Review of Land of the Lustrous
It's hard to put into words what exactly makes this show so good. Explaining, and showing this to a friend who dead-panned me with a stare: "This is the most boring shit ever" and honestly - I can see it, it's just hard to explain why it's great. - The show seems to be set somewhere in the future, humans seem extinct? and replaced by strange people from the moon and our featured cast of shining crystals. The characters are made from things like jade, diamond, ruby etc. and have the visual flair to go along with their given crystal. The show is mostly 3d animated, butfor once, this is not at all a negative. It adds a unique look to the show that sets it aside from most other animes. It's not necessarily the best looking show I've seen: the landscape and anything that doesn't feature our jolly cast can lack some detail - still, the character style makes up for this and the visuals are in that area quite impressive.
A cool idea was to make the characters genderless, at least that is the impression I got. Aside from rare occasions, they don't seem to specifically refer to any character as specifically male or female. This works rather well with our main character: I really never specifically identified that character as specifically male-ish or female-ish so if the idea was to make the character seem genderless, I thought they succeeded quite well. This is not really the case for the other characters though. Almost all of them are very feminine, especially the character Dia/Diamond. It's quite apparent that she was made to be a cutesy girl which I felt went against that genderless quality.
As the source material is still on-going this is not a 'finished' story. The 12 episodes leave a lot left unexplored, hopefully for a second season. For instance; a significant source of conflict is the ever unyielding attacks by the 'moon-people' who tries to steal the crystals (AKA the characters) and bring them to the moon. So far, they are really just en masse of white figures without any characterization at all so the 'villains' don't really have any depth (so far at least).
The setting, the style, and the characters really add something unique that makes the show quite different from others I have seen. I especially liked the main character, he/she was awesome, cute, comedic, laughable, eccentric, lovable - just filled with adjectives!
If you watch an episode or two and don't like it, you probably won't later on either. If for some reason the show is just strangely appealing though - you'll probably love it by the end!