Roving Thoughts archives

My views on Madoka: Rebellion

(There are some spoilers here.)

I finally got around to seeing the third Madoka movie last year. This is the controversial one, the one with an all-new story and various other things. You can read a lot of commentary about it around the net and I'm late to the party, but I feel like saying something.

On the one hand, what pretty much everyone says about the movie is true. It is basically fanfiction, which makes it essentially indulgent fanservice of the 'not naked people' kind; it's giving the fans the easy, comfortable thing that they (we) all wanted. All of the major characters have been changed around, smoothed over, neatened up, and turned into the popular fan views (and desires) of them. The movie even invents a relatively absurd partner for Mami. Everyone works together to fight things, we get some nice set-piece fights, and so on and so forth. The character fanservice continues even as the movie reveals more and more things and reaches its climax.

And yes, the movie has somewhat of an explanation for all of this. It doesn't really matter; a creator can always find some way to justify this sort of stuff if they want to.

On the other hand, the movie is also about the only genuinely interesting resolution to Homura's story arc that we could have had. I won't say that it redeems the movie, but it does make it interesting; a version that took the easy and obvious way out at the climax of the movie would be clearly worse. It's also a resolution that makes sense if you interpret Homura as fundamentally selfish and unable to let go, which is actually a running theme in the TV series from some angles.

(It is Homura's cycle of decisions, trying over and over again to save Madoka instead of letting her go, that wind up creating so much power in Walpurgisnacht. But for the ending of the TV series this would have been an utter disaster.)

But being intellectually interesting (in part for the fan reaction to its ending) does not make Madoka: Rebellion particularly important to see. The movie contributes essentially nothing to the TV series and is not good enough on its own to be particularly compelling. I mean, it's a movie, it looks pretty. But it doesn't have an edge and it's lazy and indulgent, with only a few scant moments of genuine emotional impact. It's more interesting as an artifact than as a movie to watch. Regardless of Rebellion's underlying motives, it's a movie that is only really for fans of Madoka (and it will enrage some of them).

(Part of this is that it's impossible to detach Rebellion from the rest of Madoka and consider it as a stand alone work. Its story is inextricably tied to the series and it can neither be watched nor considered in isolation.)

Some people consider this in part a meta-commentary on Madoka fandom (eg). I suspect that they are right, partly because I don't think the first part of the movie could have been written without an awareness of fan memes. However this doesn't make the film any more engaging to me; it remains an interesting intellectual exercise, not an affecting one. But then I hiss at End of Evangelion, so you can take my opinion with some salt if you want.

(See also Bobduh on, in part, Rebellion as fanservice.)

Brief early impressions of the Winter 2016 anime season so far

As before it's time for another set of my early impressions, this time supplementing my first episode takes after I've watched some more of these shows. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn't try out anything this season that was an outright miss; I'm not sure if this is because I'm getting better at avoiding loser shows or that I'm getting less willing to try things.

Clear winners:

• ERASED aka Boku Dake ga Inai Machi: This is basically doing everything right as a suspense show. It's interesting, compelling, well put together, and has been at points both genuinely unpleasant and genuinely beautiful. At times it's so successful as a show that it's hard to watch due to the tension and power.

• Dimension W: So far this is a well done adventure/action show featuring adult characters for once, instead of the usual collection of teens. That puts it firmly in the axis of shows like Cowboy Bebop and Darker Than Black, although it's so far not as good as either of them. The show is moving along at a very good pace; we got a big reveal about the situation in the second episode, for example.

• Akagami no Shirayukihime: This is back and so far pretty much the same as before, except that this time we seem to have an ongoing multi-episode plot. I'm fine with that, since it adds some additional interest and involvement to the whole thing.

I'm enjoying:

• BBK/BRNK aka Bubuki Buranki: I'm quite enjoying this for what it is, which is a (so far) uncomplicated shonen action story. It's well put together and moving right along, although it could yet slow down. Your tolerance for this will depend both on your interest in its fundamental genre (since it's not doing anything special there) and in your tolerance for CG characters. They don't bother me at all, but some people really hate them.

• Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash: This is a realism-inclined take on the whole 'people wind up in a fantasy world', where our protagonists are low level spuds who are not exactly having a good time. They are (not) enjoying it about as much as you'd expect, and the second episode was fairly blunt about this. The show is beautiful and well put together, with generally interesting characters, but it's not perfect; there was an jarringly unpleasant bit of extended 'fanservice' in the first episode, for example.

  So far I'm enjoying Grimgar on the whole but I'm concerned about where it's going to go. I am probably not going to enjoy an entire season of grinding brutality, for example, however realistic a depiction it is of people operating under those stresses and how they deal (or don't deal) with them. At the same time I don't see where else Grimgar can go with the setup so far; it would be equally jarring if it turned into something pleasant where the protagonists went on pretty high fantasy adventures.

