Roving Thoughts archives

Checking in on the Spring 2017 anime season 'midway' through

It's time once again for a 'midway' update on my earlier impressions of this season. This update has been delayed partly because I've gotten lazy and partly because I've been a little bit reluctant to actually admit something about what I'm watching (this happened last season too).

Excellent:

• Eccentric Family second season: This is perhaps not quite as exciting as the first season was, but that's because we've seen the first season so there are fewer surprises and revelations. What we've gotten is still really great, with character developments substituted for revelations.

  (I have some views about this. The short form version is that in the first season, characters did not grow too much; instead they just got revealed. In the second season, several characters are being forced to move out of their stasis and actually change.)

Very good:

• WorldEnd: This has continued to be as solidly good as it started out as. The characters are appealing, the twists are interesting and surprising, and it's become one of the rare shows that manage to sell me on the romance involved (and even the process of it happening).

• Alice & Zoroku: After its initial burst of action in the first arc, the show has focused its energy on the characters and the result has been great. It's warm and charming and very effective at developing Sana as a real, understandable person who comes across as being her (young and confused) age.

Good:

• My Hero Academia: There are inherent limits to what a shonen show can and will do in a 'sports tournament' setting, and the whole thing can get a bit repetitive with match after match. However, on the good side, MHA has finally mastered the art of not making things feel slow. I have no idea if it actually is slow compared to the manga, but the important thing is that MHA is not dragging in the way it was in the first season, where the padding was blatantly obvious. The result is generally a pleasure to watch.

Okay and sort of on the edge:

• Re:Creators: The show was doing pretty well until it gave a lot of focus to Magane (and <spoiler> happened). Magane stinks up the joint when she's on screen, partly because she's not actually a real character; she's a cackling plot convenience. I said some things on this on Twitter, but the bit I didn't mention there is that all of the good fiction characters in Re:Creators have clearly grown and changed due to their time in the real world. Magane has not been affected at all.

  Despite my disgruntlement over Magane and some of the general direction of the show, it has been just good enough overall lately to keep me watching for the moment. However, it is at least close to the edge and I won't be terribly surprised if it manages to push me away before it finishes.

Stalled and basically dropped:

• Rage of Bahamut - Virgin Soul (as of episode 6): I feel sad about more or less completely losing my enthusiasm for this (the original was a pretty good show, after all), and haven't really wanted to officially admit it. Nina is a pretty great character and Rita is always fun, but the show completely failed to interest me in all of the other characters and it insisted on spending plenty of screen time on them and on all of their plot twists. I'm especially uninterested in Kaisar and his angst (Rita had the right idea when she threw him into the canal); he was a pretty much always a wet blanket whenever he appeared.

  (In the original, Kaisar was mostly the straight man to Favaro's comedian, and in Virgin Soul Kaisar alone has worked about as well as you'd expect a straight man all on his own to work.)

As with last season (cf), I feel perfectly happy with how few shows I'm watching. Four shows that I'm solidly enjoying is fine, and I have no particular urge to watch more.

(Anyways, it's biking season so I have other things going on.)

Looking back at the Winter 2017 anime season

Once again it's time for my traditional look back at what I watched in the past Winter season, to follow up on my early impressions and my midway views. This time around there is a surprise new appearance, which is part of why I haven't written this retrospective before now.

Excellent:

• ACCA - 13-Territory Inspection Department: Some of the plot twists in the last episode were awfully convenient even if they had sort of been set up in advance and there were a few aspects of the setting that made me raise my eyebrows, but ultimately neither of those mattered. What made the show was both the characters and their interactions and the sheer atmosphere of the show, and it nailed both. ACCA was a show that was a lot about style and it had the style to make everything work. And I have to admit that some of the twists in the last episode were great.

  (One surprise given what happened in ACCA is how little violence it had, even when it could have.)

• March comes in like a Lion: This didn't conclude so much as more or less resolve some ongoing character threads, which is perfectly fine since we're getting more later. But even if we weren't, I feel that the show picked a good point to pause; it carefully showed us how Rei had made genuine progress in moving forwards out of his paralyzed stasis (cf).

• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: What started out as a comedy turned into a show that was very explicitly and heartwarmingly about family. Oh, sure, there were still funny bits by and in the end, but family was the heart of everything going on and the epilogue of the show made it explicit. KyoAni did very good work here. In quiet little things, I liked how the mood shifted over the course of the show; for example, Kobayashi stopped exploiting Tohru, and the cast no longer staying late at work.

  (Kanna was a vital part of making things work. Her presence didn't create the family as such, but she made its existence obvious. And she got a beautiful part of an episode where the point wasn't what happened but what didn't.)

• Kemono Friends: This is ultimately a kid's show, by which I mean that its episodic stories were generally relatively straightforward; there was friendship with new Friends (all of whom were nice people), obstacles to overcome with interesting but straightforward solutions, and so on. This doesn't mean that it was bad, though, or even merely ordinary; works for kids and young adults are quite capable of having significant depths once you start looking and being extremely good, and Kemono Friends definitely qualified here.

  Over its run Kemono Friends slowly and carefully built up a coherent world and overall plotline, built narrative momentum around everything going on, and used all of this to create a very powerful climax with genuine surprises, an epic title drop that really worked, and a happy ending that felt completely justified, partly because it used elements the show had been carefully feeding us all along. A lot of shows fumble their endings in some ways, but Kemono Friends delivered one of the best ones I've seen in a while . The show had both heart and smarts (and looking back, always had some interesting things quietly in the background).

  I don't know how Kemono Friends happened, especially from a staff that doesn't seem to have done much before, but I hope we get something more from this group of people. They have proven they can make excellent work even under challenging situations, so I'd love to see what they can do with another chance (on Kemono Friends or something else).

  (I'm someone who is not bothered by CGI if the rest of the show works, so I came to accept Kemono Friends' CGI even when it was pretty special.)

  (See also how watching Kemono Friends benefits from knowing some general spoilers.)

This season wound up being pretty thin on things to watch (since I only followed three shows during it; I started Kemono Friends basically after the season finished). However, everything I watched was somewhere between quite good and excellent (Kemono Friends is merely good a lot of the time; it back-loads its excellence as things get really rolling towards the end).

I do kind of regret that none of my secondary shows worked out for me this season. In the past I probably would have kept on watching Little Witch Academia, Blue Exorcist - Kyoto Saga, and maybe even KonoSuba and Akiba's Trip. But these days apparently I'm getting less interested in watching things I find merely ordinary or marginal, so out they all went by midway.