Let me say the obvious part first so nobody accuses me of hating. Ufotable makes gorgeous television. When Tanjiro pulls that blade and the water effects bloom across the frame like ink dropped in a clear glass, my whole living room goes quiet. My cousin who does not watch anime sat through the Mugen Train movie with me and asked, out loud, how they made fire look wet. That is the power we are dealing with. The studio treats every clash like a music video shot by somebody with a grudge against flat lighting.

The sound design carries just as much weight. Yuki Kajiura and Go Shiina built a score that swells at exactly the right half second, and LiSA singing over the opening set a bar that half the industry is still trying to reach. You hear those first strings and your posture changes. Even people who dropped the show after the first cour will admit the audio hits like a live band at a homecoming tailgate.

So the presentation is elite. Nobody with functioning eyes is arguing that.

My problem sits somewhere else entirely. Underneath all that gloss lives a plot so tidy you could predict its beats from a bus stop three towns over. Boy’s family gets slaughtered. Sister survives as a monster. Boy joins an organization, climbs a ranked ladder, fights progressively stronger opponents, and finally battles the big bad in the final act. That is the shonen skeleton, unmodified, unbothered, untouched by any real experimentation. Gotouge drew it clean and drew it well, but clean is not the same as bold.

Consider how the villains get handled. Most significant demons receive a tearful flashback as defeat closes in. First time, I felt something real. Rui and that fake family, the desperation of a lonely child stitching together relatives out of corpses, genuinely moved me. Second time, I nodded. By the fifth or sixth sad memory montage, I started checking my phone. Sympathy became a scheduling item rather than a surprise. When you can time the tragedy reveal down to the second, the emotional machinery stops working and you can hear it grinding.

Compare that to what other franchises risked around the same years. Hunter x Hunter took its most beloved character and put him through a mutilation arc that permanently reshaped that world. Attack on Titan? Isayama convinced us of one moral arrangement for seasons, then flipped the whole map and dared everybody watching to keep cheering. Vinland Saga went further. Thorfinn spends years chasing revenge, gets it taken from him, and has to sit in the wreckage figuring out who a man is once you pry the sword out of his hand. Every one of those swings could have missed badly. Swinging anyway is the point.

Now think about Tanjiro. Where does he actually change? Kind, stubborn, allergic to giving up on his sister, that is the boy we meet in episode one. The same description fits him at the finish line, only older, stronger and permanently scarred. There is one late transformation after Muzan forces his blood and will into Tanjiro, but the story reverses it so quickly that the darkness never has time to reshape him. Progress for this character means new techniques and stronger arms. Nothing rearranges inside.

Nezuko frustrates me even more. Here is a character with enormous conceptual potential, a demon who protects humans, a walking contradiction of everything the corps believes. What does the writing do with her? Bamboo in the mouth for most of the runtime. A backpack. Occasional bursts of pyrotechnics when the plot requires a save. She barely speaks for entire seasons. Her interiority stays locked in a box because giving her a voice would complicate the moral clarity the whole thing depends on. That is a risk left on the table.

The battles themselves reveal the same conservatism. Breathing styles are presented as a system, complete with forms and lineages and elemental branches, yet almost nobody solves problems through clever application of that system. Fights resolve through determination. Somebody remembers a dead relative, screams, swings harder than physics should allow, and wins. Contrast that with something like Hunter x Hunter’s nen rules, where victory usually belongs to whoever thought three steps ahead. Here, thinking rarely beats feeling. Willpower functions as a cheat code the writing reaches for whenever a corner gets tight.

Death gets the same soft treatment. Characters do die, and some of those losses hurt. Rengoku’s finale still gets brought up in every barbershop anime debate I have witnessed. But watch what happens immediately afterward. Warm light. Deceased loved ones appear in a golden field. Approval, hugs, closure delivered in a bow. Grief usually becomes a gentle handoff rather than an open wound. The survivors carry loss, but the story rarely allows bitterness, uncertainty or emotional damage to remain untreated for long.

Let me argue against myself for a minute, because waving off sincerity has become its own lazy move. A whole lot of folks showed up here worn out by irony, sick of shows where being decent gets treated like being stupid. Watching a boy’s kindness function as actual strength carries real value, and I say that as somebody who grew up when cynicism was mistaken for intelligence. Gotouge wrote a fable. Fables run on repetition and clear moral lines, that is the machinery, that is how they teach. Even the sad demon flashback pattern I complained about earlier says something honest about cycles of harm, about monsters getting manufactured by circumstance rather than born. You could look me dead in my face and say the predictability was intentional, that comfort counts as an artistic goal, that the numbers settle the argument. Fair enough. Mugen Train becoming Japan’s highest grossing film, followed by another historic run for Infinity Castle, is not nothing.

Here is where I hold my ground, though. Ambition and accessibility have never been enemies. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood handled genocide, theology, and a government built on human sacrifice while staying perfectly readable to a fourteen year old. Oda buries genuine political commentary inside a pirate cartoon and nobody complains. Easy to follow is not the same as unwilling to gamble.

What frustrates me most is the suspicion that the spectacle covers for the script. Strip away the particle effects and the orchestral swells, put those same plot beats in a mid-budget production with stiff key frames, and I do not believe this thing becomes a phenomenon. The technical achievement is doing heavy lifting that the writing has not earned. Watching the Infinity Castle material, I felt genuine awe at the craftsmanship and mild boredom at the developments happening inside it. Both feelings, at once, in the same scene.

That does not make it bad. Read none of this as a takedown. I will keep watching, I will keep buying tickets, and my arms will keep getting chills the second that music kicks in. My wish is smaller and far more specific. Give a beloved character a choice that cannot be forgiven. Hand Nezuko an actual voice. Allow somebody to stay dead without the golden reunion afterward. Trust that an audience which showed up for beauty can sit with discomfort too.

Right now, the sword swings look incredible. What they cut through rarely bleeds.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Studio Bind came back on July 5th and did something sneaky. Instead of opening on Rudeus, season three handed its first hour to Eris, sweating in a sword sanctum, getting her whole personality beaten into shape by people who do not care about her feelings. Two full episodes of a woman deciding to become worthy of standing next to somebody. Then episode three swings around to Sharia, to the warm house, the wife, the second wife, the baby, the soft life our boy built out of nothing but trauma and grinding.

