Anime

I really like this quiet little scene in the middle of episode five of Ruri no Houseki:

What’s being said here is unimportant; it’s the body language I wanted to show. The way Ruri, the blonde girl in the middle, acts towards Nagi, the woman to her right. She leans towards her seeking protection from the mild joke Yoko, the other woman, is making at her expense and ends up laying on Nagi’s lap as the sun goes down. That’s the behaviour of a child with their parent or other trusted adult and it sums up the relationship between Ruri and Nagi well. Ruri trusts Nagi to the point that she can act like the child she is, completely comfortable with her. In turn, Nagi remains the adult she is, not afraid to scold Ruri when she needs it, as in this scene from episode one:

At this point Ruri and Nagi had just met. Ruri liking jewelry but not the prices she needed to pay to buy even small jewels, came up with the cunning plan to go hunt for them up in the mountains, where she ran into geology student Nagi. As Nagi takes her along further up the mountain, they come across a sign forbidding entry. Ruri is all for ignoring it, but Nagi pulls her straight. If Ruri wants Nagi to help her, she needs to obey the rules. A very mature way of setting her boundaries, letting Ruri know the consequences of her actions and trusting that Ruri herself is sensible enough to do the right thing. When she does, it’s not mentioned again.

This is not the sort of adult/teenager relationship you see much of in anime. Anime parents tend to remain in the background, while in a slice of moe hobby series like this, when adults share the stage with their teenage protagonists they tend to be on the childish side. A good example being Akiyama Haruno from last season’s Mono, a lazy, slightly irresponsible mangaka who hangs around with the cinephoto club to gain inspiration for her manga series about a high school photography club. The only difference between her and the slightly mature for their age cinephoto club members is that she has her driving licence.

By contrast, the relationship between Ruri and Nagi is that of a child and adult. There’s a certain distance between Nagi and Ruri that you don’t see with Haruno and the cinephoto club members. What’s more, Ruri is also far more childish than most protagonists in this sort of series, in a very believable way. She throws tantrums sometimes, gets easily upset when things go badly, has a tendency to whine. She sort of reminds me of one of my nieces, old enough to be in the second grade of secondary education, very much turning into a proper grownup teenager, but who occasionally turns back into the child she was just recently. there are plenty of childish characters in anime, but none as realistic as Ruri. That’s what makes Ruri no Houseki stand out for me.

Back in January I resolved to try and finish watching the following series this year:

1. Mazinger Z (1972), 54 out of 92 episodes to go:
   The super robot show that saved anime from being crushed by the Tokusatsu craze of the early seventies. A kids’ show, but one in which in the last couple of episodes I watched we see a bus full of innocent people being murdered by the bad guys, a plane blown up and crashed and similar violence. Started out episodic in a monster of the week format but starting to deviate slightly from the format in the last few episodes. Not really made to be binge watched which is the problem.
2. Kingyo Chuuihou! (1991), 28 out of 54 to go:
   A comedy series set in a school full of weirdos, done by the same staff who would go on to work on Sailor Moon directly afterwards. I started watching this a couple of years ago as part of a group watch but fell behind and stopped. The problem I have with it is that I like it when I’m watching an episode, but rarely find myself wanting to watch it. It is very funny but also something that I can only watch in small doses.
3. Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (1986), 42 out of 47 to go:
   The third series in the OG Gundam chronology, the problem I have is that it’s a) an incredible mood swing from the previous series and b) its protagonist is an even greater jackass than Kamille or Amuro ever were. I first started watching this in 2020 (!) and never got more than five episodes in, even restarting it last year didn’t work. Just never build up the momentum to get over my dislike of Judau.

How have I been getting along so far? Not that well. Mazinger Z: 39 episodes to go, last watched 17th February. Kingyo Chuuihou!: still 28 to go, no episode watched this year. Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ: 35 episodes, last watched 19th February. Not that much progress then, nothing since February and the year is more than half over.

Back when I first started watching anime, a decade ago, I could almost effortlessly keep up with the ongoing seasonal anime as well as make huge dents in my backlog. Now it’s a struggle to just keep up. There are only so many free hours in the day and there are other things than anime I want to watch too.

When the first episode of Necronomico no Cosmic Horror Show came out it was unwatchable. Because Crunchyroll disdains their audience, they thought that using unedited AI slop was acceptable for us. Below is an example of the level of quality they thought we should put up with:

01: No way! Seriously!?
02: Management cut labor costs again. So now there are fewer softies around.
03: Please, Manager, let me work shifts again.
04: This is the only place that’ll hire someone without a guarantor.
05: Wait, aren’t you a Miko-chan Vtuber?
06: Yeah, but streaming doesn’t make ends meet,
07: so I’m doing my best with this, too.
08: I am barely making any money
09: I heard there’s a curse that hits convenience store workers
10: if their subscriber count goes over 100,000.
11: That’s real Miko-chan. Better watch out.
12: Yeah, totally.

