Japan Sinks 2020, an extremely dark and upsetting anime, aired at exactly the wrong time - no one wanted to watch a story about a hopeless, fictional 2020 during the REAL 2020. It's certainly well done, with a unique and darkly-atmospherically-appropriate art style, though a few of the subplots are a bit strange.
Every arc ultimately leads us somewhere better (as in, things get better for the characters), only to very quickly lead us back into the darkness. Things always get worse. Although there is a sense of an optimistic ending, it's not what I felt upon completing the show. It mostly left me feeling
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Jan 11, 2024
Tensei shitara Slime Datta Ken
(Anime)
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Slime starts off as a pretty decent Isekai. Season 1 especially started off really strong - it felt kind of like a progression / cultivation / LitRPG, with an incredibly OP character who slowly builds a community. It has levelling up, skill strengthening, ally recruitment, and town building - the kind of storytelling I find oddly compelling! I couldn't put the first 15 episodes down AND it was really funny!
However, the show pretty frustratingly and quickly devolves into totally unnecessary fan service (later with a loli character, which is a hard no / red flag for me), and the plot becomes way less interesting ... 
Jan 11, 2024
Dragon Ball Z
(Anime)
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My very first serious anime love - as a kid, I would have given it a 10. I even made my first website about DBZ using Adobe Pagemill when I was 8 (it was, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the internet of the time, an image gallery of content not yet aired in North America). I have a lot of love for this show - it was genuinely the coolest thing I had ever seen at the time. And it got me into reading French (and is why I read all my manga in French to this day) - a particular feature of the history of official
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Jan 11, 2024
Arc the Lad
(Anime)
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When I was 12 years old, watching torrented anime for the very first time - you know, anime that wasn't dubbed, that wasn't on YTV, that wasn't Pokemon or Digimon or Dragonball (or even Gundam Wing), that was probably a fansub - I thought that Arc the Lad was the absolute best thing I had ever watched. It was doing something with animation and storytelling I had never seen before!
But! My close friend - the one who torrented it, the one I forced to watch it with me - insisted it was bad/that other anime series were significantly better, while I continued to insist ... 
Jan 11, 2024
Fate/Extra: Last Encore
(Anime)
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I have a lot to say about the Fate franchise, but this is probably my least favourite completed series (though there are some worse OVAs or specials). Just complete nonsense. Released as a 10-episode series and a 3-episode follow-up, I wanted to watch this recently (as with all things 'Fate' beyond the original series) because of my time spent in Fate Grand/Order (the mobile game). It had Nero and Drake, characters I enjoyed in the game, but that's about it. The nonsense here is much more nonsense than even typical Fate shows, and the direction is interminably slow. It's one of those shows that just
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Jan 11, 2024
Tenchi Souzou Design-bu
(Anime)
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It's a silly edutainment show about a team of designers to whom God (a fussy client we never see) has outsourced the creation of animals. The show both revels in design-focused humour (clients are the worst) and teaches you about the biology and physiology of various animals (in way more detail than I would have expected); it actually doesn't feel like it's aimed at kids?
It's also very much a series of vignettes within and across episodes, where the continuity is mostly about the relationships between characters, who are really diverse and fun. There's some nice gender expression diversity (i.e., a super soft and sweet ... 
Jan 11, 2024
Pure fluff filled with trash tropes (VR video game world, OP MC), but done well and so very wholesome. The MC (a sweet and simple girl) hasn't played an MMO before, and proceeds to break the game by playing super atypically. Feels a bit like litrpg given progression, with more absurdity than usual - less 'progress,' more 'breaking' (going a bit too far sometimes, but mostly very fun). The core of the show is a series of female friendships - not often the focus of what otherwise comes across as some kind of shonen. And every episode ends with her fan club (veteran MMO
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