Notice what just happened. Eris left to change. Rudeus took a longer, messier road and eventually built himself a comfortable life. One of those transformations was deliberate. The other happened while survival, love and circumstance kept dragging him forward, and this season knows it.

Let me back up for anybody who only knows this show from Twitter arguments.

A thirty something shut in dies in Japan after a life of nothing. No job. No love. No dignity. His siblings throw him out of the family home after he refuses to attend his parents’ funeral, and he gets flattened by a truck while trying to do maybe his only decent thing ever. Then he wakes up as a baby in a fantasy world with memories intact, a body that works, magic talent bordering on absurd, and parents who actually want him. Cheat codes stacked on cheat codes.

Most isekai stops right there and lets you enjoy your buffet. Mushoku Tensei refuses. It is why people still argue about this series five years later, and it is why season three lands harder once you catch what it is doing.

Here comes an uncomfortable part. Truck killed a body. Truck did not kill a man.

Think about how we talk about starting over in real life. New city. New job. Fresh cut, new fit, gym membership, whole glow up. We love a fantasy where geography equals character. Move away from the block and become somebody else. Except anybody who has actually done it knows better. You unpack the boxes and then you unpack yourself, and your same old coward is still in there, flinching at familiar things, running tired scripts under a brand new sky. My unc used to say you can leave a neighborhood but a neighborhood never leaves you. He was not talking about anime. He might as well have been.

Rudeus received a most extreme relocation. Different world, different body, different family, different rules of physics. And he still stole underwear. He still peeped. He still built his sense of worth around whether a woman would look at him. He still lied, hid, deflected, and crumbled once real pressure showed up.

Not sloppy writing. Just point blank honesty, and a fandom dismissing this show as gross often misses one thing: nobody here is defending him. A camera and a cosign are two different objects.

Look at his receipts across all three seasons. This kid is six years old with a grown mind and already scheming on Sylphiette. He is a teenager with world class talent who still cannot give Eris the emotional certainty she needs. The disaster in Fittoa scatters his family across a continent, and he spends stretches of his journey doing what he always does, which is retreat inward and let shame drive. Then Eris leaves and, for a while, he does not train, does not rally, and does not go after her. He curls up. Even after he forces himself back onto the road, the same wounded man remains underneath the adventurer’s coat.

His collapse remains the most honest thing in this entire franchise. A weaker story would say reincarnation fixed him. Instead we get a reset button nobody can find, plus a long look at what happens to men who believe otherwise.

Season two was rough on viewers for keeping him in that pit. Fans clowned his impotence arc online, but structurally it was brilliant, because his body finally did what his spirit had been doing across two lifetimes. Shutting down. Refusing. Failing at intimacy. He had to sit with it in front of somebody who loved him, and Sylphie did not magically repair him. She supported him, reassured him, actively helped him through the physical problem and, most importantly, came back after he woke up expecting to be abandoned again.

Which brings us to now.

Season three drops our guy into a version of life he always claimed he wanted. Married. Fathered. Respected in Sharia. Roxy under his roof, a childhood fantasy made flesh. Money coming in. Magic powerful enough to frighten nearly everyone who sees him use it seriously. On paper, arc complete. He won.

Watch the internal monologue anyway. His narration in these early episodes still sounds like a scared kid in a dark house checking every lock. He measures himself against a possibility of loss. He rehearses failure before failure arrives. He second guesses his worth inside a home where three people already decided he is worth it. One of the most gifted mages in Sharia, still talking to himself like a guy who got thrown out after refusing to attend his parents’ funeral.

His old voice never left. It got quieter, and quiet gets mistaken for gone.

Studio Bind knows this. Everything lined up after this point exists specifically to test whether growth was real or whether comfort was doing all of his heavy lifting. When a man is safe, warm, and fed, of course he seems better. Character is whatever survives once you take his comfort away. The threats are coming. Bigger names are moving somewhere beyond his peaceful little house. Somebody is about to pull his chair out from under him right after he finally got to sit down.

Now let me be fair to critics, since they are not wrong about everything. This series leans hard on women as an engine of his improvement, and there is a real conversation to have about how much emotional labor Sylphie and Roxy carry so a grown man can slowly stop being terrible. Fair hit. But I push back on any claim it presents such an arrangement as clean or earned. Roxy in particular gets written with her own interior life, her own insecurity, her own ambition, and she never exists as a reward. Women here stay inconvenient, and being inconvenient is more than most stories in this genre allow.

Deeper thing, though, is Paul.

Rudeus spent years judging his father as a failure, a philanderer, a man who could not hold his house together. Then Rudeus grew up and became a man with multiple wives, a temper he swallows, and a talent for disappearing when things get hard. Paul dying did not just cost him a parent. It cost him somebody he had been quietly measuring himself against so he could feel superior. And now here he stands, holding his own daughter, learning what he hated in his father was never a flaw unique to Paul. It was a pattern. It was inheritance. It was in his blood and in his mirror.

Fatherhood is the final boss of this story. No swordsman comes close.

Which is why it works even while being repellent, and it is often repellent. Rebirth never cleansed him. Rebirth just opened a door and held it. Whatever a man does after walking through remains on him, every single day, in small unglamorous choices nobody claps for. Rudeus gets no absolution, because absolution is not a mechanic in this world. He gets mornings. He gets decisions. He gets the chance to not be that guy today, then he has to do it again tomorrow, and again after, while his old self rides shotgun with his seatbelt off, waiting on any reason to grab the wheel.

None of this is a fantasy premise. It is Tuesday for a whole lot of us.

Season three is where the bill comes due. I would not miss it.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Consider a standard shonen formula for a moment. Our protagonist wants to become the strongest, and everyone watching already knows his destination because we grew up following that exact journey on Toonami and debating power levels at the lunch table. Real comfort lives in that familiarity, no question. But a veteran warrior, one who was once the strongest, who carries bodies in his rearview mirror and a reputation he wishes the world would forget, occupies richer territory. He is asking a question this genre rarely poses out loud. What do you do after a war ends and you realize winning repaired absolutely nothing?

Kenshin Himura is the blueprint. Before all the wandering and the goofy smiles, my guy was the Hitokiri Battousai. Manslayer. A name Kyoto mothers probably used to scare their kids into bed. His blade helped birth a whole new era, and that era turned around and healed exactly none of the damage he did to get there. So what does he do? He carries a sword with the cutting edge forged on the opposite side and spends the next decade drifting around Japan, doing laundry and saying “oro” like somebody’s odd uncle.

