Roving Thoughts archives

Brief early impressions of the Winter 2014 anime season

As before, so again. Every season I do an early impressions post to organize my thoughts and also so that later on I can laugh sadly at my naive and optimistic views. This season I am either grumpy or being more selective than usual, depending on your perspective; as I put it on Twitter:

I'm increasingly feeling that I've been burned too many times by shows with 'promise'. Stop the excuses. Deliver something right here and now.

Quite a lot of shows failed this test for me, some of them well regarded ones. Even the ones that survived are not all that strong, so this looks like being one of those not so great winter seasons.

Clear winners (so far):

• Seitokai Yakuindomo season 2: The show reliably hits my funny bone just as the first season did.

  (This is extremely rare. Most anime comedies aren't for me.)

• Noragami: There's nothing exceptional here as far as genre and broad plot go but the show is very well executed and I like the characters. I'm with Aroduc in that it's refreshing to have a protagonist who gets powers and considers them really quite neat instead of something to be horrified about. I hope that she gets to kick more monsters.

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: It's hard to tell where this is going after just one episode but the first episode did a great job at holding my interest. My best guess is that the show will play its absurdisms straight but not seriously; if it manages to do a good job, I expect to like it a lot.

In ongoing shows, both KILL la KILL and Log Horizon continue to rock in their own ways.

Things I am reasonably enthused about so far:

• Space Dandy: This had an absolutely terrible first episode that was marred by any number of problems including bad writing that thoroughly alienated me; even people who liked it overall were saying out loud that the first half was pretty bad. Although it was an instant drop I just couldn't let go and very reluctantly watched the second episode, mostly out of masochism (there was a bit of me that didn't want to believe that something with SD's pedigree could be that terrible, although objectively I know better). To my total surprise, everything changed for the much better. The second episode was actually a nice show that did a good job telling a story and throwing in interesting and funny events without beating us over the head and even being subtle periodically. More to the point, it's a show that I want to see more of. So I've undropped it for now.

  At this point I have no idea if the good Space Dandy will continue or if the bad one will come back, so I have no idea if this is going to be something that I stay with. I'm honestly expecting an uneven and bumpy ride and probably a bunch of frustration.

• Nobunagun: This is nice and it's doing interesting things, but it doesn't have Noragami's quality of execution (or animation budget). It is clearly and consciously aiming to be over the top and to have a definite style; both of these are things that I can get behind. Better to have personality even if it doesn't always work than to be safely bland.

Not for me (tentatively):

• Tonari no Seki-kun: I read the first chapter of the manga and didn't find it particularly funny, plus there is something about the basic premise of 'boy does something that irritates girl until she reacts and then gets blamed for it while the boy always gets away with it' that rubs me the wrong way. I've seen the show's OP and frankly I think it has a good version of the joke that delivers most of the amusement value I'd get out of the show.

  I call this a not-for-me because lots of people seem to like the show quite a lot. Clearly the humour doesn't click for me and does for them.

Misses (in descending order of quality):

• Toaru Hikuushi e no Koiuta aka The Pilot's Love Song: There's nothing wrong with this as such. It's just bland and unimpressive and comes with impending grim doom (because the show has carefully told us that everything goes to hell later).

• Robot Girls Z: The first installment of RGZ has basically one core joke. Unfortunately neither that joke nor the show's execution of several variations of it are anywhere near funny enough or good enough to sustain an entire episode. As I put it on Twitter, the version of the joke done in the opening sequence is about the right length. You might as well watch that and stop.

• Wizard Barristers - Benmashi Cecil: By all logic I should really like this but instead it somehow irritates me quite a bit and I lack any interest in seeing the further activities of these characters. Perhaps part of it is that the whole exercise feels kind of soulless. The protagonist especially rubs me the wrong way with her collection of moe tropes (sleeping in late on her first day of work, jumping in apparently over her head, tragic past that gives her burning motivation, etc etc).

  (I'm also not sure I have much enthusiasm for watching a courtroom drama, even if it comes with magic.)

• Nobunaga the Fool: The first episode of this is a lot of chaos and incoherent things happening without explanation or much context. I'm all for starting in the middle of the action (it beats infodumps), but there has to be something there to get a grip on. There wasn't here and so I'm left with no interest in these characters or what's going on.

• Hamatora: This is the generic and cheaply made shonen show that Noragami wasn't.

