Digicast Episode 6: Summer Wars 2: Revenge of AngelaAnacondamon (The Adventure Movies)

Buggy, Chris, Tom, and Maduin deal with Diaboromon attempting to sabotage their podcast as they finish off the Digimon Adventure continuity with Digimon: The Movie(s) and Revenge of Diaboromon. Tom has not seen the uncut Japanese versions. Maddy has not seen the dubbed movie. Buggy is angry about geography, and Chris just wants to have a Shocking Night, Fucking Night (Rock and Rool!).

The Lain Test

In that lull between the Spring and Summer 2016 anime seasons, in which the old shows are ending but the new ones have not yet begun, I took the opportunity to finally watch Serial Experiments Lain. Now, Lain is a fantastic show, but it’s one that’s incredibly dense, surreal, and confusing, and I found it hard to watch more than one episode at a time. However, it’s one that I kept wanting to return to regularly. Then, when the new shows started airing and most of them were bad, I found myself partway through the episode thinking “I could be watching Serial Experiments Lain right now instead of wasting my time with this drivel.” I shot a few tweets off expressing this sentiment, the idea got picked up and used as a discussion point and episode title on the Anime Insiders Podcast, so I guess now the Lain Test is a thing that I want to try to flesh out a bit more.

MeganeToast Episode 1: Baccano!

Chris steps into the host seat* in the first episode of the new show MeganeToast, in which Chris and Buggy choose a randomly-selected anime to talk about in-depth. In this first episode, they discuss Baccano!

*This may or may not consist of Buggy gushing about Baccano for 3 hours and then making Chris edit it in his place.

A Love Letter to Mafuyu

WARNING: this post will be NSFW. The writer has attempted to lean away from it as much as possible, but due to both the subject matter and the character featured, discussion of sexuality is unavoidable. It will contain links, images, and text related to sex. You will likely find it weird, awkward, and a little uncomfortable. Your opinions of the writer may be tarnished. If any of these things are things you don’t wish to see, please turn back now.

Falling in love is weird and painful. Falling in love with a fictional character is really weird and really painful. But there are few things as painful or as weird as falling in love with a character from animated pornography.

Re:Zero – Earning its Reputation

Re:Zero isn’t a show that should work on paper.

After all, it’s yet another light novel about a genre-savvy protagonist who ends up in a fantasy world and ends up surrounded by a bunch of cute girls. Nothing we haven’t seen multiple times a year for the past few years. Even on paper, its gimmick doesn’t seem particularly fresh or groundbreaking. It’s a Groundhog Day loop, a type of narrative so common that I can refer to it as a Groundhog Day loop without having to define the term for most readers. What’s more, the characters aren’t particularly well-developed or compelling, and there’s a whole lot of ugly CG.

And yet, somehow, it works. Somehow, despite it being like so many other soulless things we’ve seen before, the show is actually–against everything I assumed–legitimately compelling.