Aniplex announced on Thursday that the Off Season and Monster Season books in NisiOisin’s Monogatari series are getting an anime adaptation at studio SHAFT titled Monogatari Series Off & Monster Season.

The Monster Season is real!!

Returning staff for the new anime includes Akiyuki Simbo as chief director, Midori Yoshizawa (Zoku Owarimonogatari episode director) as director, and Akio Watanabe as character designer and chief animation director. Simbo and Fuyashi Tou are again overseeing the series scripts.

And Aniplex is taking it seriously! Glad to see that those Kizumonogatari re-release bucks are being put to good use. Also, slightly related: Kizu’s coming to American theaters in 2024.

Yeah, but I can’t communicate back when people mention me because federation has been broken on SDF for almost a week now. Not that it helps to reply when I know that already… but let me know if you actually receive this!

So, it is a matter of our friendly shinobu maintainer to get them merged and update shinobu’s database with the new show info

My bad for the delay. Work’s been a real killer for the last week or so.

The bad news is that when that occurs, shinobu will likely blast all the discussion threads at once into the community.

Yup. I’m planning to do the thing overnight so that the backlogged posts fall out of the “Hot”/“Scaled” queues before most users have any a chance to see them.

This will make it hard to find discussions for the shows that people actually want to talk about

On that note… I’m thinking about migrating from the Holo bot codebase to the Rikka codebase you’ve been working on. Probably not at the same time we load the new seasonal config… but likely sometime in the nearish future. I suspect that the new engagement-based options you’ve introduced will help considerably reduce future backlog spam

Yeah, I’m subscribed to notifications for the PR and have been holding out waiting for it to get merged because it’s easier to maintain a clean git history that way. If the PR’s still not merged by this evening I’ll just bite the bullet and do it the (slightly) harder way for the sake of staying current with the new seasonals

Not a dumb question! This is what I’ll have to do if no better solution comes around.

The reason I haven’t already done that is that the underlying Holo code is not designed for multi-user. I won’t be able to just swap out the credentials because doing so will cause it to blow up when it fails to edit old posts owned by the old bot account. In other words: it’s going to be a big hassle to move over and even in the best case scenario things will break and generally look ugly.

This is actually a big fear of mine. The content on !anime@lemmy.ml is nearly identical to the content found on ani.social. If you compare the new queues you can see for yourself just how much crosspost activity there is.

If it’s a content problem, then we have a content problem too. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in with this much uncertainty

I was not ready for this held shot after the flashback/dream scene. I hate that I know exactly how it feels

And now for two interesting themes I’m picking up on:

• Clear blue skies seem to come up frequently during moments of danger, both in this episode and the last
• Blue hair guy likes acting like he’s above the drama and makes that quite literal by perching above everyone else in almost every single one of his shots

I got caught up with this series the other day and holy cow these are some incredibly directed episodes!

Just look at how expressively framed these shots are! I haven’t seen such consistently appealing layouts since 86 – I know it seems like I just screenshotted every scene, but believe me when I say that I’m exercising restraint in this list:

I’m also really digging the SHAFT/monogatari influence in the storyboard. Not a big surprise after looking at the stafflist, but these are nevertheless some very reminiscent shots:

Don’t even get me started on the juxtapositions and eye leading… watching this show so far has been such a joy and I’m really looking forward to episode 3 tomorrow!

I’ll refrain from talking specifics until the poll closes since the ideal solution is going to vary a fair amount depending upon the exact curation methodology, but I basically agree with what you’re saying here.

There will definitely be some feature for this, though – depending on the goal order established in the survey – it is possible that the feature won’t be ready at day one. For what it’s worth, I will be sharing a proposed roadmap with the community long before anything gets written in stone. Goal #1 is ensuring that the entire pipeline is as fully aligned as possible with what the community finds valuable.

Hey RealM, as @wjs018@lemmy.ml has already suggested, this is a kbin quirk. It’s documented on the kbin Codeberg bug tracker as #350. The kbin maintainers have not yet commented on whether this is intended behavior or a bug, but it does not appear as if anything will be done about the problem in the near future.

The only course of action that I could possibly take to work around the issue is to remove the bot flag from @shinobu@ani.social. Unfortunately, doing this would violate the right of Lemmy users to opt out of seeing bot activity – not to mention also violate the ToS of numerous instances (including ani.social)

I have such a softspot for this series. I love that it puts careful consideration into the lore of the world without explaining away the underpinning fantasy. I love that it’s willing to skip over perfunctory action setpieces in favor of interesting dialogue. I love that characters take each other seriously and naturalistically pursue their own individual interests without getting coded as evil.

Most of all, I love that the characters can engage in a sappy non-deathflag conversation like this and have it feel completely earned:

Don’t sleep on Faraway Paladin, you guys.

Consider blocking the bot by visiting their profile page and using the “Block user” button. Alternatively, it’s also possible to disable seeing activity from all bots from anywhere on Lemmy via your profile settings using the “Show Bot Accounts” toggle.

If you’d like to suggest changes to how !anime@lemmy.ml specifically uses bots, you can join the discussion and contribute ideas here. Thanks!

This I don’t agree with. It’s not like people aren’t allowed to make their own threads. If it seems like there’s a sleeper hit, and user created episode threads for said hit are very active and reoccuring, then automate it. Of course, that requires a pretty active someone to keep a lookout for that.

Feel free to disagree, but multiple people in the thread have said that they’re not interested in creating threads manually even when they have something to discuss – also keep in mind that these are statements coming from community members who self-selected their way into this meta thread in the first place!

