PokeNirvash

Naruto Shippuden 414 Pop Team Epic 18

The Rising of the Shield Hero 6 Ultraman 19

Right, so if Yuri's dad is supposed to be the final boss, what was the point of making Kan out to be the bad guy in the episode 1 flash-forward? Just another reason this series deserved more than the four episodes meant for Uzumaki. 12:00 - Housing Complex C #4 - The End of the Line - TV-MAV 12:30 - Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon #36 - A Place (Not) For Towa - TV-14 1:00 - One Piece #592 - To Annihilate the Straw Hats! Legendary Assassins Descend! - TV-PG 1:30 - One Piece #593 - Save Nami! Luffy's Fight on the Snow-Capped Mountains! - TV-PG 2:00 - Naruto Shippuden #415 - The Two Mangekyo - TV-PGV 2:30 - Naruto Shippuden #416 - The Formation of Team Minato - TV-PGV 3:00 - Made in Abyss #13 - The Challengers - TV-MA On a lighter note, have some extra Nanachi.

Violence Jack 1 It wasn't unwatchable, but holy shit the audio mixing for the lesbian sexual assault scene (dubbed) was atrocious.

There's probably already a thread like this out there already, but whatever. We're a little over two weeks away from November 5th, the first Saturday after the most recent Toonami schedule. With Lupin Part 6 having ended and Housing Complex C coming really close to ending, it's natural to assume that they'll be replaced by new acquisitions, ones I've dubbed the "November Replacements". Naturally, I've prepared for the possibility of there being zero replacements made, a rehash of last year's exhausting buy for time. But if there were replacements to be made, what would they be? What could they be? After much thought I've come up with five "Potential Replacements" (yes, I proper-nouned that) that I could see Toonami picking up for a broadcast starting next month at the earliest. (I wrote the below paragraphs up last night in a sort of journalistic essay style, with a couple tweaks made for public viewing, so bear with me.) Potential Replacement #1 is Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War. This one’s a no-brainer. The original Bleach was an [adult swim] mainstay for the better and worse parts of its eight-year run, even serving as Toonami’s anchor for the first few years of its revival. Nowadays, with no reliable anchors in stock between our only Dragon Balls being reruns, Zaslav writing off every original that’s less than commercially stellar, and the surefire hits being under lock and key by a streaming service that doesn’t realize that Netflix is already the Netflix of anime… even a split-cour version of Bleach would be acceptable midnight slot material. With VIZ holding the U.S. master license, and no word of Disney+ having their mitts on it stateside, plus its dub having a scheduled premiere of the Friday after this year’s Halloween marathon (featuring the first four episodes of only the second worst anime to ever air on the supposedly Better Cartoon Show), Bleach being the first, if not only November Replacement will be one that’s as unsurprising as it is welcome. Potential Replacement #2 is My Hero Academia season 6. On the other hand, this one has a much slimmer shot of getting on. Two words: Crunchyroll Monopoly. FUNimation held the rights to My Hero since the beginning, but now that it’s been absorbed into Crunchyroll, their “no TV broadcast for you” policy may affect it as well. There’s a single workaround to that, though, and that’s the Japanese licensor. Demarco admitted that certain shows under the Crunchyroll umbrella can be acquired through the Japanese side of production. It was through Sunrise that they got all those Gundams; it was through TMS that they got all those Lupins; and it was through Toei that we managed to regain One Piece. And that’s without getting into how they used their partnership with Production I.G to reverse IGPX’s write-off… So yeah, Toonami could go through TOHO Animation, who wants My Hero on TV in America, to get My Hero back on American TV, but we don’t know how much sway Crunchyroll has over that decision, so we can’t hold too much confidence. After all, if they can’t go through the Japanese side to get season 2 of Mob or SPYxFAMILY on the block, what hope does My Hero Academia have? Of course, there’s always other U.S. licensors besides Crunchyroll to get your shit from. VIZ being one of them, like I said. The other being Sentai, who we’ve seen greater amounts of content from lately, between Made in Abyss and Lupin Part 6. In fact, the second season of Made in Abyss is Potential Replacement #3. But there’s a