2025 Yearly Reflection

Yearly
Written By Rei Caldombra

Written by Rei Caldombra 12/31/25

Hello everyone, Rei Caldombra here to wish you a happy new year! This is another reflection at the end of the year, looking at what anime I watched this year, giving some accolades to those, and then getting into my experience as a creator this year.

What I watched and Read in 2025

Here’s the anime I watched that aired in 2025 in alphabetical order: Call of the Night Season 2, City The Animation, Dandadan Season 2, Dr. Stone: Science Future, Food for the Soul, Flower and Asura, Guilty Gear: Strive Dual Rulers, Honey Lemon Soda, I Have a Crush at Work, Isekai Quartet Season 3, Kaiju no. 8, Mono, My Dress-Up Darling Season 2, My Hero Academia Final Season, Okitsura: Fell in Love with an Okinawan Girl, Reborn as a Vending Machine Season 2, Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Season 3, Rock is a Lady’s Modesty, Sakamoto Days, Shangri-La Frontier Season 2, The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity, The Summer Hikaru Died, Tojima Tanzaburo Wants to Be a Kamen Rider, This Monster Wants to Eat Me, UmaMusume Cinderella Gray (also all the other Uma Musume anime), and Welcome to Japan Ms. Elf.

That brings me to 26, about the same amount as last year. Most of these are included in my seasonal roundups reviews and may have a full or first impressions review, so please check them out if you want to hear my thoughts on them and have not read those already. I also want to talk more about a lot of these series as well.

For manga, I have been keeping up with: Bocchi the Rock, Chainsaw Man, Demon Girl Next Door, Kikuri’s Drinking Diary, Mieruko-chan, and Omori. This year I have started reading 365 Days to the Wedding, The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity, and My Favorite VTuber Is Scary IRL. The first two being ones where I watched the anime and loved it enough to continue reading on. I would like to do this with more series. All 3 of these I would like to talk about more in focused reviews and analysis.

Anime Accolades

My #1 favorite anime of the year is without a doubt City the Animation. It was just absolutely everything I could want from it. It was incredibly funny, wholesome, beautiful, engaging, and filled with goofy endearing characters. I see myself rewatching this at least once every year. And that’s coming from someone who does not rewatch often. 

My favorite couples of the year are Marin and Gojo from My Dress Up Darling and Kaoruko and Rintaro from Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity. For both couples, their relationship is just so precious. They both stand very strong as main characters, being great on their own and amazing together. I don’t think either of them leans too hard on the other. All four of them I think are endearing and attractive characters in their own rights and each show makes it very clear and believable for each person to like the other so much. Gojo especially I think is severely underrated in how attractive he is as a character. My favorite non-romantic couple is Eri and Matsuri from CITY for being the two most precious goobers to exist.

My favorite OP / Opening is Call of the Night Season 2’s Mirage. Creepy Nut’s music has always been the perfect fit for the series, and it showed that again with season 2. The song is a total bop and has lyrics fitting very well for the story. The art and animation are super dynamic and use the great style and lighting from the show. I think it does a great job at showing events of the story without spoiling too much as well.

My favorite ED / Ending is Food for the Soul’s Misoshiru to Butter. The song is super catchy and really encapsulates the joy in the everyday that these types of wholesome slice of life shows tend to focus on. All the main characters get to enjoy something that represents their interests, with everyone in the group enjoying each step of the way on this day they spend together over the course of the ED.  It’s just so sweet.

My favorite individual track for an anime goes to UmaMusume Cinderella Gray’s Last Spurt. It is such a hype, energy building song that you really feel the effect of when it starts playing during races.

If you read the title for my Summer 2025 seasonal roundup then you already know it was my favorite season of the year. It is the strongest season I can think of in recent memory.

Waifu of the year amongst these shows I would have to give to the detective of Call of the Night. But my heart still belongs to Seika from Bocchi the Rock the most.

If I allow myself to branch out to UmaMusume as a whole since I got into it this year, then for this year it monopolizes the baby category aka characters I wish were my child. Winning Ticket, Haru Urara, and Daitaku Helios are my precious dumb energetic daughters who I do the Fan Screaming at Madison Beer Performance (BeReal) for.

This year was full of good slice of life shows like Rock is a Lady’s Modesty, Food for the Soul, Mono, Okitsura, My Dress-Up Darling, The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity, Welcome to Japan Miss Elf, Flower and Asura, and Honey Lemon Soda. I am a Slice of Life fan, I was fed very well this year.

Hopes for 2026

My #1 wish for 2025 is that Izumi Ito Sensei’s health will improve and that we will get more of the Demon Girl Next Door manga. I did not get my wish for a Shimeji Simulation anime announcement this year and will be continuing that wish into 2026. Related to that, I hope in 2026 we will get a taste of Tsukumizu Sensei’s next manga.

