i'd describe myself as something of an introvert Fenrir

c... couldn't happen to me......................

It's the first Big Media Post of the year! Let's keep "consuming media" in 2024!

Manga

• Kageki Shojo!!
  • I read up on the manga after having watched the anime, and it's just so good. Story of a plucky tall girl joining a fictionalized Takarazuka-equivalent acting troupe. Digs into both the joy and the pain of acting and fame. I love Sarasa Watanabe she's one of my supreme goofball comfort characters.
• Inside Mari
  • God this one fucked me up. A take on the classic 'what if you woke up as a cute girl' gender swap trope, this manga engages a lot with both the general inherent horror of that premise as well as serving as a sort of personal interrogation of gender identity on the authors' part. An extremely heavy read but a worthwhile one.
• Welcome Back, Alice
  • Like Inside Mari, this feels extremely like Shuzo Oshimi using familiar 'gender comedy' tropes to dig deeper into his own relationship to gender and sexuality. Have not finished this yet.
• There's Weird Voices Coming from the Room Next Door!
  • A short but extremely cute and sexy yuri harem manga, about a girl who moves to the city and finds that her next door neighbors are a pair of sexy friends with benefits who pull her into their world. It's a good afternoon's read.
• Kaguhara's Fetish Notebook
  • Okay hear me out - yes this is about a girl with a 'scent' fetish creeping on her classmates, BUT its treatment of that is extremely funny. Lots of ridiculous visuals in this.

Anime

• The Witch and the Beast
  • god i'm disappointed. i love the source manga here, but this adaptation is just extremely poor. it's good to see Guideau and Ashaf animated at all, but the shots and pacing of the anime are just real weird and feel completely off. maybe it'll improve????
• Kageki Shojo!!
  • As mentioned above, I love this. the anime covers the first few volumes of the manga, i hope they end up adapting more of it in the future.
• Doctor Elise
  • Unintentionally goofy isekai about a surgeon in a sorta-fantasy world practicing medicine. It's kinda trash but I must watch regardless.
• Metallic Rouge
  • the most important thing an anime can do is let you know when the moment has arrived for fighting, and this one absolutely does that. more seriously - it's neat! the world and story are interesting, the animation is nice, the girls are cute. lightly yuri vibes but i do not expect that to go anywhere (would be nice to be surprised though)
• Delicious in Dungeon
  • hell yeah here it is. one of my fav ongoing manga finally gets adapted. the anime is.... Completely Fine. weirdly, episode 3 stuck out as being way higher animation quality and more expressive (more Trigger-y)... i don't know why they're not just doing it like that all the time.
• Bang Brave Bang Bravern
  • holy shit this came outta nowhere for me, but it's great. just.... very very gay giant robot stuff. extremely silly. two buff soldiermen and a super robot in a love triangle. it's great so far.
• Perfect Blue
  • i hadn't ever actually seen this before! god it's so good to watch a piece of animation that actually knows how to use the camera as a storytelling device. need to check out the rest of Satoshi Kon's stuff that i haven't yet seen.
• Yurikuma Arashi
  • it's fun, it's goofy, it's playing with a lot of very over the top yuri language - everything is absolutely fuckin covered in lilies. it's no Utena, but what is? lots of good Ikuhara visuals in it, we absolutely got a few big crazy staircases.

Books

• A Wizard of Earthsea
  • man i wish i had read this growing up rather than a bunch of other shitty YA fantasy stuff. absolute classic, if you want a "wizard coming of age" book this is the one to start with.

Games

• Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade
  • okay so.... I have in the past been a FF7 hater, and I still maintain that it's not as good as 8 or 9. but: i finally got around to actually playing the remake and i like it a lot, it's good, it's doing interesting things with the notion of handling the impossible task of remaking one of the most beloved games of all time. a remake about being a remake. excited to play Rebirth soon.
• Final Fantasy XII: Zodiac Age
  • i love Ivalice, i love the world, the visuals, the designs, etc., but this game is kind of a slog to play? could not really get into it. there's just way too many "big hallway dungeons" up front, and the party members that aren't Balthier and Fran (who are incredible) aren't doing it for me.
• Dragon's Dogma
  • i've started Dragon's Dogma up like five or six times at least and i always kind of fall off midway in. it's great, it's a good time, it does a real good job of capturing a specific kind of dungeon crawly adventurey vibe, the systems are interesting to work with and the game allows for a wide range of shenanigans. i dunno whether i'll finish it this time, but i do want to pick up DD2 so i'm at least refamiliarizing myself with it.
• Turnip Boy Robs A Bank
  • big fan of Turnip Boy, love that he didn't pay his taxes and i love that he's robbing a bank. game is a sort of quasi-roguelite that is more about doing specifically targeted short runs than trying to beat a big dungeon. very cute art and writing.