problem with airing The Golden City of the Scorching Sun on November 5th. You see, there’s a movie in-between the two seasons of Abyss that’s kind of required watching. They leave Layer 4 in the season 1 finale, they arrive in Layer 6 in the season 2 premiere, and Dawn of the Deep Soul is where everything having to do with Layer 5 goes down. (More than necessary, I might add.) Now, the movie airing on Toonami also is just as possible, but only in the timeline where Black Lotus was cut short in reruns for low ratings and not in an attempt by Zaslav to memory-hole it. (Idiot doesn’t know how seriously animation fans take preservationism.) Between that disappointing reality, the ongoing movie embargo outside of special events, and S&P’s own brand of stinginess, Dawn of the Deep Soul may wind up being an outside-Toonami watch on my part, and only if The Golden City of the Scorching Sun is the only one to make it on the block. Potential Replacement #4, meanwhile, is a Sentai title that doesn’t require any special movies for broadcast, but is even less likely than Abyss season 2 on account of its obscurity. The Kaiji anime has been a favorite of mine since I watched the first season all throughout the month of March 2011, balanced daily with two chapters of Nana to Kaoru. It wasn’t until the Tonegawa spin-off that the franchise would experience the thrills of having an English dub, and this year, three after Sentai licensed both seasons, Kaiji himself will follow suit. Announcements were made earlier this year that season 1 of Kaiji, subtitled “Ultimate Survivor”, will premiere on the HIDIVE streaming service in "Q4", or this autumn. But to date, no word has been given on exactly when the dub is premiering, let alone who’s going to be in it. (Calling it now, Blake Shepard as Kaiji, and everyone who was already in Tonegawa’s dub reprises their roles.) So it’s possible they may be trying for a parallel premiere setup, where the Toonami broadcast and HIDIVE release are done in close proximity to one another. A more than fitting follow-up for Lupin Part 6’s dub, a fellow practitioner of the parallel premiere. (At least, until the marathons and movie nights started trickling in.) It’s a real stretch, but it’s not an improbable guess, let alone an impossible one. What’s really improbable, though, is, the final Potential Replacement, #5: Magic Knight Rayearth. I know. There’s a lot to it, and I mean a lot, working against it. It’s as old as me. The dub is early Bang Zoom and therefore super-stilted. It’s not the kind of thing you’d imagine airing on a block normally watched by teenage boys and adult men, being one of those shounen-shoujo fusion manga titles. And I've already seen season 1, so personally, it would be more than a little redundant. But there’s some stuff going for it too. Demarco said he was hoping to air older anime as a substitute for the shows they want that are being gatekept by Crunchyroll, and Rayearth fits that bill. Toonami has licensed shows directly from TMS, TMS produced Rayearth, so it’s fair game in that sense too. While it is being streamed by Crunchyroll, the U.S. license is being held by Discotek – whose regular practice of not picking up broadcast rights is another reason to go through TMS – so no worry of being frozen out on that front. And let’s not forget Toonami wanting to air Rayearth back when it was new and fresh, and missing out on that chance because Fox Kids snapped it up and sat on the rights, just to keep it from being made big by the superior block. Lastly… there’s gotta be a reason behind that Rayearth poster that showed up in Housing Complex C’s first episode, especially when the only overlap in staff and cast are Wada and Koba voicing Alcyone and Geo Metro respectively in both dubs, and Toonami having the rights to air Rayearth would be a good reason to include it, even if it is a bit silly. Still, we can’t be certain that the November Replacements are Bleach, My Hero, Abyss, Kaiji or Rayearth. As I said earlier, it could be none of the above. But like all announcements, we can’t be certain of anything until the moment the announcement is made. Except for the time gen:LOCK got on Toonami, but that was a lucky conjecture. (Word of advice, Toonami? Keep season 2 of that shit the hell away from your block, unless you wanna make season 2 of Promised Neverland look like a “Top 5 Shows Ever Broadcast” contender.) So, your thoughts? Anything I might have missed, or have I gotten all the reasonables covered?

One Piece 589, 591 Cuz Toriko is teh s uck.

