It’s time for the seasonal OP/ED roundup! I want to hear about your favorite OPs and EDs for the season (alternatively, your least favorites!). If you are looking for a collection of them all for this season, you can find almost all of them at the link below:
Just a note that you can absolutely use this thread like you would any other general discussion thread. So, feel free to post questions/comments/recommendations like any other week.
As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).
Fuck, I [re]watched 26 episodes + 2DC of Evangelion on Saturday, and spent all of Sunday and Monday feeling so angry and full of hatred toward life (I thought my life was absolute shit)… Right until I watched The End of Evangelion. Now I’ve calmed down. Maybe that’s just a coincidence and I’m just weird, or maybe not?
some thoughts I wrote down earlier
After 20 episodes of Evangelion it hit me: Shinji embodies an ordinary person who thinks he is worth something in a company/country, but in reality, he is just being used. Rei embodies the fact that he is easily replaced, and Asuka shows the massive gap between one’s desires and actual capabilities. Gendo is like textbook tyrant.
This wouldn’t have caught my attention if I hadn’t watched Madoka before this, where similar problems are raised. (When I watched Eva for the first time had no clue about any of this.)And I asked myself: what is my place in this world, am I just someone’s pawn, used to bring global ideas to life while being treated as disposable?From the perspective of a state or a corporation, it’s way more convenient to have an impersonal employee - someone without their own ideas, thoughts, family, or hobbies. Wouldn’t it be perfect for them to just use people as disposable material (Like Rei, the society in 1984, orjust Japan from 1900 to 1945.)Honestly, now I remember that this theme has been raised tons of times in literature—the “little man” trope, like in Crime and Punishment. Ironically, I was reminded of this by Cocoa in episode 4 of season 1 of Gochiusa, - a true masterpiece of world literature lol.
“Crime and Punishemnt”
It’s funny, but until the very end, I thought Gendo was a cool guy (like some of the bosses in Black Lagoon) and knew what he was doing. How wrong I was. But man, the way he sits in his chair is truly monumental :D
P.S. Every time I write in English, it feels like I’m writing an essay, so it might look a bit too formal.
OP from “Теnsеi shitаrа Кеn dеshitа 2” really rocks
DREAM OF BUTTERFLY absolutely rocks. I forget every week and then I get blown away by this awesome OP.
Nice write-up!
Personally, I can’t tell whether I disliked the anime or whether the sour taste it left was precisely the objective it aimed to achieve. I felt it just wanted to show everything bleak in our world, but after a while I felt saturated and it took me out. Also, Rei my girl, I won’t forgive the authors for your fate, I guess I’m just too soft for tragedies.
Shinji seemed a little spineless at times, which is fine as a character trait, but then it should have been acknowledged and discussed more as part of the plot I think.
I thoroughly despised Gendo since the very beginning though. The scale of modern science projects and past knowledge dwarfs individual geniuses, anyone acting superior is just indulging their ego. I’m not usually good at this, but I somehow expected how bad he would turn out to be.
I’m not all that caught up with the season yet, but I love Yorushika, so I love The Apothecary Dairy’s new OP.
I think it says something about this season that the only one that stuck out to me was when they used the song from the 90s Magic Knight Rayearth OP for the end credits of the first episode of the new show.
The only theme music that’s currently sticking in my head is Stellar, the ED for Secret Saint. The others have thus far been in one ear and out the other. (As for the accompanying visuals, unless they’re unnecesarily sexualizing a character I usually don’t care much, and they’re not doing that here.)
My favorites, probably in this order:
- Even the Student Council Has Its Holes! ED
- The Apothecary Diaries S3 OP
- Cyberpunk: Edgerunners S2 OP
- Firefly Wedding OP
- The Apothecary Diaries S3 ED
That’s just from the shows I follow this season. I haven’t seen OPs and EDs from stuff I don’t actively follow, so I might be missing something good here. Student Council Holes hasn’t released the proper OP yet, and given how show looks so far, there’s a chance it will join this list once it’s out.
I continue going through my unwatched movies stack. This week I watched Millennium Actress which turned out to be a film that places a great deal of emphasis on form, and since I’m not a huge fan of a highly artistic approach that tends to push the plot into the background, I didn’t enjoy watching it that much as I thought I would. Though, I will admit that the idea is interesting, and direction is truly excellent. There’s probably plenty of references to Japanese cinema in there, that went completely over my head, and me not being familiar with Japanese live-action cinematography contributed to my reduced enjoyment of the movie. So, objectively, I’m sure it’s a much better movie than my experience with it implies.
I also started watching False Memory – my leftover from the previous season that I overlooked, because it’s donghua, and I generally don’t watch many of these. I got used to Japanese language too much, and very often they don’t have Japanese dub, like in this case. I’m halfway through, and one thing I can say for sure is that they’re really flexing in the animation department. Visually it very much resembles FLCL, although I get the impression that in a way characteristic to Chinese studios, they’re trying to overwhelm the viewer with sakuga too much. I think more toned down approach would work better with this kind of story, and the visuals overshadow the message it’s trying to convey. That said, it’s still somewhat enjoyable. Maybe the ending will change my mind for the better. We’ll see.
