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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Autumn 2021 First Impressions – Mieruko-chan

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Miko is a seemingly ordinary girl whose daily life would be familiar to most. She wakes up, goes to school, spends all day in class, and then takes the bus back home again. As uninteresting as that may seem, Miko’s days are defined by one very specific quirk of hers – she’s able to see and sense apparitions all around her, wherever she goes.

It’s all that Miko can do to keep herself from running away screaming at every turn, but she has come up with a way to cope – as long as she doesn’t acknowledge these supernatural beings or let on that she can see them, she believes that they’ll eventually leave her alone. However, keeping up this act may be more than she’s able to bear.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Summer 2021 First Impressions – The Duke of Death and His Maid

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: The duke of a certain villa is cursed such that anything he touches dies in his hands. Yet his flirtatious maid, Alice, sometimes gets much too close for the Duke’s comfort, and often acts in a way meant to specifically get a rise out of him. It’s not that he dislikes her attention, but he’s terrified that with one stray touch, the duke might accidentally drain the life away from the one person who seems to want to be around him.

When his childhood fried Phillip asks for a meeting, the Duke is momentarily excited. Phillip was a handful when they were both young, but he also never judged the Duke. Unfortunately over the years things seem to have changed, and Phillip arrives with an entourage of guards and seems terrified to be there. It turns out that he was asked by the Duke’s estranged mother to see if the curse had somehow been lifted; if not, then she plans to pass the family title down to her younger son. The Duke wishes more than anything that he could be normal. Not so much to retain his title, but to be able to live among other people and to put a ring on Alice’s finger by his own hand.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Summer 2021 First Impressions – The Case Study of Vanitas

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: TBA (a second cour has already been announced)

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: The vampire Vanitas was born under the inauspicious sign of the blue moon, causing others of his kind to shun him. In order to seek revenge, Vanitas created a powerful grimoire with the goal of eliminating other vampires. Noé, a young vampire, travels to Paris in search of this grimoire when it suddenly falls into his lap (in a manner of speaking). As Noé attempts to help a young woman who has collapsed on the deck of the airship he’s riding to his destination, he’s attacked by a young man in black who comes crashing through the windows of the airship.

The woman is a vampire who’s been attacked by a malady that steals vampires’ true names, thus corrupting their power. The brash young man in black uses the power of the grimoire he holds to heal and return control of her body to her. He claims to be a vampire doctor operating under the name “Vanitas,” although he was given this name and the grimoire from his master who formerly held both. Is Noé’s encounter with this Vanitas fate or luck working its magic? As Vanitas hassles Noé to become his meat shield, he wonders just with whom he’s become involved.

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Anime Reviews First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2021 First Impressions – Mars Red

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 13

Source: Stage Production

Story Summary: Major Maeda returns to Tokyo after several months and is assigned to the task of interpreting whether a captured vampire might somehow be recruited as an ally in tackling the country’s quickly-emerging vampire crisis. Misaki was an actress, killed in a freak accident during a rehearsal, then mysteriously revived as proven by the stigmata on her tongue. Her mind appears to be frozen in place at her time of death, as she portrayed the titular character in “Salome;” her communication is mostly limited to recitations of lines from the play, though she seems to take an occasional direct interest in Maeda. Maeda encounters a mysterious, youthful actor named Deffrot before learning that Misaki has escaped her confinement. He encounters her just as she speaks her final soliloquy and allows herself to be burned to ash in the morning sunlight.

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Reviews Short Takes Simulcast Reviews

Winter Simulcast Check-In, Week of 1/17/2021

Hi, all. This post should be significantly shorter than the previous check-in, mostly because I’m just cleaning up a few episodes of shows that hadn’t had second episodes at the time I wrote the first post (or which I cut for time and my own sanity). If you’re a new reader, it might surprise you to know that I do actually like to write things other than episode reviews! Yet, I find it helpful to go through the process even if writing about it isn’t as interesting as it could be (though maybe some folks out there find it interesting to read).

I’ll mention this again – these recaps won’t be a weekly feature of the blog, but if there’s an interesting episode of anything in particular in the coming weeks I might take time to write in more detail about that episode specifically.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Sunday, January 10th, 2021

By the time this is posted, it’ll be Friday. This week has been a long one, mostly because I’ve been kind of sick, working from home with no change in scenery, and hoping that I don’t end up feeling worse before I get better. On the plus side, I’ve been sleeping a lot better than I have in a long time. I have a cat, whom I love very much, but she has a bad habit of waking up around 4:30am and deciding that’s when my husband and I should also wake up. She’s also one of the loudest cats I’ve ever had the pleasure to know so there’s no ignoring her when she starts her morning routine. Luckily she’s dialed it back a little bit lately and instead of pawing at my face with her foot to get me up, has been a lot more willing to curl up and go back to sleep on the bed with me.

The better sleep quality has the added benefit of allowing my thoughts to remain more coherent (at least I think they are; the jury’s still out on whether other folks agree). While I still have a bad tendency to get distracted while I’m writing (I’m blaming the internet for being so interesting all the time!), at least I’ve been able to write.