Folks really sleep on how radical that choice is. A reverse-blade sword is not merch-table gimmickry. It is one man putting a physical wall between the killer he was and the person he is fighting to become. Whether that wall holds when his past shows up at the door, and it always shows up, is basically the entire series. Then here comes Shishio, burnt and bitter and everything Kenshin could have been, forcing him to protect people without turning back into the weapon the government built.

That tension hits differently than “I want to be Hokage.” That tension is grown folks’ business.

Then you have Nanashi from Sword of the Stranger, and if you have not seen that film, close this article and go handle your business, because the animation alone will make you apologize to your television. Nanashi tied his blade into its sheath. Literally knotted the thing shut. He served under warlords, followed orders he cannot live with, and now refuses to draw steel even when drawing steel would make his life a whole lot easier.

Watching him protect that little boy Kotaro while wrestling with his own vow, that is the movie. The final duel is gorgeous, sure, but it lands because we spent most of the film watching a man beg the universe not to make him be good at the one thing he hates about himself.

Blade of the Immortal takes it even further. Manji cannot die. Sounds like a superpower until you realize immortality for a killer is just an unpayable debt with no due date. His violent past left a hundred samurai dead, including his own sister’s husband, and now he has to kill a thousand evil men to balance the scales.

Except the story keeps whispering the truth underneath all that arterial spray. Scales like that do not balance. Every body dropped creates another grieving family, another person looking for revenge, another promise made over a grave. The cycle feeds itself. Manji knows it too, which is why he moves through the story like a man serving a sentence rather than chasing glory.

And can we talk about Jin from Samurai Champloo for a second? Everybody loves Mugen because Mugen breakdances through sword duels over Nujabes beats, and honestly, valid. Rest in peace to a legend whose production still gets rotation in my headphones.

But Jin is the quiet tragedy of that show. Classically trained, technically perfect, and completely obsolete. His master is dead by his own hand after being ordered to kill him. The school that formed him has been corrupted. The world that gave his skills meaning is slipping away, and he is out here wandering an era that has little use for him except as a hired blade or a corpse.

Jin already lost before episode one started. Watching him slowly find a reason to care again, that is the arc, and the show is smart enough to never announce it.

Even Gintama, wild and unhinged as it is, runs on this engine. Strip away the alien jokes and the fourth-wall demolition, and Gintoki is a veteran of a lost war, eating parfaits and acting foolish while carrying memories he rarely allows himself to discuss. The comedy reads like armor.

When the series drops the jokes and lets him remember Shouyou, the tonal whiplash works precisely because we know the silliness was always covering something deeper. That is a very specific kind of realness. Plenty of us know somebody who laughs the loudest so nobody asks how they are actually doing.

Here is why this archetype resonates so hard with me, and probably with a lot of us who grew up between cultures and code switches. The tired warrior understands consequence. He knows that every conflict, even a righteous one, extracts a tax from the soul, and the receipt never stops printing.

Our communities know this intimately. We know that winning an argument, a case, a battle, whatever, rarely restores what was taken. The damage stays damaged. The dead stay dead. Grief does not check the scoreboard.

So when Kenshin stares at his own hands like they belong to a stranger, or Nanashi refuses to draw the weapon that once defined him, something clicks that goes far beyond fandom. These shows write pain with remarkable honesty, and they often manage it without parking a therapist in the corner to explain everybody’s feelings to the audience.

The young challenger asks, “Can I win?”

The weathered ronin asks, “What will it cost, who pays, and was any of it worth the price the last time?”

One of those questions has a power-scaling wiki answer. The other one follows you into your thirties and sits with you at red lights.

There is a craft reason this works too. When your lead is already dangerous, the writers cannot lean on strength as the stakes. Kenshin will win the duel nine times out of ten. We know this. So the drama has to live somewhere else, in restraint, temptation, and the terrifying possibility that he stops holding back.

The blade becomes a moral instrument instead of a measuring stick. Suspense shifts from “Will he survive?” to “Will he stay himself?” That second question is infinitely more interesting because we all fail it sometimes in smaller ways.

So yeah, keep your prodigies and your tournament brackets. I will be over here with the scars and the ghosts, the men who sheathed their steel not because they got weak but because they finally got wise.

Peace does not arrive when the strongest man wins. Peace arrives when the strongest man decides the whole game was rigged from the jump and quietly walks off the board. That decision, made every single episode, one temptation at a time?

That is the realest arc in anime. Full stop.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

That little gap right there is my whole argument, and a lot of us who came up on this stuff feel it in our chest even when we can’t name it.

I was a Toonami baby. The block, the countdown, that cool robot voice telling me to keep my head up. And here’s what folks forget: shows I fell for back then did not look clean. Cowboy Bebop had a smoky, lived in quality to it, jazz drifting under a gunfight, whole scenes where nobody said a word and you just watched Spike smoke and marinate in his own regret. Trigun looked rough around its edges in spots and I adored it for exactly that. Berserk in 97 moved like a flipbook somebody dropped down a staircase, and it still put more dread in my body than anything with a billion frames does now.

So no, this isn’t the tired song about how everything used to be better. Plenty of old shows looked like garbage on a Tuesday. What I’m circling is something slipperier than quality. It’s identity. It’s a fingerprint.

Think about what a background used to be. Somebody painted that. A human being sat with paint and a brush and made a hallway in Rurouni Kenshin feel humid, made the neon in Akira bleed like it was sweating. Those settings had grime baked in because the labor was physical and imperfect and personal. You could almost smell each city. Now a lot of what I see is gorgeous in a car commercial sort of way. Slick. Rendered. Every surface catching a gleam that no back alley in real life has ever caught. The polish is undeniable. Soul underneath it is often just missing.

Part of this comes down to tools, and I’m not out here pretending otherwise. Digital compositing let studios pull off complex camera moves with a freedom and flexibility that traditional cel era production could rarely match. Fights swirl in three dimensions now. Water actually behaves like water. When Demon Slayer wants a slash to feel like it split open the sky, it splits that sky, and my inner child stands up and claps. I won’t take that from anybody. The ceiling for pure spectacle has never been higher than right now.

