Roving Thoughts archives

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Winter 2020 anime season

As before I'm collecting here all of my tweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order that I saw them).

• BOFURI #1: I rather liked this, but I was biased towards it because I've enjoyed what of the manga I've seen. I'm scoring it solidly entertaining in a deliberately silly way; Maple is gleefully (but unknowingly) breaking the world in her own fun way. →

• Eizouken episode #1: That was a bunch of fun and a paean to animation, and I like these kids. I definitely hope that this show is going to go interesting places; I'll find out next episode. →

• In/Spectre episode #1: This is my kind of stuff in general so I'm biased, but this was sharp, interesting, nicely done, and with all sorts of lovely touches in dialog and action. And I like these two (I can't call them 'kids', all things considered). They bicker well. →

• Magia Record episode #1: That was a decidedly interesting start, often told in an interesting way that I liked. Iroha is an intriguing person with undercurrents, the whole show looks good (and had some decent action), and I want to watch more. →

This pretty much covers anything that I feel likely to watch. I've heard good things about the story of Infinite Dendrogram, but from all reports the implementation in animated form is not particularly impressive. There's also Heya Camp, but two large parts of what I loved about Laid-Back Camp were Rin and the actual camping and I understand that neither of them are in these shorts, which doesn't make me very enthused.

(There's also sort of Dorohedoro, but it's apparently so mired in what is sometimes called the 'Netflix jail' that it wasn't even covered in the ANN review of this season's first episodes.)

I ended up abandoning the Fall 2019 anime season

It's time (and past time) to officially note this. In the end, after my first episode reactions, I wound up effectively entirely abandoning the Fall season, eventually watching no shows. I explicitly dropped everything except Fairy Gone, and while I didn't officially drop it I haven't watched more than the first two episodes. I may finish it (or watch more) at some point, because I was reasonably enthused after episode 14, but somehow that never translated to spending 24 minutes to watch episode 15.

This marks a low point in my anime watching; I haven't been this inactive for a very long time. I think that Winter 2020 will be better (there are certainly more promising shows in it), but I'll have to see. I don't think I'm burned out, but I'm definitely distracted by various things.