Bonus Podcast: 2021 December - Anime Backlog Resolutions (Patreon)

Welcome to our inaugural patron-exclusive bonus podcast (with transcript)! Join managing editors Caitlin, Vrai, and Dee as they look back on their 2021 New Year's anime backlog resolutions, discuss the shows they watched (or didn't), and share recommendations with the AniFam.

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Episode Transcript:

DEE: Hello and welcome to our first-ever Patreon-only bonus podcast episode of Chatty AF---which I guess in this case it stands for [uncertainly] "Anime Feminisode"? Minisodes? I don’t know. We’ll workshop it. We’ll figure out a clever title for it.

I am Dee, one of the managing editors at AniFem. If you’re listening to this, you’re a patron; you probably have heard me give this introduction before. But in case you haven’t, you can find my writings and stuff on my blog, The Josei Next Door, and you can hang out with me on Twitter @joseinextdoor.

And today I am joined by fellow AniFem managing editors Vrai and Caitlin.

CAITLIN: Hello!

VRAI: [crosstalk] Hello, patrons. Thank you for your contributions. We love you.

CAITLIN: It’s true.

DEE: [crosstalk] Thank you so very, very much. Here’s a little special something for you.

CAITLIN: I’m making a little heart with my hands right now. I know you can’t see me, but I am doing it and it’s adorable.

DEE: It’s excellent audio. Thank you for painting us the word picture.

Yeah, so, to kick this off, we thought we’d start off with something a little informal and fun. These episodes will be about 30 minutes apiece. They won’t be quite as structured as our originals, although it probably won’t dissolve into us just hollering about things. I mean, it might. We’ll see. We’re gonna keep fiddling with it.

We hope for feedback from folks---from our patrons---to give us an idea of how these are going and what y’all are looking for. But hopefully this is a fun time.

This episode will be focusing on anime. All three of us, at the beginning of 2021… there was a Twitter meme going around where you would pick four anime to be your backlog New Year’s resolution. It was “These are shows in my backlog that I am going to watch this year. That is my New Year’s resolution.”

So, all three of us tweeted this out. They exist on the internet. We can’t take them back, ever! So we thought it would be fun here at the end of the year to look at our backlog resolutions, see how we did, and hopefully give y’all some recommendations from a feminist-relevant perspective on the shows we watched and if there was anything we thought our listeners and readers should check out.

So, let’s start with this: how did y’all do? Did you get through your whole backlog?

VRAI: No, I failed. I failed instantly.

CAITLIN: Well, I did not get through my whole backlog because my whole backlog is three bookshelves.

DEE: No, no, no, your resolution backlog, the four shows that you listed on your resolution backlog.

CAITLIN: I hit 50% on those.

DEE: [crosstalk] Not bad.

CAITLIN: But there are reasons that I will go into.

DEE: Okay. Do you want to go into that now or do you want me to brag?

CAITLIN: Fine, I’ll go into them now!

DEE: Okay, do it.

CAITLIN: Okay, so that we can finish it with Dee being like, “I watched all of my resolution shows! I’m so awesome.” So we’ll start with my failures first! [Laughs]

DEE: Yeah, go ahead and list your four shows and just real quick what you watched and what you didn’t, and we can dive into some stuff later.

CAITLIN: Yes. So, my four shows were Crest of the Stars, Dirty Pair, Eccentric Family, and Hataraki Man. I watched Crest of the Stars and Eccentric Family. And there are reasons that I did not get to Dirty Pair or Hataraki Man.

So, the reasons that I did not watch those two was because I’m going alphabetically through my physical media shelf. And for Hataraki Man, I bought new shows that were before the letter H in the alphabet. So instead, I watched, like, Cardcaptor Sakura and… mostly Cardcaptor Sakura because that show is 70 episodes. And also, I started a new job and I wasn’t doing my backlog watching for a little while because I watch in the mornings when I’m on my bike and eating breakfast. Stationary bike. I’m not watching while I’m riding down the road.

DEE: I’m glad you clarified because I definitely had a moment where I was like, “Wow! That seems hardcore.” [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: [Chuckles] Yeah, just going downhill for three miles. Don’t need to pedal. It’s just a straight shot.