Just as a note: after this batch the premieres start trickling off a little bit so premiere dates might be combined into fewer posts.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Saturday, January 9th, 2021

The first couple weeks of a new anime season sometimes feel like running a marathon – it’s a long haul task of watching new episodes, constructing coherent thoughts about them, and then moving on to the next one in a relatively short amount of time. From the outside it might seem like a pretty easy job to sit at a desk and watch anime, but as a lone blogger it can get pretty intense especially since I’m editing my own posts without the benefit of an outside force reminding me not to use certain pet phrases too much (for some reason, this season has been all about the word “albeit” for me, even though I haven’t used it that much in the past). The urge to self-edit in the midst of the writing process is tempting, because then the second pass takes less time. Unfortunately, it’s so easy to get hung-up on finding the perfect phrasing that I find that methodology to be more limiting. It takes training to let oneself word vomit to the benefit of the final product.

I hope folks are enjoying these little asides at the beginning of my posts; I have a difficult time getting started sometimes, and providing a window into my thought process seems to help me a get into a writing frame of mind. If you’re not keen to read vaguely-related personal things, it’s easy to just click the “continue reading” button and skip to the good stuff.

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First Impressions Reviews

Autumn 2020 First Impressions – Jujutsu Kaisen

Don’t go eating fingers you picked up off the ground…

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 24

Source: Manga

Summary: Yuuji is a high school student with an enviable amount of strength and ability in sports, but rather than join a sports team, he’d rather hang out with the Occult Research Club. It means he can leave school grounds at a reasonable hour, which is important because he spends that extra time visiting his dying grandfather in the hospital. One afternoon, after beating the track-and-field coach at his own games, he rushes away to buy flowers and put them in his grandfather’s room. His grandfather gives Yuuji some advice – do what he can to help people, or else end up dying alone. Unfortunately this fate comes to pass for his grandfather, who then passes away.

As he’s leaving the hospital, Yuuji is cornered by a man named Fushiguro who’s been hanging around the school grounds in search of a cursed object that he believes Yuuji might have. Unfortunately, Yuuji gave it to the upperclassmen in the Occult club, and they’re unsealing it as they speak. They rush to the school, but it’s too late – a lower-level (but still dangerous!) curse has discovered their folly and is now attempting to supplement its own power by consuming the cursed object. Fushiguro tells Yuuji to stay behind, but Yuuji feels he has it within his power to help his friends, so he rushes into the fray. Though he’s able to save the other club members, he finds himself about to be eaten by the creature. He then pulls one last, desperate maneuver and gives himself the finger – by literally eating the cursed finger. This gives him the power to destroy the curse, but has the added terrible effect of turning him into one. Will Fushiguro have to take him out?

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First Impressions Reviews

Summer 2019 First Impressions – To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts

During a protracted civil war that pitted the North against the South, the outnumbered Northerners used dark magic to create monstrous super-soldiers called Incarnates. Now that the war has ended, those Sacred Beasts must learn to make their way in a peaceful society, or face death at the hands of a Beast Hunter. Nancy Schaal Bancroft, the daughter of an Incarnate, turns to hunting the hunter herself. But once she catches up with her quarry, she discovers hard truths about the lives of these Sacred Beasts – ANN

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: In the young country of Patria, a competition for resources pits the armies of the North and South against one-another. The North is vastly outnumbered, but they have a special tool at their disposal – the Incarnates, unholy fusions of man and beast that have unimaginable power. This helps tip the scales to the side of the North, and hopefully, eventually toward peace.

When one of the Incarnates goes rogue, the downside of this incredible power becomes apparent. Eventually, their human souls become unable to fight off the beast personas within, and only death can stop their rampage. Elaine, the doctor who created the Incarnates, plans to kill them one-by-one to prevent anything bad from happening. Unfortunately, after she fires a fatal shot at Hank, captain of the squad, she’s murdered by Cain, one of her creations. Hank miraculously awakens two months later and learns that the war has ended, but the leftover incarnates are causing trouble across the land. He becomes a hunter of these rogue incarnates, in order to stop them from murdering the populace.

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First Impressions Reviews

Spring 2019 First Impressions – Fairy Gone

Fairies possess and reside within animals, granting them special powers. By surgically removing and transplanting the organs of a possessed animal into a human, humans can partially summon the fairy and use it as a weapon. Eventually, such individuals were used for war, and were called “Fairy Soldiers.” After a long war, these soldiers lost their purpose, and had to reintegrate into society. Nine years after the end of the war, Maria is a fresh recruit of “Dorothea,” an organization dedicated to the investigation and suppression of fairy-related crimes and incidents. Even in peacetime, the government is still unstable after the war. Many criminals still have lingering wounds from the previous conflict, and there are terrorist groups bent on revenge. – ANN

Streaming: Funimation and Hulu

Episodes: 24

Source: Original

Episode Summary: Several years ago, Marlya Noel witnessed the destruction of her home village and was one of only two survivors of the carnage. Nowadays she works as security, hoping to meet back up with Veronica, her fellow escapee. Backstage at an auction house, Marlya marvels at the fairy-related artifacts being bid-upon, though her distracting curiosity draws the ire of Free, the man running the security operation. As bidding commences on a page from a coveted underground tome, the action is interrupted by violence from the hand and heart of a beautiful blond woman. Marlya, as she defends the patrons, is shocked to discover that the woman is, in fact, Veronica.

There is no touching reunion, as Veronica seems uninterested in reminders of her former life. In the struggle, both Veronica and Free reveal their own powerful nature, battling one-another via their terrifying fairy avatars. What Marlya discovers is that, as a survivor of her village, she has this ability as well; she inadvertently joins with a fairy primordial when a fairy bottle breaks. As the violence dies down, Marlya learns that her very existence is illegal under the current government, but Free offers her an out; as an operative of “Dorothea,” he helps hunt down and regulate the use of this forbidden magic. Marlya chooses his outstretched hand – for the time being.

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