== Why I'm still watching *Aquarion EVOL*

Back when I wrote about [[reducing what I was watching in
the winter TrimmingWinter2012]], I was somewhat negative
about *Aquarion EVOL*. However I'm still watching it,
somewhat to my surprise. It's not because of [[EVOL's plot
https://twitter.com/cks_anime/status/172500963494592512]], characters,
or story; I don't like any of them half as much as I do in the original
*Aquarion*. But what EVOL has going for it over the original is that
EVOL has completely embraced the crazy, and doing this makes it easily
watchable just in order to see what they're going to come up with next.

The original *Aquarion* was always somewhat crazy but it mostly put the
crazy on the backburner in order to have room for the story and the
characters. EVOL hasn't bothered with this, so in pretty much every
episode it has been free to have something really over the top going on.
Electric bracelets that shock the pilots when they get too lovey-dovey
for each other? Music that can kill? Burying everyone in a graveyard to
connect them to each other? EVOL will do all of that without blinking,
and more. The old standby of Aquarion's Mugen Punch turned out just to
be the starting point. For me, this makes EVOL quite entertaining to
follow; I can always count on something interesting and absurd going on,
something I would never have predicted.

Although I'm not a mecha fan, the mecha fights are part of this too. The
EVOL Aquarion has far more craziness, crazy combos, and weird powers
than the original did. As of the last episode I saw there are even two
of them (at least). Crazy unpredictable fights go a long way to making
mecha interesting to me.

=== Sidebar: elaborating my relative views of the two shows

In a move that's sure to irritate fans of EVOL, I find the main plot
to date laughable (really, 'Mars needs women'?), the story uninspiring
(although there are flashes of promise if it makes a real stab at
developing the 'fighting apparent fate' issue with Amata and Mikono),
and the characters mostly reduced to barely developed cliches. As usual,
the melodramatic romantic angst between the protagonists makes me wish
they'd shut up (Mix and Andy are more interesting, partly because they
are more low key).

By contrast I actually have fond memories of the main characters and
plot of *Aquarion*, partly because the original focused on far fewer
characters and so was able to develop them much better and partly
because it actually bothered to give its characters real backgrounds and
then tell us about them.

(I am not particularly grumpy about *Aquarion EVOL*'s faults here, I
just don't expect much from it beyond easy entertainment.)