I mean, hi, I wanna submit my application for most deluded stan on this site

I mean, hi, this will be my EOY thread of some description, crossposted and archived to my blog over the next 30 days or so to clear my head of thoughts about 2021 media

the top 200 is actually a summation of all the elements I wish to talk about

the numbers aren't set in stone I still need to finalise some lists

but it will roughly break down like this:
10 albums
20 anime
30 vtubers
40 calliope mori streams
100 songs

in that order

Top 10 albums

 

I do still like listening to albums! In fact they are a great way to get the most out of music. It's just right now I'm focusing on doing so most often by going through an artist's whole catalogue and experiencing their body of work as a complete whole. Or at the least their most critically acclaimed parts if I'm not up to the entire discography. And then subsequently not listening to that album more than once in a year. But there's a few albums that were released this year or the end of last year that did stick with me and I did come back to quite a bit and so I think are worth talking about a little.

 

10 - POLKADOT STINGRAY - 何者

 

 

'Nanimono', or 'what kind of person?' is the latest album by Japanese indie-rock band Polkadot Stingray and the one that introduced me to them. They do light math rock with a fun indie backing, a little bit like Tricot if you've heard one of their songs before. They do a lot of clever instrumental things with their songs, if you want good indie-rock, I'd definitely recommend them if you're of a slightly alt bent (but don't want any tryhard edgy stuff and just want people having fun with their instruments/voice), it's all in Japanese of course, but the lead singer has a really beautiful voice that shows off the fun she's having and there's a lot of funk and clever asides here. I haven't even tried to listen to the Japanese properly (yet), I'm just having fun with the musical talent on display. I'd try 'Ichidaiji' or 'Strange' if you want to see one track that shows off what they can do).

 

9 - Wolf Alice - Blue Weekend

 

 

Blue Weekend is an undeniably great album, I've gone back to all of the Wolf Alice albums at some point this year, to finally get them into my head as one of the best bands of the last few years (which they are). I've made no secret of the fact that I do prefer them when they go loud and wild (like on 'Play The Greatest Hits'), but once I give them a bit more time, their slower stuff, which is definitely more prevalent on Blue Weekend, really comes through with its beauty. Best of course is 'The Last Man On Earth', but you take any of the tracks from 'Delicious Things', to 'Smile' to 'How Can I Make It OK?', Blue Weekend is a beautiful listen and definitely one of the best albums in the year from one of the top bands in the business right now. I still adore their early work but you can tell this is a great maturation album.

8. CHVRCHES - Screen Violence

 

 

I wasn't keen on 'Love Is Dead'. CHVRCHES are one of my favourite pop acts of the decade but they had a dud album before this so I was slightly wary with 'Screen Violence'. But that it's here should tell you that it was good, not quite reaching the highs of 'Every Open Eye' but solid all the way through.

 

There's a nice diversion into hyperpop in part with 'He Said She Said' but really the great thing about Screen Violence is the underlying lyrical concept of hacker and slasher movies. This is most apparent on my favourite album track 'Final Girl', which uses one of the most prevalent horror tropes and starts talking about its arbitrariness with two very distinct hooks. But overall, CHVRCHES really sound a lot more adventurous here, moving their already polished sound into ever more unusual instrumental backdrops (particularly Asking For A Friend, Violent Delights, Good Girls). Quality synthpop, it took a little while to grow on me but it's a solid third great album from them.

 

7. FAKE TYPE - FAKE LAND

 

 

I got really into Japanese electro-rap duo FAKE TYPE this year (made up of DYES IWASAKI, a tall guy who has a pink-haired cartoon lady alter ego, and tophamhatKYO, who is shorter and has a mustachioed top-hatted alter ego for their videos), in part because they're so closely associated with DEMONDICE, part of the same doujin circle of underground nerd rap artists known as TamaOnsen. They released their third album this year and it contains the best music I've heard from them, particularly title track 'FAKE LAND', a kooky descent into craziness. The rest of the album is much the same as that, but because it's all that, it's great stuff all the way through.

 

'BEELZEBUZ' is my other big favourite on the album, a song that starts with retro sounds before going into hard raps and great hooks, or there's the football-chant + ear-destroying 'Yummy Yummy Yummy', or the electro-boppy 'Tandemoon Rendezvous'. There's also 'Game Of Dice', a song that's pretty explicitly poking fun at DEMONDICE suddenly gaining success and outpacing FAKE TYPE in numbers when she used to be just their... groupie/MV animator (as far as I understand). It's very unusual music but there's such personality behind all of this and despite the Japanese lyrics it feels really accessible and very un-anime-like, basically there's really nothing like it.

I've not listened to the Wolf Alice album in full but I've heard a few tracks on it and they've been decent enough! 'The Last Man On Earth' is a big favourite.

rare section where I praise today's charts for getting things right:

 

6. Måneskin - Teatro D'Ira (Vol. 1)

 

 

My favourite Eurovision winner since Lordi, but I'll have a lot more to say about that in the songs countdown talking about Zitti E Buoni specifically, it's been really cool seeing Måneskin becoming one of the world's biggest rock bands as a result of their victory, and part of that was no doubt due to the great strength of this existing album as soon as their victory put them into the spotlight.

 

I still haven't heard their cover of 'Beggin'' as I don't particularly like the original song and I have no desire to help that being their main memory, but 'I WANNA BE YOUR SLAVE' is just one great part of this, 'CORALINE' and 'VENT'ANNI' are particularly good Italian songs on here, but then you also have the awesome grungey rock that 'LIVIDI SUI GOMITI' or 'LA PAURA DEL BUIO' has; 'LIVIDI' I'd probably rank as my favourite album track. I'm so happy for their success and I will support them as far as they go if they keep this up, 'MAMMAMIA' was a good indication that they're going to do so.

 

5. Olivia Rodrigo - SOUR

 

 

Yeah, I didn't call this either. Part of that was the complete and utter lack of knowledge that someone as sweetly named as Olivia Rodrigo would be doing anything near rock rather than just throwaway Disney-style bops (and an initial listen to Driver's License didn't really shatter that illusion). But much of the rest of the album, PARTICULARLY its opening track 'brutal', but also great songs like 'happier' and 'jealousy, jealousy' are more in the style of Paramore than anything else - and not in a simple ripoff way, just that same sort of vibe that I've been missing from pop a lot. And even some of the more pop ones are great, 'favourite crime' has some beautiful instrumental effects used in its climax.

 

Because she has a strong lyrical foundation and a musical style that's more towards my preferred vibe, that's enough for me to say Olivia's one of the good popstars. I've enjoyed this debut a lot, particularly a few songs that are going into my singles countdown, but throughout, it's all (except for driver's license) top quality.

