Personally, I prefer my anime without drugs. So I hope the current state doesn’t change.

Absolutely. The anime adaptation adds so many details. You can really see the passion the studio has for the series.

Just for reference, here’s the part from the manga:

Some positive news about last season’s Journal With Witch

‘Journal with Witch -Ikoku Nikki-’ has Officially won the Galaxy Award March 2026 in the television category! The last Anime to win the Monthly Galaxy Award before ‘Ikoku Nikki’ was ‘Ranking of Kings’ 4 years ago, March 2022

The Japanese Broadcast Critics Association honor is similar to the Emmy Awards, and given to outstanding television, radio programs, individuals, and organizations.

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Well deserved. If it weren’t for Frieren it would have been my anime of the season.

Hoping for Kinako anime

That character reminds me of the vtuber MinikoMew.

I wish I had come up with that.

PEAK!

Another Easygoing Territory Defense. I wonder if the anime adaptation makes me like the novel less now.

<Ascendance of a Bookworm: Hannelore’s Fifth Year at the Royal Academy> Volume 2 - Myne is off-page rampaging through Yurgenschmidt’s history. I swear to Mestionora, if there won’t be a new series from Myne’s POV about this, I will run amok.

<Fluffy Cafe in Another World> Vol. 1 - This is exactly what you would think it is. If you read the title and think you know how this will play out, you can predict the entire volume. To the letter. But that also means that you get exactly what you want if that was what you were looking for. I actually enjoyed reading it.

<Disowned but Not Disheartened! Life Is Good with Overpowered Magic> Volume 1 - Very pleasantly surprised by this one. It starts with a very trope-y “MC is a disowned noble girl who gets bullied by evil stepsister”, but then completely flips the script by making the MC competent, confident, and giving her overwhelming support from her foster family and friends. Every time one of the usual bully tropes even starts to form, they get stomped into the ground. Amusing.

<The Frontier Lord Begins with Zero Subjects> Volume 13 - Illuk village does some covert operation into the beast nation to quell an insurgency. Obviously, that’s less chill and comfy than usual, but it was written in a way that made it not so bad.

It continues to baffle me how bad this adaptation can be. How can they miss the target so completely. It’s like adapting The Lord of the Rings and then cutting all the travel parts between the big events. It just has no worth whatsoever when it isn’t shown how those “big events” are earned. Fuck whoever was in charge of this adaptation at WIT.

WTF is that abomination?! I would expect that in an episode of King of the Hill, but not something a Japanese high-schooler casually eats on a date.

Poor Otakun. I wouldn’t be able to choose either.

Honestly, everything that isn’t a (battle) shounen should be great. The most important thing is to firmly establish that anime is a “medium” and not a “genre”. And since almost every outsider thinks every anime is a battle shounen, it’s important to correct that misconception early on.

AnoHana would be my recommendation. It’s short for a series, it doesn’t take any Japanese cultural knowledge to enjoy it, and the themes are universal regardless of personal background, age or gender.

There was some fan service in the first episode, but not excessively so. But I have a high tolerance for fan service, so maybe stay away if this is something that bothers you.

Yes, I think the entire fight scene with the beast in the last episode of Frieren was also just a single frame in the manga.

Again, I love how much they added “between the pages”. All those little details elevate this adaptation so much from the source which was already a visual masterpiece. For example this entire scene with remembering herself growing up learning and the memory of her mother guiding her is added inbetween just these few frames:

And this one here made me laugh:

We also see why I am of the opinion that Agott is deeply and inherently evil and should not be allowed to exist as a witch.

I don’t think so. At least not for me. Honestly I find most school-based anime off putting since I cannot really empathize with the teenage angst and anxieties anymore. I know that it’s normal but it is so far removed from myself that it’s just annoying to see. That’s why I enjoyed this series and disliked Heibara’s Teenage NG+ as an example.

