When this was announced, I read part of the manga, then part of the LN original, and thought it might be good. I don’t normally watch currently airing anime, but I was keeping an eye on this. And I finally dove in and caught up on it last week.

This episode highlighted pretty much everything I loved about the series as a whole.

Anna is awesome. Let’s get that out of the way first. She’s easily my favorite FMC in years. And she was especially good in this episode. It’s just been so pleasant to watch her and Nukumizu get so comfortable with each other, and it was nice to see that in full flower in this episode. And I couldn’t help but laugh when she lost her imaginary boyfriend to an imaginary rival.

Kaju is awesome too, and it was great to see a lot of her in this episode.

And the senseis. I would’ve liked to see more of them all the way through, but at least they got a bit of extra screen time in this episode. They’re both interesting characters in their own right, and they have a great dynamic.

Chihaya was especially good in this episode too, even though she only got a few seconds. She’s been a pleasant surprise - she just looks so sweet and naive, and she’s so very much not.

Overall, the only criticisms I might have of the series are that a couple of character quirks were a bit too exaggerated (Komari’s stutter and Yumeko pretty much as a whole) and that it seems like very little was really settled. The pacing wasn’t really a problem in and of itself - I actually quite liked it - but it means that we need at least another season, and preferably a few more.

Overall, I was very impressed, and this was a good cap to the season, assuming another season is coming. Without another season, it’ll be a bit disappointingly incomplete, but even then, it was a good slice of life.

That was more my impression, but I don’t follow ratings or reviews much, so wasn’t sure. I just know that I rarely see it discussed, but pretty much universally positively when it is.

Is ODDTAXI underrated? If so, then that definitely. It’s just quality all the way through.

And Estab-Life: Great Escape. Yeah - it’s sort of contrived, but it has so much heart and tells a satisfying story. And Equa is wonderful.

I too “discriminate against” Chinese animation, and the illustration at the top of this article is a fine example of why - because it all looks the same. It’s like there’s exactly and only one Chinese animation art style, and it’s just regurgitated over and over and over again.

When I go to an anime site without something specific in mind and just browse for something to watch, I narrow my search by, among other things, specifying Japan as the country of origin, and toggling off all Chinese productions, just because I have zero interest in them.

Now granted - this article seems to be focused more on Chinese animators being subcontracted to Japanese productions, as opposed to Chinese productions, but I wouldn’t be the least surprised if the heart of the problem is that Japanese studios believe, and with considerable evidence to support it, that Chinese animators are unable to do anything other than that one endlessly repeated art style - that if they want their art style to be anything other than that one distinctive and endlessly repeated style that the Chinese use, they have to use Japanese staff.

Certainly I have no idea if that’s actually the case, but that was my immediate reaction - if I ran a Japanese animation studio, I would think that I would be generally unwilling to hire Chinese animators, specifically because I’d expect that they’d be unable to do anything other than that one and only, endlessly repeated art style.

Sorry - that whole thing just ended up roo rant-y for my tastes, so I deleted it.

Broadly, for those coming into the thread, it was about the asshole translators and their asshole employers who insist on “localizing” literally everything, including culture-specific things like honorifics that cannot ever actually be “localized.”

And yes - eliminating lgbt issues is another problem. That one particularly irritates me because it’s an issue regarding which the Japanese, traditionalists though they might be, are very open and tolerant - there have been lgbt characters in anime and manga, entirely non-contoversially, for as long as the mediums have existed. Then along come the Americans, who get all twisted out of shape over it.