That was more my impression, but I don't follow ratings or reviews much, so wasn't sure. I just know that I rarely see it discussed, but pretty much universally positively when it is.

Is ODDTAXI underrated? If so, then that definitely. It's just quality all the way through.

And Estab-Life: Great Escape. Yeah - it's sort of contrived, but it has so much heart and tells a satisfying story. And Equa is wonderful.

...the company’s efforts appear to be yielding results, as evidenced by the successful takedowns and ongoing legal actions against major piracy sites.

I just wonder who they're trying to convince here.

There have been piracy sites on the internet pretty much from day one.

And the biggest ones have gotten taken down pretty much from day two.

And new ones keep popping up.

I think the closest I've ever gotten to that was Rurouni Kenshin, at... let's see... 95 episodes. That was many years ago.

A few years back, and I honestly have no idea why, I watched about 75 episodes of Fairy Tail (less than half of its run) before I burnt out on it.

There's a few standard things I've watched that clock in at about 50 or 60 episodes - FMA and Brotherhood, DanMachi, SAO, Initial D and the like.

The vast majority of the things I watch seem to only last one season, or occasionally two.

I didn't know that the author of that godawful trainwreck even had another series.

I was curious to see if he could actually write something good, so I looked it up, then tracked it down and read the first dozen chapters or so, and I'd say the answer is no.

Well - it is better than Rent a Girlfriend, but only insofar as it couldn't possibly be worse.

The basic setup is seven siblings - two boys and five girls (five girls - where have I seen that before?) - who are suddenly told by their fabulously wealthy and conveniently absent father that they're not actually blood related.

The mc is the eldest son, who's actually the middle child. The other son is virtually non-existent, which is necessary because he actually knows how to talk to girls and actually does it, so if he was interacting with the sisters at all, the story would instantly turn into NTR, since the mc is predictably pathetic and the bulk of every chapter, just like Rent a Girlfriend, is his endlessly droning thought stream of insecurity, confusion, doubting and second-guessing. He's marginally better than Kazuya, but that's not really an accomplishment.

The girls are decidedly better than any of the ones in RaG, but again - they couldn't hardly be worse. They're really just animated tropes though - the teasingly provocative oldest sister, the emotionlessly provocative meganekko, the twin-tailed tsundere, the cute sporty girl and the painfully shy but secretly aggressive youngest.

And... that seems to be about it.

When I got bored with it, I skipped forward to the latest chapter (27), which is one of the sisters basically overtly confessing to him then kissing him, believing that he's asleep, which of course then leads to him revealing, after she leaves, that he's been awake the whole time. And what does he do? He shout/thinks to himself, "What the hell was that?!"

It's probably safe to assume that if this goes 300 chapters, that's what he'll still be doing.

Looks to be pretty standard cute girls doing cute things. Between the art style and the setting, it most made me think of GochiUsa with a bit of Kin-iro Mosaic thrown in.

Though that word "lily" leaps right out, since that's almost certainly a ham-handed localization of "yuri."

I guess we'll find out eventually...

You're conflating two entirely different debates.

Yes - there has been some debate around western publishers overly aggressively "localizing" manga and/or changing details to not just make things more understandable to western readers, but deliberately altering social /political content to accord with their own views. The two broad positions in that debate are to continue to depend on western publishers and their translations, or to keep translation in-house - under the supervision of the Japanese publishers.

This debate starts from the position that translation will be kept in-house, and concerns how it will be done - whether by human translators or AI. The publishers want to use AI for one and only one reason - because it would be cheaper. The JAT's position is that machine translation is so vastly inferior that it will not work, and that human translators must be used.

As is always the case, all publishers need to do is look at the scanlation community to see how things will or will not work, since the scanlators are already doing, for free, what the publishers hope to do for profit. Whatever problems exist and whatever solutions there are to those problems, the scanlators have already discovered.

And if they would only do that, they would discover, for instance, that MTL, presented as a finished product on its own, is so blatantly crappy that it's essentislly universally derided, with the only split being between the people who might grudgingly tolerate it in a specific case and the people who reject it outright.

There's no need for the JAT to argue that case when vivid proof that they're right already exists in virtually every comment section of every machine translated manga.

