So it reads as more than a correction when Netflix rolls out a gunslinger on November 3 who was flesh and blood long before he was ever a cartoon.

Bass X Machina is the kind of swing you take only when you have something to prove. Studio Mir, the South Korean house behind The Legend of Korra and Devil May Cry, runs the animation. LeSean Thomas created this one, same as he did Cannon Busters and Yasuke, so the pedigree is not in question. Brian Tyree Henry, an Oscar and Emmy nominee, voices the lead while serving as a producer. Every episode drops at once. No weekly wait, no stretching the suspense across two months. Netflix clearly wants folks to binge the whole thing and start fighting about it before anyone’s had a chance to cool off.

The setup is simple, but it carries weight. You take one of the wildest real lives the 1800s ever produced and drop him into a busted, retrofuturist version of the frontier. Outlaws everywhere. Machines built for war. And something worse than either, waiting in the dark.

Now here is what most people never learned in school. He actually existed. Bass Reeves walked this earth, and the facts of his life beat most of what a writer would dare invent.

He was born into slavery in Arkansas, somewhere around 1838. When the war broke out, accounts say he seized his chance to escape, disappearing into Indian Territory for years. He lived among Native communities, learning the languages and customs of several tribes. Their ways stopped being foreign to him after a while. So did the country itself, every creek bed and low rise committed to memory, because out there a man who did not know exactly where he stood did not last.

Judge Isaac Parker needed deputies with the nerve to cross into the badlands past Fort Smith and ride back out alive. Reeves fit. A Black man carrying that badge and that much authority west of the Mississippi was close to unheard of at the time.

Then you get to the numbers, and they sound made up. Reeves reportedly made over 3,000 arrests during his career, though historians caution that the exact total remains difficult to verify. Decades on the job. He could shoot straight with either hand, walking out of more gunfights than anyone could count without ever catching a bullet. Disguise was his favorite trick. Sometimes Reeves showed up in an outlaw camp dressed as some busted saddle bum or a passing preacher. The wanted man rarely recognized the lawman until the cuffs were already on. One warrant had his own son’s name on it. He served it anyway. You will also hear that the Lone Ranger got borrowed from his story, a theory nobody has ever nailed down for certain. Does not much matter which way that one falls. The fictional cowboy in a white hat became a household name, while the country filed the actual human being under forgotten, on purpose.

That erasure is what this story keeps poking at. The deck was stacked against him twice over.

Here is what Thomas seems to understand in his bones. You do not honor a life like that with some solemn, museum quiet biopic. You crank the volume. His vision mashes anime into the old cowboy picture, running the whole mess through a punk amp. The teaser plays that out. Boiler steam, brass fittings, a blade meeting a six shooter, and a hero who moves like he made peace with his own funeral a while back. It looks like a tribute with the volume knob snapped off, and you watch thirty seconds and nod.

The voice work goes deep on talent. Tati Gabrielle carries an edge she has sharpened across film sets and game booths. Cree Summer shows up too, and her voice basically raised a generation of kids without most of them realizing it. Janelle Monáe does double duty, voicing Glory and performing the original theme song, “Honor Killing,” the kind of extra mile that tells you nobody on this project was phoning it in.

Step back far enough and you can see the pattern Thomas has been laying brick by brick. An android who looked like a young Black girl drove the anime road trip in Cannon Busters. An African samurai, pulled from a real historical man, anchored Yasuke inside feudal Japan. This makes three. One quiet argument stated three different ways: a form that Black viewers have loved for ages while rarely catching their own reflection in it, finally handing the spotlight to faces that match the crowd.

Animation built for grown people fits this story like a tailored coat. The deputy walked through blood and gray choices during a brutal stretch of history. Any version softened for the whole family would have to lie about half of it. Keep the violence honest, leave the morality tangled, and you get a lead heavy enough for prestige drama, minus the live action price tag. Ink and paint can follow a soul anywhere a mind can picture.

Underneath all the gunsmoke sits a heavier question about who gets to become myth in the first place. That old frontier formula was never just entertainment. It whispered to the whole country about who counted as a hero, whose dirt was free for the taking, whose days rose to the level of something worth retelling. The guest list stayed short for about a hundred years. Blue Eye Samurai cracked that door recently, pulling an overlooked perspective into the light through striking animation, and this show walks through the same opening wearing different boots.

The strange machinery is doing real work too, not just looking cool. Brass gears and patched together contraptions turn the backdrop into a question with teeth. What is left of a man’s soul once every gear around him was bolted together to break him? Hang a badge on him and the whole thing twists tighter, since the nation that handed him that authority had only recently stopped allowing men to claim him as property.

Everything hangs on one bet: whether the show can hold both halves at the same time without letting either slip. The dumb fun of a sharpshooter cutting down monsters, next to the ache of a figure the real nation worked hard to erase. Stick the landing, and Reeves gets handed the kind of larger than life treatment the frontier myth kept locked away from him. Outsized. Hard to turn away from. Written down to last, not scrawled in something that fades.

November 3. The whole run in one sitting. A legend returned to us, and charging interest.

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.

And that rider is exactly why Vampire Hunter D keeps outliving every fad that was supposed to bury it. It first hit screens back in 1985 and somehow it hasn’t aged a day.

