My Clueless First Friend

Bullying sucks. I was bullied back in high school. I don’t remember all that much of those years, mainly because I blocked out a lot of the bad memories. I only realized this pretty recently, but what can you do about it? For a long time I was really sad about how I’ve wasted so many of my years being miserable. If only I had some good friends. Well, I did get some good friends later on in high school, one of which I still speak with regularly. So the importance of good friends is not lost on me.

That brings me to the first anime I want to look at today; My Clueless First Friend. Nishimura Akane is a bit of a gloomy child, who gets called The Grim Reaper by her mean classmates. She has no friends at school until a young boy called Takada Taiyou transfers from the countryside. He thinks being a Grim Reaper is the coolest thing ever and immediately wants to become friends with Nishimura. The friendship that quickly develops between the two is a joy to watch. I normally don’t like shows that go too deep into misunderstandings, because it gets frustrating to watch. In this case, the main misunderstanding is that Takada does not understand that Nishimura is being bullied and is instead just super nice to her. The series has a couple of other fun characters and is all around just enjoyable. There’s very little drama at all, and when things do get a bit sad it makes sense for the story and gets resolved rather quickly. All in all I recommend this show if you’re looking for something comfortable to watch without too much substance but also with nothing irritating about it. I’ll definitely remember this one fondly.

Jigokuraku

I think that this show is probably the one that surprised the most people. I’d never heard of the source material at all before the anime started, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Jigokuraku follows Gabimaru the Hollow, a ninja who has been betrayed by his village and is about to be executed. Except the shogunate has a different plan. Alongside quite a few other death row prisoners he is being sent to a dangerous island to retrieve the elixir of immortality. If he can manage to do that, he will earn back his freedom. Gabimaru’s motivation is to go back to his wife afterwards, as he’s only recently discovered how he’s not as hollow of a person as he always thought he was. Joining him on this journey is one of the famous executioners. Each prisoner is assigned an executioner, and Sagiri is the one who is assigned to Gabimaru.

The island they arrive on is not your average island. Strange monsters walk the forests and they’re unable to return once they get to it. What is the secret that lies deep in the center of this island and is this elixir even real? Not to mention the strange mix of religious statues and things that don’t seem to match up. There’s a lot going on, and with a second season already announced I highly recommend you to check this one out for yourself, before a new season starts. It’s very good.

Heaven’s Delusion

This one is a slow burner, but it definitely burns with a fiery passion. The show follows two different plotlines from the start. One part of the story is about Maru and Kiruko, who are looking for a place only known as Heaven. We know very little about this place and we find out as time goes on that the two of them don’t know much more about it either. Kiruko is hired to be Maru’s bodyguard. Maru seems to be looking for someone as well. Kiruko has a complicated background as well and they are looking for some people from their past as well.

At the same time, we get a storyline of a group of kids growing up in a strange facility with robots monitoring them. They seem almost superhuman in some ways, where they recover from some wounds strangely, but we also quickly learn that they can get sick and die, and things can happen to them. The adults in the facility seem shady from day one, but we’ll probably find out more about that as the show goes on.

This show is well written. And it’s so well written that there were many clues to how things eventually develop. Having said that, I’m clearly not smart enough to catch on to them, so there were many moments where I would read the weekly discussion threads afterwards and learn more about the episodes I just watched. But even without fully grasping every part of the story immediately I still found myself heavily invested in the fates of Kiruko and Maru, and their story was very interesting. I didn’t care for the facility kids for the first two thirds of the show, but towards the end I felt much more invested in their side of the story as well. It’s a show that really makes you think and has a lot of heart.

If you are choosing to watch this show, I will put some trigger warnings here. There are some scenes that have to do with trauma and non-consentual sexual acts. That’s putting it mildly for what happens, but I want to make sure that I don’t send someone who doesn’t want to see those kinds of topics to this series. If you have no problem seeing these things depicted in fiction then I do recommend this one.

And that brings us to the end of this season’s quick reviews. I watched quite a lot of shows this season, but not as many as before. To add to that, there were a lot of shows I just didn’t have much to say about. You can still expect me to talk about a few more shows on their own though. To give a sneak peek, I am planning to talk about both Vinland Saga and Skip & Loafer at a later date. And next season we’ll have to see. I’m only watching one new show, the rest is just sequels, so there’s probably not a ton to talk about. But either way, if you do check out any of the shows above, let me know in the comments down below what you think and as always, thanks for reading.