4. Sewerslvt - The World Is Fvcked; Skitzophrenia Simulation; we had good times together, don't forget that

 

 

Putting this in one to represent the final 12 months of Sewerslvt production, as after releasing the final of these 3 albums, Sewerslvt officially quit music and also her position at the top of the breakcore subgenre. In that short career though, she's already become a vibe, a great artist to attach to a 'not like the other girls' identity, and a huge volume of great tracks, some with samples from anime, some without. In many of them, sadness, strong emotions and depression reappear as common topics, as such, she's not exactly an easy listen, but more for when you want to feel things from your dance music. And often, I do, I do want to feel things.

 

The best of these is definitely the final one, I loved 'The World Is Fvcked' mostly for the great update to 'jvnko loves you' that many here will be aware of, and Skitzophrenia Simulation had some great tracks like I Break My Heart & Yours and Purple Hearts In Her Eyes, along with the grindy 'slvtcrusher', but she saved her best work for last with 'we had good times together, don't forget that'.

 

"If I have any request it is that people do not “review” this specific album. I’m comfortable with discussion surrounding my other work positive or negative but in the case of this album I’d appreciate if opinions whether it be of high praise or damning critique not be encouraged. As mentioned before, I made this album for her, these were the songs she enjoyed when I sent her short clips & demos. These were the songs she was proud of me for making. I understand that it’s fruitless to make this kind of statement given that this is the internet & everyone has an opinion. This is just how I personally feel about it & I thank those who wish to respect my request." Jvne (sewerslvt), September 2nd, 2021.

 

As such, I'm going to try and avoid this being a 'review', rather just to describe what's going on here, because it is Sewerslvt's final work, and I recommend it be given a listen if you have enjoyed what you've heard from her before.

It is explicitly dedicated to her now sadly deceased partner Angel, and is filled with emotional clues to that and sewerslvt's slow route out of music, that ramp up throughout the album. Jvne (she changed her name from Jvnko) puts a lot of her own mental state into all her tracks, but especially here. I sympathise with her a lot after hearing all of this, but its those emotions that really made her stand out among her scene and I will miss her presence unless she decides to return under another alias - it seems pretty clear the sewerslvt name is now done with no matter what.

 

While the whole album is a dedication, the final two tracks of 'we had good times together, don't forget that' are together a 24-minute epic that really sold the emotions that I think Jvne was going for here, so it's worth listening to the whole album, all good in its own way, to get to this point. The first, 'her', uses a distorted sample and a pseudo-trance build, and then final track 'goodbye' is a 17-minute eulogy, both for Angel and for Sewerslvt the project.

 

3. Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee

 

 

Japanese Breakfast I really enjoyed when I heard several tracks from her a few years ago, but I'm really glad that she's improved to become a mainstay on my indie-pop playlists with Jubilee, which is explictly an improvement from her already great earlier works.

 

The pop on Jubilee seems to be taking influences, or at least hitting the same bells in my brain as, Sufjan Stevens' work, epic instrumental soundscapes while Michelle Zaunier's vocals slowly come through, bringing some great uplifting feelings to them. While the best two tracks are the opening tracks, every song on here is a beautiful indie-pop track. 'Kokomo, IN' and 'Savage Good Boy' in particular stand out as great pop tracks, but then you have more experimental ones like 'Posing In Bondage' that barely have vocals and just show off some great synth instrumentals. Or 'Tactics' and 'Posing For Cars', which sum up the album with a slightly slower and contemplative send-off before the latter explodes in some very loud sounds that leave you emotionally shattered from having that whole experience.

 

One of the best albums of 2021, and given the identity of my top 2 albums, the easy critical darling pick from here. I love having a few of those in.

2. YOASOBI - THE BOOK

 

 

YOASOBI have only just released the sequel to this album, entitled THE BOOK 2, which is sure to appear on next year's list. But for pop music, YOASOBI were one of my first ports of call this whole year, and that's entirely built off the all-killer no-filler debut album THE BOOK. Throughout this, producer Ayase masterminds some of the best production I've ever heard on Japanese tracks, and singer Ikura lends her beautiful voice to complement it all. If I had to choose, I'd say it's Ayase's contribution that really make YOASOBI something else that has taken Japan by storm, one of the best decisions I've ever seen popular music make, but just like Alan Walker's best tracks would be nothing without Iselin Sondheim, Ikura has a very important role too putting emotion in at the most crucial moments.

 

It's a short album but everything here sounds brilliant, piano crashes, "Halzion" is a perfect example of that, with Ikura's vocals stretching themselves beautifully to the limit. This is also present on their signature song "Yori No Kakeru" ("Running Into The Night"). Elsewhere, there's much more of an acoustic and slower feeling on the start of "Tabun" ("Probably") or choirs on "Gunjou" ("Ultramarine"), or a more playful feeling on "Haruka". All of these songs are the pinnacle of J-Pop with really revolutionary production techniques that keep them being a streaming giant rather than anything throwaway, so long may YOASOBI dominate Japan's charts - hopefully until the rest of the world starts to take notice.

 

1. Mori Calliope - Your Mori (EP)

 

 

cheating? no. Besides if you put it with last year's DEAD BEATS, as well as 'Off With Their Heads' and 'end of a life' and 'Graveyard Shift', Mori has released a full album's worth of original music since she started, and there's more to come. But Your Mori is my second most-played album tag for 2021, with the first being, for the second year in a row(!!), DEMONDICE's Alkatraz. So when picking a #1, and I love every track on here whole-heartedly, there was no choice.

 

The thing is, all four of the main tracks on here will be in my songs countdown, so I'm not even going to talk about any of them too much, more about the circumstances surrounding this EP and the one track that is a bit more of a secret. The streaming version only has 4 songs. The fifth song is a bonus for those who ordered the CD. I didn't order the CD, I ordered the vinyl, which I believe does have it but I sent that back home to the UK rather than to where I am to ensure it's kept safe as a collector's item so I haven't had access to it. It's a cover of a vocaloid song called 'Empress' which wasn't even released when this first was. As such, I've only heard it through Mori performing it live

. It's great, as Calli again did her habit of inserting new lyrics for covers, the synths that surround the chorus dive and her enunciation of 'diamond in the rough' really stand out.

 

As for Your Mori itself, it was the release for Mori Calliope's birthday (4th April, not her real birthday, but the character's birthday, as 4/4 is double the death number, perfect for a grim reaper), where Hololive vtubers normally get a bit more done for them by the company, including (as far as I'm aware) helping fund music releases. Most others normally get one song, as Calli's always releasing songs, it's a whole EP. She might have funded part of it herself, I'm sure she's done that for others. 'Your Mori' comes from the pledge that she always makes at the end of streams that "I'm your Mori, I hope you'll remember me", meaning she is OUR Mori ("no, she's MY Mori!" "no...! MY Mori!"), bridal dress on the album cover an extension of a somewhat bridal-like shinigami veil in her default Live2D outfit. She starts the album off with "The Grim Reaper Is A Live Streamer", the red rose petals are referenced in the song 'Red', one of her constant verbal tics and her general habits are referenced in "guh" and she brings it to a fiery close with "いじめっ子Bully”. All great tracks that I'll talk about more individually later. Really great album that just shows how she is continually improving as an artist, and her Dead Beats get to go along with her on this journey, for which I'm very grateful.

