Must-read Monthly Monday (Oct. ’20 ed.)

If it’s not specified, the time period covered in this post is from the 21st of September 2020 to the 26th of October 2020.

Other People’s Reads

It wouldn’t be a round-up post without them. However, since I scour people’s archives on a regular basis, these may not even be from the right time period…

  • Animating Halloween | Hellsing Review by Fiddletwix – Man, it doesn’t feel like I watched Hellsing a year ago (lockdown might have something to do with that…). Anyways, Fiddletwix gives some viable criticisms to the series, although since I know Ultimate is out there, I don’t know whether reviews of just Hellsing encapsulate the entire series properly.
  • The “Happily Ever After” Stigma | Electric Editorial by Chris Voyager (Galvanic Media) – I’d never heard of happy endings being devalued in comparison to downer endings, but Voyager explains why that could be the case.
  • Impact Frames by 327 Robots – This was still pretty interesting, because it proves the legacy of older anime tends to show up in kids’ franchises more than it does in all these reboots that have been showing up these past 10 or so years.
  • Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle – Rhyme Anima First Impressions by Steph – If it’s HypMic, for the most part, I’m all over it. Mostly, as someone so deep in the fandom, I like looking at newcomers’ perspectives.
  • Rokuhōdō Yotsuiro Biyori & Breathing Life into What Japan Values Most: Family & Tradition – Anime Review by Neha (Biblionyan) – Neha’s been going through quite a bit recently, so it was a pleasant experience to find this post for one of my favourite anime in my folder. The manga has been exploring characters’ backstories as of late and while it’s not as fantastical as a lot of other things I’m reading, there’s nothing like a stable presence like this to come back to in tumultous times (even if the schedule was knocked back a bit, probably due to COVID).
  • Hai to Gensou no Grimgar | Loved the art style. by Otaku Central – I can’t help thinking back on this between AMQ and watching Re:Zero, which has a similar approach to how an ordinary person from our world survives in a fantasy world.
  • Anime Hajime Review: Fugou Keiji: Balance – Unlimited by LofZOdyssey – Fugou Keiji…is a bit of a complicated situation, now that I’ve finished it. Without spoiling anything in the series or the review, I’d say “watch it if you like buddy cop series (or even Batman, since that seems to be a common comparison reviews I’ve read have made), but prepare to be disappointed”.
  • Hataraku Maou-sama! Review by Annie – You know what they say about adding visual things to your blog posts to entice the reader? Although Annie isn’t really hanging around our neck of the woods anymore (she’s writing for Crunchyroll), she really does have that art down pat. (Depending on your view, maybe too much, but I’ll leave you to judge that.)
  • Ten Thoughts Every Older Fan Has by afanofacertainage – Regardless of the reader’s age, these are pretty relatable. I hadn’t really heard of no. 7 though, outside one Reddit AU (which is a really elaborate version of a chat fic, when you boil it down to its core components) – maybe it’s because I’m fairly sure FanFiction.Net banned those types of fics anyway by the time I was on that site…?
  • You are the protagonist of your own life. by Yomu – Lately, Yomu’s had these introspective posts that hit me where it hurts because if you’re at the end of a certain journey you’ve been on for many years, such as that for schooling, COVID makes you forget that it’s the end of that journey, because it literally could be the end of the world as you know it. It doesn’t sound very anime-related outside of how anime can make people forget to go out and find fun things for their lives themselves, but also Yomu did also remind me of Mikagura School Suite, which…wasn’t the best, for reasons I explain in his comments section.

Spellbook Offerings

Fall 2020 First Impressions

After counting the fall debuts…turns out there were 18 premieres I sampled this season alone! No wonder I normally feel stressed when the season begins!

Other Posts

Current Obsessions

  • …welp, from the posts you can kind of guess it’s the HypMic anime. Although there’s only been a few episodes so far, they’ve already come to occupy a cosy spot as first-thing-in-the-morning watching on Saturdays and I’m committed enough to it that analysing role language in it should be no problem at all (the only problem with said analysis is second-hand embarrassment, the ramifications of which have cost me more time than they should have). The rest of the fall anime was no slouch though, as you can tell, although there’s always something which is a shame to let go of for the season (Golden Kamuy 3 and IWGP were notable in this case).
  • It doesn’t help (?) the last 2 divisions were added to ARB on the 7th of October, but I somehow lucked out enough to get Jyushi and Rei + a Jiro (who I was missing an SSR of to make a full set of the first 4 divisions) before maintenance on the 21st of this month.
  • So that I don’t repeat myself too much…well, I’ve always got some manga at one point or another. (Sometimes I panic that I haven’t caught up, because much like all these AniList challenges I keep talking about, I often think I have more time than I do.) However, Happiness is the first, and possibly only, time I’ve done a simulread and, to my understanding, it goes from the 21st up until mid-November, so I don’t think I can talk about that series until at least next month.

Coming up next…

  • October’s JCS is running right now. I’ll be wrapping up the post soon and put it into the (rather unused) 10 pm slot on Halloween, which would be early in the morning the same day for people on the other side of the world. If you haven’t submitted already, submit using the tweet below and if you have and want to check out the submissions so far, go ahead:
  • Haven’t forgotten the spring 2020 or the summer 2020 wrap-up…it’s just massively delayed, as noted. I’ve only finished Arte, Fugou Keiji, Appare-Ranman and Koi to Producer as I type this, which is why I haven’t put them out yet.
  • For Halloween…I won’t promise anything because that’s a Saturday. I suspect real life is gonna kick my butt in the next month or so, on top of the fact another badge battle is running (meaning I’m watching Re:Zero against the clock), though…I guess that’s saying something, considering real life hasn’t been hectic for the past year or so due to everything COVID messed up.

 

One thought on “Must-read Monthly Monday (Oct. ’20 ed.)”

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  1. Thank you very much for the shout out! 🙂

    Just as a note, I absolutely loved Hellsing Ultimate, and I watched Hellsing back before Ultimate was even a thing (nor did I read the manga – that’s another thing on my to-do list lol) Ultimate definitely fixes nearly every flaw that I pointed out in the original Hellsing, and I won’t deny that, in the process of doing that, it kinda highlights the existence of those problems in the original. When writing that review, I still tried to take Hellsing as a standalone without taking Ultimate into consideration outside of just recommending it in the end. As a standalone, it’s still a ton of fun, but the flaws keep it from really being fantastic as Ultimate was.

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