• Active Raid: This is so far a generally enjoyable action show with some interesting things, but it's also periodically slid into some less enjoyable bits that I would preferred to live without, some of which show rather questionable judgement (like the fanservice at the start of the second episode). It's also got a bit more than its share of not so much cliched as troped characters. To the extent that the show has staked out where it's going, it's deeply silly; it features crazy supervillain hackers of questionable taste. But I'm willing to keep watching for now.

  (I called the show not as smart as it thinks it is, and I stand by that.)

It's okay for now:

• Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo!: This is reasonably funny so far (which is rare for me), partly because it's willing to be subtle. I'm not sure if the show's premise can sustain enough humour and interest to keep me watching all season, though.

I'm still watching:

• Myriad Colors Phantom World aka Musaigen no Phantom World: Oh KyoAni, how you've come down in the world this time around. There are a few interesting things here but they are mostly drowned by the combined slather of your typical low-quality LN writing and KyoAni's inability to do good fight scenes (I wrote an entire rant about part of that).

• Koukaku no Pandora: This is written by Koshi Rikudo, the creator of Excel Saga, but unfortunately it lacks the latter's manic energy and thus much of its charm. It's okay and periodically funny, but it's not really 'good' as such.

  (The first episode actually did have that manic energy, but things slowed down after that.)

• Luck & Logic: It's yet another action shonen LN-based show and as a result it's going just as you expect and is just about as cliched as you'd expect, with periodic injections of stupid and annoying things. It has mostly not been actively bad so far, just bland. I think it managed to be funny once.

  (Watching this makes it clear just how much of a standout last season's Asterisk was.)

The only reason I'm still watching all three of these shows is that they're right there and I'm apparently kind of bored this season. If I was sensible I would drop them and use my time to watch better things from my copious backlog. In a stronger season they might all be misses on the grounds that they're too boring (as opposed to misses on the grounds that they're bad).

Not for me:

• Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu: Not my kind of show or setting and sadly its general excellence was unable to overcome that. Lots of people love this, for good reason.

• Dagashi Kashi: In practice, not sufficiently funny to overcome that it's a setting and setup that generally doesn't work for me.

Not considered for various reasons:

• Lupin III (2015): I bounced off the first episode after a few minutes and haven't tried it again, partly because I've heard that the actual content is not too compelling.

• Ajin: There was no way to watch this until very recently, and apparently it's a horror show anyways. Horror is not my thing.

• GATE second season: Apparently I can learn from experience, because I thought back to my generally unenthused reaction to the first season and decided not to continue it.

• Schwarzes Marken: Since this is part of the whole Muv-Luv Alternate setting, allow me to burst out in laughter. It's by all accounts terrible on top of that.

There's a bunch of LN-based action shows and romance shows and so on that I'm just skipping completely based on the premise and initial writeups alone. The ANN preview guide was very helpful, or to be more exact Nick Creamer's reviews specifically; he suffers so that we don't have to.

So far this is a reasonably solid season, although perhaps not a deep one; I can see situations where I wind up watching only four or five currently airing shows.

(Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen is still alternating between derping along and attempts at serious deep drama that it hasn't really earned; the latter come off as somewhat over the top and ridiculous.)

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Winter 2016 season

As before, I've decided to collect here all of my tweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order I saw them).

• Myriad Colors Phantom World episode 1: Fanservice galore, which is a negative, and no KyoAni spark of life. But okay otherwise in an LN way. →.

• ERASED episode 1: I came in knowing something about the premise and with that, this was a great first episode. I want to see more. →

• Active Raid ep 1: A pretty good but also fairly stock start for this sort of thing. And wait, she's still a minor? That explains some bits. →

• Pandora ep 1: That was surprisingly fun and decent in a popcorn action way, although I could have lived without the big fanservice joke. →

• Dagashi Kashi episode 1: That was fairly good and I found it reasonably funny, but it's also clearly not my thing at all. So it goes. →

• BBK/BRNK episode 1: That was a pretty good version of an action shonen. Snappy, well done, good action sequences, doesn't waste time. Solid. →

• Luck & Logic episode 1: Perfectly competent and okay but bland, with nothing particular to distinguish it from the next action shonen show. ♯

• As I expected, Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu is not my kind of thing at all. I can see the appeal but in practice it leaves me totally cold. ♯

• Dimension W episode 1: That was plain good in a classical adult action show way. We have setup, characters, mysteries, everything done well. →

• Grimgar ep 1: Slow and I could have lived without the fanservice bit, but the setup et al is intriguing enough to earn it another episode. →

• Lupin III (2015): Well, that was an abject failure. The start of episode one irritates me too much to continue right now & probably at all. →

• KonoSuba ep 1: That was okay and periodically amusing, but the characters aren't really alive yet and it's kind of flat and limited so far. →

The one remaining new show is Ajin, but at this point I'm not at all sure if I'll be able to watch it any time soon. I've also become uncertain about its genre; if it's really a horror show about alienation from humanity and the horrible things that people do, I'm probably not interested in the first place.

