I was so impressed by this that I don’t think I’m going to follow it. I’d rather wait and binge it, because I want to sink fully into this world rather than just visiting it once a week.

From the title I thought this was going to be about making hats for magicians. I love the world building (A+ so far, though the idea of being able to keep magic secret is little hard to accept. I doubt that the series will focus on that so I think that I can lock in going forward.) and the fascination with the magic system (B to A+, depending on how well it explains advanced magic). The pacing so far is great: fast but doesn’t feel rushed. I suspect that this will be my favorite show of the season.

I went back to look at the easy-to-see magic circles. It seems that there is a wide variety of sigils. The signs around the sigils seem to have less variety. And there seems to be some variations on the enclosing circles. The floating carriage and the forbidden spell appear to have 2-levels of nested magic circles. If this was a re-incarnation power-fantasy show, the protagonist would probably immediately aim to create 3±levels of nested magic circles… but judging from the forbidden spell, 3-levels might have the potential to instantly destroy cities.

How the magic circles function with stone formations is a little bit of a mystery for now, I guess you could just say that there’s durable special ink (or whatever the ink’s made of) in the cracks.

It’s our boi Qifrey!

I already resolved to seasonally watch Akane-banashi instead of WHA (mainly because I loved Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju in the past, and partially about saving the best things for later too), but I checked some scenes. It does not disappoint. Good job on CR for making this a simuldub.

I think this is the first anime where I find the English dub vastly superior to the Japanese dub. Hanae Natsuki is a superb VA. I also opine he’s a mismatch to Qifrey.

After first ep.: Exceptional adaptation. They did the same thing that Frieren did, where they added so much “between the panels” to elevate the source.

edit after ep 2.: episode 2 was closer to the source since there was more material there that needed less anime original padding. They still managed to give the characters so much personality. I especially love how they managed to translate the manga’s insanely beautiful art panels into animation.

It’s definitely very pretty, but so far I don’t really get where all the hype is coming from. For my taste, the pacing for this type of story was a bit too fast. I also feel like we just glossed over the tragedy of practically losing one’s mother as a result of one’s own actions and jumped straight into being amazed by magic, which makes the main character seem unconvincing to me for now. The newly encountered characters seem to represent common stereotypes found in school-based stories—the genki girl, the stoic rationalist, and the edgy overachiever. Pretty standard stuff. I hope it develops in a less predictable way, because at this point the show’s main strength is just that it’s visually very beautiful.

@[email protected] Looks like episodes 1 and 2 were released together.