Okay, honestly, I just kept forgetting to actually clean up notes to make a publishable report. I do take notes! Not, like, meticulously, just like when I finish reading something I write down my impressions before I put them together for these blogs.
The Water Magician (水属性の魔法使い) is a fantasy isekai anime about a boy named Ryou being reincarnated in the untamed woodlands of a magical world. I decided to check it out because a friend had asked where to find translations of the manga, wanting to read past the anime, but the manga adaptation is currently only about as far as the anime gets into the story anyway. Plus, it has an English dub, so I could watch it while drawing, I don’t know if I would have finished it otherwise. The initial premise is that dead horse of “I just want a ‘slow life,’ but things keep happening!” Not that it’s particularly bad, but you know these guys are all liars, right? You can totally just mind your own business in life, actually, if you want to. The magic system also falls into that notion of incantations being a convention more than a necessity, but people have become overly reliant on them. The series, of course, also has a designated waifu, Sara, an elf who just likes reading books or something; I like her, a shame she’s clearly taken. At least it’s an easy watch, so it’s a 5/10, maybe higher if there wasn’t so much CGI for the monsters and such. The animation for the opening credits is really good, weekly episodes really were the greatest curse upon this industry.
A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof (忍者と殺し屋のふたりぐらし) is a borderline1 CGDCT slice-of-life dark comedy anime about the runaway ninja Kusagakure Satoko and her assassin roommate/handler/girlfriend Koga Konoha. There’s a horrible bit at the beginning about “Leader” living with her “partner” (koibito) rather than explicitly saying girlfriend, trying to allow some ambiguity about whether or not the short-haired woman with the stud earrings going around in a suit complaining about being unemployed but spending more time on pachinko than job searching is a lesbian or not. If anything, all this ambiguity leads to is making it clear Satoko has absolutely no awareness of the world around her, as if getting roped into eight separate attempts to escape the ninja village wasn’t enough for that. I’d reckon this show only isn’t classed as yuri because it isn’t necessarily a romance, because aside from the explicit lesbians, the rest are at least implicitly homosexual, right? Konoha and Satoko are just like a little trauma resolution away from making out on screen for twenty minutes straight. Some reviews I saw complained that Konoha abuses Satoko, which might be the case! I just didn’t think too much about how the girl who kills people for a living treats the walking liability that is Satoko, in part because of the slapstick nature of comedy anime. Anyway, it’s quite funny but sometimes painfully serious, an obvious 6/10.
Chernobyl is a historical drama mini-series about the Chernobyl disaster, primarily following the containment and recovery work of Valery Legasov. As a dramatization of a historical event, I would say it does a wonderful job of balancing historical accuracy and amplifying the dramatic structure. Perhaps most notable is the modifications to Legasov’s character, stripping down a lot of his life to simplify his character, as well as the addition of Ulana Khomyuk as a representation of the multitude of people assisting him as a single character. This obviously isn’t a genre I concern myself with too often, but it was an enjoyable experience. I like the cool, wet aesthetic of the whole series. I feel like I should say something about the music, but I don’t remember anything about it so it was probably quite good? Anyway, 7/10.
Defeated and Captures, This Monster Girl Refuses to Become a Loyal Pet (战败被捉，魔兽小姐不想沦为忠犬) is a gender-bender yuri fantasy web novel about a mimic that takes on the form and regrets of a betrayed imperial prince, Neph,2 who has been turned into a girl in his last moments for some reason. This series is basically as close to lesbian erotica as you can publish in China, with plenty of BDSM (particularly pet play, bondage, impact play, and asphyxiation). Neph is very interesting as a character, she gains some memories from those she consumes, and this frequently affects her personality throughout the story. If anything, it’s a huge shame how little we see of her acting as the original prince, outside of her loathing of both adventurers and the current empire. This also leads to the series almost completely lacking any sort of gender-bender tropes, given that Neph is only briefly confused why she has the memories of a man but not the body of one. Her relationship with Ophelia, more or less the driving core of the story, has some very extreme ups and downs, averaging out to Neph just being a tsundere in denial about how much of a masochist she is. When I say “masochist” here, I don’t mean in the typical “guy who does something even though it’s difficult way,” I mean she textually cums from getting choked and whipped. Honestly, it’s a shame that she stops pissing herself as much in the later chapters. A bigger letdown is that, despite Neph complaining constantly about Ophelia being a “riddler,” the two of them never really open up to each other about anything unless they’re cornered into it, like Neph just never explains why she wants to kill the emperor with her own hands. As you might be able to tell from “the empire,” the world is a bit bland with the empire conducting evil schemes, the kingdom discriminating against demihumans, the holy kingdom built on the church, and the supposedly neutral territory full of adventurers built around a dungeon. The ending feels a bit rushed, but it’s hard to say there’s a flaw in that; it’s normal for the small problems in a story to all share the same larger root, but it is nicer to have some gradual resolution before defeating the big boss. The side stories at the end meant to tie everyone’s stories together are cute, though, I like that Neph and Ophelia start a bakery with their magically birthed daughter. All around, I’d give this one a 7/10, maybe I just think it was really hot.
