#all I've been doing is watching Boruto... and after this sh*t maybe I should just keep watching Boruto.

[millennialdemon]

I know I said I wasn’t going to watch any new anime in 2019 (and evidently I haven’t been watching much anime from past seasons despite saying I’d do that, too, nya)... but listen. The urge to check out all the premieres I possibly can is too much for me to deny! I promise I ain’t liveblogging this horrible garbage, but here’s some first impressions... Round 1!

--To The Abandoned Sacred Beasts

Dull, contrived, and dreadful art, animation, and character designs - but it picked up in the last 5 minutes. Not in actual quality, but just in entertainment value: The “betrayal” was so tepid and the protagonist’s motivation going forward in the series is incomprehensibly ridiculous. Like I’m sorry, I’m supposed to be rooting for a guy named Hank (no offense to any Hanks out there... but oof) who is going to kill all of his comrades because his batshit crazy not-gf who literally shot him with intent to put him down like Old Yeller insisted, based on ONE GUY GOING BERSERK, that it’s The Right Thing to kill everyone? And he’s getting revenge on Cain for “betraying” her by killing her and not going along with the “righteous” plan to mercy kill everyone? 

“I can’t believe Cain isn’t going along with her plan to murder everyone, including me, and him!, what an evil bastard. I’m getting revenge!”

Uh huh... you want me to think Cain is off his rocker just because he did a maniacal laugh, when this girl decided that the only way to fix her mistake of creating human-monster hybrids for war was taking them out back and putting them down. And she’s not even portrayed as unstable or malicious, she’s framed like a martyr, like this is the desperate last resort and she’s so sad about it, when we didn’t see her look for any other solution? And you think I’m going to support a captain who’s gonna turn on all his comrades so quickly at the recommendation of his dead crush, when anyone with a braincell knows the real enemy is war-mongering human generals so eager to toss aside any graciousness to the monster who won their wars for them...

You’ve gotta laugh!

3/10, but upped to 5/10, for naming the villain, literally, fully, and unironically: Cain Madhouse. I stan a King. 

--Magical Sempai

This was just plainly disgusting and wildly mean-spirited; and honestly, you can parse that much just by looking at the poster alone. Ecchi Shinies on top of knit fabric sweater vests of high school age girls... there is absolutely no hope for this. 

Where Dagashi Kashi was wasted potential thanks to awful fanservice and extremely boring hetero bs, the lead Hotaru was at least a competent expert and had a lot of charisma, despite her design that reeks of authorial freakery. The protagonist girl in Magical Sempai not only looks like a h*ntai character plucked from the same set as Hotaru, but her existence is also the literal punch line of the show because of her constant (often sexualized!) failure. And in that way, this title also reminded me of Aho Girl, which is about as bad of a comparison as you can earn because Aho Girl was easily one of the worst - and most overtly malicious and misogynistic - titles of 2017. 

Easy 0/10. Completely worthless and actively harmful. 

--Are You Lost?

Where Magical Sempai sexualized the incompetence of teen girls, Are You Lost? opted to sexualize the competence of high school girls as they survive on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean! Which in addition to being just as awful, was also squirm-worthy for the obvious displays of k*nks, of which I will not detail because they are heinous.

It turns out that women, and even underage girls, can do literally anything, even survive and fight for their lives, and men will figure out a way to sexualize it and exploit them. Male Fantasies Male Fantasies Male Fantasies...

Another easy 0/10 for being worthless and actively harmful, and an additional -2 points for making me feel a vague despair at my own state of being a woman on this Godforsaken earth. 

All of this is to say that Summer 2019 is turning out to be a fucking awful season for anime. So ends the first round of first impressions... see you in a few days once some, hopefully, for the love of God, better premieres air.