Roving Thoughts archives

Some thoughts on the gamification in Gatchaman Crowds

One of the thematic clashes in Gatchaman Crowds is between Rui's idealistic vision of the world as a place where the population takes care of things through altruism without needing leaders and power structures and his actual implementation of this vision, both with the carefully selected Crowds users and that GALAX gives people rewards for their actions (and sometimes frames things as contests). By the end of the series Rui has thought better of one of these, giving the Crowds power to everyone instead of a select few, but that still leaves us with the contradiction of theoretically altruistic action versus GALAX's gamification of it.

The conventional view of this is that it shows the inherent contradictions and unworkability of Rui's vision. Appealing to people's altruism is all well and good but it doesn't actually work; in practice the large mass of people only act when they get paid for it, even if you're only paying them in social kudos. Rui is smart enough to realize this, which is why GALAX gamifies the whole thing despite Rui's professed views.

But there's an alternate view that starts with the observation that GALAX's rewards are not, say, money or anything comparable to it. Instead they're basically meaningless and I find it notable that in a show as aware of social media as Crowds is, no one ever talks about how many GALAX update points they have. Rather than being people's motivation for action in place of a nonexistent or stunted altruism, GALAX's meaningless rewards instead simply serve to give people a little push towards action and also to give them feedback to reassure them that they have successfully done the right thing. Or in short people are altruistic but also passive and GALAX's gamification exists simply to overcome this passivity.

(People may also be uncertain about what actions they should do, although having GALAX provide answers there edges into potentially darker territory. See this blog post by r042 for more elaboration of this idea.)

In support of this view, note that many of the things that GALAX asks its users to do are all out of proportion (in terms of time, effort, and risk) to any possible reward that GALAX is providing. In the course of the show, Japanese teenagers openly defy their teachers and school authorities, off the clock medical people dash into bad situations and hazards, and people spend significant amounts of time doing boring work to help strangers, all for nothing more than GALAX updates. It's hard not to call this altruistic.

Link: Gatchaman Crowds essay by Joe McCulloch

‘Gatchaman Crowds’: Four Flights Inside The Most Radical Superhero Reboot of Right This Minute is an excellent and well-informed 5,000 words or so on Gatchaman Crowds that says a lot of smart things about it. One of the reasons I love it is that it points out negative things too and makes me (somewhat reluctantly) agree with them, despite my fondness for the show. Because the essay's on Comics Alliance it takes a comics oriented view of the show, although one that's also informed by a lot of context.

(Note that there are some mild spoilers in the essay.)

If you like McCulloch's writing and want more of it, you can find him on Twitter as @snubpollard and at his Tumblr blog, where he holds forth on (among other things) Kill la Kill and other currently airing shows. I find both well worth reading and quite recommend them.

Brief early impressions of the Fall 2013 anime season

As before, so again. Every season I do an early impressions post to organize my thoughts on what I'm watching and also so I can laugh sadly at my naive views later in retrospect.

Clear winners (so far):

• Kyousougiga (aka Capital Craze, sometimes Kyousogiga): I loved this when I saw the low-resolution webrip in 2011 and I love it even more now that it looks good and I can follow the action. The second episode is a start on making the story coherent even as it tones down the madness a bit (not totally, which is good).

  (I'm aware of the on-web OVA series from earlier this year but I found the available webrips to be unwatchable so I never did.)

• Kill la Kill: This has its problems but for me they don't matter in the face of its frenzied energy and relentless, over the top absurdities. Kill la Kill turns everything up to eleven (including the potentially objectionable bits, but that may make them less bad). This is BURNING ANIME.

  (I mean, it has the mysterious teacher casually doing an over the top imitation of Utena's Akio Ohtori just as background scenery.)

  Update: see this commentary too. What it says.

• Valvrave: It's Valvrave all right. Episode 13 was a little bit tame for the show but it has to start somewhere (not drawing out the cliffhanger fight was a good move). Note that the fact that their government is entirely composed of high schoolers is causing them problems (in fact, it seems to be getting them run over).

