Anime roundup '19Q2

What a thoroughly dead season.

I tried Senko-san, but when the MC commits code like this

it's clear that he doesn't deserve a fox-loli mother-wife. One episode left me wondering how many sarariman in danger of succumbing to karoshi watching this will be tipped over the edge knowing that they won't be thus pampered when they get home.

From the backlog, Kemikurusa was a more serious attempt to bottle the KemoFure lightning, but it turned out very stodgy, even if there's just enough "WTF is going on?" to keep some interest. The overall low light levels don't help visually, and Kaban's Wakaba's constant "ooh!"ing and "ahh!"-ing get old very quickly. In all, mostly harmless, dragged down by a not-Kaban who pulls plot-convenient chemlixa-magics as needed, and a ham-fisted reveal near the end, before they arrive at what could be Japari Park. It's sad when the best of the follow-ups to KemoFure is a series of doujin strips by Quick Waipa that are doing the real KF2.

I watched the first and last quarters of Beatless, a show that fuses magical girlfriend and magical girl, in a mix of Chobits without the sexuality meets Nanoha with the intelligent devices being the humanoids. In a world where humanoid AI assistants are common, MC becomes the owner of Lacia, one of five special super-intelligent AI girls. when he encounters her in a dark alleyway, and has to take responsibility. Stuff happens like Lacia becoming a renowned fashion model, and a bunch of anti-AI fanatics (backed by a couple of the other special gynoids) taking down an experimental AI politician, then trying to kidnap Lacia (excuses for some Zap! Pow! fight scenes). More stuff happens, which I skipped, and it all turns into a race to get down into the bunker where one of the real super-AIs is housed, and we find out quite how super-intelligent they aren't when the bunker contains warehouses full of different models of household appliances that it needs to examine in order to be able to instruct the everyday household robo-servants in how to use them. Big fight scene, all the special AI girls are terminated, and the bunkered super-AI is rebooted. Life returns to normal.

If only the series had actually bothered to use its premise as more than a fig-leaf for magical-girl fights it might have had some potential. As it was. not only was it more than usually economically illiterate in all the character speechifying, it was clear that nobody involved even understood the premise. The "ara-ara" onee-san household assistant was cute though, and I'd like to place an order for one.

Fune wo Amu made a pleasant change as a series with adult characters facing mundane challenges in the world of work, and a romance that consists of one episode, the couple meet, the next they ride a Ferris wheel together, and then the episode after, they are married. Apart from that, if the series is indeed true to the level of office automation in 21st century Japan, it's a bit of an eye-opener.

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In other news: a glimpse at the possible future of anime distribution came with a series that published direct to YouTube with subtitles, each episode after the first available free for a week. A pity it was just a hose/foot-fetish short series.

And NGE/EoE came to N*tfl*x with a new Khara-supplied and rather literal translation that caused an immense amount of controversy, especially amongst the majority of the audience who didn't realise where the new translation came from, and imputed an agenda to the streaming service,

such as in this scene.

What fun!