Obligatory shoutout to [email protected] if you want a more anime-focused discussion. Of what I have watched (or seen enough of to make a judgement) there are a couple standouts. Note that I haven’t really watched much western animation in recent years.

• Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End - [email protected]
• The Apothecary Diaries
• Heavenly Delusion
• Delicious in Dungeon - [email protected] - This one is done by Studio Trigger, so it is a bit stylized, but I adore the animation in this series
• Jujutsu Kaisen - I haven’t watched this, but I have only seen tremendous praise for season 2’s animation (despite the studio’s working conditions)
• Demon Slayer - another show I haven’t watched, but have seen plenty of gorgeous clips

Wildcard answer would be Star Wars Visions. Each episode is done by a different animation studio, so it can be up to personal preference as to which ones you like, but there are some great showcases in the show.

Edit: If you care a lot about animation quality, I would recommend checking out the SakugaBlog. It goes into deep dives on Japanese animation. For example, they did a whole running series on Frieren (link to the first article).

A lot of the anime-related communities have consolidated over time to the ani.social instance. There are historical reasons for this (largely due to hostility from the ml admins), and if you want a brief history for just the general anime community, I previously wrote a post here.

That being said, the ani.social instance has been growing with new communities being added. Here are the more active ones:

General Communities

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Series-Specific Communities

• [email protected] - Delicious in Dungeon community
• [email protected] - Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End community
• [email protected] - My Deer Friend Nokotan community (currently airing show)
• [email protected] - Dan Da Dan community (show airs this fall)
• [email protected] - Dragonball community

Misc.

• [email protected] - Very new community just started by @[email protected] about vocaloids. Check it out!
• [email protected] - Community to discuss and share videos from and about vtubers
• [email protected] - Community about Japanese voice actors behind the scenes

A couple fandom communities:

• [email protected] - Currently airing show, has weekly discussion threads
• [email protected] - Show that will be airing this fall, has threads for manga chapters
• [email protected] - Show that aired a couple months back, currently mostly fanart posts
• [email protected] - Show that aired a couple months ago, currently mostly fanart posts
• [email protected] - Community to discuss Japanese anime voice actors behind the scenes and share clips

This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.

ani.social and the admin, @[email protected], has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people’s lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.

Just happened to catch your comment from the local feed and wanted to point out that this thread is in the old community. It looks like shinobu is still kicking and picked up the second cour of Nier as the first season (see the links for show info all point to season 1) and is creating threads for the episodes. The thread from rikka for the new episode is here. Just want to make sure that your comment ends up somewhere where rikka will count it for engagement towards creating subsequent episode threads.

Honestly surprised that shinobu still lives though. The little crontab that could.

I am not going to be able to watch the second half, but this start has been brutally slow. I am watching in the US on Fox and the commentators have struggled to find things to talk about. At different points they have talked about the grounds crew, tea cups, and the Copa America instead of this game. If England has any hopes of making a run in this tournament, they are going to need to make some changes, up the tempo, and find some urgency.

Really lackadaisical start to this game so far. At least when England played Denmark they came out strong before they got lazy. This game they just started that way.

Overall, this game was kind of disappointing with relatively few good chances at goal from open play (especially compared to the other Group D match). The equalizer came from a penalty that will be sure to spark discussion going forward. At the end of the day, France looked their best when they were playing quickly and vertically. They struggled to generate chances when they couldn’t use their pace against the Polish defense. Lessons to take with them as they advance.

I can’t stand when penalty takers do those inconsistent runs up to the ball just to try to bait the keeper. Aren’t there rules about that kind of thing? Feel for the French keeper on this one.

Yeah, France has looked better in the second half. Attacking with pace that the Polish defense has struggled with.

At the half:

I tuned in about 10 minutes through the half once I grabbed some lunch. I have been watching France play through this tournament and they haven’t seemed like they particularly found their groove yet. At least, they seem a pale imitation of the French team that showed up in the World Cup. I had thought it was maybe due to Mbappe being sidelined so far. However, with him on the pitch this game, they have largely struggled to break through the Polish defense (until the last ~5 minutes or so).

There just hasn’t been too much movement off the ball for France, creating space for their play makers to work through the Polish defense. France has looked better on the fast break than when they try to build it up because they have struggled to get through the back line of Poland after they get their lines set up. There were a couple minutes there at the end of the half where France started playing some quick give and go’s and were able to spring some players behind the back line to make the Polish goalkeeper come up with some good reflex saves.

As for Poland, I think they should be fairly happy with their performance so far. They have mostly managed to contain some of the French play makers while having a couple good looks at goal on the break. Something to watch out for, and they almost got caught out, is that they don’t over commit forward and have things turn into a footrace toward their own goal after a turnover.

The French team of the last five minutes of the half looked way better than the rest of what I watched, so I think they should look to emulate those quick passes and through balls to try to break through Poland as their big, lofted crosses haven’t had shown too much promise yet.