Myriad Colors Phantom World illustrates bad fight staging for us

Let's start with my tweet:

I re-watched the big initial fight in Phantom World and no, KyoAni either (still) doesn't understand fight staging or doesn't care.

I feel sufficiently grump about Kyoto Animation failing once again on fight animation that I'm going to say more about this than fits on Twitter. What I mean by 'fight staging' here is blocking out the fight, ie establishing where all of the characters are in physical space and in relationship to each other, and thus how they move around over the course of the action. Good fight staging means that the fight actually makes physical sense and that you can follow who is where (and often that interesting things are happening).

We're going to look at a specific piece from the initial fight. Start by watching this clip from Phantom World (which was conveniently already on sakugabooru for me). Don't focus on the animation quality, ask yourself how you feel about it as just a piece in a fight (in fact, basically the climactic piece). Does it really work? Does something perhaps feel off? Because for me, even on first watching it felt somehow a little bit wrong or nonsensical.

Well, that would be because it is. Specifically, it has staging that doesn't actually work. Let's break down the flow of action and call out the staging inconsistencies, or at least the obvious ones:

1. Mai and the monster are fighting on the school sports field.
2. Mai sprints away from the monster and straight towards a clock tower (at the edge of the sports field) that has students watching from behind it, with the monster following her. How the shot is framed and how the people behind the clock tower immediately scatter implies that the monster is close behind her. We are certainly supposed to feel that, just from how it's presented.

3. Mai performs a gratuitous jump, dive, and complex pivot to come up standing right in front of the low front wall of the clock tower area. All of the cues in the shot say this, and say that she's stopped here because she can't move any further back (away from the monster).

   We don't see the monster during this bit of the clip, and there is clearly a bunch of empty space in front of Mai (between her and the monster). What happened to it following close behind her in #2?

4. The monster charges at her. However, the shot suddenly shows a vast distance between her and the monster and it takes the monster a significant time to charge up to her. This is again inconsistent with #2's close-behind monster.

   What's really happened is that the show has teleported the monster backwards so that it can do a big dramatic monster charge and have a 'Mai braces and readies herself' brief cut (and also have #3).

5. We switch to a view behind Mai. As the monster strikes at her, the camera pulls back. Say what? In #3, right behind Mai was the retaining wall; we have nowhere to pull back to.
6. Mai jumps up and significantly back to evade the monster's strike; after a flip in midair she lands right in front of our new, pulled back camera position. Say what again?

   Of course, what's really happened is that the show has teleported Mai (and the monster) forward from the clock tower area, because otherwise it would not be able to have the dramatic backwards jump evasion it wants here.

7. Mai jumps back again from the monster's strike, jumps back a third time from another strike, and finally we pull back through the pillars of the clock tower as the monster charges into it and gets tangled.

There are other staging inconsistencies in shot sequences just before and after this clip. For instance, immediately before the clip begins we had a shot sequence that established that the clock tower was more or less straight to Mai's right, yet in #2 she sprints straight back from the monster rather than having to cut to the side.

The individual actions of this fight are more or less okay and it has a certain amount of dramatic beats. What it does not have is consistent staging. As a result this is not actually a real fight; instead it's a clip show of dramatic moments. The whole fight has not been storyboarded by working out what happened and how it flows; instead the clear priority has been to have a sequence of dramatic shots happen, with some vague attempt to glue them together in a reasonably consistent manner. If two dramatic sequences are inconsistent with each other, either the show doesn't notice or it doesn't care.

In other words, the show prioritizes moment to moment dramatic cuts over a fight that is dramatic when taken as a whole. The result is subtly unsatisfying and weightless, as the inconsistency and the resulting unreality rob the overall scene of some of its impact. You may not consciously think of this as you watch the clip, but it's quite likely that a part of your mind is trying to keep track of stuff like where everyone is and as a result is raising warning flags that something feels off.

(Bad fight staging can happen in live action if you do not plan out your shot to shot continuity, but you at least have a higher chance of noticing it when you have actual people standing in places and moving around. Given how anime seems to be put together, I sometimes marvel that it ever has good fight staging. I assume that there are directors who are amazingly good at keeping track of the overall scene in their heads as they storyboard out each individual angle, sequence, and cut.)

Looking back at the Fall 2015 anime season

Once again it's time for my usual look back at the shows I watched this season in order to see how my early impressions and my midway views have held up. While I do these writeups partly to be honest about how things came out, I've also found them useful for looking back at what my past views were, to see what I thought about shows more or less at the time.