That’s from the very first scene in the episode, where the protagonist is fired from her parttime job. Here’s how an actual human translator rendered it, after Crunchyroll finally fixed it:

01: I’m being let go?
02: Orders from management. They told us to cut costs,
03: so we’re starting with those with the fewest shifts. You understand, right?
04: Y-You can’t do this, Boss!
05: This is the only place that’ll let me work without a guardian’s signature!
06: But aren’t you a livestreamer, Miko-chan?
07: You must make good money from that.
08: Now you can focus on it full-time!
09: Uh, I’m not exactly popular.
10: Oh, but they say there’s a curse that strikes streamers with over 100,000 subs, right?
11: Think it’s for real?
12: You’d better be careful!
13: Yeah, I guess I should…

Apart from anything else, notice how this actually makes sense as English, even before we get to things the AI just plain got wrong? Like, what the hell does “so now there are fewer softies around” mean? Worse is that the AI completely misunderstands who’s speaking when, as e.g. in the third line, when it’s clearly the manager speaking but the AI thinks it’s the protagonist Miko. It does the same in lines 6 & 7, where it has Miko complaining she doesn’t earn anything as a streamer but in reality it’s her manager insisting that she should and that she now can focus on doing so. In other words, the AI straight up hallucinates dialogue that’s not in the original and ignores dialogue that is.

It’s also just gets stuff wrong. Some of those are understandable, like thinking she’s a vtuber rather than a regular streamer, but some are just plain daft and would’ve never been made by a human, like thinking it’s a curse on convenience store workers rather than streamers. A human would know that convenience store workers don’t have subscription counts so are not the subject here, even if the context from the original Japanese was a bit unclear. It also misses that the manager is asking her if it’s true, rather than stating that it is.

The AI also fails completely to translate any onscreen text. The Youtube profile page screenshotted above is subtitled in the human version, but not in the AI one. If you don’t speak Japanese therefore you miss that Miko’s channel has barely 3000 subscribers, far too few to make a living from. This is important information, completely absent in the original subtitles, which is a problem in a show which introduces all its streamers with onscreen subscriber counts.

And the show doesn’t deserve this AI slop. Now that it’s actually understandable if you don’t speak Japanese, it’s actually quite a fun, clever little death game show. Miko, together with dozens of other streamers, big and small, gets invited to beta test a VR game, a game that looks like a knockoff version of Fall Guys. As she races to complete the first level, fun little challenges pop up and the competitors dwindle until only seven, including her, manage to finish it and discover the secret behind the game. There’s a fun little rivalry with the blond, twin tailed girl behind her, who she had a clash with during a streamers’ meetup and the rest of the supporting cast is fun too. Animation switches between 3-D in the game world and regular animation outside of it. The latter is decent if not spectacular.

Now that the subtitle situation is hopefully fixed, I will actually watch this, but be warned that another new anime also uses AI. Crunchyroll and the industry in general will continue to push this unless we have them suffer the consequences for it.

What are you saying. You’re fifteen years old, far too young to act like a grizzled salaryman happy to escape the rat race. What on Earth could you have possibly experienced that makes you want this?

Around 40 Otoko no Isekai Tsuuhan was a terrible isekai series from the Winter 2025 season I shouldn’t have finished, but the one thing it got right was getting the setup done in a minute and a half dialogueless montage. Here instead we get the protagonist Ryo meeting an angel, who spells it all out for him what happened and where he’s going to, none of which is necessary. We could’ve inferred the same from just seeing him in modern clothing wander into what’s clearly a fantasy world. What also isn’t necessary is him spending much of the rest of the episode laboriously working out how magic works, by using the scientific knowledge he learned in his old world. Now this is better than having him be immediately overpowered, but it’s still not interesting and I have no confidence it will ever amount to more than just some basic science facts cribbed from Wikipedia, misapplied.

That’s the frustrating thing about naro slop like this: it’s far more interested in telling rather than showing and often more interested in world building than storytelling. This is fine in light novels or manga in as far as it’s easy to skip this stuff, less so in anime where you can’t. And since most naro authors don’t really have the imagination to create interesting worlds, you get things like this, where you have to spent an episode watching the protagonist hone his water magic and hunting and being hunted by magical monsters. The icing on the cake is when at the end of the episode, it cuts back to the angel who notes that our protagonist is immortal, or at least will stay young forever. That could’ve been a fun little puzzle for our hero to discover! Here just given away because it’s important to never let your audience be surprised by any development in your story ever.

Vexing too is that there are plot developments that feel undercooked because so much time was wasted with all this exposition and world building. For example, as Ryo explores the forest surrounding his home, he comes across a dullahan, who starts teaching him sword fighting. This is interesting, but it’s all done so haphazardly and quickly that you don’t get a feel for why he does this or what’s going on. Ryo has to explicitly say that this is what he’s doing to make sure you understand it.

Similarly, there’s his fight with a monstrous eagle, where he barely escapes by blinding it in one eye. The eagle comes back in a mutated form to take revenge and this could’ve been the highlight of the episode, a measure of how much Ryo has grown, but the pacing is horrible and it’s over before you know it, leaving it as just one more incident. It’s immediately overshadowed by the coming of a dragon, which Ryo had just learned are natural disasters you cannot possibly survive. That would’ve made a good cliffhanger, but instead this dragon turns out to be the chatty, misunderstood kind and all the tension is drained from the episode again.

In all than, this is the anime variant on those Netflix shows where the characters tell you what they’re doing on screen, just in case you’re busy cooking spaghetti for dinner and not paying attention. Something that’s there to be half watched.