It's time for the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season. This 'midway' check has been delayed in large part because this season has turned out to be pretty much a bust for me, which has not left me with enthusiasm for writing this.

Things I'm still watching:

• Aldnoah.Zero: This has quietly turned into the one show that I actively look forward to watching this season. It's not great and the writing is periodically clumsy, but it's generally well done and interesting. The secondary characters really make the show for me; Inaho is so far mostly interesting as a cryptic mystery instead of a character to be engaged with.

• Zankyou no Terror: This has plenty of beautiful cinematography and animation, but the characters are and remain fairly much ciphers, the actual events are getting increasingly absurd, and I'm not entranced by the plotting. Still it's good enough that I keep watching, although often after some delay (I'm an episode behind right now, for example).

Dropped:

• Space Dandy second season: Theoretically this is just suspended, but I don't think I've ever continued a suspended series. I wrote an entire entry about why this failed for me, but I can boil it down to a tweet: pure artistry in a show isn't enough for me.

Misses:

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei!: As I thought I might, I got tired of this. I decided that the conclusion of the first story was far enough, especially as it apparently shifted to comedy hijinks for at least the episode after that. To put it one way, comedy hijinks is not what I was watching Prisma Illya for.

• Sword Art Online II: I came to my senses. SAO II has good production values and some ideas that could be really interesting stories if well handled, but it also has the usual generally terrible and overdone writing, a slavish adaptation process that hurts the anime-only part of the audience, and overhanging it all the long absurd shadow of Kirito poisoning everything he's involved with. I won't say that SAO II would be a good show if it starred someone other than Kirito, but at least it would have a chance.

So far I haven't used my free time to dig into my backlog of anime. I've just been taking it as downtime and fiddling around with other things (mostly other diversions on the Internet). It's been kind of nice as a break but I sure hope that the fall season is better than this.