Fully enjoyable:

• Concrete Revolutio: In some ways this was not subtle and in others it was hard to follow (to get the most of it you had to keep track of what had happened when in the timeline, which GuyShalev's Concrete Revolutio episodes posts help with). But as the show went on, I became more and more taken with all of the various things it was doing and the story it was telling and, yes, the characters involved. The whole thing has wound up as a quite enjoyable show and I'm looking forward to the continuation in the spring.

  Concrete Revolutio has a relatively distinctive animation style and aesthetic, which I enjoyed but other people may not. I think that it fit the story it was telling and it was probably chosen for that reason.

• One-Punch Man: This is here not because it's a great show but because I consistently found it funny and enjoyable. I'm aware that finding OPM funny is a minority position (at least in the Twitter anime circles I follow), but then anime humour rarely works for me in the first place. In addition to being funny, OPM also had some decent storytelling in spots; it pulled off one reasonably dramatic storyline involving Mumen Rider and a few other nice dramatic moments. I did some OPM takes on Twitter.

  A lot of people love OPM for its fight animation, but I'm more ambivalent. A fair number of its fights were visually spectacular without being what I consider good fights, including the climactic fight in the last episode.

• Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: This remained a well constructed and well made show all the way through to the resolution of the first cour's plotline (it continues in the spring season). It's not exactly deep, since this is a LN action show, but it's well done with surprisingly good writing and a good couple. I'm really looking forward to the next season.

  (Apparently some people think that Asterisk is a harem show. I disagree with that; Ayato and Julis are a clear couple and almost no one else is particularly trying to horn in on that.)

Okay:

• Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider: The great thing about the show was Moe and her interactions with everyone, especially Saikawa. The mystery was okay and the process of revealing it was interesting and often very tense, atmospheric, and quietly horrific. Where the show falls down badly is that it fails to challenge the absurd character positions and philosophy that get espoused throughout and especially at the ending. Since all of them are basically garbage, this lack of challenge makes much of the ending into an eye-rolling experience where I had no investment in any of the events and characters.

  (See also, which has some spoilers.)

  In short, when the show was good it was great, with Moe sparking off people, things about her history and Saikawa being revealed, and so on. But when it was not good it was pretty much a disappointing more or less stinker, and the ending was a serious letdown; the last episode was basically worthless apart from a few bits with Moe.

• K - Return of Kings: I have a great deal of affection for K as a result of the first season but this season tried my patience by being kind of slow. In the end it came through with some great final episodes, character bits, and a definite resolution (even if it was a bit hokey). I enjoyed the whole thing but mostly not anywhere near as much as the first season. In my view, Fushimi really stole the season from everyone else by being clearly the best and most interesting character.

  The conclusion to this season basically rules out any further K, and I find that I'm perfectly okay with that. K has had its run and told its stories, and I'm content to stop there (although I might be a bit sad if this season had been stronger; this season and the movie make it look like the first season was pretty much a fluke where everything clicked just right).

I finished it:

• Owarimonogatari: As I put it on Twitter, people who are into Monogatari probably loved the resolution to the Shinobu Mail storyline. I liked some aspects of it and some moments in it, but on the whole I wasn't really set on fire by anything in this season the way I loved, say, Hanamonogatari.

• Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen: The show has spent almost all of this season derping around. Its only saving grace is that it manages to be very, very charming during this derping around, charming enough that I've kept watching when I would have dropped any other show that pulled this stuff off.

  (Every so often the show made legitimate dramatic points, but they were undercut by the derping.)

Dropped:

• Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans: For various reasons I wound up dropping this shortly after I wrote up my midway views. Ultimately I just didn't really care about the characters and their struggles and I felt the show was going in directions I generally dislike.

I fully enjoyed three shows this season and was reasonably fond of everything else I watched, even if Perfect Insider wound up letting me down after a very strong start (and really, it was pretty strong for most of its run; only the ending was a real nose dive).

Checking in on the Fall 2015 anime season part way through

Once again it's time for one of these now-traditional midway updates on my early impressions of the season. While there have been some surprises so far, things have broadly turned out the way that I expected.

Great:

• One-Punch Man: I didn't expect this to become basically my favorite show of the season, but it has. The humour has been working for me (partly because the show is willing to be understated and just let the funny bits sit there without comment) and I like the overall developments. It even recently managed an episode that was mostly drama and that still worked for me. The presence of Genos is very important for making everything work; Saitama is mostly a force of nature, but Genos is someone we can connect to.

• Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider: I go hot and cool on this show as it oscillates around, but I can't deny that at its best it is really good. It has a great grasp of understated atmosphere and how to be horrifying, even if sometimes it spends time ambling around in ways that make me kind of roll my eyes. It understands that it's just as important to explore the characters we're interested in as to explore the mystery, and both Moe and Saikawa are great for this (Moe more so than Saikawa).

