

"sensei, can we go to the airport?"

yuji suddenly asks, looking up at his teacher, who was seated beside him. "airport? why do we need to go there?" probed satoru. "my big sister's coming back from australia today. normally, she would only come back for vacation but...now that our grandpa has passed, i guess she just wanted to give me some support." yuji responded with a mellow smile at the thought of his big sis, he's missed her so much.

satoru pondered for a moment, before giving his student an accepting grin and a thumbs up. "i don't see why not! i mean if it's for my student of course i'll accept" he said, pearly whites showing as he stood up, which was soon followed by a gleeful yuji. "really? thank you, sensei!" yuji's smile widened, to which satoru returned with the same gleeful smile. seeing his students happy in this damned world was enough.

☆★☆★☆★☆☆★☆★☆★☆☆★☆★☆★☆★

"so, what's your sister like?" satoru asked curiously, hands gripping the steering wheel as they drove to the airport. (unfortunately, he had to drive) yuji's eyes lit up at this, finding this the best opportunity to ramble about his big sister.

"she's the best sister anyone could ever possibly ask for, except her teasing, she still treats me like a kid even now.." yuji started, obviously passionate about his beloved big sister. "she's well versed in arts and crafts, and even she even opened up a small shop in australia!"  she's talented, satoru thought, feeling the gleefulness of his student from the driver's seat. "she sounds impressive," he nodded with a smile, a pause following soon after. "is she pretty?" satoru felt bold at the moment, not sure why. maybe he was just curious, yes that's it, right?

"very! she's basically the female version of me, sensei!" yuji replied, to which satoru chuckled imagining a vague image of yuji's sister in his mind. "can't wait to meet her then!" satoru nodded with a cheeky smile as they got nearer to the airport.

the weather was surprisingly pleasant, the sun shining down from the large patch of blue sky, covered slightly by white fluffy cumulus clouds creating a breezy atmosphere that isn't cold but not too hot. the traffic wasn't too much of a bother as well, they got to the airport as quickly as they left the jujutsu technical high school.

the only predicament was, the airport is jam packed with people. yuji frantically searched for his big sister, since her plane had landed thirty minutes ago. even with satoru's height, it's still quite hard to look around properly, he didn't quite know what yuji's big sister looked like in person, yuji just described her to be a feminine version of him.

that is until he sees his student's eyes light up, rushing towards someone, almost pushing everyone that was in the way, engulfing a shorter girl with the same pink hair as yuji in a bear hug.

"you've grown so much, yuji! you're taller than me now!" the pink haired woman said, stepping back to look at her little brother (that's not so little anymore). satoru couldn't see her very well, unfortunately. "i missed you lots, nee-san! i brought sensei with me, come meet him!" yuji takes his sister's hand and leads her to satoru, who was somewhere at the entrance of the airport, leaning against the wall.

to say he was infatuated by her was an understatement, hell, he was enamoured by the woman who stood before him. she was short, her hair shone a strawberry pink like her brother's, her eyes, oh her eyes were beautiful, they shone like a pair of gems, and her smile, they were so bright and warm, almost like the gentle rays of the sun. she stood out from the rest of the crowd.

"hi! you must be yuji's sensei. i'm (____) itadori, his big sister. nice to meet you..uhm, sorry what was your name again?" you greeted with a smile, small dimples showing on each side of your cheek as you held out your hand for him to shake.

your voice snapped him out of his euphoria, it sounded so angelic, he wanted to hear your voice everyday. satoru's mind felt absent as he looked down at you, you were really more beautiful than he had imagined you to be.

"sensei?" yuji queried with concern, making satoru shake his head, that same charming and handsome smirk appearing on his face (he was nervous). "sorry sorry, nice to meet you too, miss (____). i'm satoru gojo." he held his hand out as well, meeting yours, his hand was larger than your hand, almost swallowing it whole.

you smiled as you shook hands with him, feeling a small electric spark when your skin came in contact with one another, though you paid no mind to it.

"yuji has told me all about you, mr. gojo! thank you kindly for taking care of my brother. How could I possibly repay your kindness?" you said with a slight bow, making satoru feel slightly embarrassed  (for the first time ever). "no need, i was just doing my job as a teacher." replies satoru, clearing his throat. his adam's apple bobbing up and down as he swallows. hard. why was he so nervous in the presence of this woman who he just met? he was so used to flirting with other girls (despite being a virgin) but.. you. you made him nervous.

"oh I insist, mr. gojo!" you chuckled, lifting your head up, straightening your posture. yuji tugged at your sleeves, making you look at your little brother. "what is it, yuji?" you ask, tilting your head sideways. cute: satoru thought. "i'll go to the bathroom for a bit" yuji says quietly, earning a nod of acknowledgement from his sister. "sensei" yuji gives him a thumbs up before rushing to the nearby restrooms of the airport.

"well that was something" satoru laughs as he stands there, quite awkwardly now that he's left alone with you out of all people. you on the other hand, only laughed at his awkward response. "now, back to my statement: how can i repay you for taking care of my brother, mr. gojo?" you ask once again, you were stubborn like your brother, almost.

satoru comes up with an absurd idea in mind, he hesitates, this was going to be a bad idea. "your number," satoru responds, his throat becoming dry from the sheer nervousness he was feeling. "you can repay me by giving me your number, miss (____)." he continues, it was insane how he was able to keep his smirk up despite his palms beginning to sweat.

you were silent for a moment, your cheeks becoming rosy by each passing second. it wasn't always you encountered a man who was bold and smooth enough to ask for your number, and actually become successful at it. you chuckled as a response, your chuckle coming out as embarrassed instead of happily as originally intended. "really now?" you whisper, your index finger scratching your cheek lightly, before you came up with an idea.

you rummaged through your backpack, finding a thin black marker in one of its pockets. "that's a pretty bold move you got there, mr. gojo" you bite back a smile as you take his left hand and begins to write your number on his palm, you looked so adorable in his eyes, with your half-lidded gaze concentrated on writing the numbers on his skin, your visibly rosy cheeks, and your hair that was annoyingly in the way of letting him see your face in all its glory.

slowly, satoru lifts his free hand up to tuck a thick strand of your pink hair behind your ear, since it was in the way. a seemingly harmless action yet it made you divert your attention from his palm, to his face with slightly wide eyes, and suddenly, your gaze felt like a spotlight, it was as if you were looking at him like he was the only man in the world.

you clear your throat, stepping back to give him his space, and then put your black marker back in your bag, eyes studying the numbers that you wrote on his palm. "there"  you say simply, with a small smile. satoru stands there, seemingly in a state of euphoria for a moment before shaking his head, cerulean blue eyes looking down at the black ink drawn on his skin through his blindfold. a lopsided smirk appearing on his face. "now for some reason, i feel quite special to have a cute girl's number in my contact list. thank you, miss (____)." he responds, his smirk turning into a cheeky grin as he stuffs his left hand in his pocket, careful not to smudge the ink on his palm. after all this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

in return, you huff out a laugh. "(____)'s fine, mr. gojo." you chime in, your voice seemed so soft to him.

