There’s no reason the broadcast of the UCBA couldn’t do dramatic finales in multiple angles and in slow-mo. They have a zillion micro-drones all over the battlefield. The live feed might be limited in the slow-mo stuff only because something else dramatic could happen immediately after the first dramatic thing. But the feed probably has a dozen PiP options, plus you can customize your feed to follow a certain contender, since there’s at least 4 different fights going on at the start of each match. The feed that Sydney and co. are watching (and us) is the “official” feed with curated camera angles and is what the Gail and Bluce are working from.

Besides, anime used to be replete with the 1, 2, 3, SLASH trope. I’m thinking specifically of the ending of Wicked City where the ninja girl gets preggers powers, because of course she does. But that’s hardly the only example. I don’t know if it’s that much of an anime trope these days though. My anime intake lately is much lower than it used to be, mostly because I got my start with it in college… Well, probably Harmony Gold Robotech was my first real bit of exposure to it beyond Voltron/Ultraman/Speed Racer, but anyway, I think I kind of reached my saturation level a while back.

I think the two shows that finally really bored me away from the genre was me trying to watch Bleach, and I think toward the end of the first season, the “Hah hah, I have defeated you!” / Hero flexes his antagonist gland extra hard and finds a hitherto unknown source of power then one-shots the boss, who then goes, “What!? That’s impossible! Noooooo! >dead<” And it was like anime plot paint by numbers. I was like, “Oh my god, I have already seen this exact same thing 87 times!”

The other one was me trying to watch Naruto. I enjoyed the humor, I vaguely recall being amused by the pink-haired girl being closet-boy-crazy? Am I remembering that right? But the fights. God damn, every fight was like, “I’m going to throw a punch now, but first, let’s do a 20 minute flashback to show how I learned this punch.” Like the whole first season, they only got through about 4 fights, because every fight took 4 episodes? I’m being hyperbolic, but again, I decided I didn’t have the patience for it at the time. The only reason I was watching it in the first place was because for about three consecutive A-Kons, like half the cosplayers there were dressed as Naruto characters, and I was keenly aware my Anime literacy was falling way behind. So I gave it a shot, but unfortunately I was all Shonened out.

I’ve hardly sworn off anime, but I have less time to watch it these days, and I can really only watch dubbed stuff because I can’t draw and read subtitles at the same time. In the last few years, all I’ve watched is Delicious in Dungeon, Saiki K, a few years back, which was fairly amusing. Komi Can’t Communicate… Oh, I watched the first two seasons of My Hero Academia, which I recall liking mostly. Does Aggretsuko count?

I really need to watch Frieren. The only thing I know about that show is from the pictures I’ve seen Frieren online, and they mostly involve her… >cough< interacting with Mimics.

My favorite thing I’ve watched recently was My Dress Up Darling, which has a fantastic dub, IMO. Though I wish the main character would get therapy instead of spiraling into depression for 3 and a half minutes every episode because ten years ago a girl told him he was dumb for liking dolls. It’s just a little embarrassing to try and show an anime to someone who isn’t already saturated in the culture and having to sheepishly explain that the Japanese don’t know how to write… emotions? Or at least western-style emotions? Is that a thing? But the rest of the show is amusing, I promise!

Look, it’s… when an anime character is sad, and not just “comical spray of tears” sad, you all know the exact sequence that’s going to happen. Head down, tears running down cheeks, and a lot of murmuring/whispering. Then they pop to their feet and scream until they wind down with the trail-off scream. I don’t know, maybe that’s how Japanese people act? I hope it’s just a wildly overused trope of Japanese media, cause it doesn’t seem healthy, and it’s not how any human I’ve ever met acts. So I get self-conscious when I show someone a thing I like and there’s this weird recurring bit in it, and I reflexively feel the need to apologize for? Anyone else get like that?

ANYWAY.

Green Strider gets the triple angle deathblow, which is fair, since he blowed up a spaceship with a single sword strike.

Here you go, a brand new vote incentive. Featuring the least sexy character in the comic. No, I take that back, Cooter is the least sexy, but don’t expect a pinup of him anytime soon. Or ever. There is a nude version over at Patreon. Note I didn’t say NSFW. She is nude in those picture, and she does identify as female, but it’s… hard to tell. She is a humanoid aberration by D&D terminology, not a mammal. And before you ask, no, I don’t know how many vertebrae she has in her neck.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.