I haven't checked out any of the four (I think) high school romcoms that are airing this season and I haven't heard anything about any of them that would change my mind. This is not a genre that generally works for me. Similarly I haven't looked at any of the other comedies, as none of them sounded like they would at all work for me.

The best N anime that I saw in 2013

This is much like last year's best N, namely what I consider to be the best or most enjoyable N anime that I saw in calendar 2013 (regardless of when they were made or released). The top three shows this year are extremely close, so close they're almost a tie. I could wimp out by declaring it an actual tie but if I'm being honest the three shows are not quite equal in my affections.

(See also the winter, spring, summer, and fall retrospectives.)

In order:

• Shin Sekai Yori: This was an excellent but not flawless show for most of its run that is pulled up to greatness by the power of its ending, especially the last episode; I wrote a bunch of words about this. If I had done a '12 days of anime' series of entries, the climactic one would and could only have been:

  MY NAME IS SQUEALER!

  A perhaps underappreciated aspect of Shin Sekai Yori is its mastery of disturbing atmosphere. Over and over the show manages to be quietly creepy in visuals, directing, and so on, and it has quite a number of genuinely disturbing or tense moments.

  I've written enough about the show that I've made an index of my Shin Sekai Yori entries.

• Kyousougiga: I've come to think that Kyousougiga is a triumph of spectacle in service to story. It is visually stunning and crazy but pretty much everything (including some things that you'll initially dismiss) is there because the story calls for it. And the story is good enough to carry the weight of expectations created by the visuals. I also think this story could only have been told through anime, at least in anything like this form; it fundamentally needed to be told visually. See also. Some people will dock it style points because it was not necessarily clear in spots, but that's part of why I love it; it pushes a bunch of my style buttons. I like shows that throw you into the action ('in media res' as some people like to say) and leave it to you to decode things as you go along. I personally thought that Kyousougiga did this very well.

  (Bobduh has written a quite interesting discussion of Kyousougiga if you want to read more.)

• Uchouten Kazoku aka Eccentric Family: This is a small, quiet, but great show and one that pushes many of my buttons; I wrote a bunch in my summer wrapup. I don't love it quite as much as Kyousougiga only because it is more quiet and less visually spectacular, although it's full of its own beautiful moments.

  (I actually find it hard to directly compare the two and I sort of consider them tied here. Also I'll refer you to Bobduh's review of the show once again for more informed commentary.)

Because my top three are very close to being a tie, I want to add some more words on where each of them excels. Shin Sekai Yori is the most ambitious show; it aims very high and hits what it's aiming for, although at the expense of its characters. It confronts us with uncomfortable questions and doesn't give us easy ways out and it's the show that most makes me think and talk this year, as you can see. Uchouten Kazoku has the most fully realized characters and the best and most interesting story, but it's a small story in a small setting (it's both fantasy and ordinary life at once, and that's part of its power). Kyousougiga is the most spectacular and enthusiastic of the three shows, the most anime of the three, and it has the most interesting characters.

(For example, Koto is a great character and great fun, but I don't think she's as fully realized and human as Yasaburou or Yaichirou. She's closer to Benten and Benten is deliberately mostly a cipher.)

• Gatchaman Crowds: I really liked Crowds and it made me think; it's a very smart and aware show, one that repeatedly subverts your expectations in order to do interesting things. At the moment I feel that I can't rate it properly because I think that the Blu-Ray release is likely to involve a significant restructuring of the last two episodes. As it is, the TV broadcast version loses some style points for the first half of episode 11. See also and also, and relatedly some entries: 1, 2, 3 (all may have spoilers). As usual Bobduh has interesting things to say.

• KILL la KILL: As I like to say, this is BURNING ANIME. While it hasn't finished airing, how much I've unconditionally enjoyed the 12 episodes produced so far means that the show has shoved its way into this list anyways (which is perfectly appropriate). Besides, I don't think that this is the kind of show where the ending can ruin the overall experience; even if it goes down in flames in the end, we'll always have things like two-star banchou Mako.

  (I'm pretty sure that KILL la KILL is going to be remembered more for a succession of epic moments than for the stirring depths of its plotting and characterization. And it's delivered plenty of those moments so far.)

• Ghost in the Shell ARISE episode 1: Call this the special merit award for the best cyberpunk anime of the year. The first episode of ARISE is everything I could have asked for here, complete with genuine surprises and chilling moments that could only really have been done in this genre. I really like this new version of the Major, and of course it delivers good action and animation too.

  (I did not love the second episode as much and the whole thing is incomplete so far.)

