shows

2025 In Review: The Series

by

Good Morning Folks! This morning I am continuing my series of talking about things that I liked in 2025 and this time moving on to series based content. Some of this is traditional television series, and others are anime… but it felt right to sort of split a line between this kind of content and one off experiences like a movie. I consume an awful lot of my content on Plex, and as a result it was very easy for me to go back and look at what I had actually watched during the Calendar year of 2025. This morning I am going to talk about some of the high points, and some of the low points, much like I did the other day with books. In truth I really did not consume anywhere near as much content as I normally would… 2025 was a rough year for so many reasons.

Pantheon

This lives in that realm of Anime but not-Anime that so many properties like Avatar do these days. I was tipped off to this series by my friend Sita who begged both me and Ammo to watch this, and I have to say I am very glad that I did. This is a very William Gibson-esc transhuman masterpiece that has some really awkward bits in the third act. Effectively this series SHOULD have gone on for longer, but only got two seasons… and there is a clear point in the middle of Season Two where they realized that they were not going to get a Third Season. So they very quickly had to rush to the ultimate conclusion of everything that they were working towards… so that in itself feels a bit jarring. However this is so well worth the watch if you have never seen it… or like me did not even know it existed.

Dan Da Dan

This quite literally might be the highlight of my year when it comes to media viewing experiences. I fell in love with this series in a massive way, and I will probably always have the opening for season one by Creepy Nuts living rent free in my head. Season One was fucking amazing, and Season Two just kept things up as the friendship and the will they or won’t they nature of Momo and Okarun continues to deliver. The show is fucking wild honestly, and I admit it probably takes about three episodes to hook you. The plotlines are among the more outrageous when they come to anime, and I would relate it to something akin the lines of FLCL. If you stick with it though, I think you will end up a convert. It is just plain fun on so many levels and I am anxiously looking forward to season three whenever it drops.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

Growing up in the era of The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator… both movies that I love deeply still even as an adult… I really wanted this to be amazing. I am not sure why it was not. On paper everything about this seemed like it was going to be a homerun. I think maybe the problem that I had with this was the fact that the weakest bit… were the adults. Specifically I feel like there was some exec somewhere who would not greenlight this project without an established adult actor playing a character in it. As a result it sort of felt like Jude Law stole way too much screen time, and was not actually worthy of it. Anytime it was just the kids doing shenaningans and adventures it was cute and fun… but when you looped him into the mix it got weird quickly. I think there could have been something really good here, and it did have moments of magic but collectively it just didn’t really work.

Murderbot

One of the series that I talked about in my book post was Murderbot and chaining through the entire series of books prior to the start of the television series. I was so glad that I did this, and I was even happier that for the most part… every single character in this series felt spot on for their book counterpart. That is… except the titular character of Murderbot. I had trouble adjusting to this for a bit, because Alexander Skarsgard will on some level be Eric Northman from True Blood for me. That said… as the series continued on by about episode three he had won me over completely and now I am not sure I could picture another actor playing Murderbot. I am so amped for this to continue because that first book is far from the best of the Murderbot adventures. We haven’t even encountered my favorite characters yet. We will be eating well with this one I hope, pending it continues getting good reception and more seasons.

The Witcher: Season 4

Something that I absolutely did not expect to be posting… is that The Witcher seires might have won me back. Season 3 was fucking awful. They did my boy Eskel so damned dirty, and them playing fast and loose with some of the lore… in the worst possible ways… made it all just feel awful. I was not planning on watching this season, but only did so because a friend of mine was talking about it. I can’t believe I am saying this… but I think Liam Hemsworth might be a better Geralt than Henry Cavil was. Things are starting to veer closer to the normal lore of the books/games as well which is a massive improvement. More importantly than that I got to hang out with some of my favorite characters a lot this season… Dandelion, Yarpin, and Zoltan. Massive improvement over the shitshow that was season three and I am hoping it keeps this upward trajectory.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

I will be honest… this is one of those series that I only watched because my friend Ammo was talking about it. I am not normally into elves even in the least, so the fact that this series is not only about an Elf… but also a damned dirty finger wiggler (Mage)… would have originally pushed it out of my normal scope of interests. This is legitimately one of the best Anime and or Series in general that I have ever watched. The way the story is told is so interesting and unique, and the whole perspective of someone who lives for thousands of years…. and how they might view short lived races is fascinating. Not to mention the story has an awful lot of heart to it. Season two will be dropping pretty soon and I am hoping I can find it in dual language version because I greatly prefer watching television as to reading it.

Delicious in Dungeon / Dungeon Meshi

Have you ever said to yourself that you really wanted a cooking show with the central conceit of it being played out through the lens of a D&D style adventuring party? No? Well I had not either until Tumblr sold me on this show by constantly pushing cute images into my feed. This is a show that I started with subs, and then rewatched the entire damned thing dubbed because I just like the characterization of the individual characters a bit better. Japanese voice actors can sometimes be a bit over the top for me, especially since I am not culturized to that being normal. Marcille especially just FEELS better in the Dubbed version to me and is way less annoying than the Japanese counterpart was. Super charming and cute show, but please note… it is ABSOLUTELY a cooking show. The fact it is happening in a Dungeon and has occasional combat is just a side effect of the settting.