Most anime curdles. You go back to it years later and the art looks stiff, the story crawls, whatever scandalized folks at the time barely registers anymore. This one dodges all of that. Hideyuki Kikuchi wrote the novels it springs from, Yoshitaka Amano gave its central character that unforgettable look, and together they made something that flat out refuses to feel dated. Picture a world where a castle gone to ruin sits in the shadow of dead cyborg machinery and nobody around thinks that is strange. Where ancient bloodsuckers lord over crumbling estates powered by lost tech. Where a cross might save you, or might do nothing at all, because most of the rules you learned from Western myth got rewritten ten thousand years back.

Go to the first picture and the texture tells the story. Directed by Toyoo Ashida, the 1985 original is rough around the edges the way only vintage OVAs can be. Grainy color. That analog hiss baked into every frame. Doris Lang, a farm girl out on the fringe, gets marked by Count Magnus Lee, a Noble pushing ten thousand years old who wants her as his bride. Her options look grim. So she hires the drifter nobody trusts, the pale loner carrying a sword as long as he is tall.

What hooks you here is the pulp. This version leans hard into grindhouse instincts. Magnus Lee’s castle works as a funhouse of trapdoors, snake women, and horrors lurking around every corner. His daughter L’Armica sneers at the drifter precisely for what he is, a mongrel holding the blood of her kind and the frailty of ours. A mutant named Rei Ginsei covets Doris too, and his ability to twist space around him makes the fellow especially dangerous. Then there’s Greco, a mayor’s brat slobbering after her from the human side. Everybody wants a piece of her. Our quiet killer stands in their way, barely wasting a syllable.

And then the hand talks.

There is a face living in his left hand. A wisecracking little symbiote that talks trash and chews up whatever scene it lands in. Every so often, the little rascal saves the day by swallowing a blast of energy, a mouthful of dirt, or even a whole windstorm. On paper it reads ridiculous. In practice it works, and that smart mouth ends up being a big reason the movie doesn’t sink all the way into gloom. People have been quoting that gremlin for forty years now.

Jump a decade and a half forward and the ambition explodes. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust premiered at the Fantasia International Film Festival in 2000 before reaching American theaters in 2001, and brother, it’s a different animal. Yoshiaki Kawajiri, the same mind behind Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, took the helm. The man doesn’t do restraint when spectacle is on the table. Adapted from Kikuchi’s third book, Demon Deathchase, this feature trades grime for grandeur. Every frame looks painted. Character designer Yutaka Minowa builds on Amano’s haunting vision, giving the film a beauty that feels almost unreal. Shadows pool thick as ink. Light spills through cathedral windows in a way that makes you forget you’re watching animation rather than a moving gallery.

The emotion cuts a lot deeper here. A wealthy family hires our wanderer to retrieve Charlotte, their daughter, taken by a Noble named Meier Link. Simple bounty, right? Except she went willingly. She loves him. He loves her back, truly, and the chase stops being a rescue and turns into a tragedy you watch coming and can’t halt.

That is the genius move. Bloodlust asks whether the monster is actually the monster. Meier isn’t drooling over a victim. He is a being out of time trying to hold one honest thing before the dark claims it. Meanwhile a rival crew, the Marcus brothers, hunts the same prize for coin, and among their company travels Leila, the lone soul with real warmth in her chest. Her slow thaw toward the quiet swordsman, two outsiders recognizing each other, gives the picture its aching core. The moment she asks him to visit her grave someday wrecks people to this day.

The ruined keep they race toward belongs to Countess Carmilla, a legend soaked in Bathory lore, scheming to rise again through Charlotte’s veins. But getting there means surviving the deadly Barbarois warriors hired to protect Meier Link. Benge slips into shadows. Mashira becomes a monstrous werewolf. Caroline takes on deadly plantlike forms. Together they turn the journey into a gauntlet of nightmares. Kawajiri stages each clash as a music video from hell, gorgeous and vicious at once.

So which earns the crown? Depends on what you came for.

The original is comfort food for the horror head. It is a mess, and proud of it. Lurid, full of fangs, carrying the grain of an era when the medium was still testing how strange it could get away with being. The movie wants a scream, a flinch, maybe both at once. It won’t apologize for any of it. It stalks, slashes, and heaps on the body horror, basically daring you to look away first. Nobody puts it on for restraint. You put it on because some madman had the nerve to toss Dracula and Mad Max in a blender decades before the genre figured out that was even on the menu.

Bloodlust is the fancy one. Put it on for the friend who swears up and down that cartoons cannot make him feel a thing. Then the love story at its center does precisely that, aching in a way this medium almost never has the guts to try. Its visuals embarrass most of what gets called animation now. And the sadness of it just settles in your chest and refuses to leave. The 1985 one goes for your pulse. This one goes for your throat and takes its sweet time squeezing. If the earlier outing plays like a haunted carnival, the follow up plays like a requiem. It is not a continuation of the same story, but a separate adventure that finds something even more heartbreaking in the same lonely hunter.

Here is the thread tying both together, the thing that drags new folks to these movies decade after decade. It is him. The dhampir who fits nowhere.

Think about it. People fear him for the fangs he hides. Nobles can’t stand him either, put off by the human weakness in his blood. He guards the very folks who would drive a stake through him the second they figured out what he really is. And on he goes, chasing the monsters tied to his own bloodline across a dying planet, one century bleeding into the next. He doesn’t rest. The girl is never his to keep. That one place that might feel like home? Always just out of reach. That loneliness is written into his very bones, and it lands different when you have ever felt caught between two things that both reject you.

Amano’s designs make the ache visible. Those long limbs, that androgynous grace, the costume somewhere between samurai and funeral. He looks like sorrow wearing a hat. The far future around him, with its crumbling tech, feudal terror, and mutant wildlife, stays fresh because almost nobody else commits to that exact recipe. Other shows explore apocalyptic ruins. Vampire tales have been told a thousand times. This saga fuses both into one bleak, beautiful dreamscape and refuses to blink.

