Roving Thoughts archives

On watching a lot less anime this year

Looking back on this year in anime for me, one thing that definitely stands out is that I've watched a lot less shows than I usually do. It hasn't been because I'm out of time, or because I have some limit on how many shows I want to watch. Instead it's because I've become a lot more willing to listen to my gut, to mostly not watch things unless I'm actually enjoying them, and to drop shows that I've stopped being interested in even if they're quite late in their run (and I thus have a lot invested in watching them, in a way).

(It would be snappy to say that I'm watching less but enjoying it more, but that's not true. The shows that I'm enjoying are not magically better than they ever have been, it's just that I'm not watching much else.)

Looking back, things here have probably been building for some time (cf my Winter 2014 grump), but this year is evidently when my feelings quietly boiled over and I started cutting back pretty drastically. I dropped or didn't even start a lot of perfectly decent or okay shows this year that I probably would have watched in past years, and I've mostly not checked out shows that are outside of the areas that usually work well for me, even if they're getting a lot of praise (this season, for example, there's Bloom Into You among others).

When I started watching less, I think that I wondered if I'd feel idle and bored and wind up just coming back to fill up my time with anime again, especially since in the past I've used various shows basically to fill the time over a cup of coffee or the like (cf, and also). It hasn't worked out that way, for all that there's a part of me that wants to feel the urge to watch more. Although I sometimes think 'a year ago I'd have been watching anime at this point in my week', I've not wound up short of other diversions to fill up my time with (if nothing else, there's always my technical blog).

This all feels like a vaguely unsettling big change of some sort. I've been watching anime for a fairly long time, and usually a fairly decent amount of it, much more than I currently am now. When you suddenly get less active in a fandom you were previously pretty active in, well, it's natural for certain thoughts to spring up in your mind. Is this a sign that I'm about to quietly slide mostly out of anime fandom entirely, as I've slid out of other things in the past? I don't think it is, but then I probably didn't think that about the other fandoms either, not at the start.

(On the other hand, my past dropping out of fandoms has generally been pretty abrupt, even if I didn't do it deliberately. This is not that kind of 'doing it one day, stopped almost entirely the next' that those have often been.)

However, this also doesn't feel like something that's going to reverse itself. I don't look around and feel that there's spare time I could watch more shows in if I wanted to (perhaps old classics, or things I have fond memories of, like Stellvia); instead I feel that I'm basically watching as much anime as I have both time and interest for.

Who knows. Maybe I've just gotten a little too jaded and worn down about anime, and it'll wear off in a while. There's certainly a part of me that wants it to, that identifies as an anime fan who watches fairly voraciously, that wants to go back to four or five shows a season the way 'it should be'. Or maybe I've finally stopped feeling like I should watch everything just because I started watching anime in an era when we grabbed for whatever scraps we could get because they were so rare. Anime today is a feast of simulcasts and available shows that we can pick or choose from, and that's a great thing.

(These personal ramblings and reflections are part of my contribution to the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

In appreciation of Gun Gale Online's band of sisters

There's a lot of reasons that I like Gun Gale Online, starting with it being great fun to watch, but certainly one of them is that it is a very exceptional show in a couple of ways. To put it simply, Gun Gale Online is an action show that's all about a bunch of women, and it's almost completely free of fanservice (and romance). Gun Gale Online is about a bunch of women gleefully having fun together shooting each other up in a game, and sometimes shooting men who make the mistake of getting in their way.

(There are some men, and a couple of them matter. But mostly not.)

But the show's not just about the action, not really. It's also about the things that happen outside of the Gun Gale Online game, in the time when Karen and others aren't playing. It's about how these women interact with each other in their real life, how they connect, how the strands of their friendship and fellowship entwine. Gun Gale Online is an action story about GGO the game, but it is also a story about people. GGO would not be half the show it is if it didn't make us believe in those women and their connections. The show is not high art, but it makes everyone come alive; everyone is pretty much a real person. And in the show, almost everything that really matters, almost everything that has real character, is interactions between women (on the battlefields of GGO or off it).