COMPLETE: 1/5

 

next time, anime

I need to give the Sewerslvt album a listen still. I really enjoyed your BJSC entry. I can't remember where, I think it was on AOTY and reddit where I read some pretty disturbing accusations that Sewerslvt was involved with and promoting pedophilia. Not sure how true that is but I can see why people may think that.

I've not listened to the Wolf Alice album in full but I've heard a few tracks on it and they've been decent enough! 'The Last Man On Earth' is a big favourite.

 

I'd definitely recommend giving it a listen!

 

I need to give the Sewerslvt album a listen still. I really enjoyed your BJSC entry. I can't remember where, I think it was on AOTY and reddit where I read some pretty disturbing accusations that Sewerslvt was involved with and promoting pedophilia. Not sure how true that is but I can see why people may think that.

 

Yeah, some of her albums are very long, but the one where my BJSC entry is from, The World Is Fvcked is a nice manageable 35 minutes so I'd say start with that one.

 

There's a lot of stuff I've seen around sewerslvt, I don't know how true all of it is, because she certainly WAS an edgy channer under another name (Sadboy Sheldon) before this. That one I think I remember reading, and it seems to come from old album/single covers. They're all drawn though and on all of her Spotify album covers for one I see the characters as avatars of Sewerslvt, so not children, and currently the album covers are updated censored versions, so if they were NSFW in the past, it seems like she moved past it with her releases over the time I've been following her, which never had anything like that.

Top 20 Anime

 

This is actually smaller than my usual anime list, I've stopped watching anime as much. Blame vtubers and an increasingly scatterbrained attitude that makes it impossible for me to focus for too long on any one thing. But also a growing sense that I've seen so many of the top anime (though still with some notable omissions) and not enough of the top TV shows. I added both The Sopranos and The Wire to that of classic TV shows I've seen this year, and like everyone else I got Squid Game fever two months ago, so there was plenty of non-anime watching - and even then it's decreased massively since I started coding about halfway through the summer + a certain pink-haired vtuber started getting addicted to streaming.

 

As I always do, it's the shows I watched this year, not shows that were released this year, but I do focus a bit more on shows that were released this year naturally. There's only a few shows outside of this curated top 20 that I even completed. in order from worst to better: Goblin Slayer, (good: a decent fantasy anime with LOTR references, bad: has an explicit reputation that I'm not defending), Full Metal Panic (good: Chidori Kaname, bad: worships the military and has pretty explicit pro-war right-wing politics), Tamako Market (good: cute KyoAni models, bad: boring as hell story), Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon (good: good workplace comedy, bad: sketchy side characters), Hanbun No Tsuki ga Noboru Sora (good: drama about young characters with terminal illnesses, bad: way too short) and Re:Zero S2 Pt2 (good: lots of Emilia, my favourite character bad: dragged a bit until the final act). I've gotten good at not watching bad anime and it was basically the shows I had something to complain about with that didn't make my top 20.

 

20. Bookseller Honda-san (2018)

 

 

Very appropriate given my oshi mark has me as a skeleton for all-time now, a workplace comedy about working in a manga store, with a half-length this raced by quickly. The strange heads of the workers are never explained, though the main character's skull head is used well with a bunch of unforgettable expressions in reaction to whatever's going on, and it's just a bunch of fun situations that you'd get having to deal with otaku customers.

 

It's from a manga literally written by a former bookstore employee using his own experiences as a basis for the stories, so as you'd expect with that kind of thing, the early material is by far the best, but this is very inoffensive, has some smart sketches, and was very easy to watch.

 

19. Black Lagoon (2006)

 

 

If I focused on one past year for my catalogue anime, this year was 2006, both because it's 15 years old, and so is well outside any standard throwback discussion, and also because 2006 was a bit of a turning point for the industry with a load of good anime that I've already seen, so I wanted to pick up some of the second-tier ones that I hadn't seen. Black Lagoon is one of those, a dark adventure anime about a mercenary crew in South East Asia. Some Japanese salaryman gets the short end of the stick, gets sent to Thailand to complete a transaction and ends up falling in with these mercenaries.

 

The strength of the first season of Black Lagoon at least, and likely the rest of it, is cover character Revy, quite possibly the sexiest ever anime character designed. In that she's got the same attitude as Bebop's Faye or NGE's Misaki, but is several orders of magnitude more dangerous and thrilling to be around because of it. She's great, much of the rest of the story is good adventure stuff, wouldn't say it hugely stuck in the mind but I loved Revy.

 

18. Mawaru Penguindrum (2011)

 

 

I know lots of people I follow in the anime community really love Mawaru Penguindrum, I found it a bit slow-going. I might get round to doing a rewatch of it so I can understand the themes better, as it doesn't seem like an anime you watch once and then forget about, but it took a lot of thinking to imagine how it came together in the first place.

 

It does touch a lot on family, something few anime do, as it's about three siblings who are living together now their parents have disappeared, who encounter some very strange penguins sent to aid the family, along with a sentient penguin hat that latches onto and keeps alive the sickly youngest sister, in order to initiate their Survival Strategy, order the older two brothers to search for the Penguindrum. Whatever that is, the penguin hat doesn't go into details.

 

Penguindrum is by auteur anime director Ikuhara, I've seen one of his works before, the incredibly gay Sarazanmai, so I'm slowly working backwards in time. As with the former, there's a lot of emphasis on unreality, connections and meaningful repetition, Penguindrum is certainly well designed and has a clear artistic direction behind it, but it definitely needs another watch before I can promote it like I regularly see so many others doing.

 

17. Prison School (2015)

 

 

Prison School is one of those anime where you accept some basic ludicrous assumptions as part of the premise, and then everything works along fine. For instance, here, a previously all-girls school has just opened up to being co-ed, has accepted precisely 5 boys out of a student body of hundreds, all 5 of whom are losers in one way or another. Then they're almost instantly caught spying on the girls in the changing rooms and are sent to the school's in-house prison, where the voluptuous student council vice-president, she whose boobs overfloweth, her leather-heeled boots laced high and her g-string tight and exposed, whips them with her riding crop while making them do manual labour. This all orchestrated from the shadows by the student council president, whose word trumps that of the school principal, as she seeks to have the boys expelled.

 

As you might be able to tell, Prison School doesn't take itself seriously. That character of the vice-president is so over-the-top that she steals the scene whenever she's around as a fantastic parody of over-sexualised characters, and the boys masterminding escape attempts is pretty fun to watch. It's obviously very adult humour and though the plot doesn't have a whole lot of depth, as a comedy, it works in absurdity.

