I think that is actually a totally fair way to look at the show. The moral implications of Kotaro's actions are immense and dark. Also, the way he more or less threatens them with society's reaction to zombies in order to become idols is extremely manipulative. I can totally understand why those aspects of the show would turn somebody off from watching.

For me, I have been enjoying the show after basically accepting those bits as the needed bits to establish the premise and then moving on. Namely, the premise of a group of zombie girls becoming idols. After the first couple episodes, they aren't really brought up any more and the girls are all acting of their own will. They are even capable of doing the makeup on their own without Kotaro by the time you reach season 2.

I don't have too much time to craft my usual tome of a comment this week, so I will keep it short. Quick hot-takes on a couple shows I watched during the past week:

• Eminence in Shadow: Return to form after fanservice break
• Frieren: BRB, dead after getting hit by Frieren's flirting
• 100GF: Next episode is gonna be wild for anime-onlies
• Zombie Land Saga Season 2: Yep, still good. Hasn't lost a step from season 1

@ram@lemmy.ca, if you would be so kind as to do the pin/unpin shuffle like normal, that would be much appreciated.

I mentioned it in the comments over at ani.social (as well as a lot of lore), but thought it was worth mentioning here as well that Kadokawa posted this version of the season 1 OP to their official youtube channel in which all the characters are played by crowbars (バール or bar in the credits).

It doesn't look like it. Holo, the project that shinobu is forked from, sometimes has a hard time with certain shows. It works by parsing the sites of all the different streaming providers and a public torrent tracker to look for new episodes that are released. So, if a site changes its layout a little bit or if torrents are named in a way that it isn't expecting, it just won't pick up those episodes at all. I think if you were to redesign holo from the ground up today, you would probably use the AniList api instead of parsing all these things, but holo predates the api iirc.

Edit to add here that I think the reddit mods that use holo for the subreddit must do a lot of manual interventions or have codebase changes that are not pushed to the github. I have run a personal instance of holo for a while connected to a testing lemmy instance I spun up and its behavior exactly matches shinobu. So, the fact that holo does post threads for shows like JJK to the subreddit means that it has either been done/scheduled manually or they are running a modified version.

@ram@lemmy.ca if you could do the pinning/unpinning thing, that would be great!

This past week during the holiday I managed to catch up on several shows that I had fallen behind on.

• Frieren and Eminence continue to be my favorites of what I am watching this season. The anime-original fan-service episode of Eminence was interesting, but looking forward to getting back to the actual plot next episode.
• Helck is still going and it has been nice to not be stuck in a flashback any longer (still need to watch episode 20). I am hoping that they can build to a satisfying season conclusion.
• 100GF is an interesting one. I have loved parts of it and others feel too excessive. I appreciate that they really lean into jokes super hard (something I wish Girlfriend, Girlfriend did more of), but I feel they go too far sometimes. That line is going to be different for each person though, so it is hard for me to criticize them too much.
• Girlfriend, Girlfriend is still doing its thing. I think the adaptation has been alright, but I haven't changed my mind that it just works better in manga form.
• The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch has been ok. It has had its ups and downs and I am mainly still watching due to inertia. Probably not one I am going to remember for very long going forward.

Finally, I had some time to start Zombie Land Saga season 2. They wasted no time picking right back up where things left off. There was a bit that happened off screen between seasons, but it isn't too jarring. The bright spot for me in this show continues to be the voice work of Mamoru Miyano who plays the primary male character Kotaro. You might recognize his voice from some of his other roles such as Light Yagami (Death Note), Okabe Rintaro (Steins;Gate), or Pandora's Actor (Overlord). I am only two episodes into the second season and looking forward to the next chance I get to watch more.

I have previously written about some of the issues I had with Suzume. I think it is a visually stunning movie. I just wish it was better written.

As for Usagi Drop, I really enjoyed the anime and looked up the source. However, when I looked it up, pretty much all I found was threads warning or memeing about it. So, I looked up the synopsis and realized that I was fine with just the anime.

No idea past the previous posts to twitter. The situation is likely still unfolding. I wouldn't be surprised if delays like this one continue. That is what has happened for past shows like Zom 100 and Nier. The delays start as a day or two and then get extended to a longer hiatus once they run out of booked timeslots for the broadcast season.

Just wanted to swing by and give an update that there is now a 1 day delay for the next episode making its way to streaming services.

Here is an article about it. Basically a giant corporation is doing giant corporation things and driving the animators to work on unreasonable timelines with a ton of extra crunch. There has been some recent pushback against Mappa in the past week or two from others in the industry.

Yes, that is definitely on my list to watch from this season, I just haven't had time to pick up any new shows with my work schedule lately. I also have had to pause watching some older shows I had been working my way through (sorry Zombie Land Saga season 2, I'll be back soon).

I haven't seen any announcements. If I had to guess, I would expect the show to continue to come out regularly. However, if things continue to spiral over at Mappa, then the quality could decline as the show continues. Time will tell.