✿ Animanga ✿

Steel Ball run follows disgraced jockey, Johnny Joestar, and his yaoi partner, Gyro Zepeli. They embark on a race across the US to gather the corpse of Jesus Christ. It's weird, which is exactly what Araki is good at. I say SBR is Jojo's best part because of the characters in it. Pretty much everyone here is compelling. Johnny Joestar in partciular begins absolutely pathetic, which is unheard of for a Jojo protag. His stand, TUSK, mirrors his character development throughout the part, which ends in an excellent showdown with the part's main baddy, the president of the United States.

This show is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine. It has tons of elements that, on paper, would make me dislike it. It's an isekai, the protag is kind of pathetic, and it's full of waifu bait. Despite all of this, I found it incredibly compelling. The world that Nagatsuki wrote has an intricate political system, with a royal election being the backdrop of the series. Subaru's return by death ability is shown as more of a curse a lot of the time, and theres a ton of psychological horror elements in a lot of the loops he goes through. It's pretty refreshing and doesn't fall into the power-fantasy trap that isaekai usually does.

I got introduced to dorohedoro by my good friend choco, over at happycloverlife, who hosted watch sessions for it. I started off watching, half paying attention, but got hooked the more I watched it. Our group only watched the first 4 episodes that night, but I ended up binging the rest of the series on my own the second we were done, and attended the rest of the watch sessions to rewatch it. After that, I read through the manga from where the anime left off, and burned through that in just a few days, reading in 6 hour sessions. Dorohedoro is really, really good. The best part about it are the characters and factions it follows. None of them are dislikable, and each have their own unique motivations. Theres a really cool magic system involved, with a political dynamic between the humans, and the sorceres. The cgi component of the anime might throw some people off, but I think it looks good, and if you read the manga, you can see why they decided they needed CGI to properly adapt it.

Lain is out there. I watched this show when i was like 16 and it affects my online aesthetic to this day. It follows a weird girl who gets consumed by the internet after her dead schoolmate emails her. A lot of the themes brought up in it are relevant to this day.