My most anticipated anime of 2026 has to go to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run. Other continuing anime I’m really looking forward to are Re: Zero, Ascendance of a Bookworm, Dr. Stone, and Tojima Tanzaburou. 

Thoughts as a Creator

This is the 1st full year of Blog Under a Log! There has been a lot of visit growth on the website this year, more than double compared to last year! That makes me super happy! I’ve been getting more comments too, which also makes me really happy! I love hearing your thoughts about what I talk about as well.

I started the blog in March of 2024. This year I posted 43 articles to the website. This is quite a bit less than last year. I want to do more than that as I feel I have the capacity and desire to. But I am not going to be too harsh on myself. When starting a new hobby, you tend to be more gung-ho at the beginning with all the excitement. My goal will be to make at least 50 next year. I have been endeavoring in the latter half of the year towards consistency and will continue that. I will do my best to put out 1 article every week and hopefully get ahead so I can have some wiggle room and upload on specific days. But I will upload additional things when I can. Sorry if me not being the most consistent person has made it harder to keep up with me as a creator. I’ll keep trying to improve for both our sakes.

I’ll take a bit about videos too. I slowed down on making videos and then stopped in October. I was really struggling to get myself to do them. It was just too much for how much time and energy I can put into it. I plan to get back to making videos soon, but I will not attempt to do videos on almost everything I write like I did before. Going forward I plan to just do videos on focused reviews and analysis. So manga chapter reviews like Omori and seasonal roundups I will not do videos for going forward, while I will definitely do videos on full reviews and analyses. I will be going back and doing videos on things I have already written to catch up on those as I can. 

One new thing I did this year on the website was hosting my friend’s 6-part economic analysis about gacha games. Please check that out if you’re interested, it’s different from the type of thing I normally write. I have had a friend’s work on here before ((Top Five Autistic-Coded Characters in Anime (Ranked By An Autistic Girl)), but this was my first time editing someone else’s work. This was a fun experiment that I’m glad we did. Please look forward to seeing other people’s work here in the future! Maybe one day there could be other people consistently posting here, but for now I am happy hosting my friend’s works occasionally.

My most successful post of the year was Doro’s Journey from Meme to Official Mascot by a wide margin. I’m really glad this is the one that did the best. I had a ton of fun making it and it took a lot more work than usual. This is something I really wanted to make and doesn’t fall directly into the usual type of reviews and analysis that I do, so I’m glad it had such a good response. This is a moment that makes me glad that I’ve stuck to prioritizing doing what I want over being optimal. I would not have made my favorite creation of the year if I had done what I was “supposed to do” and stuck just to reviews or just analysis of just anime/manga to stick hard to a niche. I would love to be more objectively successful, but satisfying my own desire to create comes first before views and interaction. This is a time where that has paid off. And this is what I encourage other creators to do as well. I will never discourage someone from trying to become a professional creator online if that’s what they really want to do. But I encourage people to do what they want first and foremost so you can be happy with yourself and create content natural to you and view monetary gain as a bonus. There are good ways to optimize (it’s not like I don’t think about it at all), but I hope people don’t let the numbers burn them out and/or make them miserable, pursuing cheap sensational content over what they really want to do. Data and analytics can be a useful tool, but it can also dig you into a hole of pursuing numbers and money over self-fulfillment. Sorry if this sounds like a lecture, I am not trying to act like an expert when I’ve only been properly creating for a few years now. This is just a great place to put my thoughts about these things. Just sharing my feelings on the matter.

I would love to make money from my Patreon or from views, but I am not going to jeopardize my integrity and personal desires to do so. The website is growing but I have no intention of using display ads in the future. If you love my work and can afford to support me through Patreon I would appreciate it, but it is not necessary. I’ll do my best to continue making content that makes me happy and is also enjoyable to you too! I hope you can enjoy my work for it being truly me.

Thank you so much to everyone who has been supporting me this year! Whether you have been commenting, sharing, or just silently reading, I really appreciate it. I hope you will stick with me to see what I make next year. Thanks for reading throughout this year! I hope 2026 will be a good year for all of us!

My Patreon if you would like to support me and the website: patreon.com/ReiCaldombra As a free member you can get notified about new uploads on Blog Under a Log and my YouTube channel. You can also become a paid member to financially support me, but any support is greatly appreciated! If you’d like to follow me on any socials, you can find them on the About page.

Rei Caldombra

Lizard Vtuber whose the main writer and owner of Blog Under a Log! See the About section for more info about me.

https://www.blogunderalog.com/
Next

Economic Analysis on Gacha Game Pricing - Part 6 - Conclusions