• Space Battleship Yamato 2199: See my views on the show, which are too complex to try to summarize here.

Just on the edge:

• Psycho-Pass: As I said at the time this is far from flawless but it managed to become a good show by trying hard and having Akane. I wrote about Sybil and the ending. For all of its flaws, I will give it this: the show had ambition and it tried, and in the process it raised a number of interesting questions (some actively, some just passively and thus possibly not deliberately). That is fundamentally why I am reluctantly listing it here.

  (This is not as good as some of the shows below but more memorable, which shows that my classification scheme here has a bug or two.)

Shows that I consider good but not memorable over the long term:

• Girls und Panzer: This is an extremely well executed sports action show; it was fun and interesting and enjoyable throughout. It delivered a stirring climax that was worth the wait, although I kind of wish it had managed to air all of its episodes last year so that I could put it among better company in last year's list.

• Little Witch Academia: This is a great little adventure story of a sort that we rarely see any more because everyone insists on complicating things (and often putting darkness and grimness into them). It was also very well made. Again, though, there is no real depth to it; it was simply fun. Not that fun is bad, but fun by itself usually lacks staying power.

• RahXephon: For all that I wound up somewhat down on it in the end the show was compulsively watchable, well made, and generally good throughout its run. It's the best and most interesting reaction to Neon Genesis Evangelion that I've seen.

• Ginga Kikoutai Majestic Prince: It had heart and affection for all of its characters and the result delivered a good show. It is not the show's fault that I am not a big mecha fan or that it did not have anything really new to bring to the table, just a good execution of relatively standard concepts. However it is laced with great little moments.

• Zetsuen no Tempest: In retrospect I didn't quite enjoy the second half of the show as much as the first half (as usual the romance plot was not quite successful with me) but it remains a very solid show. See my winter retrospective for more commentary.

Honorable mentions:

• Suisei no Gargantia: It was technically well made, it had a number of good characters and good ideas, and Chambers stole the show by the end. I think I've warmed to it somewhat since my views at the end of spring.

In the end I completed 28 shows, OVAs, and movies this year, which turns out to be exactly the same as last year (I also looked at and dropped a lot of shows). If I'm counting right, six of these were movies, also the same as last year. Overall I think that this was an excellent year, as I saw at least three shows that I consider great and a bunch more than I consider excellent. Shin Sekai Yori alone would have made for a good year; that I have at least two other shows jostling it for the top of the list is amazing.

While I saw all three Rebirth Rebuild of Evangelion movies this year, they do not make this entry for reasons beyond the scope of this margin. The third movie was the most interesting one.

Sidebar: Noteworthy things that I have not watched this year

I have not seen Wolf Children, Aku no Hana, Attack on Titan, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (which I tried out but couldn't get into), Silver Spoon, Watamote, the Madoka movies, or pretty much any of the 'cute girls doing cute stuff' shows. I understand that many of these are well done and appear on other people's top-N lists for good reasons.

More words on the ending of Shin Sekai Yori and the show overall

(There are plenty of spoilers here.)

This is sort of a reaction to Bobduh's articulate review, where he covers both why the show is excellent and why despite this it leaves him cold. While I've come to sort of agree with him about some of its flaws, what elevates Shin Sekai Yori to greatness for me anyways is the power of its ending, specifically roughly the second half of the last episode, and how I read it. Rather than simply give us an action show resolution to the situation in the ruins of Tokyo and then a straightforward upbeat epilogue, Shin Sekai Yori instead went out of its way to give us an uncomfortable ending that grants humanity to previously inhuman characters and systematically strips away the idea that the Cantus humans are the clear heroes; even Saki, our sympathetic protagonist character, is revealed to still be reflexively prejudiced. If there is a hero of the ending it's shown to be someone viewers had probably been looking down on and hating. This is a dramatic and powerful reversal of the situation that leaves us without comfortable or easy answers (and the revelation in the final coda of the show drives that home).

To be specific, I think that the staging and presentation of the ending makes it clear that we're supposed to sympathize with Squealer, not the Cantus humans running the trial. The whole visual vocabulary of the trial is that of a humiliating show trial, Squealer engages our sympathies throughout with both logic and bravery, and what happens to him is horrible. The final revelation at the end of the show finishes this off by giving the viewer no refuge for prejudice and no grounds to look down on the queerrats. I am not at Bobduh's level of 'burn down the Cantus humans' but the ending makes me believe that we're supposed to feel uncomfortable about what happened with Squealer (and even that it was unjust), and I do. At the same time the show has spent the entire run building up Saki (and Satoru) as our viewpoint and people we like, so we didn't want to see them die either. This dilemma is where and why I think the show becomes great.

