Roving Thoughts archives

Brief impressions of the Winter 2020 anime season so far

As before, it's time for my relatively early views of how this season has shaken out so far, following up on my first episode reactions. This entry has been delayed partly because I'm lazy but largely for the traditional reason, which is that I haven't wanted to admit something about one of the shows airing this season.

Great:

• Magia Record: This has completely blindsided me with how good it is and how much I've been enjoying it. The entire show is very well presented, with excellent staging, scenes, direction, and so on, the characters and their interactions are appealing, and the overall story interesting, with a solid balance of mystery and slow revelations.

  (The show's staging is very deliberately unnatural, but that fits its mood and setup, and it's doing very good things with that staging.)

Good:

• BOFURI: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense: This is my kind of thing so I'm biased, but even then I think it's solidly entertaining and above all simply fun. The show has an infectious joy of people playing this game and having fun at it, and it communicates that well along with the inherent comedy of Maple and her friends quietly breaking the game by doing things that the developers didn't expect.

• In/Spectre: I like this style of show (it's from the same author as Blast of Tempest) but sometimes it has a little more talking with a little less compelling things than I'm entirely happy with. People making clever plans is all well and good, but sometimes I want a bit more. However, the show routinely does excellent character interactions, with the core cast interacting with each other in nice and often funny ways. Seeing Kotoko being taken down a peg is never not amusing, and everyone has believable chemistry with each other.

Tacitly suspended:

• Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken (#3): This is an excellently made show about animation, with some appealing characters and all of that. But it hasn't really clicked with me and watching it often makes me feel that I'm sort of being lectured at (with a lot of love, but still). Some of the little things the show does with the characters don't appeal, either.

  Many people really love this and I'll probably watch episode four (which is apparently very good). But episode five is apparently all about giant robots and the various issues around the genre, which sounds exactly like what I'm not interested in at several levels.

That Eizouken hasn't clicked with me makes me feel both sad and guilty, because this is theoretically just the sort of thing that I should really enjoy and watch as an anime fan. It's even made by one of the best directors working in anime, someone whose previous shows I've generally quite enjoyed or at least appreciated. But my gut is just not interested and these days I listen to it.

(My gut actively looks forward to Magia Record, enjoys BOFURI a lot, and is okay with In/Spectre.)