DEE: [crosstalk] Reading subs. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. [Chuckles] Dirty Pair, I decided to skip over so that I could keep moving forward and because I donated to the Kickstarter, so I will be getting it on Blu-ray when that comes out.

DEE: So you’ll have it all fancy looking.

CAITLIN: Yeah, I’ll have it all fancy looking, high definition. Nothing looks better than cel animation that’s been properly remastered into high definition.

DEE: That’s not sarcastic. It actually does look amazing. She’s right. Crunchyroll recently dropped Utena onto their stream, and unlike everywhere else Utena is streaming, it is the new HD remastered release that Nozomi put out a couple years ago on Blu-ray. And y’all, oh my God, it looks so good!

CAITLIN: It looks good, right?

DEE: It’s so beautiful! So yeah, I get it. Wait for those pretty Blu-rays.

CAITLIN: So, Hataraki Man, still coming, but now I gotta finish getting through El-Hazard, I gotta get through Emma, I gotta get through Genshiken…

DEE: So you should have just done A’s and B’s when you were putting your resolution list together.

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] I should have. At least I got to the E’s.

DEE: You did. No, you’re doing good, because I know you got through Eccentric Family.

CAITLIN: I did. I did watch Eccentric Family, which was excellent! Oh my god, it’s so good!

DEE: It’s so good, right?

CAITLIN: It’s so good!

DEE: It’s almost like I’ve been shouting about it for years for a reason.

CAITLIN: I don’t remember that. I don’t remember you ever saying anything about it, Dee.

DEE: Sure. Sure, you don’t remember all the tweets or the two-part article I wrote or the recommendations on AniFem.

CAITLIN: I’m pretty sure—

DEE: None of that happened.

CAITLIN: You’ve never mentioned it before. I’m pretty sure.

DEE: It’s fine. I’m the Cassandra of anime recommendations, so I’m used to it.

[Laughter]

DEE: Yeah, that and Chihayafuru, you watched both of this year. You were like, “They’re so good! Why did nobody tell me?”

CAITLIN: Yeah!

DEE: And then I threw pillows.

[Laughter]

DEE: But yeah, so we can get into recs and stuff in a second here. Vrai, you said you failed. How did you do?

VRAI: I got one for four.

DEE: Okay. Hey, that’s not nothing. 25% is still a percent.

VRAI: It is a non-zero percent. So, my four were Chihayafuru, School-Live, Black Lagoon, and Simoun. And the only one I managed to finish was School-Live, which is stupendous, and I can’t believe I hadn’t watched it before, because it is extremely my shit.

DEE: Yeah, I know you would be very into School-Live. I’d like to do that as a retrospective at some point. I think that would be a good one to do an episode on.

CAITLIN: Ooh, yeah.

DEE: There’s a lot you can dig into. Okay, so you did get through School-Live.

VRAI: I did. The rest, I simply did not, and I don’t really have an excuse except that I discovered Tubi this year, which has to be doing something illegal because, my god, the number of excellent material they have on that website.

DEE: What have you been watching on Tubi? Anything anime-related or…?

VRAI: Absolutely n— Although, they do have Belladonna of Sadness on there. For folks who are looking to watch it and don’t have Kanopy, it’s there and it’s free. You don’t have to have an account or anything. It’s just got ads on it.

DEE: Cool.

VRAI: But no, mostly I’ve been watching old, weird horror movies on there.

DEE: Okay, so you got distracted by old, weird horror movies. That is the Vrai Experience.

[Chuckling]

DEE: That’s very on brand for you.

CAITLIN: Flophouse has talked a lot about the weird shit that’s on Tubi. I know they had Key the Metal Idol for a while, which is also on my shelf.

VRAI: It’s a hard streaming service to talk about because, again, I have a half-conspiracy theory that they are very not getting these titles legitimately, so stuff isn’t on there for very long. I’m relishing it while it exists.

DEE: That’s fair. Enjoy it while you can. Okay, so you got through one.

Okay, this is the part where I get to brag. I got through all four.

VRAI: All right, go for it.

DEE: Boom. In fairness, I intentionally picked mostly shorter stuff. So, I did Moribito, which is 26, Kaiba, which is 12, 13. It’s a cour. The last two were actually recommendations from you guys. Vrai, you recommended that I do Miyazaki’s run on Green Jacket Lupin III. So, it’s a little over half a season that I watched there, so probably 16 to 18 episodes, somewhere in there. And then I did Crest of the Stars, which, if you watch the whole thing it’s pretty long, but Crest of the Stars proper is only 12.

