First Look! Fall 2022 Anime: All the Rest (Patreon)

I’ve done somewhat lengthy review of Mobile Suit Gundam the Witch from Mercury you can read here and now it’s time to tackle the five  other anime I watched this season!

There’s some anime I chose to save for later, like Bocchi the Rock!  (which I’m watching now and enjoying) and Raven of the Inner Palace,  though I’ve heard great things about it and it’s a rare shoujosei  adaptation so definitely go check it out! I might do a review of that  when I do get to watch it, since it’s been overlooked this season with  so many heavy hitters.

But onto what I did watch!

Akiba Maid War

This  jaw-dropping genre pastiche takes the tropes of yakuza cinema and  applys them to early 2000′s maid cafes in Akihabara locked in bloody  war. Young Nagomi dreams of working in a maid cafe, only to find when  she goes to work for the Oinky-Doink cafe (yes, they’re pig themed) that  the cafe is heavily in debt and rival maid cafes are gunning to take it  down. She’s protected by the deadly 37-year-old maid Ranko, who has a  dark past.

Akiba Maid War is wild from start to finish. It starts  up with shootout where Ranko kills a ton of maids perfectly times to a  cutesy maid music performance and doesn’t let up from there. There’s a  side-splitting bloody baseball episode, a deadly boxing match, and more.  The comedy is endlessly entertaining- the way the maids continue to use  their cutesy animal puns even as they engage in yakuza style violence  kills me- but it also has quite a few dark twists in line with its  inspiration. This a show that could have easily come off as making fun  of femininitiy or indulged in tons of fanservice, but it doesn’t do any  of those things. It’s just women in ridiculous outfits fighting each  other and getting into ridiculous situations. It’s just utterly  committed to its bit in a way that’s admirable.

I wouldn’t saw  this a show with big themes, but there are some small ones it’s very  consistent about, and one of them is if you want to be a cute, you are,  and fuck anyone who says otherwise. Ranko is 35 (later 36) and is also  utterly terrifying, but she repeatedly states that age has nothing to do  with being cute or a maid, and when rival maids shit-talk her for being  older than them they’re always framed as villains and shut down. The  coda especially hammers in it’s message of ‘women in their 30s are  cute’, and that shouldn’t be notable, but anime is well known for acting  like any woman over 22 is an old maid, so it’s actually pretty  refreshing. Ranko is fantastic.

If you can stomach exaggerated  violence (I would call it an anime that revels in gore and the violence  is cartoonish half the time, but lots of folks get shot), I definitely  recommend this one. It’s a fun (and occasionally heartbreaking) ride.  Definitely in my top 5 for the year.

Chainsaw Man

After  being exploited by the yakuza, a teenage boy gains the ability to turn  into a ‘chainsaw devil” and is recruited by a shady government  organization. He can either work for them to kill other devils or die.  Denji’s perfectly happy with this, because after a hard life he’s only  interested in a warm bed, three meals a day, and his dream of touching a  boob. Teamed up with a blood-crazed demon girl and babysat by a tired  veteran demon hunter, Denji is completely oblivious to the ominous  machinations closing in on him...

I enjoyed this anime,  and it inspired me to read the manga, which I enjoyed even more. It’s a  fun time full of monsters and weirdos and there are themes of being  exploited by your workplace and all that good stuff. But I’m not going  to count it among my favorites, because honestly, the early Chainsaw Man  material isn’t the strongest. Though a good deal of it is needed to  build up what the manga does later, a lot of it feels meandering.

Denji is also VERY repetitively horny in the early chapters (though he at  least hops he bar-in-hell most horny anime boys don’t manage to slither  over and doesn’t violate consent). Also unlike most horny anime guys,  his immature attitude is understandable as he grew up isolated from  other people with little education, this is all new to him. He does  develop as a character (shocking twist, I know) as he slowly gains more  of an understanding of how to approach the idea of sex in a way that  works for him, but it takes 5 episodes to get him on that track. I don’t  blame the anime for this like most, though some parts are stretched out  a bit it does adapt roughly three chapters per episode, which isn’t a  bad pace. And if they cut anything out, fans would be throwing an even  bigger fit than they already are. (It’s very funny to see the same fans  that complain about the slow pacing turn around and complain about a fight cut out of the second episode. WHICH IS IT GUYS, THEY CAN’T DO BOTH).