That is why newcomers still fall hard. That is how the old heads end up guarding their discs. You can see the influence reaching into later Castlevania games, where producer Koji Igarashi acknowledged Vampire Hunter D as one inspiration for Alucard. That blend of otherworldly beauty with deadly loneliness became part of a larger gothic tradition spanning anime and gaming. And the story is still finding new audiences. In August 2026, GKIDS announced that Bloodlust would return to North American theaters in a new HD presentation, with a wider theatrical and home entertainment release planned for 2027. More than twenty five years after its original premiere, that beautiful nightmare is getting another chance to haunt the big screen.

So if you have yet to ride out past the edge of the map with the quietest killer in the wasteland, handle that soon. Put on the grimy 1985 cut first for the jolt of it, then let Bloodlust go ahead and wreck you proper. Run them back to back and watch the art form evolve. Two different adventures built around the same haunted soul, one rowdy and raw, the other quieter, more heartbreaking.

Out there the sun is still a threat. Those old castles have not fallen. And some solitary rider is moving along that road with no end in sight, going on forever, close enough to human that it hurts.

That is the magic. That is why it lasts.

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.

Shinichiro Watanabe, the mind behind Cowboy Bebop, served as chief director while Studio Bones turned the project into a playground for an unusually large collection of writers, directors, designers, and animators. The show lived on that freedom. One week you got a zombie outbreak played strictly for laughs. A few episodes later Dandy entered an intergalactic grand prix that eventually hurled him billions of years into the future. Over 26 episodes across two seasons, very little felt obligated to what came before because continuity was never allowed to put a leash on the imagination.

You barely need the premise, which is sort of the joke. Our guy drifts around the galaxy registering new species for cash, hauling along a cranky robot called QT and a Betelgeusian who looks a lot like a house cat and answers to Meow. The three of them inhale wings at a knockoff joint with a name that would get sued. The Gogol Empire keeps trying to capture Dandy, and the show cannot be bothered to tell you the full reason until much later. Small stakes, loud shirts, a pompadour you could see from orbit.

Variety was the flex. Inside a single stretch the show might hand you body horror, then drop Dandy onto a strange planet populated by highly evolved plants, then swing into a ridiculous high school musical parody that had no right to work as well as it did. Other episodes played with radically different visual styles, alternate dimensions, and worlds where the characters themselves could be bent into shapes that barely resembled ordinary existence. None of it needed to connect neatly. That was the point nobody argued with.

The payoff landed late, when the series finally dove headfirst into the whole alternate selves idea and nailed it precisely because it had already earned the chaos. Dandy encountered other versions of himself, QT, and Meow scattered across alternate universes, each one a shade off from the crew we knew. By the finale, the reason the Gogol Empire had been chasing him came into sharper focus. The idiot everybody had underestimated possessed extraordinary Pyonium energy, the very thing capable of bending the boundaries between dimensions. That smug narrator floating over every adventure turned out to sit a lot closer to the center of everything than you would ever guess.

So there it is. Dandy could die, planets could explode, timelines could swap, dimensions could fold in on themselves, and the next episode would just keep walking, hair unbothered. No grief counseling. No three film arc about processing the pain. Keep it moving.

That lightness was the actual power. A solid decade before alternate worlds became the industry’s comfort food, this funky little oddball treated infinity like a shrug and a punchline. Big stakes were never the aim. Dumping them was, which let the imagination run anywhere it wanted without pausing to ask permission.

Put it on now and it feels less like an old relic and more like a memo nobody answered. The culture caught up to the idea, then lost the lesson sitting under it. Endless possibility only stays fun while it stays loose. Grade every alternate universe on a rubric and you choke the very thing that made it worth watching. Our boy figured all that out while hunting a paycheck across a galaxy that could fall apart at any moment, laughing the entire way down. It’s a mystery, like he always said. Maybe just let it stay one.

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.

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.

A marine biologist named Stephen Hillenburg cooked up SpongeBob, and it hit screens in 1999. Bikini Bottom just flat out refuses to follow normal rules, and nobody living there seems the least bit bothered. Fire burns fine underwater. Sandy the squirrel walks around in a diving suit and everybody treats it like ordinary Tuesday business. None of it makes a lick of sense, which was the whole idea. Hillenburg spent real years studying the ocean before he ever picked up a pencil, and you can tell. His made up sea somehow feels lived in.

What sneaks up on you is how much of the comedy grows out of work. Half the show plays out at a fast food counter. You’ve got a boss so cheap he’d charge you rent on the air near his register. His star employee, though, treats flipping burgers like a calling, which drives their coworker Squidward slowly out of his mind. Meanwhile the competition is a guy the size of a thumbtack, dead certain that one stolen recipe stands between him and the life he deserves. Take away the water and it’s just people worn down by work, chasing things, putting up with folks they never chose. Adults heard those jokes one way. The young ones heard them another. That second layer is a big chunk of why the thing lasted.

Now flip the channel in your memory to Dimmsdale.

The Fairly OddParents came from Butch Hartman, and there’s a wrinkle worth noting. The kid actually reached the screen before SpongeBob did. His scrappy shorts turned up on Oh Yeah! Cartoons back in 1998, a full year ahead of Bikini Bottom opening its doors, though he wouldn’t claim his own half hour slot until 2001. Timmy Turner is ten, ignored by parents who love him in a distracted sort of way, and terrorized by a red haired babysitter named Vicky who rules his house like a warden. Into that gap float Cosmo and Wanda, magical guardians who grant almost any desire the boy can dream up.

