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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Sunday, January 10th, 2021

By the time this is posted, it’ll be Friday. This week has been a long one, mostly because I’ve been kind of sick, working from home with no change in scenery, and hoping that I don’t end up feeling worse before I get better. On the plus side, I’ve been sleeping a lot better than I have in a long time. I have a cat, whom I love very much, but she has a bad habit of waking up around 4:30am and deciding that’s when my husband and I should also wake up. She’s also one of the loudest cats I’ve ever had the pleasure to know so there’s no ignoring her when she starts her morning routine. Luckily she’s dialed it back a little bit lately and instead of pawing at my face with her foot to get me up, has been a lot more willing to curl up and go back to sleep on the bed with me.

The better sleep quality has the added benefit of allowing my thoughts to remain more coherent (at least I think they are; the jury’s still out on whether other folks agree). While I still have a bad tendency to get distracted while I’m writing (I’m blaming the internet for being so interesting all the time!), at least I’ve been able to write.

Just as a note: after this batch the premieres start trickling off a little bit so premiere dates might be combined into fewer posts.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Saturday, January 9th, 2021

The first couple weeks of a new anime season sometimes feel like running a marathon – it’s a long haul task of watching new episodes, constructing coherent thoughts about them, and then moving on to the next one in a relatively short amount of time. From the outside it might seem like a pretty easy job to sit at a desk and watch anime, but as a lone blogger it can get pretty intense especially since I’m editing my own posts without the benefit of an outside force reminding me not to use certain pet phrases too much (for some reason, this season has been all about the word “albeit” for me, even though I haven’t used it that much in the past). The urge to self-edit in the midst of the writing process is tempting, because then the second pass takes less time. Unfortunately, it’s so easy to get hung-up on finding the perfect phrasing that I find that methodology to be more limiting. It takes training to let oneself word vomit to the benefit of the final product.

I hope folks are enjoying these little asides at the beginning of my posts; I have a difficult time getting started sometimes, and providing a window into my thought process seems to help me a get into a writing frame of mind. If you’re not keen to read vaguely-related personal things, it’s easy to just click the “continue reading” button and skip to the good stuff.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Friday, January 8th 2021 Part 2

It’s always a good day for anime, so I’m moving forward with the other couple of new episodes from last Friday. I’m pretty pleased with my progress thus far. I always have it as a goal in my mind to watch the first episode of a series before the second one airs. I nearly never achieve this, but I keep hoping to at some point. I’ll say it outright – I’m a perfectionist in certain ways, and the way that manifests when writing about new anime is that, once I fall behind, I feel like it’s hopeless to try to catch back up. I’ve missed out on some good viewing opportunities because of this, because I end up moping and don’t have enough time to watch all the anime I would like to.

I can’t really say that this time will be entirely different, but I’m doing a lot to try to work on my attitude and refocus if I start to get off track. For example, I would have liked to have had the previous post up on the site on Tuesday, but I was feeling ill and couldn’t manage to finish it. But I used some break time on Wednesday to fix it up and post it without dwelling too much on the feelings of inadequacy that tend to creep in when these things happen.

This might not really be the proper place to talk about this, so I might write a separate post down the line. I’m just thankful and happy when people read and enjoy my writing, no matter when it gets posted.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Friday, January 8th 2021

It’s amazing how much things can change in a short amount of time. Yesterday during the day I was all geared-up to come home and watch anime, but then before I went to bed I started to feel suspiciously cruddy. Now I’m working from home and hoping that all I have is a case of the creeping crud. Luckily I don’t feel too poorly, but I’m a little irritated that the only places I’ve been for quite a while (aside from work, which is fairly isolated) are “the grocery store” and “the other grocery store” and I still managed to catch something.

On the upside, it does mean I get to use my lunch time to watch a little anime to maybe catch up a little bit (not that I’m stressing). This group of premieres is the largest so far, but if this post gets too long I might split it in two so that I don’t overwhelm folks.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Thursday, January 7th, 2021

So far I’m really enjoying the more chill pacing of writing reviews this season. It’s not that there are fewer premieres, it’s more that I’m holding myself to more realistic standards and not getting so stressed about being one person attempting to complete the work of several. Knowing that I’m trying to write a reasonable amount rather than word-vomiting the huge essays I had been writing about each new show has kept me from dreading the process. I can’t guarantee that there will never be word vomit, but I’m trying to keep it as a “sometimes” issue.

These premieres mark the end of the first week of the new year. It’s already been a wild ride, that’s for sure. There have been quite a few jokes about people deciding not to renew after their free 7-day trial… I for one am deeply hoping that the year will be looking up a little bit from here. At least I will try to enjoy some great anime!