• Concrete Revolutio: This isn't as spectacularly great as Perfect Insider sometimes is but I think it has more consistency and it's doing a bunch of increasingly interesting things. Its stories can lack subtlety in both themes and execution, but it still winds up making them be interesting and periodically (visually) spectacular. And I quite like what its doing with its structure as it circles around both a central revelation that we know is coming and a whole series of reveals about the characters and the history of the show.

  This is a show that you absolutely have to pay attention to in order to get everything. @GuyShalev maintains a very handy accumulated timeline in his Concrete Revolutio episode posts on his blog.

Okay:

• Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: This is not a great show, as you'd expect, but it's been a consistently enjoyable watch for me. The show is simply well constructed and well made, and the characters are nicely drawn and interesting. It's also mostly been free of what I'll call 'LN anime bullshit'; I barely roll my eyes when watching.

  This is one of the two shows I watch the fastest once it becomes available (the other one being One-Punch Man).

• K - Return of Kings: I like these characters and this setting, but gosh the story is moving slowly. One of the things that made the first series work is that there was always something relatively crazy happening (whether it was action, happenings, or revelations about what was going on); this series has mostly lacked that.

• Owarimonogatari: I'm too invested in the Monogatari series to stop watching, but I still don't feel any real investment in the characters here because they feel less like people and more like cardboard cutouts spouting dialog. That could change (Monogatari has been able to get me to care) or the show could become visually interesting to watch, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hanging on on the edge:

• Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen: Kuon and Haku are great characters but the show itself has mostly been going in circles recently as it dragged in more and more other characters. This might be okay if the new people were interesting too, but mostly they aren't and they don't really contribute much to the interesting core characters that we do have.

• Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans: Apart from the issue of looming doom, the problem here is that nothing here has really made me get emotionally invested. The characters and story arcs are certainly interesting, but so far they haven't got me on a gut level. It's nice seeing everyone maneuver around and have problems and grow and so on, but it doesn't leave me with any sort of burning desire to see the next episode. I almost dropped the show before episode 7 (after a twitter ramble), but reconsidered. I suspect I'm simply not up for two cours of this and will drop it at some point, although I don't know exactly when.

  (As I found out with Space Dandy, mere animation firepower and so on is not enough to keep me watching if I don't actually care.)

Dropped:

• Heavy Object: To be impolite, the bullshit involved with this show got to me, including the character dialog. I decided that the uninspiring conclusion of the uninspiring second arc was a good place to stop watching, because it was never going to offer me anything more interesting than what I'd already seen.

My top three shows this season are great and Asterisk is enjoyable popcorn, so I'm happy overall with this season; from my perspective, it's quite a good season. Certainly I haven't been tempted to pick up or watch anything else to fill in the time, and in fact I have pending stuff that I'd like to get to but I haven't found the time for.

Looming doom generally hurts my enjoyment of a show

Here's something that I've not so much discovered as realized recently: I generally don't really enjoy a show where there's doom looming over the characters. This was a factor in my initial reaction to Symphogear and it's come up again this season in Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans.

It's not that I'm opposed to character death (although certain forms of it turn me off) or that I require happy endings from my shows. I think it's perfectly okay to kill characters, even in casual ways, provided that it fits the show and the mood. What's different about a show with doom looming over things is exactly that there is doom looming over things. If I know some of the characters are going to die, I can't watch the show without wondering who it is and when it's going to happen. Is it going to be this episode, this next scene? When is the knife going to be jammed in and twisted? One of the common effects of this for me is to devalue much of the work the show is doing to develop characters. Actually caring about doomed characters feels somewhere between wasted effort and falling for the show's emotional manipulation, which irritates me. And when I don't know who's doomed when, well, pretty much all of the characters get affected.

So on the whole, a show with looming doom winds up being kind of a strain to watch. There is a constant tension and worry in the background that I don't like; it's simply wearying.

Despite this I think that shows can have looming doom and still work. While I don't have fully formed thoughts on how yet, my incomplete thoughts are that an important ingredient is for the show itself to acknowledge the looming doom by having it affect the shape of the story and the characters. In this I contrast Sidonia and Iron-Blooded Orphans. IBO is has relatively consistently ignored the doom looming over the cast, with essentially no sign of it in the story, while Sidonia embraced it in the atmosphere of the show and even the character reactions from relatively early. As a result this aspect of Sidonia worked for me and did not get me down, whereas watching IBO remains partly wearying and tense in an unpleasant way.

(An interesting question is whether I'd be enjoying IBO if I didn't know the outside-the-show information that Mari Okada (the show's writer) both quite likes melodrama and has said that there's going to be suffering in the show.)

