Roving Thoughts archives

Anitwitter pushups [12 days of anime 2016, sort of]

Anitwitter is not why I do some pushups every morning (that would be due to Kirk Tuck). But @B0bduh and @GuyShalev certainly provided extra motivation and a more concrete goal early on in the process, and that still sticks with me. I'm not there yet and recently I've actually regressed (possibly because I'm now doing my pushups more properly, ie deeper), but I keep plugging away. Someday I'll get up to @B0bduh's level (I hope)! And maybe my arms will stop aching one of these days.

(As regular and even extensive cyclist (cf, and), I get a decent amount of exercise in general. But when you're a cyclist, every day is leg day and generally no day is arm day, so I figured that giving my arms some work to do was a good idea. Does it make carrying my not all that light bike up and down the occasional stairs any easier? Answer hazy, ask again when I can do more pushups in a row.)

(Although I don't promise to write twelve entries, this is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime for 2016.)

Checking in on the Fall 2016 anime season 'midway' through

It's time for a slow-moving midway update on my early impressions. This is late enough that shows are generally moving towards their climaxes instead of wallowing in the midway point, but that just gives me a better idea about them (and perhaps more room to get let down in the end, but I don't really want to be pessimistic this season).

Great:

• Flip Flappers: This is my kind of show in the same way that Kyousougiga was, in part because it's a show that's whole-heartedly embracing the potential of its media and could only have been done in animation (and I'm biased towards that). But as Space Dandy taught me, mere animation firepower isn't enough to hold my attention; what really matters is the characters and the story. And that has been compelling and thought-provoking all on its own. This has easily become the show I anticipate the most every week.

  (It's also one of the rare shows that gets me to actively think and talk about it a lot (cf). Mostly I'm a quiet consumer of anime, so a show that I can't get out of my head is unusual.)

Very good:

• Sound! Euphonium second season: This is stuffed with all of the things that KyoAni does so well these days; it is beautiful, full of lovely character touches, loaded with great scenes, and so on. But the story has not (yet) come together with the power and drive that the first season had, with everything sprinting forward to a single destination.

  (Also, I have grumps with the most recent episodes.)

Good:

• March comes in like a Lion: As with my early impressions, ultimately I continue to just like it. The show's shifted from painting portraits to moving Rei forward (even while it looks back to explain him), which is a good and necessary development. Unlike some people, I'm not bothered by the periodic funny interludes; if anything, I think that they're an important part of making the show work as a whole.

  I'll wave my hands here, but I think that without these interludes I'd find the show too unrelenting. And in a way they're true to real life, because in real life ordinary and even funny things go on around us even as we go through our own darknesses. March lives inside Rei's head a great deal, but there's more to the world than just that.

• BBK/BRNK: The show remains solid and fun, along with sometimes being beautiful and sometimes surprising me. It can also be exceptionally silly and funny, which is part of its goofy charm.

Popcorn entertainment:

• Brave Witches: Yes, I know, I dropped this after the first episode. I changed my mind, because apparently I wanted some popcorn entertainment this season and this is inoffensively tolerable in its genre beats (although sometimes it stumbles a bit).

  Why this and not Regalia? In part, apparently because flying witches dogfighting CGI aliens is more my thing that giant robots are (even with the no-pants thing).

Dropped:

• Regalia - The Three Sacred Stars: I'm going to wave my hands here, but certainly a large part of it is that giant robots are not really my thing and some of the characters were overly annoying. (I basically dropped this as the result of writing up my early impressions, as I suspected would be the case.)

Part of me still wants to take a look at Fune wo Amu, but I've been sitting on this for most of the season and haven't done anything about it so if I'm being realistic it's probably not going to happen.