When this was announced, I read part of the manga, then part of the LN original, and thought it might be good. I don’t normally watch currently airing anime, but I was keeping an eye on this. And I finally dove in and caught up on it last week.

This episode highlighted pretty much everything I loved about the series as a whole.

Anna is awesome. Let’s get that out of the way first. She’s easily my favorite FMC in years. And she was especially good in this episode. It’s just been so pleasant to watch her and Nukumizu get so comfortable with each other, and it was nice to see that in full flower in this episode. And I couldn’t help but laugh when she lost her imaginary boyfriend to an imaginary rival.

Kaju is awesome too, and it was great to see a lot of her in this episode.

And the senseis. I would’ve liked to see more of them all the way through, but at least they got a bit of extra screen time in this episode. They’re both interesting characters in their own right, and they have a great dynamic.

Chihaya was especially good in this episode too, even though she only got a few seconds. She’s been a pleasant surprise - she just looks so sweet and naive, and she’s so very much not.

Overall, the only criticisms I might have of the series are that a couple of character quirks were a bit too exaggerated (Komari’s stutter and Yumeko pretty much as a whole) and that it seems like very little was really settled. The pacing wasn’t really a problem in and of itself - I actually quite liked it - but it means that we need at least another season, and preferably a few more.

Overall, I was very impressed, and this was a good cap to the season, assuming another season is coming. Without another season, it’ll be a bit disappointingly incomplete, but even then, it was a good slice of life.

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.

Actually, after I finished that admittedly satisfying screed, I debated whether or not to post it, since from what I saw, this one shares a (somewhat disturbing) quality with Rent a Girlfriend - it’s somehow sort of intriguing and attractive in spite of, or maybe because of, its many and glaring flaws. It wasn’t that it was awful to read - it just got boring and tedious, and I got tired of cringing and rolling my eyes on the mc’s behalf. I suspect that, as I do with RaG, I’ll still read it from time to time, just on the off chance that something satisfying might happen - you know - some sort of character development or progress.

Though I’m not sure in the long run whether that’s a point for or against avoiding it altogether.

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.

Hmm… I might have to give this a shot.

I generally don’t watch manga adaptations, since I’m almost always disappointed by them. But I’ve tried to read this manga a few times, and I keep bouncing off of it. I just find the enormous contrast between the public and private versions of the sisters to be too extreme and jarring to be believable, or even reasonable. It’s almost as if there are six different girls, or as if the scenes with the sisters in their public personas are fantasy sequences.

Maybe if I just let it wash over me as an anime, it’ll work.

Awesome clarification - thanks.

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.