Sen

bless this girl

more big media posts. this was a big month for anime, as a ton of new fall season series got started off.

• Manga/Comics
  • Please Bully Me Miss Villainess
    • a webtoon manhua about a girl that gets isekai'd into an otome game as the villainess, and is compelled by the 'system' of the world to bully the heroine. but then, yuri happens. it's very cute, the story is kind of out in the weeds now but i like the main girls and that goes a long way.
  • 5 Seconds Before a Witch Falls in Love
    • Short story collection about a Witch and a Witch Hunter falling in love. nice, but i wish there was more meat here.
  • Marvel G.O.D.S. (#1)
    • read the new Marvel thing from Hickman. it's good, and well-told, but hardly the revolutionary world-changing thing they were claiming. honestly have been falling out of love with a lot of Western comics lately.
  • #DRCL (volume 1)
    • kind of a retelling of Dracula, in manga form. it's very artsy and surreal, with a lot of more abstract/impressionist pages rather than straight plot. there is some Gender Stuff going on here - idk how that's gonna play out, but hopefully treated well.
  • Qualia the Purple
    • hoooooly shit i loved this. starts as the story of a girl who views all humans as robots, expands into a big love story crossing time and space. yuri that goes deep on explaining quantum mechanics. if you like Madoka, you'll probably like this. big recommend.
  • Alcohol and Ogre-girls
    • the story of a shy amateur bartender and an outgoing ogre-girl who can only consume alcohol. bit of a modern/urban fantasy story with a focus on cocktails and girls with horns. very fun.
  • Skip and Loafer (vol 1-7)
    • having watched the anime earlier this year, i had to follow up and read the manga. it's good! high school manga but with a very real-feeling group of characters, one of the few good 'real' portrayals of a trans adult in manga (bless Nao-chan), plus vol 7 ended off on such a big event. v excited to continue with this, hope it gets a second season of anime too.
  • Anemone is in Heat
    • if you want just real solid good genre-yuri, you can't do much better than this. overachiever girl meets sick girl, they develop feelings, and the results are just so incredibly heart-warming and fun.
  • Cheerful Amnesia
    • a goofy and light-hearted story of a girl who lost the past 3 years of memories meeting her girlfriend of 2 years, and immediately falling head over heels in love with her all over again.
  • One Piece (100ish chapters in)
    • welp, after years of putting it off i'm finally reading One Piece. i'm about 100 chapters in so far, and it's fun but feels.... padded? like other manga would have covered more "story" at this point, OP is a lot of pages of "just fights". i read a lot of shonen but i guess not like this shonen. gonna stick with it though.
• Anime
  • I'm In Love With The Villainess
    • have been reading the manga, and i'm very happy to see it get animated, but boy i wish the production was better - this is one of the rougher-looking shows i've watched in a while. at its core though, i still love it.
  • Shangri-la Frontier
    • permit me my shonen indulgences. i'm a huge fan of the manga, despite being generally averse to "power scaling MMO isekai". something about SLF just hits right for me, i can't explain.
  • Migi & Dali
    • hooooo boy what a weird and goofy show this is. twin brothers pretend to be one person, and get adopted by a couple that lives in the same village as the person who murdered their mother. incredibly absurd but played 100% straight. i love this.
  • Undead Unluck
    • Undead Unluck is one of my fav ongoing Shonen Jump series, and this adaptation is great. My one sticking point is, these first few bits of the story are particularly hard to recommend - it gets better I promise!
  • Tearmoon Empire
    • a Marie Antoinette-type gets guillotined and then reincarnated as her 12 year old self, then tries to avoid that fate. does the girl deserve the chop? absolutely. but can she turn this thing around? probably not? just a very fun show.
  • Dead Mount Death Play (season 2)
    • peak is back! i loved the first season a ton, went back and read the manga up to current since then, and now we're picking right back up with season 2 of the anime. the show was already full of a big ol cast of weirdos, so naturally it now ups the stakes by adding a bunch more. great stuff.
  • Stardust Telepath
    • gotta have a Probably Yuri Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, and Stardust Telepath is a pretty good one of those. the Cute Things this time is building rockets. the girls touch their foreheads together to communicate telepathically. it's extremely cute. one of them is an alien.
  • The Apothecary Diaries
    • holy shit yes, it's here. a poisons pervert solves medical mysteries in a historical fiction Imperial not-China. honestly this is my anime of the season so far - just absolutely beautiful, and Maomao is one of my big comfort blorbos.
  • Hunter x Hunter (2011)
    • i started this up last month actually, alongside Media Club Plus. Having already read the manga, i knew basically what i was in for, but boy it's just so good to see these characters animated.
• Live Action
  • Dimension 20: Burrow's End
    • it's very fun that they're all playing stoats, but holy shit this one's graphic. more Watership Down than Redwall.
  • Make Some Noise
    • it's not as good as Game Changer, but it's still pretty funny.
• Games
  • Umineko: When They Cry (currently mid ep 4)
    • i'm still in the middle of this! but wow what an incredible journey so far, i'm extremely invested in this story and these mysteries. love Beatrice a ton she's my favorite (I am nothing if not predictable). excited to continue reading and finding things out and making very wrong guesses!
  • World of Horror
    • the 1.0 release of this came out. i like WoH, but i almost feel like the game is a bit of a waste of its (very strong) aesthetic - the focus on random events, roguelite progression, and disconnected mysteries make any kind of real coherent narrative purely the realm of player invention.
  • Slay the Princess
    • i love this game, and i love each and every Princess. some (Tower) more than others, but they're all perfect and beautiful in my eyes. seriously though this is a great horror love story VN from the folks behind Scarlet Hollow, my other big fav horror/romance VN, with an incredible premise, stellar voice work, and a wide branching narrative.
  • SIGNALIS
    • Creepy scary survival horror, with robot girls. I'm not too far into this yet but have been having a pretty good time. Aesthetics are top notch.

