Achievement unlocked: she finally remembered his name. Though it seems she didn’t have any trouble at all with Dan’s name.

As a general user, I like the topic system they have set up over there. It lets you just follow a couple topics and automatically subscribes you to a bunch of relevant communities (curated by the admins) for that topic across the fediverse. It was so much easier than trying to seek out a bunch of communities using some kind of third-party lemmy community search tool (like Lemmy Explorer).

I haven’t tried their moderation tools yet (might appoint my piefed account as a mod to see what it’s like). But, for just general browsing, I have liked it a lot.

From the title, I thought this was going to be about depictions of prejudice in novels (based on race, magical ability, wealth, etc.).

I can’t afford to judge others based on what they read, lest I be judged myself. Something about stones and glass houses.

Yeah, the AniList synopsis has a different feel to it than that one. More isekai for the isekai content machine.

Not sold on the character designs at the moment

Interesting piece here is that the character designs are being done by Take. It seems pretty much in line with her other works including Pokemon (2019) and Katanagatari.

The mobile suit aesthetics

Mechanical design is being led by Ikuto Yamashita who has done quite a bit of mech work. Most notably, given Anno’s involvement, is that he did the mechanical design for Evangelion and its subsequent movies.

Bravern was one of the best shows that seemingly nobody in the West watched. It was completely overshadowed in the Winter 2024 season by some other big shows that were airing at the same time (Frieren, Dungeon Meshi). I absolutely loved it and recommend it wholeheartedly.

My goodness… As if they needed to give me any more reasons to like everybody in this hero’s party. I loved that Tia, right at the end, used her own determination and grit to make it happen. Now I just hope that when this inevitably is an anime, that it gets the adaptation that it deserves.

Bravern had a scene very much like this, though it only aired earlier this year. Instead of a boy though, it was very much an adult man that had a girl (basically an adopted daughter) pop into his mech pilot seat with him. The show was basically a parody of a lot of other mech tropes though.

A Pham focused episode this week. Otherwise known as Ars’s cheat code. Pham can do literally anything you ask, up to and including delivering a child!

More questionable military strategy this episode. This guy has a whole lecture about how Couran is vulnerable because he joins the front line, and then proceeds to go out and fight on the front line. In any case, we haven’t seen the last of him I am sure. This is one of those bad guys that is called smart so that when our folks outsmart him, they seem super smart.

Pham’s shadow magic was fun. We also got to see some Pham backstory this episode. I don’t think it is too surprising that somebody in charge of a covert ops band of mercenaries has some dark memories in their past. @rikka@ani.social

However, Ars only stares back with his resting confused face.

I just managed to catch up on the past two episodes. Episode 9 was a ton of fun, but this one…wasn’t. It had its moments, but it weirdly felt like a bad imitation of episode 9.

The whole plan of setting up Alicia was executed much more poorly this episode. I agree with Mel @rikka@ani.social

Some other story beats we got this episode was the Will reveal. It’s not terribly surprising considering how we knew he used to be a noble and how much they lingered on that painting of the King and his brother in an earlier episode. I get the feeling that Duke is hiding something about Will and I am not quite sure yet what it is. His conversation with Alicia about him seemed weird.

Speaking of Duke being weird…

Fortunately, Alicia shut that down…

However, she then walks out of the room and seems to be all blushy about it. Like, this is Grade A creeper stuff Alicia! Don’t enjoy it! Gill needs to convince her that a true Villainess doesn’t need a man like Duke.

Apparently GQuuuuuuX is pronounced g-quacks. Also apparently, Hideaki Anno is cowriting the series.

As far as I can tell, this seems to be a more or less standalone Gundam property rather than fitting into some timeline of one of the Gundam-verses.

These two have very different sets of expectations for the coming sleepover.

Oh man, inject Dark Mia straight into my veins. This prince deserves everything coming to him. I like the turn to a revenge story this has taken with Mia’s story. Between that and the warm romance that Philia is going through, the two sides of the story are so different, but they are both fun.

She was so eager to go drink that she couldn’t even hide the drawing software UI.

Poor Jirai-chan! She might not have a boyfriend anymore, but at least she made a bee(?) friend.

Also, Shroomy-chan was so cute. She felt straight out of a Ghibli movie.

Another incredibly cute chapter!

Until…Chokki-chan just had to make it weird.

These two are so damn cute it hurts.

Finally got the push I needed to finish working on a dedicated rules page for the wiki that I use for !anime@ani.social. The meta discussion around it was helpful in that I learned that I was perhaps a bit out of step with what users wanted.

Also, I was doing some testing of my community on piefed and identified a couple bad bugs for some types of posts we use. The devs over there were very responsive and both of the bad bugs have since been patched (one, two), with a third, minor bug to be fixed at some point.

I will probably leave this pinned for a day or two to help with visibility a bit, but I don’t intend to make this a big deal. It is mostly just an expanded version of what was in the sidebar and an effort to get written into text how I was already moderating things.

The image is a dramatic reenactment of how I wrote up the rules.

It’s White Fox that’s animating it, right?

That’s right. It looks like it was planned for 16 episodes. Here is my guess as to the release schedule strategy:

Instead of running 16 straight episodes and either starting or ending mid-season, they decided to start at the beginning of the Fall season (with a 90-minute special), take a break after the first 8 episodes (which wrap up an arc), then jump in again with the final 8 episodes in the middle of the Winter season so that its finale will air around the same time as other shows also finish up.

Total speculation on my part, but I did go back and find that this release schedule was how it was originally announced back in September. So, it’s not like they changed it partway through the season.

I am now two episodes behind on Tower of God because of traveling (hoping to catch up before the next episode airs), but it has been a massive disappointment so far. I can’t see how there is some amazing savior of an episode on the horizon.