The introduction of cacao is a bit worrying since that puts the show after the colonization of the Americas (post medieval times). The plot could take place right before the British destroying the Chinese empire since it was so backwards until the end. I'm pretty iffy on the heroine being pretty all along, I'm now expecting the eunoch being either secretly unsnipped or going through some reversible chemical castration.
It’s not actual China, it’s a fictional country that resembles China.
Rule of thumb is to start from episode 215 then start watching every third episode backwards until episode 176, then watch forward the episodes that are divisible by a prime greater then ten up to episode 341, then go to the beginning and watch the rest as normal.
Start from Episode 3. The first two episodes are filler episodes meant to be gifts to manga readers. Also don't skip any episodes (except for maybe the recap episodes that happen every 25 episodes in the 2006 anime even though I think they're charming in a scrappy way). Gintama is meant to be a slow burn about a town and the people who live in that town and it all pays off eventually.
Gintama is the only long running anime that I can rewatch with fillers and not be mad at what I'm seeing on the screen. Something that I can't say about Bleach, Naruto or DBZ. Gintama doesn't have that many fillers in the first place and most of them are only in the season one anyway. The worst way of watching Gintama I've ever seen and after years I still can't comprehend is skipping all the episodes and watching only the serious arcs. Like why would you do that to yourself? It's like telling someone ''Yeah, go watch Cowboy Bebop, but only the Vicious episodes''.
I think it's just the honest way that Gintama presents its "filler" in comparison to other anime. Gintama is very blatant in the fact that they've run out of money and they're doing a clip show / redubbing of important scenes with other characters. The "filler" episodes that aren't just that are also some of the best episodes/moments in the anime (Fake Ending, We're Sorry, and half of Otsu's songs for example). It doesn't bog the series down with low quality "filler" arcs which I greatly appreciate. I blame series like Naruto, DBZ, and Bleach for the negative connotation that "filler" episodes have in general. Some anime really do thrive off of filler and non-manga content (Oshii-era Urusei Yatsura).
This is pretty asinine and I've heard it more than I'd have to. Gintama has way too many callbacks to earlier episodes for it to even be viable to skip the non-serious episodes (especially since they're usually the best episodes in the series). The first 30-odd episodes are dedicated to introducing major players in the story as well as the central cast, could you imagine skipping that and going straight to Benizakura or Umibozu?
That's not the title of the song.
I think the a good rule of thumb if someone wants to skip (although I kind agree to avoid doing that) is find out if the arc is referenced again later. There's a pretty good comedy arc where Hijikata gets possessed by a cursed sword with the soul of a dead otaku that comes in to play in 2 or 3 other arcs, but I kinda remember not liking a few stand alone arcs like that one that dealt with Elizabeth being some kind of starwars/gundam knock off as well as one where Gin was stuck in a haunted inn with almost none of the main cast present. Although take that opinion with a grain of salt because gintama was one of the first anime I watch so a lot of the jokes and references went over my head (looking back on the ghost inn, that was years before I knew what the fuck jojo's was and iirc most of the comedy in the arc was gin trying to convince himself these are stands and not ghosts). Might have to rewatch it myself to see what exactly I missed.
Adding Nanachi was the most ingenious thing the author did. The series actually wasn't all that popular in Japan till Nanachi was introduced, then the series exploded in popularity thereafter.
Tbf, Nanachi's arc is when the show transitions from being somewhat creepy children's book into being full on Lovecraftian horror. Also always thought Nanachi was a girl based on pretty much everything about her.
Bondrewd's entire objective is to find a way for someone else to suffer the concquences of anime decompression sickness for him so that he can return from the depths of the hole and retain what little human form he still has left which is pretty much objectively evil unless you really want to bet that the artifacts/knowledge he would recover would make up for it (and I've seen almost no evidence that anything recovered has done anything good for the world at large, not even to the extent of the batteries in Roadside Picnic). I prefer the "Bondrewd #1 Dad" memes because it gets at a kind of funny part of his personality where he is very charismatic and comes across as kind to these children even as he feeds them into a wood chipper.
I was incredibly iffy on this with the intro, but at least in the LNs she is never actually played as the "super beautiful once she whips off the glasses" trope. At best she is shown as just moderately pretty, while being unrecognizable to how she normally carries herself. All the other ladies of the rear place are still described as being way more attractive in general (for good reason considering their jobs). It never changes how she is treated and she normally just stays the same aesthetically.