Things I am reasonably enthused about so far:

• Galilei Donna: The first episode was great and pushed a lot of my buttons but it was all setup. Now it's up to the rest of the show to deliver on that initial promise.

  (For example: in the OP, when the machine Hozuki is working on explodes in her face she doesn't look panicked or even worried, just maybe a bit peeved.)

• Kyoukai no Kanata: What I'm hoping for is KyoAni-quality action scenes with the appealing character interactions of, say, Hyouka. The show has done reasonably well at delivering that so far although there are problematic aspects (I don't like artificially clumsy moeblobs). I'll give it points for being clever enough to have the character that uses her own blood as a weapon say 'well of course I'm anemic after a fight'.

  However shallow it is of me, my interest in KnK is directly related to how much action it has. I suspect that the character interaction will not keep me watching if the show shifts to just that.

  (At this point in my anime watching a show has to offer something pretty exceptional to keep me watching N teenagers talking to each other. It can be done (cf Toradora), but it takes work.)

• Arpeggio of Blue Steel - Ars Nova: Some people have violent reactions to the character CG. I'm apparently less selective; characters could be better animated, but it's not bad enough to bounce me out of the show. With that said I don't expect any great depths to the show, just well done ship to ship action (which I'm getting so far). If that flags, I'm out.

At least a bit marginal already:

• Yozakura Quartet - Hana no Uta: I could do without the fanservice but otherwise this is a serviceable and technically nicely done action show involving characters that I have fond memories of.

  (I suspect that the charm will wear off at some point.)

• Log Horizon: This is already more enjoyable than Sword Art Online, although that's not exactly a high barrier to clear. It's not deep but it is willing to be amusing (which is more than the grimly serious SAO ever did). I consider it a definite plus that it's lighthearted and people are not at risk of dying.

• Yowamushi Pedal: I have no idea how interesting this is to non-cyclists and I have no idea how long it'll sustain my interest. But right now I'm enjoying all of the little things that they get right about one of my things and I can't not watch it.

  (For example, I was absurdly happy that they put in the click of a clipless pedal clipping in in episode two. Yes, I know that sentence makes no sense if you're not a cyclist.)

  Some tweets about the cycling bits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Overall I'm pretty clearly watching too many things at the moment. Some shows are going to fall by the wayside, probably a bunch of them; at some point I'll get tired of spending time on stuff that's merely blandly entertaining. On the positive side the only show continuing from last season is Yamato 2199.

(Oh wait, I forgot Monogatari Series Second Season. That may not stay on the schedule for long.)

Misses:

• Tokyo Ravens: This is simply too generic, bland, and slow. In short, nothing like the OP made it look. It's possible it will turn into the K-like show that the OP suggested but if so, it did so too late for me. It's an extruded Light Novel product despite initial appearances.

• Coppelion: I don't like cliched melodrama at the best of times. When you combine it with various setting stupidities (and questionable art, regardless of how pretty the backgrounds are) it's far too much. I especially dislike how the characters seem so unprepared to wander around the ruined Tokyo, both physically and emotionally, despite the fact that this is apparently what they've been preparing for all their lives.

  You could do an affecting, interesting drama with this basic setting and premise. This show is not it.

Not for me:

• Gingitsune: There's nothing wrong with this but there's also nothing exceptional about it either, and it's not really my kind of thing. I'm sure that it's going to be heartwarming and nice, sort of like a more bland version of Natsume Yuujinchou (which I've already basically burned out on anyways).

• Samurai Flamenco: This is apparently a realistic drama about someone who wants to be a superhero in an ordinary world. This is not a story I'm interested in.

  (To the extent that I want realistic superhero stories, what Gatchaman Crowds did is much more my thing.)