I don't really have words for how rare this is in anime. Shows with all-female casts are almost entirely confined to a small slice of genres, and when they do escape they must almost always come with fanservice, romance, or at least the prominent and important presence of some men. On top of that, in action shows with women, only infrequently do they get to simply be people. In anime, male characters get to have plenty of shows with bands of brothers (it's the default state of ensemble action shows); women so very rarely get shows with bands of sisters. Gun Gale Online is a very welcome exception, gleeful pink rabbit and all. Especially our gleefully murderous pink rabbit, having a great deal of fun in a game that she enjoys a lot with her friends.

(As a long-term anime watcher, it is very hard for me not to be cynical about anime in some ways, whether or not what I am seeing is actual reality, and I think I'll leave it at that.)

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

Netflix versus the discourse (on Anitwitter and elsewhere)

I usually think of myself as someone who watches anime as a pretty solitary activity. It's not really true, as I've understood for some time (for instance, I know I face the tacit pressure of conformity), but most of the time I can not really be conscious of the social side of my watching; it's just sort of there, as something that happens. This year, Netflix provided an interesting reminder of that social side.

With a weekly show, there's always a current episode, the most recent episode that aired and then became available here, and that's what most people are watching and reacting to and talking about. While the discussion is generally at its most intense the day the episode becomes available, not everyone watches it or reacts to it right away. And even if you watch it later in the week (as I often do for some shows), there's still people to talk to about it or read current reactions to it in various places. This whole environment enables a discourse that is focused on that episode; it's the obvious thing about the show to talk about, to react to, and to frame a discussion around.

Netflix shows did not work this way. Netflix released most or all of the anime shows it funded this year in the same way that it releases other TV series, which is to say all at once, with every episode immediately available. In particular, it released Devilman Crybaby that way, with all episodes available January 5th. Some people burned through the entire show in the next day or two; some people burned through it in a week; some people took much longer. One of the results was to distinctly attenuate the discussion about Devilman Crybaby, because people who wanted to talk about it lacked the common ground of a 'current episode'. If you were an early watcher, you might avoid discussing things because of spoilers, or have only limited other early watchers you could talk about things with. If you were a later watcher, you might have to carefully not look at early discussion in order to avoid spoilers and in any case your current episode might be old news to a lot of people.

(And even if you didn't deliberately avoid spoilers, you had to go find old discussions, or have them already bookmarked and saved; they weren't on top of Anitwitter, feed readers, Animenano, and so on.)

I don't know if this lack of fan buzz hurt or even helped Devilman Crybaby, either to get more viewers or to get people to think about the show more independently than they might have in the discourse's usual echo chamber. I do know that it made my own experience of Devilman Crybaby feel distinctly different from watching weekly shows, and I likely didn't discuss it half as much as I would have done if it was a normal show.

(Also, of course, the experience of burning through something as intense as Devilman Crybaby over a short period of time is definitely different than it would have been seeing it at a one episode a week pace. I don't know if a forced weekly pace would have made Devilman Crybaby more or less powerful, but it certainly would have made things feel different.)

I suspect that Netflix's mass episode drop also lead to less blog entries and so on about Devilman Crybaby than there would otherwise have been. Certainly I expect it led to less episode by episode analysis, because there really wasn't much point unless you wanted to do a close reading of the whole show or record your reactions and thoughts on an episode by episode basis. But with that said, Shin Mecha Guignol did a very interesting series of articles on each episode.

I also watched Netflix's B - The Beginning and some of A.I.C.O. - Incarnation, each of which was made available all at once and each of which didn't get too much discussion that I saw, but with both of them I think there are what you could politely call other factors at work as well. Violet Evergarden is an odd case, because it was available week by week everywhere except in the US, where it was available all at once at the end of its weekly run; as a result, I experienced it week by week as a normal Winter 2018 show.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

The moment when Laid-Back Camp's Nadeshiko won me over

In the beginning of Laid-Back Camp, Nadeshiko comes across as mostly your typical progatonist for these sorts of shows; an energetic but ditzy newbie, all full of both enthusiasm (to drag us along) and ignorance (so we can have things explained to us). She had her moments, but in the beginning I was worried that I'd get tired of her.

In the fourth episode, Nadeshiko and the other two members of the Outclub head off to a campsite in what turns out to be a longer walk than they expected. The other two turned up at the starting point with reasonable modest amounts of stuff, but Nadeshiko had a significant load and as they started walking, what I was expecting was the obvious cliche that Nadeshiko had made a newbie mistake in her enthusiastic loading up.

