My anime group is watching three shows at any given time. Currently, we're watching
Lupin III, Part 2,
Steins;Gate 0, and
Moriarty: The Patriot.
Lupin is basically just a dumb, fun show, following the antics of a rather perverted gentleman thief and his cohorts as they go about stealing random things and occasionally screwing each other over. Well, mostly it's the busty, shapely Fujiko Mine who screws Lupin and his friends over, which often happens because Lupin is too obsessed with wanting to lay pipe. Also a Japanese detective named Zenigata working for Interpol is often just behind them, and is himself obsessed with arresting Lupin, though he doesn't want to see him killed and will even act to save his life on occasion. It really is just a dumb, fun show that uses cartoon logic for basically everything. I will note, though, that the animation team had a pretty impressive attention to detail, by often drawing vehicles and weapons that are appropriate for the country a given episode is supposed to take place in.
Steins;Gate season 2 seems to be a worthy sequel so far, and got interesting more quickly than the first season. Of the three shows we're watching now, it's easily the one I look the most forward to. My only real complaint with it is the loli shit that keeps turning up in it thanks to the self-declared super-hacker being
that kind of otaku, apparently.
But the main story is keeping me coming back, even if it does broadcast its twists pretty transparently.
Moriarty seems to be specifically tailored to appeal to the alphabet social justice crowd. The titular character is essentially a blonde bishi-boy who is every stereotype of Sherlock Holmes, but an evil commie. He's so awesome, he even invented communism, apparently, as in the second episode, which is a flashback, he has a bunch of kids chanting "kill the rich!" and is himself obsessed with the class system Britain has at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, though both he and the show seem to ignore the existence of the middle class. Their main obsession is just how horrible rich people are, though ironically Moriarty (or rather the character who ends up taking on that name) is himself presented as one of these rich aristocrats. The show essentially starts out as revenge porn, making aristocrats out to be cartoonishly evil so Moriarty can plan out the perfect murder for whoever were harmed by them to get their revenge, calling himself a "crime consultant." Actually the way he ended up as William Moriarty is that he convinced the eldest son of the Moriarty family to talk his father into adopting him and his brother, basically to look good to a particular aristocratic woman who's the bleeding heart liberal type, only to get said eldest son to kill his entire family and several servants by burning their mansion down, after stabbing the actual William Moriarty in the gut with a chair leg, so they could all pose as brothers and inherit the wealth of the Moriarty family. Later it shifts to a whole group of characters joining the brothers so as to affect some grand plan to reform Great Britain from within to become a communist utopia, and Sherlock himself turns up and becomes a "worthy foe." It gets even weirder as far as going into fan-fic territory by having another character who joins them and takes on the name James Bond (who is actually a woman but has decided to become a man to serve the cause). I'm mainly watching out of morbid curiosity to be honest. It's actually kind of sad, because as a Production I.G production, it has the usual attention to detail given to the more technical stuff, like period-accurate buildings and skylines, as well as steam locomotives and other vehicles. Also it's kind of funny how basically all the background, unimportant characters, look entirely normal, while anyone who is a main or supporting character looks very stereotypically anime, with the men all looking like something out of a boy-love magazine.
