I have been pretty busy this past week and, with the start of the new anime season, have spent more time on the anime side of things rather than the manga side. So, the backlog has grown quite a bit. However, that is also due to me finding a series that I have been enjoying and working my way through to catch up with the current chapters:

• The Moon on a Rainy Night

I have been really enjoying this series as I have worked my way through it (up to about chapter 10 atm). I guess I had been missing a good yuri series ever since I finished up Monthly in the Garden with My Landlord. So far, it has been really good. With one of the leads being mostly deaf, it is a bit serious at times (moreso than Kimi wa Yakamashi Tojite yo Kuchi o! was), but it manages to keep things light enough to not tip over to melodrama territory.

• Mato Seihei no Slave / Chained Soldier

I managed to catch up to where the first season of the anime wrapped up. I paused my reading there at the moment since that is about when I found the first series I mentioned above and it kind of sucked up all my time instead. Looking forward to seeing where it goes from here though.

• Momose Akira no Hatsukoi Hatan-chuu / Momose Akira’s First Love Struggles

This is only a handful of chapters in and has been pretty cute. It doesn’t really reinvent the wheel of romcom by any means, but the execution is pretty funny. The ways in which Momose constantly screws up her attempts at romance are pretty original.

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Re:Zero Season 3
2. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Dan Da Dan

Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.

Two standout shows this week on both charts. Re:Zero and Dan Da Dan both made a big splash in the rankings. I expect Re:Zero to stay strong through the season, but time will tell if Dan Da Dan can stay strong past its bombastic premiere.

Getting into the Fall season and I have some initial thoughts on what I have been able to watch:

• Oshi no Ko - The season 2 finale just aired and season 3 was announced. I am so, so pleased with this past season. I couldn’t have asked for a better adaptation of the source.
• Dan Da Dan - A hell of a premiere. There were some uncomfortable moments, some good humor, some hints of romance, a mountain of WTF, and lots of gorgeous animation. No idea what to expect with this show going forward.
• Orb: On the Movements of the Earth - I really enjoyed the first two episodes of this show (a couple torture scenes notwithstanding). As somebody that has taught astronomy in the past, it’s been fun. I have been using the show discussion threads to drop some science info if anybody is interested.
• Loner Life Isekai - I very well might drop this. I enjoy the manga, but it is overall a pretty typical story that doesn’t really do much to set itself apart. With limited time for me this season, this is probably going by the wayside.
• Negative Positive Angler - A slice of life series about fishing…and terminal illness…and crippling debt. You know, comfy. I liked the premiere, so I am going to try to keep up with it to see where it goes.
• 365 Days to the Wedding - Really cute first episode. I am really hopeful that the romance delivers going forward now that the premise is established.
• Villainess Who Goes Down in History - I enjoyed the first episode and hope that with a time skip coming, the age gaps present between potential love interests become less creepy. Just because courtly love in the past involved very young nobles, doesn’t mean we need to carry that forward through our fiction.
• Appraisal Isekai Season 2 - The first episode feels pretty much exactly like last season. I might try to keep up with this one as the adaptation has been decent.

With the new season well underway, I thought it was time to refresh things with a new recent threads post.

I am not really that familiar with the non-premium experience on CR (or the dub version of the show), so I can’t really help you too much there. Sailing the high seas of the internet is always an option. As much as I am an advocate for supporting official distribution channels, sometimes they are just really, really bad (HiDIVE used to be horrendous, but has gotten a bit better with some time).

Thanks for the notice! I will mark this one as disabled in rikka’s database. This means that any future episode posts would need to be requested manually by private message.

At least for this episode, the torture happened off screen…

We unfortunately lose our heliocentric sensei this episode, but not before he leaves us with some words of wisdom (@[email protected]):

I often say something similar to junior scientists I work with in the lab. I usually phrase it as a negative result is still a result. We can learn just as much (and often more) when things don’t work out the way we hope or expect them to than when they do. I remember back when the LHC was about to be turned on and some of my physics colleagues were really excited and hopeful for the standard model to fall apart once we started getting data back. Unfortunately, it still stands…

There were two additional science topics I wanted to bring up this episode. The first of which is a carryover from last episode:

• Magnitude

This is the scale by which we measure how bright stars are. Rafal talked about how he is able to see stars with magnitude 6 and Hubert mentions how that must mean he has good eyes. This is because magnitude 6 is about as dim a star as you can see without any kind of light pollution or magnification. As a point of comparison, a magnitude 6 star is ~10,000 times dimmer than Mars or Jupiter in the night sky. That number doesn’t really give you a good intuition because our eyes don’t really work on a linear scale though, so magnitude uses a logarithmic scale. Mars/Jupiter are magnitude ~-3 (smaller numbers mean brighter). Another comparison would be Polaris, colloquially known as the North Star, which has a magnitude of ~2. For an illustration, wikipedia has one:

• Alnilam

This is the star referenced in this episode and is the name given to the middle of the three stars that comprise the belt of Orion. I don’t have too much to add here other than that the three stars in the belt of Orion have served as a distinguishing feature in the night sky for many different cultures across history due to the relative brightness of all three and their close proximity. It is easy to pick out quickly to get your bearings. Also, as a bit of trivia for me personally, I have previously worked (in collaboration) with a company called Alnylam which derives its name from this star.

