Japanese Reading Report: 05 January 2025

It's 2025. This is my final year of university (hopefully) and will mark my 6th year learning Japanese. I hope that we can all accomplish great things this year.

MONSTER

I did a big push to hit 75 total volumes of manga for the year. On the 30th of December I was at 71 so I read four volumes of this in a span of two days. I ended up getting pretty close to the end of the series by report day (today), but unfortunately there is still one more volume to go until I know exactly what Tenma and the gang's fates will be.

It's getting into the deep story moments now and I don't want to spoil too much. I'm grateful to report that Grimmer is still alive. I'm a little bit worried that all the build up will be for very little pay off... at least the journey so far has been entertaining.

ぼくらの

This is a rewatch. I first watched ぼくらの in 2022 or so. I enjoyed it quite a lot and regularly recommend it to others.

The story is about a large cast of children who sign up to play a "game" which puts them in a series of life or death kaiju fights while piloting a giant (and I mean gigantic) robot they name Zearth.

I don't want go into any more detail because it's an anime that "goes places" and is best experienced blind. It's good. Go watch it, and prepare to cry.

ダーリン・イン・ザ・フランキス

I watched one episode of this right before deciding to watch ぼくらの. The setup sort of reminded me of Gurren Lagann, with a humanity trying to survive an Earth-turned-wasteland environment.

Within the first episode alone I think the only notable thing for me was that, because every human is given a number assignment rather than a name, the characters use Japanese number puns to give each other normal names.
Sadly the main female character, 02, was not given a human name even though I think she would be cuter being called Oni.