Not even tried and I feel like saying something about them:

• Infinite Stratos S2: Gets utterly terrible reviews even from people who quite liked the first season. I have no interest in yet another set of allegedly comedic harem hijinks.

• Unbreakable Machine Doll, Strike the Blood: Apparently your generic extruded Light Novel product.

• Golden Time: Apparently not the mature, university-based story with mature characters that was vaguely advertised.

PS: I link to my tweets partly so that I can find them again. Besides, it sometimes saves me from repeating myself.

(Since someone is going to ask someday, I generally go with whatever name for a show that the fansubbers are using and they usually use the Japanese names instead of the English translations. This is simply me being lazy since I keep track of what I've watched using the fansub names.)

Some bits about the ending of Gatchaman Crowds, especially Berg-Katze

(There are spoilers here. Also, I ramble.)

I called Berg-Katze a magnificent villain who had been one step ahead of everyone all the time, so let me explain that. Berg-Katze said two significant things during its conversations: that humans would destroy themselves (in a big conflagration) and that what it was looking for was a suitable source of lots of fuel for this blaze. Berg-Katze's plan all along was to engineer this.

First, BK got Rui to create GALAX and empower the Hundred. This created something that BK could take over by impersonating Rui and a source of disgruntled ex-Crowds users, which BK then recycled into the Neo-Hundred to cause chaos. This chaos, concentrated into one place by the chase for the Prime Minister, created a bunch of paniced people. BK then hijacked the Prime Minister's broadcast and goaded all of these paniced people into becoming Crowds themselves. Berg-Katze's expected result from this was increasingly violent chaos as a whole bunch of uncoordinated people with newly-given powers stampeded back and forth, inevitably made mistakes about who was a 'bad Crowds' (and defended themselves from attacks by what they thought were bad Crowds), and so on.

(Psycho-Pass did a very similar take on the panic of crowds towards the climax of the show.)

At every step of this, Berg-Katze manipulated everyone to create the conditions for its next step. Nowhere was this clearer than when people restored trust in GALAX and distributed smartphones to everyone during the disaster to restore order, only to have Berg-Katze use this to reach everyone with its corruption of the Prime Minister's message and offer them the Crowds power. This wasn't an accident; Berg-Katze planned for this response to the Neo-Hundred. In fact the entire purpose of the Neo-Hundred and their chaos was to set up this situation.

Since I've seen some confusion about this: Berg-Katze didn't take over the Prime Minister's body during the broadcast, just the broadcast signal. We were clearly shown a mismatch between what was happening in person and what the broadcast showed happening.

(I made some tweets about this whole thing: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

Defeating this plan took multiple things and would not have happened without Hajime's effects on everyone, especially Rui. OD needed to defeat Berg-Katze to recover Rui's NOTE, but that wasn't enough by itself; Rui had to reach a point where he would offer the clearly dangerous power of Crowds to everyone, where he trusted that people's potential for good would overcome the clear possibility of even more chaos. It was a brave gamble given that it amounted to pouring more potential fuel into a burning fire.

(How I regard the 'gamification' of GALAX and its users is sufficiently complicated that it calls for another entry.)

On OD: I have no idea if he's supposed to be dead or not. On the one hand he does collapse from his injuries and doesn't appear in the epilogue. On the other hand, his visible injuries don't appear to be life threatening, Utsutsu was presumably available for healing, there are no visible signs of mourning in the epilogue, and other characters don't appear in the epilogue either. I'd like to convince myself that he survived but I'm not really able to do so.

Similarly, I have no idea if the fallen Crowds' people from Rui's fight with Berg-Katze eventually recovered. I'd like to believe they did but I don't think we have any evidence about it one way or another.

Looking back at the Summer 2013 anime season

With both the season and my watching of it basically wrapped up, it's time for another one of my now customary post-season looks back (as before) to go with my early impressions and my midway views. As has become typical, not much has changed from the latter.

