== Checking in on the Summer 2014 anime season midway through

It's time for the usual midway check in on [[my early impressions of this
season Summer2014Brief]]. 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 LearningFromSpaceDandy]] about
  why this failed for me, but I can boil it down to [[a tweet
  https://twitter.com/cks_anime/status/497182219388342272]]: 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.