Chiller's issue wasn't that it had numbers that low - as if you'd expect anything more from a specialty cable network that isn't even in the most basic of packages - but that the numbers dropped 89% from week 1 to week 2. But for as much of a failure as it was, it got me to actually watch (and like!) Is This a Zombie, and for that, I'm at the very least grateful.

Hareluya II BOY 1

Shinobi no Ittoki 3

"I always wanted to date a chick named 'The Power'."

We interrupt this lull between reruns for a special segment hosted by Pikachu and Meowth Popuko and Pipimi. They better get Brittney Karbowski in to do the dubbed version.

Lupin the 3rd: Part 6 24 Housing Complex C 3

Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon 35 Pop Team Epic 17

Pop Team Epic 15 (dubbed) Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro 10 (dubbed)

...Crapbaskets, I missed a day. Oh well, better nate than lever. 12:00 - Housing Complex C #3 - The Wheel Comes Full Circle - TV-MA 12:30 - Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon #35 - Battle on the New Moon, Part 2 - TV-14L 1:00 - Lupin the 3rd: Part 6 #24 - What Crooks Love - TV-14V 1:30 - One Piece #589 - The Worst in the World! A Scientist of Terror: Caesar! - TV-PG 2:00 - One Piece #591 - Chopper's Fury! The Master's Inhumane Experiment! - TV-PG 2:30 - Naruto Shippuden #414 - On the Brink of Death - TV-14 3:00 - Made in Abyss #11 - Nanachi - TV-MA 3:30 - Made in Abyss #12 - The True Nature of the Curse - TV-MA

The Rising of the Shield Hero 5 Ultraman 18

Personally, I'm a little annoyed Albert didn't show up more. I was also expecting at least a cameo from Sherlock and Lily last episode, especially since they went to the trouble of bringing back Moriarty after his end-of-arc cameo.

Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer 14 This show could really afford better animation, not that it's stopped the emotional beats from hitting dead-on. If it was as easy for me to cry at an anime as it is for you, I'd definitely be shedding tears right now.

Too soon!

Naruto Shippuden 413 Shinobi no Ittoki 2 Satomi's prominent absence from the OP animation gives me hope that she'll die before the show is half-over.

I know, and I'm exercising my right as an adult by choosing to save it for a later date, as opposed to right this second.

It's not like I'm never going to watch it, it'll just take longer than you want for me to get around to it.

Lupin the 3rd: Part 6 23 Patapata Hikousen no Bouken 8

I went into this episode with an unhealthy amount of dread. The moment I noticed all the one-off female characters from this half each had voice credits for this episode - Mylene, Gabby, Linfeng, Amelia, Muru, and even the deceased Hazel - I had a gut feeling that only got worse the moment Mathia went full sleeper agent in episode 19. I feared I would go into this episode and discover throughout the course of its 22 minutes that these characters, even those without an explicit connection to Tomoe, would wind up dead like Hazel. Offscreened in a fashion unseen since Appleseed XIII in 2011. (Trust me, the inconsistent CGI wasn't the only thing wrong with that show.) Now, after having seen it... I feel somewhat relieved that those still alive managed to survive. Sure, having all of them be Tomoe's pupils was a little lazy (if not unprecedented), and having them all enter Lupin's world to play a role, say a specific line in their native language so as to make him go full sleeper agent and return to Tomoe feels awfully manipulative; the latter coming off as even more ridiculous when you remember that some of their episodes had their run-ins with Lupin feel extremely coincidental, especially Muru's. (She wasn't even featured in episode 13's "women watching Lupin" montage, for pete's sake! Even Finn got screentime in that one, and she wasn't even part of Tomoe's trigger phrase plan!) But hey, the only thing worse would've been killing them off without the decency of an onscreen demise for forced drama, and personally, that's all that matters. Bonus: apparently Arianna lived! We never saw her onscreen, but after her bloody exit in episode 19, I thought she'd be dead for sure. But between Zenigata never outright specifying if she lived or died, Arianna's recording saying that Mathia stabbed her, not killed her, and that scene of Yata in a hospital waiting room, it appears that the ambiguity of her fate has shifted to the side of "I lived, bitch." Guess Yata was just being melodramatic, reacting to her losing consciousness from a grievous wound like Mister Pedro reacts to pretty much anything that inconveniences him. [noooooooo~!]