"i'm back!" yuji yells, catching the attention of the two adults as her runs back from the restrooms. "why don't we grab a meal? my treat" you say, smiling at the two boys, in which yuji returns with an excited nod. "i don't mind, but it will be my treat, i insist." satoru offered, "oh no need, mr. gojo. i insist." you reply,

"i insist, miss (____)"

"no, i insist, mr. gojo!"

"why don't we just divide the bill?" chimed yuji, making the two adults that stood in front of him think for a moment before coming to a conclusion.

"oh alright, that seems fair." you nod, looking up at satoru, the man nods as well. "then it's settled, let's go!" satoru grins excitedly, staring down at yuji and back to you.

"let's go! i'm starving!" yuji groans, taking the first step forward, and you smile at your younger brother, a sweet, nostalgic smile.

satoru swears to himself that he was going to win your heart, your soul, all of you. you were perfect from head to toe.

and he sure as hell isn't gonna let someone like you go.

— Mayven.

[littlemissonewhoisall]

I think a lot of people who haven't read Batgirl (2000) and only know Cass from her appearances in other characters' books or online summaries miss something very essential about the root of why she's such a good fighter.

Yes, Cassandra was trained in martial arts from birth, learning from some of the deadliest assassins and mercenaries in the world. But that was not the core of what David Cain was doing with her, nor is it the real root of what makes her so dangerous. People who were raised from childhood by assassins to be dangerous fighters are not particularly uncommon in the DCU. Even in the Bat Family alone, Damian, Jean-Paul, and Helena were all trained to be assassins from childhood. The reason why Cass is still presented as a much better fighter than them isn't inconsistency though, it's because their training lacked something very important.

Cass wasn't an apprentice or an heir to David, nor was she a weapon to accomplish his agenda. She was first and foremost a science experiment. David didn't have a kid and decide "now I'm going to make you into a killer like me". He had a child specifically for the purpose of having a blank slate of a person that he could use to test his theories about the role of human body language in combat.

Yes, she was trained to fight. Yes, he planned on having her go on assassination missions. But these were ways to prove his concept, not an end unto themselves. David was convinced that if someone's entire development was influenced by communicating solely through body language that their brain would develop so that they were more adept at combat than any normal person could actually learn, regardless of their level of training, and he was right*!

Cass has mastered a bunch of combat styles, at least offensively, but she's also able to pick up new styles almost instantly, and react defensively against skilled opponents without needing any technical knowledge of defensive styles. She can coordinate and react far more efficiently than is humanly possible for anyone else, because her brain just works differently due to the unusual circumstances of her development. THAT'S what makes her an unparalleled* fighter, not her level of training.

*Shiva being an aberration which should not be counted

[milliebobbyflay]

Okay so I've spent a while thinking about how to word my actual problem with homestuck 2, and the works that make up post-canon homestuck more broadly. I think a lot of people resort to nitpicking bits of awkward writing or art in some attempt to pinpoint a source to an underlying sort of hollow uncanniness, which is funny because homestuck's supposed golden age of acts 1-5 are themselves FAR more of a tonally inconsistent mess of odd character beats, jokes that don't always land, and janky looking art.

Homestuck 2 has been written and drawn by very talented and passionate artists from the beginning, I think the actual issue comes down to a mix between the general pitfalls of hiring fans and the particulars of hussie's outsider background and unorthodox writing style.

First is the issue of hiring fans in general; while it can seem like an easy shortcut to finding talented writers already familiar with the voice and story of the original work, you have to be very aware of how fan culture operates. Beyond the obvious pitfalls that fans are unlikely to approach the story from a detached perspective, there is the larger issue that past a certain point fandom becomes essentially self sustaining. Once a fandom has existed for a long enough period, its most avid members have likely spent FAR more time engaging with other fan works than they have with the original art object. Fandom and the art it produces are, in this way, a sort of a folk tradition; artists are imitating and responding to other artists, characters become archetypes through which to explore certain ideas and dynamics, and the values and tastes of the most prolific and influential fan artists become as inseparable from a participants mental image of the character as the original work itself.

For an example, the affected theatrical mannerisms and cruelty Vriska adopts while in her Mindfang persona have become inseparable from the popular view of the character. Despite the fact that it's heavily signposted as a sort of role playing performance from the jump and she's more or less dropped it by the back half of the comic, it was nevertheless how she had acted in the bulk of her scenes around the time the ur-texts of homestuck fandom were being written, and as so an understandable misread of a character became inscribed into the fandom canon, and by extension her characterization in Homestuck 2.

All of this is extrapolated by the sort of unorthdox, building-the-plane-while-flying-it manner in which Hussie's writing style developed.

Based on his commentary, I get the sense that Andrew is an incredibly clever and thoughtful writer who lacks the theory and vocabulary to precisely describe his process. He tends to communicate in sort of abstract metaphors which aim to bridge the gap in explaining the actual conscious process he uses to plot his stories, but the way he talks about technical nuts and bolts writing craft stuff gives me the impression that his approach is largely intuitive, bordering on unconscious. He's a lot better at describing how he writes than what he writes or why.

You can of course piece a lot this together—his approach to art draws from the tradition of videogame spritework, where the visuals exist as a utilitarian vehicle for conveying information first and a work of illustration only inasmuch is needed to serve the greater story. His character writing draws more from a synthesis of literary fiction, sitcom writing, and "making up a guy" style posting humor, where characters are defined more by their life experiences and underlying psychology than by their goals and values, but also seem to have largely been constructed backwards from a starting point of a funny or interesting manner of speaking. Importantly though, I don't get the sense that these were conscious decisions, just that to Hussie they seemed like the logical way to approach these tasks, and I don't really think he could outline them in a way that would actually help a new team of creators grok how to draw and write in a way that feels like homestuck. I also don't think Hussie could actually explain the psychology that undergirds his character writing, I think he was mostly just drawing on his own life experience and imagining how this sort of character might logically speak and act.

As a novelist, and Hussie is one, both your thought processes and the sum total of your worldview and life experience are just as important to your work as the actual conscious decisions you're making, and I think that where there are gaps in understanding, the new writers are filling in the gaps with both a more conventional approach to the creative process and over a decade of accumulated fanon, and I think that's why homestuck 2 never really rises above feeling like a very well-made fanfic to me?

[my-maehem]

“I’m sorry— who are you again?”

I introduce to you my MC, Hemera! I currently don’t have any L O R E about her just yet but…

I’m sorry but can I brag about my idea of her using her wand as a hair stick!?!? Imagine if I made a custom hair stick wand irl………

Here is the little info I have about her:

She has striking red hair that pairs well with her bright, green eyes. I love using complementary colors.

