The Bastard!! oav's were better:

This tv season does one thing better than the original oav series -- it included the three subordinates of Arshes Nei and Dark's fights with all of them exactly as seen in the manga.  It's worse in all other respects.  The voice actors are worse, the music is worse, the art is worse, and the pacing is worse.  Everything is elongated by the useless commentary of useless voyeurs whose only purpose in life is to watch fights unfold in front of them and comment on it, pointing out obvious things that everyone can see without having to say anything about it.  There's also more censorship in the tv series than in the oav's or the manga, basically a distinct lack of nipples that the original anime and source work had no problem displaying.

Due to the needless elongation of every scene by having more people comment on the action than actually having the action, the tv series manages to run for 13 episodes but still hasn't caught up with where the 6 episode oav series ended.  And due to the uninspired voice acting, music and art, the scene that made me cry, the clash of the two Halloween spells in the original Bastard! oav's, came across as dull and lifeless this time around.  They couldn't even get me hyped for the best event in the series.

My hope is that the second cour of Bastard!! gets us to new material.  With another thirteen episodes, surely the new anime can adapt more of the manga than the original oav's covered.  When doubling the length of your series doesn't help, quadrupling can always manage.

The series was good enough to watch in a few days, I'm not saying it's bad, but the pedigree it was supposed to live up to was much higher than this.  Only the second cour and the promise of new material makes this version of Bastard!! rankable at all.  And even then, its ranking won't be much better than 200.

Meanwhile, Russia is rapidly gaining ground around Lysichansk.  Soon all the Ukrainian soldiers in the region (around 20,000) will be surrounded and destroyed, an ironic outcome because all Ukraine had to do was not commit so many troops to such a precarious position weeks ago and this outcome wouldn't have been so disastrous for them.  Anyone could see they were putting troops into a bag about to be tightened shut, but Zelensky doesn't care about the lives of Ukrainians, something put on display yet again.

I've also gained ground in Fire Emblem: Three Houses.  I successfully managed to spare Hilda, Claude, Flayn and Seteth during my new playthrough of the Crimson Flower route.  It's great that the people I care about can be saved if you play well enough, the game developers were really thoughtful and kind to include that level of leeway.  Now I just have to beat the route as a whole and my stealth army will be crowned as the new perfect strategy.

The summer anime season, including Utawarerumono, is only hours away.