Laid-Back Camp didn't do that. Instead, Nadeshiko walked the other two into the ground; as Chiaki and Aoi were slowing down, she was still cheerfully going along, load and all. Nadeshiko hadn't made a mistake at all. Instead, she was just that strong, untiring, and capable. That was the moment that sold me on Nadeshiko as a great character, not at all the genki maniac airhead that I had expected and been afraid of.

Looking back, there had been flashes of that even before the fourth episode. For instance, in the first episode Nadeshiko had biked all of the fairly decent distance from her home to the campsite, and didn't seem any the worse for it. But the fourth episode was where it became clear to me, and that moment in the fourth episode is what clinched it.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

Devilman Crybaby

So, yeah, I watched Devilman Crybaby. It was an experience.

Before I started watching, what I knew was that this a Yuasa adaptation of a famous early 70s Go Nagai manga, funded by Netflix and so without broadcast content restrictions. The first episode pretty much delivered what I expected in that regard; as I said on Twitter, it was very over the top in Go Nagai's usual way, and gleefully and faithfully rendered by Yuasa (eg). I also said something that I didn't intend as foreshadowing, but:

I didn't get emotionally pulled into Devilman Crybaby because many parts were absurd, but that's probably the best way to consume Go Nagai. To be actually in the show would be terrifyingly intense even in this episode; distance helped a lot.

Yuasa's Devilman Crybaby turned out to be very good at kicking you in the feels, to put it in the modern idiom. It became nothing like it had started out as, mutating from an over the top operatic exercise in excess to something very powerful by the end. I went into Devilman Crybaby expect to get interestingly executed pulp. I wound up getting far more, with real emotional impacts.

(In retrospect, the mood of the striking and compelling OP was also foreshadowing. That's not a pulp show's OP, in either animation or music.)

To talk of whether or not I liked Devilman Crybaby seems almost beside the point. Devilman Crybaby is not here to be liked; it's here to put you through the wringer, and what you make of that experience is up to you. My own ride through Devilman Crybaby was quite the rollercoaster, even though it didn't entirely pull me in (also).

After I'd finished the show, I read Wikipedia's article on the manga, which covers the metaphor Go Nagai intended for the whole story. I see where and why Go Nagai was going, but only intellectually and I have to view it as very much a product of the early 1970s and the Vietnam war. It's not something that resonates with me, for all that it feels like Go Nagai had to have been very passionate about it when he created Devilman.

(Although I don't know if it's the case, it certainly feels like Devilman has to be an angry work, with Go Nagai railing against one aspect of the world and people. But this is all me reading things into Go Nagai's central metaphor.)

Devilman Crybaby is in some ways a messy show, one that feels abbreviated in spots; I suspect that people who've read the Devilman manga will have a deeper appreciation of the show than I do. I'll probably never rewatch it, and I certainly don't love it; not only was it wrenching, but Yuasa's version stays faithful to the manga's downer ending (which is apparently famous and iconic). But I'm not going to forget it any time soon, and I have no regrets about watching it. It is, very definitely, a powerful work. And a very Yuasa one.

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

Briefly checking in on the Fall 2018 anime season 'midway' through

I know, in my fall brief impressions I said that I probably wouldn't do a 'midway' post. I changed my mind because there are a couple of things I want to note before the shows end and my views change again.

Excellent:

• SSSS.Gridman: This show is amazing, and it's also reached the point where the giant robots and kaiju fights are essential drivers for the compelling character drama. It also continues to sneak in straight faced jokes and absurd situations that are both funny and illustrative of the strange setting.

Good:

• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: I caught up on this and I'm enjoying it as straight entertainment, which is pretty much what I was hoping for. This is not deep drama, but among other things it's a fundamentally pleasant show. It could easily have been about war and fighting, but instead it is ultimately about building up a community.

• Thunderbolt Fantasy S2: I'll now say the thing that I didn't really say in my brief impressions, which this is not as good as the first season. It's picked up lately, but it still lacks a vital, compelling spark that the first season had. Still, I was very pleasantly surprised by one character in the latest episode.

  (Part of my dissatisfaction with this season is that the Mistress of Cruelty was a punching bag from the start. There were shades of Gen Urobuchi's treatment of her in the first season as well, but it had other characters to make up for it.)

