After nearly running out of physical manga last week and not feeling especially motivated to continue with what I have on hand, I decided to focus more on other stuff this week to try to get ahead of schedule a bit. It’s probably unrealistic to always have margin on my moyase goals, but having them in yellow bothers me.

I watched all 13 episodes of 後宮の烏, which was pretty good. It has a lot of interesting old-fashioned language and the characters and scenarios are fun. Royal court intrigue is a cool genre and the supernatural elements are generally pretty understated. Unfortunately about halfway through I kind of lost my ability to fully appreciate it because everyone started calling the main character 娘娘（ニャンニャン）and it killed any sense of gravity that the scenes were obviously going for. Chinese aesthetics really are not for me.

I also watched episodes 1-3 of もののがたり (all that are out at the time of writing). I wasn’t sold by the trailer but I like the “corporate demon hunters” aesthetic so I’m giving it a try. So far it seems fun but also a bit by-the-numbers and I’m not sure if it’s going to have anything that sets it apart from the average battle series. The main guy at least is not very interesting and the (ostensibly) main girl has barely been in it.

All my literal reading this week was 青春ブタ野郎はゆめみる少女の夢を見ない, which I started and finished in six days. Since I haven’t seen the movie yet this book was uncharted territory for me and as usual it’s a pretty easy read. I was reading along to the audiobook (5:47) but I think even if I hadn’t been I probably would have been able to finish it just as quickly, or maybe a little slower. The themes in this one were “self-sacrifice” and “selfishness” and how they can be intertwined in unexpected ways. I wasn’t really sure where it was going until about the 2/3 mark when suddenly everything fell together and a bunch of foreshadowing from across the series paid off all at once. It ended on a cliffhanger so I guess I’ll have to jump right into the next one pretty soon.