Where the sponge’s saga mines the grind of adulthood, Turner’s tale lives entirely inside the fantasy of being small and powerless. Every episode is a pressure valve for childhood frustration. Bad grade? Wish it away. Bully getting loud? Poof, problem solved. The genius sits in the catch. There’s a rulebook, Da Rules, and it exists purely to make sure each wish curdles into a mess. You cannot manufacture true love. Fairies cannot directly maim or kill people. And whatever the kid conjures always spirals into a lesson he’d rather skip.

That structure tells you everything about the split. One cartoon asks you to laugh at the absurd machinery of the working world. The other hands you the keys to omnipotence, then quietly teaches you why unchecked wanting rarely ends clean. Both are moral in their bones. They just preach from opposite pulpits.

Look at the texture, too. Hillenburg’s ocean is soft and painterly, a little grimy, alive with strange organic shapes and a jazz and sea shanty soundtrack that feels older than the audience. Hartman’s Dimmsdale is sharp, flat, loud, built from bold outlines and primary colors, humming with the frantic buzz of a grade schooler bouncing off the walls after too much cereal. You could mute either and still know which universe you’d wandered into inside three seconds.

Even the pacing splits them. Bikini Bottom often slows down and marinates in a single stupid moment until it becomes hypnotic. That famous shot of the sponge scrubbing while the narrator drones about time passing? Pure patience as a punchline. Dimmsdale, by contrast, sprints. Setup, wish, catastrophe, reset, all before you can catch your breath. Hartman built a machine for velocity. The marine biologist built a mood.

This is where I tip my hat to what the network was pulling off back then. Early 2000s Nick wasn’t chasing a single flavor of funny. It was betting on range. You could roll out of bed and watch a fry cook find spiritual meaning in a spatula, then turn around an hour later and see a lonely ten year old accidentally destroy his town with a careless thought. Neither approach apologized for itself or tried to mimic its rival.

That confidence mattered. A lot of channels pick a lane and flog it into the ground. Nick, in its prime, understood that being young contains multitudes. Little ones are surreal philosophers, then turn into raw balls of want a breath later. The biologist spoke to the first mode. The animator spoke to the second. Put them side by side and you’ve pretty much got the whole feeling of being a kid, back when the adults ran everything and mostly missed whatever was rattling around in your head.

Both franchises got milked long past the point they should have quit, and the reason is plain enough. When something taps a real vein, executives keep drilling long after the well goes dry. Purists argue the fry cook lost his soul after his creator first stepped back, and plenty of folks felt Turner’s adventures overstayed their welcome too. Fair criticism, all of it. Still, go back to those first few seasons of either one and they hold up. Two cartoons chasing totally opposite notions of what counts as funny, parked under the same roof, both landing. That is not nothing.

I catch myself missing that whenever I sit through a lot of what’s out now. Too much of it feels ground down into mush, scared to pick a lane or say anything with a pulse behind it. Back then two very different minds were handed room to be strange in their own directions, and Nick had the nerve to platform both without forcing them to rhyme. The undersea tale dug into adult drudgery through the eyes of a creature too pure to notice how bleak his gig really is. Timmy’s world, meanwhile, mapped the fantasy of childhood escape and gently reminded us that getting everything you want is its own kind of trap.

Neither is better. That was never the question worth asking. They’re two answers to the same riddle of how you make a kid laugh while slipping something real under the door. Put a fry cook at one end and a starry eyed boy at the far side, and you’ve drawn the full width of what that beloved network could be when it trusted its own imagination.

And honestly? Both of them still hit. Throw on an old episode of either and watch how fast the years fall off your shoulders. That’s the mark of the good stuff. It waits for you, patient as the tide, ready to pull you right back under.

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.

Four titles come to mind first whenever this subject surfaces. Golden Boy, Excel Saga, Those Who Hunt Elves, and Dragon Half. Each feels built by folks who assumed nobody in charge was paying attention, and that freedom is the entire flavor.

Start with Golden Boy. Kintaro Oe completed the curriculum at Tokyo University’s law school and then walked away without the degree, choosing instead to pedal a bicycle across Japan and study life the hard way. He scrubs toilets. Writes code. Learns to pull noodles by hand. He also spends a healthy chunk of each episode leering at women in a manner that would land a real man in a cell. Gross on paper, no argument. Yet the work carries a genuine heart beneath all the sweat and the nosebleeds. Kintaro helps every woman he crosses, mends something broken in her, then rides off before she can thank him properly. This six episode OVA run, released from late 1995 through mid 1996, played the perversion for slapstick, but it never let go of the sweetness. That balance is a magic trick most makers today are far too nervous to attempt.

Then comes Excel Saga, possibly the most gloriously broken piece of television I have ever set my eyes on. Director Shinichi Watanabe took Rikdo Koshi’s manga and treated the source like a chew toy. Every week the thing picked a fresh genre to dismantle. A sci fi invasion flick one Friday, a survival drama the next, a bowling sports story after that. Its author himself gets dragged on screen as part of a recurring gag in which he is made to approve each new mutation of his own creation. A man forced to watch his baby twisted into something unrecognizable, and his suffering is the punchline.

Its finale sealed the case. Episode twenty six, titled Going Too Far, was built on purpose to be too filthy and too violent for broadcast, so it never aired and surfaced only on the home release. Watanabe said afterward that going beyond the limits of an ordinary television series felt good. Sit with that. It was neither accident nor leak. Someone sat in a room and decided the last act should be a middle finger to the very notion of a limit. That kind of nerve rarely survives a boardroom.