So, I mostly stuck to stuff that was one-to-two cours. I didn’t have, like, Chihayafuru on there, which is in the 70s at this point, because it’s three two-cour seasons, so that’s a long one.

VRAI: That’s quite a lot.

DEE: Yeah. Yeah. So, I did try to pace myself. I had Dear Brother and Kimagure Orange Road as stretch goals. And I started Orange Road but I didn’t finish it. And they were stretch goals, so they don’t count. I got my four done.

It also helps that I watch anime with a friend weekly, and so he was interested in both Moribito and Crest of the Stars, so we ended up watching those together. So that always helps, too, when you have a regular schedule and then every week we watch two to three episodes of a thing. So I did get through all of mine.

Before we get to feelings on them, I guess we’ll circle back… Okay, Vrai, you watched School-Live. You said you really, really liked it, yeah?

VRAI: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I own it now. It’s on my shelf.

DEE: Okay, cool. And Caitlin, you’ve seen it, too, right? All three of us have watched that one?

CAITLIN: Yes. Yes.

DEE: Okay, I thought so. I thought so. I thought you had watched that one as well. Yeah, okay. So that’s definitely something we could talk a lot about, but we’ll try to keep it to a minimum here since we’re just doing recs.

VRAI: Yeah, because like you said, I think there is a whole retrospective worth of stuff there. I’m sure Mercedez would want to talk about it because I know she actually has or had—I don’t know if it’s finished—a dedicated School-Live podcast for a minute there.

DEE: Oh, wow. Yeah, so we definitely want to bring Mercedez in for an extended discussion of it. But just in brief, who would you recommend it to, and why?

VRAI: It is very much in the post-Madoka era of “Here is an extremely cute aesthetic that we have undermined with horror.” I guess I should say post-Higurashi because that was really the progenitor of it. But it was especially post-Madoka because it came out right after that anime aired, so sort of inevitably…

DEE: It was deep in the moe boom. Yeah, it was like 2013, 2014, I think. Because I was blogging about it but it was early, early in my blogging days.

CAITLIN: I think recommending it to Higurashi fans is a really good call.

VRAI: Yeah. It’s one of those shows with a first-episode twist, so I don’t want to get too much into it because I think it’s a fairly well-known thing at this point, but the details may be less so.

So, it is a story about these four friends who are part of the School Living Club, and our perky heroine just loves her friends and loves school and loves living there, and everything is not necessarily as perky and chipper as she makes it out to be, is the basic premise. And it does a lot of really good interesting things with… Actually, you know who should watch the show is: if you liked Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, you might like School-Live.

CAITLIN: Yeah, that’s another good recommendation.

DEE: Yeah, that’s not a bad rec either. Yeah, it does some really interesting things with mental health and the moe genre. It was the first show I watched that, by kind of challenging the moe genre, got me to understand why people like it as a genre. It’s one of those shows that encourages you to reevaluate the way you consume certain types of media.

And I will say (I don’t know, Vrai, what did you think?) I found the first episode interminable! And I would not have finished it if I hadn’t known there was a big twist at the end that changed the whole…

CAITLIN: Yeah, so the first episode… So it is also directed by Masaomi Ando.

DEE: Oh, that’s right! I forgot it was Ando. Hell yeah!

VRAI: [crosstalk] Yeah, it shares a director with Hanako-kun.

CAITLIN: AniFem favorite Masaomi Ando, who also directed Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun, yeah. He does actually a pretty solid job in the first episode of… every so often you just get a flash of something that’s like, “That doesn’t seem right. Something is off here.” Yeah. And I mean, I haven’t watched it since it aired… how many years ago? Six…

DEE: Don’t worry about it. [Chuckles]

CAITLIN: [Chuckles] Too many! But that was what held my attention really well, just like, "Oh, there’s something strange going on here. What is that written on the chalkboard? Hm…"

DEE: [Laughs] Yeah. I would describe it as sort of a psychological horror series. Would you guys agree with that?

VRAI: Yeah, definitely.

CAITLIN: Yeah.