Shows from this season that I've finished, in order (with a big gap between second and third):

• Uchouten Kazoku (aka Eccentric Family): As mentioned before, this pushes a bunch of my storytelling and urban fantasy buttons so I can't be objective about it. With that said, I loved it; I found it lovely, affecting, and very well done. Its last episode is the best finish of the season, concluding just as the show should have (and with some nice subtle bits). Overall it was a glorious ride right from the first moments of the first episode (and beautifully animated to boot, cf).

  Although this story of tanuki, tengu, and humans in Kyoto is done, I'd be happy to watch another turn of the wheel in another season.

• Gatchaman Crowds: This isn't flawless but it is excellent; I rank it just below UK only because UK pushes more of my particular buttons. I've seen people characterize the ending as being thematically satisfying but not dramatically satisfying, which strikes me as a fair way of putting it; we get the right ending for the show but not one that involves great big dramatic things going on for us to watch (and it's at best ambivalent about the fate of one character and obscure about another). All of the characters were great and Berge-Katze is a magnificent villain.

  (See here for some very interesting analysis of the visuals in the final episode. Spoilers, obviously.)

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya: This featured good initial magical girl fights that came to a peak in the gloriously epic second half of episode six. Unfortunately that was the show's high point; it never again equaled either the action or the interest of those early episodes or especially of episode six, to the point where everything from then on was decidedly ordinary. Had I stopped after episode six I wouldn't have missed anything particularly compelling.

  Unless you're fond of the Fate-verse or really like fairly cliched fighting magical girls in general, I'm tempted to suggest that you just find the fight from the second half of episode six on Youtube and watch it. That's the only really impressive bit. The first Nanoha movie covers the overall genre better and more enjoyably.

I theoretically plan to restart watching Rozen Maiden Zurückspulen at some point but I still haven't watched an episode since my midway views so I may be rather optimistic here (or too stubborn to admit that I'm not interested in a show that people praise as quite good). Regardless of why I'm still stalled, I'm not going to hold up this retrospective to see if I do watch more.

Still running:

• Space Battleship Yamato 2199: It's great (although not flawless). I don't have anything coherent to say about it except that if I was pressed I would probably rank it as the second best show I watched this season (narrowly ahead of Crowds but behind Eccentric Family). It's not so much cliched as it is archetypal.

  (See also.)

• Monogatari Series Second Season: If I was a smart person I would stop watching this. The charm has long since worn off and I'm mostly watching through inertia. If I was a grumpy person I would say that it spends too long doing too little because it's too busy being clever.

Shows carried over from the spring:

• Ginga Kikoutai Majestic Prince: Given my general views on mecha series I don't think I can fairly evaluate this. I quite liked it and found it good but I suspect that I won't really find it a show for the ages (if that makes sense). It did a very good job of balancing comedy and drama and touching my heart without losing its overall tone of goofyness and fun. People who love mecha may well have a stronger reaction to MJP.

• To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S: I watched enough episodes to see Touma punch out Accelerator and then stopped. Allegedly the remaining episodes actually have action and an actual plot (and feature the other characters), but I'm not sure I have enough interest to actually watch them.

  Contrary to what some people have said, I prefer the first season of Railgun. Railgun S dragged on too much through the Sisters arc and had too little of Mikoto's friends and too much of Touma. However emotional the Sisters arc is, this was always its fundamental problem; in a series theoretically about Mikoto the climax is all about Touma being a hero. To make it worse the show dragged on Touma's part of the fight extensively.

Overall I rate this season as exceptional. Ignoring Yamato 2199 for various reasons, we had two shows that are basically certain to make my 'best N of 2013' list and a strong finish to a good third show (MJP). One of UK or Crowds all by itself would have made a good season; two make it great.

(For now I am going to pass on whether this season is better than Winter 2013. That I can even suggest that with a straight face says how strong this season has been.)

Two things from Valvrave's first season

(There are some spoilers here up through episode 12 and it's going to be relatively opaque if you don't know Valvrave.)

