Zenshu

I confess I really wasn't sure about this one after the first episode, but Zenshu has won me over (for now), though I'm really hoping it ends happily.

Let's call it isekai-adjacent. Natsuko Hirose is a young woman that has been totally and wholly consumed by making anime/drawing since she first saw A Tale of Perishing (a distressingly depressing anime movie) as a young girl. She could probably draw the characters in her sleep. After high school, she went straight to work and developed a hit anime (a la magical girls) and now she's supposed to follow that up with a new one...about first love. Something she knows absolutely nothing about.

While struggling with the deadline and tossing storyboard after storyboard, she winds up eating an expired clam lunch and collapses to (theoretically) reawaken in the middle of A Tale of Perishing, right before one of the characters, Unio (a really annoying talking unicorn dude), is about to sacrifice himself to save the other heroes fighting the Void. But Nautsuko has her pegboard, which is apparently magical now, and it demands she draw! A desk appears and she does; drawing with release, drawing like she hasn't been able to draw since her last project started. 

And she saves the day and Unio, re-writing the battle on the fly. Then she promptly collapses and sleeps for a few days. Now, I should mention that she'd stopped cutting her hair and wasn't going to cut it again until after the project was done (or at least the storyboard) and when she first arrives in the world, she looks, basically, like a walking clump of hair. Can't see her face at all. So the heroes are shocked when they realise she's actually human.

I'm not going to rehash everything, but let's say that the show really seems to be about her rediscovering her love of drawing, but also seeing people outside of herself and her obsession for the first time. As she changes the world around her, it's changing her too. Luke Braveheart, of the super cheesy name, falls in love with her instead of Destiny, the character he was supposed to (and Destiny, instead of being a damsel in distress, becomes a crazy bodybuilder and builds an orphanage, finding her purpose as well, even if it wasn't what the original writer wanted). And the original writer (who also had died) is there too -- in the form of a bird, annoyingly proclaiming to Natsuko that the end of the movie is set in stone and there's nothing she can do about it.

And the ending is terrible; Luke would have become the Ultimate Void after Destiny died. The world ends, the future destroyed.

Can Natsuko re-write this tale? Is she really there or just experiencing bad clam hallucinations? That'd be a shame, because she needs Luke (and the others). Just as much as she needs her spark.

So I'm curious as to how this will wrap up. I'm not going to look anything up and spoil myself.

Edit: Finished it. It was good. The ending made sense, but was also bittersweet (she saves the world, but also goes back to "reality"). But they left it open for a sequel as Luke has promised her he'll find her next time. 

The best part is that it's one of the more original storylines in the season. Definitely glad I watched it. Dunno that I would watch it again, unless there is a second season and we get some romance thrown in if Luke makes it to reality...