But watch what happened underneath all of that shine. A house style crept in. Open up five of your biggest ongoing series from recent years and squint. The character faces share identical proportions, identical doe eyes, identical shading logic sitting under a chin. The color grading leans on those same cool blues and warm oranges because that reads as cinematic and everybody’s chasing one look. It’s competent. It’s frictionless. And it flattens things until a whole medium starts to feel like it rolled off one assembly line with a couple skins swapped out.

Compare that to how instantly you could clock an older director’s hand. You knew a Kanada influenced action beat by how the smoke curled and the light popped, all that wild elastic motion breaking physics on purpose. You knew Kunihiko Ikuhara by how strange and theatrical he let a frame get. You knew Satoshi Kon before the title card finished, because that man edited reality like it owed him money. Those weren’t just pretty shows. They were somebody’s brain leaking onto a screen. Imperfection was their signature.

There’s also a rhythm thing nobody discusses enough. Older series knew how to sit still. They’d hold on a face. Let a room breathe. Let silence carry weight until you leaned forward on your own couch. That patience was partly a budget move, sure, since you can’t animate what you don’t have money to animate. But scarcity forced creativity. A held shot with good music and a good voice actor could gut you. Now the pressure pushes creators to keep visual dopamine flowing every few seconds, so quiet moments that once built a character get chopped down to make room for the next set piece. We traded atmosphere for adrenaline and I’m not fully convinced it was a good deal.

And can we please talk about the factory. The isekai pipeline, seasonal light novel adaptations getting pumped out on schedules that would make a sweatshop wince. When you’re producing that volume under those deadlines, individuality becomes the first casualty. There’s no time for a weird choice. No room for a background painter to get precious about light in one window. You need it on air, so you reach for a template, and templates carry no accent, no dialect, no regional flavor. It just is what it is and then it’s gone by next cour.

Now let me check myself before somebody in my comments does it for me, because it’s not all doom and I’d be lying if I said so. Chainsaw Man looked as filthy and strange and mean as anything from the golden era, and that was on purpose, a real aesthetic swing. Studio Trigger still animates like they’re allergic to sitting down, all that loud manic energy that could only come from specific people making specific choices. Frieren understood stillness better than most shows from any decade, letting long stretches of nothing carry the ache of watching everyone you love grow old. Dandadan is a whole mood unto itself. So the fingerprint isn’t dead. It’s just rarer, and it tends to show up when a team fights for it instead of taking whatever easy path technology lays out in front of them.

Maybe that’s my real point, one I keep circling back toward. Technology isn’t the villain here. It’s neutral, a bigger box of crayons than we’ve ever had. What changed is incentive. When a market rewards clean sameness over risky character, most output drifts toward clean sameness, because that’s how markets behave. Old grit wasn’t nobler than us. It was just what happened when passionate broke people made the best of limited means and let their weirdness show because hiding it cost more effort than they had to spare.

So where does all this leave a grown blerd who loves this medium too much to pretend? Right in the middle, honestly. I’ll keep pausing frames of new stuff to gawk at how good it looks, because it does look that good and denying it would be a lie. And I’ll keep going back to those smoky, imperfect, hand touched classics when I want something that feels like a person made it for a reason, not something a spreadsheet greenlit for a demographic. Both things stay true and I’m at peace holding them at once.

Give me the beauty. I want the beauty. But every so often, would it kill somebody to leave a smudge on the glass so I know a human was here? That smudge was never a flaw. That was the whole soul of a thing, and I’d hate for a generation to grow up thinking soul and polish were ever one word.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

What is Found Footage Horror?

To start off, found footage can be referred to as both a technique in filmmaking and a genre of film whereby the movie or film is shot as a series of recordings, often in the first-person perspective. These recordings act as a way for the recorder (i.e. the actor) to the relay an event or story to their audience. Because of this, the found footage genre reveals a sense of realism in its technical uses of ‘shaky camera’ scenes and a reliance on diegetic sounds (e.g. in-film noises and natural ambience) instead of non-diegetic sounds (e.g. sound effects and added soundtracks).

At first, found footage was simply considered a unique film genre and technique, however that changed after the cult classic The Blair Witch Project released in 1999 that the genre gained massive popularity. After that, every filmmaker and their mother on a budget took advantage of the momentum at the time to keep releasing more and more similar and uniquely different found footage horror movies. Even though found footage was mostly used in the horror movie scene, other filmmakers have taken to it in other genres – just like with Chronicle of the sci-fi and action genres.

Let’s Keep It Underrated

As much as found footage horror movies are a great storytelling media form, we think it’s best to keep the genre lowkey and specialised for horror fanatics and the occasional movie/series binge watcher. What that means is, found footage horror is best kept niche and underrated – and not made mainstream.

It is not an inherently bad thing to have found footage horror be mainstream, especially when you think about the success of The Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity franchise – which, to this day, keeps inviting people to give found footage horror, or horror movies in general, a try. But it sometimes feels like the novelty of some mainstream media like movies and TV series is lost once they are made mainstream. This can purely be a subjective take on the matter, but still… If found footage horror somehow, was actively, produced and released specifically for mainstream consumption, the freshness of the genre will likely vanish.

The biggest reason for the loss of freshness is due to the beauty of found footage and found footage horror. Which is that it lies in the key world “found”. For something to be found, it had to be lost at some point, so all these found footage movies give audiences the illusion that the movie they are watching is a CD, VHS tape or even a dark web video that they found and are secretly watching. It almost acts as conspiratorial evidence for the deaths of a family, of why a local park is haunted or why a group of teenagers went to a cabin and never returned. That is part of the appeal of the genre. So, if it were all made mainstream, everything would just be handed to us on a silver platter and those production companies would tell us to “Watch!”. And some of us just hate being told what to do. Found footage horror does not tell you what to do – it just sits there and waits for you to click ‘play’.

Found Footage Horror Suggestions

There are a lot of found footage horror movies out there – honestly, a lot – but there are a couple that really know how to capture audience’s attention based on its plot, use of the found footage technique and overall distinctiveness from other movies of the same genre. Even so, all found footage horror movies deserve to be checked out and judged by yourself – but these found footage horror movies below are definitely a must watch.