Unlike the game where we are given a barn owl, if she were to pick her own messenger it would be a tuxedo cat. Feat. My cat Max, he’s an adorable menace.

Very cocky with an inflated ego, she will bite.

Uses sarcasm 24/7, more than likely her coping mechanism.

I actually made her American because I thought it would be a fun idea to have someone with an American accent at Hogwarts. and because I’m American hehehehe.

She likes to keep her hair up almost all the time so I don’t actually know how long her hair is yet…

If you haven’t figured it out yet she is in house Slytherin, although she does share some characteristics of a Ravenclaw.

Definitely gives anti-hero vibes…

OMG I FORGOT TO ADD HER BODY FRECKLES… she has body freckles btw, similar to the freckles Ominis has on his pretty face.

That’s all I have for her currently, I’ll definitely have more details about her later, I kind of want to do more character studies of her and ofc other characters… I also just want to find a simple style I can use, apologize for the inconsistency of my art style, I normally draw realistically and I’m trying to find a simpler style to use for like comic strips or interactions.

Now I gotta draw these boyz:

See yeah! 🍪

[brucebocchi]

Winter 2024 anime, Pt. 2: Mixed reactions, the bench, and the gems

hey y'all, this is also up on my ko-fi! it's free to read both here and there, but i'm struggling financially rn so i could appreciate if you'd throw a few bucks my way if you liked it! part 1 can be found here.

And we're back for part 2! Here's all the new stuff I finished this season, and one more I'll get back to later. As with before, these are sorted alphabetically within each category and are not ranked as of yet.

Also as before, the OP for each series is linked in the title. Check them all out if the header images aren't giving you the right feel for each show, but also check them out because most of them were actually pretty damn good this season.

[Solo Leveling OP voice] LET'S GET IT!

Mixed Bags:

Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable!

Your standard, quasi-harem “easily flustered Regular Guy wins over hot girls just by being really nice” shonen romcom. I really don’t have much to say about this one other than if you’ve seen My Dress-Up Darling, you’ve basically seen this already. The only thing that really sets it apart is the setting.

Tsubasa (voiced by Nobunaga Shimazaki, in a FAR cry from his turn as Mahito in Jujutsu Kaisen) is a straight-laced Tokyoite whose family situation lands him in a small city in the frozen boonies of Hokkaido. While looking for the bus to his new house, he runs into a gyaru in the snowy wild, the underdressed, hilariously-proportioned Minami, and they hit it off. It turns out they go to the same school, there are other cute girls there who take a shine to him as well, it’s nothing new.

I ultimately don’t have much to say about Hokkaido Gals, but I do have a soft spot for series like this, and after reading ahead in the manga I felt obligated to see it through. This is all junk food, but it’s all stuff you’ve seen done better in other series. I also have a soft spot for gyaru in anime and manga, and while I do like Minami just fine, she isn’t Marin Kitagawa or Rumiko Manbagi. I don’t really have it in me to recommend this show to many, though, at least not until another season rolls around, if that ever happens. The manga genuinely does get a lot better as it goes on, but the really worthwhile stuff may not happen until a third season, and I just don’t see that happening. 

The manga has issues that the anime isn’t willing or able to solve, chief of which being the visuals. The art style of the manga is wildly inconsistent, and getting a mediocre animation team on this didn’t help matters at all. While the colors often pop nicely against the pretty, snowy backdrops, nobody looks all that great overall. The characters are recognizable, but they just plain don’t look great a lot of the time, nor do they look consistent from one cut to the next; I said that Minami’s proportions are hilarious, but just as hilarious is how wildly they vacillate from one scene to the next for the sake of trying to titillate the viewer.

My biggest takeaway from both the manga and anime was everything I learned about Hokkaido in the process, and if the series is taking subsidies from the island’s tourism bureau, then it’s a job well done. I want some goddamn jingisukan now. The OP is a great time, though. I’m shocked it took over a decade for us to get a proper “Uptown Funk” knockoff in an anime.

Metallic Rouge

I’ll be upfront in saying that this was my biggest disappointment of the season by far. This show had so much going for it, and what we got was… ugh.

There was an unbelievable amount of promise from the outset: This was Studio Bones’ commemorative 25th anniversary production, and coming from the studio that gave us all-timer adaptations like Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood and Mob Psycho 100, not to mention later works from Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichiro Watanabe (including the Cowboy Bebop movie), you can’t fault anyone for having high expectations. It looked to be a fitting production as well: Watanabe’s influence shines through immediately in the gorgeous, lived-in cyberpunk off-world locales and racially diverse cast. Action takes the form of dope robo-tokusatsu transformation fisticuffs, and it’s entirely in 2D animation to boot. The first couple of episodes were killer, too; everything looked and sounded amazing, and there were just enough plot threads teased out that I just had to see how they’d unravel.

It brings me no joy, then, to say that Metallic Rouge collapses into a jumbled mess. I don’t even want to bother talking about what happens in the show because I don’t fucking care anymore. There are few media experiences more sobering than to have it dawn on you over a span of several weeks that “oh… this isn’t actually all that good, is it?” Episode after episode piles on with sloppy lore, weak worldbuilding, warring factions whose names you immediately forget, pointless double-crosses, and the most predictable twist you’ve ever seen. For a while I was willing to accept the fact that I didn’t know what was going on half the time and expected things to become clearer, but now I’m not entirely sure the writers knew either. The stakes apparently kept rising and everything just kept getting more claustrophobic. I’m glad it’s over, if only because if I had to hear “Clair de Lune” one more fucking time, I was going to go ballistic. 

There are several attempts at emotional beats, as the story is rife with tragedy and sacrifice, and every single one lands with a wet thud. Nobody gets enough time, motivation, or characterization for any of these things to feel like they actually matter, and that’s especially a shame because the finale might have been able to stick the landing if the previous episodes were less dense and better paced. Emphasis on “almost,” though, because just before the season ends, we get the absolute most pointless fakeout I’ve seen since The Rise of Skywalker, which is the lowest point of comparison you can make for any work of sci-fi.

This is especially frustrating because on paper, there is so much to like here. Rouge and Naomi are likable-enough deuteragonists with a fun dynamic, and they’d make easy yuri bait in a better show. The characters are all pretty and uniquely designed across the board, and the overall aesthetic, almost a pastiche of late-90’s anime futurism, is undeniable. The toku suit designs are neat and several of the action scenes are gorgeous. The score and soundtrack are outstanding (except for the aforementioned Debussy indulgence). I have few complaints about how the show looks and sounds; the style is great! All of my issues lie with the substance.