DEE: Yeah. So, go into it being aware of that. It’s not super gory, but there is some violence and some disturbing imagery for sure.

VRAI: It definitely abstracts its violence in a way that I find very interesting.

DEE: I agree.

VRAI: It’s quite a poignant picture of bonding and grief. And I can understand maybe listeners getting their hackles up a little bit in terms of dark subversions of moe. I think we’ve all been down that road a time or two. It doesn’t feel shitty. It really cares about its characters and wanting them to come through this and encouraging us to care about them, not think of them as just meat for terrible things to happen to because they’re cute. This is not Elfen Lied.

DEE: Yeah, no, no, no, not at all. It does have an episode that’s basically just fan— It has the obligatory pool episode that is irritating because it felt like they were like, “Well, we gotta have it in there.”

CAITLIN: [crosstalk] Zoom in on the titties!

DEE: [crosstalk] But they still managed to undercut a little bit in some ways. So, yeah, it falls into its own trap sometimes, but I think overall it does a really nice job of…

VRAI: Well, and that’s the only episode that’s like that, which is so weird.

DEE: Yeah, it is! The rest of it is really, really good, I think. So, yeah, not perfect, but I’m with you on: I think it’s a good rec, especially if you can handle a little bit of psychological horror and a little bit of light gore.

VRAI: Oh, and about the first episode, by the way, I sprang this on Dorothy and she didn’t know anything about it. I had to, like, beg her to stay sitting through. “No, no, no, just watch this with me,” because she was trying to get up and do dishes. And then you hit that last minute of the first episode.

CAITLIN: Mm-hm. Yeah, there’s very much a “No. No, no, no, bear with me. Bear with me. Just…”

DEE: Yeah. The show is handling these cute-girl elements. It’s doing it for a reason. Wait for it. Yeah.

But yeah, again, we could spiral off on this, and I think at some point we should, but let’s table it for now. Point being, you watched it and you don’t regret it, so that’s awesome.

VRAI: Yay.

CAITLIN: I would like to talk about Crest of the Stars.

DEE: Yeah, go for it. I’m really curious to hear what you liked about this one, because I know you did, because you recommended it to me.

CAITLIN: Oh! You didn’t? [Chuckles]

DEE: Oh, Caitlin, I hated it. I didn’t finish it.

CAITLIN: Oh no!

DEE: I watched the first season because that was all I said I had to watch for my backlog resolution. I didn’t keep watching it because I really didn’t like it, so please tell me why you liked it. I’m curious.

CAITLIN: So, the first time I watched it… And listen, it is a complicated series to discuss through a feminist lens. The first time I watched it, I was 15 years old and I thought Lafiel was so freaking cool, and I wanted to be just like her. And I mean, I enjoy the relationship between Lafiel and Jinto. I enjoy the dialogue. I think it is an interesting universe to explore. I don’t think the show really grapples with the imperialism in the way that it should.

I don’t know. I like the characters. I like spending time with them. Part of that might be nostalgia from when I was a teenager. And it did feel a little weird looking back and seeing this character that I loved when I was 15 almost two decades later. I haven’t watched it in the interim, so there’s not this sense of “Oh, well, I grew up with the character” receding in the past. It was like, oh, she’s 16 years old. She’s written like a 16-year-old. I can’t hero-worship her the way that I used to.

I have watched all of the anime adaptations through Banner of the Stars II. Er, Banner of the Stars III is the last one. Whatever. I’ve watched all of them. Actually, Banner of the Stars II, which is the third TV show, is the best of the bunch. A lot of people like the second season better, because it’s more space opera-y, there’s more space battles and blah blah blah. I thought the third one struck the best balance.

I’m curious: is there anything in particular you didn’t like about it?

DEE: I found it very cerebral and cold, I guess is how I would describe it. The pacing—especially those first few episodes—is very, very slow. And it’s a lot of explaining space battles but not showing them and explaining the politics but not showing it. It’s based on a novel, and you can tell because it’s very exposition heavy in a way that I think would work better in a book than it does on screen.

And slow pacing isn’t a thing that bothers me. I mean, I love Snow White with the Red Hair. This is not a secret.

CAITLIN: [Chuckles] A show that I found boring.

DEE: Yeah. And then it started to pick up, in terms of: stuff was happening. The arc where they find the creeper in space who’s got all these maids semi-enslaved.

