That sounds rough
Curiously, it was the previous chapter that really hit me, because my dad was like Naruto's mom, except that he alternated presuming my inevitable failure with haranguing me for not trying.
On a broader note, this series impresses the hell out of me. Who would've expected early on that it was going to turn out to be so emotionally complex?
Not quite either one, or maybe a bit of both.
Kasane Teto is a virtual singer, using a piece of software called Utau.
Briefly, the way it works is a human voice is recorded making every possible phoneme, then each phoneme is keyed separately in the program, so an end user can put together strings of phonemes to form words and phrases, and by adjusting their pitch and timbre and tempo and so on can make them into songs.
So it started with a human voice, but it's all computer generated.
Hopefully that's all, and she's gotten the message that he definitely is trustworthy (even Grieja is trying to bring her around).
I was just wondering, because it seemed like such a cliffhanger, if there was some reason she literally couldn't tell him - like revealing the secret would break the spell - and I just didn't remember that part.
I can't remember - is there a reason for her to not tell him?
Yes - Kaede is fully aware of and embarrassed by the prospect of "various things."
I count that as progress
Well, we finally met the tanuki family. I liked it all in all, and now Yachiyo has an assistant, and I assume the whole family is going to stick around. And Yachiyo passed a second mission - I'm assuming there's an overarching plot involving those.
Interesting that this episode was set 50 years after the last one.
I've been resisting wjs018's predictions of mood whiplash in this series just because I'd rather it not, but then they went ahead and threw a mostly implied bit in with the human ship, then made it explicit in the post-credits scene. Ah well.
The OP is still oddly clunky, but it still makes me smile anyway.
I love ARIA. To me, it's the perfect iyashikei - it's just beautiful snd calm, and Akari's entire purpose in life is to share happiness. And Alicia is the archetype ara ara onee-san.
The only series I'm following so far this season is Apocalypse Hotel. Last week's episode was fine all in all, but it did an odd thing. They showed the OP for the first time, and it was uncomfortably dissonant - both downbeat and off-key, and ultimately sort of dirge-like. But it was disconcerting enough that it has to have neen deliberate, and it sort of fits, because at the point we picked up the story, both the hotel and the MC have just about run their course, and have just at this late stage found a glimmer of hope. So I suspect that as their fortunes improve, the OP is going to evolve to reflect it. Or at least I hope so, since that would be awesome, and without something like that, the OP will just remain inexplicably awkward.
As far as day-to-day viewing goes, I started off the week with season 1 of Baka to Test. It was fine but sort of oddly dull. I'm not quite sure how it managed that, since all of the individual parts seem like they should add up to more than that. The setup's interesting and the characters are relatively well developed and the art style is intriguing and it's consistently funny, but it still somehow manages to be sort of drab all in all. The subs were sort of meta-amusing though - very much "localized," and by era as well as place.
Then after a bit of wandering, I watched Saekano Or more precisely, I watched half of Saekano, then dropped it. It was strange - the "boring girlfriend" of the title was the only engaging character in the whole cast. She's intriguing and distinctive and very much her own character, while all of the rest are just awkward conglomerations of tropes that aren't even internally coherent. I never got a sense of any of them as distinct, recognizable individuals - they were just sort of blank ciphers assigned some combination of stereotypes - and their actions never seemed to spin off from their characters, but to just be whatever was necessary to move the plot along. And most notably, the qualities and actions assigned to the MMC tended to be tedious, insufferable and obnoxious, in addition to arbitrary, which is most of what led me to drop it.
Then I ended up on something only sort of anime-adjacent - Pantheon - which was excellent and highly recommended, but not technically anime, so I guess I'll leave it at that.
One of the creepier manifestations of his profound mental illness.
As I just noted in another response, I immediately heard the OP as an overly earnest and depression-prone robot a century out from human contact letting go, to the best of her very limited ability. I thought it was brilliant.
ETA: The more I think sbout it, there are two notable things about that OP - the song was both down tempo and off-key, and a number of her dance moves actually required a partner.
How awesome would it be if, by the end of the season, the song was sweet and light and she had a partner?
I'm okay with that. It feels a bit too rushed and incomplete and open to be really satisfying as an ending in and of itself, but it works overall, and effectively says, "Now go read the LN."