SSSS Gridman is amazing and the other two are perfectly enjoyable, so I'm currently considering this a perfectly good season. That I got back on the wagon of watching and enjoying Slime is nice, even if Thunderbolt Fantasy S2 is a little bit of a letdown. Still, I can hope for a strong finish to the show; it definitely still has potential and room for twists.

Letting my memories be: on not rewatching Full Metal Panic!

Back in the days, I watched all of Full Metal Panic! and I remember enjoying it pretty well (although the original FMP more than Fumoffu); I still stand by what I said in my memorable anime from 2002, including there being good reasons that people have always wanted more of it. Then this spring when everyone finally got their wish for more, I completely bounced off of the new season. For whatever reason, FMP! Invisible Victory didn't click with me.

That hurt, and in the aftermath of that hurt, I thought about going back to rewatch the original Full Metal Panic! for the first time since I'd originally seen it. Part of me wanted to enjoy its magic again to make up for Invisible Victory not working for me, and part of me wondered if my fond but vague memories of the original would hold up in the light of a rewatch or if they'd been selectively gilded by the passage of time.

(I'm sure there are shows that wouldn't be as good as I remember them if I saw them again, where today they'd be far less novel and new and I'd be more attuned to their flaws and limitations.)

After toying with the idea a bit, I didn't. I decided that I was better off leaving my fond memories be, as they were. If my fond memories are gilded, I don't need to shatter them by a rewatch. If my fond memories are true to what I'd feel today, the honest answer is that Full Metal Panic! is still not something I think of as a compelling classic, and realistically the first season was a 24-episode 2002 production, so if nothing else I'm sure that parts of it were slow. My wish for a rewatch is more a product of nostalgia and my disappointment at Invisible Victory not working for me than of any fundamental interest in seeing Full Metal Panic! again.

It is, I think, a good thing to be able to leave things in the past. I definitely enjoyed Full Metal Panic! back when I saw it, and that is sufficient in itself. I don't need to revisit and critically reassess it or in fact anything, to re-judge it by my standards today. Nor is my enjoyment of Full Metal Panic! in the past injured by my feelings about Invisible Victory now. Nothing is wrong with enjoying one then and not the other now; it is just that things change. The Sousuke, Chidori, Tessa, Mao, and the others that live in my heart are still there, as fondly remembered as always. I had fun with them back in the days and nothing now changes that unless I let it.

I don't think this is quite nostalgia, I don't yearn for the past when I enjoyed Full Metal Panic!; I just appreciate that I did, and find it sufficient without further questioning of it.

(There are some things where I might want to take a critical look at what I uncritically swallowed back in the days, but I don't think Full Metal Panic! is a show like that.)

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

The best N anime that I saw in 2017

Yes, I know. It's practically the end of 2018, and here I am writing about my 2017 'best N'. This is a rather delayed entry, and unlike last year's best N it's not because I have conflicted feelings; I just got lazy and let it slip and slip and slip. Not writing things is easier than writing things, after all.

Because this is significantly delayed, I probably have a somewhat different perspective on 2017's shows than I would have had in January or February. The passage of time always changes my feelings about shows; some of my immediate enthusiasms fade, while other shows rise in my estimation. Of course this also makes an immediate end of the year view suspect, because I will be writing it only weeks after the fall season shows finished, with hot enthusiasms still running, but a full nine months after the winter shows did, with cooled and more distant reactions. But so it goes. Perhaps writing 2017's best-of so far from the end of 2017 has given me a more even perspective on everything.

As usual for these retrospectives, this is what I consider to be to be the best or most enjoyable things that I saw in calendar 2017 (regardless of when they were made or released). As is now standard, my general rule is that only shows that have actually ended count because you never know what eye-rolling things a show may finish up with. Conveniently for me, this still excludes March comes in like a Lion, which finished in 2018. While March had a nominal season end in 2017, in terms of the show as a whole it was just a pause.

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

More or less in order, but I'm not going to categorize exactly how good I feel these are:

• Land of the Lustrous: A stunning show in very many ways, both in the presentation and in the story itself. Ultimately it was the story of how Phos changed and was changing, and perhaps how all of the gems were moving from their long stasis. See my fall retrospective for more words and hand-waving about this very memorable show.

• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: This was both a funny comedy and a heart-touching show about (found) families. It never forgot to be funny, but it also never forgot what the show was quietly really about. As a show about families, it was also quietly about the changes and accommodations you make when you form a family, which is not a common message.

  (As an extension of that, it was also sort of about how you fit yourself into friendships and a broader society around yourself.)

• Kemono Friends: At one level this was not an amazing show, although it was a very good one once you peeled back the superficial surface story; it had a bunch of quietly great characters (some of them painfully real), very solid world building, excellent use of incluing, and so on. At another level, Kemono Friends was the magic of anime. It transmuted what should have by all means been dross into spun gold and in the process showed everyone how unimportant many conventional aspects of anime ultimately are in making a great show. Welcome to Japari Park, now and forever.

• Made in Abyss: This was a generally excellent show (albeit with some questionable aspects) with an absolutely stunning last third that was terrifying, heart-wrenching, peculiarly beautiful, and ultimately optimistic. In at least two episodes, Made in Abyss managed to achieve the kind of genuine emotional power and impact that very few shows can even approach. People who watched Made in Abyss will not be forgetting this piece of music any time soon.

• Girls' Last Tour: As a whole this was a quiet, beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking little gem, where our duo of blobby characters in deliberately scratchy backgrounds delivered quiet meditations on life. Perhaps I should love it more than I do, but as a whole it is a little bit too much of a downer to live in my heart that way. As the title says, this is the last tour through a ruined and desolate world, however beautifully presented and however touching, and however many things the show finds in the ruins.

  (Partly as a result of what GLT is fundamentally about, I can't really imagine rewatching the show as a whole. Maybe little nice moments and scenes, but nothing more.)

On the edge, if I'm being honest:

• The Dragon Dentist: This little two-episode OVA probably flew under many people's radar, which is a mistake. It packed a lot into its short run, including a bunch of fun stuff, a quiet optimism, and a genuine sense of heart. Oddly, one thing that elevates it quite a bit in my regard is the opening of the second OVA, but that's something that I can't explain without spoilers to people who haven't seen the show.

  (This is on the edge because it doesn't quite stand out and stick in my memory as the other shows do, but at the same time it's much more than merely ordinarily good.)

Old things I watched that impressed me:

• Iria: Zeiram the Animation: This is a fun six-episode OVA from the 1990s with a distinctly different feel from modern anime, including in its settings and its character designs. I wish we had more of its distinctly different SF feeling in modern anime; modern SF anime designs and settings are generally pretty predictable and thus somewhat boring. Iria is entertaining enough to watch for that alone, and it's worth watching to see what we could have if people wanted to do it.

• Crusher Joe is very 1980s. Both the movies and the OVAs are entertaining in the 1980s action adventure way; they were worth watching both for that and as pieces of animation history. There's a reason that the movie is kind of a classic (and it's not just the first animated appearance of the Dirty Pair, sorry, Lovely Angels).

I'm kind of cheating by not trying to rank these two shows against the current shows I watched this year, but both of them feel like such different things from currently airing stuff that it feels impossible to do a meaningful comparative ranking. Besides, it's my blog so I'm allowed to cheat if I want to.

From here on in, we're in the category of shows that I consider good but not necessarily memorable over the long term. There is no strong ranking between the shows, although there is a subdivision this year.

Good things I want to like more than I actually do:

• Eccentric Family S2: There were plenty of things to like about this season but it hasn't stuck with me the way the first season did, and at this distance it doesn't feel essential. This is pretty much what I predicted in my spring retrospective, so I'm not too surprised. I still wouldn't mind seeing more Eccentric Family, though, as it was always enjoyable and I do like the characters, the setting, and so on, so I'd be happy with seeing them gallivanting around more.

• Princess Principal: This was a genuinely fun show with a lot of good things all through it; it's definitely set a standard that many shows like it now fail to live up to. But, as I said in my summer retrospective, it was more of a prequel than a story, and in the end this means that it lacks some degree of impact.

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ: This was a fine installment of the Symphogear experience, with a number of nice touches. But it's not really something that I could point to to sell people on Symphogear (and not just because it's building on everything that came before), which is kind of a pity. As a Symphogear season, at this distance from it it's ordinary.

Good shows that I no longer have strong feelings about:

• Alice & Zouroku: On the one hand, this show was basically a treasure; it's a show that focuses on children and makes it work. On the other hand, while I have fond memories of it it's not sticky in the way that some other shows are.