Metallic Rouge may have had all the ingredients, but it just needed more time to cook; whether that would have been by doubling the episode count or by more carefully planning the pacing and trimming some of the fat from the lore, I’m still not sure. Probably both. It probably needed better writers, too. Maybe it just isn’t as smart as it acts and there was no way to satisfyingly resolve the clumsy civil rights allegories that bring it uncomfortably close to the likes of Detroit: Become Human. So all of the above, I guess. I tend to adore stories that involve artificially-intelligent beings developing their own wills and emotions and learning to cut their own strings (the likes of Blade Runner, Nier Automata, even a couple of character arcs in the Persona series), but this ain’t it. I’m not even mad anymore. I’m just disappointed.

If there are two positives that will stick with me, though, they would be the absolute banger of an OP and, of course, Naomi Orthmann herself (pictured above, left). Outstanding character design. I’m mildly obsessed. She deserved a better show.

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer

This one isn’t even worth talking about, so here’s a brief synopsis, then I’ll add some commentary, and then we’ll all move on with our lives. 

Rentt, a beloved but mediocre adventurer in a fantasy town, gets lost in the mysterious labyrinth that all adventurers explore for personal gain, gets waxed by a dragon, and awakens as a shitty-looking CGI skeleton. He notices, though, that he’s able to level up better as a skeleton than he did as a human, and with the more monsters he defeats, the more he evolves into something closer to human. The rest isn’t really worth discussing.

If I’m being honest, I should’ve dropped this show much sooner. It looks kinda lousy most of the time, the plot (inasmuch as there even is one) is boring, character designs are forgettable (except for Rentt’s closest ally, Lorraine, holy hell) and it seems wholly uninterested in actually building its own setting. If it returns for a second season, I won’t be there, nor will I feel like I’m missing anything. Each episode felt like a chore to watch. I probably only saw it through because 1) I liked looking at Lorraine, I know what I’m about, and 2) I didn’t want to lump it in with the shows I did drop. The Unwanted Undead Adventurer isn’t as patently upsetting or frustrating as those three, but it just plain isn’t a very good show.

The Witch and the Beast

This show could have been so much more. I was drawn in by the gorgeous character designs and intriguing blend of Victorian gothic aesthetics and architecture with modern infrastructure, and very quickly disappointed by just about everything else. The first episode is an exceptional proof of concept, and almost everything that follows is an upsetting showcase of what could have been.

The story centers around Ashaf, a languid, chain-smoking agent of the governing church with a big-ass coffin strapped to his back, and his partner Guideau, a snarling hyena in a young woman’s body, as they investigate abuses of magic across the continent in search of nefarious witches. Guideau in particular has a bone to pick with witches, as the body they presently inhabit is the result of a witch’s curse, and they remain in furious pursuit of the one who cursed them. The curse can be temporarily undone by a kiss with a witch, allowing Guideau’s true body, a hulking brute confined to the coffin, to escape and wreak havoc. Meaning that on a few occasions we get a girl-on-girl kiss followed by a big dude wrecking shit. There’s also other investigations of serial killings, necromancy, and a cursed sword, and here’s hoping you like those, because the coffin breaks are few and far between.

This wasn’t great! By the third episode I had the sneaking suspicion that the animation talent on hand just wasn’t enough to support the aesthetic. While the character designs are exceptional, almost everyone looks awful in any shot that isn’t completely focused on them. This is especially true of Guideau, who looks so inconsistently off-model from one shot to the next that I’m still not entirely sure what they’re supposed to look like, and that’s kind of unforgivable when we’re talking about a main character. Everything looks too dim and too shiny at the same time, and action scenes look like shit more often than they look interesting. I can see so many flickers of something excellent (or at least really good-looking) in Witch and the Beast, and everything else that keeps those flickers from actually igniting makes it so much more frustrating to watch. Maybe just read the manga instead; the panels I've seen from it were uniformly gorgeous.

Actually, yeah, you should probably just read the manga, because for a season of anime, the pacing is atrocious too. It’s clearly trying to angle for a monster-of-the-week format, but each of these mini-arcs is a little too dense for a single episode, so multiple episodes are dedicated to these one-off curiosities, most of which do nothing to advance the plot or show off what the show does best. And if one of them isn’t particularly interesting, you’re saddled with it for the next two weeks like you've been stuck munching on a mealy apple. And I know you can only adapt so much in a 12-episode season, but the decision to end the season on a flashback arc and a lore dump was baffling. That’s not world-building, that’s lazy, and it made the show’s existing pacing issues feel that much more inane.

I feel like I was sold a false bill of goods. I can only imagine how the mangaka feels about this. Dull and uninspiring all around. What a waste.

The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic

Isekai, unassuming high school boy gains a unique power, impending war with the Demon Lord, yadda yadda yadda. The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic isn’t anything new or special by any means, nor is it particularly well-animated or -paced, but at its best it’s silly and charming enough that it made a nice, brainless palate cleanser on Fridays.

Usato, your standard quiet high schooler, ends up walking home on a rainy evening with the popular, attractive student council president and VP, when an isekai portal happens. It turns out that it was just the seito-kai that was invited along for the ride (and President Suzune, as it turns out, is fucking psyched to get to be in an isekai), and Usato got caught along with them. When tested for magical aptitude, Suzune and VP Kazuki hit the jackpot with electric and light affinities, respectively, but things go awry when Usato’s reading turns up with healing magic. Terror strikes the palace as the intimidating dommy-mommy Captain Rose barges in to spirit Usato away from his new friends and into her squadron of goons to train him as a combat medic.

As character comedy goes, this one is actually pretty solid at times. Shogo Sakata is plenty of fun as the put-upon, lippy Usato (a much louder role than Chainsaw Man’s Aki Hayakawa), and Atsuko Tanaka (Major Kusanagi herself!) is a blast as the terrifying Rose, an uncompromising slave driver of a drill sergeant with a secret soft side. The dynamic between them is great, too; Usato is over Rose’s shit from the beginning and isn’t afraid to talk back to her, but before you know it, this transforms into friendly banter as Rose clearly takes a shine to Usato and knows he can handle any punishment she doles out. Suzune’s also a bunch of fun now that she’s broken away from having to be the competent, popular girl at school and gets to fully lean into being a complete dork.

Wrong Way also works decently as an isekai, because it makes an effort to stay rooted in high fantasy rather than fall back on JRPG mechanics, meaning there are no stat screens! It also avoids the trappings of wish-fulfillment isekai series by having Usato start out as a regular-ass guy; he’s not a Kirito type, just someone Rose sees as a rough gem in need of cutting. There are no cheat skills or OP weapons or anything, just a kid training every day to get stronger so he can protect the people close to him, and that’s the kind of anime protagonist you should want to be.

For better and for worse, I get serious mid-00s vibes from this one; watch the OP if you don’t believe me. Some of the colors pop uncannily in that early-digipaint-era way, and the animation is pretty middling; the most fluid animation we see is whenever Suzune is acting like a creep. Much like those mid-00s anime, though, Wrong Way may have benefited from being weekly (or twice as long) rather than seasonal. There’s a ton of planting with very little payoff, and it doesn’t feel like the actual scope of the story has even been addressed yet. We don’t even learn why the series has the name it does until someone literally says it aloud in the 11th episode. I may have to reevaluate this season after a possible second, if we ever get one, because this doesn’t stand too well on its own.

