God is Dead, Long Live Takopi

Forget everything I said about Takopi’s Original Sin being “tough to recommend” and watch one of the most uncompromisingly and stunningly realised works of animated art this wretched decade has brought forth so far.

A Very GLORIO 2024: Gee’s Year in Review

If there’s a pervasive theme to 2024, I think it’s the constant sense of there never being enough time. This has been a noticeable trend for years, but this year it became impossible to ignore that a lot of anime were materially compromised, either in episode count or fidelity. The age of the 52 episode TV anime is dead, and I think the end of the 26 episode TV anime is not far off. We now live in the era of 13 episode seasons; a frankly inadequate number of episodes for many kinds of stories. Watching familiar stories try to fit themselves into this new format has been awkward to say the least. The shows I’ll be talking about are the ones I think are most significant, either good or ill, to my 2024 anime watching experience.

A Very GLORIO 2022: Artemis’ Perfectly Cromulent Anime Awards

Realistically, not every series can be a gem, and not every series even strives to be. So, here’s a toast to the little guys – those anime that aren’t great but also aren’t terrible, the shows that got people through seasons full of outright shite, the titles that helped fill in the blanks and got a “well, that was at least okay” seal of approval in return.

A Very GLORIO 2022: Aqua is extremely boring

This is it, folks. I have officially hit rock bottom. I’m going to be boring. I’m going to give you my five favourite shows of the year, and my thoughts on them, and that’s it. So put on your beige shirt and produce some kind of monotonous grunt to express your excitement in a respectable fashion. Here are — deep sigh — the shows of 2022 I want to shout ou— err, I mean, highlight. Boringly.