I am actually really excited for this. I have written previously about how the anime adaptation was way better than I expected it to be. Looking forward to more of this one.

Every other MC wishes they could learn her powers.

This thing is an alien that has been beaten into a shape that makes it look vaguely human. But scratch it the slightest bit and the alien comes out.

This pretty much describes demons in Frieren. Different demons you have to scratch at harder than others, similar to how better AI models you have to engineer your prompts better to get it to break. The best fictional stories are the ones that can help us to better understand and contextualize the nonfiction world around us.

I know AC has a reputation for being unpredictable, but I hadn't heard anything about The Kingdoms of Ruin. Surprised to see it jump out to the top of the chart like this over some big hitters (JJK, TEIS, Frieren). Time will tell how it shakes out as the season goes on.

This isn't really an answer, but I spent a lot of time trying different voice chat systems out a couple years back, but couldn't get my social group to move off Discord.

So, the real answer is any that you can convince the people you want to talk with to use. However other options include Mattermost, Jitsi, Mumble, Teamspeak, and Nextcloud Talk off the top of my head. I think I remember seeing that rocket.chat has voice now too.

Personally speaking, I appreciate the automated posts as a standardized format for the posts to be made. Having consistent post titles makes searching for previous discussions easier and the posts (after some tweaking for lemmy vs. reddit) include a table to make looking at previous episode discussion threads very easy.

That being said, I sympathize with people that don't want the community or their feed filled up with episode threads that don't have any comments/activity in them. While the community remains small, it might be better to limit the number of shows that the bot is used for rather than let it rip on everything it finds. The anime subreddit can do that because of the larger userbase more actively voting popular things to the front page, but in this community, all posts spend some time in the front page.

The bot also definitely has some issues. There are some shows that it seems to not be able to pick up new episodes for. As an example this season, the bot missed making a thread for Tearmoon Empire (thanks @lvxferre@lemmy.ml for stepping in). Last season, I remember several shows that also never really got threads either. I am not a dev, so I can't really dive too deeply to figure out why, but the problems are there.

I think you are right. I had thought at first that Frieren was referencing Fern hesitating against Illusion-Heiter with this comment. However, it stands to reason that Fern had fought monsters on her journey with Frieren before fighting Qual. I think it would be especially cruel to have Qual be the first non-training fight you make your student experience.

The author continues to somehow raise the bar in this series every chapter. Also, I can't help but use the English title for this series.

Folks that have read this far in the story, is it worth going back into? I bounced off the first couple chapters and dropped it, so I am not sure if it got better or not.

Premieres October 4 with a new OP by OxT once again. 12 episodes long this season.

Based on the characters/outfits in the visual (as well as the new trailer) looks like they are planning on adapting at least up through the first arc of LN Vol 4. That means ~4 episodes per arc, similar to Season 1.

I don't really know why, but it was a bit of a meme in the early days on /r/manga and people were doing tons of alternate joke translations. I think that early attention gathered a lot of positive responses, but I think if you look at the content of this story without that context, it's pretty generic.