Roving Thoughts archives

Looking back at the Fall 2014 anime season

Once again it's time (and past time) for my usual retrospective look back at the season to see how shows wound up, following on my early impressions and my more solid midway views. The short summary is that fall was a good season (at least for me). As I sometimes do, I'm ranking shows a bit more by how much I enjoyed them than by how good I think they are.

Excellent:

• Shirobako: This has become the surprise hit of the season and in some ways of the year for me. The show has deftly mixed several levels of comedy with drama, tension, heartache, and in the end a deeply heart-warming climax for the first half. This show has heart and affection for all of its characters (yes, even Tarou) and it shows, even if the show is not perfect.

  (Some of the ways that the show is not perfect are probably authentic to the work environment it's portraying. By which I mean a certain amount of casual background sexism.)

• Mushishi second season: Mushishi is as good as it ever is, which is both excellent and in many ways on a completely different level than other shows; it continued to give us a whole string of quietly beautiful, poignant, and touching episodes. While it's probably objectively better than Shirobako (and it certainly has less flaws), I've come to see it as cool observation to Shirobako's warm passion and right now I simply connect with that passion better than with the observation.

  (One reason that Mushishi is so much observation instead of passion is that Ginko only rarely reacts to the situation; most often he's less a character and more an oracle. Sometimes this actively robs the show of impact, for example when it skips having Ginko react to the effects of his actions in episode 17.)

Good but falls a bit short:

• Shingeki no Bahamut - Genesis: This finished quite well, with lots of excitement and good moments, but in the end it couldn't quite live up to the promise of its first four or five episodes. Part of it is that things slowed down once the show got into the main plot and part of it is that the explanation of various events didn't entirely make sense. However, for me the show's largest eventual flaw is that it demoted Amira from an interesting active character who did interesting things down to a standard do-nothing damsel in distress. Losing what was the first or second most interesting character in the show made the show much more ordinary, even if it was still a well done adventure show.

  With that said, I had a lot of fun watching almost all episodes and there's plenty to like about it, including things most 'action' shows don't actually do well. It's an atypical show and I quite liked that. It just didn't wind up being amazing, which is what it could have been if it sustained the first few episodes all the way through.

• Garo - The Animation: In the end this season of Garo was frustratingly erratic. I've come around to the view that the show's writing is almost always standard but sometimes it can execute those stock scenarios in ways that are very powerful. When it doesn't manage that the episodes often come across as quite pedestrian and boring, even if the developments and themes in the episode are important in the long run. But the high points are very high and the show can be inventive. The other problem with the show is that often it just doesn't have the animation budget it needs and then it compounds the problem by deliberately filming fights very dark to cover up the problem.

Okay:

• Hitsugi no Chaika - Avenging Battle: In the end it ended decently but not excellently. In some ways the ending was surprisingly abrupt (although not in any way that would be easy to fix); in other ways I think the largest difference was just that the show didn't draw out things that other shows would have, although it didn't have anywhere near Bahamut's flare for the dramatic. While the show was decent it never entirely lived up to the promise of the very first few episodes.

• Log Horizon: The show is trucking along more or less as it always has been this season. Unfortunately this is not up to the relatively exciting standards of the first season (which was wall to wall with interesting developments and evil plots) and it has a noticeable flaw or two that keep irritating me. I've also wound up with the impression that the pacing has slowed down so it's drawing things out too much; I keep wanting it to do something and do it faster.

• Fate/Stay Night - Unlimited Blade Works: It looks pretty, the fights are generally good, it's nice to watch Rin and Archer bounce off each other, and the show is doing yeoman work to make things with Shirou be reasonably interesting. But after the dust settles it's still F/SN, which is why it's at the bottom of my list.

  (It did pick a much better moment to stop for three months than Fate/Zero did; it's a cliffhanger but it's not in the middle of the action.)

On the whole I think the season was somewhere between quite good and excellent for me, with plenty of stuff that I enjoyed on a week to week basis and the slow climb of Shirobako to amaze me.

(I say that Shirobako may be the surprise hit of the year for me over Ping Pong because the latter had Yuasa going for it from the start. Shirobako really came out of nowhere from my perspective and yes, I know the director has a track record. With a few extremely talked about exceptions, I don't pay much attention to directors because they in no way guarantee that something will be excellent or interesting.)

Log Horizon's weakest part is Minori's plotline

The most recent Log Horizon 2 episode has made me fully realize that the show's largest single flaw is how it's addressing Minori's romantic feelings for Shiroe, and unfortunately this is a serious flaw that significantly lessens the show for me; it actively makes things painful any time the storyline comes up. That the show focused almost all of episode 13 on the whole mess made the episode kind of unpleasant to watch.

The problem is not Minori's feelings as such; they're sort of vaguely realistic and if it wanted to, the show could do a decent plot handling the issues involved there in her mixture of hero worship and a crush. The problem is that the show insists on taking the situation seriously, with characters (starting with Akatsuki but not limited to her) taking Minori's would be romance as a realistic possibility. Various people clearly see what is going on, indulge Minori, and appear to see nothing wrong with the whole situation, when by all rights they should be either backing away quietly or taking her aside and saying 'um, look, you are 14 and he is a college graduate, no'.

In short, any actual materialization of Minori's intended romance would be deeply creepy and that the show strings along the possibility of this is itself not a comfortable thing. It doesn't help that this is a not particularly attractive anime cliche and/or trope in general, one that shows almost never handle well. As it is the whole thing feels very 'light novel', which is not praise.

The whole show would be much better off if it lost Minori's feelings down a well and then never referred to them again. I'm not particularly fond of Akatsuki's angst in general, but removing Minori as a nominal romantic rival and shifting things purely to gaining the courage to approach Shiroe would help a great deal (although not completely, since that particular trope is very shopworn).

(This comes from a recent Twitter conversation or two. To put it one way, I've decided not to do all of my blogging on Twitter.)