(In fact I think most people will have been reflexively rooting for Saki right through the action in the ruins of Tokyo. Only when the show pulls back afterwards to give Squealer's side of things do doubts start seeping into our minds. I'm pretty sure that this is deliberate on the show's part; it wants us to be caught up in Saki's viewpoint and then come to a skidding halt as things look more and more disturbing afterwards. Some people may pull themselves away beforehand but I didn't really.)

To me, where Shin Sekai Yori excels is in raising hard questions and then not giving us comfortable answers. As I wrote at the time everyone is doing horrible things because they are all trapped in horrible situations. Over and over the show gives us a clear evil to rage against and then shows us why that evil exists and how it is the result of well intentioned people doing the best that they can in a terrible situation. There are no morally bright characters that we can root for without qualms, not even Saki and Satoru at the end. For all that Squealer is not a nice person, even his rebellion is morally defensible, as he carefully explains to Saki (and us, the viewers). I could do worse here than quoting @llvn from Twitter:

I love how it presents complexity without judgment. Everyone is wrong. But they deserve life, freedom.

Shin Sekai Yori is both a picture of fallible people trapped in a terrible situation making the best life that they can, mistakes and all, and a show that confronts us with hard questions that it doesn't give us any comfortable answers to. It doesn't give us any heroes or any clear villains; instead it makes us uncomfortably understand all sorts of people who are doing terrible things.

(Similarly, what happened with the queerrats is extremely unpleasant but it's also pretty much the result of relentless logic. Also note that even Kiromaru, the 'good' queerrat, is a complex character with his own motivations that don't neatly align with those of the Cantus humans. After all, the entire reason Kiromaru came to the ruins of Tokyo the first time was to see if he could find some effective way to rebel.)

By the way, I would probably have a somewhat different reaction to the end of the show if I thought that the show was presenting the Cantus humans as being successful. My view is that it's rather to the contrary; the Cantus humans are on a not so slow decline due to a shrinking population base and repeated horrifying incidents such as what happened with Shun (cf the worldbuilding bits pointed out in this comment). Since I don't like the Cantus humans and think that the world would be better off if they didn't exist, this is okay with me.

(I'm pretty sure that the show also agrees with this position since I don't see any particular sign that the show considers its world of the future to be a better place than today.)

As for the flaws (or at least one ongoing flaw), I have to agree with Bobduh that in retrospect the protagonists are the weak point of Shin Sekai Yori. I don't want to sound too negative here because I don't think they're bad (I found them and their interactions perfectly believable), but they are pretty passive. Shin Sekai Yori is not a story about Saki acting forthrightly to change her world, it is mostly a story about her experiencing and coming to understand it. In that sense Bobduh is right; this is more a science fiction story about setting and ideas than a story about actual people.

(This was also Inushide's major criticism of the show.)

Sidebar: an alternate reading of the show

To be fair, you can also read Shin Sekai Yori in a different way. I can construct a plausible reading where the Cantus humans are right to be as cruel and brutal as they are to everything and where the show is an argument from utilitarianism. In this version of the show, Saki's life is the story of a tragedy (and she even tells us this in a voiceover); her moments of rebellion against the proper way of the village lead first to the rise of Squealer and second to the tragedy of his rebellion.

(Squealer's life arguably revolves around his first encounter with Saki and her friends. That fateful meeting not only saved his life and his colony, it also may well have put him on the path to rebellion by showing him weak, fallible, and manipulable Cantus humans.)

My justification against this simple reading of the show is how it handled Squealer's trial, specifically how it doesn't show the Cantus humans in a good light. They are not people handing out justice, they are the masters punishing an uppity slave.

What School Rumble taught me about my tastes in anime

One of the things I've found is that I learn more about my tastes from the anime that I strongly dislike than from the anime that I like. It can be hard to figure out why I like something, whereas with stuff that I dislike there's often something in specific that I can point at and say 'that, I can't stand it'.

Which brings me to School Rumble, a well regarded 2004 comedy series, which I watched two episodes of once upon a time. The first episode was cute and decently funny (and had an Initial D parody that I found hysterical). Then I watched the second episode and bounced off it very, very hard because it was full of the lead characters humiliating themselves in various ways.