CAITLIN: Do you know who played him?

DEE: Oh, it’s Koyasu or Seki. I can’t remember. It’s one of the [obscured by crosstalk].

CAITLIN: It’s Koyasu!

DEE: It’s Koyasu. Yeah, as soon as he spoke, I was like, “Oh hey, Koyasu. What’s up?” I started to get into it during that arc.

But my thing with slow pacing stuff is it needs to be warm. I need to really enjoy spending time with the characters, and it wasn’t that. And to be fair, hard sci-fi is a hard sell for me anyway. I have a hard time getting into it regardless of medium. Western stuff to live action, I have a tough time with it. I’m more into your space operas, your space westerns, that more pulpy style. I have a tough time with hard sci-fi because I do find it very cold and exposition-heavy in a way that I don’t find interesting. So, that’s a blockade there anyway.

And then I remember the final arc feeling very rushed and tacked on. And it’s been a while since I finished it, so I don’t remember the details. It just kind of ends, and I knew there were two more seasons. I don’t remember the exact specifics of the resolution, but I no longer cared what happened to the main duo. So, yeah, it wasn’t for me, and it’s one of those where sometimes I watch a show and I’m like, “Yeah, it just wasn’t for me. But if you like XYZ, I think you’ll like it.” With this one, I mean, again, maybe if you really like hard sci-fi like---I don’t know, Star Trek: Next Generation maybe? That’s another one that I know a lot of people really like and I just could not get into it.

So, I don’t know. I’m sure it’s there for someone. Obviously you enjoy it, Caitlin, and that’s great. I’m glad it has a fond place in your heart. But yeah, I did not continue to watch that. I finished what was required for my resolution and I stopped. So, that was Crest of the Stars for me.

CAITLIN: You know, that’s fair. That’s fair. What you’re describing is also kind of the way I feel about Legend of Galactic Heroes.

DEE: Yeah, I can’t get into that one either, for similar reasons.

CAITLIN: Which is way longer than Crest of the Stars.

DEE: Mm-hm. Oh, it absolutely is. Yeah, that’s just a tough sell for me as a genre.

CAITLIN: Almost 100% dudes, so that’s even less interesting to me. If you don’t have a cool female character who I can latch on to, then what are you even doing?

[Chuckling]

CAITLIN: Why am I even here? [Chuckles]

DEE: Yeah. And then, what was the other one you finished? Eccentric Family, right?

CAITLIN: Eccentric Family! Yeah.

DEE: Yeah, did you want to… I mean, we’re coming up a little bit on time here. You kind of talked about how you thought it was fantastic. I agree. I concur. Eccentric Family’s great.

CAITLIN: Just what an incredible story about grief and family and tradition. And I love Kyoto. Kyoto is basically a character in it, which I think is a running theme with Morimoto’s [sic] works. This is also the Tatami Galaxy guy.

DEE: [crosstalk] Morimi, yeah.

CAITLIN: You want a series that has warmth? That is a series that has warmth.

DEE: Absolutely it does. And P.A. Works has a lot of shows I really, really like. I think it’s my probably hands-down favorite P.A. Works show. And it looks very different from their other stuff, and I just adore it. I think the studio president loves the novels and was like, “Yeah, no, we’re animating these.” So if Morimi ever finishes the trilogy, we should get the final season, too. So, fingers crossed.

CAITLIN: Oh yeah, no, there are some episodes that just fucked me up in an extremely powerful way.

DEE: Yeah. But I think ultimately, it is a very— Because again, like you said, a lot of it is about grief because it’s about these four brothers, especially the main character, coming to terms with their dad’s death. But it’s not like a suffering porn type show. It’s very hopeful and about the process of grieving and community and… Yeah.

Really curious… You haven’t watched season 2, right? You just watched season 1?

CAITLIN: No, no.

DEE: Yeah, real curious to see what you think of season 2, which is more like a bridge season. Anyway, I’m glad you liked it. I hope you keep up with it. I hope you finish it on… I know season 2 doesn’t have a Blu-ray yet, but someday maybe? Crunchyroll, pleeease!