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Wednesday, January 6th 2021

Well, as I’m writing this it’s definitely been an interesting couple of days in the United States. To be honest, it took a day or two to get enough sleep to feel like I could pay attention to an entire anime episode and write coherently about it. I think there are some folks who can use media to escape from whatever happens to be going on; my anxiety is just too terrible to let up for 25 minutes so I can take in an anime episode. But I’ve been wanting to watch anime, so I’m going to give it a try and see how far I get.

Most folks will notice that the look of the blog has changed; while I wasn’t really planning to switch things up at this very moment, a friend let me know of some image compatibility issues that were showing up on the mobile site so I figured it would be a good opportunity to make a change to my very out-of-date theme. I may be tweaking things in the coming days, but this is pretty close to what I wanted.

Note: There is a small spoiler for Hortensia Saga in its review. It’s one of the main conceits of the series and if you’re looking closely enough you can identify it on your own (even though the show itself is not keen to call it out directly), but I know more than one person who missed it until participating in discussions afterward, so if you’d rather go in completely blind you can skip the second review in this post.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – Premieres for Monday, January 4th 2021

Hello friends! So it seems the season has started in earnest now. I, for one, am excited to see whether anything I was excited about actually pans out. We’ll see!

I’m going to be prioritizing non-sequel material for the time being, as I’d rather get a handle on the unknowns rather than the familiar anime about which we’ve probably already made our decisions. Hopefully I’ll be able to carve out some time to talk about my favorite sequel premieres, too.

I’m attempting to group premieres together by premiere date; if a lot of shows premiere on the same date I may have to break some of them into multiple parts. I’m still testing out this change in format and hope to land on something that works for the long term.

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First Impressions Reviews

Winter 2021 New Anime – The Early Bird Catches the Worm

You know, over the past year I’ve come to truly dislike the word “unprecedented,” because it’s been used time and time again to describe the utterly batshit state of affairs in the world today. And yet, here I’m about to use it to describe the roll-out of this most current anime season.

This season is an odd one for various reasons, perhaps the biggest of which is that it’s turned into kind of a catch-up situation for some series that were meant to have been broadcast sooner, but which were delayed due to the Covid-19 situation. Now we’re being delivered more anime than may have been anticipated, some of them extremely high-profile released. Another thing I’ve noticed is that there have been a few early broadcasts. This in itself isn’t that odd; the odd part is that the early broadcasts are available to us in the US, rather than on, say, Japanese Netflix or some other platform unavailable to us in the West.

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Anime Reviews Reviews

Encountering Turbulence Atop a Witch’s Broom

This post contains spoilers for the anime series Wandering Witch: The Journey of Elaina. This series is available to Watch on Funimation’s streaming service in the US.

Last December, back when going to the movie theater was still a choice one could make on a whim, my husband and I decided to tag along with some members of the anime club who had planned a group viewing of the film Cats. We pretty much already knew what we were getting into; I’d read several reviews lamenting the truly weird design choices, mis-used A-list actors, and pressure that the animation team was put under to adhere to some unrealistic directorial choices. But I wanted to hang out with my friends, and going out to movies was at that time a pretty reliable way to see a bunch of them at once outside of anime club. The movie was definitely an experience, though I’d say the defining moment for me was near the end of the film where Judy Dench as Old Deuteronomy breaks the fourth wall, turning directly to the audience; I audibly gasped and hid my face (a friend of mine still teases me for this). For the most part, though, the adaptation was just a cavalcade of bad decisions and poor attempts at both humor and drama.

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First Impressions Reviews

Autumn 2020 First Impressions – King’s Raid: Successors of the Will

The demons return after a century long slumber…

Streaming: Funimation

Episodes: 26

Source: Game

Summary: A century ago, the Kingdom of Orvelia quelled a demon invasion. Since then, the country has been peaceful, and that’s the only world that apprentice Knight Kasel knows. His biggest concerns are whether he’ll complete his apprenticeship with his mentor, the Knight Clause, and whether his dinner (usually something like cooked spider that would make most folks turn up their noses) will upset his stomach. His friend, a local priestess named Frey, is one of the few people with whom he shares these feelings.

But the nobles of Orvelia are beginning to hear rumblings of a new demon invasion at the borders of their country. There’s some disagreement about how to deal with this, but one rogue noble offers a suggestion – hire the mercenary group Black Edge, comprised of Dark Elves willing to fight for a price. Unfortunately, racism against Dark Elves runs deep in Orvelia, and the other nobles aren’t convinced about letting them fight on behalf of the nation. The Dark Elves also have their own goals; as a reaction to the suffering inflicted upon their people by the humans of Orvelia, they’re out to seek revenge. With demons now responsible for taking out an entire Orvelian scout party, what choice will the country ultimately make?

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