Roving Thoughts archives

Watching Kemono Friends benefits from knowing some general spoilers

Kemono Friends was a series that didn't even make my radar for the winter season, but it's been steadily picking up buzz and good press and I recently started watching it. This experience very much benefits from knowing some general spoilers due to what I'm going to call the Symphogear effect.

Much like Symphogear but more so, the opening episodes of Kemono Friends are not particularly attractive on their surface. The CGI is frankly janky (although I can get used to it and I even find it kind of charming now) and the general plot of each episode is not particularly deep. While the show is laced through with mysteries and allusions, it's all too easy for a show to drop lots of hints that amount to absolutely nothing and plenty of shows fumble their ending this way. Which is where the general spoilers come in, because they do the crucial work of letting me know that Kemono Friends is not one of these.

For example, those mysteries and allusions are in fact our old friend incluing at work doing subtle worldbuilding. Those uneasy feelings I get when I watch the show and see things in the background are entirely intentional, and paying attention is thus actively rewarding; I'll pick up things and have fun theorizing. And things like Nick Creamer's review of Kemono Friends lets me know that the smart writing I think I'm seeing is not an illusion and the show has a real and satisfactory payoff in the end.

All of this elevates the show well above its relatively modest surface appeal. When watching Kemono Friends with this advance knowledge, I can both enjoy the surface, which is decently entertaining in a lightweight way, and amuse myself by thinking about all of the things in the background. I'll also admit that seeing all the memes and artworks of various characters on Twitter has helped to prime me for their actual appearances in the show. If I'd tried to watch Kemono Friends cold without this general background, I suspect that I'd have bounced off the show entirely on the grounds that it was very little more than it appeared to be and didn't have enough promise.

(The surface show of Kemono Friends is okay but it's not deep; it's goofy friendship slice of life and learning experiences, mixed with lectures on animals and ecologies and so on. I might have watched it for that alone if I was sufficiently bored, which I actually might have been last season.)

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

It's time for a slow-moving midway update on my early impressions. This update has been delayed in part because I didn't want to admit something, and that was partly because of the tacit pressure of conformity.

Excellent:

• ACCA - 13-Territory Inspection Department: This has continually been the most interesting show I've been watching this season. It wasn't always clear where it was going (and it's still not), but it had such a sense of style, atmosphere, and character that that didn't matter. And while I wasn't really looking, in its quiet, atmospheric way the show has covered a huge amount of plot territory, especially in the past few episodes. I can't wait to see where it goes next.

• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: This is still a comedy but it's a lot more than that too; at its heart it's about family. I don't like all of it, but enough of every episode lands that it's great. It has a real mastery of quiet moments, background things, and little gestures.

In ongoing shows, March comes in like a Lion has continued to be quietly great. There are less fireworks now than there used to be, but more development and progression. Shimada has been a great addition to the cast.

Not for me:

• Little Witch Academia: In the end, this is basically a kids show (that's made by Trigger, and is airing at midnight because apparently the TV anime model is fundamentally broken). There's nothing wrong with LWA being a kid's show, but kids shows generally don't really appeal to me and LWA has not been the exception.

  This is kind of what I was worried about before LWA started airing, although not exactly it. In the end it was less the cliched stuff and more the general style that didn't work for me. I have a bunch of issues with what happened in the episodes I watched, but in the end all of them come from looking at a kids show with the eyes of an adult.

Dropped:

• Blue Exorcist - Kyoto Saga: In the end, the slow pacing killed it for me. This has the leisurely execution of a show that knows it's adapting a manga arc and is thus ultimately not particularly going anywhere. I like the characters, but no.

• Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! 2: Episode 4 was all about Darkness and I hate what the show does with Darkness, so I bounced off it and then realized I wasn't particularly interested in the show as a whole. The show had one core joke and mostly wore it out in the first season; the things it did in the first three episodes of the second season weren't enough to keep me (and some of them I disliked).

I have continued to not watch Saga of Tanya the Evil, and what I've heard about recent developments have convinced me that this is the right decision (partly because I'm on Tanya's side in one small aspect of the show, although everything else I've heard about her makes me think I'd dislike her).

In the past I've felt antsy when I was down to this few shows I was watching. This season I have no such issues so far, and I think that that's partly because the three remaining shows are all really good ones. They each leave me happily contented when I watch an episode and I eagerly anticipate the next one when it gets close.