Of the anime in this “mixed bags” segment, I’d say I enjoyed Wrong Way the most, but it still had enough problems for me to keep it here. It’s not a particularly bad anime, but it’s not especially good either. I guess we can slot it into what Hazel refers to as “good mid.”

On Hold: 

Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?! (three episodes watched)

Man, what a title. That was the main draw for this BL series, which on paper is basically a gay version of the Mel Gibson vehicle What Women Want. 

Adachi (a surname that will always make me laugh thanks to Persona 4), a gloomy salaryman, has hit the big 3-0 without getting any, and now he can somehow read anyone’s thoughts just by making physical contact with them. Just as he laments that this is his life now, he accidentally bumps into his handsome, popular coworker, Kurosawa, whom he learns has been harboring a massive crush on Adachi this whole time. Well dang, what now? Kurosawa’s a really nice, thoughtful dude, but Adachi’s never even thought about being with a man before! And isn’t there something wrong with already knowing this secret? How can he even go into the office and look Kurosawa in those big, handsome eyes… every single day…

What I’ve seen so far has been pretty solid, if not particularly well animated. The visuals are really my only gripe here; I just put it off for way too long and didn’t have it in me to finish it on time to actually get this thing written and published. Yaoi isn’t my forte, which feels like a shortcoming on my end as a fledgling bisexual, and I’ve already remarked on the solid LGBT representation this past season, so I do plan on hopping back on this one.

I gotta say, the co-leading voice actors put in serious work this season. Adachi is voiced by Chiaki Kobayashi, who continued his role as Stark in Frieren, returned to Mashle as Mash Burnedead, and contributed to Metallic Rouge’s cluttered cast as Noid. Kurosawa’s seiyuu, Ryota Suzuki (of whom I’ll always be a fan for his masterful turn as Yu Ishigami in Kaguya-sama), also held down leading roles in Bang Brave Bang Bravern and The Unwanted Undead Adventurer. They’ve been great in the few episodes of Cherry Magic! that I’ve seen so far, and they’ll be a huge part of what brings me back.

The Gems:

Bang Brave Bang Bravern

I feel like the mark of a perfectly audacious piece of media is in the moments where I find myself incredulously shouting “WHAT THE FUCK AM I WATCHING” at the screen, and Bravern made me do that at least once per episode. I have so many things to say about what makes this show great but all of it can be summed up as “it fucks so goddamn hard.”

A joint military exercise in Hawaii between Japanese and American mech pilots goes south as a sudden invasion by metalloid aliens portends certain doom for humanity. Just in the nick of time, though, a bombastic, autonomous mech named Bravern arrives from space and insists that ace pilot Isami Ao take his reins. Isami reluctantly agrees, and to his consternation, Bravern goes full tokusatsu on everyone’s asses, complete with fully-diegetic theme music, and keeps the threat at bay. With Bravern continuing to pester him to act as a pilot, Isami is forced to take up the mantle of a reluctant hero as everyone rallies around Bravern to save Earth. Tagging along is blond-haired, blue-eyed American pilot Lewis Smith, who gets to live out all of his Top Gun fantasies, right down to the latent homosexuality.

That last point isn’t a projection or anything: This show is legitimately gay as hell, and it rules. Bravern’s feelings towards Isami feel far more romantic than what you’d expect from a literal robot, and his description of how it felt to have Isami pilot him for the first time, as relayed to a grim-faced military council, is riddled with hilarious innuendo. Isami struggles not only with shouldering the burden of needing to be a hero to all of humanity, but also being beset on both sides by a loud, insistent mecha and a dewy-eyed gaijin, both of whom very well seem to want to get in his pants. Intricate rituals punctuate Isami and Lewis’ angsty relationship as these broad-shouldered, muscular men grow ever closer. It’s also worth reiterating that Isami is voiced by Ryota Suzuki, who also voiced Kurosawa in Cherry Magic!, and that may not have even been his gayest role this season. I’m not super well-versed in mecha as a genre, but I do know that there’s a lot of Warrior’s Bond-type stuff in these series, and Bravern lays it on thick. And hard.

This show looks killer, by the way. CGI implementation in 2D anime is still a touchy subject, but Bravern features some of the best I’ve ever seen. Simple cel-shading goes a long way to the point where, outside of some uncanny motion, Bravern himself feels perfectly blended into the hand-drawn animation. Mecha designs range from realistic military-style tech to otherworldly sentient robots, and battle sequences run the same gamut as the stakes rise. As goofy as all of the above may sound, it’s committed to being a grandiose, big-time mecha showcase.

This is as good as camp gets in anime; Bravern does for the mecha genre what Akiba Maid War did for yakuza film pastiche (I have also heard positive comparisons to Samurai Flamenco, which I’ll have to get on ASAP). It’s an excellent mecha show in its own right, and wildly hilarious to boot. Bravern himself is very genre-savvy and seemingly a bit of an otaku himself; he loves acting like a mecha hero, to everyone else’s chagrin. Several of the villains (also mechanical beings, voiced by an all-star seiyuu roster that includes Kenjiro Tsuda, the aforementioned Atsuko Tanaka, and Rie Kugimiya) are total dorks themselves. A CIA interrogator tries to waterboard a mecha at one point. Bravern is a deeply silly show, but its heart is planted as firmly on its sleeve as its tongue is in its cheek: For as wacky as it can get, the story still unfolds with a straight face and excellent emotional beats. 

This show also has the most unskippable ED of any anime since Chainsaw Man dropped a new one every week. I will not say what happens. You cannot predict what it is. Just watch it. One of the top YouTube comments on that video says “When I saw this ending after episode 2, I thought I was going crazy.” That’s a ringing endorsement.

Chained Soldier

On the heels of 100 Girlfriends completely rewiring my brain, I was raring for some more good old-fashioned anime trash. I was told that there would be plenty this season, but you can consult the “dropped” section to see how well that worked out for me. Chained Soldier came with some significant hype, and soon enough into the first episode I realized that I’d actually skimmed through this manga before (don’t ask why), so I was on board immediately. Now here’s some nice trashy fun.

The world is in peril thanks to creatures called Shuuki that can advance on our world via portals from another dimension. Women primarily lead the charge against these monsters, as this dimension produces a special fruit that can lend them (and not men) otherworldly powers to help them in the fight. Yuuki, a perfectly normal young man, ends up in grave danger as he stumbles into a portal, where he is saved by the beautiful Kyouka, a commander who is able to subjugate Shuuki at will and use them to fight others. In a bind, she asks Yuuki if she can subjugate him, which he agrees to by licking her finger and transforming into a monster himself, at her beck and call. Because of his utility in battle, Yuuki is enlisted into her squad of baddies (and also an 11-year-old), living in their home as a caretaker and answering directly to Kyouka as her “slave.”