CAITLIN: Someday maybe. I do plan to watch it, but it’s a lot trickier if it’s not in my [backlog shelf] thing that I’m doing because, you know, I get into things. [Sighs]

DEE: No, I get it. Okay, so those were your two. I’ve got four, but I don’t have to talk about Crest of the Stars because we already did. I guess I’ll start from number three. So, I did watch Miyazaki’s run on Green Jacket Lupin, which was very fun to see Hayao Miyazaki, early, early career, kind of figuring out what he wanted to do with this franchise.

It’s very hit or miss. It’s all very episodic. There were definitely some episodes where I sort of felt my eyes glazing over. I didn’t dislike the experience; it was kind of like a “There’s nothing really here.” There’s a very good group caper episode that involves him faking getting arrested and being in a prison for a while, and the whole group gets together to… There’s a couple of those that I really enjoy. I love the group caper episodes.

The one that really sticks out for me is the one on the cruise ship. Vrai, do you remember this one?

VRAI: Yes!

DEE: It’s so good!

VRAI: [crosstalk] It’s amazing.

DEE: It’s so good! It’s Lupin and Fujiko very much in that sort of friendly, respected rivalry vibe that I love between the two of them. But then there’s also this well-to-do lady who says her necklace has been stolen, and neither of them stole it, but they’re the ones who wanted to steal it, so they’re trying to figure out what happened to it. And it’s a really fun, kind of twisty episode. Again, I think it hits the best version of Lupin and Fujiko’s relationship. I really, really like that one.

VRAI: Sometimes I go and just rewatch the little sakuga loop of Fujiko dancing with Zenigata to distract him to make myself happy because it’s so charming.

[Chuckling]

DEE: It’s a very charming episode, yeah. So I would say… I mean, anything episodic like that can be kind of hit or miss. But overall, I had a good time. I’m glad I watched it from a historical perspective especially. Probably not something I’ll necessarily go back to except for two or three of those episodes that I really enjoyed. But yeah, it was fun. It was also like… I don’t watch a lot of anime from the ‘70s, and boy howdy!

VRAI: [Chuckles]

DEE: Boy howdy, that mostly lack of sakuga can be a lot sometimes. But it was fun. Yeah, that was one where it was just during dinner I would watch an episode, and so I got through it pretty quickly. The next two would take a little bit longer to go through.

Kaiba is, I believe, the first TV series Yuasa Masaaki directed---of Devilman Crybaby and Keep Your Hands Off the Eizoken fame, for folks at home. It is an original series. Like a lot of Yuasa’s work, it is very surreal and heady. Episode… I think it’s 3 and 4, the early stuff where it’s a little bit more episodic, is kind of the peak for me. It is devastating at times, but in a very artful way. The last few episodes try to bring the plot together, and things get convoluted in a way that I don’t think it quite lands the way it should.

That having been said, if you were interested in Yuasa’s career, if you’re interested in arthouse anime of any kind---like if you’re a fan of Ikuhara or, this season, stuff like Sonny Boy---I would say absolutely check it out. It’s very ambitious, it is trying to say a lot of things, not always super well, but I find Yuasa’s style and thematic exploration really interesting. So, despite not being totally enamored with it by the end, I would say it is worth your time if that kind of artsy or just the history of Yuasa as a creator interests you.

VRAI: Yeah, Kaiba’s been on my list for forever.

DEE: Especially in the first half, there’s some really good episodes that really just punch you in the throat, but in a good way. [Chuckles] And it’s also one that in… Full disclosure: I watched the final four or five episodes knocked out on my second COVID [vaccine] dose, so that may have impacted my feelings about them. But yeah, I would say put it on your list if you’re interested in really ambitious projects, for sure.

It would be another one that I think would be an interesting retrospective to do at some time, because I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on what it’s trying to do and how successfully it does them in terms of some of its… it has some elements of classism and social hierarchies, and there’s a little bit in terms of the main character can kind of swap bodies, so there’s a little bit of a genderqueer consideration in there. There’s a character who’s (probably unintentionally) a bit of a racial stereotype. So, there’s a lot you could dig into, and I’m by no means saying it is a perfect show, but it is an interesting show, so I think it is worth it for that.

And then Moribito, I fucking loved!

CAITLIN: [Laughs]

DEE: I kinda knew I would.

VRAI: [crosstalk] That seems like a very Dee-core show.

