I was planning on demoting Eminence in Shadow next time I revised my rankings, but I must revise that decision in light of this news. With a second season Eminence may well deserve its ranking of #127. The anime may now catch up with the manga. It's nice to see all the series I like getting sequels, it means I'm not alone in my assessments of these shows, that a lot of people see the same value in them that I do.
It's kind of sad though, the better isekai series like Hai to Gensou no Grimgar and Death March didn't get second seasons, while inferior ones like Kami-tachi and Eminence do. I'm in favor of all great series getting a second season, but why these and not those? Obviously the commercial public isn't perfectly aligned with artistic merit, there's just a loose overlap. In my ideal world all great anime would receive sequels all the way to the story's conclusion, Grimgar, Death March, Kami-tachi and Eminence. Shikkakumon, Hataraku Maou-sama, Isekai Nonbiri Nouka, Youjo Senki, and Ken Tensei too. And while we're at it Gate, Outbreak Company, Choyoyu and Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear. Instead of a lucky few getting sequels, or stopping at season two and giving up, everybody would get the honor they deserve.
This world is supposedly so affluent and advanced, but it still can't even finish the stories it started. This seems to me to be a bare minimum standard that even Charles Dickens was able to accomplish hundreds of years ago. So where is the progress? Out of my top 200 anime, 76 series are incomplete and less than 51 episodes long, while 77 are completed, and the remaining 47 are slated to eventually be completed or are at least really long with lots of completed mini-arcs. That's a very middling result, split almost exactly down the middle between success and failure. And that's referring to the best anime ever made, which of course favors longer and more complete franchises. So even if you're among the best in the business your odds are 50/50. Just imagine if we had twice as much great anime as we do now, which is what we deserve. That would be over 20,000 episodes for everyone to watch at least once over their lifetime (and if you're sensible like me you'd watch them twice or thrice). It's almost a lifetime guarantee of fun. It could be done, the stories are already written and completed in their source works, nothing is stopping us. The cost of anime episodes isn't high at all. If we had spent the $100 billion we just blew on Ukraine on completing all unfinished anime franchises we could have easily achieved this goal. But instead we wanted to genocide the Russians of Donbas. That's basically the entire problem with modernity in a nutshell.
At least one story has received a full rendition though -- Imouto Sae Ireba Ii, or 'A Sister's all you need,' has released its final translated volume, #14. You can purchase it or download it from nyaa.si. I'm in the middle of the latest Xanth book, 'Question Quest,' so Imouto will have to wait a bit until I can open up a timeslot for it. But I'm definitely looking forward to finishing this series. It's one of those moments of eventful progress that is so rare in life. The war in Ukraine never ends, kids and employees still have to wear face masks even though they've been proven not to work, the CDC has entered the covid vaccine into the childhood vaccination schedule even though it also has been proven not to work and be deadly poison besides, and even though we spent trillions on repairing our infrastructure somehow our rail network, airports and power supply has become less reliable instead of more. But at least in the world of fiction there are proper endings, resolutions to problems, happy, satisfying answers to our questions. At least we have Imouto Sae Ireba Ii, which according to the title is apparently all we ever needed anyway.
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