Roving Thoughts archives

2018-06-15

Checking in on the Spring 2018 anime season 'midway' through

Increasingly, these midway entries are where I'm put face to face with what I'm actually watching and what I'm enjoying, and I have to admit to it (either in public or to myself; the latter can be harder). If I was still happy with everything in my early impressions, this wouldn't amount to much, but as you might guess from me writing this, I'm not. In fact this season has been especially bad.

So it's time for me to face up to some awkward things and admit them, by talking about what I'm watching and not watching.

Fully enjoying:

  • Sword Art Online Alternative - Gun Gale Online: This has stayed a great entertainment watch all through, with plenty of twists and turns that have basically all been fun. LLENN is a great character, as is basically everyone around her, and the result is something that I look forward to each week.

  • Hisone and Masotan is a solid mix of genuine fun and interesting, sometimes touching developments. The overall plot has turned out to be an interesting mixture of genuinely interesting things and pure fun craziness, as have various additional characters who've been slowly accumulating.

Suspended and probably dropped if I'm being honest:

  • My Hero Academia (#46): The show is pretty much the same as it always has been; I've just basically run out of enthusiasm for its shonen jive (to borrow a term from Evirus).

  • Megalo Box (#9): The episodes are fine by themselves but the characters have been a bit too iconic to really engage me, and it is ultimately a sports drama, which usually doesn't work for me. I'm pretty sure there's a plot twist coming in the next episode that I'm not going to enjoy, so I'm just sitting on things.

  • Darling in the FranXX (#19): It's not that the show has done anything worse than usual, it's just that I've been feeling less and less enthused about its usual as episodes have piled up. FranXX has had some good stuff, but it's also had a lot of things that don't have the impact that the show's wanted. I agree with Evirus's view on the whole, but I don't think I appreciate what it's trying as much as he does.

    (I used to call DarliFra popcorn entertainment and it still is in a way, it's just that Gun Gale Online does it so much better and I don't really need to spend my time watching anime that I'm meh on.)

It's possible that I'll watch more of any of these three, but at the moment, having actually written this down, it feels unlikely. I'm not really on the edge about any of them; I just haven't been willing to admit it. And there's a bit of me that whispers that I've already watched so much of both MHA and FranXX so why not see them through.

Dropped:

  • Golden Kamuy (#5): As usual there's nothing wrong with the show, it's just that I wasn't particularly enjoying it and I didn't care about all of the plotting and machinations going on. I guess that I'm not that into bloody adventure stories, even if Asirpa had good faces and various characters had fun interactions in general.

  • Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory (#3): Oh, this one hurts. But somewhere in the decade or so since the last FMP and this one, the magic all leaked out for me, and after a while I became willing to admit it to myself. Plain and simply, I found I had no interest in watching the fourth episode and I didn't feel like I was missing anything by walking away.

Given my final comments in my early impressions, I apparently had the feeling that things were going to turn out this way basically from the start. Now that I've managed to admit that I'm only really watching two shows and I've probably dropped everything else, I find that I'm fine with the situation. If I really wanted to watch more anime, there are old shows I have waiting. In the mean time, there's plenty of other things to do.

(My resolution for next season is to drop things faster if I'm not genuinely enjoying them, no matter what I may feel. The sunk cost fallacy is dangerous, especially when it comes to something like Darling in the FranXX.)

Spring2018Midway written at 22:14:00; Add Comment

By day for June 2018: 15; before June; after June.

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