2022 Anime Listing
I forgot to keep track of the list during the year so I'm just going to do a short-list of things I remember in 2022. And I only did a couple of the big highlights in my memory. This year was fucking stacked, and this has been eating so much of my brain energy when I need to be working!!! Bah.
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury
Anime of the year. What if we did Revolutionary Girl Utena, but in space, and the story isn't about how the kids are all being manipulated and groomed by the a man made up of entirely red flags, but instead the story was about how all the kids realize how awful the system is and leaning on each other to break out of it and thrive.
Also it's so gay. Suletta and Miorine are an adorable couple. Suletta is a ball of anxiety who has a consistent speech impediment, and a strong sense of justice, and just an infinite amount of game with the ladies. Miorine literally confesses to Suletta that until she showed up and started meddling in her life all she ever wanted to do was run away and disappear but now she's happy and wants to stay and make something of her life for herself and others. There's a fat girl who's cheerful and friendly and doesn't get made fun of and more popular with the boys than the rich girl with a literal fan club. There's several dirtbag boys who are all secretly soft sad lads trying to cope with the expectations being pushed on them.
Of course it's still a Gundam and so it has a Char clone, commentary on war and exploitation and capitalism, and all the other things that Gundam as a franchise is typically very good at handling. But damn, they really did have Suletta and Miorine get engaged in the first episode and have Miorine say to a very confused Suletta "girls get married all the time, it's completely normal. Stop being weird about it."
Chainsaw Man
It's good. It's excellent actually. Denji is the worst boy, just an absolute goblin with no brain. Power is a feral goblin too with no brain cell. All the other characters are excellent. I've been well fed on dirtbag boys and feral, unhinged women but Chainsaw Man has given me something I've been starving for: A truly evil, unrepentant, irredemable woman. Not misunderstood. Just evil.
Anyways I'm in love with Makima and Chainsaw Man is good but you already knew that.
Akiba Maid War
Violent. Funny. Truly unhinged. Absolutely unpredictable. And most of all the events of the last half of the season brought me to tears several times! Also it features a 35-year old grown as woman working at a maid cafe. Her name is Ranko and she's literally perfect, and her whole arc is so cute and wholesome (despite all the people she murders on the way).
Akiba Maid War is a show you should just watch without getting too many spoilers – even though those spoilers will make even less sense than Symphogear spoilers – because it's just such a wild ride.
Birdie Wing -Golf Girls Story
Another truly unhinged anime about lesbian sex – I mean golf. Golf, you see, is and always has been a metaphor for lesbian sex. I had a wonderful time with it and don't want to share the excessive number of screenshots from it right now. But it's at the top of my lists and as my partner can attest I was laughing so hard for so long that I had to take a break because my throat and lungs hurt so much and I literally fell out of my chair laughing at one point. It's got such a wild energy to it, and it's beautiful.
But, if you need someone else to sell it to you, here's the video that hard sold me on it.
The Monogatari Franchise
I literally have too many words. I love this franchise so much. It does so many fun things with its animation and pacing. The stories are all very good, and more than most all the character arcs really land. If you love weird obscure word play, studios spending equal animation budget on making action look really cool as it does making things very uncomfortable and horny, and think I generally have fantastic taste (which I do): Check out Monogatari (starting with Bakemonogatari, I believe).
Urusei Yatsura (2022)
The original Urusei Yatsura was made by the woman who wrote Ranma 1/2, Inuyasha, and a bunch of other stuff. The 2022 version is a remake/reboot of the original anime and it is, for my money, one of the funniest romcoms I've seen. If you dislike stupid anime romcom bits – you know the ones, all of them – then you should actually watch Urusei Yatsura because all of those bits were stolen and reenacted in every romcom anime/manga since and actually Urusei Yatsura executes every single bit it does so fucking well I see why all its jokes have been getting stolen since its original release. It's not particularly deep, just executed very, very well with a generous budget.
Engage Kiss
Watch Engage Kiss. It's high energy fun trash by the character designer of Date-A-Live and the animation team behind Kaguya-Sama: Love is War. It features the absolute worst boy imagineable and several women who want to make him better, worse, or dead. And that's not even touching how fundamentally cyberpunk the setting of Bayron City is. Did you know you can order guns on Bayron City Express and they'll deliver in under 15 seconds?
Lycoris Recoil
The biggest sin comitted against Engage Kiss was that it had to share the season with Lycoris Recoil, which is an incredible polished john-wick-as-a-moe-anime-girl affair. Lycoris Recoil had so many good things, but I will tap the sign:
It's not that Lycoris Recoil is bad. It's probably one of the best productions of the year, also cursed by the fact that it shared a year with Chainsaw Man. But for all that production and polish, I just enjoyed other things more because they were messier and took risks. But Lycoris Recoil is cute and gay and has incredible action scenes, and is just perfectly executed in everything it attempted.
Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai
Rascal might be my favorite romance anime, only because Sakuta is so good. They managed to make a show filled with cute girls and the lead boy is somehow my favorite. Also, I would not call it a harem anime. My favorite way to discribe it is "one really healthy relationship build on communication and trust that is being harried by the emobiment of quantum physics problems."
Sakuta also has one trait that is typically missing from every single boy in media (and most in real life) and that's being able to flirt really well without ever making it uncomfortable. He plays off things other people have said, or leverages sexual humor or innuendo to diffuse tesnse situations. Sakuta might be the reigning Best Boy of all time for me, just because he's so genuinely charming.
The Executioner And Her Way Of Life
A world that has outlawed isekai protagonists because they cause nothing but problems! The first novel take on isekai in a while, because the story is about Menou, who's job is killing isekai protagonists, and she comes across a girl with the Pure Concept of Time, which prevents her from dying by reversing time to before any wound. It is really gay, and good, and I've been craving more since I finished it because it's explicitly gay and gives me so many feelings.
Re:Creators
I love stories that are about things, and Re:Creators is definitely about something. It's about creators, and the works of art and media that they create and put into the world, and the ways that those works affect other works, other people, other creators, and themselves over time. For good and bad.
It's also masterfully animated and just so exciting, and every time the soundtrack kicks in I just go wild because some of the coolest shit is about to happen. The characters all feel very unique while being clear plays on specific characters/tropes/archetypes (the one boy who is basically Shinji Evangelion comes to mind). The way the creators interact with each other and each other's works is so representative of actual creators I know, and that really made me feel like the show extremely comes from a personal place for the people who worked on it.
I'll be thinking about it for a long time. You should absolutely watch Re:Creators.
Desert Punk
I rewatched Desert Punk, which is an anime that I've thought about for a long time and has lived in my head for over a decade. It actually holds up way, way better than I remember and it's genuinely good post-apocalypse sci-fi featuring literally the biggest dirtbag protagonist and his apparent quest to make literally everyone in the entire world hate him so much he's literally the antagonist by the end. Genuinely good watch. Skip the episodes named "Compromising Positions" and "A Dog In Heat", those episodes add basically nothing and are uncomfortable, but the rest of them are good. I personally watched the English dub and it's the only way I'll watch this particular show.
Do It Yourself!
Slice-of-life anime about girls building things. The animation is really good and is the single thing that made me realize I don't hate slice-of-life as a genre, but rather I hate the Moe blob art style. The show goes into a wild amount of instructional detail for the use of powertools, including safety precautions at times, and how to build things. It's really sweet, and also very gay. Like really gay.
Also it might be the single most accurate portrayal of a character with ADHD I've ever seen. She is excitable, clumsy, has a wild imagination, forgets things (but also never forgets anything simultaneously), and placed second in her grade on her tests because she fell asleep and that's also how she failed to make it into the really expensive school for rich people – she literally fell asleep while taking the entrance exam. Everything about Serefu as a character is a 100% perfect portrayal of a child with ADHD who is brilliant and energetic. It felt really good to see, actually.
My Dress-Up Darling
My Dress-Up Darling is really cute and good and I am running out of ways to convey that kind of sentiment about things that I don't have deep critial opinions of. Gojo is a quiet boy with hobbies seen as femmenine, who is socially isolated, and Marin is a very pretty, outgoing otaku who draws realtionship charts on the classroom board for her favorite hentai games. They make cosplay together and fall in love.
Marin is literally perfect in every way and her most endearing aspect is that she genuinely loves when people are excited and passionate about things and wants to share that with them. Also it's really imporant to remember because the trailer for the show says it explicitly, Marin is straight. This important. Ignore all the times she fawns over pretty girls or says things like this:
Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department
Really good office comedy show about the people who work for an evil organization creating kaiju and attempting to rule the world. They deal with deadlines, unreasonable demands, and all the other stuff you'd expect from a comedy about working for a really good manager and trying to create the evil monsters to fight Tokusatsu/kamen rider protagonists. Like Total Fantasy Knockout (see next), it also has a trans character who unfortunately has to put up with being misgendered a lot by their boss, but actually addresses a lot of complicated trans feelings sometimes well and sometimes not. It was really good!
Life with an Ordinary Guy Who Reincarnated into a Total Fantasy Knockout
A trashy isekai about a drunk dude who gets wasted and mumbles a wish about wanting to be a pretty girl, and then him and his helpful very Gay/Ace best friend get murdered by the Goddess of Love And Beauty who grants the drunk's wish to be a girl. It actually does directly ask "hey, are you happier being a girl? Do you want to go back?" and the protagonist responds "I don't know. But it has made me question what the fuck gender actually is."
It leans on some really dumb bits longer than it should have, but I will remember it fondly for actually addressing directly and unambiguously the question of gender between all the genderbend anime tropes. For trash isekai, it was largely tolerable and while not particularly memorable or flashy or high budget, it was enjoyable.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
When the show's description of "after being stabbed by a random man", it meant it. He was stabbed by litearlly a random guy who was charging down the street like Link doing a sword dash in ALTTP and just happened to hit him. It was funny and well done, and probably the most I've enjoyed a Standard Isekai. I don't have many deep thoughts about it, but it's well animated and the world is interesting enough.