Filterable post flairs and instance-agnostic links are my two biggest wish list items that I think would go a long way to making that specific community much nicer (speaking as a mod).

This is one of the limitations of the holo project that shinobu is based on. There are sometimes shows that it doesn’t pick up when it is airing for one reason or another. Then, later down the line, it can randomly pick up a show or episode that it hadn’t detected before.

The technical reasons for this come down to the difficulties of parsing raw html or text strings of torrent titles. Often times, the titles aren’t formatted in just the way holo expects, so it won’t detect the episodes that release. This issue was one of the main motivating factors in creating a whole new bot that doesn’t rely on this method for the creation of discussion threads. Coming to [email protected] with the new season.

I am so torn up that this show is over (for now). As a huge fan of the source, I was so incredibly anxious about this series before it began airing. There are any number of ways it could have gone all wrong and it isn’t a story I thought would connect with such a broad audience. However, in my wildest dreams, I hadn’t expected the show to be this good. Phenomenal job all around. I can’t believe that this is only the second show directed by Keiichirou Saitou, the first being Bocchi the Rock! That is a talent that I will be keeping an eye on going forward.

Awesome episode once again. This show does flashbacks in a way that no other show does. I don’t mind at all that we had a break or two in the action to get a flashback, because the stories that they tell are always great. The flashback showing Himmel’s party fighting that other dungeon boss was great (loved that Heiter was just having an off day).

However, the flashback with Frieren and Serie is the one I found most interesting. I remember reading the manga and coming away with the impression that Serie was…if not evil…at least didn’t have virtuous intentions. She always had a menacing aura about her, both in the way she was drawn and the way she acted. An example is that the sequence animated here, where a young Flamme holds hands with and travels alongside Serie feels like it is a mother reminiscing about her child that has long since left the home and accomplished great things. However, in the manga, it feels colder, like Serie is more detached from Flamme, driving home the point that she must have trained Flamme on a whim because she doesn’t seem to feel anything at her passing (chapter 53 if you want to read this sequence yourself). At least that is the impression I had when reading it.

Finally, the OST this episode was great. It was able to transition so smoothly between these gentle flashback scenes to suddenly driving up the intensity in the Frieren battle. The animation is of course great, but I just wanted to call out the OST as well since I think it adds a lot to both halves of this episode.

Frieren hugging Methode caught me off guard and cracked me up. If only Sein had stuck around with the group long enough to befriend Methode, the onee-san of his dreams.

What an episode. I had said in previous threads that I didn’t really remember this trial too well from reading the manga back when it came out. I have been rereading the manga after watching each episode and I think this whole mage exam arc has been done a huge service through the adaptation. The quality of the animation and choreography of the action scenes that occur all through this arc have been stellar.

I might have forgotten a lot of this portion of the manga, but I will not soon be forgetting that Ubel vs. Ubel fight scene from this episode. The perspective shifts in that sequence from first to third person and back were done so smoothly and the choreography was clear in that it was easy to follow what was happening the whole time. The fight against the Sense clone was also great. The quick cut to Sense stabbing through Edel’s chest after the attempt at hypnosis was so well done.

Back when this show started, I kept waiting for the quality to drop. I just figured there was no way that they could keep up this quality for all 28 episodes. If anything, the production quality has only improved. This production has gone nuts and I hope that the team can stay together for the inevitable future seasons to come.

I am looking forward to the group’s strategy next episode as they are mostly working together now. Somebody still has to deal with that Sense replica while Fern and Frieren are going to strategize for how to handle the Frieren replica.

Denken in episode 20:

Denken in this episode:

That included me.

The second round begins! I personally wonder what a unified group of test takers could have done to this dungeon. The fights against the replicas would have been interesting. The Laufen vs. Laufen fighting animation was great and I wish it would have lasted longer. Overall, the coordination of Denken’s group seems pretty good. It’s too bad the young girl got trapped and had to leave, but if she struggled against gargoyles, then Shadow Frieren was going to chew her up.

I bet all of you thought that Dungeon Meshi was the only show this season that was going to have a mimic educational segment. Well, Frieren should know more about mimics than just about anybody else out there. They are pretty much her mortal enemy. It’s something that her and Chilchuck can bond over.

Also, I remember when I was reading the manga, it wasn’t until about this point that I really started to get how broken Fern is. It had been mentioned before that she was the youngest to become third class, etc. However, for Sense, a notoriously strict First Class Mage, to come out and say how exceptional Fern is, helped it sink in. I don’t think it really counts as a spoiler to say that Fern continues to be a badass as this story goes.

Also, these two seem to be getting along a bit better than at first.

The replica even nailed Frieren’s uninterested expression. With an episode next week titled “Perfect Replicas” I think we know which type of fight this is going to be for Denken and co.