I think Chainsaw Man fans need to  acknowledge the early material just isn’t as a good as the later stuff,  and being able to binge-read it in manga form just helps. The anime  can’t do much about that, and it’s clearly a cinematic all-star  production, with lovingly animated new ending credits for each  individual episode, so I don’t have a lot of sympathy for complaining  fans when I had to endure Sailor Moon Crystal and a million yuri  adaptations kneecapped by production woes. It’s a good anime doing what  it can with the material it has, y’all try having real anime problems  for once.

Rant aside, Chainsaw Man has a lot of good action, cool animation, and importantly to me, a fun range of fucked up women. It’s also the rare anime that plays into the horror of an adult woman grooming a  teenage boy. The anime does a good job of throwing up the red flags for  Makima, yet she’s so good at what she does you almost fall for her  alongside Denji. There’s also the loveable, feral demon-girl Power, who  hits a lot of my adoration buttons and I do love that for once, the main teen leads of a shonen manga are truly just buddies, she and Denji have a fun vitriolic friendship. Because of the themes of the story,  there’s an unlikely confluence most of the women Denji meets manipulating him by offering sexual favors while not being actually interested in him, which  you could read into, but I honestly just think the author likes screwed  up women, which hey, same. Overall, the anime got me to read the manga,  and now that I’ve devoured it all, I’ll be happy to consume next season  at whatever pace it goes. I just hope those unfortunate animators at  Mappa get some rest.

Do it Yourself!

Teenager  Yua Serufu (yes that’s a pun and it is bought up) is separated by the  best friend who gets into a fancy tech school. Yua is endlessly clumsy,  but when she runs into a cool girl, she’s tempted to join the Do It  Yourself! club and do some carpentry and crafting. The club quickly  grows, but can Yua lure her estranged bff into the fold?

This is  just a cute show with cute animation about girls working with power  tools. It’s relaxing and sweet and there’s not much else to say about  it. It’s set five minutes into the future, but it did handle it’s themes  of tech vs analogue well, with the ultimate message being “now that we  have all this cool tech, we should focus on doing what we want, like  working with out hands”, which is nice in these troubled times. The  characters are very archetypal- Yua’s friend is the archetypal tsundere,  we have a girl who says ‘nya’ a lot. It’s a little noticeable that the  American exchange student is way more fleshed out than the South-Asian  one (we don’t even get her country of origin stated in the show) and  there’s a weird moment with the little robot watching the girls bathing .  Other than that, not much to warn for. It’s a sweet show, but it won’t  set your world on fire.

Spy x Family Season 2

More  Spy x Family, and it continues to be a lot of fun! I enjoyed season 1  a  lot, but unfortunately this season covers some of the weaker material  in the manga, where the story seemed to be spinning its wheels with a  lot of one shots. Because of how the seasons are separated, it’s also  incredibly noticeable how underutilized Yor (assassin mommy) is in this  one and how little we know about her job. Honestly, I don’t think that’s  entirely down to sexism or anything, I wonder if the writer was just  struggling with how to make us root for Yor hunting down and killing a  man- it’s a pretty big ask for that to be the main focus of an arc in a  comedy show. But fortunately, he does eventually figure it out, and  there’s a good Yor arc full of strong material coming up right where  this season cuts off, so look forward to that.

For some  reason, they also cut out one of my favorite sidestory chapters with  Yor. Considering that they adapted all the other sidestories and even  added material this season, I wonder if they’re just saving it for the  next one? They better be. Anyway, Anya’s still great, there’s a cute  dog, it’s still a fun anime, but not as strong as the first season.  Fortunately, there’s good stuff coming up.

Mob Psycho 100 Season 3

It’s the final season of Mob Psycho! This is a quieter season than Season 2, but the show’s themes of  identity and accepting oneself. Episode 6 made me emotional about a  character I’d never had any emotions about before, there’s a cute little  arc focusing on everyone’s favorite weird alien-obsessed girl and the  finale is a perfect cap on both Mob and Reigen’s development and their  relationship that’s the heart of the show. 

I appreciated that, as small  as they were, we got a glimpse of the real, grounded girl that exists  behind Mob’s idolization of his crush Tsubomi. It was a nice touch that  she lost her sparkly anime eyes and she got plainer ones like the other  characters as it was impressed on us she doesn’t exist on a pedestal.  It’s just all around solid material.   I’ll miss this show a lot.