I know. Hear me out.

I put “slave” in scare quotes because Chained Soldier fortunately isn’t going full Shield Hero on us; this arrangement has a give-and-take baked in. See, every time Yuuki completes his service, Kyouka (or whomever else takes advantage of this anomaly) is compelled to carry out whatever suitable “reward” springs from his unconscious, and this is where the ecchi kicks in. Sometimes it’s a kiss, and sometimes it’s something a little more; the reward corresponds to the length and intensity of Yuuki’s contributions to battle, so the heat can turn up in the form of, say, clothed face-sitting, a good scrubbing in the bath, or some nice, casual CBT. All of this is to say that “slave” is a bit of a buzzword here: It’s more of a dom/sub situationship with a lot of extra steps.

Yes, just about everything that isn’t an action setup is full-on harem trash, and Chained Soldier lays it on thick, right down to full-on nudity. Nothing about this show resembles high art, but I can’t help but admire such a high level of commitment to its aesthetic, including the sleaze. It fully commits to the bit and doesn’t even bother lampshading its own trashiness. Chained Soldier knows what it’s about, and I respect that. It also has the good sense not to sexualize the youngest girl, which is a point in its favor that I can’t award a couple other shows previously discussed.

And while this show is plenty fun, the action sequences often excellent, and the character designs usually delightful, there’s not actually a whole lot going on here. As I said with Mashle, I know that battle manga like this can take a minute to really get cooking, and as I said with Witch and the Beast, 12 episodes may not always be a sufficient runtime to adapt enough to break ground, but the debut season feels more like a proof of concept than anything else. That being said, Chained Soldier’s manga has a very effusive audience, and its praises don’t seem to entirely be about the boobs and butts, so I’ll wait patiently for the second season. I think it’s earned that much.

Delicious in Dungeon

This is the one I’m having the hardest time writing about because it so confidently and so completely speaks for itself that anything I could add would feel like scattering sawdust at the beach. Dungeon Meshi (I refuse to call it by its official English title) is a widely beloved manga among those who’ve read it, and for Studio Trigger to do an honest-to-goodness manga adaptation for the first time might as well be front page news among anime fans. 

The story follows Laios, the deeply weird human hero, as he delves back into a bizarre and mysterious dungeon to rescue his sister Falin from the belly of a dragon, along with his misfit party: The neurotic half-elven mage Marcille, the temperamental halfling rogue Chilchuck, and the dwarven warrior-slash-chef Senshi. The party is frequently low on supplies, so to survive the trip they’ll need to subsist on the most abundant resource in the dungeon: Monsters. Senshi’s aptitude in the kitchen helps ensure that everything is edible and sufficiently tasty, regardless of how nasty the monster it came from may have been. With monster obstructions out of the way and their bellies filled, our party delves deeper into the dungeon as the mysteries deepen in kind.

I love the character dynamics in this so goddamn much. Marcille and Chilchuck are frequently put off by the dubious monster food presented to them, but their consternation is worsened by the fact that Laios’ fascination with the monsters it came from annoys the shit out of them. I referred to him as “deeply weird,” but that doesn’t begin to describe his absolute galaxy brain, and I mean it as a term of endearment. Laios is deeply knowledgeable and curious about the fauna in the dungeon, and not just how they taste: He is vocally curious about how certain monster attacks may feel, sings along with siren songs, and even keeps a hardcover bestiary inside his breastplate. He’s one of those people you turn to if you have a question on a hyperspecific subject, but you have to be careful how you ask it or else you’re trapped for the next two hours. And I love him for it.

Even putting the comedy aside, there is a fascinating human element at play in Dungeon Meshi, and I can tell that that surface has barely even been scratched yet. Marcille is just as dogged in her pursuit of saving Falin as Laios is, maybe even moreso (remember what I keep saying about LGBT representation this season?). Chilchuck continues to convince himself that he’s only in the job for his own personal gain, but you can see that mask slipping. And I still wanna know what Senshi’s deal is. Even with the five major players I listed, there’s an increasingly deep roster surrounding them—showcasing a broad spectrum of races and ethnicities, both real and fantastical—each with their own histories and motivations, and I cannot wait to see how they play out and interact with one another. There seem to be much deeper themes at play here as well as we learn more about perceptions and grudges between differing races, oppositional magics, clashing ideologies, and the monetary incentives that drive both the dungeon’s exploration and its very existence. I’m here for it.

I’ve been holding off on reading the manga until the season is up in June (though I could crack any day), but I know a loving adaptation when I see one. Not that Trigger ever slacks off in the animation department, but they absolutely brought their A-game here. Everyone looks bouncy and cartoony in the way only Trigger can pull off while still looking as close as possible to Ryoko Kui’s source material (as far as I can tell). As with Frieren, the action sequences aren’t frequent, nor are they entirely what the show is about, but they look incredible every single time. And the food, of course, looks incredible, no matter how weird. This is practically a cooking anime and a fantasy dungeon anime at the same time, and both aspects are visually on point at all times.

I’m obviously speaking from my own bubble as one of the six people who still use Tumblr in 2024, but I rarely see new anime make a splash like this on social media every single week, and the ones that I do are usually the monster shonen hits like Chainsaw Man or Jujutsu Kaisen. Dungeon Meshi deserves the exposure and success it’s attained, and I’m excited to see it continue. I’d easily slot this right up there with Bravern as one of the best new anime of the season.

A Sign of Affection

I’ve seen a hell of a lot of shonen slice-of-life romances in the past year and change, so a nice fluffy shoujo like this was an excellent palate cleanser. There were a hell of a lot of Big Action Setpieces and panicky teens and grim dungeon crawlers this season, and at the end of the week I wanted to unwind with a bunch of pretty twenty-somethings falling in love with each other.

The show centers on Yuki, a young woman living with congenital hearing loss, making do at a public college after growing up at a school for the deaf. Though she’s able to get by with LINE messages and lip reading, she’s unprepared when a foreigner asks for help, but she’s saved by a handsome and mysterious young man named Itsuomi. He’s able to help out, and takes an interest in her when he realizes his fellow undergrad is deaf, and Yuki takes an interest in kind because he’s really goddamn hot. It turns out that he’s a polyglot and an avid world-traveler, but sign language is not in his purview. This mutual interest sparks the concern of her childhood friend, Oushi, one of the few people in her life who already use sign language, who wants to be sure that nothing untoward is happening. And it isn’t, because this is just a really lovely, low-stakes romance story.

