Roving Thoughts archives

Looking back at the Summer 2016 anime season

Once again it's time for my usual look back at what I watched this past season, to follow up on my early impressions and my midway views. 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.)

I wound up dropping Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 3rei!!. 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 I didn't watch it and in fact ignored it so thoroughly that I kept forgetting to mention it in these entries.)

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

Once again it's time for a slow-moving midway update on my early impressions. We're well into the dog days of summer and here in Toronto the annoying heat is lingering far longer than it ought to, which doesn't make me enthused with things. This has been a season where I've been grumpy with perfectly good shows, or at least perfectly ordinary ones. On the other hand, there's an amazing winner here.

Great:

• Thunderbolt Fantasy: Here is something that I totally didn't expect and didn't see coming; TF has very good writing and solid characters (really). They're over the top wuxia characters, of course, but they're all fully realized people with smart interactions. I was particularly taken when what had been a comedy relief character up to that point made some sharp observations that were never the less perfectly in character, and also as the scene played out they screwed up in a way that was totally true to their comedy relief nature.

Good:

• Twin Star Exorcists: I know, I don't usually mention ongoing shows carried over from previous seasons in these things. I'm making an exception for TSE because TSE has been really quite good (within its genre). It's become my second most anticipated show this season; it's always a pleasure to watch, it has excellent character interactions, and it is still totally owning its style and limitations.

  (And it has something that makes its pacing work.)

I'm still watching:

• Qualidea Code: The show may be developing it a bit too slowly, but this has an actual interesting and unpredictable (to me) plot in addition to reasonably appealing and interesting characters and a good popcorn nature in general. I'm actively enjoying every episode and I want to know what's going on, which is a good sign.

  Also, this is not a typical show in this genre. For example, the nominal protagonist has been almost completely pushed off to the side for several episodes now (he's barely appeared and is barely discussed). The focus has moved to several other characters, all of them interesting in their own right.

On the edge:

• Fate Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 3rei!!: To absolutely no one's surprise, this slowed down and has sort of been ambling around a bit. At this point I'm two episodes behind, although I intend to catch up; it's been decent enough and it makes a good popcorn watch.

Dropped:

• Alderamin on the Sky: I didn't really care any more and it was moving too slowly and in a direction I wasn't all that interested in. It did do some interesting things while I was watching it (there was an impressive fight scene and its aftermath, for example). But the good stuff wasn't enough to keep me going in the face of the stupid and goofy bits, the pace, and the general developments.

• Battery: There's nothing wrong with this and it's actually quite good. But I just haven't found it compelling. Apparently I'm not in the mood for a show like this right now, and it doesn't help that I feel that the protagonist should really chill out a bit.

  (Perhaps I'm almost never in a mood for such shows, and Cross Game was an anomaly. Battery is the kind of show that you're sort of supposed to like just because it's good, much like serious literature fiction. And in books, I've always been a SF/F person instead.)

• Taboo Tattoo: I dropped it for no particularly compelling failing or reason. I just decided I was done.

In other shows, I gave Mob Psycho another chance and it continued not to work for me. This show may be the most impressive show this season that I'm not watching; certainly lots of other people love it. I've also definitely dropped Macross Delta.

This is a quite low number of shows to be watching in a season but I find that I'm perfectly fine with this. I have plenty of things to do with my time other than watch anime, and so I'm doing some of them.

(Unsurprisingly it feels good to not sort of force myself to watch things just to fill up time. And yes, maybe I should do this more often.)