It’s hard to describe. Both are some form of wish fulfillment plot, but one is going back to have a chance to overcome their anxieties and the other is going back having overcome them already. I think it’s a different target audience - tweens vs middle aged.

As someone in the age group as MC I find the idea of going back to middle schooler with all the insight and confidence of an adult quite compelling.

The ED is a banger. I heard it before ,though so it’s not something made for the anime.

I was shitting on the first adaptation because they skipped so much important world and character building to just get to the plot points faster, but in this season they just ignore everything. Whoever is in charge has absolutely zero idea of what makes the series great. Probably didn’t even read it in the first place. I had so much hope for an adaptation by a studio that can animate more than a powerpoint slideshow, but now I would gladly go back to the shitty first studio.

Interesting comment by the creator:

As a result of pouring absolutely everything from the thirty years I’ve been alive into this project, every last element, from self-harm to drugs, religion, and sex—got flagged during the review process. Each time it happened, the anime staff worked hard to keep the vision intact, insisting: “We absolutely don’t want to let fear of regulation ruin what makes this work compelling,” and they kept pushing. Thanks to that, the NEEDY anime has been coming together in an almost undiluted, straight-from-the-bottle form. Seeing the staff’s passion and depth of understanding, and how strongly they believed that “the concept of NEEDY GIRL has a reason to exist in this world,” and that “there are certain expressions only this work can depict," I’m now fully certain of this project’s value.

When the voice actors performed the scripts I’d written so nakedly and frankly, there were moments when someone, fully immersed, would start crying. In that instant, I realized it: what this work is depicting, in the end, is “human beings.” A lot of people have discussed NEEDY with “the internet” at the center of it all.

As for me, I’m proud to say I wrote out, in the original game, both the sweetness and the bitterness of the internet as I’ve seen it from childhood to the present. And because this is an anime born from that kind of work, of course we have to ask ourselves: “What was the internet, anyway?” Even the title of the new song I made with my friends this time is “INTERNET ANGEL”. After releasing the game, the huge reaction to it connected me, too, to an unspecified multitude across the world. And I was insulted at times, had admiration hurled at me at times, was loved at times, attacked at times. Who on earth are these faceless people? Trends, oshis, faith, sneering cynicism, call-outs and pile-ons, outrage fires, consumption, algorithms, SNS, love and hate, influencers, pop, culture, criticism, subculture, mainstream, illustration, animation.

My conclusion was: “human beings.”

The true nature of the internet is nothing special. It’s simply “a gathering of human beings.” It isn’t anonymity, and it isn’t AI.

Everything there is a collection of individuals: First there are people, and then there is the internet.

At the end of a long history, humanity finally took a small rectangle into its hands and connected, at light speed, with people all over the world. Faced with the first great transformation in human history, many people are tormented by both its merits and its harms. Now, people fear that excessive power so much that smartphones and SNS are being regulated around the world.

That overwhelming electromagnetic field, too, is “human beings.”

Picking at a single word to nail a celebrity to a cross and burn them for it, or elevating a nameless girl—wrapped in two-dimensional aesthetics as she broadcasts her feelings—into an idol to be worshiped… all of it is done by individual human beings, one by one.

The internet’s true nature was human beings.

And so, at the turning point of my mid-life, I had to depict across thirteen episodes everything I’ve experienced of “the truth, the goodness, and the beauty human beings possess,” and in doing so, sublimate that strange youth I spent together with an unspecified multitude across the world into the comprehensive art form called animation.

That comes with immense pain. It also means we can’t avoid including extreme, blunt expressions, and I’m sure countless opinions will fly back and forth. I think that, too, is proof that you are human. When the Taroman film ended on the caption “Taro

Okamoto: Human,” I was overwhelmed, thinking: yes. Exactly this.

Me, and you—we’re not anonymity. We’re not anime icons. We’re not creators, or lurkers, or streamers, or scalpers, or fans, or antis, or Toshiaki, or Nanashi-san.

We are human beings who feel pain.

nyalra

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