Honorable Mentions

To Be Hero X gets a bit of an honorable mention for me. Really good show, but I did not finish it during 2025 so I don’t quite feel right giving it its own spot on the list. Additionally I really enjoyed the Ironheart series and Daredevil: Born again and hope we see more of those in the future. Marvel really is in this awkward spot right now and I am hoping they can pull their shit together and start producing amazing stuff in the way it was during the first decade of the Avengers Saga. I still fucking love Shoresy and Season 4 was pretty great, and I know that I have Season 5 queued up to watch in the coming weeks. I would prefer for it to finish so that I can watch it all in one setting, and it is just starting to release episodes.

Tomorrow I will be talking about the movies that I watched and either enjoyed or disliked enough to talk about in 2025. What were some of the highlights for you last year when it came to serialized content? Drop me a line below and let me know.

Please Mind Spoilers

by

Spoiler Town

the-walking-dead-season-6-b-key-art-michonne-gurira-rick-lincoln-alt-amc-home-1600x720

Last night was the second half premiere of Season 6 of the Walking Dead, and man….  was it a roller coaster.  I am not however going to talk much about the show, because I don’t want to give anything away for those who have yet to see it.  This seems like a sensible position, and it also tends to color my reactions on twitter…  because just like Star Wars Episode VII I didn’t want to be the one to rob the magic of the moment from anyone.  With a big show like this, there is always talk on Twitter about the inconsiderate nature of some, who start emoting about specific events on a show or a game immediately.  For me personally…  spoilers don’t mean that much and if I was going to watch a show or play a game in the first place…  I am still going to play said game/show even if I know the entire plot.  However I realize most people are not like this.  There are a lot of folks who love the thrill of not knowing if our team of stalwart heroes will survive the episode, or if they really can get out of this jam.  For the sake of the people who are not me, I’ve learned over the years how to share my excitement over something… and emote freely…  without actually giving much detail away.  So this largely involves focusing on my feelings, or the overall experience and not necessarily plot details.  Once I got used to it, I honestly find it a much more enjoyable way to share my experiences.

The above tweet is an example of something I said last night while watching the show.  It helped me to get the jitters out that were building up inside of me, but at the same time…  gave away nothing.  What Walking Dead episode doesn’t have a bunch of ups and downs… and while everyone who was also watching knew exactly what I was talking about…  it didn’t do anything to spoil the folks who get the show two full hours behind.  This isn’t just Walking Dead, or Game of Thrones, or whatever else happens to be the hot “It” property.  I would love to see this same logic applied to almost anything.  Games like Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, and The Secret World all have deep story content… that involves the same sort of ups and downs and plot twists you might expect from a novel.  In the guilds I have been responsible for, I have always tried to stress keeping guild chat as a spoiler free place so nobody had to accidentally log in and get all of that build up spoiled.  Some however are always careless, and while you can scold someone….  once the spoiler is in an open channel it is impossible to remove.  Mostly what I am asking for is for folks to be more considerate about the shared space we have be it Twitter or the chat channels in games themselves.  It is lovely that you don’t mind spoilers…. because largely I am in the same camp as you…  but be thoughtful of the folks who really do.  Is your few minutes of excitement really worth ruining someone else’s entire experience?

RWBY Season 3

 

RWBY_Reddit_Fanart

Another event from yesterday that could have been spoilerific… was the public release of the final episode of RWBY Season 3.  There is so much amazing stuff happening in this show right now… and a lot of stuff that also makes me super sad inside.  For similar reasons to Walking Dead, I am not going to go into a bunch of detail since I know folks are still catching up.  Over the last few weeks I have gone through this interesting evolution of not actually knowing what RWBY was really, to getting interested…  to binge watching my way through the entire series run to this point.  This means that I actually got to watch the last three episodes with the rest of the world as they were publicly released around noon on Sunday.  Now for sponsors they get access to the show on Saturday, and I honestly expect that come next season I will be counting myself among this number.  It isn’t often that I find something that I literally want to tell people to stop everything they are doing and “watch this thing now”, but with RWBY it definitely falls into that category.  There is just so much to love here, that it is going to be hard to cram it into a blog post.  Basically RWBY takes all of the parts of Bleach, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Naruto that I truly love…. and gets rid of all of the parts that annoy the fuck out of me. On top of that… it is populated with tons of awesome women characters….  who are not simply there for gratuitous eye candy.

There are a lot of aspects of Anime that are just lost on me, mostly because I don’t understand the Japanese Cultural references… or at least not all of them.  I’ve called RWBY an American Anime… but in truth it is more than that… it is a global internet Anime because in truth… the references and reactions that it draws upon could be understood by pretty much ANYONE using the internet and social media.  The most impressive thing about this show is how watching it compressed like this… has made me realize just how damned impressive the improvement from season to season has been.  The first season… while really good… was cludgy as hell, and it quite literally felt like they were using poser to do this (which they were).  From that point on however… they started to master the tools and by season 2 it was already feeling more like traditional animation.  Season 3 however skyrocketed that quality bar, and I would pretty much put the show up against anything in the air.  I really look forward to seeing just how much improved Season 4, because they are teetering on that edge of what traditional animation can provide…. but with motion capture and 2D rendering.  If you are already indoctrinated into RWBY, we need to talk… because so much shit is going on.  If you are not however… I highly suggest you catch up… this playlist has through S3 E6 but it is the best playlist I was able to find on YouTube.  Once you are hooked then it is time to go to the actual source and the Rooster Teeth RWBY page.  Most of the episodes are 12-16 minutes long, and it is well worth your time even if you squeeze them in between other activities.