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Jujutsu Kaisen's Culling Game Arc felt like watching a Fate entry by Mappa. A battle royale between involuntarily marked sorcerers with a motive to gather their energy and transcend (reach Akasha), people from old eras reincarnated into new vessels using their magical items, 3 sorcerer families, Itadori having survivor's guilt and referring to himself as "a cog in the machine" (Emiya seeing himself as a tool of justice, with the cog imagery and all), Domain Expansions basically being Reality Marbles etc.

I finally finished Journal with Witch today and [as I hoped/expected](/r/anime/comments/1sk6c8z/anime_questions_recommendations_and_discussion/ofz3kjj/) I have a new favorite anime. [](#utahapraises) Aside from the things I mentioned in the previous comment, I found that it does a lot of little things well for me like facial expressions and showing contrasts/callbacks without explicitly spelling it out for the audience, e.g. [episode 12] >!Makio and Emiri's mom going to a restaurant that she calls spacious and bright and the next scene is Kasamachi and Touno going to a restaurant with dark wood paneling that's framed to make it look fairly cramped!< and [episode 13] >!Makio and Asa having the same breakfast they did in the first episode with Asa having learned her lesson to not put the sausages in the sandwich.!< Also [more generally] >!the contrast between the friend groups of Makio and Minori with the latter mostly falling into stereotypical mother/housewife roles and Makio's friends largely rejecting romantic relationships as a whole.!< There are a lot of instances along those lines, those are just what have stuck out in my mind in the past day or so. Overall a fantastic show and I'm glad other people have generally appreciated it as well. I'm looking forward to completing my first rewatch of it tomorrow by revisiting the final episode again as I've already rewatched every previous episode before moving on to the next. On top of that I'm now going around and replacing my use of [Jinto from Crest of the Stars](https://myanimelist.net/images/characters/10/119868.jpg) as an avatar on different online sites with Makio. He served me well for nearly 20 years but she's a better representation of how I am at this point in my life.

Decided to drop Bookworm because it's too slowburn for me. Also, it's just occurred to me now: I've started watching Bookworm because of the premise. Girl who likes books reincarnates in the world without books so she literally starts printing industry just so she had something to read. "If you want something, do it yourself" principle taken to the extreme. But, [Bookworm] >!she have achieved her goal, she has her goddamn books now. And what even is Bookworm without its premise? Just another run-of-the-mill fantasy with a dash of Game of Thrones. Well executed with decent worldbuilding of course, but still, there's nothing special about that!<

I want to comment on *Pokemon XY*, but I don’t think there’s anything I can say that won’t come off as mean. It’s just crazy some of the revisionism I’ve seen relating to the series. There seems to be a ton of survivorship bias going on as I distinctly remember myself and many others falling off the show and acknowledging that Gen 5-6 Pokemon was kinda in a slump, but then Gen 7 rolled around and suddenly all the loud minority of Shounen Bros sticking around were suddenly up in arms that it’s actually the best thing ever. When I rewatched it a few years back during my full Pokemon binge, I was willing to chalk my falling off to just my tastes changing at the time, but upon rewatching it I can now confirm that it is maybe the most uninspired and bland season of Pokemon, and the most fanfic-y until the latter half of *Journeys*. People look at the camera work and Serena and Greninja and gas up the show, but the production team is still clearly getting used to working in 3D space for most of it and the writing team in retrospect clearly had no idea what to do with Serena for most of the show. It’s got the guise of being a “more serious” entry in the franchise while maintaining the sanded down Ash from BW and carrying no themes through its repetitive and recycled plot lines. By the end it’s just a generic Shounen series, and not even a good one at that, and the less we talk about how they just rush Serena’s “arc” to get it done and over with the better. I waver on calling it the outright worst generation of the Pokemon anime, but at least *Advanced* as the benefit of a few new and interesting ideas for the franchise that later entries could build off of. Meanwhile if you told me that XY was filler while the team worked on preparing themselves for SM, I would totally believe you.

Those who search find I guess. Watched *[RG Veda](https://myanimelist.net/anime/439)* and *[Kaze no Tairiku](https://myanimelist.net/anime/1777)*, which were really good both in general and at scratching my itch. Amongst other things they have in common that they're very clearly just a small vignette within a larger story, but that works for me. They also have some impeccable visual designs, and *Kaze no Tairiku* in particular has some very neat building of atmosphere and storytelling trough its soundscape and small visual cues. All in all, both are absolutely worth watching and while they're clearly advertisements for the original work, they're also good enough you can consider me sold.

I think pretty much everything has aired already; What's your best day of the week? [](#ama) For me, it's **Saturday (Kanan and Yowayowa sensei)**. Quite the different vibe compared to my best day in Winter (Oshi No Ko & Shiboyugi) hah. Possible challengers would be Tuesday's Love Game and Marriagetoxin, and Monday's Liar Game stand alone (if it gets a bit better). I also like Sunday for the 2 horny shorts; I like shorts in general, and I'm horny, so it's 2 in 1.

From the reviews I expected *[Cipher](https://myanimelist.net/anime/11867)* to be something special, one way or another, but turns out it's pretty much just a musical piece in the vein of like, *[A-Girl](https://myanimelist.net/anime/5447)* or *[Machikado no Märchen](https://myanimelist.net/anime/11221)*. Honestly a pretty straight forward short that runs through some parts of the manga. Nothing like *[Yami no Purple Eye](https://myanimelist.net/anime/9509)* which is nigh impenetrable without knowing what you are looking at beforehand. Anyway, *Cipher* was fine, not particularily bad, not particularily good.

Finished Cross Game and it was pretty good. I'm not really into baseball but they manage to make it exciting for viewers to keep watching and the romance is kinda meh but the slice-of-life vibe is top notch. Overall, it's a standard romcom/sports series which is what I expected from a Mitsuru Adachi series though like his other series, when you watch one of his series, you kinda watch all of them due to how similar his format is.