Roving Thoughts archives

Checking in on the Winter 2018 anime season 'midway' through

I know, calling this 'midway' is a bit rich, even for me. But I haven't seen the end of any of the shows I'm watching, so I want to write down some things before I start changing that, as an update on my earlier impressions of this season.

Smash hit of the season:

• Laid-Back Camp: This has stayed ridiculously engaging all the way through, with hardly a misstep. As I expected I'm much more interested in Rin's solo camping sections, with their focus on the mechanics and the beauty of the experience, than on the Outclub's 'gang of friends' segments. But even the latter are a solid experience (in moderation), and the whole show is my clear winner this season.

Generally excellent:

• March comes in like a Lion: After stalling on this for quite a while, I motivated myself into watching it and it's still as solid and as good as always.

Popcorn with flashes of something more:

• Darling in the FranXX: It's not that the show is bad; it's just that it's disappointing on multiple levels. But every so often it pulls off a surprise or a very good episode, and outside of that it's good popcorn entertainment if you can hold your nose about certain aspects.

Surprisingly good, I think:

• The Ancient Magus' Bride changed my opinion of it with the last episode, which is the first episode that I hadn't read the manga version of first. It came across as a quite good episode, so I'm swinging around to the idea that I've been somewhat too hard on the show because it generally hasn't been living up to the manga.

Either on the edge of being dropped or dropped:

• Violet Evergarden (#10): The show is beautiful (and I'm not just talking about the art), and when I watch an episode it mostly pulls me in to the moment. But then the episode ends and I immediately wind up pulling back from it. I don't think I feel intrinsically engaged with any of the characters; the show is so well put together that it makes me care anyway when I'm watching, but outside of that I feel distant from it, with very little urge to watch it. Between episodes, watching feels more like an obligation than anything else.

  I may finish up the show just because, but ultimately if you told me that I couldn't watch any more than I already have, I wouldn't feel at all annoyed.

Dropped:

• Katana Maidens - Toji no Miko (#9): I got tired of the show's generally slow pacing and gave up on it after a while. I like the characters and when things happened it was okay, but I couldn't take the stop/start plot development any more. Even Evirus calls it 'okay'.

  (I could say that I started picking nits in things, but when I start doing that it's because I'm growing disenchanted with the show.)

In Netflix mass dropped shows, I watched B - The Beginning and have been working through A.I.C.O. - Incarnation, which somehow feels like a show from a decade ago (it's not anywhere near as compulsive a watch as B was).

In general this has been a quiet, laid-back season for me. There's nothing I'm watching that really inspires passion, for all that Laid-Back Camp is a great charmer.

Brief impressions of the Winter 2018 anime season so far

Every year, the onset of January with its freezing cold gives me the urge to just hibernate until spring; my energy and drive drops, and it's very easy to put things off if they take some amount of initiative. This has hit me unusually hard this year, which is a large part of why I'm writing what is normally an 'early impressions' entry so far into the season. But still, I'm writing it, so as usual here's how my views of this season have shaken out so far, following up on my first episode reactions.

Very enjoyable:

• Laid-Back Camp (aka Yuru Camp): This is simply ridiculously charming and comfortable for me, in much the same way that Long Riders was. The show is very good at making fall and winter camping attractive. To my surprise it's also completely sold me on the character I didn't expect to like, and overall it's wound up being one of the two most compelling shows of the season for me.

  (Nick Creamer has convinced me that it's doing some clever structural things too, so this is not the simple show it sort of appears as; it has a lot of smarts and excellent execution behind the scenes.)

• Darling in the FranXX: I don't have very high expectations for this show, which means that sometimes it's surprised me. I'm fairly sure that the show is deliberately working on some big ideas but its implementation so far is merely ordinary and sadly conventional. It is pretty nice looking and well made, which makes it a good popcorn show for me.

  (It's the second most compelling show of the season for me.)

Good:

• Katana Maidens - Toji no Miko: The show has continued to execute pretty well with any number of nice little touches but without doing anything spectacular. I've seen it compared to Mai Hime and I sort of agree with that, although I don't think it's up to Mai Hime's quality. I'm enjoying it as a popcorn watch.

Divided opinions:

• Violet Evergarden: I have wound up feeling that this is good without being compelling. I enjoy episodes when I watch them on a minute to minute basis, but I don't feel much of a push to watch new episodes when they become available (as a result, I'm currently behind). It doesn't help that I find some aspects of the overall story to be hard to believe in if I think about them too hard.

  It is very pretty, though, and also very well directed and made. Kyoto Animation is pulling out the stops for this and it shows.

  (This is close to what I expected before the start of the season, because the whole story premise we were given didn't sound like my kind of thing. I'm pleasantly surprised that I've found VE as interesting as I have; I expected to bounce off it almost immediately, but instead I'm enjoying it on an episode to episode basis.)

I'm not considering Devilman Crybaby as part of this season for the simple reason that I've already watched all of it, since the entire show appeared at once at the start of January. About all I want to try to say here is that watching it was a pretty wild ride and not at all what I expected at the start.

In ongoing shows, The Ancient Magus' Bride has trucked on much as it was last season, with a mixture of competently done stuff, disappointingly ordinary things that should be extraordinary, and some surprisingly great episodes that I've loved. This is not a truly spectacular adaptation, but it has its moments.

I'm theoretically watching March comes in like a Lion but in practice I haven't gotten up enough mental fortitude to face the two remaining episodes in the Hina bullying arc, which means that I haven't watched any of its episodes since the start of January. I understand that things pick up and it has a happy ending, but the whole thing is so heavy that I keep putting it off (my latest excuse is 'I'll catch up while March is off due to the Winter Olympics').

In practice all of this means I'm regularly watching four shows more or less promptly and eventually watching a fifth. I hope to increase that by one by catching up on March and letting it work its magic on me, but that requires energy and gumption instead of hibernation, and hibernation is really easy right now.