What School Rumble taught me is that I can't stand this. Not only do I not find it funny to see decent people doing embarrassing things and humiliating themselves, it's an active turnoff. It makes me cringe in sympathy for them and just no. I don't watch anything to cringe like that. Somewhere there is a dividing line between poking gentle fun at people and humiliating them and the second episode of School Rumble was well over it for me.

(I'm not even really interested in seeing characters that I dislike get humiliated.)

There are probably some situations where this sort of humour can work for me (I'm pretty sure I've seen and enjoyed classic black and white era film comedies in which this was a part). But as presented in School Rumble or other typical anime shows it doesn't work at all. Very few things will get me to turn off a show faster than the show asking me to laugh at someone because they are doing stupid, foolish things.

PS: I don't know if School Rumble continued with this sort of humour because I never watched any more of it. I doubt I could get the bad taste out of my mouth even today. Yes, I know, it's a pity, I'm probably missing out on a good show. That's how things go.

(This entry goes with what I learned from Jigoku Shoujo. Yes, this is a very slowly written entry; I've had it planned from the start of Roving Thoughts but never got to it until now.)

The necessity of queerrat biology in Shin Sekai Yori

(Major spoilers here.)

The following is probably obvious, but once you start following the dots at the end of the show it's clear that what happened with the queerrats is almost inevitable. Right now I feel like laying out why this is so.

A core ingredient in the precarious stability of Cantus humans is death feedback, which makes it so that almost no Cantus human can use Cantus on another human to any dangerous degree. In its flashbacks to history the show gave us a fair number of examples of what happened without this precaution (and then the false minashiro explained it). But death feedback presents a problem for Cantus humans as they interact with regular humans, especially after the history we were shown. Put simply, Cantus is what keeps Cantus humans safe from humans but death feedback means Cantus humans can't actually use it; regular humans are thus free to come after Cantus humans with everything from sharp rocks to firearms and kill them all.

This gave Cantus humans not very many options. They could completely wipe out regular humans, they could somehow completely isolate themselves from regular humans (and make a very big bet on that isolation lasting forever), or they could somehow make it possible to safely use Cantus on regular humans without invoking death feedback. The latter is what they did: they made regular humans non-human enough that they would not trigger death feedback (or at least that they would not usually trigger death feedback; as we saw during the show, killing queerrats can still trigger it under some circumstances). Cantus humans still needed to keep an eye on queerrats, especially initially; as Squealer showed, Cantus is not guaranteed protection in many ways.

(I suppose they could also somehow make it so that regular humans couldn't attack Cantus humans, but I don't think that that's a reliable protection. Note that death feedback itself is not reliable, cf fiends.)

I don't think that the Cantus humans initially warped humans into queerrats to have slaves. I think that was just a side effect of having queerrats around and keeping an eye on them.

I see the biology of queerrat queens as a measure to make it easier to control and limit queerrats. Queerrat queens are implied to be large and mostly immobile, and they are the only breeding source of queerrats. This makes it much easier to keep track of them and much easier to eliminate rogue colonies (just kill the queen and ignore everything else) and control the spread of colonies. Cantus humans were undoubtedly already very familiar with how hard it is to control the population of people who can breed freely and widely.

The morality of the queerrat rebellion in Shin Sekai Yori

It all started when @A_Libellule and I got into a Twitter discussion about this particular issue. In the course of the discussion I had a realization about my core moral position here:

If a group has to choose between living as slaves or committing genocide, picking the latter is morally legitimate.

It would certainly be nice if the queerrats (and interested Cantus humans) could find some solution short of genocide (genocide is ugly and invites counter-genocides and so on), but they are not obliged to do so and they are not obliged to remain slaves instead of committing genocide. The Cantus humans lost all moral standing to complain about it the moment that they started keeping queerrats as slaves (and, lest we forget, wiping out entire queerrat colonies when they felt like it), just as if you try to keep someone as a slave you lose the grounds to complain if they kill you to regain their freedom.

By the way all of this applies if a group is choosing between living as slaves or 'merely' killing some (significant) number of the people keeping them as slaves. I am just taking it all the way to genocide as an extreme case.

(Naturally this deeply colours my view of Squealer's rebellion and his fate and also my overall views on the Cantus humans.)

I could go on at greater length here but I suspect that this is the kind of thing where either you agree immediately or where you are not going to be convinced at all.