 

16. Wonder Egg Priority (2021)

 

 

(cw: suicide, other trauma)

 

Wonder Egg Priority really became the unexpected discourse show of the first quarter of this year. It came out as the third and least anticipated anime from an overworked studio in that one anime cour, but quickly surpassed The Promised Neverland S2 and Horimiya in at least discussion points (I didn't watch either). And as TPNS2 veered off into train wreck and Horimiya sorta held its own, Wonder Egg Priority was delivering us a rather interesting anime about girls saving other girls from committing suicide through the use of magical eggs which allow them to enter a dream world and fight off manifestations of inner demons. It looks pretty beautiful, the four main girls are all well-realised characters with good depth (all of them would be easy contenders for a best character list, certain shows are just really good at that) and it doesn't shy away from talking about serious issues that affect young people in modern society. All good stuff.

 

Where it fails really, to make it any higher, is unfortunately the anime industry. WEP was really a victim of that. Outside of that, it sometimes felt a little insensitive and traumatic with the trials shown, there's the entire plot device only helping girls, ever (boo gender essentialism) except that one time where they helped a trans boy which, while, yay trans rep, had some rather unfortunate implications. One of the main characters is implied to be (unfortunately not confirmed) a trans girl who never has an issue with said plot device so I don't think it's intentional transphobia but still. And then that scene inserted rape trauma to add more tragedy. So at times it crossed the line, it's brave to tackle these subjects, but they weren't always sensitive with it.

 

Then there's the ever evolving story that was far too big for the current anime industry standard of 13 episodes. They introduced some huge game-changing character in episode 11 out of 13, only to never mention them again. Then the final episode was... delayed, eventually becoming a special released 3 months later that wasn't well received and I never got around to watching because of how much of a trainwreck the show became. And that all comes back to CloverWorks' insane schedule that saw this show, that could have been a summer masterpiece with a bit more planning, come out as a low-priority production in the middle of the most packed winter season in years. With animators forever underpaid and overworked no doubt.

 

I enjoyed Wonder Egg Priority for its first half, in part because it's tackling some important subject matter that it does sometimes make great points on, and it was, at first, well-produced. I also enjoyed the discussions around it a lot. But they definitely dropped the ball on it thanks to capitalist work schedules and took little care in ensuring quality control in the writing, which is doubly important when you're tackling issues like this.

I've not been an albums person at all this year sadly so no surprise I've not heard any of your Top 5 either - I did enjoy the Mori Calliope you sent to BJSC though so maybe that's an excuse for me to listen to some of her other music?

Started giving a lot of attentions to YOASOBI thanks to THE BOOK. I'd say it's the best album of all 10 from your list.

Great to see the albums from Wolf Alice, CHVRCHES, Maneskin and Olivia Rodrigo on here!

Nice albums list!

I've not been an albums person at all this year sadly so no surprise I've not heard any of your Top 5 either - I did enjoy the Mori Calliope you sent to BJSC though so maybe that's an excuse for me to listen to some of her other music?

 

Yeah yeah yeah! I'll always recommend her stuff. I think "Red" is the most accessible off of Your Mori so I'd give that a try first and see if you like that too. And "Bully" has a pretty unique pop melody. If you like electro-swing at all then "The Grim Reaper Is A Live Streamer" and "Graveyard Shift" are ones to go for also.

 

Started giving a lot of attentions to YOASOBI thanks to THE BOOK. I'd say it's the best album of all 10 from your list.

 

 

I love YOASOBI, I need more people to stan them. If you're going to listen to one JP act, it has to be them right now, they're killing it.

 

Great to see the albums from Wolf Alice, CHVRCHES, Maneskin and Olivia Rodrigo on here!

Nice albums list!

 

Thank you, nice picks from it!

 

15. Rent-A-Girlfriend (2020)

 

This was an interesting romantic comedy that popped up last year and I just got around to watching it this summer. It's interesting because as you might expect from the title, it's about a college guy who unintentionally finds himself using a rental girlfriend service, where a similarly aged girl pretends to be his girlfriend, and then misunderstandings ensue while he starts to catch feelings for her, while she remains professional. Other girls come into the picture, like his ex-girlfriend, another rental girlfriend who starts catching feelings for HIM and a young newbie to the trade who the main girl puts the main character on a date with to help her learn the ropes as he's a 'trustworthy, regular client'.

 

I'm not too proud to admit I did find some parts of it relatable, hell my vtuber hobby has a couple of overlapping traits (the parasociality is similar to the way in which one side of the transaction is nominally in it for the money), but also some of the past relationships I've had with girls have been less than straightforward - by which I mean going from friends to dates and vice versa. Not that this service is something I'd use if it existed, because it's more about showing off you have a (fake) girlfriend to wider society and a) that's sketchy, b) not something I care about due to preferring single life and c) the amount of money that the main guy spends just to have time with the main girl because he'd rather not clear up misunderstandings makes me have heart palpitations but d) more power to the characters who pay for their college by going on dates with rich men.

 

But the interactions that come from a fictionalised version of this intertwining with young adult feelings are very interesting to watch. As is the question of: could a real relationship ever develop out of the skin trade, because in an ideal world, it wouldn't exist as everyone who wishes to gets perfectly partnered up, but that is just that, an ideal world. It's a fine show if unspectacular because it doesn't QUITE stick the landing on its topics in favour of simple romantic misunderstandings.

 

14. Attack On Titan Final Season Part 1 (2021)

 

The beginning of the end, as Attack On Titan erupts into all-out war. If you haven't seen it, this is one of the principal anime epics of the last few years and is a must-watch. It's pretty heavy spoiler territory this deep in but I quite enjoyed the first half of this season, though my hype for the final part next month has been dampened a little by people not being so enthused with the manga ending. It could still be saved I'm sure, and I'm sure there will be some exciting parts to it.

 

 

The focus this season on the Marleyans, and their treatment of the Eldians who had remained behind is quite harrowing stuff, particularly the arc about young kids being raised to believe that the main characters we've been following all this time are bloodthirsty killing machines.

There's some excellent fights as usual but I feel the ending is coming at just about the right time. As a whole, Attack On Titan will be one of my favourite anime, but it's also just so above everything else it kinda doesn't even register on the same scale and this season taken alone is less good than the shows ahead of it.

 

13. Higurashi Gou (part 2) & Sotsu (2021)

 

I wish this wasn't down here. Gou was my #1 anime of 2020 and I don't regret that, though it's slightly worsened by the outcome to this latest season of Higurashi. And in fact, the rest of Gou, that set

Satoko up as the main character and villain of this arc, using an underutilised character and properly looking at what happens when her motivations collide with the temptations of the witches that oversee the entire When They Cry shared universe

was really good. That's why it's as high as #13. And SotsuGou together means 'graduation' in Japanese. Which would be a perfect conclusion to the story of Higurashi that already got a conclusion in preparation for the eventual good adaptation of Umineko (pls, still wishing for this).

 

Enter Sotsu. Now, in the original Higurashi, the first season was the setup, the question arcs, where everything was mysterious and unexplained, and then Kai, season 2, was the answer arcs, showing you similar events but from a different perspective, putting everything into recontextualisation and the reason it's one of my favourite anime series is this way of drawing you in with an uncertain situation and then later replaying that situation but from different perspectives. The new season of Higurashi was supposed to have Gou be the questions, as they pretty faithfully recreated some of the original question arcs but with minor differences. And then Sotsu was supposed to be the answers. It was the answers. The problem was the content of the answers.

