I think this will be the last Hoshi no Samidare post, which is kind of ironic as it comes after probably its best episode.  If this show were a single cour I might grit my teeth and stick it out until the end (though a single cour Biscuit Hammer adaptation would be even more of an abomination).  But I just can’t see myself writing about twenty more episodes.  No way.  I’ll keep watching for the moment, so if anything changes dramatically (a scenario it’s hard imagine) I can always pop back in and make note of it.

The hardest part for me, honestly, is that I feel disloyal to Mizukami Satoshi for dropping this series.  But this isn’t the Water God I know – this adaptation doesn’t come close to doing the work justice.  I used to think that when it came to manga I loved, any adaptation would be better than none at all.  Time and experience has changed my mind, though never more dramatically than in this instance.

Shinonome Hangetsu did add a spark of life to things.  And his death was handled with marginally more dexterity than the first big emotional speed hump, Yuuhi’s ugly past with his grandfather.  But there was still a lot here that just wasn’t right (if you know, you know).  And there were a couple of material changes too, that while they’d seem minor if I pointed them out are actually pretty important.  And as torpid as this adaptation is on the production side, that’s the absolute last thing it can afford to do.

If this season is teaching us anything, it’s that no matter the source material if there’s no passion and eloquence behind an adaptation, it will fall flat.  It’s a sad way for Mizukami’s first foray into adaptation to end – I almost can’t even bear to think about it.  I can only hope it won’t be the last, because there’s so much more good manga in his repertoire crying out for a respectful treatment in anime.  This is the anime landscape in 2022 – interesting material does get adapted, but you get a half-dozen interchangeable isekai shows announced for every one of those.  And while to be brutally honest it doesn’t much matter if one of those gets  a crap treatment, when one of the good ones does it highlights everything that’s broken in the production committee system.