• WorldEnd: This is a rare show of its fundamental nature (by which I mean being a light novel) that made everything completely work, including its ending. See my spring retrospective for more words.

• Knight's & Magic: This is the best popcorn show I watched all year, because it was so earnest and honest about what it was and what it was doing. It helps a lot that I have a weakness for stories of this nature, what one could call 'competence porn', and I don't mind giant robots.

Finally, honorable mentions:

• your name: This is a perfectly fine movie and it's very well made, but I don't have strong feelings about it in the way that some people do. I certainly don't think it's stunning except perhaps in a visual sense, although it certainly has many nice touches and subtle details.

  (Part of my muted reactions to this are that I think I have a different reaction to characters forgetting what made them the person they were than most people do. See, for example, my reaction to the ending of Darker Than Black's second season.)

• Kizumonogatari: The whole set of three movies was spectacular and beautiful and periodically affecting and sometimes terrifying. But, at the same time, it's Monogatari, which means that it has a bunch of aspects that are very distinctive and not necessarily always to my taste. I have divided opinions about Monogatari's quirks, for all that I keep watching it, and as a practical matter those quirks lessen Kizumonogatari's impact on me.

• ACCA - 13-Territory Inspection Department: I really liked this back at the time (cf) and it still stands out as a show that is definitely about adults, but at this distance I've mostly forgotten it. Looking back I think that one flaw of it is that while mysteries get revealed, there is not really any character development (for all that there is a lot of fine character interaction and it has a great feel for atmosphere). Style is great, but apparently it can only make a show stick so much for me; what really makes something work is probably heart (all of which my top things of 2017 have in full measure).

(Although the last two episodes of Long Riders! aired in 2017, I consider it really a 2016 show and anyway I already talked about it in my Best N in 2016. The last two episodes didn't let the show down in any way.)

My notes say that I finished about 28 shows, OVAs, and movies in 2017, which is about what I finished in 2016 as well. As in 2016, I dropped any number of shows, including promising shows and sad letdowns. Looking at my records suggest that I didn't continue 22 things that I either sampled or actively tried to watch, including one show where I got almost to the end before deciding not to go on (that was Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond).

The highlights of 2017 rank pretty highly for me, at least at this distance from them. At least the first five in my list will likely stick with me for some time.

Brief impressions of the Fall 2018 anime season so far

As before it's time (and well past time) for my no longer early views of how this season has shaken out so far, following up on my first episode reactions. This is another slow season for me, but I'm happy with what I'm actively watching.

Excellent:

• SSSS.Gridman: This is the standout show of the season for me, but not because of the kaiju fights; it's everything else that I really like, especially the character drama. There are all sorts of quiet exceptional things about Gridman that I'm not going to try to summarize here, and anyway many of them are small contributors to its compelling whole.

Good:

• Thunderbolt Fantasy S2: This has been slower than the first season and so not as compelling, but it's still a solid show that is finally starting to develop its tangled complexity, without about three or four things going on at once.

Good popcorn entertainment:

• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: I like and fully enjoy this when I get around to watching an episode, but I haven't found watching episodes to be fully compelling and as a result I'm several episodes behind. I have reasons for this, but the fact is that I'm not behind on my other two shows.

  (One reason I don't find this as compelling is that I burned through the manga, so I know what's coming.)

Dropped:

• Release the Spyce (#2): As I put it on Twitter when I got around to watching the second episode, this is a perfectly serviceable show. But at the moment I'm not really interested in a show that I find merely serviceable.

  (I've also heard that Spyce got kind of messy later on.)

• The Girl in Twilight (#1): In the end I opted not to watch more than the first episode, partly because I heard various things about further episodes that didn't really sound like it was something that I wanted to follow.

I feel satisfied with my top two shows, and when I want some popcorn entertainment I have Slime (as I'm calling it). This is way down on my past watching level, but I don't care about that any more; I'm watching what I want to, and not watching things just because I feel that I should.

PS: Given that we're basically in the middle of the season by now, I don't expect to do a midway views entry this time around, although I might change my mind if I decide to drop Slime.

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Fall 2018 anime season

As before I'm collecting here all of my tweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order that I saw them).

