Hot tip: it turns out if you drop everything you’re watching except for the really great shows, EVERY week in anime is a great week in anime! So it goes for this particular week, where my likely unsurprising decision to finally drop Angolmois means I’m only watching shows I really, really enjoy. Fortunately for you folks, the less I watch, the more I apparently have to say about it – My Hero Academia, Planet With, and Revue Starlight all left me with plenty to talk about, and I’m eager to get to it. Even without a dedicated character drama this season, both Planet With and Revue Starlight are doing their best to give me meaty drama and thematics to sink into, while My Hero Academia continues to offer a thoroughly engaging mix of sturdy fundamentals and creative embellishments. Let’s start out by exploring My Hero Academia’s uniquely clever adaptation choices, and run the highlights of these excellent shows down!

The latest My Hero Academia played out a hypothetical scenario I’ve long considered to be a neat possibility for shonen manga adaptations, but never actually seen in action. This episode’s battle between Yaoyorozu and Team Ojou was entirely anime-original, but fit naturally into a preexisting arc’s structure, simply because the manga version of this test only covered about half of 1-A’s routes to victory. By covering an assumed (but ultimately not consequential) fight that was breezed over by the manga, the anime adaptation was able to spotlight a few of 1-A’s underserved characters without disrupting the overarching flow of the narrative, and instead actually just leaning into one of the manga’s biggest appeals: the ensemble teamwork of 1-A fighting together to accomplish something.

The fact that this fight wasn’t actually all that exciting almost feels besides the point. It was satisfying to see Yaoyorozu take a direct leadership role, and great to see Jiro have something to do in the first place, even if their battle of wits here ultimately turned out to be a monologue-heavy wait for a last-second reversal. Both Yaoyorozu’s growing competence and 1-A’s back bench in general have been underserved by the manga, and by simply inventing a fight to explain their movement between two points in the manga, the anime was actually able to address those issues naturally. Heck, even this episode’s relative slowness felt like a smart choice in its own way – the next few episodes are bound to be animation highlights, so putting in a dialogue-focused strategic bout seems like a clever way to pull animators without undercutting a fight that needs them.

There aren’t that many points where you can naturally pull off a trick like this, but I’d be happy to see the anime adaptation offer more “also this happened” stories like this and the Tsuyu internship story. Narrative focus is generally a virtue, but so much of My Hero Academia’s appeal is wrapped up in “c’mon, let’s see these lovable kids kick some ass” that I’m always game for anecdotes like this. Cool trick, My Hero Academia.

This week’s Angolmois was mostly concerned with a night raid that was so obscured by this show’s damnable filters and so poorly conceived in terms of dramatic pacing and coherence that I’m happy enough stepping off here. Angolmois has basically just been pleasant-enough filler from the start, and with its narrative sagging a bit and the visual excitement of the first episode unlikely to return, I’ve reached the point where its episodes are starting to feel like work. I also wasn’t a fan of how this episode spent all of its board-arranging time focusing not on tactical battle choices, but on introducing individual super warriors. Angolmois doesn’t have anywhere near the character writing or aesthetic chops to make a show about larger-than-life titans clashing interesting – its main hook was that it seemed to be taking a more realistic and strategy-focused approach to combat, but with that approach seemingly falling by the wayside, there’s not much to hold me here. It’s been pleasant enough, and Angolmois is still a perfectly reasonable show, but I think this is where I get off.

As if determined to clear up any doubts about it being the best show of the season, Planet With went above and beyond this week, offering an episode that didn’t just exemplify all of the strengths of the show so far, but focused those strengths into a genuine human anthem. From Nezuya’s ominous appearance at the clubroom onward, the show slowly circled the truth of what the sealing faction was actually pursuing, leading to that devastating contrast of Ginko explaining that “their price is they steal the heart’s hunger, and its hope” as Takezo sank into one more pleasant fantasy.

Planet With’s economy of characterization is truly remarkable – it only took a couple brief sequences with Takezo to truly humanize him, with standout moments like his photo of Eiko and explanation of how his son still needs him making his perspective and sympathetic nature immediately, viscerally clear. The show thus turned an explanatory sequence regarding the nature of the sealing faction into not just an active battle, but a heart-thumping validation of humanity’s internal fire. Mizukami’s incredible capacity for naturalistic dialogue and characterization doesn’t just make his stories satisfying in a character sense, it allows him to pull off lightning-fast conflicts like this that land as impactfully in personal terms as they do in thematic terms, with the poignancy of the personal stories and the beliefs they reflect each empowering the other. Seeing Takezo smash through the false fulfillment of the sealing faction’s dreams genuinely got me tearing up, and we’re only five episodes in. This show is going to kill me.

Finally, it felt like this week’s Revue Starlight had essentially one specific task on its mind: making sure the audience could believe in the close bond between Karen and Hikari. I wasn’t a fan of this episode’s larger “Hikari runs away and Karen chases her” structure, mostly because it just felt very arbitrary and shapeless to me – these events felt like they took place because the writers decided the two should reconcile in front of the place they first made their promise, not because those events were a natural reflection of ongoing character journeys. That said, I really appreciated the sort of “catching up montage” of conversational fragments that essentially formed the meat of their reconciliation. Shows like this often fail to present motivations or friendships in concrete, personal terms, and this rambling collection of common experiences and news from London and various other banter went a long way towards selling Karen and Hikari as specific individuals who genuinely care about each other.

I also liked how much of the drama outside of those two leaned into Revue Starlight’s general theatricality while also maintaining that personal touch. The little snippets of conversations between this show’s various couples all felt relatively convincing while also playing into the show’s theater drama affectation, which is certainly not an easy combination to pull off. In the end, my biggest complaint was that the central competition still remains frustratingly vague – Karen’s commitment to everyone “shining together” just doesn’t mean anything to me, so all these nice character beats are still kinda dancing around a hollow center. Hopefully Revue Starlight will soon extend the same focus to its overarching themes that it’s been recently applying to its smaller character beats.