But instead, the publishers consistently make choices that any halfway decent scanlator could tell them are going to fail to appeal to the fans, which choices then - surprise surprise - fail to appeal to the fans.

Huh.

I would've expected, if I saw news about this series, that it would be to announce that it was being axed. It seems a bit late in the game for an adaptation.

Granted - I dropped it a couple of years ago and it might've improved since then, but it just doesn't seem likely that it actually has.

It was decent enough when it started - if nothing else, the art is charming and the girls are all cute, and all in different (if tropish) ways.

But Medaka and his whole situation always came off a bit vague and contrived, and as it went on, it just got more and more obviously and awkwardly contrived. He didn't get any sort of character development really - he was just assigned a handful of traits and reactions, given a handwaved backstory that sort of vaguely gave them something that sometimes resembled context, and inserted into the story.

And beyond being cute, the female leads really didn't bring anything interesting to the mix either. Mona is the class idol, but she's actually self-conscious and insecure. Asahi is the cute sporty girl, but she's actually self-conscious and and insecure. And Namba is the cool beauty, but she's actually - surprise surprise - self-conscious and insecure.

And... that's about it really - a selection of cute but insecure girls and a guy who cycles back and forth between stoic and awkward because something something monastery.

Again though - maybe it unexpectedly improved after I dropped it. I dunno - it just seems odd to me that it's getting an adaptation this late in the game.

Spent part of the day checking this out.

It's a light novel original. There's a manga adaptation, and that's where I started. It wasn't very good though, and I was pretty sure, as is often the case when a lot of the text in the original is the thoughts inside the protagonist's head, that the manga was just skipping over big chunks of it. I kept plugging away through four chapters (mostly because they were done by Skythewood, and I trust their judgement - our tastes strongly overlap), but then found that 5 and 6 are missing from mangadex, some sort of sniping war has broken out starting with chapter 7, and Skythewood has apparently dropped it.

In sorting all of that out, I discovered that Skythewood has been translating the light novel, so I just read that instead. And discovered that the manga has indeed left out huge chunks of the original.

It's pretty good all in all. It's very definitely of the "oddly proud and determined loner finds himself surrounded by pretty girls" subgenre that seemed to really take off with the success of Oregairu. The twist with this one, and to its credit, is that all of the girls are romantic losers who initially turn to the protagonist for a shoulder to cry on (either figuratively or literally), then it expands from there, as they come to appreciate him more broadly and he starts coming out of his self-imposed exile.

And thankfully the anime art appears to be based on the LN illustrations rather than the manga.

So - IMO, the LN is pretty good, the anime is promising, and the manga can be ignored.

I contributed to TVTropes in the early days, and quit after they banned Lotte no Omocha, At the time, it wasn't so much because of any concern for that or any other specific thing, but just because the way it all went down empowered a regime of prigs and assholes.

So last week I yet again rewatched an unusual favorite - one that I rewatch fairly often, but have never seen discussed anywhere - Kemurikusa.

It was obviously made on a limited budget, and Wakaba is sort of tedious and annoying with his non-stop chatter about how interesting everything is, but still, there's just something about that series that really speaks to me.

A lot of it's the world. It's so bleak and such an odd combination of familiar and alien. And it's so well presented.

Mysterious settings are tough to do well. If they're too alien or too inconsistent, then they just end up weird and inexplicable, but if they're too familiar and logical, then it's too easy to figure out what they're all about and they lose that sense of alienness. The world of Kemurikusa is neatly balanced - it's thoroughly bizarre underneath the familiar trappings, but it always feels as if there is some underlying logic and order to it, even though we don't know what it is. Obviously at this point, I know its secrets, but I can still feel that sense of slowly unfolding mystery - that there is a logical explanation for all of it, just out of my grasp.

And a lot of it's the characters (except for the most part Wakaba). They're all anime archetypes, but... well, let's just say that even that is part of the underlying logic of that world. There are in-universe reasons why they're each who and what they are. And they are all appealing in their own ways.

And the story ultimately is very compelling. It retains most of its mystery right up until the final secrets are revealed, and then all the pieces fall into place.

I'd really like to see this get a remake some day. I like it already, but I can just imagine what it could be with a bigger budget and another episode or two (the last bit before the climax in particular was obviously rushed).

Anyway... I enjoyed it as much as I always do, and just wanted to say something about it...