Like Bloom Into You is cute, but the anime literally just up and ends halfway through the story with no conclusion or even climax to the story (yes, I went and read the manga afterwards and the complete story was good, particularly in how it reached a point where the characters all realized how silly the central driving internal conflicts of the first half were), and when I look at relevant MAL stacks it's like "these aren't bait - well ok this one is, and that was is, but uh..." or "alright so it's an incestuous loli story but..." and all I can think is so this is basically the only place I trust to ask.

Side question, is there anywhere I can actually find translated light novels that's better than nyaa.si? Because as consistent as that's been there's still occasionally things like the Bloom Into You spinoff that's either not there or not complete.

So Girls Band Cry basically did the literal exact same ending that Jellyfish tried to do, except it actually involved all the cast instead of just being one of them getting to have a small personal win while the rest sit around watching from the sidelines like , and was also paced for that to actually work as the climax.

The first seven episodes of Jellyfish were better, hands down, but the last five were like an entirely different show (in fact, I'd say the tail end of Jellyfish was literally just the tail end of Girls Band Cry but worse because it didn't fit the characters or story trajectory at all and also wasn't executed well), with the one exception of episode 11 and how it dealt with Watase's gender. In contrast, the first half of Girls Band Cry wasn't great: the characters were abrasive and annoying and all the narrative drama was just Nina or Momoka getting mad and then storming off because of it, over and over, but it admittedly did manage to turn it around in the last five or so episodes and give it all some semblance of a coherent story arc.

Also tell me I'm not the only person who didn't realize until episode 10 that Tomo and Rupa were a couple? They never say anything about it that I caught, but it's pretty clear in retrospect that the two women who live together, spend every waking moment together, and who have a categorically different sort of relationship than they do with anyone else are together, at least after seeing these scenes from ep10 and ep11:

Unfortunately the Nina/Momoka pairing people were meming over never happened, though it's not particularly surprising since they just didn't have any particular chemistry past the first episode or so. In fact, looping back to the "Jellyfish turned into a worse version of GBC in the end" point, the heel-face turn Jellyfish did with Mahiru and Kano basically turned them into Nina and Momoka: friends, but held at arms length.

The last point to mention is the art: third act narrative problems aside, Jellyfish was a stylish and gorgeously animated show with vibrant static-but-lively backgrounds; Girls Band Cry had a fair bit of style to it and was probably the least bad looking CGI anime I've ever seen, but the CGI still just looks bad most of the time and the added motion from animated background action dilutes the shot and distracts from the actual focus of any given scene. I've come to strongly believe in the value of a static background as an economy of motion and focus thing, and a crowd of janky moving repeated-model extras wiggling in the background absolutely brings down the scene in a way that a static panel of out-of-focus background characters doesn't - so it should be no surprise that the best looking shots in GBC are the ones without a ton of background action or jarring movement that the CGI exacerbates.

So I get that it's not like in Cities: Skylines where it's used for pathfinding by people traveling around and instead is like "people go stand at the sad and unfulfilled person station in the hopes that a carriage will arrive to take them somewhere they need to go," but what happens then? They have an "I would like to go do a job at the job factory" travel goal and an "I would like to go shopping" travel goal, but do they also have an "I would like to go home" goal or do they just teleport back home after doing a task?

Do I need to coordinate them returning home or just being delivered to places they want to work and shop?

Edit: for that matter, how does refueling work for trains and busses? Do they just autonomously seek out fuel stops when they need to, or do I need to micromanage that somehow? Scratch that, I just watched a bus go to a gas station unprompted, through I'm still unclear on whether trains will find a fueling station or if they need to be routed through one.

Damn too bad Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night only got 7 episodes, that seventh episode was so good it surely it would have gone great places from there, there's no way anyone could have fucked that up and made it fall flat. Kano and Mahiru literally rode off together into the sunset on a motorcycle after holding hands on the beach and each admitting that her driving motivation is wanting to do things for the other, sure would have liked to see the rest of that story.

Anyways, what was I talking about? Ah yes, and the punishment would be getting eaten by yurikumas or turned into one or whatever the fuck the court was doing, making characters into surreal allegories for repression and ostracization I guess. That's the one, I want anyone who does yuri bait to be turned into a surreal allegory for repression and ostracization.

From this horse with high heels to this dog with tails for legs to "I fused Adolf Hitler and that beautiful afghan girl from iconic National Geographic photo cover", along with just so much generic and weird waifu shit.

Also more cowboys than you'd expect.

Honorable mention to this monstrosity that somehow manages to combine waifu trash with weird monarchist shit.

As a bonus it's set to like the most generically safe corporate music possible, too.

Fuck you just know he's doing it like that in the hopes of getting attention from businesses and getting hired to make shit like that for them, that's why it's such empty and pointless bootlicking.

Added horror is that for the foreseeable future this is gonna be the new face of corporate branding, until it starts to be seen as vulgar and archaic and cycles back to stark minimalism after another decade.

"Mee-oow, mee-oww, food, ny-ow!"

"You don't have to do that I'm already feeding you."

"I do not speak english and am confused by these unfathomable noises you are making, but it seems my food summoning ritual was a success. This requires further study."

Me, laughing, points at passing seagull: "thesis"

You:

Me, points at passing fish: "antithesis"

You:

Me, points at passing penguin: "synthesis"

You:

The animation and color palettes are gorgeous, the soundtrack is great, and the story is both cute and poignant, revolving around an amateur artist, disgraced former idol, said former idol's fangirl/stalker, and a failing vtuber starting a band but focusing mainly on their personal alienation and anxieties instead of the music/performance side of that. The four main characters are all pretty unambiguously queer too.

Cons: might be yuri bait, and the rare fanservice shots are weird and tonally out of place with the rest of the story. There's also five episodes left in the season so there's plenty of time left for it to milkshake duck and retroactively ruin the first half.

That's dialectics for you.

And the more unironic you do it the more irony it is.