Those Who Hunt Elves rests on maybe the most deranged premise of the bunch. Three ordinary people from modern Japan get hauled into a sword and sorcery realm alongside a Type 74 military tank. To return home, they must gather fragments of a spell, and those fragments sit tattooed on the skin of random elven women. So the plot, week after week, has these travelers cornering elves and stripping them down to read the runes. Written out plainly, it sounds like something you would never confess to owning. In motion it plays goofy rather than nasty, closer to a rowdy schoolyard scrap than anything sleazy, complete with a tank that eventually becomes possessed by the spirit of a cat. One detail earns a mention: this oddball helped show that late night anime could find an audience, helping open a lane for a wave of titles that followed.

And Dragon Half. Two brief OVA episodes from 1993, and I have never laughed harder at anything so short. Mink is the mixed blood daughter of a legendary dragon slayer and the very beast he was sent to slay, the two having fallen in love instead. She spends the entire runtime chasing a pop idol who hunts monsters on the side, a fellow named, I promise you this is real, Dick Saucer. Character art collapses into squished chibi shapes mid scene for no reason beyond the laugh. One demon in the second short spends his single appearance bitter that he got cut from the first. Its closing tune, “My Omelette,” turns absurd food lyrics into a full blown musical number set to Beethoven. This piece roasts fantasy quests and idol culture and its own lane all at once, and it never pretends to sit above the trash it happily riffs on.

So why does almost none of this get made now. Money is part of it. Current production moves through committees, streaming partners, and merchandise forecasts, and committees flinch at anything liable to spook a sponsor or trip a content filter. Another part is the internet. A single clip yanked out of context can torch a project long before the full joke lands, so studios play it safe. And honestly, a fair share of newer comedy leans on referencing other anime rather than standing on its own two feet and simply being funny. There is a real difference between a wink and a joke, and the wink won.

I am not going to pretend every old tape holds up. Plenty of it is dated. Some of it is flat out nasty, and a few of those gags would clear a room now, with good reason. We lost the nerve underneath. These shows were happy to look stupid and grosser than anybody expected, all for a laugh. Those creators trusted you to handle a mess. They picked the joke over the brand and lived with it.

Today’s product is usually prettier. Cleaner lines, smoother motion, tighter scripts. What it seldom carries is that gremlin energy, the sense that anything at all might happen because no one was policing the room. Give me the tank possessed by a cat. Give me the wanderer who studies life by scrubbing floors. Hand me Dick Saucer and that absurd theme song. That chaos was never a flaw in the design. It was the whole reason to press play.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

Katsuhiro Otomo put out Akira in 1988 and pretty much wrote the book on animated dread. He set it in a Neo-Tokyo raised up on the ashes of a city a catastrophic explosion had erased, so Japan’s whole nuclear nightmare sat right there in the backdrop. The story kept poking the same ugly nerve. What happens once our reach gets way out ahead of our judgment? Mamoru Oshii turned up seven years behind him with Ghost in the Shell in 1995, and his Major Kusanagi spent the runtime unsure whether any soul was still left inside a mass-produced body wired into the net. Think about the timing on that. Regular folks were out here cussing at a dial up modem, while this movie already had its teeth in what your online self amounts to, whether a hacked memory still belongs to you, where the human ends and the code kicks in.

That was the assignment back then. Look forward. Cowboy Bebop, Serial Experiments Lain, Steins;Gate, Ergo Proxy, Evangelion. Even the giant robot joints carried heft, because the machine always doubled as a question about the boy strapped inside it. These stories chewed on cities and circuits and deep space and the bomb. They treated what’s coming like a place worth fighting over.

Now flip on a seasonal lineup and count how many series open with some tired office worker getting flattened by a truck.

Truck-kun, the fanbase calls him. Patron saint of the reset button. He rolls up, does his job, and our hero wakes reincarnated in a swords and sorcery realm holding cheat-level abilities, a swelling crowd of adoring companions, and a demon lord to slap around. This is isekai, “another world” in Japanese, and across the last decade it went from a rare novelty to the beast devouring the schedule whole.

Look at the count and it gets silly. One industry analysis found that for something like two decades the genre barely showed up, maybe zero to four new titles in a given year. It hit fourteen by 2019, dropped back to eight in pandemic-hit 2020, and after that the thing just went nuts. Twenty six in 2021, twenty three a year later, thirty three by 2023. Then a fat thirty four in 2024, the year this other world stuff swelled into roughly fifteen percent of all the fresh television anime Japan put out. Sit with this one. More than half of every otherworld title counted in that analysis arrived after 2020. Not stacked up over four patient decades. Dumped on us inside a handful of years.

Why? Follow the money, same as it ever was. Making original animation is pricey and flat out scary for the people signing checks. So studios and publishers keep returning to a content mine that already proved it could build an audience. Amateurs post serialized stories on a site called Shosetsuka ni Narou, or Let’s Become a Novelist, where popular works can arrive with readers already waiting. Publishers scoop up the ones that catch fire, turn them into light novels and manga, and some eventually make the jump to animation. By 2026, more than 200 anime projects had come from works posted on Narou alone. KADOKAWA itself later admitted the business had leaned too hard on familiar winners, pointing to a bias toward Narou and isekai properties that helped create market saturation and left less room for originality.