Why would it be flooded? You don’t have to do the poll that frequently. If you redo the poll midway through the season, wouldn’t that be enough? Or maybe after about 3-4 weeks, when for most anime, 3-4 episodes should be out.

Because poll turnout is generally low, it will take multiple polling drives over time in order to assemble a representative sample. It is true that a representative sample isn’t strictly necessary, but the less accurate the polling, the less aligned the resulting outcome will be with what community members actually want.

I agree that a poll isn’t the most ideal, but it’s the simplest I feel like. Overcomplicating it is even less ideal.

I’m just speaking for myself now, but I don’t think the current situation is so dire that making a change should be considered strictly mandatory. The perfect may indeed be the enemy of the good… but we already have a half-good option. Any chosen alternative needs to be demonstrably gooder.

In any case, I think we’re ultimately of the same mind about what makes a good solution; all other things being equal, the chosen solution should be made as simple as reasonably possible. Superfluous bells & whistles will only compromise the odds of success, after all! With that being said, could I get your thoughts on this modified proposal? I like it a fair amount, but it still strikes me as somewhat clunky… I’d love to get your eyes on it for a second opinion if you have the time

And thank you for the very original suggestion! The more ideas going around the better the brainstorm

I like various parts of this proposal, though most of the feedback I’m seeing is that people do generally want proactive threads as long as they’re relevant. The problem is finding a way to continue proactively posting threads in people’s feeds while somehow eliminating the following issues with the current implementation:

• Too many low-interest series competing for real estate with high-interest series on the community feed
• Low-interest series not attracting any attention

Your approach solves the first problem at the expense of severely reducing the discoverability of lower interest series. It seems possible to tweak this proposal in such a way that it solves the original problem without that downside:

1. Restrict per-episode threads to a secondary community (!episode_discussion@ani.social works, but anywhere else would work just as well)
2. On a daily basis, post a “Today’s Episode Ratings” thread to the main !anime@lemmy.ml community which will simultaneously act as a directory of what’s airing today & a ranked board showing each individual thread’s current score/ratio/comments
3. If an episode thread does well one week, then the next episode of that show will have earned the right to get hosted directly on the main !anime@lemmy.ml community feed instead of being hidden away

I think this achieves a good balance between pruning automated posts and maintaining discoverability. The appeal of using a “Ranking” thread as a link directory like this is that it creates a fertile area for low-spoiler crossover discussions/discovery without sapping interest in visiting each of the high-spoiler individual episode discussion posts linked therein. Furthermore, dangling out the ability to “upgrade” a show like this will serve as a general incentive for engagement across all interest levels while still solving the original problem of fairly determining what should/shouldn’t be promoted on the main community feed.

That’s a good point! Now that I realize the spoiler implications… I’m suddenly a lot less happy with the original concept. With that being said, I don’t feel that leaving it up to a pre-season poll is an ideal solution either. Lots of strong-looking shows drop off hard and lots of the season’s best start out as dark horses – most of the time, I think that we’d end up preventing more active discussions than we’d actually be bringing back. Theoretically, we could try to solve this with a recurring poll, but I’m skeptical of doing that because: A) poll participation suffers from selection bias & B) flooding the feed with repeated poll threads would be even worse than simply sending out a bunch of empty discussion threads.

I apologize for claiming to be open to thoughts and then immediately shooting down that one… so let me at least conjure up an important takeaway from it: the best possible solution to the problem is one that – no matter which show you choose – you can still find a place discuss the latest episode of it somewhere. I think that’s important because it keeps us out of the business of gatekeeping and creates the kind of cross-pollination opportunities that many of us want out of an online anime community (i.e.: you can discover cool shows as they’re airing because fans are talking about it in the same shared space).

With that being said, if I had to structure an ordered list of priorities, it’d look like this:

1. Minimize “spillover” spoilers between ongoing series
2. Maximize per thread feed impact (i.e.: the only acceptable feed spam is good content)
3. Maximize discoverability / cross-polination

I like the idea of merging threads because it boosts objectives 2 & 3, but objective 1 takes precedence. Could we somehow have our cake and eat it too? For example: /r/anime has their spoiler corner subthreads which start autocollapsed. Lemmy doesn’t support this (yet), but perhaps there are alternative solutions if we get clever enough?

Err… there’s really no need to explain yourself. You’re just voicing what everyone else was already thinking, including me!

For the purposes of this thread please just think of me like any other member of the community. That guy who deals with the bot upkeep may as well be someone else entirely 😉

FWIW: I think anything we can do to increase discussion will be a boon to the community. That’s why we collectively wanted an episode discussion bot in the first place, after all. With that being said, we probably overshot it. Rather than making it easier for everyone to join the discussion, we ended up spreading out the discussion too thinly. It’s a sort of ghost-town effect.

So, what next? Well, I still believe in automation, though I think we need to redo it in a way that better fits the current size of the community. We should start small and build that back out until such a point that we can actually justify the one-episode-one-thread model. How do we do that? That’s up to you guys, but here’s a proposal to consider:

1. Every day, an episode discussion thread gets automatically posted covering all episodes which aired that day
2. On that thread, a poll is posted for people to vote on the best episode of the day
3. On an as-needed basis, if a show is so popular that the other episodes are getting crowded out, then we give those shows their own dedicated threads in the style of the current bot

What do you folks think? I’m very open to thoughts & suggestions

Faraway Paladin 2nd Season? I’m hyped. Not much else that I’m overly looking forward to in terms of sequels, though (I’ve sworn off AoT for now until it’s genuinely over).

Which new shows do you folks foresee making the top ranks this season? Most of these titles are totally new to me, though I’ve heard that the 100 Girlfriends manga is kind of notorious. Maybe that’ll be this season’s so-bad-it’s-good show?