Note that you can make a functional argument over whether the queerrats were going to commit genocide or simply kill some number of humans and then stop. My personal view is that they were going to have to go all the way to genocide and they knew it; one surviving breeding pair of Cantus humans was potentially all that was necessary to take over the world again and destroy all queerrats, so none could really be allowed to survive.

My memorable anime from 2003

See the initial 2000 entry for the full background. I'm doing this based on the show's start date and memorable is not the same as either good or significant. Date information comes from Wikipedia and Anime-Planet.

(Because it may be relevant this year, I'm mostly listing things in alphabetical order instead of any implied quality or preference order.)

Standouts:

• Fullmetal Alchemist: People argue about whether this or Brotherhood is the better FMA experience, but I hope that we can all agree that this is excellent regardless of which is the better version. The anime original ending doesn't bother me in the least and the journey there is full of excellent twists and turns and any number of great characters. There is so much good about this show that I have no real words for it.

  This is the best shonen action show that I've seen. (Shonen action shows are not the same thing as shonen fighting shows.)

• Gunslinger Girl: On one level this is an exciting action story with a thin veneer of plausibility, and on that level it will not let you down although it will periodically disturb you, sometimes deeply. At another level this is a character story about a bunch of extremely broken people (some of them obviously so and some not). The ending is quiet and beautiful and a gut punch in its own way.

  (I was never able to take the followup series seriously. Read the manga instead.)

• Twin Spica: This is an excellent adaptation of (part of) what I understand is an excellent manga. It features great characters, including the protagonist, good writing, and so on, all wrapped up in an affecting, heartfelt storyline, and the conclusion to the show warmed the cold cockles of my heart as few other endings ever have.

  (It's 20 episodes. That won't take long. Do check it out. Yes, this is another underappreciated series that I'm trying to sell you on.)

Standing out in a bad way:

• Gilgamesh: My feelings do not fit within the margins of this entry so I wrote an entire rant about Gilgamesh's ending.

Ordinarily memorable:

• Dokkoida?!: You probably haven't heard of this but it's a quite charming and amusing show. It's the sort of comedy that makes me smile reliably (which is not common) and the characters are generally touching, especially once you get to know them.

• Godannar: I've never been able to decide if this show is a straight up serious take on the Go Nagai part of the giant robot genre or a straight-faced affectionate parody of it. Whichever it is, it's epic. It has any number of plot twists, a bunch of cool characters (including secondary characters like the mechanics), and GIANT COMBINING ROBOTS in the Go Nagai tradition. Oh, and lots of fanservice of an old-fashioned style (that goes with the Go Nagai tradition, of course).

• Narutaru (aka Shadow Star): This starts out as a pleasant bright series where a girl winds up with an alien pet and then things go all to hell. It's basically all the fault of people. The results are wrenching but memorable. Note that this is part of a manga so you won't get any real answers in the show (but by the end you probably won't care about that).

• Stellvia: I have fond memories of watching this but I have to admit that many of the actual details of what happened in the show have faded by now. I'd probably enjoy a rewatch and I may do that someday. I remember the romance as one of the better ones that I've seen.

Honorable mentions:

• Chrono Crusade (sometimes aka Chrno Crusade): I'll be honest; this is memorable in large part because of how it had a relative downer of an ending. But I remember it as well executed on the way there, with interesting characters (especially the protagonist).

• Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu: This is okay, but I like the serious Full Metal Panic better than the full bore pratfalls comedy version.

• Last Exile: Scamp's review has made me look back on this with more favour than I did at the time, partly by giving me a more optimistic take on what the show did to Lavie. Parts of it are great, parts of it I would have to rewatch to perhaps reassess, and parts of the ending are well over the top. Please note that the opening fleet combat segments are supposed to be absurd and stupid and ritualized and ineffectual. That's the point. The Guild wants them that way and what the Guild wants, it gets.

  (The resemblance to the stupider parts of World War I warfare is probably deliberate.)

• Read Or Die the TV: Unsurprisingly the much longer TV series is much more character focused and has much less action (and it's lower-powered) than the OVA trilogy. It wasn't bad, though. Anita steals the show.

• Scrapped Princess: Bagpipes in the opening, antagonists named after firearms, and an interesting explanation for everything that was going on. The show was not flawless and fumbles the execution at a few points.

• Tsukihime: Apparently any number of people will assure you that this anime doesn't exist. I found it a perfectly fine show with a number of interesting concepts and interesting characters.

• Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito: See this Secret Santa review for a pretty good summary of the show. When I watched it I thought it was going to be deeper than it turned out to be and the ending is not the greatest, but the bits in the middle are genuinely fun and crazy.