Then wrap the business case in something warmer. These shows peddle comfort. The lead is usually a burnout, a shut in, a kid who got stepped on, somebody life forgot. He dies ordinary and wakes chosen. No shock that grinding adults eat it up, especially during lockdown stretches when everybody wanted a soft spot to duck into. I get the pull. Honestly. Ain’t nothing wrong with a warm blanket after a brutal week.

But here comes my gripe, and it is a Blerd gripe to the core.

The old masters used their craft to squint hard at what waits ahead and warn us. This new wave mostly uses it to bounce. One lineage asked where humanity is headed. The other asks how quick can I ditch this planet for a pretend realm where I finally stand as the baddest cat in the room.

Not every last drop of it is hollow, mind you. Mushoku Tensei caught real smoke for its main character early, yet it earned respect from plenty of viewers for actually letting a broken man grow up. Re:Zero runs its lead through a meat grinder of trauma and fallout. Every so often somebody bends the familiar frame toward something true. Make believe was never the villain either. The atomic dread of those classics was its own flavor of flight, and the mecha stuff always packed a little wish fulfillment. Nobody is pretending the golden age was spotless.

The rub is sheer volume. When a single lane swallows around fifteen percent of everything, the neighboring lanes start fighting harder for room. High concept science fiction slowed to a drip while the reincarnation assembly belt ran three shifts a day. Where is this generation’s Ghost in the Shell, wrestling with what synthetic minds mean now that we went and actually built them? Right now we are living smack inside the questions those elder films only dreamed. The face scanners are already watching. Chatbots fake a soul convincingly enough to spook your grandma. And the fight over what a body even is anymore runs hot every day. The moment is begging for bold speculative storytelling, and a giant slab of the business answered by mailing everybody to fantasy medieval Europe with a floating status screen attached.

Maybe the tide turns. Fans have been grumbling louder about the same tale showing up on loop, and even major industry players have admitted that leaning too hard on familiar formulas can squeeze the life out of originality. Better still, Science SARU brought Ghost in the Shell back to television in July, becoming the first studio other than Production I.G to animate a Ghost in the Shell series across the franchise’s roughly three decades on screen. The old dog got let off the porch again, which tells you somebody upstairs still trusts that a hard look at what’s coming can move units.

I hope they are right. Because this art form handed me my earliest vision of what might be waiting for all of us, ugly and dazzling and painfully human. It taught a kid on the couch to lift his eyes and look outward. I would love the next kid to get more than a truck, a cheat code, and a one way ticket clean out of reality. Hand them a mirror aimed at the horizon instead. That is what this whole thing was made to do.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

What’s It About?

The manhwa features female protagonist, Penelope Eckhart – a woman hated throughout the kingdom for her brutish, arrogant and temperamental attitude and behaviour. Penelope is not only all this but also a duke’s adopted daughter as well as a villain character in a otome game – a romance simulation game – titled ‘Daughter of the Duke: Love Project’.

Fast forward, we are introduced to Siyeon Cha, a university student from modern day South Korea who has finished playing all modes of the otome game; including the frustrating ‘hard mode’. Under mysterious circumstances, she finds herself transmigrated into that very same game as Penelope Eckhart herself. Forced to navigate the new world whilst bound to a system that makes her play on hard mode, she strives to gain all the skills and affection of the love interests needed to clear the game and survive her impending death. All the while, the game’s love interests slowly begin to realise that she wasn’t as bad as they originally believed.

Will It Flop or Flourish?

To be honest, anything can happen. Villains are Destined to Die is not the first or only manhwa series to receive an animated adaptation. There has already been a few in the past couple of years and currently, more have either been confirmed to be in the making or confirmed to have a release date – just like the action, supernatural webtoon, Eleceed.

The biggest concern fans might have about the adaptation could possibly be which animation studio picks up the series. As Solo Leveling and The Beginning After the End (TBATE) have shown, the animation style and the amount of passion put into the work by the animators can either make or break a manhwa’s overall adaptation. Another worry could also be how loyal the writers and animators will be to the series’ IP. The manhwa is already well adapted from the web novel its based on, so transferring that same faithfulness to an arguably bigger project – especially one with a, maybe, smaller budget – can lead to a third-rate production.

Even with these key factors, which should leave some fans worried, there is still hope that everything might end up going well or even better than we expected. For one, Villains are Destined to Die is just that popular with a sizably good worldwide fanbase. This means that more time and effort could be spent making the animated series stand out as well as its plot does.

An argument can be made that the manhwa might receive the TBATE treatment, not all hope is lost when you consider the difference in the level of expectation from them both. Meaning, some of us readers are likely holding on to the art style, costume designing and character chemistry being as faithful to the original work as possible – even if it means sacrificing smooth animation and a plot arc or two. Similarly to what was done for Who Made Me a Princess in 2025 with its beautiful Chinese animation.

Future Villainess Manhwa Animated Adaptations

If all goes well with this villainess manhwa and the popularity blows up as most fans expect it to, then more villainess manhwa adaptations may be present in our future. With the success of Solo Leveling, a lot of action/system/cultivation manhwa readers have held their breaths, waiting for the next big hit. The same may end up happening with the villainess manhwa fanbase.

Villains are Destined to Die is by far not the only best and biggest name in the manhwa scene. It simply managed to become the template for what villainess manhwa should look like and has inspired manhwa creators to create more original and refreshing works following the trope. Including, but not limited to, this series, there are Kill the Villainess, Beware the Villainess, How to Win my Husband Over and Your Throne that also have the potential of being picked up for adaptation the same way Villains are Destined to Die is. It is also important to note how this manhwa grew in popularity when it was being pushed forward on recommendation lists for people to read during the times of Covid-19.