The first suggestion for a found footage horror is The Blair Witch Project. This might seem anticlimactic considering how it was the first found footage horror that brought mainstream attention to the genre but it is a significantly good movie to watch – especially if you are first starting out in watching the genre. It is not incorrect to describe The Blair Witch Project as slow-paced, but it makes up for that by creating an unsettling atmosphere by having the characters be lost whilst slowly being bewildered and apprehensive in the massive, supposedly haunted, woodland they are in. The interesting part of the found footage horror is how the climax is placed closer to the end of the movie with the final scene being left open-ended and without a definite resolution. Thus, leaving the audience with a disturbing lack of closure.

A second suggestion for a found footage horror to watch is Grave Encounters. If you are someone who enjoys watching those ghost hunting shows, then this movie is for you. The overall premise is about a group of individuals planning on recording an episode in an abandoned, haunted mental asylum with hopes of capturing evidence of the paranormal on camera. Now, this recommendation is limited to the first movie, mostly because the second one isn’t as good. The reason is that Grave Encounters 2 feels to lose a lot of its sense and realism (a key aspect of found footage) closer to the end – which can be off putting to some viewers. Other than that, there is Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum a South Korean equivalent to Grave Encounters that is also a must watch.

The last, but certainly not least, recommendation for a found footage horror is The Conspiracy. As the title suggests, the mockumentary is about conspiracies having to do with a powerful global secret society (e.g. the illuminati), government cover-ups and two filmmakers who make it their mission to investigate everything that has to do with that. This found footage is very nerve-wracking for any viewer who is an overthinker and is easily paranoid about the state of the world and those who govern it. As you watch it, there are also small innuendos that call on real-world celebrities and leaders which almost makes the mockumentary feel realer than it honestly should be. For some conspiracy theorists who end up watching this found footage horror, they could end up suspecting the movie of admitting to some conspiracies being true.

It is an unfortunate thing to admit but found footage horror is not for everyone. Even though the horror sub-genre takes the cake in how innovative and novel it is, the lack of the usual movie magic and effects may seem off-putting and uncanny in its realistic mode of storytelling. And that’s okay. Every movie watcher is allowed to tap into what they are interested in, but they all have to admit though… Found footage horror is an intriguing genre in media!

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.

Ed and Al learned that rule the hard way. Two kids missing their mama, thinking they could bend the world back into the shape it used to be. What they got instead was a verdict written on their bodies. One loses a leg, then trades an arm to anchor his brother’s soul to a suit of armor. The younger one loses everything below the neck and walks around as a hollow shell of steel, quietly terrified that he never really came back at all. That’s the opening act, and the run won’t let you forget it.

Now here’s where it gets slick. This could’ve stayed a story about magic and its rules. Instead it puts a bigger question to damn near everybody who walks on screen. What do you want, and what will you burn to hold it?

Roy Mustang aims to sit at the top so he can pull the rotten military up by its roots and never let it march children into the sand again. Noble on the surface. But that man carries Ishval on his back like a second spine, having turned people to ash under orders and named it the sin he owes the rest of his days to. His ambition is soaked in guilt, and the closer he gets to the chair he’s chasing, the more the writing pokes at him. Are you climbing to fix it, or climbing because you cannot forgive yourself unless you do?

Scar might be the realest example of the tab. Everything taken from him. His people, his brother, his arm, his name. The answer to that ruin becomes more ruin, and he hunts the very state alchemists who wiped out his kind. And the writing refuses to let him off easy or condemn him cheap. It sits with him in the ugliness, then slowly walks him toward a harder truth than revenge. Rebuilding demands more than tearing down ever did.

Then you got Hohenheim, the father who ran. Centuries of life, a body packed with screaming voices, and one dream he never says out loud until it’s almost too late. That whole silence hides a wish to undo what he set in motion, to hand his boys a world that isn’t sitting on a bomb. His arc is a man spending centuries trying to answer for a catastrophe he survived before those two were even thought of. When he finally settles that account, he does it quietly, wearing a small smile, like somebody who made peace with the bill.

The villains sell the theme just as hard. Father, the thing wearing Hohenheim’s old face, craves godhood. Give him the chance and he’d swallow the sun, standing above need, above limits, above the very law that governs everybody else. And that’s the trap laid for him. A being that refuses to give anything up, that demands profit with no cost, is the one soul in the whole tale who ends with nothing. Reaching for it all, that creature closes its hand on air.

Those homunculi break your heart in ways you don’t see coming. Greed claims he’s after money, women, power, all of it. But watch him at the end. Turns out the thing he’d been starving for was friends, people who’d ride with him, a table full of somebody. Laying down his own existence for that realization, he dies more human than the humans around him. Envy, all that rage and cruelty, cracks open to reveal pure jealousy underneath, a creature furious that it could never be loved the way people love each other. Even the monsters wanted something. Even the monsters paid.

Peep the sneaky brilliance of it. The law isn’t really about drawing circles and clapping your hands. It’s a mirror held up to everybody in the frame. Winry chooses to build instead of avenge, setting down the knife her grief tried to press into her palm. Riza ties her fate to Mustang’s, ready to follow him into hell and put a bullet in him herself if he ever loses his way, because she settled long ago on what her loyalty would run her. Even Ling, chasing immortality for his clan, has to stare dead at what that crown might turn him into.

And the ending, man. The closer plays out like the whole thesis wearing a bow. Ed stands before the truth one final time, his brother’s body on the line, and does the one thing the run had been building him toward. Alchemy is what he gives up. That gift, the talent that made him a prodigy, the ability he’d leaned on since he was a shorty, all of it offered up to pull Al back in one piece. Plain as day, the message lands. Your most valuable chip is usually the very thing you believed made you special. Al matters more than that ability, he decides, and in losing it he becomes more of a man than the craft ever made him.

What sets it apart from a hundred other action shows is that it never blinks. Plenty of stories wave the idea of consequence around, then hand the hero a clean win when the clock runs down. Brotherhood keeps its receipt. Everybody leaves the counter lighter than they walked up, and that honesty is why grown folks still argue about it in the comments a decade and change later.

That’s why it lands so heavy years after the credits roll. It isn’t preaching that suffering is noble. It’s telling you something quieter and truer. Everything worth having sits behind that counter, and life is gonna ask you to lay something real down before you carry it out the door. Sometimes it’s a limb. Sometimes it’s your pride, your comfort, your picture of who you thought you were.

Brotherhood just had the nerve to make you feel the weight of that trade in your chest. Every character steps to the same register, hopes in hand, and answers the only question the universe ever really asks. How bad do you want it, and what are you ready to leave behind?