Archetypal tsunderes and the transience of (anime) fame

Scamp of The Cart Driver somewhat recently wrote Anime Archetypes: The Superior Appeal of the Tsundere for MAL (via), in which he said:

There are some debates over who the original tsundere is. I've seen it argued that Lum from Urusei Yatsura was, but she's very open about her affection so I don't think it counts. However there's no doubt which character became the popular face for the term with anime fans. That would be the hot-headed robot pilot, Asuka Langley from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

While I don't doubt Asuka's current status as the popular and archetypal 'first tsundere' in anime fandom today, I find this status interesting. Particularly, it leads me to reflect on the transient nature of something being a famous or well-known anime. Because, you see, Asuka is not the first famous tsundere that Western fans were exposed to, not even the first one in a big series. Who I'm thinking of here is Akane, from Ranma 1/2.

Akane's a clear and undeniable fit for the classical tsundere; she's hotheaded and quick to mete out some violence to the object of her affections (that would be Ranma), periodically soft and affectionate, and of course neither she nor Ranma are at all willing to admit their love for each other. Ranma 1/2 itself predates NGE by several years and back in the 90s it had a massive presence in anime fandom. Despite all of that, today Ranma 1/2 and memories of Akane have faded from fandom, including her archetypal tsundere nature (to the point where Scamp didn't even bother to mention her). Instead she's apparently been displaced by Asuka, who may not even be a tsundere as such, as well as later characters that she seems pretty clearly a template for, such as Love Hina's Naru Narusegawa.

(You can argue a lot about if Asuka actually ever likes Shinji. As for Naru, Scamp's description of her behavior in his article applies just as much to Akane.)

I can speculate about various reasons why Asuka has stuck in people's memories and Akane hasn't, but it's more interesting for me to just note that it's happened. An entire influential series and its characters, one that inspired or at least touched a whole generation of fans, has just disappeared from the modern landscape of fandom. If you'd told someone in the mid-90s that Ranma 1/2 would be barely remembered or mentioned in fandom in twenty years, I'm not sure they'd have believed you. Yet here we are.

(In the early and mid 90s, even if you didn't particularly like Ranma 1/2 you could hardly avoid hearing about it if you were part of anime fandom. People cosplayed, people talked about it, people wrote a huge number of fanfics (some of them well known and relatively influential), and so on. You could say that it was kind of the Naruto of its day.)

Sidebar: Some views on why this happened

I suspect that a fair part of it is a combination of fandom turnover (and growth) and the relative views of both shows. I wouldn't be surprised if most old fans from the 90s who've been exposed to Ranma 1/2 and Akane have left (modern) anime fandom, and certainly fandom has grown a lot since then. At the same time, new fans are much more likely to be told they really should watch Neon Genesis Evangelion (which is considered a classic for good reason) than that they should explore Ranma 1/2 (which is, uh, not as good as NGE and is much bigger and more sprawling), so they're much more likely to either see or hear about Asuka than Akane.

(Leaving fandom is not the same thing as not watching anime any more, and for that matter fandom has fragmented. I know of at least one cluster of relative oldbies that barely crosses over into the modern anitwitter or MAL or ANN based fandom. Scamp was of course writing his article for the MAL fandom audience, since that's where it was published; your mileage may vary elsewhere.)

Brief early impressions of the Fall 2015 anime season so far

As before it's time for another set of my early impressions, this time supplementing my first episode takes after I've watched some more of the shows I'm actually following.

Clear winners:

• Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider: This is still not really showing its cards, but on the other hand I love how the characters interact. It's a grown up show with flawed characters who are too smart and too smug for their own good.

• Concrete Revolutio: It's now clear that the show's big theme is the moral ambiguity of super-powers (and how attempts to see the situation as black and white are a terrible mistake). On the one hand, this is nothing new to readers of American superhero comics over the past couple of decades (from roughly Watchmen onward); on the other hand, Concrete Revolutio is a good show and I'm enjoying it even if I don't expect it to have anything much new to say. I really like that the show is aggressively not spelling things out and letting us draw our own conclusions; it favorably reminds me of UN-GO.

  (The creators have apparently explicitly said that they were inspired in part by Watchmen.)

• One-Punch Man: Anime comedies that I find genuinely funny are rare, so I treasure them when one shows up. One of the things that makes OPM work for me is that the show generally doesn't overplay its jokes by having the characters actually react to them.

I'm enjoying:

• K - Return of Kings: In the end I quite liked the first series. It's great to see all of our old friends back and the changes are nice, but at the same time I wish the show was moving faster and being crazier the way the first season was.

• Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen: I haven't watched the original series (my notes say I dropped it after 3 episodes), but fortunately you don't have to in order to enjoy this new one. While it took a few episodes to get me genuinely enthused about this, I'm now rather enjoying how the characters rub against each other. Kuon and Haku are an especially nice combination.

• Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: At one level this is a standard LN show of the 'people fighting in high school' sub-genre and there's nothing particularly new or novel. What I'm enjoying is the execution, which I find refreshingly competent and well done. It has energy and a refreshing lack of annoying or outright offensive (to me) cliches.

