Well well well. Here we are again. Wednesday has arrived, and as you all know, the astral spheres have clearly designated this of all days to be the chosen day of seasonal anime reflection. And on the third day, God watched Naruto, and it was good.

As far as this week in particular goes, the anime is doing pretty all right at the moment. This continues to be a season that’s sorely lacking in my kinds of character dramas or theme pieces, but fortunately, its top contenders in other genres are impressive enough to keep my interest anyway. My Hero Academia absolutely killed it this week, and while Megalo Box wasn’t at its best, it’s still maintaining a polish of execution and sturdiness of storytelling that make it an easy watch. And as long as I have Yang Wen-li mildly commenting on the inherent inhumanity of war, I’ll probably be okay. The cartoons are doing pretty alright, and I’m eager to talk about them. Let’s start with some megalo boxing and run this week down!

Megalo Box finally pulled back just a tad on the execution this week, offering an episode that was a bit more reserved in its animation while still offering plenty of thrills. In addition to just being a fun adventure, Megalo Box is turning out to be an unexpectedly distinctive showcase for a variety of animation styles – after the first two episode’s emphasis on pose-to-pose movement and the third’s looser, more character-driven cuts, this episode seemed to prioritize active camerawork and post-processing, conveying through the camera’s swoop the momentum it couldn’t evoke through active animation.

While the show’s execution was almost as compelling as ever, this episode’s focus on ringside discord between our three leads felt a little weaker to me. Megalo Box is unashamed to embrace a simplified, iconic storytelling style, and that normally works out perfectly well, but when it comes to more personal moments and character turns, that tendency towards archetypal beats can make it feel somewhat emotionally flat. The shows Megalo Box is aping established specific kinds of cool that, while certainly prioritizing cool in a general sense, also expressed a sense of individuality. Megalo Box is missing a little of that individuality for me, so I’d like it offer some genuinely unique-to-this-narrative personal moments or speeches to give me something to hang on to.

Meanwhile, My Hero Academia offered its first top-tier episode of the season, elevating Midoriya’s big fight into what was very likely the most visually stunning episode this show has ever seen. The episode’s first half was a lot of whatever that mostly just reminded me how much worse some things are in animation than manga – I’d basically breezed over all the crappy spinster gags regarding the pussycats in manga form, but having to listen to someone slowly read out all those lines is a lot more frustrating. But as soon as we got to the battle, holy shit.

In the manga, this was already one of the best fights of the story so far – not only was it visually astonishing in its own way, but it’s also essentially the moment Deku really “becomes a hero.” Not just inspiring his friends, but actually physically and psychologically saving someone else, and playing the role for them that All Might played for him. It’s always been an emotionally anthemic moment, and brought to life through this episode’s gorgeous animation, it easily rivaled moments like Deku and Todoroki’s battle. My Hero Academia can at times get a little groundless in its thoughts on the nature of heroes, but watching Deku frantically strategize with two broken arms, or apologize to his mom as he experienced his final moments, articulated the madness and glory of what he does in the starkest possible terms. This was easily one of the fights I was most looking forward to in animation, and holy crap did this team deliver. My Hero Academia continues to rise above my expectations.

Hinamatsuri’s fourth episode was unfortunately its weakest, offering the lamest collection of jokes the show’s put together so far. It wasn’t an actively bad episode or something, but there were a fair amount of sequences in this episode that relied heavily on absurd reactions to situations that just… weren’t all that absurd. The gags also seemed a bit slower-paced than usual here – sequences like Hina’s brief band membership and Hitomi falling asleep on her feet were built up far too much, and the punchlines simply couldn’t follow through. On the plus side, the show is as strong as ever when it comes to the found family stuff, and the sequence of Hina temporarily being kicked out of the house was touching on both Hina and Nitta’s sides. Hina’s deadpan and Nitta’s bluster each mask their affection for the other in a very endearing way, leading to some of the show’s best moments being payoffs like Nitta acknowledging Hina’s new vase. Hinamatsuri is still a good show, this just wasn’t a great episode of Hinamatsuri.

Fortunately, Legend of the Galactic Heroes had another fine episode, and seemed to reveal its own philosophy on all this galactic-scale bloodshed for the first time. In short: it sucks. If any character is the true authorial voice of Galactic Heroes, it’s Yang, and he certainly made that voice heard this week. From “only losing armies need heroes” to “should we be praised for killing millions of enemy soldiers?”, his frustrations with war and his country were clear in every conversation this week. Based on the classically “evil” nature of empires and their lofty rhetoric about freedom, the show up until now could easily have been read as favoring the alliance – but no, the alliance is just as hierarchical and jingoistic and fool-lead as the empire, they just have better marketing. Galactic Heroes is certain that the true enemy isn’t those who wage war wrong, but those who seek war as a route to power, and this episode made that argument in stark terms without ever feeling either unrealistically didactic or even oppressively dour. Yang’s a great lead, this is a fun story, I’m having a very good time.