This is pure, unfiltered shoujo at its best. Yuki’s internal monologue is peppered with flowery prose, and everything and everyone looks soft and beautiful. Fashionable, doe-eyed women and pillowy-lipped ikemen abound (seriously, holy shit, the lips on these boys) as the scope widens and the main love interests’ friends explore their own possible love stories. Itsuomi is very much of the “mysterious boy” archetype you’ll find in romance stories in this demographic, but he’s not hiding any sort of dark past like you’d typically expect; he’s just an interesting guy who keeps his personal life close to the vest. He’s a self-appointed world citizen who loves learning about how people of all cultures live their lives, and in Yuki he sees someone within his home turf who happens to live in her own world entirely. And it’s easy to see his forward behavior with Yuki as infantilizing at first (Oushi sure does, and I’ll get back to him in a second), but as they grow closer Itsuomi quickly becomes much more considerate of her boundaries and learns to accommodate her as he studies sign language and gestures that help ensure her comfort. This is a story about Yuki’s horizons broadening just as much as it is about Itsuomi wanting to be let into Yuki’s narrow world, and that sort of synergy makes for some exceptional romance.

A Sign of Affection deserves some credit for refusing to shy away from Yuki’s disability and making a point of depicting her world as one that does little to accommodate her. Very few people in her daily life ever bothered to learn sign language, she relies on a friend to take notes during lectures, and work is hard to come by. It’s an honest depiction that makes an effort not to be exploitative, which is a breath of fresh air. Not only that, but there’s some interesting meta-commentary in there: The only major conflict in the story stems from Oushi’s jealousy, and his reservations about Itsuomi possibly “taking advantage of” Yuki almost feel like he believes that he’s the only one who knows what’s best for her just because he’s done the bare minimum to accommodate her. He thinks he’s coming from a good place, but he winds up accidentally infantilizing her in exactly the way he thinks Itsuomi might. That’s a particularly interesting bit of irony!

I’ve seen enough shonen-oriented romcoms where an unassuming Regular Guy gets flustered as a way-too-casual girl pushes his buttons (hell, I’ve already reviewed two of those this season), so it’s nice to see the formula flipped for a shoujo as Yuki and her best friend Rin blush and squee over Itsuomi and his coworker Kyouya, respectively. A Sign of Affection isn’t afraid to get a little silly with it, either; plenty of these moments are punctuated by characters’ faces going low-detail or full chibi, and they are cute as shit every single time.

This one was just cozy as hell. If you’re into this sort of thing, swaddle yourself in it and bask.

Solo Leveling

I let this one collect dust after the third episode and didn’t pick it back up until the season was almost up, and honestly, I was kinda dreading it: The trailers didn’t look too promising, the show was slow to start, and it looked like yet another derivative JRPG-style dungeon crawler that managed to get popular. Turns out, nah, this show actually kinda fucks and the web novel series and webtoon it’s based on are popular for a reason. The story is nothing special, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a perfectly serviceable turn-your-brain-off action spectacle with a bit more lying beneath the surface.

In a modern-day South Korea where portals to mysterious dungeons open up and threaten the populace, those who can brave the dungeons, known as hunters, are an invaluable human resource. Once someone is assigned a grade as a hunter, they have that grade for life, barring some rare occurrences. Sung Jinwoo is at the lowest rung on that ladder as an E-rank, incapable of improvement, assigned the epithet “the weakest hunter of all mankind.” He mostly shows up to portal raids as a warm body to fill a quota, and one such job goes haywire as most of the raid party, Jinwoo included, is brutally slaughtered in an arcane secondary dungeon within a portal. He somehow wakes up in a hospital, unharmed, and able to access a digital menu before his eyes that exhorts him to do the One Punch Man workout every day, lest he incur punishment. He gets hilariously chadly in the span of a few days in the hospital, including an inexplicable haircut, and finds access to dungeons only he can enter and levels up within this new system.

This one gets off to a slow start and may have benefited from a longer premiere like Oshi no Ko or Frieren, but once the table is fully set, Solo Leveling really starts to cook. Jinwoo’s titular leveling process is a blast from one fight to the next, and as he moves to work in the dungeons that other hunters can access, it turns out he’s been training with the weights on. He’s suddenly fighting way above his pay grade, and after staving off attacks from hunters taking advantage of portals for nefarious ends, he is recruited by an ambitious corporate scion to make some real coin and establish an independent association of hunters.

While it can feel like there’s a whole bunch of table-setting between portal sequences, it’s some smart worldbuilding on Solo Leveling’s end to establish how portal hunting became a central pillar of this society, and doubly so how political and capitalist interests can leave a wide berth for corruption and bad actors. If there’s money to be made in hunting, of course people will find ways to make even more at the expense of others, both at the corporate and individual levels. There’s a lot of talk in there about “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection” and that… makes me nervous.

Those are terms that can be used to justify immoral actions in the name of money, sure, but Jinwoo also uses them to justify his own process. To what end is he constantly improving himself? Sure, he's doing what he can to provide for his younger sister and their ailing mother, but I see less and less humanity in him as this goes on. There are constant hints at something far more sinister at play than just a dude getting stronger for himself, not the least of which being “the system,” the UI that implores him to keep taking on these “quests.” Something, or someone, seems to be guiding him. Whenever another hunter turns on Jinwoo, of course his self-defense instincts kick in, but system pop-ups instruct him to defeat X number of hostiles like it’s a normal video game scenario. There’s something eerily depersonalized about these encounters, despite them being full-on mortal combat, that gives me serious Ender’s Game vibes. Consider me intrigued.

I’d heard that the Solo Leveling manhwa’s main draw was its visuals, and though I had my doubts early on, I'm sold now. This is a pretty solid presentation! Hiroyuki Sawano turned in yet another banger soundtrack to punctuate all the action setpieces, helping to stitch together a fairly complete tapestry. Said setpieces are exhilarating and almost impressively bloody, and while the animation is nothing impressive in the day-to-day, it goes absolutely batshit when the gloves come off. Movement is inhumanly fluid and the visuals can go into the same loose, psychedelic territories we’ve seen in the likes of Mob Psycho and the second season of Jujutsu Kaisen. If this is the new meta for shonen action, I’m not complaining.

By all rights, this is a pretty decent show, but if I’m being honest, this one just hasn’t stuck with me much. And that’s fine! Sometimes I just wanna see some nutty action stuff and move on with my day. Solo Leveling hits that spot perfectly, and I'll be right back there when it returns for its next season.

‘Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess

I was surprised to learn that the gag manga this is based on, with such a seemingly simple premise, has been running for well over 200 chapters and counting. As the anime progressed, I was far more pleasantly surprised to learn that it actually works.

In a standard anime fantasy world where the forces of good are fighting the demonic Hellhorde, an unnamed warrior princess and her talking enchanted sword are taken prisoner and subjected to torture as they’re squeezed for intel. Said “torture,” as the title’s scare quotes would suggest, is mildly unconventional, as the demon baddie inquisitor, aptly named Torture Tortura, attempts to ply the princess by presenting her with tantalizingly delicious-looking food that she can only partake in if she coughs up some info. Naturally, the princess caves every single time, but her intel is often inane and useless, so the “torture” continues. It’s not all food, though: The princess is soon held out of arm’s reach of adorable baby animals by a gyaru beastgirl, pampered into submission by a spa-loving giantess, and is faced with a tsundere vampire faildaughter, who… tries. 

