A couple months ago I noted some shows that had caught my interest. Now that the season’s almost complete I have some additional thoughts to jot down about a few of them.

The news is mostly good. But only mostly.

First, the hits that keep on hitting: From Bureaucrat To Villainess remains a delight and the continuations of Apothecary Diaries and My Happy Marriage are staying the course of being completely excellent. Fully recommended, watch if you can.

Honey Lemon Soda, on the other hand, is harder to recommend. I think there’s a lot of excellent artistry going on, and it’s remarkably willing to look unflinchingly at how shitty schoolkids can be to one another. Like, this isn’t “light comedy hijinx” stuff. Some of the bullying can be really hard to watch. It’s not graphic or anything like that, but the verbal nastiness feels all too real. And it remains a high school romance show, which I can’t blame anyone for lacking any interest in. With that said, I think the show will stay with me longer than I expected it to at the start.

It’s not a Winter 2025 show (I mean, we’re not caught up enough to be watching the actual current season) but: We’re most of the way through the first season of Shangri-La Frontier and it may be the best “shonen battler” show about a group of gamer nerds in a “VR MMO” ever made. It starts out with the usual “boy who’s good at gaming gets good at a new game” thing but once the other main characters join to form the core group partway into the first season it goes from “good fun” to “an absolute joy.” I’d say I can’t pick a favorite character but I suspect if I don’t choose Arthur Pencilgon she’ll plot to have something horrible to happen to me, and then Sunraku and Katzo will mock me about the results.

Just… watch this show if you want fun video-game-y shenanigans starring a delightful group of dorky gremlins.

Now we come to the “why did it turn out this way” section.

I had to give up on Headhunted To Another World. Despite a surprisingly good amount of worldbuilding and its devotion to the idea of the protagonist using his “real world” experience to solve his “demon world” problems, the fact that one of his fellow generals was immediately demoted to being a starry-eyed love interest (complete with over-the-top reactions to… everything) just wore me down. I couldn’t take it anymore. Dropped.

And that brings us to Guild Receptionist. (I typed out the whole gigantic title in the alt text for the image at the top of this post if you need the reminder.)

Here’s the thing: The show we were sold was a funny concept. Lady who works the reception counter at the adventuring guild in Generic Fantasy World With Game-Inspired Dungeons who is secretly a badass fighter but doesn’t want to be an adventurer because she values her downtime too heavily to get tied to that lifestyle? Valid! And if they’d remained focused on that, the show could’ve been an enjoyable, if ultimately forgettable, piece of seasonal fluff.

But… no. They had to give the show two things that are weighing it down like granite millstones. There’s a love interest, and there’s a big-bad-villain plot arc. Neither of these are genuinely terrible ideas in and of themselves. As executed in this show, however? It’s a snooze-fest. I find myself checking my phone out of boredom, and I am the kind of person who stays laser-focused on the screen when watching shows.

The love interest is Jade, the most generic “I’m the hero in a vaguely fantasy game setting” guy you could ever have hoped for. He’s a good guy! Noble, hard working, and of course he’s smitten with Alina, our protagonist. The resulting romance arc could’ve worked but the way this whole aspect of the show is written, instead of making each other better and more interesting, Jade basically makes Alina a less compelling character with every single interaction.

The “big bad” plot arc isn’t even worth vitriol. It’s just boring. I don’t care, I don’t care, I cannot bring myself to care. They did not put in the work to give me reasons to care. Nothing about it changes Alina’s motivations in any meaningful way. In fact she’s not even directly involved with the plot arc. She goes into the dungeon to solo the bosses, but that’s for her own reasons. She doesn’t know there’s a “big bad” until very late in the show. It’s so weird and unnecessary.

Yet I’m going to finish Guild Receptionist just to see how it ends, because apparently sometimes I need a train-wreck of a show to follow. I’m not recommending you do the same, however.

So… some big winners and a couple of losers. Not a bad result, is it? Now let’s see what the Spring season has to offer…