Although not particularly a villainess manhwa, The Remarried Empress, recognised for its intriguing revenge story and otherwise controversial plot points, was picked up for a live action adaptation. Its Korean drama is even anticipated to premier on the 4^th November 2026 on Disney + which continues to show the possibilities villainess and fantasy romance manhwa have in the film and television industries.

Altogether, the Villains are Destined to Die manhwa is an interesting reach into the trope for adapting from the Korean comic market considering how the Japanese manga has since dominated the Asian animation industry. With nothing else revealed about the upcoming animated series, we, as fans of both the web novel and manhwa can only wait and hope it will be worth the watch.

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.

Beerus.

Rewind to where the property sat before he arrived. Toriyama had handed us planets, proud Saiyans, Namekians, King Kai, Supreme Kai and an afterlife with its own divine order. Frieza squeezed the galaxy in his fist. Cell absorbed his way toward pure nightmare fuel. Majin Buu melted folks into candy and swallowed them whole. Heavy hitters, no doubt, but every last one lived inside a single tidy shelf of existence. We had gods and Kais above the heroes already, and honestly that felt pretty close to the roof of the whole building.

Then the destroyer sauntered in and ripped that roof clean off.

Battle of Gods dropped in 2013 and quietly reset the table. Here was a being who treated Super Saiyan 3, the transformation that once looked like the mountaintop, as a light warmup before dessert. Beerus swatted our hero around like a kitten batting yarn. The scary part was not only the gap in muscle. It was the reveal that a whole tier of reality had been sitting above everyone the entire run, unbothered, asleep, waiting. All that blood the Z Fighters spilled suddenly read like the minor leagues.

That single idea cracked the franchise wide open.

Look at what came pouring through the door behind him. Whis, the attendant and martial arts master who casually outclasses Beerus himself, introduced angels into the mythology. God ki became an entirely new lane of power. Super Saiyan God arrived through the ritual, while training under Whis eventually pushed Goku and Vegeta toward Super Saiyan Blue, opening a fresh training path with real stakes instead of one more screaming glow up. The old rule was simple. Get mad, shine brighter, win. The purple deity flipped it. Steady your spirit, master divine energy, or stay stuck forever in the kiddie pool.

The cosmology kept unfolding from there. We learned there was not one lonely Kai running heaven. Twelve universes existed, each with its own destroyer and its own angel keeping the scales even. Above all of them sat Zeno, a tiny childlike ruler with the authority to erase whole realities on a whim. None of that framework existed before a certain feline decided he was hungry. Lifting the ceiling barely covers it. Truth is, there were floors and floors stacked above the one nobody knew was there.

Here is the part heads sleep on. The stakes turned personal without him ever needing the villain slot. Conquest was never the point. No hunt for immortality, no grab for the Dragon Balls, no revenge tour. Mostly he wanted good food, more sleep, and the occasional bout to keep his edge sharp. That relaxed menace hit different. You could not reason your way past him, could not out will him, could not friendship speech him into a redemption arc. Half the tension in early Super came from the crew tiptoeing around a landlord who might evict their entire existence if the pudding tasted mid.

Whis balanced that dread with comedy, and the pairing gave the show a texture it never had. Suddenly training arcs carried weight again because the target had moved. Goku and Vegeta were not grinding to top the next planet buster. They were reaching toward the divine, learning under an angel, trying to earn a nod from a creature who could yawn them out of the plot. That fresh ambition breathed life into a saga plenty of us assumed had already peaked back with Buu.

Then comes the payoff that settles the whole argument. The Tournament of Power grew out of the much larger cosmic playground Beerus helped open in the first place. Zeno, the survival gauntlet where eight universes gambled everything on a single ring, and the idea of entire realities competing for survival all depended on a multiverse that Dragon Ball had barely imagined before the Gods of Destruction entered the picture. Beerus did not personally create the tournament. Goku and Zeno pushed that event into motion. But the biggest, most ambitious event in the property’s history still traces back through the world that opened after one bored destroyer woke from a nap because of a prophecy about a legendary crimson form. Look at the calendar in 2026, better than a decade past that first yawn, and the ripple still has not slowed a step. Pull that thread and the whole modern run unravels in your hands.

Folks crown Ultra Instinct as the jewel of this era, and it is gorgeous, easily one of the coldest reveals anime has ever cooked up. Even that leans on scaffolding the cat helped build though. Ultra Instinct is a divine technique mastered naturally by the Angels. Kakarot only chases it because Whis put the idea in his ear, and Whis only walked into the picture as an escort to you know who. Trace any highlight of the last decade back far enough and the same purple silhouette is standing at the origin, arms folded, mildly annoyed you woke him.

That is the honest reason the cat matters more than any tier list ever could. He did not win a popularity contest. No loudest finish, no flashiest arc either. What he did was hand the writers a bigger canvas. Before him the roof was a Kai and a planet or three. After him it was twelve realities, a ladder of gods, angels, an omni king, and a tournament for survival across all creation. That is not a power spike. That is a brand new map.

So the next time somebody drags you into a could Goku beat thread, tap out with grace and drop the real take. The Saiyan is the face. The heart. The reason we tuned in as shorties and stuck around as grown folks with bills and back pain. Nobody is stealing that from him. Yet the architect of everything that made the sequel years feel enormous was never actually him. It was a hungry, sleepy, magnificently petty god who showed up expecting dinner and wound up redrawing the boundaries of the entire mythos.