Evirus (sort of via Author):

[...] And [the school] elected a flibbertigibbet as their leader? Seriously? And the deepest desire of the refugees is to engage in traditional school functions after reaching safety? [...]

Yes, yes they did elect a flibbertigibbet. It was probably a terrible mistake. But here's the thing: Valvrave totally sold me on the emotional logic of the situation. Let me set the scene to show you why.

The two candidates for student council chair and thus leader of the whole place were a stuffed shirt technocrat and the aforementioned flibbertigibbet politician's daughter. Both gave speeches to the assembled student body. The technocrat went first and his speech was full of how he'd organize increased production of this and better living conditions through that and so on. It had about as much emotional connection with his audience as a project presentation.

Then the politician's daughter stepped up. She gave an emotional 'whoop up the audience' speech and in the course of it she promised to organize a school festival. Or, to put it another way, she offered everyone the chance to pretend for a while that they were all normal students doing normal student things, to set aside that their country was occupied, their parents distant prisoners, every aspect of the life they had known before was gone, and that they themselves were working ceaselessly to try to keep an increasingly ruined environment limping along while some of their friends had actually been killed. Oh, and they were being hunted by people who would cheerfully murder the rest of them.

So, yeah. They elected the flibbertigibbet.

(And I could see it coming like a freight train from the moment that Shouko started her speech.)

The other thing I've seen questions about is Saki's tears when Haruto offers to marry her in the aftermath of the infamous rape and she rejects him. My theory is that the tears are because, to put it one way, Saki didn't want Haruto to propose to her out of duty (which is what he makes it clear that he's doing), she wanted him to propose out of love. She's crying because the offer shows that the shadow of the rape and Haruto's feelings about it have killed any chance for genuine, unforced love from Haruto (at least for now). She has no choice but to reject Haruto's offer and basically renounce him because the alternative is an empty relationship built on top of Haruto's feelings of guilt and duty.

Or in short, Saki's tears are about the death of a relationship that could have been but is now not going to happen. She's giving up on something she wanted, not because she doesn't want it any more but because having it is impossible now.

(I don't know how serious Saki really was about Haruto before the rape but she did seem to be interested to some degree.)

My view of the future of western 'anime'

In Is RWBY Anime? Jonathan Tappan says:

Once (as recently as the 1960s) American animators dominated the world and even Japanese animators sought to emulate them. Now America is an animation backwater and Japan dominates the world. So it’s natural for people like Monty Oum to try to imitate anime and even call their own work “anime”. It’s natural but it’s a mistake.

If America is ever to regain a respectable place in the world of animation, American animators need to develop a new style of their own, something distinctly American, [...]

In Anime and where it's made I said I didn't think this call was the right approach. Since Author has specifically mentioned my bit about this I want to say more about it (possibly rewriting myself in the process).

I don't think that a new form of good American animation will arise out of slavishly imitating Japanese anime, but then I don't think that good animators can do this slavish imitation in the first place. Truly good animators will inevitably evolve their own styles from all of the influences that are at work around them, and an American animator is inevitably going to be swimming in influences other than anime over the long run.

Or in short: if America is going to produce good animation it's going to be in a new style no matter what. You don't have to exhort people to do this; it will happen all on its own. People will find their own voice and after the fact it will be called 'distinctly American animation'.

(Although I don't know the history, I rather expect that this is what happened to create Japanese anime. I suspect that Tezuka and other early pioneers did not set out to deliberately create a non-American form of animation; instead it just happened in response to everything around them, including not being in America.)

But at the same time, animators start somewhere and they are influenced by things. Today an obvious starting point and influence is anime, especially if you think that anime has become better developed than western animation (perhaps on the grounds that western animation has by now been almost entirely confined to a few narrow styles and genres). So I think it's a mistake to tell animators 'don't start from anime and don't let yourself be influenced by it', especially if the reason why is merely 'because this isn't Japan'.