 

While the original Higurashi had new scenes and new situations, Sotsu didn't. About half of the entire runtime of Sotsu, already 15 episodes as opposed to Gou's 26, was literally clips of Gou scenes, which made it really boring to sit through. It's like, imagine the arcs are two stories on the same stage but with a curtain obscured, and in the question arcs the audience can only see the first part. The original answer arcs would move the audience around the stage to show you the second story, which has power over the first and can see through the curtain but leaves the curtain alone. Sotsu just rips the curtain in half and doesn't listen to the audience's complaints that they've already seen story 1 as it tries to show both, while ignoring that its second answer story is incredibly thin.

 

And that's the other thing, so many missed opportunities. To take one that I'm rather personally close to, Mion

goes crazy for the first time ever, in the whole of Higurashi, normally it's Keiichi, Shion or Rena who do, in Sotsu, and the show even pays lip-service to that by literally including it in a line. So they know the significance of it. So the theories are that Mion is more mentally stable than the other characters in this state, and has justified reasons and actions that she can enact, perhaps making her more dangerous, I had it locked on that her talk with Keiichi in the corresponding Gou arc was that she wished to protect the status of the Three Families and her status as the incumbent heir of the Sonozakis would drive her to do... something with it. Kill off the threats to the villages, or at least put a spanner in the works of witch-Satoko's plans, because it's her who's masterminding this whole thing. In Sotsu, this conclusion is dealt with in the most unsatisfying way possible, Mion doesn't do anything special on her rampage, she almost instantly runs into Satoko who shoots her with a gun, putting an end to it. It's a downright insulting conclusion to Mion's character arc, and the reasons WHY she'd never gone crazy before this are never addressed, meaning that even newbies should notice something's wrong here, and I do not wish to acknowledge its existence.

Because ultimately for Sotsu, it's clear that the only characters that matter are Satoko and Rika, once you get past what little new material there actually is. You can see it on the poster, they're the only two in colour. Now ideally that'd be because the story is actually doing some interesting things with Keiichi, Rena, Mion and Shion in shadow behind them but no, the story would actually rather they didn't exist as they essentially only appear where they'd already been positioned by the events of Gou, and characters outside this main 6 get even less development. The only ones who interact with Satoko and Rika are the witches Hanyuu and Eua, as well as, bizarrely, Satoko's erstwhile abusive uncle Teppei, who gets a reforming arc. Out of all characters who least needed a reforming arc... That the ending of Sotsu does this whole thing where it goes past all the characters who had so little screen time and had their interesting and real motivations discarded so that Satoko and Rika could do magical girl witchy stuff that really belongs elsewhere in the When They Cry universe is a real let-down. If you wanted to do this story and it's shallow at best, don't do it with characters who already have a great story and lore.

 

I do like Satoko and Rika, and their battle with the witches had some good points, especially Satoko's mental battles with Witch-Satoko. But god if Sotsu wasn't overall just a giant let-down and a bad conclusion to this relaunch of the Higurashi story.

 

12. Chihayafuru 2 & 3 (2012/2019)

 

 

I finished watching Chihayafuru, at least all the anime that has been released thus far, earlier on this year. It's good. Karuta remains this wonderful Japanese sport that has a lot of depth to it and it's really good for a sports anime by consistently being unpredictable with the results and which characters get focus through the tournaments as a result of that: for instance Chihaya's old mentor character Professor Harada goes on a rather deep run through a tournament at one point despite being in his 50s and clearly having a few problems with keeping up with the younger competitors.

 

I do have to be in the mood for it but enough time has passed that I'll be up for it whenever they decide to conclude this with Chihayafuru 4 and have Chihaya properly take on the flawless, beautiful Queen Shinobu, while her two male leads Arata and Taichi surely have good stories coming to them also. I love every main member of this team, as well as the other side-characters of the main karuta club, Ooe, Tsutomu and Nishida, who all have several emotional moments as they come up against their skill wall.

 

11. Gintama c. 150-c. 250 (2009-2013)

 

 

I'm almost through Gintama! Really! Which does make it at this point the longest anime I've ever tackled, with over 250 episodes seen. But there's still 100 more to go. What I watched this year was pretty damn good, including the arcs where best girl Tsukuyo makes her appearance as the protection leader of the Tokyo Edo underground (Yoshiwara)'s courtesans, incredibly skilled with throwing kunai at Gintoki's face. She has two of the best serious arcs in the story so far, the Yoshiwara in Flames, where Yoshiwara is not in flames but the Gintama trio are asked to come and sort out the leadership of Yoshiwara, and the Red Spider arc, where, confusingly, Yoshiwara does burst into flame, and we learn some great stuff about the background of Tsukuyo.

 

Outside of that, the Gintama team are constantly doing anime sitcom antics mixed in with occasional great samurai stories. It's a good combination, even if as a comedy show, the characters aren't often in major danger - though that might change as the episodes I haven't yet seen are slowly moving into a final arc of builds and surely something unexpected will happen.

 

Sometimes the comedy arcs don't hit, there were a few Star Wars parodies which felt tired, and yet sometimes they do, I remember the arc where all the male characters go into a ridiculous city-spanning competition to win the idol Otsu's love fondly.

10. Zombieland Saga: Revenge (2021)

 

 

The first season of Zombieland Saga aired a few years ago and I caught it at the time, as I'm generally interested in musical shows, particularly ones with... strange gimmicks like this. As I said at the time, I was interested in how far they'd take it, and while they went the more non-lethal route, I still enjoyed it a lot. So a second season was very welcome.

 

The setting for the second season is quite a bit different from that of the first, as while the first introduced the zombie idol group filled with young ladies who'd had their idol careers tragically cut short at different times from the 19th century to the 2000s decade, and follow them gaining relevance in the backwater prefecture of Saga in south-west Japan in 2018, the second season time skips a little (to 2019-2020 of all times! with their final concert taking place in March 2020) and starts off with the up-and-coming idol group having booked at a big football stadium and absolutely, embarassingly bombing, with barely any of the stadium being filled - which sends the entire group into disarray. Until they figure out to pull themselves together and get their revenge. All the while still keeping their zombieness secret. And filling the music segments with music that sounds even more like BABYMETAL at times, at other times like a particularly strong J-Pop act, they don't slouch on the music either. The OP from this is my favourite anime song of 2021 and will be making an appearance in my songs chart later.

 

There's good story arcs in here, even more than the first season, the group sets out about becoming a strong and beloved local presence in Saga, interacting with radio hosts (based on a real radio host in the real Saga!) helping out when a flood strikes the town, and even a timeskip back to the 19th century so we can find out the long-awaited backstory of the chronologically oldest zombie in the group and how that relates to the whole plot being even possible. Before the inevitable buildup to a return concert at that same stadium. I think, though the story is predictable, as it often is in idol shows (hence why I didn't spoiler tag any of that), it used its concept even stronger than in the first season and I'm very happy I stuck with it (and for those in BJSC, this helped inspire one half of my BJSC 136 hosting of course).

