== Looking back at the Summer 2016 anime season

[[Once again Spring2016Retrospective]] it's time for my usual look back
at what I watched this past season, to follow up on [[my early impressions
Summer2016Brief]] and [[my midway views Summer2016Midway]]. This one has
turned out a lot shorter than it is in many seasons, because, well, let's
run down the shows:

Great:

* *Thunderbolt Fantasy*: Puppets and all, this remained very strong all
  the way through. We had twists and turns and revelations and surprises,
  even things that pleasantly surprised me. This was over the top wuxia,
  but I like that, and I happen to feel it was pretty darn good over the
  top wuxia.

  *Thunderbolt Fantasy* did not necessarily aim high, but (like *Flying
  Witch*) it's a show that absolutely delivered perfectly on what it
  aimed for. It had very sharp genre writing and it hit every beat you
  could want, including quite clever revelations and explanations in the
  last two episodes. It is one of my favorite shows of the year and I'm
  happy that we're apparently getting a sequel (even though I don't
  expect it to be quite as dramatic).

I finished it:

* *Qualidea Code*: The animation quality clearly dropped off at the end
  (and when I can notice, you know it really went) and things got a bit
  silly, but on the whole *QC* delivered what I expected and wanted from
  the whole experience. It even threw in a few surprises and unexplained
  things.

I sort of continued watching it:

* *Twin Star Exorcists*: I watched this all the way or almost all of
  the way to the end of the season and enjoyed it, but I've now dropped
  it. The show has apparently entered a filler arc that I'm not too
  enthused about (and added a kid character, although it's doing okay
  at handling her), but the real failing in my eyes is that it skipped
  forward two years and nothing particularly changed in terms of character
  relationships. If the show hadn't explicitly said 'we skipped forward
  two years', I wouldn't have noticed. Given how fast things were moving
  in character relationships before then, I find that this totally blew
  away my suspension of disbelief.

  More fundamentally, while the character interplay between the
  protagonists was cute and okay, it just feels played out. I'm not
  really going to see anything new and something just felt played
  out about the whole thing. I don't need to see these characters
  repeat their same nice patterns over and over again; I've already
  seen it enough times.

  (I'm writing so much here because there's part of me that wants to
  keep on watching *TSE* because it's a perfectly decent show. But
  my gut has told me that I'm not particularly interested in watching
  episodes, so. [[On Twitter
  https://twitter.com/cks_anime/status/783810772161921025]].)

[[I wound up dropping *Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 3rei!!*
https://twitter.com/cks_anime/status/772223182493388801]].  I'm neither
surprised nor particularly sad; I honestly expected it from the start. I
probably won't give any future PI series a chance, because I keep getting
burned out on it.

On the one hand, this was not a very good or very active season overall.
On the other hand, *Thunderbolt Fantasy* was amazing and I feel fully
satisfied about having watched it. On the whole I'll take this season
over one where there's a bunch of okay shows but nothing that stands
out in the way *TF* does.

(And in things that I keep omitting, *Active Raid S2* aired this season
but [[in contrast to my earlier guess Winter2016Retrospective]] I didn't
watch it and in fact ignored it so thoroughly that I kept forgetting to
mention it in these entries.)