This past week I have not had too much time to watch anime, but managed to keep up with a couple airing shows.

• Frieren once again outdid itself with what is my new favorite episode of its run. It was so good that I rewatched it and made a second top-level comment in the episode thread about it.
• Eminence in Shadow had an interesting episode this past week. As a source reader, my reaction seems to differ a lot from anime-only reactions that I have seen. There were some serious bits of the story left on the cutting room floor from Episode 6 that source readers haven't been happy about. I just hope that they were cut in order to give us something special later in the season like they did at the end of season 1.
• Helck continues its backstory exposition dump. I like backstory as much as the next viewer, but you know what else I also like? Story. About a full third of the show's runtime has been this single flashback sequence explaining Helck's past. I really think that instead of a solid 5-6 episode flashback chunk, it could have been interspersed with the rest of the story (see Frieren for a good example of how to mix backstory and story).

Finally, a bit of a meta comment. If you haven't seen, the lemmy.ml admins decided to remain defederated from the ani.social instance, home of the episode discussion bot. I have thoughts on this, but setting those aside, I just wanted to let people know that the bot is still making posts like before, but over in a different community on the ani.social instance. If your account is on an instance that federates with ani.social, then great! Go check out the community over there and you can see the discussions that happen on those threads. If your account is on lemmy.ml, then you will have to make and use a different account to access that community. That can either be an account on ani.social or an account on an instance that still federates with ani.social.

@ram@lemmy.ca if you would be so kind as to do the pinning/unpinning, that would be lovely. Mod of my heart!

• MF Ghost: "Pacing is slow." It is if you're looking at it in a character-centric lens. From a worldbuilding perspective, it's actually as good as it gets. The episodes get into detail on the track conditions and how each car behaves (the Carrera vs. Cayman battle for first stood out). I'm aware the author seems to be a pervert, and the 5-10% non-car fanservice is a societal problem if it occurs in real life, but it also tells quite a bit on the sensibilities of the Japanese society in that work of fiction. The show needs to last two-three cours though so we can see how Kanata's quest to find his father turns out.

• Frieren: I'm in Episode Six, and I'm divided on the visuals of the dragon fight. I thought it was Pain-fight level terrible, but the comments I read are almost unanimous on its kinographic excellence. Upon further introspection, while I stand by my assessment that the backgrounds looked low-effort, the hand-drawn dragon is indeed very well-done.