The Devil Is a Part-Timer!
Watched Part Timer for the first time and it was very good. It has a bit of a rocky transition from workplace/bit comedy show to like an ongoing story, and the switch of studios after a decade for season 2 was a bit jarring at first. But I love all the characters and would happily watch more.
Magical Girl Raising Project
Proof that Madoka Magica poisoned the magical girl well with cynicism. Magical Girl Raising Project asks the important question of "what if Madoka Magica was Danganronpa" and also lets you know that's the plan in the first episode instead of waiting till the third or fourth episode to tell you that violent, bloody death is on the table. I liked it well enough, the characters were cute. There's a boy who becomes a magical girl with a big extending sword (that I only put together now as a thing) that doesn't get treated as weird for liking magical girls or wanting to become one. Also there's a lesbian couple in college who do die but everyone dies by the end, but they're actually the cutest couple and fuck the one is just so cool and good at fighting especially since her only power is "summoning walls like Hyuse from World Trigger."
Burst Angel
Burst Angel comes from the time of Desert Punk and Witchblade. It's a Gonzo production, but this time an original production. It's very gay and strange. It's a western set in a cyberpunk dystopia future tokyo. The show is fascinating and fun and Jo and Meg are litearlly canonnically in a romantic, intimate lesbian relationship. Also Jo has a cowboy gunslinger mecha and every time it comes out I'm momentarily stunned because I forget that this is a mecha anime. Give it a watch, it's not bad! It's dated and it's storytelling tropes and style speak to the time (evil corporation makes monsters, a bunch of plotlines you've seen before, etc.) but it's worth it.
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-
Alright, so, I liked it well enough for the first half. But then the second half started to get into a weird space where it tries to milk the really big, really earned emotional peaks for so long that it undoes all the work it did getting there. Anyways nobody told me that Re:ZERO was a horror anime, and if they had I'd have paid attention to it a lot sooner. This was the specific video that got me to give it a watch, and I really, really liked watching it with this context in mind.
The Idaten Deities Know Only Peace
This is on the list for the sole reason of I really enjoyed this show and liked a lot of things it did. This is not a reccomendation for it. A lot of people just say "oh well it's a mature show, rated TV-MA" but like there's a sexual assault scene in episode one that isn't graphic but very explicit in what is happening. The show has a lot of casual attrocities between bouts of bloody ultraviolence and otherwise stunning worldbuilding, and that can put a lot of people off.
It is worth noting, however, that it doesn't do any of those things without intent, and never makes those things titalating. They are treated as background elements that are definitely evil, but not the concern of the protagonists – the Idaten, gods of war created by people's wishes for salvation who ostensibly exist to protect humanity. The show does an excellent job of showing the inhuman, alien logic of immortals better than shows like Re:Zero and its witches. Even the antagonists describing why rape is a state policy (to make more demons) are taken aback by the sheer lack of empathy of the Idaten.
As one of the gods says (paraphrased for intent), "Humanity is distinctly not on the brink of extinction. In fact humanity is flourishing more than it ever has at any other point in history. It doesn't really matter what happens as long as they don't all die."
It was truly compelling, and I love so many things about the world and characters. I love that the when the show wants to make me uncomfortable and succeeds without relying on shock value. I also enjoy that the show goes to great lengths to show both the Idaten and the demons to be more or less incompetent idiot losers.
A bit of spoiler territory regarding the first episode's sexual assault: It exists to prove a specific point, as a nun who is assaulted prays to god for salvation and the gods don't care. We see the nun later after they've been captured to see their spirit hasn't been broken. During one of the final confrontations between Idaten and Zoble, the nun meets the gods and sees the truth: The power of prayer and friendship will not stop evil from happening. Action will.
I dislike the use of rape in storytelling almost universally, and this did make me extremely uncomfortable, but, there was something just very effective about the use of it to set the tone for the world and arc for this character. Seeing the story through and understanding that it was done with intent and not to set up "this specific person is evil", but to demonstrate systemic violence... I respect Idaten's writing decisions.
Anyways, I highly recommend against watching Idaten simply because I can't in good concious suggest it to anyone because of decisions that it made, no matter how much I enjoyed the show or respect those decisions and how they were handled.
Bocchi The Rock!
Really good, incredibly relatable show. Great music. I adore the way the show descends from moe blog styles to rediculously deformed character shapes and to live-prop claymation and so much more. It's a visual treat, and Bocchi's growth through her anxiety is well earned and acknowledges that growth isn't linear. Go watch Bocchi The Rock!, it's wonderful.
Arknights: Prelude To Dawn
The anime does way more justice to the early story than the game does, if only for the fact that the anime can't fuck around for hours on end having you slay 400 people your company is trying to treat/save and then talk about how unjust all the violence is. The show lets Rhodes Island put its money where its mouth is and actually show them trying to do better where the game just can't.