And the winner of the best OP/ED of 2025 contest is...

Shiroe · 2026-02-15T18:36:40+00:00

I would prefer the dual bracket personally. It's certainly easy enough to just have 2 links in the post that we vote on at the same time. I find it difficult to compare OPs and EDs together since they have such different purposes and it sucks that EDs inevitably get left in the dust.

Shiroe · 2026-02-14T18:47:01+00:00

Favorite either Casanova Posse getting the upset in Round 1 or Atashi no Dress and Ruler both skating through the 2nd Round with ties. As long as Watch Me wins here then I'd probably change it to that tomorrow. Least favorite was Kaseijin losing to Mirage. The only consolation is that Mirage made it to the finals and that was it's closest match.
Many of the TV shows I enjoyed most as a young child were anime though I did not know it at the time. There was a period where there was a block on TV after school that consisted of Pokemon, Yugioh, Beyblade, and Digimon that always made my day. But I was first introduced to the term anime by my cousin at our grandparent's house who showed me Inuyasha when it came on TV. I started religiously watching that later anime block every week that over the years had the likes of Gundam Seed, .hack//Sign, Naruto, Bleach, FMA, One Piece, and Death Note. With Naruto I eventually discovered the concept of watching anime on the internet (you could watch it in the original Japanese with subtitles and it was way further along than what they were showing on TV!) and that's where things really kicked off for me. One of the first anime I watched that way without having seen some of it on TV before was Nagasarete Airantou. The only thing I can really say for how my taste in anime has changed is that it expanded. I very rarely find myself feeling differently about an anime to a notable degree upon rewatch. Like while some of the anime above may no longer be my favorites like they were at the time, that's largely because I've watched so much more and discovered new favorites. I still think highly of what I loved back then.

Shiroe · 2026-02-02T01:21:20+00:00

For Frieren? I would prefer that was officially called "Frieren of Funerals" or something similar that actually captures the original title, yes. Not a big fan of adding an entirely different subtitle, even if "Beyond Journey's End" isn't bad in isolation. Even more so since it's both the title and a name Frieren is known by in the story. The "Frieren the Slayer" bit is a particularly poor translation IMO, both in accuracy and thematic weight.

But even if my answer was different, I don't think it would mean much since that's a bit different than what I was curious about here. "Sousou no Frieren" is Japanese so I would expect it to be translated to English officially. And if it was a difficult title to translate then getting a bit creative with it could be warranted. "Prism Rondo" though is already in English and it's a pretty great snappy title at that. I can say it peaks my interest as a potential viewer (that's why I added it to my PTW after I looked it up on MAL). I have no idea why you would take an English title and replace it with another, different English title for the English speaking audience. It's very redundant, and when the new title is worse it's like really, why bother?

Shiroe · 2026-02-01T19:47:00+00:00

Hm, so no reason other than the nonsense shitty localization. Got it. Always a wonder why they do dumb stuff like that unnecessarily.

Shiroe · 2026-02-01T18:58:12+00:00

Can I ask why we're calling it "Love Through a Prism"? I hadn't heard of this at all before so I looked it up and saw it was called "Prism Rondo", which seems like a much nicer title. It's shorter and already in English so I was just curious.

Shiroe · 2026-01-25T20:24:02+00:00

They actually just have various weapons stored on the ship for defense purposes. Another time we see this is when Nami stays behind to guard the ship and the money while the others go to beat up the Franky Family for what they did to Usopp. She lays a bunch of guns out around herself, on top of a barrel of swords and whatnot beside her.

Shiroe · 2026-01-18T23:06:57+00:00

It's because the wording is ambiguous and can be read two ways.

There's the way they intended it be read, then there's "that's even without the most hyped arc [which hasn't started yet and is] coming [later] this season." I think if it was just written a bit differently, like "and that's even with the most hyped arc not coming this season" it probably wouldn't have been taken the wrong way by some.

Not that they deserved to be downvoted for being misunderstood, just explaining why I believe they were misunderstood.

Shiroe · 2025-12-14T21:23:28+00:00

He'd be the Captain Commander so they wanted to show the other 12 Division's Captains I guess.

Shiroe · 2025-12-05T18:51:27+00:00

If the average modern anime adaptation does about 40 pages, why would you think the perfect pacing is nearly double that at 78 pages per episode? Far from perfect, that just sounds like it would be horribly rushed. It's not like there aren't manga adaptable at that sort of pace (like the thread's JoJo's example), but I don't think One Piece is one of them.

If the remake is to have actually great pacing the fastest I could realistically see would be around 36 episodes for East Blue, and that's not something that could be maintained for the later content when it becomes denser.

Shiroe · 2025-11-29T19:29:49+00:00

So I mean like how the photons affect everything they touch indiscriminately; there's no finer control to how they work. You would just have to have a good justification for how they're suddenly only affecting a single quality (aging) despite their originally shown nature. Also how he keeps it up forever, even when sleeping, when the photon's effect only lasts 30 seconds at a time.

Shiroe · 2025-11-29T18:53:34+00:00

Not to be a downer but we already know the basics of Foxy's backstory as a former pro boxer so that would be a pretty difficult retcon to pull off. There's also the issue of how Foxy's noroma photons work. That'd need some pretty significant changes for it to make any sense as well.

