== Why dropping *Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress* makes me oddly happy

Every so often I worry that I have no sense of taste in anime, or at least
in action anime. After all I watch a lot of what is basically bland dreck
(*Haifuri* [[this season Spring2016Midway]], *Luck & Logic* [[last season
Winter2016Retrospective]], and the list goes on); to get me to not watch
an action show, it usually has to be either unusually terribly made or
unusually stuffed with obnoxious cliches (or both). I will really put
up with a lot if you feed me a certain amount of tolerable action.
I'll even be reasonably enthused about it.

*Kabaneri* is not the sort of action show that I drop. Far from being
an unusually bad one, it's an unusually good one, well directed and
well made. In the four episodes I saw it had high points that were well
above what many shows I've watched achieve in their entire run in fight
direction, art, sheer staging of scenes, and so on. Nor was it laden
with the usual painful cliches of the broad action genre, and it even
had only a few cardboard cutout stock characters from central casting.

(*Kabaneri* had some cliches but they're [[Araki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetsur%C5%8D_Araki]] cliches not genre
cliches, if that makes sense. The charitable will call them themes.)

I dropped *Kabaneri* anyways because I didn't like it, despite it
having everything everything that ought to have kept me watching.
What that means is that I'm responding to something in action
shows that's more than the obvious; I have some sort of taste
for them that transcends basic technical qualities.  *Kabaneri*
is a quite competent action show and I've even [[been convinced
https://moesucks.com/category/anime/series/koutetsujou-no-kabaneri/]]
that there's some depth in the writing, but I'm still not interested.
It's simply not to my taste.

Which is why dropping *Kabaneri* makes me oddly happy. Dropping it
because it's not to my taste means that I actually *have* some taste.

(This doesn't mean that I understand my sense of taste here. While I can
point to nits around *Kabaneri*, I feel that they're only the surface of
my reaction to it. I've forgiven more from worse shows and kept watching
them, so there's something deep in *Kabaneri* that just turns me off it.)