• Thunderbolt Fantasy S2 episode 1: I can't figure out if Shang was reasonably smart, rather stupid, or both at once. Also, this didn't quite start with the bang that I was expecting; this was more setup than anything else. ♯

• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime episode 1: I enjoyed this as goofy, over the top fun in a genre I have a weakness for, but it's definitely made better by having inhaled the manga first. (Among other things, I liked spotting the changes from the manga.) →

• The Girl in Twilight episode 1: That was an interesting start but as usual it's all setup and doesn't say anything about where the show's going. Still, it's interesting enough to get me to watch the next episode. ♯

• Release the Spyce episode 1: That was a perfectly good and enjoyable experience. It didn't set me on fire, partly because it was a bit too goofy, but the end means they've clearly opted to go big with the show and I can respect that. I'll certainly watch the next episode. ♯

• SSS.Gridman episode #1: Okay, I'm a sucker for shows that start out this way (teasing some mysteries, offering some hints, having weird stuff happen), and the characters are pretty solid too. I actively enjoyed the quiet parts before the action; there was nice interplay there. →

(I made a typo here; SSSS.Gridman has four S's, not three.)

This is all of the first episodes that I feel like looking at at the moment. Other things have gotten praise, but they're in genres that almost never work for me or don't seem appealing on a broad level. And as far as my enthusiasm for this season actually goes, well, I'll have to quote a recent tweet:

I'm backlogged on shows already, but that's because I'd apparently rather play around with Grafana+Prometheus rather than watch anything I have pending (which may say something about what I've got queued). Sorry, Slime show, but I already read the manga. Maybe later.

(This doesn't include either SSSS.Gridman or Thunderbolt Fantasy, both of which I'm enthusiastically watching so far.)

Looking back at the Summer 2018 anime season

Once again it's time for my traditional look back at what I watched in this past Summer season, to follow up on my early impressions and my midway views. As in the spring, this is a pretty easy wrap-up since I only watched three shows all the way through this season.

Excellent:

• Planet With: The show always wore its heart on its sleeve, and on the whole I think it worked, but I was left feeling that it went a bit too fast at the end. The show's breakneck pace was great when it was moving briskly over the standard robot show beats that we've all seen many times before and that carried no real emotional weight, but it felt less successful when it was speeding over things that would have built more emotional investment. But reactions here definitely differ (cf).

  (Unlike some shows, it doesn't feel like Planet With was forced to condense itself because of limited run time. All of its choices about speed seemed carefully designed and entirely deliberate, although they were obviously strongly influenced by its episode count.)

  On the whole I think Planet With was a great show, always enjoyable and exciting, with excellent characters and many little touches. It left any number of things not said explicitly but implied sufficiently much that we could get it if we paid attention, which is something I always enjoy. It also deliberately made it clear that we were not seeing everything important about the lives of these characters, just a small slice; this was most explicit in the last two episodes, where it made a point of alluding to various off-screen things.

• Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight: In the end the show's strong focus on its message and the theatrical parts of its presentation left me with a lack of emotional investment in the characters and the show as a whole. I like and admire the show, I think it did some really impressive things on a technical level (with its directing, layouts, and so on), I'm glad that it exists, I enjoyed watching it, I believe that it's doing good work, but in the end I don't think I care very much emotionally or that the show will stick with me. My involvement in the show was mostly intellectual, apart from Daiba Nana (who needed a hug and got one in the end, good for Revue Starlight).

  Revue Starlight is very entangled in the Takarazuka Revue, so it will perhaps land with more impact on people who care about it and who are sufficiently familiar to clearly see the messages RS has to send without the guidance of something like Atelier Emily's essential writing on the show.

  (See also this review, which hits a lot more points. Also, my tweets in reaction to the last episode.)

Popcorn educational entertainment:

• Cells at Work!: This slowed down in the last portions in the sense that they seemed to run a bit low on interesting educational things to show us and wound up leaning more on the characters to carry episodes. Since Cells doesn't really have characters that it's possible to become strongly invested in, this didn't entirely work for me. But the whole thing was still worth watching as popcorn entertainment.

I feel satisfied with this season as a whole, partly because I no longer feel compelled to fill up all of my spare time with anime.

(I also watched some of the first Overlord series and plan to get back to see more at some point. It's ridiculous and overpowered in a way that amuses me.)