Regardless of what we think Monty Oum should call what he's making, I think it's sensible for him to consciously and deliberately model it on anime. If he's a good artist, he and it will go in their own way regardless of what the base was. And in the mean time I'd be a big hypocrite if I didn't think that anime makes a good base to build from.

Anime and where it's made

Via Author I wound up reading Jonathan Tappan's Is RWBY Anime?. Both Author and Tappan come down firmly on the side of 'no'. For myself, I don't know what to feel about the whole issue so I'm going to ramble on with some of my thoughts. I'm going to focus on manga, not because I know more about manga but because I know more about American and Western comics than I do about modern American animation.

On the one hand labels like 'American anime' and 'OEL manga' simply feel cringe-inducing to me (Tappan's description of 'sad' is an apt summary). On the other hand I feel, contra to Tappan, that Japanese anime and manga have clear stylistic differences in both writing and art from their American and Western counterparts. American comics cover a lot of ground (from big-two superhero comics out through various sorts of independent and alternate comics, including webcomics) but nowhere in this range do they really look like manga from what I've seen. I rather expect you could show people anonymized pages or panels from both American comics and Japanese manga and have them reliably pick out which is which (and do similar things with plot summaries).

(Frankly, part of this is that the average manga artist is probably better than the average American comic artist, not because of intrinsic talent but because Japan has evolved a ferociously competitive and sophisticated manga market. My impression is that you must be on the top of your game to have a chance in Japanese manga; this is not really true in America, most especially in American superhero comics.)

Given this stylistic difference and an increasing number of people in the West who've grown up reading manga, some number of them will want to create works in the style of that manga. If nothing else those are the stories and art that appeal to these creators (and some of them may have little or no exposure to American comics; just look at the relative sales figures for translated manga and traditional comics). Today we lack a good term for such works. They are not 'manga' in the sense that they are not from Japan and the Japanese manga system but at the same time they are going to be stylistically different from 'American comics'. If these new works are executed well they will be far closer in style to Japanese manga than anything else.

(One of the problems with 'OEL manga' today is that many of the works have not been executed well by Japanese standards; they would not pass muster as real manga and cannot compete with it.)

I see a similar issue happening with RWBY and animation in general. The creators of RWBY are clearly familiar with anime and are drawing much of their stylistic inspirations from it. The result today is somewhat clumsy and awkward and not entirely successful (much as OEL manga has been, although I think RWBY is better executed) but I wouldn't be surprised if that gets better as everyone involved gets more experience. And as with 'manga-style comics', we currently lack a good term for such animation and I suspect we're only going to see more of it.

(If you want to make 'grown up' animation in the west I don't think you have very many models to follow and the dominant one is likely to be anime.)

I don't think Tappan's call for animators to develop a style that's different from anime and manga is really the right approach. At its core what it amounts to is telling people not to work in the style that they like and admire simply because they are not from Japan. It's especially unlikely to work if you believe that the manga and anime style is further evolved and more artistically sophisticated and successful than the western counterparts.

(I do tend to think that anime and manga have better developed styles of art, composition, directing, and storytelling, not because of any innate superiority but simply because both fields have a lot more practice under ruthlessly competitive conditions than their Western equivalents. This commercial competition doesn't always work out artistically (see the parade of cookie-cutter anime that gets churned out every year), but it often nurtures a significant degree of competence.)

Update: see WesternAnimeFuture for more discussion of this, prompted by Author.

Update (October 16th): See also The authenticity of non-Japanese manga, by Sixten for interesting commentary.

Sidebar: the audience reason for 'OEL manga' and 'American anime'

This is obvious but worth mentioning: one pragmatic reason to stick those labels on your works today is to attract people who like manga and/or anime but do not like Western comics or Western animation. You are basically hanging out a genre sign, much like covers on fiction books.

I suspect that this is a not insignificant issue for RWBY, although it also gets to draw on a growing machinima movement in the west that is breaking out of the general confines of traditional animation.