Turns out that’s not a magic system. That’s just being alive.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Think about the rest of the Marvel roster for a second. Tony Stark wakes up in a mansion, sad about his choices, then builds a new suit worth more than my whole neighborhood. Thor is a literal god. T’Challa, and I say this with all the love in my Wakanda loving heart, is a king with a nation of geniuses behind him. Steve Rogers has the government cutting him checks and the moral clarity of a man who has never once had to choose between groceries and gas. These are aspirational figures. We look up at them.

Peter Parker? We look across at him. Sometimes we look down at him, because the man is usually on the ground, exhausted, mask half off, wondering how he’s going to explain to his boss why he missed another shift.

And right there sits the whole secret. It explains why he keeps working, generation after generation, while other characters cycle in and out of relevance. Spider-Man is the hero who saves the city and then still has to figure out his own life, because the universe has never once said thank you.

Peter stops a runaway train and Aunt May’s medical bills don’t disappear. Webbing up the Rhino in the middle of Midtown earns him a menace headline from Jonah the next morning. Losing sleep on patrol costs him the day job, since he kept showing up late. Every win comes with an invoice. Every triumph gets taxed. If you’ve ever worked a double, come home to bad news, and still had to be somebody’s rock the next morning, you already understand this character on a cellular level.

And here’s the part folks who only know the movies sometimes miss. The comics have been running this play since 1962, and the play never gets old because life never gets old. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko made a teenager who got powers and immediately used them to chase money, because his family needed money. Simple as that. Money was the origin before the origin. Before the guilt, before the great responsibility speech, Peter Parker was a broke kid trying to get paid. Ditko drew him hunched and wiry, not sculpted. Stan Lee later said the full-face costume helped any kid imagine themselves inside it. Any kid. That detail hit different in Black households, and it’s not an accident that decades later Miles Morales slid into that suit like it was tailored for him. The mask was always an open invitation.

Then Uncle Ben dies, and it’s Peter’s fault in the way that so much grief feels like our fault. He didn’t pull the trigger. All he did was stand aside when he could have acted, and that might be the most human kind of guilt there is, the kind built on a small selfish moment that snowballed into something you can never take back. Marvel could have let that wound heal. Instead they made it the engine. Peter doesn’t fight crime because it’s noble. He fights crime because he’s trying to outrun a debt that can’t be paid, and every one of us carrying some version of that debt sees ourselves swinging right beside him.

Now stack the losses. Gwen Stacy falls off that bridge and the snap of that webline is still one of the most brutal panels in comics history, because Peter’s desperate attempt to save her is implied to play a role in the tragedy. Captain Stacy dies telling Peter to take care of his daughter. Harry spirals. May gets shot. The marriage gets erased by a literal deal with the devil, and say what you want about One More Day as a story, but the message underneath it was loud and clear: this man cannot be allowed to be happy. The editorial mandate and the cosmic law of his universe are the same law. Parker luck is not a running gag. It’s the thesis.

Compare that to how the industry usually handles pain. Bruce Wayne turned his trauma into a fortune fueled war machine. Peter turned his into a part time gig that barely covers rent. Batman broods in a cave full of supercomputers. Spider-Man broods on a fire escape because his apartment is too hot and the AC unit died in July. One of these men I admire. The other one I am, and so is my cousin, and so was my uncle, and so is every twenty something in Brooklyn or Bronzeville or Baldwin Hills juggling three responsibilities with two hands.

The genius of the character is that his powers never solve the actual problem. He can lift a car but not the rent. Bullets get dodged with ease while the landlord finds him every single time. Spider sense warns him about the Green Goblin but stays silent when MJ is about to walk out the door because he missed another dinner. Marvel figured out early that the fantasy of power is only interesting when it crashes into the reality of powerlessness, and nobody crashes harder than Peter Parker.

This is also why he translates across generations without needing a reboot of his soul. The details update, the core stays put. In the sixties he was a bullied science kid. In the Raimi era he was delivering pizzas in a gig economy before we had a name for it. Miles came along in 2011 and suddenly the story was also about code switching, about carrying your community’s expectations on your back while hiding half of who you are, and it fit perfectly, because Spider-Man was always a story about wearing a mask to survive. Into the Spider-Verse said the quiet part loud: anyone can wear the mask. But the fine print matters. Anyone can wear it because everyone already knows what it costs. The price of admission is struggle, and struggle is the one universal language.

Tom Holland’s version gets clowned sometimes for being Iron Man’s intern, and fine, fair. But look what the MCU did the second it wanted him taken seriously. No Way Home strips him of everything. May dies with the responsibility speech on her lips. The world forgets he exists. The movie ends with Peter alone in a tiny apartment, sewing his own suit, broke, anonymous, starting over. The biggest superhero franchise on the planet understood that the only way to make Spider-Man feel like Spider-Man was to take it all away. His authenticity lives at rock bottom.

And let’s be honest about why that lands so hard for us specifically. Blerd culture gravitates to Peter because he embodies a rhythm we know in our bones: excellence without reward. He is brilliant, genuinely one of the smartest people in the Marvel universe, and the world treats him like a menace anyway. Doing everything right earns him a smear campaign. Still he shows up, over and over, for a city that would sell him out for a headline. If that’s not a familiar tune, I don’t know what is. There’s a reason the Davis and Morales household felt so lived in from page one. The blueprint was already there. All Bendis and Pichelli had to do was change the address.

Even his enemies underline the point. Norman Osborn is a billionaire. Kingpin owns half the city. Otto Octavius had institutional backing Peter could only dream about. Spider-Man’s rogues gallery is basically a lineup of men with resources fighting a kid with none, and the kid keeps winning on heart, wit, and the sheer refusal to stay down. Every knockdown gets answered with a jump back up and a joke, because the jokes are armor too. Anybody raised on laughing to keep from crying recognizes that defense mechanism from across the street.

So no, Peter Parker will never catch a break, and honestly, he shouldn’t. The day he does, the character dies. Marvel can give him a new suit, a new love interest, a new borough, even a new person under the mask entirely. What it can never give him is ease. The mask works because the face under it is tired, and the webs work because the hands shooting them just clocked out of a shift. He saves the city, goes home, checks his account balance, exhales, and gets up the next day to do it again.