• Owarimonogatari: At this point I'm too invested in following the Monogatari series to have a really objective opinion on this; the odds that I wouldn't watch this despite grumbling about it were always close to nil. In general it's enjoyable as usual, and it's nice to see Araragi repeatedly shoved off balance. But boy I wish it'd move faster; as things stand it feels like the show is deliberately filling time with rambling dialog.

  (Honestly, Perfect Insider is basically doing the Monogatari dialog thing much better than Owarimonogatari itself.)

They're okay so far:

• Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans: This is a Gundam show so I'm kind of predisposed to not be deeply enthused. With that said, it's a pretty good example of its genre and it may yet get me fired up with solid enthusiasm. I'm certainly enjoying it more than I expected so far and I rather like a number of the things it's doing, even if I know that most of the cast is probably doomed and it sometimes does characterization with a large paint roller.

• Heavy Object: This is another typical LN show, this time of the 'how will the protagonists manage to pull this one off' fighting genre. It's not great and it's definitely quite LN, but I've been enjoying it in a casual popcorn way. I'll probably drop this after a while.

  (If you're going to watch Heavy Object, you absolutely can't think very much about the logic of what you're seeing. HO is full of things that happen because this is a LN, not because they actually make any sense.)

Misses:

• Noragami Aragoto: In retrospect the only Noragami character I really care about is Hiyori, whose fundamental role is to be a bystander. Yato is an irritating putz most of the time (his alleged charm points mostly aren't), Yukine's continued suffering and angst leaves me unmoved, and the show's never given me a reason to care about Bishamon. Once I realized all of this I decided that show wasn't compelling enough for me to bother continuing this season, not when there was already a fair amount of stuff that I liked a lot more.

  (Yes, this walks back my opinion from the end of the first season.)

• Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru aka Beautiful Bones: This was not bad as such, it was just uninteresting. I've already read a lot of mystery stories, most of them much more interesting than this show, and there's plenty more out there if I feel like I want more in the genre, plus I'm pretty sure that there's better mystery anime out there that I haven't watched yet.

• Comet Lucifer: Another show that turned out to be uninteresting. I gave it two episodes and it gave me no particularly compelling reason to watch anything more.

• Garo - The Crimson Moon: The first episode of this had basically none of the things that made the first Garo interesting and unusual, and a certain amount that made me sigh (like the 'funny' kid sidekick).

• Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry: As many people have said, this is basically the same show as Asterisk in many ways. But at least for me this is generic and not particularly good in a way that Asterisk isn't. I kept watching it to have an informed opinion in the debate between partisans of the two shows, but then I flamed out at episode 3, which I found unwatchable.

  (I very rarely abandon episodes partway through watching them. This was an exception.)

One of the big debates this season is between Asterisk and Rakudai; in many ways the two are almost the same show but many people have strong preferences. As you can tell I come down on the side of Asterisk. To condense my views, I think that Rakudai is doing some potentially interesting things with Stella and Ikki but it's otherwise loaded with terrible tropes and bad or merely clunky execution (like clumsy and eye-rolling writing). Asterisk isn't as potentially exciting but its execution is far better and more interesting (and far less cringe-inducing), and I don't trust Rakudai to deliver on its potential anyways.

(And Asterisk has its own vaguely novel bits.)

The really short way to summarize this is that in theory Rakudai has more potential but in practice Asterisk has much better execution.

Not for me:

• Osomatsu-san: This combines a bunch of genres that almost never work for me, as it's both a comedy and an ordinary life setting. As a result I've opted to skip checking it out, even though it gets a fair bit of praise.

Not even considered for various reasons:

• Young Black Jack

• Anti-Magic Academy: The 35th Test Platoon: It's yet another LN show like Asterisk and Rakudai, but apparently even worse than Rakudai. Nope.

• Lance 'n Masques: Apparently epically bad. Someone I follow on Twitter is watching this and tweeting the terrible art and shots, of which there are many.

The one show I haven't seen and would like to is the new Lupin, which appears to be basically unavailable over here. I've seen the opening, which is pretty cool.

This makes three shows I'm quite happy with so far and several other shows that I expect to watch all the way through, plus stuff that I'm enjoying so far but don't necessarily expect to have staying power. By my current metric of 'do I have enough things that I actually have to think about my APR ballot', this is a reasonably good season and it may become an excellent one. Heck, Iron-Blooded Orphans could surprise me and earn a place alongside my favorite Gundam works.

(Right now, how excellent the season turns out to be depends on how well Perfect Insider and Concrete Revolutio hold up. Both are very early so far so they could both fumble things, or they could really come through.)

Looking back at the Summer 2015 anime season

Once again it's time for my usual look back at the shows I watched this past season to see how my early impressions and my midway views wound up in the end.