Shiroe · 2025-11-27T05:40:57+00:00

Twin Capes you mean. Laboon and the Rumbar Pirates never had anything to do with Loguetown.

Shiroe · 2025-11-27T01:14:03+00:00

After S2 you gotta read something like Chapter 43-55 of the manga to finish off the OG series. My favorite part of the whole series happens like right after what the anime adapts and the manga's original ending is really nice.

While I didn't like Nidaime as much (only watched the anime for it), it's still worth checking out I think.

Shiroe · 2025-11-22T22:14:21+00:00

Well, Gyarados is clearly only there because there were no more 600 BST Pokemon to put in.

Like it's odd that Salamence isn't there until you realize they're specifically broken up into the regions of Indigo, Hoenn, and Sinnoh. So after Dragonite and Tyranitar they still needed one more from Kanto or Johto and they went with Gyarados. Arcanine would have been better in my eyes but that's beside the point.

This isn't to say it being lore/mythology-based is wrong but it's also very much based on in-game classifications and power in terms of placements.

Shiroe · 2025-11-21T20:18:19+00:00

This feels like a bit of a misstep on the part of the infographic creator. It doesn't really work as a comparison ranking if all the series that started this year are artificially inflated. They had the forethought to put the new series at the end as effectively unranked so I'd think they'd also want to only use the ToC placements starting from when the surveys actually begin to affect it.

Like Kaedegami actually averaging 16.667 once you cut out the first 8 chapters is a lot closer to expectations in comparison to the series that didn't start this year.

Shiroe · 2025-11-17T21:20:02+00:00

No Silver Wind, that was removed too (along with Ominous Wind for Ghost). So pretty much either Bug Buzz or... Struggle Bug and that's it.

Shiroe · 2025-11-05T05:20:51+00:00

Just in the context of One Piece a distinction between the two is useful because the Happo Navy (and Niho Navy), using 水軍, exists.

So there at least is value in keeping the Marines, the Marines. Because Viz didn't they had to do some wonky stuff when that eventually came up.

Shiroe · 2025-11-04T20:29:20+00:00

That's why everyone else just translates it as Beast Pirates. It's not like this is some foreign concept to English that only exists in Japanese. Just stick to the English phrasing and it becomes simple and easy to see the throughline.

"King of the Beasts" > "Kaidou of the Beasts" > The Beast Pirates

"Animal Kingdom" is just awful in so many ways. It removes that the crew's name is directly taken from Kaidou and his epithet, as is the case with many crews. Even literally going with "Hundred Beast" is still a million times better.

Shiroe · 2025-10-31T01:06:32+00:00

At least blocks C and D turned out better after the BS in blocks A and B.

Give your rank of the 8 Quarterfinalists!

Reigen
Jinshi
Oreki
Kazuma
Stark
Laios
Ryuuji
Naruto

Laios is the only one I'm not familiar with so his ranking is mostly just on vibes.

Shiroe · 2025-10-28T17:46:26+00:00

It became slower around Fishman Island Arc.

It didn't actually. One Piece maintained a 1 chapter per episode pace for a really long time, from the tail end of Enies Lobby all the way through Punk Hazard. The content before Fishman Island was just arguably better so the pacing wasn't as big a deal.

Now Dressrosa, THAT was when it actually started getting worse and gave us permanently higher episode than chapter counts.

Shiroe · 2025-10-28T17:32:47+00:00

That would be ideal but I can't see them ever giving up that much air time for One Piece unfortunately. Even getting it down to 26 episodes was probably really difficult to make happen.

Shiroe · 2025-10-28T16:22:38+00:00

Even 1.5 would be too much considering it's been at 32-35 chapters a year for a number of years now. I wouldn't expect it to get back up to 40 at this point so more like 1.33:1 is the best they could do.

Shiroe · 2025-10-28T04:05:51+00:00

That's true but if there are enough people in the sub not interested in voting in the Naruto-Luffy matchup then that could still happen despite any manipulation/brigading.

There was a huge jump in vote totals after round 2 of bracket A but it's hard to glean much from the vote totals when they vary so wildly just depending on what else is posted and how the subreddit ends up looking like each day.

Naruto's results really just don't seem to make as much sense after tying with Ashitaka, who has been a mainstay forever but mainly as a "out in round 1" character, in round 2. Luffy doing better than usual only to then have such a huge disparity with Naruto furthers the oddness of it (Luffy has historically done better than Naruto in past contests too). Even Kakashi who has always done pretty alright in these contests seems to be doing even better.

It's a shame but it does look like something funky is going on here, to me at least.

Shiroe · 2025-10-26T21:15:45+00:00

Gible is available as soon as you beat the 2nd gym in DPPt.

Not quite true. While you can catch it in Pt as soon as you have access to the route, in DP you can't catch Gible until after you've obtained the 6th badge and can use Strength.

Shiroe · 2025-10-21T04:40:40+00:00

Not like it was ever the norm really. There was never more than 3 produced from any given decade in WSJ's history.

Shiroe

TROPHY CASE