Anime winter wrap-up

It's the end of the winter anime season... well, technically, Metallic Rouge has one more episode coming on Wednesday, but watching Metallic Rouge has been like reading someone's unedited first novel, and I doubt the finale is going to change that assessment.

I went back and realized I didn't post about what I was looking forward to this season, what with everything going on. Aside from Metallic Rouge, there were two supernatural shows with 20th-century-ish secondary-world settings. The Witch and the Beast is edgy grimdark about hunting and killing witches, and Delusional Monthly Magazine is a Fortean comedy. After a couple of episodes of The Witch and the Beast trying way too hard to convince the viewer that it was an important thinky show which was trying to tackle big issues by showing lots of young women being mutilated and killed, I was ready to drop it. Delusional Monthly Magazine, though, really found its footing after a couple episodes and became my second favorite show of the season after Undead Unluck.

Undead Unluck just got wilder and wilder, and better and better, though I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone as their first shonen action-adventure show. Unfortunately the start-of-episode recaps got longer and longer too. I'd rather have had it skip a week a few times.

I also watched the second half of The Fire Hunter, which carried over the great story and terrible production values from the first. I hope the book it's based on gets a professional translation someday.

And then there was the rest of the current season of The Apothecary Diaries. I love the historical setting and the mystery-solving, but the budding romance was extremely tedious, I desperately want the male lead to vanish forever and be replaced by someone more interesting, and I did not like aspects of the wrap-up of a certain major character's story toward the end, where someone who is supposed to be an intelligent grown adult is excused from everything by suddenly being portrayed as a helpless man-child. Overall the series has been kind of like junk food or easy-listening music: tasty in the moment, but unsatisfying. And yes, I'll probably still open another bag of it when the inevitable next season comes around.

Looking to spring anime

Anime spring is coming! Tomorrow, in fact! If you're looking for an exhaustive list of what's coming, you can choose from ANN's sober list of upcoming releases, Scamp's always entertaining season preview, or this YouTube playlist of trailers which was assembled for a watch party at the Animoo Chat Discord server. (Skip to #2 for the first actual trailer.)

The thing I'm most excited about this time is Train to the End of the World, which combines three things I reliably like: trains, weird low-key post-apocalyptic stories, and Yokote Michiko as head writer.

Next up is Karasu wa Aruji o Erabanai (no English title yet because no English-language stream has been announced), about courtly maneuverings in a parallel Heian-era-like world of crow people.

Then there are a whole bunch of things which I think might be good and intend to check out: the Spice & Wolf remake; Wind Breaker, this season's winner for Most Unfortunate Title, which is actually some kind of shonen battler with high school delinquents; Astro Note, which involves an unemployed cook and some aliens undercover as the operators of a boarding house; Tonari no Yōkai-san, which looks like a slice-of-life about rural Japan and the mythological creatures living there; Go, Go, Loser Ranger!, a satire of tokusatsu superhero shows; and Mysterious Disappearances, a contemporary urban fantasy about guess what.

And I'll probably check out Touken Ranbu Kai, even though I don't expect it to be good, just for nostalgia's sake because I watched all of its predecessor back when I was doing the simulcast column for Amazing Stories.