 

9. Rec (2006)

 

 

There's two great examples of my retro 2006 diving in this top 10, and Rec is the first. It's a very short anime, only 9 episodes long and each of those is only 13 minutes long but that means nothing is wasted.

 

At its root, Rec is one of those simple sudden cohabitation anime. Which is, a man and woman meet cute, then circumstances conspire for them to start living together unexpectedly. In this case, the two end up on a spontaneous date before, after parting ways and discovering they live quite close, the girl's apartment burns down. The guy sees this and offers her a place to stay.

 

Rec's approach to this is a lot more mature and less exploitative than many cohabitation anime, in many there's quite a power imbalance one way or the other but here they're just two characters in their 20s, new to the workforce and coincidentally working in intertwining industries, the guy works in marketing and the girl is an aspiring voice actress who gets hired to do ad reads for the guy's company. The relationship drama happens but it's kept relatively realistic and I thought it was a really tightly done story given it's fairly obscure and old.

 

8. Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song (2021)

 

I always admired Tappei Nagatsuki, the creator of Re:Zero for clearly being able to craft a good story with a vision to make everything make sense in the end after a season of mystery. And so when he got a new original anime, I was very interested in what Vivy would end up being. It seemed to be going well so I jumped in. The result is something that starts off feeling like what I saw of season 1 of Westworld, super-intelligent beautiful robots in an amusement park that turn on humans, but quickly evolves into a time-travel epic. By the end of the first episode, the stage is set for a whole season that takes place over a century as AI evolves from an pretty add-on to human experience to centrally taking over most of society.

 

It follows Diva, or Vivy, a singing AI robot who's the first ever autonomous AI, who's the natural target for a message from the future telling her to avert the rise of the machines in order to save humanity. As she follows Asimov's rules of robotics (well, not exactly, but the concept is similar, she is given a singular mission, to make people happy with her singing, which she interprets to mean that she must save humans so they can enjoy her music), she obliges and at turning points throughout her life in the next century, intervenes in order to change the future. The scale of this is absolutely epic, such that it's a must for anyone who loves a good sci-fi thriller. Vivy is a very unusual prospect of a main character, a robot who clearly has her own, emergent personality while still being clearly a bit inhuman, but she is beautiful and well-written, she carries the show character-wise IMO.

 

As it has a music theme as well, there's some excellent music hidden in here but none more brilliant than the hurricane-force 'Sing My Pleasure' (aka. AS YOU LIKE MY PLEASURE) which opens up every episode, showing off Vivy's singing ability.

 

 

7. Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san! (2021)

 

This was an anime that anime leftists were dreading. If only because the main girl looks so smug that we were sure that she'd be instantly in every reactionary weeb's profile picture as they crusade about their right to lolicon and their fantasy of Japan as a land without politics. Fortunately, none of us must have read the source material because... the opposite happened (she started making Among Us references in the subtitles instead and was basically too focused on emasculating the guys in here that none of them really picked her long term - also as far as I can tell they've as a whole been quite deradicalised recently, for which we are all thankful).

 

This is basically 12 episodes of a high school senior boy getting initially bullied, then fiercely protected by a bunch of juniors. See, what the manga was most infamous for was those first bullying scenes, where the main girls mock his drawing skills. See, the thing is, and I noticed it first episode, is that Nagatoro, the main, tanned girl, she instantly notices the passion that he has and while not letting her guard down, slowly begins to work herself into spending time with him at his art club.

 

And that, that is what I really enjoyed about this one, that while the masochism draws you in, it ends up showing a funny and cute relationship as a more confident girl brings this guy out of his shell, but not through any easy route, he has to go through his own set of personal growth and set backs, that neither works without the other. I wasn't really expecting a great slice-of-life romcom out of this one and I really like those sometimes.

6. Non Non Biyori Nonstop (2021)

 

 

A third season of Non Non Biyori, which I watched a couple of years ago, is much the same as the first two, but even better. As Non Non Biyori is an anime that stubbornly refuses to let time advance and would rather stick the characters in limbo in their beautiful idyllic rural junior school forever, that's far from unexpected. I like watching this anime in the summer so I saved it for then and it was great. Even better than the first two seasons, the situations that the young girls who make up the main cast find themselves in is comedically sharp as ever, whether that's hiding wrongdoings from a parent, a new girl getting flustered around meeting the rest of the gang, flashbacks to when some of the adults were teenagers, or when the young world-weary candy shop owner ends up taking care of the youngest, bright-eyed and curious Renge.

 

I thought I might be tired of the setting and rank this low when I watched it, but the art and sound for this is as high quality as ever, the environment in ruralest of rural Japan an easy 'I want to go there' (most of the reason I started watching), the story even starts to add a sense of time going through the seasons and jumping back and forward through flashbacks, and every character in here is incredibly lovable, as perfect a healing comedy show as the first two seasons were.

 

5. Welcome To The NHK (2006)

 

 

The final outing for my 2006 diving, and the most recent one, I was really, really impressed with Welcome To The NHK. It's one of those few anime that you feel directly has a purpose for being outside of just telling a good story, outside of being a popular merch vehicle, this is an anime with a message. And it's message shows that really stand the test of time, that are worthwhile to go back and examine. The message... don't be a NEET you losers. Well, a lot more sensitive than that. But it's directly focused on Japan's hikikomori problem, centred around the depressing life of main character Satou.

 

Like some of the other shows on this list (I was noticing a theme, Rent-A-Girlfriend, Rec and even Nagatoro feel like they have similar setups), there's a fairly underwhelming guy with a problem, and he meets a manic pixie dream girl who lives near him and gets intertwined with his life quite unusually and as a result he starts to improve things. Except there the similarity ends. Satou doesn't just continually improve things, he has massive depression, he goes through huge ups and huge downs throughout the series, is forced to confront his average ability and a world that will be so harsh to his attempts that he will return to his room and remain unemployed and alone for large amounts of time. For Satou, the one constant is this girl who decides to make him her project and demands that he sheds his hikikomori status to come to the nearby park every night to listen to her read philosophy and self-help as part of a course to improve his life.

 

I'm happy I'm in a good place right now, as if I'd watched this when I was down, it might have been just too much to enjoy what with Satou's pretty clearly poor mental health. What there is to enjoy is that it's a much more realistic portrayal of life than most fiction, there are good times for people, there are setbacks, people won't end up where you expect them to, capitalist society does grind everyone down so that they end up making choices that they'd rather not (a side-arc on a multi-level marketing scheme that an old classmate of Satou's gets roped into is one clear example of this). Which is either a call to change it or change yourself, or both. Incidentally I was doing a bit of fiddling around with game development tools while I was watching Satou do his arc trying to write a visual novel (something I believe I now possess the ability to do, I just need to have a story worth a damn, which is going to take a bit longer).

both of these are about rocks:

 

4. Houseki No Kuni (Land Of The Lustrous) (2017)

 

This was the first anime I watched of the year, and where I started looking on MyAnimeList from. I recall it really well and fondly though! It's something I'd been planning to watch for quite a while but because I'd only heard a couple of things about it, I wasn't really prepared for how good it was. What I had heard was there was really fluid and beautiful animation. 3D animation no less, something that anime often struggles with. That's accurate, there's a bunch of sequences in here that are legitimately jawdropping. Thankfully, there's a really good story holding it all together as well. Including a bit of an awakening for me identity-wise.