Excellent:

• Gatchaman Crowds Insight: In the end the show didn't give us any really easy answers, which is not unexpected; the issues Insight was dealing with aren't problems you can solve easily. Sadly the show felt it had to explain itself to people who might not have gotten it in the last episode, which I wish we could have done mostly without, but on the whole I really liked it.

• Akagami no Shirayuki-hime: This was a late season pickup for me and it wound up totally surprising me with how much I liked it. I wound up writing an entire entry on my views on Shirayuki-hime.

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear GX: It didn't finish as strongly as it started and Hibiki's father is still a putz, but it definitely delivered the Symphogear experience (complete with a surprise or two). The finish wasn't as epic as the first season's, but it would be hard to top that and I enjoyed what we got.

Okay:

• GOD EATER: This was nicely made and I enjoyed what I saw of it, but it never had anything particularly deep or compelling about it. Its production problems were unfortunate, but the delayed remaining episodes have made me realize that I probably don't care enough about this to watch them whenever they wind up coming out.

• Rokka no Yuusha: I don't want to go so far as to say that this was an epic troll, but it kind of was. I liked some of the things the show did and it did play pretty fair with us with the mystery (there was not so much clues as foreshadowing periodically), but I think it misstepped with one story choice and the whole thing just moved slowly.

  (And the second half of the last episode sure had a quality collapse.)

  I don't regret watching Rokka but I have no interest in a second season.

• Ushio to Tora: This remained burning 90s shonen and I enjoyed that part of it. Unfortunately that comes with side orders of periodic bad writing, not enough budget to do the fights really well, and the usual slow moving plot. As a result I've opted not to continue with this after this season; although I generally enjoyed watching it, I didn't enjoy it enough to carry forward into a busy new season.

I finished it:

• GATE: It didn't end so much as stop mid-show, because it's being continued in a season or two. If I'm smart I won't continue it then.

• Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 2wei Herz!: As mentioned in my midway report I picked this up once the fights started. Well, they finished and so did the show. My verdict is that the fights were okay but certainly not up to the standards of episode six of the first series.

The top three shows this season were good (once I picked up Shirayuki-hime) and I think that I'm going to be satisfied with that. I only really watched one thing out of boredom and I more or less knew what I was getting into with it anyways.

(In fact, looking back at my spring views I think that this season was better overall than last season. Last season only had Sound! Euphonium to be consistently great, while this season had three shows I always really enjoyed watching.)

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Fall 2015 season

Since I want to do less of my blogging just on Twitter (cf), I've decided to collect here all of my tweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order I saw them).

• Heavy Object episode 1: Meh. It's a reasonably well made, reasonably well done generic work. You know the drill by now. →

• Noragami Aragoto episode 1: Maybe I'm in a grumpy mood, but nothing in this episode really (re)hooked me. It was okay but needed a spark. →

• K - Return of Kings episode 1: It was fun to get back together with these people, but not much actually happened this episode. ♯

• Rakudai Kishi no Cavalry ep 1: This is a decently competent and essentially generic instance of what it is. You know all the parts by now. ♯

• Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen ep 1: All setup, no hook. As setup goes it was okay & different than usual, but that's not really enough. ♯

• Gakusen Toshi Asterisk episode 1: This is clearly LN based, but wow, it actually has energy and knows how to be interesting and intriguing. →

• One Punch Man episode 1: This was okay and I smiled a few times, but the next episode better have a whole new set of jokes. →

• Concrete Revolutio episode 1: However crazy and stylish this was, it was once again a case of all setup and basically no hook. →

• Comet Lucifer episode 1: At least there's something like a hook here, even if it feels like they crammed too many obscure hints in this ep. →

• Iron-Blooded Orphans episode 1: It's a giant robot war story. It's cliched but not abjectly stupid, and sometimes clever and a bit subtle. →

• Owarimonogatari episode 1: On the one hand, that sure was a lot of talking and nothing else. On the other hand, I did stay interested in it. ♯

• Perfect Insider episode 1: That was interesting in a way that most shows aren't, even if I have no idea where it's going or what it's about. ♯

• Garo - The Crimson Moon episode 1: I'm sad to say that there's no special reason to care about this, no special spark like the original. →

• Sakurako-san episode 1: That was decent, but it would have been a bunch better without the LN protagonist and the need for him. ♯

• Hidan no Aria AA: nope. Just nope. In the short amount I watched this did less than nothing to offset my bad memories of the original. ♯ (also, and I'd have been happier listening to myself about giving it a try)

Anything with a → link has additional discussion in the replies to my tweet (sometimes more tweets from me, sometimes talking with other people).

(Having done this by hand once, clearly I need to automate it for next season. Or at least do it piece by piece as I make these tweets, instead of well after the fact.)