the wonderful thing about Dead Mount Death Play (and Narita's stuff in general) is you can take any side character and feel like they'd be the protagonist of their own story. i wanna know about this grizzled warrior of a reporter, what's his deal?

• Manga/Comics - I didn't start up many new manga series this month so instead here's some check-ins with a few ongoing series I've been reading
  • Ayaka-chan Is In Love With Hiroko-senpai
    • Everyone loves office lady yuri. This one is cute, starts off more gag/comedy but there is plenty of stuff to scream about. Takes "just talk" to its furthest extremes.
  • Dead Mount Death Play
    • I was enjoying the anime so I caught up on the manga - it's good! Very much more explicit than the anime but otherwise generally it's the same, makes me excited for season 2 of the anime in October. Also the name is fun to say.
  • Dandadan
    • Every chapter of this is crammed full of a million insane things, it continues to be absolutely buckwild and constantly escalating.
  • Shangri-La Frontier
    • This continues to be one of my favs, it's a lot of shounen fights but the frequent genre-hopping and weirdness of it makes it stand out.
  • Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou
    • Still the most healing thing on my shelf, I'm working my way through vol 2 and enjoying every page.
• Anime
  • Patalliro
    • This anime is ancient in ways that make it difficult to rec, but it is very gay and you do get to see a lot of bishie boys doing spy shit.
  • After War Gundam X
    • It's a good Gundam! Kind of an alternate world 'what if' spinoff from Universal Century, it really goes deep on Newtype stuff. Pala Sys and Ennil El are my big favs from this.
• Games
  • Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk
    • A dungeon crawler/blobber, I bought this forever ago but had barely played any of it so this is basically a new game. This, too, is yuri.
  • Street Fighter 6
    • I'm ass at fighting games and unwilling to invest the time to learn, but World Tour mode has been fun.
  • Voidigo
    • Of the various roguelite twinstick shooter games, Voidigo is maybe the best one I've played since Binding of Isaac?
  • Chrono Cross
    • I first played this way back on PS1 as a kid, picking it up again now has been a treat.
  • Astlibra Revision
    • Hoo boy this game is weird in a lot of interesting ways. Feels like a sort of maximalist "say yes to everything" style of game design and narrative. Combat is also v satisfying.
  • Nova Lands
    • A pretty cute Forager-like, I haven't gotten super far into this yet. I like having robots running around my island though.
  • Chained Echoes
    • It's a SNES-style retro RPG, the characters and everything seem fun and there are mechs in it, so that seems neat. Have not put a ton of time in yet.
  • Mars First Logistics
    • A very fun physics puzzle funny car builder. Sometimes you just wanna make a goofy contraption and drive it across the surface of Mars for a few hours.
  • Ghost Trick
    • I started playing Ghost Trick last night! It's very good, I would kill for Missile.