None of that is superhero fantasy. It’s Tuesday. And it’s exactly why, sixty plus years deep, when a new kid in a new decade picks up that book, they don’t see an icon. They see a mirror. With great power comes great responsibility, sure. But with great responsibility comes an unpaid electric bill, and Peter Parker is the only hero in the game honest enough to show us both.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Ranking Systems in the Imperial Palace

This goes back to Ancient China when emperors were permitted to take as many women to be their wives as they wanted – within the bounds of traditional rules and customs of course. The women who would enter the palace to wed the emperor were made to follow one of these traditional customs, which was the imperial concubine ranking system. This entailed them occupying a position that granted them a certain amount of comforts and power within the imperial palace. As simple as it sounds, there were factors that went into which rank a woman was placed in. To begin with, the emperor, their husband, was the one that ranked them and he did that by looking at how prominent a woman’s family background was, their ability to have children, and also whether they were talented enough to receive his favour – in other words, were they worth enough to receive his affection. Different Chinese dynasties had different ranking systems that were sometimes based on what the emperor at the time wanted.

Simplified, the ranking system consisted of the empress, the emperor’s main wife, consorts and concubines. In all these systems there would only ever be one empress. Other ranks could come and go, but she always remained. Nonetheless, the ranks of the imperial wives served different purposes but the predominant purpose was to maintain court dynamics. Which often spawned court and palace intrigue.

Is the Web novel any good?

To answer whether or not The Job of an Imperial Concubine is a good read: Yes, the web novel is a first-rate read. On the surface, it is well written, the characters are properly fleshed out and although it feels more slice of life, there is enough plot and drama to keep the reader wanting more. The protagonist of the web novel, Zhaung Laoyan, is the perfect definition of a go getter and a woman who strives to live comfortably and luxuriously – even if it means throwing her dignity away to make that happen.

Like a lot of Asian web novels out there, The Job of an Imperial Concubine is tagged as a transmigration story. Zhaung Laoyan, our female protagonist was an older woman working corporate as a PR manager before she passed away and found herself in the body of one of Emperor Feng Jin’s concubines in ancient China. The era can be described as a fictional version inspired by the real-world Han and Qing Dynasties. Throughout the coming chapters, Zhaung Laoyan is consistently bound by strict palace rules whilst being forced into the schemes of the emperor’s other wives. But what the story is unique in is its not so unique type of plot of how our female protagonist does not have a golden finger. What that means is, Zhaung Laoyan doesn’t have any special talent or skill that really distinguishes her from the other characters, besides being a transmigrator who is smart enough to survive the imperial palace’s treacherous schemes. In that way, she can be mistaken as a background character turned protagonist.

An interesting detail that makes the web novel a great read is how well Emperor Feng Jin doesn’t love any of his wives or at least is good at pretending he doesn’t love them. Anyone can find this type of character refreshing. Moreover, he constantly manipulates even the ones he cares just a little for, simply to maintain the systemic relationship the women of the harem are all meant to fit into. At any part of the novel, whenever you read from his perspective, there is an involuntary feeling of holding one’s breath because you never know what he is really up to. Just like when – SPOILER ALERT – he married a performer because he “liked her dancing”, only for him to later on let her be framed for a murder she didn’t commit. The reason for that? He was letting his other wives vent their anger and jealousy on her for being the ‘new, pretty’ wife in the harem.

Similar Chinese Short Dramas

There have actually been a couple Chinese dramas that follow the same or similar plot as The Job of an Imperial Concubine. Especially Chinese vertical short dramas – just like the ones you see on TikTok and YouTube. An example of this is the short drama called: Reborn, she was forced into palace for sister, won emperor’s heart, and became supreme empress and Modern Consort’s Guide to Rising in Rank, that you can both find and watch on YouTube.

Modern Consort’s Guide definitely differs from the web novel and the similarities lie in how the transmigrator concubine, strives to survive in the cutthroat palace environment by seducing the Emperor and rising to be his most favoured wife. Unlike the novel, however, the concubine blatantly says she wants to be the most powerful woman in the palace whereas Zhaung Laoyan just wants to relax and stay out of drama as much as she can – she just knows the only way to do that is to stay on the Emperor’s good side, always. Another obvious difference is how the web novel takes on a more serious tone but the short drama is more comedic with a couple of overly exaggerated scenes, like how the emperor “called for water” seventeen times during his first night with the female protagonist.

But then we have the Reborn…and became supreme empress short drama that matches the web novel’s tone the most – excluding the mandatory cringey and exaggerated scenes found in every Chinese vertical drama. The drama focusses on Shen Zhinian, the female protagonist, and how she gets revenge on her sister for murdering her in her past life by gaining the emperor’s favour and rising in rank in the harem. The whole drama shows how Shen Zhinian manipulates the emperor and makes sure the schemes of the other women in the harem go back to bite them. It is an interesting watch when you are someone who appreciates a character who, against all odds, uses their brains more than their brawn.

To sum it all up, The Job of an Imperial Concubine is a Chinese web novel that encapsulates the transmigration aspects of most Asian web novels but introduces realistic characters, in a realistic setting with realistic consequences. Those of us who consciously look out for good, bingeworthy reads set in historical eras can really value this one.

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.

Freakazoid: The Odd Hero

It makes sense, that cartoon is something of an acquired taste. It was like a superhero version of Animaniacs with all of the Warner brothers—and Warner sister—in one person. On top of that, Freakazoid never really did much you’d associate with superheroes.

Sure, he had the powers, the super speed, and ran around in his underwear, but his confrontations with villains often ended with them being annoyed to insanity or bumbling their way into an arrest. Plus, his villains never really required that much effort to begin with.

Obviously, Freakazoid was a parody of superhero comics and cartoons. There were several super toons out at the time: Batman, Spider-Man, X-Men, the really fun Swamp Thing show, and the really mediocre Fantastic 4/Iron Man series over on UPN. But what if Freakazoid was introduced into the DC comic book universe?

No One Wants A Freakazoid Comic

Just hear me out! Freakazoid came out in 1995 and ran until 1997. In that time, the series didn’t get a comic book. It was a show owned by Warner Brothers which owns DC Comics. Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, and The Simpsons are all cartoons that got their own comic book runs. So, why not Freakazoid?

One reason is that it didn’t have a long run or anything. Still, there have been cartoons that got action figures off of few seasons. As a matter of fact, those cartoons were made purely to advertise the action figures! Freakazoid didn’t get any merchandise. Biker Mice from Mars got action figures, a video game, and a reboot.

