Anime

Frieren

hyouka and haruhi maybe

• oh also lain

Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso

I usually pick out my anime carefully. I don't watch that much so I don't want to pick something that is ass. I also tend to finish everything I watch. So usually I pick out things that I quite like.

In the beginning of liking slice of life I didn't know what to expect and if I liked it so I didn't guess before watching that I would be into it. However it changed with Lucky Star. I watched a few clips on youtube and thought, man this is going to be great. And it was! While watching the very first scene where they eat lunch I just thought "this is the shit". Lucky Star really confirmed to me that SOL was my thing.

Some of the shows I found had great opening scenes and became favourites:

• Shadows House
• Ancient Magus’ Bride
• Medalist
• Ascendance of a Bookworm

Golden time

Monogatari Series.

This is the first 45 seconds of the first episode:

It's really perverted but I've never seen perversion presented in such a way. I instantly knew it had a different kind of "language" in anime. I love every second of it. ^and^ ^i^ ^love^ ^hitagi^ ^so^ ^much^

I am going to exclude any shows for which I had previously read a manga or novel version of the story. There are a couple shows I can think of where I knew after episode 1 that I was in for a good time:

• Kino's Journey (2017) - The first episode is excellent and really sets the tone for the kind of show you are in for. It's really, really good.
• Heavenly Delusion - I went in completely blind to this show and was blown away. I was instantly hooked and after the show ended I binged the entire manga, keeping up with it to this day. The OP is excellent as well. Unfortunately no season 2 announcement though.
• Little Witch Academia - I love LWA and I fell in love with the world and characters right from the beginning.
• Konosuba - As somebody that has read/watched way too many isekai over the years, this show hit the humor sweet spot for me basically as soon as Aqua entered the picture.

Joshiraku is about five rakugo-performing girls. The first episode opens with the end of a performance by one of them (to an audience of mostly empty seats), then the OP. Okay - at this point, I don't really know what to expect, other than likely low-key humor.

Then it moves to them in a dressing room in which most of the series takes place, kneeling around a table. The camera focuses on one of them, then after an awkwardly long silence, she says, "You should just read the manga instead."

I was sold right then and there.

There are two main categories of being special to me.

The first is when characters show some maturity - or just a lack of stupidity - in their thoughts and behaviour in the first episode. Some examples include:

• Thors from Vinland Saga
• multiple characters from Frieren
• now that I think about it, plenty of anime from my Peak Drama list fits this criterion

These anime would end up having stories, characters and writing that are top-notch, clearly a cut above the rest.

The other is when the show subverts expectation by not following stupid tropes from the start; these are usually parodies. Some examples include:

• Cautious Hero - dude who got isekai-ed isn't some loser to begin with (i.e. no wish-fulfillment)
• Konosuba - dude who got isekai-ed did not get cheats (i.e. no power fantasy)
• 100 Girlfriends - dude is not a wimp who can't handle girls (i.e. no self-insert for losers)

These anime are special by virtue of being different from peers of the same genres / subgenres.

The beginning of Redline gave me the impression that the whole movie would just be a sequence of cool shit happening, and then the whole movie was a sequence of cool shit happening. It ended up being one of my all-time favorites, and proved to me that an anime doesn't need a complex story to be excellent.

Outlaw star.