Two great quotes about the Fate-verse

There is all sorts of gold in this somethingawful forum thread on the Fate-verse (via @monoids). I particularly like the directly linked entry (which made me break out in helpless laughter):

The Fate franchise is like Paris. It seems pretty and fun, and then you dig a little and the whole thing is built on a giant sprawling maze of dead people.

Then another golden quote:

[Fate] Mages might not all be psychopaths but I can say without reservation that they are all assholes.

Except for Waver, but then again he's living in the house of two old people he brainwashed into thinking they're his grandparents.

I think Waver gets better over Fate/Zero but yes, this. It is not a coincidence that the Fate-verse related works that I like best are the ones that have the least to do with the main story and the serious characters.

(The Fate-verse is the usual term for the setting of Fate/Stay Night, Fate/Zero, sort of Kara no Kyoukai and Tsukihime, and various other works that haven't been animated yet. Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya makes light-hearted references to it, which is really the best way; you get the cool awesome bits without having to think about the pools of blood.)

Checking in on the Summer 2013 anime season 'midway' through

It's time for the semi-traditional midway update to my early impressions. The overall summary is that this is an excellent season with multiple stunning shows.

Things I'm (still) watching, in order:

• Uchouten Kazoku: What Eccentric Family truly excels at is its storytelling (which is not the same thing as plot or action). UK doesn't have the most original or attractive sounding plot but none of that matters; what it excels in is in a sense its execution, of how the plot is conveyed to us. That's storytelling, a collection of moments like raindrops.

  UK has the best characters of the season (for me) and Yasaburo has a great narrative voice (which is, unsurprisingly, a storyteller's voice). To be honest I was hooked on UK from his opening narration in the first episode.

• Gatchaman Crowds: I have no coherent words to sum up the complexity and plain smartness of this show. It continues to twist and turn in ways that are simultaneously surprising and entirely logical and to be a rocket heading, well, somewhere. This show is fast-paced (without feeling at all rushed) with not an ounce of flab on it.

  Hajime continues to rock. Everyone does, really, but especially Hajime. DIY Hajime really sold me on the show.

• Rozen Maiden Zurückspulen: This is a fine show but I find it hard to watch, partly because of the feeling of creeping doom. Unwound Jun is not in a good place and not having pleasant experiences and after six episodes it's hard to shake the feeling that he is not going to have a really happy ending.

  (Probably it gets more cheerful if I watch more.)

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya: I have to revise my initial opinion: this delivers plenty of well executed magical girl fighting action and some great Type-Moon jokes and references. The second half of episode six was especially epic. The core plot remains nothing special enough to write home about but the overall execution is more than enough to keep me watching.

  I think that this is much more enjoyable if you know enough Fate-verse lore to get most of the major references, such as the cards and what happens with Illya in episode six. I'm not sure how interesting it is for someone without that background.

• Monogatari Series Second Season: My interest level has climbed up from where it was initially but the show is still not really rocking my world. It's okay and interesting enough for me to keep watching, partly because it's now stuck Araragi in a tough situation.

Now declared a miss:

• Stella Jogakuin Koutouka C3-bu: The short version is in my tweet. The long version is that the show is not really about the action, it's about the character drama and the character drama (and the characters themselves) did not hook me. I might have stayed watching purely for the action but there isn't enough of it and it's merely ordinary (which is what you'd expect if it's only there to support the character drama).

  (This stands in contrast to Girls und Panzer where the action was interesting by itself and I cared more about what happened with the characters.)

In ongoing shows from last season (and before) Majestic Prince remains excellent, I am sort of watching Railgun S every so often in bursts, and Yamato 2199 is absolutely great (and I will catch up sometime).

(I'm treating Yamato 2199 sort of how I treat really great treats; it's so good that I keep saving it to savour slowly. This is kind of silly but it's very me, and the show lacks the weekly new episode release that would otherwise prod me into action.)