You get what you pay for with a show called The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses
by Bob Johnson

If you’re sold on the title, then yes, this show will deliver! For the rest of you, starting with the folks far to the other side of the fence, let me remind you of the tried and true fandom advice of “don’t harsh the squee” – a good reminder for any fevered debate, let alone during this hot, hot Summer 2023.

Meganewasu is about a girl… and a guy. For shonen anime, these are not your traditional stars of the show. They’re not motormouths leaping through memetic scenes with finger Vs in the air. There’s no lightning-fast combat, merchable props, or magic cats. It’s just two people with fee~fee~s and a lot of shyness and introspection.

If this was any other show, this would be the B plot. When they interrupt the samurai space battles just to cut to two randos dithering about their hormones-to-spoken-words ratio, I’m the first to shout “SAY IT! SAY IT!” at the screen. But in this case, there’s nothing to derail. You are not going to get palace intrigue in the teachers’ offices at this school. There’s no army of genki girl mecha pilots. This show is hearts and sugar and fluff all the way down.

This is one of those “healing” shows I’ve heard so much about, isn’t it? A weekly meditation on the beauty and melancholy of having a crush, seeing the other maybe-or-maybe-not crushing back, while also already knowing better than to pollute the local social network with ill-considered pickup lines. And it feels real, like Fujichika-sensei is a lady who can speak with a sliver of experience, perhaps?

Though even I have been impatient with the show’s glacial pace, I resisted the urge to watch at double speed, which gives the background art plenty of time to shine. Some of it, like the school entryway CG, is a little overused, but it definitely pops. The way the sunbeams catch the dust in the classroom is not something you usually see outside of full-budget movies or the odd KyoAni production. So it does feel a tad off to see the relative disinterest in animating the background characters.

Is this a feast for 100% of anime fans? Certainly not. But what if you’re tired of only getting a slice of romance with your generic shonen show and want the awkward gawpers stuttering at each other to be the whole meal? Well then, this is your ride. It stretches out those moé shojo-ai tropes wide, long, and soothingly around all of those highs and lows felt while aching another millimeter toward a confession.

Maybe Look It Up:
The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses (Meganewasu) anime
Based on the manga by Koume Fujichika
Produced by GoHands, Licenced by Crunchyroll
Streaming (press time): Crunchyroll

The points don’t matter, unless you’re expelled, from Classroom of the Elite
by Bob Johnson

Not everyone’s a high flier. Take Kiyotaka Ayanokoji, for example. He just wants to sail through doing the bare minimum. The only problem is that his dad sent him to this particular boarding school to earn elite medallion status, and the ridiculous games this academy makes its aspirants play would make the most cutthroat Atlanta boardroom blush.

The students are issued Delta Airlines crew uniforms red blazers, assigned to a lettered “class” team, given a set number of starter points, and then are hounded through a series of crises designed to inspire their permanent tragic desperation and dependency on playing the game. The players are never entirely told the rules, which are constantly in flux anyway, and they really don’t matter until the end of each challenge event, when the scores are totalled, and we find out who has won and who is expelled.

But Kiyotaka has a secret, and a plan. His secret is that he really doesn’t care, and nobody can ever make him. But as long as he’s here, and he has to play the games, he’s going to make sure that nobody sees how well he can play. Hence his carefully cultivated relationship with Suzune Horikita, a too-cool-for-you prep who only cares about her own grades and standing, until Kiyotaka ropes her into helping out the whole class. With Ayanokoji pulling the strings, Horikita begins to win.

But this doesn’t just inspire the team to rally around her, it draws the attention of the school administration and rival classes, who each have their own reasons to keep Class D’s face eating dirt at the bottom of the totem pole. It plays out time and again, with Ayanokoji thwarting each new scheme in turn, coming closer and closer to showing his true skillset.

Along the way, we explore concepts in game theory and tour the DSM-5 in search of new mental illnesses, mainly borne by the ladies of the show as it expands its ecchi harem. Given the kind of show this is, it’s particularly unusual that the show’s first and most important relationship (Kiyotaka/Suzune) is hardly ever treated as a romantic pairing, though that may change next season, who knows?

Spoiling the show further wouldn’t be fair to you; there’s a special sauce to CotE that I haven’t seen come together anywhere else. Some of the ground it covers was trodden in shows like Moriarty the Patriot, Monster, and Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans… or for western media fans, think of it as Suits meets Hunger Games meets Poirot mixed with a dash of Cyrano de Bergerac. Bottom line: this show is Code Geass done right. It’s worth a watch, if you want to attend head games high school.

