I’m looking for magical girl manga where the girls discover and learn magic by themselves instead of it being granted through some contract

Witch Hat Atelier has girls learning magic by being taught it. It’s not really the magical girl genre – and their mentor is a guy and there are plenty of male witches in the background – but the overall focus is on a small group of young girls learning magic.

Not sure if that’s really what you’re looking for, but its at least adjacent! (Also, the art is lovely.)

e: Oh, and there’s an upcoming anime of it, here’s the trailer

Sure, that’s kind of tangential to the point I’m making. Something can reflect transphobic ideas without explicitly being about trans folk.

I’m curious how these modern takes on One Piece will deal with the Okama and related characters (assuming they get that far!)

I haven’t read the manga, but the anime at least comes off super-transphobic in how they’re played for laughs at times. I think that’d necessarily be cut from the live action version, but less hopeful about this for another anime adaptation.

I’ve always read that it’s because many light novels started online, and the way they were listed meant you needed the title to really grab folk’s attention.

(I actually really like this particular anime; the animation is often iffy but art and story really appeal to me!)

One kind of interesting twist on that is Fincher’s The Game. It remains unclear until the very end of the movie whether the main character is in a convoluted game where people are pretending to conspire against him, or an actual conspiracy using the game as cover.

They also tended to say the changes made it ‘hard to follow’ or ‘ruined the pacing’ or other things, but as an anime-only that just flat wasn’t true. I actually really loved the kind of elliptical feel of the story in S1.

I honestly kind of felt that source readers were border-line brigading posts about the anime on reddit. It certainly didn’t make me any more inclined to check it out!

You should probably have made some of the questions optional – “distribute a 100 points” is just not something I’m going to bother thinking about.

Bofuri is surprisingly good! Not in any way serious in tone, since it all takes place in an MMORPG, but some good action scenes, especially in the first season.

Pretty sure it’s completely kid friendly (no fan service or other anime weirdness.)

One issue I’ve seen is that the bot’s empty posts tend to flood out other more interesting stuff from my main feed.

I’ve thought about removing the community from my feed for that reason, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I think Shield Hero and Goblin Slayer have mixed review because the content/story is much more mature than Frieren.

Hmm, the former two shows always seemed extremely juvenile to me.

I’ve watched four this season:

• Seven Spellblades: I assumed going in it would be fairly generic, but it’s turned into my overall favorite, mostly on the merits of the story itself. It does a surprisingly good job of maintaining a relatively large ensemble of MCs. (Also, given that the setting is kind of “dark anime harry potter”, I can’t help but appreciate the implied “fuck you” to JKR in one subplot.)
• Helck: not all the humor lands for me, but enough does that I really enjoy the show! The slowly unfolding plot is kind of neat too.
• Undead Girl Murder Farce: I really like the sense of humor and style in this one. At the start it seems like it’s going to be a bit like In/Spectre in terms of slow-paced mystery solving, but the action starts to pick up ~half way through the first cour.
• The vending machine iskei: I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a good show, but it’s been watchable enough I made it to the end of the season!

it seems to kind of match the manga’s art style, though.