Category Archives: Episode Writeup

Log Horizon II – Episode 16

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Slow episode this week, as we spent time eating lunch, and then dinner, and then lunch again with Tohya and friends. It always seems a little strange to me that the same show contains both Shiroe’s narrative and the Tohya/Minori stuff – yeah, it’s not like the Shiroe narrative is the height of narrative/thematic complexity, but it feels like this material is aimed at an audience significantly younger than the rest of the show. Are the same people going to enjoy watching Tohya figure out how maps work and also be able to sit still for a twenty minute speech on the double-edged nature of MMO fanaticism? I dunno.

Anyway. Here’s my full ANN writeup on the episode. Somewhat exasperated notes below!

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Parasyte – Episode 15

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Parasyte’s kinda just rambling along at the moment, retreading character points and slowly making its way towards exciting plot beats. There’s just a critical mass a show can reach of touching on certain refrains without further exploring them where it starts to drag, and Parasyte’s about there right now. My eyes were kind of glazed during this episode’s middle sequences, but I fortunately perked up at the ending, as it seems the plot’s starting to kick in again. Go kick some ass, Shinichi. Go do something, for chrissake.

My full ANN post available here. Notes are below!

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Yuri Kuma Arashi – Episode 3

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Time for more gay bears! I did an absurd megapost for last week’s episode, and that’s not sustainable, but I should be able to keep up reasonably-sized writeups on this thing. I mean, it’s really up to Ikuhara, I suppose – I feel like I’ve got a decent handle on the flower/bird/bear imagery at the moment, but who knows where we’ll be five episodes from now. All that we’ve seen up til now could very well be a clever trap, and the bears will end up being representative of late capitalism instead of societally villainized sexuality. Stranger things have happened.

But no use theorizing on how exactly this show will make me look dumb in the future. Let’s get to the bears!

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Rolling Girls – Episodes 1-2

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These were some lovely, lovely episodes. The animation and art design, the fun world, the whole Riot Grrl theme – it’s excellent stuff. I kinda wish we weren’t forced to watch it in Funimation streaming quality, but what can you do. These first two episodes largely just set up the premise, and we still don’t really know what these rolling girls are after, so the real work starts here – but if this show can keep up the idea density and visual flare of its start, we’re in for a fun ride.

My full ANN post is available here. Notes on episode two are below!

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Log Horizon II – Episode 15

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Welp, we’re back with the kids again. This was a slow, slice-of-life style episode, with lots of gags and enjoying food, but it did establish a new character conflict for Isuzu and new overall goal for the younger team. It’s hard to really feel much enthusiasm for a quest that doesn’t have any inherent tension to it, but hopefully the character conflicts will give it some weight. And “go get quest materials to make a bag” is such a boring starting narrative that I have to assume this will go somewhere else eventually… or it could just focus on the concert stuff, I guess.

Anyway. Here’s my ANN post on the episode, and you can check out my rough notes below!

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Parasyte – Episode 14

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This episode felt kinda unfocused, with a bunch of general plot movement taking the place of one focused conflict. The plot movement was decently engaging though, and it’s nice to see basically all our principles continuing to evolve – Shinichi, Migi, and Ryouko all exhibited new wrinkles in their evolution this week, and it’s always pretty great seeing Ryouko handle her baby like a sack of potatoes. Parasyte chugs along.

My full ANN post is available here. Notes below!

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Yuri Kuma Arashi – Episode 2

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Hey guys. I don’t know if I’ll be keeping this up, but I really can’t resist doing a writeup or two for a new Ikuhara show. Almost nothing else in anime lends itself to close reading as consistently and necessarily as his work – he’s basically always constructing a conversation on the level of metaphor and theme, and Yuri Kuma Arashi seems to have almost disposed of the base narrative level entirely in preference to that stuff.

Yuri Kuma Arashi is also a show about bears who are lesbians having fun naked times together. So… yeah. Ikuhara’s definitely decided to embrace his own niche, but I certainly don’t have a problem with that. You can check out my writeup of the first episode if you’d like, as we’re already knee-deep in plenty of potential thematic threads, but who knows where this will all end up. Let’s hang out with some lesbian bears!

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Log Horizon II – Episode 14

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Once again, one of Log Horizon’s one-off diversions ends up being one of its best episodes. This one wasn’t an unexpected character study like William’s speech, though – it was just all the stuff Log Horizon normally does, except executed way better than usual with an entirely new cast. Natural worldbuilding, fun characters, a very cute riff on Journey to the West, and some actually solid fight scenes. If this is a sign of things to come, we’re in for a real treat in this Kanami-Nureha-Shiroe conflict.

Here’s my full ANN post. Notes are below!

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Yuri Kuma Arashi – Episode 1

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Hey guys! So, this isn’t exactly a classic time stamp writeup, but I took a whole damn lot of pictures during the first episode of Bear Storm, and plenty of notes besides, and so I figured I might as well assemble what I do have. What writeups I eventually settle on is still an open question – I might actually be covering this show for ANN (you can check out my more structured thoughts on this episode over there), I might do my own writeups, or I might collapse in a heap if I try to do any more work than I’m currently doing. We live in a world of uncertainty.

I will say I loved this first episode, and that there’s plenty of rich stuff to dig into already, and that it’s clear that Ikuhara hasn’t given up on any of the stuff that makes his work so compelling. Watching an Ikuhara show feels like some kind of thematic symphony – different repeating refrains and meaning-infused symbols all flow past each other and reflect on one another, the variant ideas charging all of his points with the depth of interconnectedness that only narrative can achieve. It’s a hell of a ride. Let’s run this first episode down!

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Parasyte – Episode 13

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And we’re back, with a real sad-sack episode for Shinichi. Kana’s dead, his girlfriend doesn’t trust him, Tamiya is sending private investigators after him… things aren’t going so great for our hero right now. We also got some pretty interesting developments on the parasite side, which I end up spending most of this episode’s article rambling about. Doing a lot of rambling in general at the moment – preview week’s in full swing, I’m alternating between sleeping, doing ten hour shifts, and writing about cartoons, and the weather outside is approaching the opposite of livable degrees. I might be hallucinating, because I’m pretty sure I also watched a show about lesbian bears. G’bye everybody…

Here’s my full post on ANN. Hopefully lucid notes below!

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