I've seen a number of other shows from 2003 that don't make these lists for one reason or another.

Things I want to watch or that I know I should watch category:

• The Big O (second season): I loved the first season but the second season dropped into the void of disappearing Toronto anime clubs.

• Kino's Journey: I saw the first few episodes but no more for some reason. The few episodes I've seen have been enough to show me that I want to watch more.

• Tokyo Godfathers

I saw a fair amount of Gad Guard at the time and kind of want to finish it off someday. It was a stylish show that took a significant plot swerve just where I stopped being able to see more.

Looking back at the Fall 2013 anime season

Since all of the fall shows that were going to finish have done so (and been subtitled, which was looking chancy at one point), it's time for the usual retrospective look back (as before) to go with my early impressions and my more or less midway views.

Clear winners:

• Kyousougiga: The show did not let us down. It ended excellently, with many great moments and developments along the way, and it never lost its sense of whimsy and spectacle. It earns significant bonus points from me for making what was previously an inscrutable background detail into an important plot point. Following my usual rule of thumb, younger Myoe is the major protagonist because he gets the most character development (although it should be noted that younger Koto gets her share too).

• KILL la KILL: It remains BURNING ANIME and populated with a whole collection of excellent characters. The Four Devas only improve as we get to know them and Mako continues to steal the show with her awesomeness. I am very much looking forward to more.

Plain good fun:

• Yozakura Quartet - Hana no Uta: My final view is that this was solid but not deep. On a technical level it has the best fights of the season (although KILL la KILL's were more fun and gripping). One drawback to the show is that it's not a complete work in and of itself; it is simply a slice out of an ongoing series that doesn't reach an ending so much as come to a finale and then stop.

• Log Horizon: This has developed into a fully enjoyable blend of good characters, amusing MMO stuff, cleverly evil plotting, and interesting philosophical issues. I suspect that the eventual ending will not really satisfy me but until then the journey there is nice.

Ordinary:

• Arpeggio of Blue Steel - Ars Nova: For all that the ending actually improved the show for me the whole thing was not a particularly exceptional show. It was decent and some of the battles were fun, but that was about it.

• Kyoukai no Kanata: Episode 10 excepted this show was a disappointment. KyoAni brought its A game as far as the art went and spent some effort on the characters, but pretty clearly fumbled the writing. The end result was a disappointingly generic and unconvincing light novel adaptation with better production values than usual.

  (KyoAni also supplied a masterclass demonstration in how beautiful art and complex animation does not create good fight scenes, but that's another entry. For now see the sidebar on my midway views.)

Carried over from the summer:

• Monogatari Series Second Season: I wish I could appreciate the depth to this that other people see but at this point I can't see past a bunch of characters standing there spending a lot of time talking at each other and not saying very much while not much happens. I liked scattered moments of this season and many of the climaxes but not much of the stuff in the middle. I also think that Shaft's visual design has long since passed the point where it detracts from the experience instead of enhancing it.

In the worth mentioning category there is Space Battleship Yamato 2199, which I finished midway through the season. Although I have qualified views of it I still think it was great.

Dropped:

• Valvrave: Let me summarize my view of the second season with a tweet:

  I like the first season OP song for Valvrave more than the second season.

  I'm serious about that. First season Valvrave was at its best when it was throwing one crazy thing after another at us, topping itself each time around. The second season mostly dropped that; while it had occasional moments of craziness it never really exploited them and in fact sometimes immediately killed off the characters it had just made so interesting. Oh, and I've gathered that the ending descends to carnography, which is not one of my favorite things.

My experiences with Valvrave this season are a valuable reminder that I should listen to my gut. If I am repeatedly unenthused about watching more of a show it is a big flashing sign that I should drop it right away. Doing that with Valvrave at the first sign of lacking enthusiasm would have freed up quite a number of episodes of time.

Overall I think that this has been a great season. Ignoring Space Battleship Yamato 2199 as not really being a 'this season' show, this season is going to more or less contribute two shows to my 'best N of 2013' entry.

My views on Space Battleship Yamato 2199

I've wound up with tangled feelings about Space Battleship Yamato 2199 (henceforth Yamato), although I quite enjoyed watching it. Overall I think it's an excellent show that falls just short of greatness and is hard to unconditionally recommend because of one issue. That issue is with the structure of the overall plot, so let me describe how I see Yamato.

