hey everyone it's lego captain harlock. this october was honestly not a great time for anime. it felt like everything took forever to watch. i'm gonna have to separate by format again.
before we get into all of that though, i need to give a brief foreword regarding Precure. this month, i finished Yes! Precure 5 GoGo!, and though it was better than the last season (particularly in animation question), it was still a piece of shit. truly, i cannot understand toei's aversion to making this show good, especially when they knocked it out of the park with Futari wa Precure: Splash Star. i fucking hate precure 5 so much. nothing but squandered potential for all 97 episodes.
note: i originally started writing this on 2025-11-02 but then i was busy for the entire month... sorry.
(tv) anime of the month
i apparently capitalized an "i" last month. apologies for that.
we've got some contenders, i think. last month, i mentioned Dororo to Hyakkimaru. it was really fucking good for the first half, and then went episodic in a way that was just okay. i watched Magic Knight Rayearth, but that wasn't as good as i was hoping. i also watched Slayers TRY, but though it was great, it wasn't the thing that stuck out to me the most. so we're hopping across the pond to china.
Modao Zushi (or The Founder of Diabolism) is probably not the kind of thing i would have appreciated even a year ago. i didn't really understand the appeal of cultivation until reading Sinui Tap (Tower of God) at the very beginning of the year, but reading Guimi Zhi Zhu (Lord of the Mysteries) is what probably got me actually interested in it, despite it not being wuxia. Modao Zushi assumes the viewer is familiar with the tropes of wuxia and cultivation, but it crafts an utterly unique world with intensely detailed politics.
the politics of this setting is probably its strongest point, actually. drama between characters is almost entirely a product of the relations between different cultivation clans, which feels important due to how much time they spend immersing you in the history that comes to a head in the second and third seasons (as season one is almost entirely set in the past). there is real sorrow here, which is only bolstered by the impressive animation displayed throughout. though Guimi Zhi Zhu had a rough adaptation, director Xiong Ke did a much better job here, likely a product of the amount of episodes they were given for the first season.
perhaps least important to this discussion is the fact that Modao Zushi is a BL. i'm not a huge BL watcher/reader, but this is certainly one of the better relationships i've seen. it's no Doukyuusei, but you can tell that they put real effort into making the relationship between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji feel natural and dynamic. the only thing that bothers me is the fact that most people seem to watch Modao Zushi because it is a BL, when everything else i've already mentioned is significantly more important to its artistic identity. i hope those people were pleasantly surprised by what they got.
anime movie of the month
it's peak.
Chainsaw Man: Reze-hen adapts one of the best arcs of the manga and makes a fucking magnum opus out of it. it's genuinely one of the best anime movies i've ever seen. i am so happy that MAPPA changed the director for this.
though i did appreciate the cinematic approach to the first season, the movie's comedic timing and general higher quality makes me not feel so bad that the "cinematic look" is gone. the movie feels like the manga, which is one of the biggest issues with the first season aside from its misuse of CGI.
also, we finally got to hear the full version of MAXIMUM THE HORMONE's ED from the first season. i was shocked.
i don't have much to say about this movie because there's little i can say without spoiling it. it's great, plain and simple.
OVA of the month
i like having a separate category for OVAs since they're hard to rate in comparison to tv anime and movies due to their typically short and often incomplete nature. this month had one standout candidate, though...
though perhaps not that strong in the thematic or plot department, Black Magic M-66 accomplishes its solitary goal of being fucking awesome with style and ease. it has some of the most insane cuts i've ever seen and is thrilling the entire duration. there is not a moment in this film where i was bored. any time there was a chance of low action, they would pull some insane animation out of their asses for something as simple as a bus driving through the forest.
and man, that elevator scene. the insane spinning redraws of the entire scene, the extended cuts, the TENSION!? god, i wish i could watch that for the first time again.
manga of the month
i read Shin Seiki Evangelion. i'm not going to take the time to highlight it here because it is frankly just inferior to the original anime (especially in its final arc. it's kind of hard to outdo EoE). it was the best manga i read in october, but that's not saying much when the other options were Dai Mahou Touge and Seihantai na Kimi to Boku.
final thoughts
i really thought i was going to finish Saint Seiya in october... fucking dumbass. i'm halfway through december and i'm STILL not done. close, though.
i'm gonna write the next article right now. -lego jujutsu kaisen