 

The characters in Land Of The Lustrous are all genderless representations of gems. Who live in a gorgeous country paradise inside an isolated world surrounded by water from all sides, and are constantly under attack by creatures from outside of the world who shift into their dimension and seek to abduct them for the precious material they contain. Despite looking humanoid, all of the main characters are made of stone that reflects the real-world gem's hardness, so while main character Phosphophyllite is quite a soft gem, the most powerful gems are the three Diamond gems who are the hardest (and of course, the prettiest, and somehow, the most gender variation, all of them look very androgynous but the one called Dia is possibly the most feminine-looking gem and the one who represents the black diamond Bort clearly the most like a masculine prettyboy). Though I'm fairly certain all of them use they/them pronouns. WHICH REALLY APPEALS TO ME. I've started to dislike doing too much definite gendering of myself and this vision of a world where that doesn't matter is very cool. There's more depth that can be applied here and it's not the main focus but it's amazing how pretty every character is but not in a sexual way, in a just 'this gem is literally stunning' way. I could look at these characters for hours. Many of them use beautiful shades of blue and green as well.

 

Anyway, visuals aside, this was very good, every gem has traits associated with their real-world gem counterpart, but it was a great alien world to uncover, the currently existing anime doesn't uncover all of the mysteries and with the world constantly under attack, there's a lot of high-stakes exploration of that world and genuinely jaw-dropping fight scenes. Excellent anime fantasy.

 

3. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 6: Stone Ocean (first 12 episodes) (2021)

 

my separations are entirely based on what I watched in that year, I watched most of the rest of JJBA in 2020, it instantly became one of my favourites, and I was very much eagerly awaiting Part 6, where for once, the main character associated with the generation-spanning Jojo-family is not a male, but a... GIRL. Which is a great step-up from the first time the Jojo heir was female, author Araki skipped generations right over her and made her into something who fell under a deadly curse due to being too weak to control the setting's superpowers, Stands, and had to be rescued by her son Jotaro back in part 3. Now, after a few diversions to unrelated branches of the family in parts 4 and 5, part 6 has her granddaughter Jolyne as a convict, and the setting of the series is within a prison in the early 00s. I love Jolyne after this first part, she's tough, quick-thinking and very, very beautiful - and in a very nice story, both the English VA and the Japanese VA seem to be women who have built their lives around obtaining this very specific role, it's nice to see people getting their dreams.

 

The story has, to be fair, only just begun but there's already been a bunch of different exciting situations where Jolyne has used a great amount of ingenuity to escape the clutches of Whitesnake, a villain who is after her and her stand Stone Free (screw the localisation, we're keeping the classic rock references), as well as her sidekick's stands Kiss and Foo Fighters. The prison has a lot of potential even with the little we've seen of it so far and there's been some classic Jojo puzzling as enemy stands have trapped, I'm very glad to see it back and I got through the currently released episodes very quickly (validating my decision to not read 20+ year-old manga I'm really bad at reading manga send help, I want to but I just can never get into it). It didn't validate my dislike of Netflix releasing episodes in batches rather than weekly but we can't win them all.

2. Uma Musume (Horse Girls) : Pretty Derby Season 1 (2018)

 

 

I've separated these out in a way I don't normally. I watched both seasons of Uma Musume this year, but they're very distinct experiences and I wanted to separate them out. Also so I could have a completely horse top 2. It's quite an unlikely top 2, I never thought I'd get into this show this much but hidden beneath a fairly generic looking cute girl show is a fantastic sports story.

 

There's a reason for that of course. Uma Musume isn't about just any random horse girls, it animefies the spirits of old Japanese racehorses and reincarnates them in a world as anime girls. And then with that unimportant conceit out of the way, effectively tells their racing story, with some masterful adaptation on the ups and downs of a real-life star-studded racing career. This all means there's a lot of Wikipedia diving I was able to look up for famous Japanese racehorses from the 90s, and all the emotional parts of this that work so well when I'm invested in the race hit me doubly with the knowledge that this set of events really happened.

 

Season 1 of Uma Musume mirrors events from the late 90s, with a core set of main horse girls who are from all over the time period (indicating where the next season would go), but the main 2 girls who are seen racing, Special Week and Silence Suzuka, are two notable horses from the late 90s, as are all of their normal racing competitors. Special Week in particular had an awesome career, winning more and more races until he peaked as a four-year old, which works excellently in sports anime format. There's also a significant arc dealing with injury, which sets the stage for my #1...

 

1. Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Season 2 (2021)

 

I cried loads at the end of Season 2. Even with knowing the story, it's the same reason I love Hamilton (not really related it's just on my mind a lot right now), real stories that fit a great heroic narrative are often superior to any imagined one. And that's what Uma Musume does with focusing on its pair of main character horses who are from the early 90s, Tokai Teio and Mejiro McQueen. For starters, Teio is the absolute best anime girl you could think of, bright and cheerful and stealing the stage even when she's not the main character, and Season 2 opens up with her on an incredible winning streak which is a joy to watch. McQueen's awesome as well, pragmatic and wise and very determined to keep her position at the top of the racing hierarchy, for her prestigious Mejiro family (she's the anime rich girl of the setting and I adore anime rich girls).

 

Even more than Season 1, Season 2 has a huge focus on injury, training, comebacks, and a realisation that the new generation will eventually take over. Throughout the season, a bunch of characters who appeared in the inter-season OVA as mains start coming up through the ranks and pushing Teio and McQueen to the sidelines, marking the switch from when our mains dominated in the early 90s to the major Japanese horses of the mid-90s. McQueen and Teio make promises to each other they can't keep, they get injured. There's a great sub-arc about a horse called Rice Shower who, both in real life and the anime, got some hatred from media and fans bizarrely, for winning races, because he/she had the misfortune to win races that would break a winning streak for another horse. The real horse got dubbed "The Black Assassin" due to this and his coat colour. And the show uses the opportunity to make a point about the nature of fans and their interaction with the stars. The final few episodes switch focus back to Teio with some of the greatest emotional payoff I've ever had while watching an anime.

 

I loved Uma Musume's cuteness and great sports anime instincts, and it was most helped by the fact that it was real. It's incredibly underwatched (in the West, it's huge in Japan because of its associated mobile game), I was only recommended it by a friend and the fact I fell into the part of Twitter where people really like it. Anyone who enjoys horse racing would probably get even more out of it.

