The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases ep1: This show is peak low-effort isekai filler content. The entire plot is as per the title, though rather than living as he pleases in the slow-life subgenre as advertised, the former hero immediately rescues some useless, blushing women from some comically badly-animated hounds made from crumbly plaster and then goes off to fight monsters for them while they goggle breathlessly from the sidelines. The banishment elements are wishy-washy too because there were references made to heroes being betrayed, which set things up for an edgy revenge show, except that the hero is actually banished by a complete stranger (narratively) five minutes after being reincarnated and goes along with the humiliation perfectly happily. So the banishment doesn't feel important (or even relevant), as the lead actively wants to be an overpowered munchkin masquerading as a low level NPC. Now that I think about it I'm not even 100% sure that this is an isekai at all because the series doesn't seem to care about internal consistency or properly establishing whether the world the hero came from is elsewhere, he just goes with the flow and seems to fit in perfectly well in the generic fantasy setting. At least the show's shoddy animation occasionally made us laugh, though we were always laughing at it rather than with it.
A Condition Called Love ep1: This season's shoujo romance (no-mance?) is already much better than last season's A Sign of Affection - which is probably a controversial opinion (sorry). While the latter had the more unusual concept and the study of deafness was genuinely interesting, A Condition Called Love has two central characters with their own objectives and glaring red flag issues to deal with right from the beginning, so it's captured my drama-seeking imagination much more readily. The lead is unsure about whether she can actually feel romance but curious enough that she can't completely ignore the dodgy boy from her school who keeps pestering her to go out with him, in a way that would come across as deeply creepy (and sometimes veers very close!) were it not for the fact that he's clearly an inexperienced schoolkid as well. What I find compelling is that he's initially attracted to her because she talks to him like an actual person instead of flirting or acting like she has an agenda; this is one of my own preferred romantic fantasies (and one that is often unfulfilled both in anime and the real world). The characters are, in many ways, products of the different ways that children of different genders are socialised growing up and as a result they stand out amongst their peers for not fitting in; both Hotaru and Hananoi-kun have unrealistic expectations of romance and are coming at the same problem from completely opposing directions. It's an interesting subject to explore and I hope that they'll both figure things out together, whether or not their relationship actually ever goes anywhere romantically.
R
out of 