And you’d think that would be it; the joke wears thin and you move onto something else. Before you realize it, though, something’s changed: The princess and her captors are quickly becoming friends. The premise almost feels perfunctory: These inquisitors are actual people just doing their jobs, and whatever happens after the princess’ myriad confessions is fair game. There’s no malice or animosity, even during the “torture” sessions themselves: Everyone will have a blast and grow closer as friends, and then the princess will voluntarily go back to her bedless cell. It’s like Sam and Ralph after they clock out, except they’re almost always off the clock. Everyone is genuinely looking out for each other in all directions, and the only thing that keeps the torture going is the need for a status quo to return to, even as it grows more elastic. If anything, Time for "Torture" is a good example of committing to the bit without having to necessarily rely on it.

The real irony in all of this is that it becomes increasingly apparent that the princess is having her needs met in captivity far better than she ever did back home. In her proud proclamations about how she’ll never cave to the temptations before her (shortly before she does just that), the princess often talks about her upbringing and her time as the head of an imperial legion, but these stories often betray her lack of friendship or any of the little things that make life worth living. Her life as royalty was one of isolation and deprivation, to the point where she finds more freedom and fulfillment as a prisoner. She truly lives in a society.

Hellholm, on the other hand, has a surprisingly healthy approach to things like work-life balance, food, and leisure, and its most valuable prisoner is no exception. The Hell-Lord himself is a surprising exemplar of this; for as much as he looks and talks like your standard terrifying JRPG demon king, he’s a surprisingly good dude! He looks after his family, employees, and even the captive princess as if they are all one and the same; he exhibits strong principles and an aversion to conflict, sees to his employees' needs and wants alike, and is a supportive, loving father to his unbelievably precious little daughter (who also serves as a “torturer,” to the princess’ delight). He’s also a big time anime dork, and even bonds with a knight attempting to rescue the princess over their shared otakudom before sending him off peacefully. As “villains” go, he’s top tier.

Time for "Torture" is nothing groundbreaking by any stretch, but it’s a cute, silly time and it plays with anime fantasy tropes in the same way a six-month-old German shepherd “plays” with a cheap stuffed toy. How long the premise holds up is entirely up to you, but I had a lot of fun with it. I have no idea how this ended up being one of the better shows this season, but I guess it just scratched the right itch for me.

[support-ponies]

MOD PAGE (mobile friendly)

🐶🐕MOD KIBA!!! ☕🍩

Heyo!!! I am KIBA! You might know me more as Typhwosion! I am she/her but I don’t really care what pronouns ppl use for me. I made this blog to try and make peoples days a bit easier with cute and happy ponies~ I love doggies and coffee and plushies! My favorite ponies are Applejack and Maud and Trixie and I love RariJack💖 I hope I can make your life a bit brighter with my silly drawings~ My husband is Mod Dynamo! Here’s my carrd to all my other socials and here’s all the art i’ve made on this blog. ૮⍝• ᴥ •⍝ა 💖💛💙

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

🐱🐈MOD DYNAMO!!!🧡🍊

I’m Dynamo and I’m here to support the sweetest girl in the world with some Arty McArt™ and stuff. I like cats, video games, and cheese (not necessarily in that order.) My favorite pony is also Maud. If you like my art, get ready to not see much of it here if ya dare. (And here is all the art he’s made on this blog) ฅ^•ﻌ���^ฅ

And here are all the collab art we’ve done together, Dynamo usually does the sketches for these and I ink and color them.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

MOD MORI

Howdy everypony! I’m one of the new mods, you can call me Mori!

I use He/Him and I’m transmasc + bisexual andddd my favorite ponies of the mane 6 are Fluttershy and Pinkie, though my heart truly lies with Luna. You know how it goes. My sona is named Astral Beryl and I’m hoping to become a geologist and/or voice actor, but for now I draw ponies because… Well I really love to! I hope they can help brighten your day!

Also as a note my art style is going to be… Wildly inconsistent and I apologize beforehand if certain pieces aren’t as nice as others. Such is the way of art and wanting to try new things like drawing more consistently.

o/ Stay hydrated party ponies! Hope to see you around!

ART TAG / MAIN BLOG

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

MOD PIXEL

Hello everypony! I’m Pixel, also known as @fruitypieq :3

I use he/they/lun/luna and my ponysona, Night Peak, uses she/he/they. My favorite ponies are Princess Celestia and Princess Cadance, and of course Sunset Shimmer too!

I am not sure what else to put here but I’m very excited to be here, its nice to meet all of you! I’m excited to start drawing your requests and I hope I can help make your day even a little better!

If you enjoy my art you can find more of it on my main blog, or on my art blog, @fruitypieq-art! Have a wonderful day everypony!

ART TAG / MAIN BLOG

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

MOD WILLOW

Hiya! I’m Mod Willow! I use any pronouns and so does my ponysona, Cece! I’m intersex, intergender, transmascfem and lesbian. I am currently trying to get into school to become a therapist but art is one of my biggest passions! I love helping and inspiring people so I hope my art can do that for you all <3

I love all the ponies but my very favorite is Princess Luna, and my favorite out of the Mane Six is probably Fluttershy. I’ve been in the fandom for about 12 years and I’m very happy to be contributing to it in any way I can!

Have a lovely day and stay mindful!

ART TAG / MAIN BLOG

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

MOD APPLEJACK

Hi everypony, I’m mod applejack! I’m a 22 year old mlp superfan who has a special passion for G1 although all gens have a place in my heart. I love to cook, read, and draw for others. My other special interest besides mlp is beekeeping; I’m actually a certified beekeeper myself! I’m so happy to become a part of this amazing blog and support those who need it<3

ART TAG / MAIN BLOG

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

MOD FAELING

Hi all! I’m Mod Faeling! I go by Fae or Faeling, and my pronouns are she/her. I’m a 30 years young autistic artist who has a love for helping bring positivity to others! ✨

My ponysona is goes by Star Blossom with she/her pronouns!

My favourite generation is Gen4 and my favourite MLP is Fluttershy! I love how gentle she is and her love for animals, it matches my personality so well!💕

I am happy to be here, I have a love for drawing positive art, as I do the same on my own social media’s art accounts but not just MLP characters, all sorts of different cartoon and anime characters with positive quotes!

I’ve always wanted to help others in some way and doing things like this has always made my heart feel like I’m doing something good in the world, you all deserve encouraging and positive words to get through your days! 💕

If you end up liking my art, you can always find me at @faelingmagic on tumblr or all my other socials at http://linktr.ee/faelingmagic

I look forward to drawing for you all!

ART TAG / MAIN BLOG