Now, I’m not one to throw Biker Mice from Mars under the bus (Bucky O’Hare was better) but if they could get merch, surely Freakazoid could’ve gotten a standalone comic at least. No, he should’ve been a hero in the DC comic book universe. It would’ve been like if DC’s Captain Marvel swapped brains with Deadpool if it ran today.

In the 1990s, it would’ve been pretty much in line with the rest of DC animation’s comic book series. Endless wackiness and storylines that didn’t really go anywhere but what if he was introduced in this decade—well, it’s a wrap now—through one of the several universe shake-ups the publisher has had since its start?

If an intentionally annoying character like Deadpool can have dedicated comic, spin-offs, and a fanbase, I believe Freakazoid could pull it off. That is, if he’s introduced right and isn’t made into someone like…Sentry. Just all of the power and little of the “Wow, I’d read a full series on just this character”-factor.

I’m Serious

Put my man Freakazoid in DC Comics. He doesn’t need a whole comic; I’d settle for anything more than a cameo. Put in the Justice League. Yes, the Justice League, an organization—like the Avengers—with more members than there are Wu-Tang affiliates.

I want him mixed in so well with the comic book universe that we’ll have to get an edgelord grimdark version of him by Frank Miller with Rob Liefeld doing the art. Then everyone will be slack jawed once they get an Eisner Award for the mini-series Freakazoid Offline.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Tongari Boushi no Atelier, or Witch Hat Atelier, is a Japanese animated series (an anime) that started airing in April 2026. Produced by BUG FILMS, it took approximately 3 and a half years for the adaptation process of the manga, of the same name, to be completed before its premier. The hype following the announcement and release of the series was to be expected considering how the manga received critical acclaim after winning the Best Manga Award of 2025 at the 37^th Harvey Awards – outshining even One Piece.

Because of this, it felt only right to watch and review whether the anime lives up to the standards of the manga it is based on. It has already been a couple of weeks since Witch Hat Atelier came out, but it is never too late to express your thoughts on something that directly captures your attention when it does. This review only looks at the first episode of the anime because first impressions always matter.

Summary and Analysis

Overall, the plot of Witch Hat Atelier features a little girl named Coco who aspires to become a witch due to her immense love and admiration for the art of magic. Unfortunately, in the world she lives in, only those born and blessed with magical powers can be witches. All of this comes to head when Coco, after seeing a witch named Mr. Qifrey use magic, discovers all she needs to wield the mysterious and alluring power is a pen and a casting seal. From then onwards, adventure and intrigue ensues.

The series opens with our main character, Coco, questioning in a neutral tone whether the identities every person adopts is inherently known – thereafter she answers herself by stating how “These things aren’t decided at birth”. This opening scene already speaks to what kind of person Coco is. It insinuates that she is perceptive about the world and realistic about what she can be and cannot be even though she has an intense desire to become something she admires. Her optimism, however, almost attempts to blindside the viewers and have her appear as ignorant and naïve about how the world worked – even though that is not the case. We can see this in a flashback when her mother explains why and how she could not be a witch, leaving her disheartened, only for the next scene to be Coco enthusiastically trying to cast a spell whilst role-playing a witch. These scenes of the episode did well in revealing the duality of her character.

The overall mood of the episode is relatively down-to-earth. It is calming in a sense whereby we as the viewers are getting to know the characters, especially our main character. We can feel this mood shift when Coco tells the story of the time she met a “witch in a mask”. The change is not drastic, but there is something about the way Mr. Qifrey contemplates Coco’s story that gives it a sense of foreboding. Another scene in the episode that gave off this feeling is when Coco began experimenting with the pen and casting spells from the book. Just watching this scene would put any adult with a child on high alert because Coco, a 10 or so year old child, is evidently ignorant on how magic worked and the potential scale of its destructive power. The episode did well is setting up these shifts in tone and mood as the viewers can now anticipate how the upcoming episodes can make them feel and whether or not they are willing to go through that.

Another noteworthy aspect is the recurring image of the book. Not just the book Coco got from the masked witch but throughout the episode – from the start with Coco’s monologue to the end where the episode ends with a shot of a book’s page flipping to the next. This recurrence obviously points to the masked witch and how them giving Coco the book of spells started the whole story, but it can also symbolise a newfound knowledge and experience. In the series’ case, that is the recurring image of the book symbolises Coco’s new enlightenment into the world she had always dreamed of experiencing. That is why the episode ending with a page turning signifies a new set of ideas and understanding that Coco is about to acquire about the “mysterious and sparkly, valuable and pretty” world of magic.

Animation and Voice Acting

The animation style is nothing short of breath-taking. It is smooth in the way the characters move in the settings they are in and how natural and realistic these movements are. The scene where Coco cuts a piece of fabric for Mr. Qifrey directly captures how delicate and precise the animators of the episode (and perhaps series) were in every frame they animated.

The only downside – but not too much of a downside – is the voice-acting in the series. This judgement is specific to the Japanese voice-acting. There is nothing bad about it, but there is nothing special either. It almost felt as though it was done to serve a purpose; the script said Coco needs to be happy, so the voice actor spoke in a happy voice; the script said Mr. Qifrey needs to be carefree, so the voice actor used a light-hearted tone in their speech. Not to diminish the work put into bringing the characters personalities to life, however the voice acting can be praised in the same light as some other anime already out there.

Closing Words

In closing, the series is a definite watch, especially if you are interested in fantasy, magic and adventure. The medieval fantasy aesthetic makes it even more appealing to watch, and it really gives off the vibe that the anime takes place in an alternate world where magic is part of people’s everyday lives though strictly observed by the witches who can use it. Which makes it even more exciting for what’s to come in the following episodes regarding the worldbuilding and magical systems put in place.

So, if you are a blatant fan of the Harry Potter franchise, The Lord of the Rings trilogy or literally any isekai anime with magic and overpowered characters, then Tongari Boushi no Atelier is without doubt made for you.

Staff Writer; Fadzai Nyamande

A South African who brings her love for fiction, manga, and storytelling into every piece she creates. Her writing is shaped by imagination, curiosity, and a true appreciation for the worlds stories can build.

Feel free to drop a note at; FadzaiN@AfroGamers.com.