Alright, so we have an entire anime about heliocentrism. I have taught astronomy courses in the past and have a bit of interest in the history of science, so this is right up my alley. There were a couple things they brought up in this first episode that people might not be familiar with:

• Aristotle’s theory of gravity

Aristotle (4th century BCE) believed that everything had a natural place in the cosmos, and gravity was the force that pulled it to that place. In his worldview, earth’s natural place was at the center because it was the heaviest, water’s natural place was to sit on top of earth, air on top of water, fire on top of air, and then the celestial sphere above that with heavenly bodies like the moon embedded on that sphere.

• Astrolabe

This was a tool that dates all the way back to ancient Greece. The tool has many different uses (literally hundreds), but primarily was used in astronomy for precisely measuring one’s latitude, the elevation of an object in the sky, determining the time of day, measuring the height of objects, etc. It was a tool that was a go-to for any natural philosopher to have and ended up with many religious applications as well such as calculating eclipses, equinoxes, etc.

• Aristarchus of Samos

Believe it or not, this ancient Greek astronomer theorized the heliocentric model of the solar system a full ~1800 years before Copernicus would publish his work. Unfortunately his writings have been lost to time and we only have some small quotations and references to it that survive in later works. There were occasional astronomers that would come in the centuries following that would resurrect the heliocentric model, but it never reached enough of a critical mass to take hold of scientific consensus. The consensus until Copernicus was originally developed by…

• Ptolemy

Ptolemy was an ancient Greek thinker that proposed a model of the solar system that happened to support the theology of the newly forming Catholic church, which went on to promote the Ptolemy geocentric model and its epicycles as literal Gospel basically. In Ptolemy’s model, the Earth was at the center of the solar system and the other heavenly bodies (moon, planets, sun) moved in these complex loops that wrapped around in a circle while the distant stars were stuck on a celestial sphere encompassing everything that rotated. These complex epicycles were created to explain the occasional periods where planets would move backward in the sky relative to everything else, called retrograde motion. This is the model of the solar system that Rafal drew in the dirt near the end of the episode. Here is that same type of diagram from Wikipedia:

Science lesson over! I will echo @[email protected] in that one thing I didn’t enjoy about this episode was the torture scene that it started out with and then the later burning a heretic at the stake. So, not looking forward to more of that going forward. However, the scientist within me is burning (figuratively) to keep watching.

@[email protected]

I am so happy that we got an instant announcement that a season 3 is in the works. The source manga is nearing its finale, so there is maybe like 2-3 seasons of material left to adapt once that finishes.

For everybody (myself included), that wished there was more Ruby this season, then prepare yourself for season 3. Aqua might think his revenge is over, but it merely shifted to Ruby and the world better watch out. Additionally, we now have some mysterious character feeding information to help stir things up.

Only one thing is certain going forward; Kana will continue to keep losing. Truly the losing-est of losing heroines…

I really enjoyed the MV as well. They made a whole album of B Komachi songs for the first season, so it is nice to see that they are continuing to make songs as B Komachi has reached its next form.

It is really nice that they went ahead and made the MV and produced a whole song for the show. In the source manga, there were just a couple lyrics here and there, but nothing nearly as fleshed out. Also, I loved that shot of dark-star Ruby when it popped up in the MV. Give her back her bright star and it would be very cute, but with the dark stars, it takes on a very menacing vibe.

I think you are probably referring to Chapter 122 (or thereabouts). I think a season 3 could reach that far. After two seasons we ended around chapter 80. It was helped along a bit by a triple-length episode one though. I am not quite sure where season three will end, but so far this adaptation has been excellent and I fully trust them to pick a great spot.

Episode 13 just released today and this announcement was released alongside it.

Link to the episode 13 discussion thread.

I had to do a double take for this one. They made Miyo look so small/young in this visual I almost didn’t recognize her. This visual makes it look more like a father/daughter than two people that are engaged and similar in age.

Looking at the voting demographics, a huge chunk of voters at AC are <20 years old. For a show that is multiple seasons in at this point, I doubt many are going back and getting caught up.

Reading the synopsis, it really does have a lot of similarity.

And just like that we are a part timer thanks to An for repaying the favor of helping her out before. She better get used to that spicy chicken.

Oshi no Ko was truly fantastic this season. I was shocked to see it didn’t win Best Adaptation or Best Drama. At least it got the deserved Best ED win.

And the heroines just lost one more time as you looked right past them!

Yeah, AC’s taste probably doesn’t line up with lemmy’s very well. A closer approximation would probably be the anime subreddit. I don’t think they do a seasonal poll like this one though. The most recent week had that show at #18. Much better than the 43rd rank that AC had it at.