First of all, congratulations to “The Boy and the Heron” on winning the Oscar yesterday! I hope to see the movie sometime once it is released for wider consumption.

As for things I have been watching this past week, I have been watching just enough to keep the discussion threads going for a couple shows. Like last week, I am still on vacation, so I am busy doing things other than sitting around watching anime (lots of beach time). So…here are some quick updates:

• Bravern - This show continues to be pretty unpredictable. They pretty heavily foreshadowed the one big thing that happened last episode, but as for the direction of where we go from here, it is anybody’s guess. I am still surprised that this show hasn’t gotten the audience in the West that it has in Japan. One random tidbit I love about it is all the random English phrases that the VA’s use throughout. It never fails to put a smile on my face when they try to say military jargon in English.
• Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic - The climactic battle has finally begun in this show. I have been pondering whether or not I would want to watch a season 2. The pace has been really slow this whole show, only adapting 2 LN volumes over 12 episodes (I think). If the pace didn’t pick up in future arcs, it would be even more painful.
• Metallic Rouge - What can I even say about this one. It’s story is so convoluted and twisted that I don’t think anybody can untangle it. I think this series has been my biggest disappointment in anime in quite some time.
• Tsukimichi - I really like this story, but this past episode was not great. It was basically a lot of conversations about lore/world building and, even though they devoted a whole episode to it, was enormously abbreviated. They have taken lots of liberties in the past with rearranging bits of the story to help it flow, and I feel like they could have rearranged elements of this part of the story to help keep people’s interest better.
• Chained Soldier - This has been doing fine. I won’t say it has been great, but it hasn’t been terrible either. My only complaint really, is that I feel like the world of this series is so much bigger than what we have seen. Season 1 feels almost like a prologue more than anything because we are still meeting important characters even this far into the first season (and haven’t yet met some characters that have been mentioned a bunch).
• Sasaki and Peeps - This show has been a roller coaster in many ways. The story keeps jumping from one genre to the next and the quality of each episode keeps jumping around as well. I only hope that they can land the plane by the season finale.

Meta update: The next couple weekly threads will have certain focuses…

• March 18th - Spring anticipation thread. This will also serve as the official thread for users to request show discussion threads from the bot. Before this post goes live, I hope to finish writing the wiki page on how to interact with the bot to do things like request episode threads.
• March 25th - Winter wrap-up thread as most shows will have aired 11 or 12 episodes by this time.
• April 1st - Spring kickoff thread. April 1st will also be the official start of the new rules where no user-created episode discussion threads will be allowed. The bot will fully take over at this point.