I wound up just watching two continuations in the summer cour, and then dealing with the household health crisis meant I didn't have the energy to keep up with a continuing storyline for most of fall.
I finished watching
Yatagarasu in the summer, and while the last arc wasn't quite up to the same standard as the main one, it was still the best thing I watched this year, and I am about to become very tiresome by recommending it absolutely anywhere someone implies that they might be interested in Hugo recommendations.
I also watched season 2 of
Oshi no Ko, which is mostly about Aqua acting in the stage play adaptation of a shōnen manga. It was good, it left me wanting more of the story, but on a week-to-week basis it felt like it had absorbed a little too much of the shōnen aesthetic. The run of episodes covering opening night probably took longer in total than the actual play would have, much like shōnen battles that can take five episodes to cover 5 minutes.
I also watched 3 or 4 episodes of
Bye Bye Earth before losing interest.
In the fall, I caught the beginning of the latest season of
Re:Zero, and it seemed fine, and I believe I'll go back and watch the rest of it sometime soon. And in late December, I tried
Dan Da Dan before noping out after episode 2.
Dan Da Dan makes an interesting contrast with
Undead Unluck. They're both shōnen manga adaptations which both came with a reputation of getting good after a rough start, they both start with a male and female hero being thrown together in immediate peril and forced to work out how to make their powers work together while shouting a lot and enduring a bit of forced intimacy. But one of the reasons I stuck with
Undead Unluck was that I was immediately ready to root for Fūko, whereas I don't like either of the leads in
Dan Da Dan at all. Also, while some awkwardness between the characters in
Undead Unluck is a side effect of Fūko's power working best with direct skin contact,
Dan Da Dan is just obsessed with naughty bits and with subjecting its female lead to creep-o-vision camera angles. So no thank you.
My overall top pick for the year is
Yatagarasu, as I said, and if I had to round it out to a top 5, I'd add
Undead Unluck,
Astro Note (shout-out to
this review at The Glorio Blog which pointed out there was more going on than met the eye, without which I might not have gone back for episode 2),
Oshi no Ko S2, and
Train to the End of the World.
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