The core of Yamato is a bunch of excellent real characters who are put into an overall story that is somewhere between epic space opera and a mythic story (or a series of mythic stories, starting with a series of classic war stories). The characters are good, the situations that they get into are often great, and there are excellent individual episodes, but because the core is epic, mythic space opera there are a number of things that happen that are semi-cliches at best. This is especially the case at the end of the show, where events spiral into a series of climaxes that are emotionally satisfying but not necessarily entirely solid and convincing plotting. To enjoy Yamato fully you have to be willing to accept that things are grand and crazy in the best traditions of inexplicable space opera and that you will not get explanations for some core things. It is this not quite successfully executed mythic nature that costs Yamato its chance at greatness for me. The best mythic stories are both mythic and completely convincing at the same time, and Yamato doesn't quite manage that; by the end the seams show a little bit too much for me.

(To its credit I think that Yamato understands that the cliches are cliches, so it doesn't try to pretend that they are supposed to be surprises to us or anything. It speaks to Yamato's excellent writing and characterization that the cliches are still affecting and emotionally powerful.)

At its best, Yamato is glorious. And it's at its best quite a lot. The directing and animation is excellent (it's head and shoulders above ordinary TV-grade work, well up into OVA or movie territory), it does action very well, the writing is tight and surprising and capable of being genuinely disturbing, and it's quite emotionally affecting. There are all sorts of interesting characters and the show is happy to let them quietly do things in the background, confident that we'll catch the bits in passing. One of the things worth noting is that Yamato doesn't stop to explain very much about the Gamilan characters; there is a real sense that we're just seeing a little slice of their lives as they intersect the Yamato's journey and there is a whole sprawling complex history that we don't know.

(This is probably going to frustrate some viewers because at various points we're left to take a lot on faith instead of having the real background to understand things. I was not bothered by it for various reasons and in fact found it kind of interesting and refreshing.)

At the same time Yamato is not without flaws (beyond the overall plot issues I've noted). See, for example, the criticisms mentioned by Scamp at the Cart Driver. But the flaws are relatively minor compared to Yamato's major achievements (see eg The Card Driver's praise for it here).

By the way I would be remiss if I didn't single out episode 14 for special praise (it's the famous mental episode; see eg Shinmaru's writeup). This is not just a genuinely weird and suspenseful episode in the best traditions of good horror, it's also loaded with subtle, well done character backstory (and character development). This backstory emerges naturally because the characters involved are being ensnared in their own memories, which effectively gives us (deliberately nightmarish) flashbacks without the bad taste that flashbacks can often have.

Liked: very much.
Rewatch: possibly, although I'm not sure I'd see anything more in a second viewing.

A (qualified) defense of Arpeggio of Blue Steel - Ars Nova

I have been rather down on Arpeggio so far but its ending actually managed to change that; not because the ending is great by itself but because it forced me to change my idea of what the show was about. I still don't think Arpeggio is great but for me it is now somewhere on the decent to good line.

(My reconsideration started from the thought that the ending felt pretty satisfying, and then I wound up thinking why it was that way despite what happened in it.)

On the surface Arpeggio presents itself as the action-adventure story of Chiyaha Gunzou (and his ship and crew) making a dangerous trip from Japan to the US to save humanity and fighting their way through the Fleet of Fog to do this. This is what you'd expect from the premise and from the presentation of most of the episodes, although as time goes by you may notice a certain amount of digressions from this straightforward plot. As this action-adventure story the show is, well, competent but unexciting.

But this is not really what Arpeggio is about. It's really about the ships of the Fleet of Fog (and Iona, I-401, Gunzou's mysteriously renegade ship) and most especially the battleship Kongou, leader of the hunt for Iona and Gunzou. They are the real protagonists of the show and the most interesting characters (not Gunzou or his crew); as a result of this, they get all of the character development and the ending of the show is a resolution of Kongou's story. This whole aspect is actually decently interesting, affecting, and well done, with some real twists to it. It's also not obvious as the show played this aspect reasonably subtly (by my standards, and admittedly I can be kind of oblivious to things).

As a straight up action-adventure story of the I-401's trip from Japan to the US, Arpeggio is kind of a bust; it has acceptable battles but it's no Girls und Panzer or Yamato 2199 (and the ending is going to disappoint you). As an action-adventure character story about the ships of the Fleet of Fog, it's actually reasonably interesting and decently done and the ending fits. As a result I now have a rather better opinion of the whole thing than I did before.