 

COMPLETE: 2/5

 

NEXT: Vtubers

Top ... Vtubers

 

Last year, I pooled together a bunch of random thoughts about select Vtubers I'd watched a lot of in my first year being properly introduced to them as a concept. I'm happy to report that it hasn't been a blip and I'm still very much enjoying the vtuber space produce a bunch of very funny and cute women (and some men, Nijisanji's debuting their first English male vtuber wave in a few hours and a couple of them look like great personalities) and have it engage me more than most streamers outside of political niches have ever done so.

 

I'm still not doing this as a countdown, as though they were just music or anime. Their content is very personally tied to them and it doesn't feel right to rank them as such. Besides, there's no point in concealing my #1, I've made everyone quite aware that my oshi (my number one) is Mori Calliope, and at least 50% of the vtuber streams that I watch, if not quite a bit more, are her streams. Instead, in this third section, I'm going to sort all the OTHER vtubers I've watched enough of to talk about by agency, briefly go over what I currently watch them for, and then the fourth section will be dedicated solely to Mori and all of the highlights I've caught from her streams over the past year.

 

The vtuber space is a lovely space to be in, whether on the corporate side, and most of the vtubers in here belong to one of the big 2 agencies, Hololive or Nijisanji, or on the indie side, which is a few, mostly connected to Mori. And those who do not appear here, it's only because they haven't (yet) caught my attention with anything specific, I'm sure they are wonderful people and are having great fun with their audience, I wish there were more hours in the day. And certainly everyone who is here is a very talented entertainer who's provided me with a nice bit of social comfort over the year as I've been trapped a continent away from my family and most of my friends.

 

In general, I really like and go for karaoke content if I see one happening, no matter who is doing it, it's much like the modern version of going to concerts, but certain game streams really pull me in too, as do chatting streams if I'm currently invested enough in the vtuber to chill out with them for a bit. As I'm only membered/subscribed/paying money to Mori, I chat a lot more in her streams than in the others (subscribing has benefits like no chat cooldown and cute emotes), but adding my voice to the crowd of support for the others is something I'm happy to do too.

 

With that in mind, given there's no particular order here, I'll start with Nijisanji. I didn't mention them at all last year, and that's because they only debuted their English branch this year. with that in mind, all names in italics debuted in 2021 and so I couldn't have talked about them last time. Their Japanese branch is so large and unwieldy I wouldn't even know where to begin but I have been watching a fair bit of their English branch lately. As a whole, they have a bit more of a shit-post 'we're just having internet fun' feel than the Hololive EN branch, as they're still quite small and have less sponsors to worry about, but I've noticed a lot of people I follow on Twitter have really been liking them and getting along with the camaraderie. They've even, as I said, debuting the first major corporate male English-language vtubers in a matter of hours as I write this, and some of the boys look just as fun as the girls. One of the boys is British, making a lot out of that trait, and from his Twitter actions, seems very likeable. If that matters, but I think HE'S LIKE ME. He's even left-handed!!!

 

But as for the girls, Nijisanji does numbers. While Hololive had 5 English vtubers debut in 2020 and 6 in 2021, Nijisanji equalled that number over three waves in just 8 months. In order, these waves are known as Lazulight, Obysidia and Ethyria. The boys who are joining them very soon are called Luxiem.

 

Lazulight

 

Elira Pendora: I do have a favourite in Nijisanji, and it's this adorable cute solar sky dragon. Though I see a bit more talk in online places about her sister dragon Selen, Elira is currently leading the Nijisanji EN crowd in subscriber numbers, so I guess you can call me a follower. Elira's great though. The main thing is, she's so often streaming when I have work (as my work translates to primetime US) that I can rarely catch her and while I love her, a lot of it is streams I have little interest in. That's how I know she's a favourite, I like her in spite of content not appealing to me, I want to watch more of her stuff but lots of it is gaming content that I wouldn't watch. So when she does a game series I like watching, like Slay The Spire (or any roguelike I've played, but Slay The Spire is the most recent of her best ones), I take the opportunity to get lost in hours of her playing that. She has a really infectious personality and if only I could catch her live more often, but I very much enjoy her, I check out even her VODs I'm not interested in on occasion to catch fun moments and it's through her that I most often check out the rest of Nijisanji.

 

Also my cursor is currently setup to be Elira-themed, complete with her stream loading tape for the 'busy' bit, an animation of her when I'm normally browing and an animation of her dragon pet over text and buttons. I like it, very visually distinct.

 

Finana Ryugu: The fish (FEESH) (officially a pure gamer mermaid) of Nijisanji I've mostly come across when she's being... lewd. The incident that sticks out in the mind the most is when she was playing the clean version of Nekopara - a VN with an adult patch - got to the point where the... scene... was obviously skipped and started looking it up live on her other monitor and described it to chat using food as metaphors:

 

Obsydia

 

Petra Gurin: I watch Petra, the penguin, for some adorable piano or other instrument playing streams (as an example of a more weird one she did, she recently did a stream as her penguin baby form Petrin doing a recorder recital) - she also takes requests which is really cute, penguin piano playing (and most similar quiet musician streams) are great ones to wind down to:

 

Rosemi Lovelock: Rosemi is one of the more creative members of Nijisanji, I see her doing weird streams a lot more often. Which is a good thing, mind you. I've seen her played some good games, like Age Of Empires, that don't appear very often in the vtuber lineup, she does good ASMRs, and some of her most creative streams include a stream nerding out about astronomy that was very fun to watch and a SNL-esque production featuring all of the Nijisanji group.

 

Ethyria

 

Nina Kosaka: A late arriving Mum of the group, Nina instantly stood out as a lady with a quick wit and a good sense of what works well on stream. I find her very easy to watch, even as she calls all of chat her honeys and does a fair bit of (admittedly very funny) mum roleplay. She's got a very ambitious Jojo's watchalong going that I'll be sure to watch the archive of whenever I decide to rewatch that, and like Elira, she seems interested in roguelikes and punishment games like Getting Over It which are great to chill out to.

 

Enna Alouette: Enna stood out as, aside from clearly being a huge When They Cry stan like I am, so much so that she named her meme tag #enntheycry, she's a songbird and so falls into the realm of MUSIC VTUBER. Which I'm always interested in. Her first song, Wish Of This Songbird is a very ambitious production where she really shows off a phenomenal range and a bunch of polyphonic skills (which she loves doing, see also this other clip of her doing Grace Kelly) and I'm certain she'll do a lot more worth listening to in the future.

 

As for the others, Pomu, Selen (who has a great laugh and a great banterous sibling relationship with Elira), Millie and Reimu, they're also great, though I can't think of any specific moments that I've seen with them but I'm always open to catching them in the future with something I'm interested in, it's very easy to click on a livestream if I see it happening or have them cross my mind and go to their channel.

 

next I'll do the indies and then as before I'll go to Hololive, some of whom I actually did last year so I can really focus on what specifically they did in 2021: