Dropped Shows for the 2024 Summer Season

 It's a bit past the half way point of the season which has somewhat fallen into a slump across a number of shows.  This season saw me watching an abnormally large number of shows, larger than any season in the past 10 years I would imagine.  But not all of them have survived to the halfway point, quite a few have gotten dropped in recent weeks and here is the rundown of whats been left behind.

2.5 Dimensional Seduction

    I pretty quickly was able to determine that this show was not for me.  It focused too much on the characters perverted tendencies and both of the characters seemed to lack any depth of personality beyond their archetypes.  I keep thinking of it as a poor attempt at copying the concept of  My Dress-up Darling but completely missing the key piece that made that show so good...the heart and realism of the characters.  My Dress-up Darling had some questionable choices in how gratuitous it chose to expose Marin and highlight her dangerous level of comfort but 2.5 D really missed the bar on its protagonists' make up to be worth trudging through.  This was dropped after episode 1.

Plus Sized Elf

    Watching the anime adaptation of a questionable manga I read more of that I probably should instantly reminded me of why I stopped reading it.  While the concept is novel this series offers little more than fanservice.  But at least its thicc girl fanservice which struggles to receive mainstream exposure.  But, its fanservice in the end and I have too little time to spend retreading this 'story' even if its more adult than the source material.  This was dropped after episode 1.

My Wife Has No Emotions

    I have a lot of problems with the concept of 'yamato nadeshiko' the out dated, idealized concept of the dutiful, subservient wife.   This show, about an old model android who's owner attempts to force into an object of affection serves little purpose than perpetuating otaku stereotypes.  Those stereotypes, talking points of conservative politicians in Japan since at least the turn of the millennium, center around adults who struggle or outright refuse to engage in 'normal' relationships with the opposite sex, further exacerbating the countries declining birth rate.  I suspect its not at rampant as many sources will make you believe, but this show doesn't work to dispute that.  This was dropped after episode 3

ATRI: My Dear Moments 

    I have watched a number of anime based on visual novels, some were well done others were annoying.  But ATRI is the first time I can think of where said adaptation felt exactly like watching a play through of said visual novel.  The characters were obnoxious and trite and the story was so purposefully mysterious that it was difficult to generate any interest in its outcome. This was dropped after episode 5.

Twilight out of Focus

    I was hoping to get a good yaoi series to cleanse the palette from the abysmally boring Tadaima, Okaeri.  The first few episode of Twilight out of Focus seemed to do just that.  But then it started to become a situation where the actual developing plot lines were little more than set ups for the characters to have sex.  Then it reset its self and decided to set up another pairing, completely shifting focus and just became rather boring.  I dropped this after episode 6.

The season still have a little more than a month to go and honestly...VTuber Legend might be cut in before I concludes.  It was fun at first but as its progressed its meandered into a world that appears to only appeal to people who are big into VTubing...which I am not.  At this point though, everything else is on course to be finished when the season wraps up and I will have to crank out more than a dozen end of series reviews in the beginning of October.  The Fall season, based on the shows that are known so far, seems to be less interesting than this Summer season has been, which is a bit sad.  If the Fall is lighter for my concur ant viewing, I can probably concentrate more on the back catalog!

The Keirin - a Specifically Japanese Bike Race

The 2024 Spring season saw a sports anime called Rinkai! that told the story of 5 young women who decide to join the semi pro ranks of the national keirin racing league.  While the keirin is an event during the Summer Olympics, it began its life strictly for the purpose of gambling.

 

    Keirin, literally bicycle racing, is one of many race formats that exist in the bicycle discipline known as track cycling or track racing.  Track cycling is a form of bicycle racing that has existed since the 1880's and involves a closed oval track with steeply banking turns.  The specialized bikes used in track racing are unsurprisingly known as track bikes.  Track bikes have a fixed drive train, which means the gear that rotates the real wheel is fixed to the wheel its self, meaning that as long as the pedals are moving so too is the rear wheel.  There is no coasting or stopping pedaling by the rider with out the risk of serious bodily injury.  No matter how big or strong the rider is, the mechanical advantage of the drive train can not easily be overcome, if you try to stop pedaling while riding a track bike there is a very real chance that the momentum of the pedals will throw you from the bike.  Due to the nature of the fixed drive train, track bikes only have a single gear, determined ahead of time by the size of the front chain-ring and rear cog.  Racers will change the size of these gears depending on  their goal for a specific rare.  Usually, the gearing of the drive train is set to be very high, to achieve as great a speed as possible without having to pedal at an impossible rate.  The final thing that makes track bikes different is the lack of any mechanical brakes.  The only ways a rider can slow a track bike down is through gradual reduction of pedal velocity, removing the riders weight off of the rear wheel enough to remove it from the surface allowing the rider to lock the wheel up with their legs or crashing.

