Selection Project Selected:

After mulling over how much I enjoyed the first two episodes of Selection Project, I decided it merited entry in my top anime rankings.  It has beautiful art and music, a great diverse cast from all the different regions of Japan, a reasonable and sympathetic plot, and is basically firing on all cylinders.  Another huge advantage this series has is it's an original product, so the story can be animated in full in one sitting.  Stories with endings are great.

Ever since the disappointing new season of Battle Athletes came out earlier this year, I've been wanting to kick the franchise out of my rankings.  Selection Project benefits from my current need for a new entry, so all it had to be is decent to win Battle Athletes' place.  But I think it's far beyond 'decent.'  Right now it will stick around at rank #200, but by the time the series is done I expect it will be ranked much higher than that.

Battle Athletes as 6 ancient oav's from the 1990's alone doesn't deserve a spot in my rankings, and all of its tv seasons suck so add nothing to the franchise.  Actually they subtract from the franchise.  Selection Project will be 13 episodes of 2021-level art and animation, all of which will be strong contributors to the whole.  It's no contest.

As per my custom, any series that reaches my top anime rankings also merits a spot in my fictional character hall of fame embedded in '100 Waifus.'  So I also took this opportunity to edit out Momo and substitute in Suzune, the heart-afflicted main heroine of Selection Project.

The Momo I'm speaking of is the imouto from Vividred Operation.  She's friendly, hardworking and cute.  But she had two problems -- she's a minor side character of an already short 12-episode series.  And on top of that there were already 3 other Momo's in the book so her inclusion was extremely confusing.  No one wants to keep track of that many Momo's.  Suzune, on the other hand, is the very first of her name.  And she's the main character.  This too is no contest.

Since I was editing '100 Waifus' anyway, I also took the chance to correct Last Order's name to 'Last Order Misaka,' because kids should have last names that match their parents'.  I also changed Obi-wan's name to Obi-Wan, because that's how the official Star Wars people are spelling his name.  I also decided Hozumi's eyes were brown, not red, and corrected Chapter 17's physical descriptions yet again.  I also corrected Hinata Hyuga to blue-haired instead of black-haired.  It's a very dark blue just like Honoka Yukishiro's, but since I already changed Honoka's hair color from black to blue, to be consistent I had to do the same with Hinata.  Minor details but it's important to get these little things right.

The point of re-reading '100 Waifus' is to find things that can be improved and edit them, so I don't mind my 30th readthrough falling into the same pattern, even though it sure took a while to kick in this time.  Since I intended to fiddle with the Tales of Arise names someday anyway, it was impossible to declare the book finished no matter how this readthrough went.