Otonari no Tenshi-sama ni Itsu no Ma ni ka Dame Ningen ni Sareteita Ken – 03

This one is squarely on the bubble at this point.  I do find that as a rule (though not always – look at Koukyuu no Karasu), even when I find an LN adaptation I kind of like they tend to wear out their welcome faster than other series.  And indeed things started to feel a bit same-y to me here, even though Otonari did change things up a bit plot-wise.

That change came in the form of Amane’s mom, who pops in for a surprise inspection of her son’s apartment and finds it surprisingly clean and well-ordered.  She’s annoying but she serves a purpose for the plot, namely to accelerate things between Mahiru and Amane.  By repeatedly referring to them as a couple and making Mahiru call Amane by his first name Shihoko (who I assume is with her second husband or current boyfriend) plants the seeds in her son’s mind.  And maybe not just his.

I must say, though, I find Chitose even more annoying than the mother.  And her relationship with Itsuki is even more problematic than the main pair.  The casual chauvinism runs deep with this two (to be fair, it runs deep in Japan most of the time).  But now that they’ve found out Mahiru and Amane are neighbors they’ll certainly be used to kick things along too.  It’s not going to take Chitose long to connect Mahiru with the “feminine touch” she says she notices in Amane’s apartment.

As ever, the main strength here is that Amane and Mahiru are pretty good together.  The question for me is whether that can survive the inevitable entanglement of their relationship in the romance fishing net.  The answer to that question is probably the answer to whether Otonari no Tenshi-sama can make it as a series.

NieR:Automata Ver 1.1a – 03

Any thought of Nier Automata Ver 1.1a being in the mix as a bubble series pretty much became moot this week.  That’s because the broadcast was put on hold “indefinitely” starting with Episode 4.  This was (again) chalked up to Covid-19, but industry buzz is that it was down to a production in disarray (in other words, basically the Isekai Ojisan – and apparently 86, though I wasn’t following that – scenario repeated).  Covid remains a very serious public health crisis in Japan and worldwide. But it’s also given anime productions a built-in excuse for the same nonsense they’ve always pulled.

I have a couple thoughts on this, starting with the striking lack of evidence of production troubles in this episode.  It looked fine – rather good in fact.  Also that it’s kind of a shame, because this halt comes just as I was getting sort of interested.  I still find 9S pretty annoying and 2B basically a cipher, but this is not a character-driven series to me – it’s all about the premise.  And that premise has some bite to it – this whole androids vs. robots thing is interesting.  And the behavior of the robots (or “machine life forms” in the local parlance) is somewhat intriguing.  Not to mention the very human-looking dude at the end.  I’m curious to see where all this goes.

As for the future, well – it all depends on them.  If the eventual return of Nier comes at a time where it makes sense for me (which pretty much rules out spring entirely) I’ll take another look at it.  But at this stage no one seems to have any idea when that might be, so it doesn’t make much sense to worry about it now.  We’ll see when we see.