New year, new season, new anime for us to love (or hate). Sengoku Youko is good, we promise!
RSS | iTunes | GooglePlay | Spotify | Amazon Music | Podbean | Stitcher | Youtube
Show Notes
6:28 Dungeon Meshi (Delicious in Dungeon)
28:22 Sasaki and Peeps
40:08 Solo Leveling
49:17 A Sign of Affection
1:01:14 Sengoku Youko
1:11:52 Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!
1:22:24 Metallic Rouge
1:36:59 Bucchigiri!
1:44:44x The Witch and the Beast
1:51:34 Bang Brave Bang Bravern
The Glorio Blog 
I really *really* want to love Metallic Rouge, because by all rights it should be right up my street, but… it makes me feel the same as Carole & Tuesday, and all the others. They feel so empty and calculated, like the creators are trying to replicate what made some of their earlier works popular and iconic, and it’s just not working because they’re missing something. I’m watching these shows and keep thinking “man, I could be watching [insert actual iconic show like Bebop or Eureka Seven or Wolf’s Rain or Darker than Black or whatever] instead and I’d be having so much more fun.” I think it’s the writing, frankly. Metallic Rouge feels like the show is going through a checklist of character types and plot points, without taking care to add any individuality, charm or excitement. It’s not like a show needs to be the most unique thing to be interesting, but this is just something I’ve seen before done way better.
As for Bucchigiri, honestly at this point it grates on me. As I said I’ll defend its existence, but god it’s just so annoying to me. And every time Arajin starts going on about wanting to lose his virginity and obsessing about the girl, I can’t help hearing “NO HOMO! NO HOMO! (wink wink write doujinshi nudge nudge)” which is just, eh.
On that point, though, rest assured, there’s *tons* of cute, innocent, wholesome BL manga out there. BL is not a genre, really, there are no rules to it, only stereotypes, mostly built on flawed understandings based on a very narrow sample way back when it wasn’t as widespread and easily acquired as it is now.
Yeah I’m not all that high on Metallic Rouge either, but I’m willing to give it one more episode. At least it’s nice to look at.
I do try to avoid categorizing BL as a “genre” but sometimes the word just slips out. Hopefully we see more of that variety in anime form in the future.
Thanks for pointing that out. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that “Cherry Magic” is the *only* BL story to be wholesome and fluffy — I absolutely know that is not true.
What I tried to say is that these “scandalous” clichés, even if they might nowadays only be represented in a minority of works, are still prominently perceived as emblematic of BL as a whole by people unfamiliar with that whole scene, partially because of the proliferation of all sorts of memes and partially because at some point, whichever few BL anime there actually were, did often include these tropes.
I would say it is similar how yuri is often seen as little more than cutesy high school girls holding hands and casually groping each other, because it’s usually the yuri stories with these specific tropes that get turned into anime, even though yuri manga with more mature characters and themes also exist.
In that regard, “Cherry Magic” comes across to me not necessarily as the first BL manga to both get an anime and not include these “this is what the Internet thinks BL is” tropes — after all, Jel mentions “Given” in our discussion — but it does seem like an adaptation with enough potential to “unshackle” BL form its reputation and open the door for some more variety in what gets adapted.