Trigun Stargaze
Posted 20 April 2026
I'm going to start off with saying that I found this anime disappointing overall. I didn't want to be disappointed. I didn't go into it with skepticism like I did with Trigun Stampede. I didn't pay attention to any of the promotional material, which I probably should have, because then I could have potentially prepared myself for disappointment.
Stargaze had a much lower budget than Stampede, as well as a completely different team working on it. Unfortunately, it shows. Compressing 10+ volumes of manga into 12 episodes was never going to be easy, but the pacing (which I found to be way too fast in Stampede as well) is just weird in Stargaze. It spends too long on some things and not long enough on others. Some characters are replaced with others. Other characters live when they died in the manga and 90s anime. Milly finally shows up but is barely a character; she and Meryl barely have anything to do.
I could go on and on about all the things I thought didn't work.
With Trigun Stampede, I went in skeptical (I was not a fan of the character designs) but stuck around as it went on to be a pretty decent re-imagining of the manga, even with the extremely fast pacing. It probably helped that I found Stampede to be fairly tonally similar to Trigun Maximum. Stargaze did not have any of that, unfortunately.
Joran, the Princess of Snow and Blood
Originally posted on Wordpress on 18 October 2021
Originally, I was going to review all the episodes in this show. I wrote a full review of the first episode (it is posted on my Pillowfort account) and it ended up much longer than I thought it would be. Since I'd planned on reviewing four episodes per blog post, that was going to be a problem. Then I realized I didn't want to do a full review of this series anyway, so one (brief) post it is.
This show...had potential. It was definitely interesting, and a lot of stuff happens, but I think that's where the problem lies. Too many things happened in too short a period of time. Sawa Yukimura, the protagonist, has a goal - a lifelong dream - of killing the guy who killed her family. That happens at the end of episode 4. This is a 12-episode show.
Joran takes place in an alternate history Japan in the 1930s. In the background, there's a group that's aiming to overthrow the government. That does happen by the end of the series, but again, it is a 12-episode show. Things aren't explored in the detail they definitely should have been. A longer season (24 or 26 episodes) would probably have fixed the pacing issues and allowed time for exploration of the characters & the world.
I will leave this post on a good thing: this show is quite pretty! I definitely like the art style, especially the sketchy style used with the changelings.