Naruto Watched and Rewatched:

I watched episode 500 of Naruto Shippuuden, then rewound it and watched it all over again.  As a result, combined with all my efforts heretofore, I've both watched and rewatched the entirety of Naruto.  From the beginning I've said that any must-see, great anime in my top anime rankings is worth watching not only once in full but that I could even watch them all twice, and have set that as my goal for any show I tout.

For Naruto especially though, which has often been my #1 anime of all time, and still sits at the lofty position of #10, rewatching it was the least I could do for this show.  Naruto has accompanied me for fifteen years now.  I've been watching it from the very beginning, and now I've watched it to the very end.

Naruto was a fifteen year long project.  Rewatching Naruto took a year on its own.  It's rare for such enormous things to finally decelerate to a halt.  But Naruto isn't really over, even now.  The Bolt anime will continue, and so long as it has Kishimoto's supervision/approval, it can't be considered filler.  There's still a good chance that the Bolt anime will adapt the scarlet spring gaiden manga, which is straight from Kishimoto's pen.  Until at least that section is adapted into the anime, Naruto isn't over.  But it could be that Bolt lasts another fifteen years and they will all be fantastic too.  Who knows?  Dragon Ball Super has been surprisingly good.

I expect to see this ride through all the way to the end, and not only watch all of Bolt but rewatch all of it too.  So this is just a milestone in the journey.  Who knows when the ending will actually arrive.  Maybe after Bolt they'll do a story about his kids or something.  Like a horror movie it'll just never die.  But it's still a really impressive milestone.  Fifteen years!  Wow.

There's also a good chance that Naruto Kai will be a real thing in the future, in which case watching Naruto all over again is a real possibility.  Even if that doesn't happen, someday I want to take on the Naruto abridged challenge, and watch Naruto Abridged vs. all my favorite short anime series such that they're of equal length to Naruto Abridged, and see which is better overall.  My relationship with Naruto isn't done yet.

Hinata sure was pretty in her kimono, as was Hanabi.  Most of episode 500 sucked, but it was well worth it for the beautiful moment showing Hinata and Naruto together.  To the very end, Naruto managed to be like that -- mostly dross, but always containing at least one amazing scene or line to justify it all.

Akame ga Kill! Zero introduced a whole new round of villains our Imperial assassins need to fight.  It feels like the manga is going to extend longer than I expected.  The best parts of the new volume that has come out isn't about the fight of the week though, it's about the character development of Akame and Green that's occurring somewhat in the background.  Everyone wants to know how Akame went from Imperial agent to a member of Night Raid, and the hints in this volume towards that are the core of the volume's appeal.

Luke Cage isn't any good, but I guess I should've expected that going in with an all black cast/setting.  I'm not really the target audience this time.  In that sense, I'm glad Iron Fist is going back to a white blond boy as the protagonist.  After I finish watching Luke Cage he's on queue.

Gilmore Girls' new season was also underwhelming.  Rory, for some reason, transformed into a total slut as an adult, and Lorelai didn't treat Luke as well as he deserved.  There was a bit of the old school charm in the show, it was still funny a lot of the time, but I dunno. . .  There's talk of making more of the show, but if it's going to be like this, I'd rather they didn't.

Firefly remains the gold standard for western television.