1/17/2025

I wanted to make a new page for the new year, even though I only written four posts for 2025, just to keep things organized. I do not want to have to keep editing the old pages to add links to the new posts, so I'll try to think of something.

I want to get back into anime this year. I do watch Toonami, but I have not really broadened by horizons since I last had my Crunchyroll subscription in the 2010s. I got into some interesting shows back then, along with the big hits like Sword Art Online and Kill La Kill, I was watching Sparrow's Hotel, the short anime about a ninja girl at a hotel that looks like it was straight out of the 90's, and Crime Edge, which starts like if they made an anime based on Freaky Fred from Courage the Cowardly Dog. There's a lot of interesting anime just this season alone, and while there are plenty of old anime I have not watched yet, I should at least get familiar with the anime that's on now.

Being a man in his thirties, I decided to watch something that is the most appropriate for me: the recent anime adaptation of Hana-Kimi, an adaptation of a 90's romance manga made for teenage girls. Okay, sorry, I didn't want to get back into anime with a "protagonist gets isekaied into a fantasy world and finds out he's some uber-powerful god with tons of potential wives" anime, so I decided to watch a shoujo instead. This is an anime about someone sneaking into a space for the opposite gender specifically to get close to someone of the opposite gender. Since it's a girl trying to get close to a guy, sometimes too close as she tries to kiss him while he's sleeping at one point, it's okay. Jokes aside, it seems like a decent romance story, and half of the reason to watch it is that one blonde classmate who has to constantly reaffirm how straight he is despite being clearly in love with this new student. Maybe a bit problematic, but one has to remind themselves it was the 90's. While I did not read Hana-Kimi back then, I am familiar with that one clip from one of the dramas. Not sure if that scene is in the manga, but I'll find out if I keep watching!

The last anime I tried to watch on and off over the last few months was also an old shoujo, though in this case the anime was also old. Yes, 2000 is old, people born that year can drink, deal with it. I do not know how I found out about Daa! Daa! Daa!/UFO Baby, but I watched about 50 episodes of it. It's a cozy romantic comedy show, skews a bit young with its focus on slapstick and weird alien schenanigans, but it's cute. Also, one of the characters is a character based on the mangaka herself, who happens to have something close to an orange on her head, so that's certainly appealing for me! I did not drop it because it was an anime made for pre-teen girls about childcare, it's because the English subs got struck off of YouTube. These uploads had been up for years, with comments about how romantic it is and asking when the two are going to kiss, and now they're gone. I was assuming it was the anime equivalent of "abandonware" since it was up for so long, but I guess it's not abandoned! I felt guilty because I downloaded some of them with YouTube Premium's download feature, and I could not help but think I snitched. We do seem to be in some sort of shoujo revival era with Magic Knight Rayearth getting another adaptation very soon, we got a lot of "reincarnated as the villainess" stories recently, and the aforementioned Hana-Kimi being an anime adaptation of an old shoujo manga being released this year. Maybe the powers-that-be caring about UFO Baby enough to strike episodes down is a sign that it will get some sort of revival soon, even if it's just the old 2000 anime. I can just imagine someone thinking it's DanDaDan Season 4 and being very confused.

Someday I'll watch something that isn't an adaptation of an old manga, or, gasp, actually watch something made for dudes. I did rewatch Golden Boy recently, and that's still good. Study, study, study!