isekai – Two Boring Hapas

Personal notes: I’m back!!! I know my last post was all the way back in February – before a lot of things changed – but now that I’m officially done with my master’s degree and we’re really settled in from moving, I have a desire to get back on track blogging. Let’s start with my favorite topic that’s really gotten me through the pandemic so far…

Does the title of this post look familiar? Maybe a little too familiar? Like maybe you literally saw it two posts ago and you’re wondering if I got lazy and reposted it all over again? (I mean, yes, I did, but…) If you watched any Spring 2020 anime, one of the following series from the following image should look familiar…

That’s right! My Next Life as a Villainess (in Japanese: 乙女ゲームの破滅フラグしかない悪役令嬢に転生してしまった…, AKA: HameFura はめふら) got an anime adaptation in the Spring 2020 cycle. A *full* season. Like twelve episodes. A real anime adaptation that released weekly and not just a small web series or something like that.

I was scared/excited for the adaptation just because manga adaptations can be that bad — Golden Kamuy’s CG use or Dance in the Vampire Bund’s veering from the story — but if it’s done well, it just makes us fans SOOO HAPPY. So guess what? I feel like HameFura’s anime adaption deserves the following award…

I’d even go as far to give the anime this award:

It’s one of the only shows recently that I made a concerted effort to watch each episode as soon as it came out, just because each episode was just so good. YES, it is a shojo, so there’s more focus on the relationship building than fighting or anything else, and it does it well. Each character fits into a certain archetype, and how each archetype plays well or not with the main character just made it fun to watch. I laughed quite a bit with this series (especially with one of the non-story episodes), and really look forward to season 2.

If you couldn’t tell off the bat, and this is pretty much the same with a lot of other isekai, this is a reverse harem with a departure from the typical otome isekai reverse harem. Which is so wholesome while being so cute to watch. Hnnnnnnng.

As we march on to the rest of 2020 and into 2021, I’m cautiously waiting for some more anime adaptations from this genre. 🙂

Somehow, while I’ve been diving back into reading manga after my stint of using novels as escapism from a bad boss (I’ll talk about that another time), I’ve only now come across the genre of otome-game isekai! It’s a very oddly specific genre but is so much fun to read.

There may be some spoiler-related things in this post just because of how the genre goes. If you’re not into spoilers, skip this post. I’ve hidden it under the Read More if you’re on the main site. 🙂

Personal note: I know we haven’t had any updates for quite some time! There’s been a lot of changes at home so we haven’t had a lot of time to devote to the site. Hopefully next year will be better! Stay tuned!

August 2020 update: one of the above series got an anime series — check out my review here!

August 2020 update #2: somehow this is one of my most popular posts because there’s a lot of you fellow fans out there! I’ve updated the below with a BUNCH of suggestions to read and started to separate them out — cos there’s a lot of differences!