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

If it’s not specified, the time period covered in this post is from the 23rd of November 2020 to the 21st of December 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…

(I’ve been in a big Thinking mood lately…can you tell?)

• Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!: where LOVE is everything! by Shiroyuni (The Limitless Imagination) – Boueibu is one of my mainstays, although it doesn’t often get much love within WordPress. Thus, seeking out bloggers’ old Boueibu posts from prior to my move here in 2017 is always a treat.
• Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun!: Now I Have Something to Look Forward To by Irina (I Drink and Watch Anime) – That “something” is, of course, a 2nd season in spring 2021. As for the anime itself, you might remember I made a post on it a while back.
• Taking a Look at the Top 9 Isekai Anime by Yomu – Isekai anime are a dime a dozen, but have you ever wondered which ones are the most popular? This is a list you can really debate about.
• Anime Hajime Review: Mr Love: Queen’s Choice by LofZOdyssey – This series went under the radar when it aired last season, possibly because it’s a Chinese joseimuke game which tries to give you both hot guys to romance and supernatural plots, but it escalates quite quickly. If you haven’t seen the anime or played the game yourself (it’s available on the Play Store with an English translation which is kinda funky but does the trick), then check out thsis review and see what I mean.
• What Determines How Long Our Anime Fandom Lasts? by Yumeka (Anime Yume) – As 2020 comes to an end, it’s once again time for introspection and way too many bloggers’ round-up lists (of course, this one runs every month, so don’t count this in there…). With so many things coming to an end in my life (and not just the year), it’s food for thought – what if I wake up one day, like I did with Katekyo Hitman Reborn, and not like anime anymore?
• 5 Manga I’m Currently Obsessed With by Steph (Two Happy Cats) – …and sometimes you just need a light listicle. To be fair, Shuumatsu no Valkyrie recently got an anime announced, so maybe it could be counted as “predicting the future”…?
• No, Alternative Media is Not Creating a “Post-Literate” Society | Electric Editorial by Chris Voyager – As much as I liked to read (note the past tense) and as much as I prefer physical books over digital ones, there’s not a lot of reasons to read when basically everything these days is digital, especially post-COVID…
• Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle – Comedy Done Right! by David (Another Anime Review) – Have you been keeping up with Maou-jou de Oyasumi this season? (Then you’re better than me.) Why’s it so fun? Read and find out.
• Embracing Every Stereotype and Reviewing Magic-kyun Renaissance! by Shoujo – Shoujo made her comeback to the blogosphere lately, so I’ve been interacting with her more. Maybe one day we could talk about husbandos together…? (Who knows? I’d be open to the opportunity though.)
• The Multipotentialite Curse by SimplyMK – “What do you want to be?” For someone whose Twitter description is “Dabbles in a lot of things, excels at none of them”, it makes sense that my answer changed several times during the course of my education. Noting what happened this year and this month, this post came at exactly the right time.

Spellbook Offerings

#AniTwitWatches (Kanon)

I also joined #FightingEvilByGroupwatch in the middle of the month, although that’s a Twitter exclusive.

• Kanon 4 – 6
• Kanon 7 – 8
• Kanon 9 – 10
• Kanon 11 – 12

Other Posts

• Ode to Anime Studios – Lidenfilms
• A Guide to Anime Social Media
• The Perfect Man (and Other Questions Relating to Hot Guys) – Just to put the icing on the cake of Scott’s husbando posts.
• Weekly Manga Reads (…and Then Some)
• Do “Seasonal Gems” Even Exist?

Current Obsessions

• Spotify Wrapped: I’ve checked out this year after year for basically 5 years now, although Spotify suddenly made it a big deal to use the phone app for the first time…which is slightly annoying. My music taste gets reshuffled when I hear some new cool-sounding stuff or when I find a new artist to listen to, to the point where I started a “new music to listen to” playlist this year to clean out years of accumulated songs (…and HypMic drama tracks). I’m hearing a bunch of things that came out during/after lockdown now, instead of filling it up with AMQ results…so things have drastically changed in my On Repeat.
• Podcasts: Speaking of which, I only listened to 2 podcasts on Spotify this year: Seiyuu Lounge (from The Hand that Feeds HQ’s founder/content creator…who has an accent fairly close to Irina’s) and the Hypnosis Mic aftertalk (associated with certain livestreams I normally don’t catch, due to timezones and experience with Boueibu‘s livestreams telling me they’re mostly fine to skip), so when it asked me to pick my favourite podcast, there was basically zero contest. Sometimes while I’m reading or writing blog posts, I’ll have these as background noise. I only got into these fairly recently because the latter started in October and I discovered the former around the same time. At the end of last year/start of this year, Hypnosis Radio was on Spotify, so I was kind of expecting that to be mentioned in Wrapped, but it never showed up. (Hypnosis Radio is obviously a Hypnosis Mic radio show, but it notably had a few injokes which carried to the rest of the series, such as Gentaro’s favourite dinosaur being the ankylosaurus.)
• Graduation: I mentioned here I’m basically done with my studies. Certainly enough, I passed everything enough that I can graduate in absentia for now (I had no choice, due to COVID). There’ll be a digital ceremony and a separate physical ceremony when they can hold one.

Coming up next…

• It’s the end of the year and that means more Christmas-based torture (?). This being a year without much cheer, I’m not feeling the holiday mood…I’ll probably just do the end of year round-up this week, since it’s too late to start.
• 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. If you’re wondering why I haven’t worked on it for months…it’s over 100 episodes total and gets bigger every week. I burnt myself out watching Re:Zero, the Heaven’s Feel movies and Genei in November, so mustering up enthusiasm for a single non-HypMic episode is hard these days. However, now I’ve gotten past Sherlock’s debut in Yuukoku no Moriarty, I may be able to heal from it faster than I think I’m capable of (although I should be careful, lest I fall right back afterwards). That, plus putting Kanon and Sailor Moon first and general malaise (as noted previously), means the number of episodes I need to catch up on just keeps snowballing…
• By the way, Kanon is not in my wheelhouse, which already makes mustering enthusiasm for it a bit of a slog (interaction, the sense of accountability and the fact I haven’t seen anything that makes me want to ragequit/sleep are what compel me to continue), but each Kanon #ATW takes up a big chunk of my day…normally around 9 am – 2 pm on Tuesdays all up…because it’s normally 3 episodes each, unlike previous #ATWs, which were 2 each at the most. Interacting with everyone’s tweets takes several hours due to how some people don’t have their content up until hours after I’m done, even after I procrastinate. Doing 2 #ATW watches back-to-back on the 15th (even if one was a skim-through to refresh my memory and put placeholder content) was really taxing and wiped out the time around 11 am – 2 pm plus 5 pm – 7 pm (that equates to approx. 1 hr per ep.), so hopefully I manage myself better in 2021…