Heroic Desire:

I'm most of the way through my DanMachi rewatch.  The first season was great, the second season was mediocre, and the third season is somewhere inbetween.  I decided the filler ova's and movie don't even count as part of the real DanMachi so they joined the Sword Oratoria spinoff as merely 'good.'

I'm not sure DanMachi would make my rankings without the upcoming fourth season.  But with it I think it's just enough.  If it's particularly good maybe DanMachi will rise in my rankings, who knows.

The best scene in DanMachi is extremely early.  Episode 3.  Hestia is being chased through town by a Giant Silverback and Bell comes to his Goddess' rescue, except he's too weak to defeat the monster and can only run away while carrying Hestia in his arms.  Eventually he decides they can't both escape and locks her behind an iron door, telling her he'll buy her time to escape so run for all she's worth.  Instead she arms him with a new powerful dagger and then the real fight begins where he heroically, incredibly, comes back from way behind and beats the Giant Silverback which a few minutes ago he'd already made his peace that he was going to die to.

The amount of emotions and hard decisions and impressive maneuvers Bell does in that one scene exceeds the entire rest of his adventuring life.  It's incredibly well animated and voice acted.  It must have had the budget of a movie.  But there was one more thing carrying the scene, and that was the song playing in the background for the first time, 'Heroic Desire.'  This song is so epic and so beautiful it carries the whole series on its back.

DanMachi is barely a great anime, but this background music is a 5-star hall of fame song.  It's the best of the best, as good as it gets.  To make room to add it in, I had to demote Desperate Fight from FF 12 to 4-star, Dancing Mad from FF 6 to 3-star, Beethoven's Symphony No.7 in A major, Op.92- I. Poco sostenuto - Vivace to 2-star, Mobilize from World of Warcraft to 1-star, and Tsubasa o Kudasai from Evangelion from 1-star to nothing.

Adding in a new song to the top tier causes a chain reaction of work. >.<.  But Heroic Desire by Keiji Inai is too good, I couldn't ignore it.  It deserved the effort.

Meanwhile, Anime News Network suggested I read a new manga called Sousou no Frieren, saying it was the best manga ever.  With praise like that I figured it was worth checking out and wow, it is good.  I wouldn't say it's the best manga ever, but then again I'm only on chapter 10 and there's 81 chapters so far.  Maybe it only gets better from here.  Once I've read it all I can give it a more accurate rating.  Between the remaining eps of DanMachi and the remaining chapters of Frieren I've got a lot of fun stuff to do.

The latest two NFL playoff games were also decided by last second field goals -- one in overtime -- and unexpectedly the Bengals are playing the Rams in the Super Bowl.  Now that it's come to this I'll cheer for the Bengals, it would be nice if they won their first ever Super Bowl.  I felt so bad for Joe Burrow tearing his ACL in his first season in the NFL but here he is, back in his second season and already at the Super Bowl.  What a wonderful comeback story.

I'm not going to religiously follow the upcoming Olympics.  I'm mainly interested in the figure skating events and the rest are kinda blah.  I mean, how many times can you watch a guy ski or snowboard while doing gnarly flips and twists before you've seen it all before?  Speed skating actually isn't that fast and takes forever to see who wins, it isn't like track and field competitions where they run right alongside each other.  Medal winning highlights are good enough for all these secondary sports.  Mainly I just want to watch the three Russian figure skating girls sweep the podium and stick it to the 'free world' which really means the 'free to be a gay or transgender pervert, while not being free to do anything else world.'