The Accountant is an action movie about an accountant, pseudonymously Christian Wolff, who does the forensic accounting for various criminal organizations. True to its genre, the movie is incredibly fast paced, interspersed with flashbacks to Christian’s past to explain his situation and behavior. The actual plot is just him trying to do one last above board job before moving on to the next place, but it turns out to be way more complicated. Very exciting, I do just have one question: why would you make a sequel to that? No, I know. I know why. Point is, there isn’t much to say. It’s pretty neat, 6/10.
Daddy, Please Let Me Be Your Fan! (爸爸，请让我单推吧!) is a gender-bender yuri urban fantasy web novel about the great hero Chu Yuanqing getting fired from his job and becoming a magical girl about it. Having saved the world and reset the timeline already, Yuanqing just wants to support his daughter financially after his death, but finding a job that pays well enough for his life insurance policy is pretty tough, luckily he has a transformation skill and can just decide to permanently become a cute girl! Hurray! The plot then centers around the job she finds, being an idol competition show, but it makes it very clear that there’s something off about this show. First, they suddenly introduce international licensing for the idol industry, where anyone getting kicked off this show will be barred from getting a license for life. Then, there’s the psychological cruelty of the show, all of it publicly exposed via live streams before the edited episodes air. Honestly, the secret isn’t that well hidden so I won’t count it as spoilers: the show is for training magical girls to fight off the things that Yuanqing had originally defeated to save the world the first time around. Regardless, magical girl yuri slaps, of course you gotta help “replenish mana” daily~! The other “mystery” of the series is who Yuanqing’s daughter’s mom is, but that one also doesn’t take much to figure out. I don’t care much for mystery anyway, so I give it a 6/10 at chapter 278, might continue it later. Good luck trying to read this yourself, the translator took it down to sell as a series of ebooks on Amazon, lmao.
Transmigrated as a Cannon Fodder Villain? I Became a Yandere Loli (穿越炮灰反派？我化身病娇萝莉) is a gender-bender isekai yuri web novel about a man dying and finding himself transmigrated into the world of a web novel, as the cannon fodder character Chi Xiaocheng, right as she has kidnapped the female lead. Xiaocheng decides that the only way out of the inevitable followup to her kidnapping of Su Tao is to get Su Tao herself on her side… by claiming this was all out of love! Xiaocheng “acts” out the role of a yandere with the support of her very own system, “pretending” to be in love with Su Tao, yet the way Su Tao reacts and treats her still made me really feel that heartache of realizing someone just doesn’t feel the same way about you. This series is basically impossible to discuss without spoilers,3 but I’ll try to keep those to a minimum. I will say, I know it’s part of her “act,” I know it’s all part of a plan, but Xiaocheng’s suicide note made me fucking sob. This series made me cry at least twice, definitely a record. The levels of what is true or not in the story are very fun for a while, until the questions get answered and the series relies more on the relationships than the mystery. The way that Xiaocheng justifies “pretending” to always have loved Su Tao to make her act more realistic, but it just turns out to be the only reasonable way to justify the “original character”’s actions in the first place is just one of the more compelling aspects of the overarching theme that the “original author” could force things to happen but couldn’t force people to feel certain ways. Chi Xiaocheng and Su Tao’s relationship obviously improves over time, it’s a romance, but it loses the spark from the beginning. Su Tao was absurdly innocent at the beginning, it takes 500 chapters for her to realize there’s more to intimacy than kissing and holding hands, but then they just start fucking all the time? I was really hoping for more out of the dynamic where Xiaocheng knows how to fuck but is a bottom, whereas Su Tao is supposed to be the top while not knowing anything about this. Also, Xiaocheng fed Su Tao her blood a lot, but that just stopped coming up? Really fumbled the opportunity for her to appease Su Tao’s obsessiveness by offering some blood, right? Anyway, got bored after reading up to chapter 612, it’s a 6/10, I guess.
Since I haven’t been publishing these as I should have been, I actually have a lot of notes saved up! This is already around 2000 words, so I don’t actually want to publish them all at once! Thus, I’ll just release these week by week catching up on my notes, okay? Maybe next time I can start talking about the other video games I’ve been playing.
This is mostly a joke, it’s basically Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, but the original manga is not published in a Kirara magazine so does it really count? Plus, is murder cute? Only sometimes! ↩︎
The name is kind of complicated, The translations list the prince’s name as Naev and the mimic’s name as Nymph, possibly for clarity. However, there is no indication that she changed the name in any way, not that I read the raws, so I’m just sticking with the middle-ground name of Neph. ↩︎
Like, it’s actually tragic yuri time loop shit, but that’s hella spoilers! ↩︎