DEE: Yeah, it’s historical fantasy. I tried watching it in college. And it’s not what you would expect. Looking at it, you think it’s gonna be a really epic, action-heavy story, and it’s really more of a found family... There’s stretches of it that are more like fantastical slice-of-life, where it’s just the two characters living together and trying to piece a life together after the wild political happenings that occur in the first nine episodes or so.

It’s based on some novels, but it’s a really, really strong adaptation. I think it’s Production I.G in the mid-00s, when they were fiddling with a lot of… I don’t want to say "Western style," but the art style is a little bit less like what you consider to be the anime style at the time. It’s a little bit more realistic.

VRAI: It looks like Princess Mononoke to me, just off the top of my head.

DEE: Yeah, it looks that way a bit. Also, the other thing that’s really interesting, I would love to get an article from an indigenous person on it because the author is very interested in indigenous communities. And I think it is loosely based off of imperial Japan, early era. But there’s this element of the indigenous population that was kind of pushed to the margins by this incoming force that now has this very elegant Heian era–style court system. And so, there’s some push and pull between those two groups, and the protagonist is actually a foreigner from---I think she’s maybe from overseas; I can’t remember exactly---over the mountains. And so there’s a lot of national politicking elements, but at the heart of it is this really warm found-family story between this female warrior and this imperial prince. It’s just really good, you guys! Moribito is good.

VRAI: Aw.

DEE: It’s hard to track down. I’m not sure if it’s streaming anywhere currently. I have had the DVDs forever, so I just watched them that way. But if you can get a hold of Moribito—

CAITLIN: Sentai has it.

DEE: Oh, Sentai has it. Perfect. It’s on HiDIVE right now. Excellent! Okay, well, get thee to a HiDIVE and watch Moribito, with the understanding that the pacing is maybe not what you’d expect it to be.

I’m glad I tried it again [now that I'm] older, because I understand why it didn’t necessarily click for me in college but, watching it now, it was really, really good. Very satisfying conclusion as well. So, just the complete package. I liked it a lot. Good historical fantasy, for sure.

VRAI: Do we want to make any called shots for 2022, or shall we save that to Twitter and circle back to this?

DEE: Oh, actually, question for you: do you think you’ll do an anime resolution backlog next year? Do you think it will have the shows you didn’t finish this year on it, or do you think you’ll just go for a clean slate?

CAITLIN: I think I’m gonna be extremely unambitious in what I resolve for. I gotta put all the stuff that’s coming up in the next couple months for me, I think, if I keep going through alphabetically.

DEE: That’s fair. Vrai?

VRAI: Well, my, I guess, no-longer-secret goal for 2022 is to finally get around to watching The Untamed, which people have been trying to get me to do for years, literal years. So, anime backlog, I will probably also try to pick some short stuff or maybe stuff we are already doing for podcasts. That’s not cheating.

DEE: No, that’s not cheating. That totally counts. If you count podcast shows, I did watch more backlog stuff this year.

For me, I might swing for the fences this time around. I need to watch Dear Brother before it disappears from Retro Crush. And I would like to continue with Kimagure Orange Road. I got like four or five episodes in and have just kind of gotten distracted. So I might do two longer shows and then two shorter shows. Caitlin, you’ve mentioned Stellvia, so that might be on my list. I could cheat and put some of the stuff I currently am just a few episodes into on there because I’ve already started them. I’m watching Daily Lives of High School Boys and Emma with a friend, so I could theoretically put those on, too, if I’m feeling like cheating. But there’s just so much anime. It’s great.

VRAI: So much anime.

DEE: Daunting but great. Should I play us out? I guess I don’t necessarily need to give… This is a Patreon podcast, so y’all know where to find us. It’d be wild if you didn’t know where to find us.

But once again, we appreciate all of you for donating to the site and helping us pay our contributors, pay our editors, handle all the day-to-day expenses, because running a website costs money. Yeah, we appreciate you.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode. We’ll continue to do these each month. And we’d love to hear your feedback and comments.

And you know what? If you have any shows that should be on our New Year’s backlog resolution, throw them in the comments. If we haven’t seen them, then we’ll take them into consideration.

VRAI: Thanks again, patrons.

DEE: That is the show! Happy New Year’s. Happy holidays. We’ll catch you next time.