Long may he nap.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

But a giant reputation throws a long shadow. When one crown swallows the whole conversation, a gang of wild, ambitious work from the exact same stretch of years slips quietly into the dark. The 90s were hungry. Studios took swings that would make a modern executive break out in a cold sweat. So pour yourself something, get comfortable, and let me walk you past a few doors that reflex keeps bolted shut.

We can start with Macross Plus. Shoji Kawamori built this alongside a young Shinichiro Watanabe, and yeah, it landed years ahead of the classic that made his name. So what is it? A love triangle bolted onto two rival test pilots, with a virtual pop star named Sharon Apple crooning her way into the whole planet’s skull. She is an artificial idol, but the dazzling persona still depends on a human being supplying the emotional machinery underneath. The story keeps circling that, prodding at counterfeit feeling and where it leads, way back before a single one of us lost sleep over some algorithm nudging our mood. The dogfights land like hand drawn poetry. Yoko Kanno sits on the score, which alone should tell you the pedigree runs bone deep. Big questions about machines and the human heart, and the wild part is it argues them mid air, with fighter jets screaming across the sky.

Now flip the whole mood inside out. The Irresponsible Captain Tylor arrived earlier in the decade, and it moves like nothing else you will find in this lineup. Justy Ueki Tylor stumbles into command of a warship through a bizarre mixture of luck, nerve, and circumstances nobody around him can quite explain. Is he a complete fool? A hidden genius playing the long con? The series never actually says which, and that ducking is the whole gag. But sit with it and something craftier surfaces. It keeps needling the notion that maybe half of running anything comes down to luck wearing a steady face. Ridiculous on top. Sharper down below than it ever cares to admit. Funny stuff, but there is a brain humming behind the laughs.

Martian Successor Nadesico gambled on something most productions would dodge, then nailed the bet. Up front it looks like the standard toybox. Big mecha, laser scraps out in the void, a ship crammed with weirdos. One of them is a reluctant pilot whose real ambition is becoming a cook. Then the thing spins around and dissects the very genre it happily lives inside. Characters obsess over a fictional old mecha cartoon nested within the plot, and that extra layer of self awareness lets the whole ride swing from slapstick straight to gut punch with zero warning. Somebody dies and it wounds you precisely because you were cackling one minute prior. Bold architecture, that.

Then the road gets genuinely strange. Serial Experiments Lain refuses to hold your hand for even a second. A withdrawn schoolgirl gets pulled into the Wired, a networked realm that starts bleeding into ordinary daylight until her sense of self begins to dissolve. It landed in 1998 and somehow called our whole online life ahead of time. That dread of thinning out into a screen. The gap between the self that logs on and the self that logs off. All that loneliness buzzing right beneath the noise of staying endlessly plugged in. Rough sit, I won’t front. The rhythm runs crooked on purpose, the audio gets in your teeth, and the pictures lodge behind your eyes and refuse to leave. Cannot name much else that hits the same bruise.

Craving a bit more swagger and swashbuckle? Outlaw Star has you fully covered. Gene Starwind, his young partner Jim, a mysterious bio-android navigator named Melfina, and a vessel that brawls using actual grappler arms bolted to the hull. It wears its pulp soul out loud and proud. Treasure hunts, ray guns, a certain bathhouse detour that folks online still argue about, all of it stitched together with real warmth. If Bebop plays the melancholy cousin sipping whiskey alone, this joint is the rowdy relative who wants to raid a cursed tomb and crack jokes the whole way through.

Key the Metal Idol never got the flowers it plainly earned. Tokiko, Key for short, is dead certain she is a robot, and her one escape hatch is rounding up 30,000 friends so she can finally cross over into being a real girl. Sweet little hook, sure. Then you press play and the whole thing just aches. It goes hard at the idol machine, at how people get chewed up and tossed aside, at plain grief, at that slippery riddle of what even makes somebody human. One lonely kid sits dead center, reaching for a single true bond. It runs longer and odder than any level headed producer would sign off on, and it repays every squirmy minute it drags out of you.

Land the whole tour with Infinite Ryvius. Think Lord of the Flies, except the deserted island is a beat up spaceship and every kid trapped on it is barely grown. The adult crew is gone, and nobody is around to steady things. Resources tighten. Trust evaporates. The panic creeps in fast and never really clears out. The kids have to govern themselves while dread quietly tightens around every corridor. The story watches how fast order rots, how power corrupts the young as easily as anybody older, how raw fear rewrites who a person always assumed they were. Grim, patient, and a whole lot sharper than that premise has any right to be.

Here is the notion I keep circling back around to. Not a single one of these titles has to defeat Watanabe’s crown jewel to hold value. That framing misses the plot entirely. What the decade proved, over and over, is that one giant winner can quietly bury a whole room of scrappy, swing for the fences work. Creators were wrestling with war, machinery, selfhood, isolation, and dystopia from a dozen wildly different angles, some through comedy, some through horror, some through pure spectacle you could feel in your chest.

The knee jerk recommendation is not wrong, understand. It is just lonely up there. It stands hogging the spotlight while a green room packed with brilliant, thorny, gorgeous work waits in the wings, praying somebody finally cracks the door. So the next time a homie asks you for a pick from that golden stretch, resist the easy layup. Send them toward Sharon Apple’s uncanny performance, or Lain’s collapsing reality, or Tokiko counting endlessly toward her impossible number. Hand the underdogs a turn under the lights.

These titles earned their spotlight back then, and it still belongs to them now. Track each one down and give it the evening it deserves..

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.