u/AnteikuAnimeReviews

Those smiles are everything. You can think back through all they’ve gone through, the good and the bad, and now you see this moment, and those smiles. And I think once again: “What a time to be alive! We get to see this!” It’s a small thing, but it’s also irreplaceable.

It’s a little more heightened with this Jugemo story Akane is telling for this competition. It’s not a long story, and it’s definitely humorous, and does depend on how the Rakugoka chooses to actually speak the words: in this case, the absurdly long name. We basically heard Akane in the background saying the name once, some of the setup portion of the story, and the final couple of mentions of the long name, which she read really fast, something that’s not that unusual for this particular story performance. Sooo…what’s being accomplished here from a storytelling or entertainment perspective for this anime? Akane doing Rakugo off camera while others marvel or deride her performance? Not compelling. Not fun to watch.

Jugemo is a short story: it doesn’t have to take more than 5-10 minutes, depending on how it’s told. I hope to see her whole performance of the story next week. What the other characters think of her performance isn’t remotely important or interesting to me. What she does, how her VA actually performs the story as Akane, is what I care about.

This anime gets you so emotionally invested and you don’t even realize it. Then suddenly you’re smiling and laughing and crying and your heart feels like it’s gonna fly away and you’re enjoying yourself so much…. Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun seems like such a silly anime from the outside, but it’s so good and so unexpectedly evocative. There’s a greatness to the production effort for this series that cannot be ignored. This anime earns every accolade it gets, without an ounce of hype preceding it or flashy popularity. It’s a silly, fun, masterful work. All just to entertain you and me, to make us laugh and smile and do great art just for the sake of it. I love that.

For better or worse, this anime has also had a distinct lack of ladies. We’ve had Arthur’s mom and the ninja girl Jasmine, but neither of them are that remarkable in any character aspect. They introduced a new interesting girl late in ep6. We’ll see how that goes.

That library guy transforming whenever he touches a book or enters the library is killing me. Makoto and her speech patterns and tone and what she says is hilarious. I thought the student council president would be a one-off character (she was already overwhelming in her debut), but now it looks like her funny confidence vibe are going to appear more often now as well. I’m really starting to look forward to this show every week.

Rimaru about to go Luffy-mode on the evil bourgeoisie.

Ep5 didn’t do Kazuya any favors. Chizuru comes out looking like the queen she is. Mami gets the finger. Every time she appears.

This is anime is either something really special or it just imagines it is. The presumption to say that a season and a half is the “prologue.” I love how bold that is! But m very impressed. And now, I expect to be even more impressed. We shall see if this anime can live up to that expectation. If it does, it really will be special.

It’s everything about her, but also…it’s that smile. It makes my heart soar.