Maybe Look it Up:
Classroom of the Elite (Youzitsu) anime (S1 and S2 reviewed)
Based on the manga by Sakagaki and Shogo Kinugasa
Produced by Lerche, Licenced by Crunchyroll
Streaming (press time): Crunchyroll

Since When does Production I.G adapt BL Mangas?
by Bolt Vanderhuge

I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t have bothered to watch Moriarty the Communist Patriot if not for my anime group voting for it. I had actually never heard of this before, so I went into it completely unbiased when I started. The fact that Production I.G had done it gave me some hope initially, because back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, they had actually made some pretty good stuff, even it was pretty obvious one or more people there had a huge anti-America boner. While the same attention to technical detail is still alive there, as someone obviously did their homework on Victorian-era Britain. But while the art skills are still there, the writing skill apparently is not.

At first I thought this series might just be some attempt to make the character of Moriarty more sympathetic (as the title calling him a patriot suggests), or at least an attempt to try some kind of a twist on the old Sherlock Holmes franchise by focusing on this character. Essentially, Moriarty shows all the same deductive skills that are stereotypically associated with Holmes, but the “twist” ends up being that the perpetrator of the crimes he solves are all rich aristocrats and the “service” he offers is to arrange for someone else to murder them.

While was not immediately apparent to my dense self, but after the opening monologue started in the second episode and the flashback featured therein, it became obvious that this series is really just socialist revenge fantasy, which frankly was quite horrifying for a freedom-lover like myself to watch.

The strict class separation of Victorian England really lends itself well to socialist talking points, but the show really does go overboard on it. Part of me wonders if they are just using England as a proxy for Japan, given the taboo against criticizing the Imperial family, but that’s probably giving the writers too much credit given how cartoonishly evil all the aristocrats in this series are depicted. Except for Albert Moriarty, who proves his virtue by murdering his entire family after first talking them into adopting William and his brother Louis. Only after the senior Moriarty paid for Louis to get life-saving surgery, though.

The first part of the series was very formulaic, consisting entirely of some aristocrat doing something completely inhumanly evil, William showing how smart he is by figuring out who committed said wrongdoing and/or finding all the details he needs for him and his crew of fellow commies to murder said aristocrat without getting caught. These “perfect crimes” were to be part of some plan to somehow reform the British Empire, but it wasn’t really apparent how this would be accomplished since it really seemed to be all about the revenge aspect and just how smart William was. I would even have gone as far as to accuse him of being a Wesley Crusher level Gary Stu if not for the fact that he was basically just the pop culture stereotype of Sherlock Holmes but evil.

I was honestly getting bored of this series once the initial shock of Production I.G having gone full commie on me had worn off, but just as I was starting to zone out, the series changed things up by introducing the famous detective and archenemy of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes. It was at times actually somewhat interesting to see these two play off of each other, but it was also pretty apparent that the show was basically morphing into a yaoi fan-fic. It later became the ultimate crossover fic after introducing a few other characters from the classic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle series by doing some … interesting things with them. For example, Irene Adler went from being able to disguise herself as a man (somehow, in spite of being built like Danni Ashe), to being trans, and being able to beat the crap out of people, to actually being the first James Bond, and first agent of MI6, which was totally invented thanks to William Moriarty’s influence. Upon the reveal of her new name, I laughed my ass off. A character named Billy the Kid also turns up. Stuff like this was the only real entertainment I got out of this series. It’s literally the ultimate yaoi socialist self-insert cross-over fan-fiction.

I guess another example of the hilarity of this show is that it seemed to be structured like the 1997 Berserk series in that it started in 1911 New York City (with a period-accurate skyline) and then flashed back to William Moriarty’s beginning in London, but it’s like the writers forgot to bookend the series, and rather than ending up back in 1911 New York City, it ended in Switzerland. This Rian Johnson level of subverting expectations may be accurate to the manga (I don’t know or care), but it is still pretty funny.

So should you watch this show? Well, that depends. Are you a communist BL fan who also likes Sherlock Holmes? If so, you’d probably like this show, and hijacking planes to get to Red Zone Cuba. Do you like watching absurd things and making fun of them? You will find plenty to make fun of in this series, but it only really picks up toward the end and you really have to wait for the laughs before that. If you don’t want to wade through propaganda to get to the stupidly fun second season, or were foolishly hoping this show might do an actual adaptation of a Conan Doyle mystery, I would recommend that you skip this one and maybe watch Sherlock Hound instead.

Maybe Check It Out:

Moriarty the Patriot
Directed by Kazuya Nomura
Based on the manga written by Ryōsuke Takeuchi and illustrated by Hikaru Miyoshi
Produced by Production I.G

Streaming (press time): Crunchyroll