    The race course in track cycling is known as a velodrome.  Over the almost 150 years its existed the specifications of velodromes has changed.  The biggest things that have changed are the total length which also helps determine the degree the four corners of the oval are banked.  The track is always two long stretches capped with two banked turns on either end, with varying lengths of much shorter strait areas between each sides two corners.  The total length of the velodrome and the straightaways determine the pitch of the turns.  The modern Olympic velodrome is 250m in diameter with each of the corners usually at a 45 degree pitch.  The banked corners are designed to allow the racers to be able to turn without turning their front wheel, the curve of the track carries them on a technically straight path.  The surface of a velodrome must be free of blemishes and debris to prevent crashes.  The width of the tires used in track cycling is usually between 18 and 23 cm in width and have very little to no tread.  For comparison, the standard width of a mountain bikes tire is around 58-63 cm.  Olympic velodromes are surfaced in specially treated wood planks that are designed to be smooth, featureless and offer a slight amount of traction for the wheels.  The banking of the track decreases near the lower portion of the track, the typical position for the fastest racers.  Riders that are high up on the track bank will normally have to maintain a minimum speed of around 25 kph to avoid loosing traction and sliding down the track.

    Races done on a velodrome are either lap based or distance based.  Keirin is a little bit of both.  Keirin was established in the late 1940's as Japan was beginning to rebuild its self following the lose of the second world war.  Its creation was primarily for the purpose of betting.  This necessitated strict standards and regulations to limit the chances of mechanical advantage by more financially secure racers, limit material failure and to try and curb unconventional cheating.   In Japan, from its inception to the current, Keirin is essentially no different from horse racing when it comes to why most people in the country pay attention to it, its an exciting way to gamble.  

    A Keirin race features eight racers for a heat.  The standard distance of the race is 1.5 kilometers.  The participants begin the race being paced by a motorized bike which will slowly build the field up from 30 km/h up to 50 km/h.  Once the races have reached 50kph, the motorized bike will leave the track and the racers are free to go as fast as they want for the remaining 3 laps/750 meters of the race.  The first person across the finish line wins.  It is not unusual for the racers to hit a top speed over 70 km/h.  The slow build up in the beginning is needed due to the bikes only being a single gear which is set to a significantly large ratio.  Set your mountain bike to its hardest gear then try to pedal that from a dead stop and you're still not close to what the keirin racer is doing when they start their race.

    There exists a multitude of racing formats in the world of track cycling and keirin is one of the few disciplines that has remained one of the few remaining events for track cycling in the Olympics.  It is a quick race, mere minutes instead of hours like road racing, and has a lot of excitement as the racers physically bump each other to gain the best position during the race.  It may be the most physical of all cycling disciplines and well worth checking out!

    Unfortunately, Rinkai! has not yet been made available in North America but you can check out the keirin during the 2024 Olympics as of the week that this post is published.  As with everything, there is a wealth of archived footage of keirin events all over YouTube along with the other track cycling events.  I also recommend another Olympic track cycling event, the Madison, named after Madison Square Gardens (which used to host many track events in its early days).  The Madison is a long distance lap event in which teams of two riders compete against each other.  Both member of each team remain out on the track at all times, but only one of them is accumulating a lap count.  As the race goes on they switch off which member is adding laps and they do so by a physical exchange where the rider who is transferring to be the laping member will be pulled up to speed through a hand grab by the other rider who will be pulling to the top of the track to slow own and rest, a bit of a transfer of momentum at 20+ mile ans hour...while all of the other teams are also racing and doing the same things, its intense to behold!

My Home Hero

 My Home Hero (マイホームヒーロー) is a 12 episode crime drama based on the manga of the same name by Yamakawa Naoki and Asaki Masashi .  The anime originally aired during the Spring of 2023.

    What would you do if your only child was in an abusive relationship that could very well end in her murder?  Tosu Tetsuo, when faced with that very scenario, did what ever he could to protect her and the rest of his family.  He becomes concerned when his daughter Reika arrives for a lunch date with black eyes.  Her avoidance of the situation causes the mild mannered salaryman concern and he heads over to her apartment to talk with her.  He inadvertently encounters her boyfriend, a flamboyant braggart named Nobuto.  He overhears him discussing his abuse with a group of friends but before Tetsuo can learn more a man approaches him.  The man pretends to be scouting for call girl clients but when he gets Testuo in a secluded area he beats and strips him.  The man is looking out for the abuser and takes a photo of Testsuo and his ID for safe keeping, hoping all it takes is a warning to the worried father to keep his nose out of things.

    After spending the night recovering in an internet cafe Tetsuo returns to his daughters apartment, to try and gather clues about her boyfriend.  Before he can formulate a plan, the man enters, oblivious to the scene, belligerently chatting on his cell, visibly intoxicated.   Testuo hides in a closet, overhearing the conversation and becomes convinced that the man will kill Reika once hes been able to extort money from her.  In a moment of panic he sees an opportunity and fatally strikes the larger man with a rice cooker.  At that moment his wife enters the apartment, finding her husband trying to settle his nerves, bloody rice cooker still in his hands.  He does his best to explain the situation to her and she agrees to help him to hide the crime, unwilling to lose the love of her life over protecting their daughter.  Little to either of them understand the difficult task ahead of them.  Nobuto is the son of a man who holds an important position with a dangerous crime syndicate.  He will search the ends of the Earth to find his son and enact any level of retribution he wants.  Testuo, with the help of his wife, must use his lifetime of mystery novel reading to aid him in disposing of the body and preventing the crime from being connected to him.

    I was never able to get past season one of Breaking Bad.  The continuously building tension of a situation spiraling more and more out of the control of the main characters got incredibly exhausting to endure.  My Home Hero is not unlike Breaking Bad in that regard.  The entire plot is 'will Tetsuo be able to get away with this one murder'.  Almost immediately that situation becomes impossible as the criminal syndicate his victim is a part of knows full well that he walked into Tetsuo's daughters apartment and never left.  The person Nobuto was on the phone with before Tetsuo killed him was a man named Kyoichi, who was nearby.  Kyoichi, sensing something wasn't right with the situation, begins to investigate the apartment.  He fully suspects Reika's unassuming father knows what happened to the disliked gang member and wants to use him as a stepping stone to more authority in the syndicate.  The course of the anime roughly follows a week in time as Tetsuo is quickly rounded up by Kyoichi and is given a week's deadline to either be blamed for the murder or find the lost man.  Testuo spends all of his time, being heavily monitored by the gang, working out ways to cover up any last traces of the crime and to manufacture evidence that would exonerate him in any way possible.  Every moment of his life is filled with uncertainty and terror as the malicious criminals he becomes surrounded by offer little sympathy for his situation.

    Aside from the constant stress of the events that transpire from beginning to end leasing to mental fatigue, there are numerous points through out the story where Testuo's successes are aided by deus ex machina.  The story tries hard to remain within the realm of realism but there are a few points where that becomes absurd.  The weakest thing in the story over all is how the audience is supposed to accept Testuo's cunning and knowledge come from his avid interest in crime mystery novels.  Using this knowledge he's able to craft masterful plans to further his artificial innocence.  Aside from the idea that plot points used in fiction are largely realistic and beneficial in Testuo's situation are hard to believe, the idea that he is able to remain as level headed his is being chocked up to his carer as a salesman is absurd.  Its crazy that he has some of the knowledge he does and the means to utilize it in a real world situation.  That and there are a few key moments where he is able to 'perfectly' seize on an opportunity for maximum effect.  There is way too much in the way of plot armor to make the story as satisfying as it could be.  But thats not to say it isn't a finely crafted story with a lot of twists and turns.  It dips its toes into the morality of the characters situations and shows them coming face to face with the reality of whats going on, but that is largely swept away in favor of the continually complicated problems.  Death Note was easier to digest due to the super natural nature of the story, but My Home Hero tries really hard to make us think it exists in the real world that it ignores the unrealistic ways some of the problems resolve.  That said...I may have to pick up the manga as there appears to be a lot more story than was done in the anime...but we shall see.

 

The anime is available in dub and sub format on Crunchyroll.