Nekopara in, Hatena Illusion Out:

Over time I've grown disillusioned with Hatena Illusion.  The series billed itself as a kaitou anime, but it was actually a lame battle series, without any thieving at all.  After the first episode, the animation quality dropped like a rock, to near bottom.  Kemono Friends looks better.  This for a series whose main selling point was the art from To Love ru.  The character designs really are great, but with such a low budget adaption none of it shines through.

The only good episodes of Hatena were when Kana and Yumemi were quarreling.  After that it quickly returned to battles full of levity because it was obvious who would win from the start.  Battles without tension are just a waste of everyone's time.  Plus, with such terrible animation, it's not like the battles could be thrilling to watch either.  Often it was hard to tell what was even going on.

Meanwhile, Nekopara billed itself as mindless fluff, but every now and then carries powerful emotional punches that aren't mindless in the least.  It also has some of the best comedy I've seen in years, and an amazing budget that lets it animate everything beautifully.  It's like night and day.  There are many weaknesses to Nekopara, like some cats not being attractive side characters, and the ova's being totally out of sync with the tv series, but it can't dim the sparkling of the main cast.

There's always a risk when crowning a series as great before it's even aired in full and this time it caught up to me.  With Nekopara airing simultaneously, though, I can quickly jump tracks and no damage done.  This emergency rescue of my rankings won't afford Nekopara much breathing room, though, I don't even think it's as good as Tears to Tiara, so that will place it ultimately only at #199.  Eventually Nekopara will end up axed too.  But at least the top anime rankings will have actually decent anime in it until then this way.

This also changes my fictional character hall of fame, with Chocola as the representative of Nekopara in and Kana as the representative of Hatena Illusion out.  It's a shame because Kana in her kaitou outfit really is beautiful.  But the story just doesn't do justice to the illustrator so it's all wasted effort.

I made another edit to '100 Waifus' which had always been bugging me -- even though one of my rules of naming said that, 'if possible, children's names should come from the same franchise as their mother,' inscrutably a Majikoi character was not born to Sayaka, my Majikoi mother.  This has been fixed and now the child nestles under the correct wing.  Of course, other franchises have children born to different mothers than their appropriate one, but they have the excuse of being so popular and having so many characters that no one mother could possibly have birthed them all.  In Majikoi's case there were only six such children so it makes no sense to be outsourcing any of them to anyone else. 

My 19th readthrough is still in the early going so there's probably many more useful edits to come, but like this the book will steadily improve ever closer to perfection.

Kanata no Astra has been rewatched and it was as good as I remember.  No complaints here.