Roving Thoughts archives

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.)