2015-12-28
Looking back at the Fall 2015 anime season
Once again it's time for my usual look back at the shows I watched this season in order to see how my early impressions and my midway views have held up. While I do these writeups partly to be honest about how things came out, I've also found them useful for looking back at what my past views were, to see what I thought about shows more or less at the time.
Fully enjoyable:
- Concrete Revolutio: In some ways this was not subtle and in others
it was hard to follow (to get the most of it you
had to keep track of what had happened when in the
timeline, which GuyShalev's Concrete Revolutio episodes posts
help with). But as the show went on, I became more and more taken with
all of the various things it was doing and the story it was telling
and, yes, the characters involved. The whole thing has wound up as a
quite enjoyable show and I'm looking forward to the continuation in
the spring.
Concrete Revolutio has a relatively distinctive animation style and aesthetic, which I enjoyed but other people may not. I think that it fit the story it was telling and it was probably chosen for that reason.
- One-Punch Man: This is here not because it's a great show but
because I consistently found it funny and enjoyable. I'm aware that
finding OPM funny is a minority position (at least in the Twitter
anime circles I follow), but then anime humour rarely works for me in
the first place. In addition to being funny, OPM also had some decent
storytelling in spots; it pulled off one reasonably dramatic storyline
involving Mumen Rider and a few other nice dramatic moments. I did
some OPM takes on Twitter.
A lot of people love OPM for its fight animation, but I'm more ambivalent. A fair number of its fights were visually spectacular without being what I consider good fights, including the climactic fight in the last episode.
- Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: This remained a well constructed and well
made show all the way through to the resolution of the first cour's
plotline (it continues in the spring season). It's not exactly deep,
since this is a LN action show, but it's well done with surprisingly
good writing and a
good couple.
I'm really looking forward to the next season.
(Apparently some people think that Asterisk is a harem show. I disagree with that; Ayato and Julis are a clear couple and almost no one else is particularly trying to horn in on that.)
Okay:
- Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider: The great thing about
the show was Moe and her interactions with everyone, especially
Saikawa. The mystery was okay and the process of revealing it was
interesting and often very tense, atmospheric, and quietly horrific. Where the
show falls down badly is that it fails to challenge the absurd character
positions and philosophy that get espoused throughout and especially
at the ending. Since all of them are basically garbage, this lack of
challenge makes much of the ending into an eye-rolling experience
where I had no investment in any of the events and characters.
(See also, which has some spoilers.)
In short, when the show was good it was great, with Moe sparking off people, things about her history and Saikawa being revealed, and so on. But when it was not good it was pretty much a disappointing more or less stinker, and the ending was a serious letdown; the last episode was basically worthless apart from a few bits with Moe.
- K - Return of Kings: I have a great deal of affection for K as
a result of the first season but this season tried my patience by
being kind of slow. In the end it came through with some great final
episodes, character bits, and a definite resolution (even if it was a
bit hokey). I enjoyed the whole thing but mostly not anywhere near as
much as the first season. In my view, Fushimi really stole the season
from everyone else by being clearly the best and most interesting
character.
The conclusion to this season basically rules out any further K, and I find that I'm perfectly okay with that. K has had its run and told its stories, and I'm content to stop there (although I might be a bit sad if this season had been stronger; this season and the movie make it look like the first season was pretty much a fluke where everything clicked just right).
I finished it:
- Owarimonogatari: As I put it on Twitter, people who
are into Monogatari probably loved the resolution to the Shinobu Mail
storyline. I liked some aspects of it and some moments in it, but on
the whole I wasn't really set on fire by anything in this season the
way I loved, say, Hanamonogatari.
- Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen: The show has spent almost all
of this season derping around. Its only saving grace is that it
manages to be very, very charming during this derping around,
charming enough that I've kept watching when I would have dropped
any other show that pulled this stuff off.
(Every so often the show made legitimate dramatic points, but they were undercut by the derping.)
Dropped:
- Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans: For various reasons I wound up dropping this shortly after I wrote up my midway views. Ultimately I just didn't really care about the characters and their struggles and I felt the show was going in directions I generally dislike.
I fully enjoyed three shows this season and was reasonably fond of everything else I watched, even if Perfect Insider wound up letting me down after a very strong start (and really, it was pretty strong for most of its run; only the ending was a real nose dive).
2015-11-21
Checking in on the Fall 2015 anime season part way through
Once again it's time for one of these now-traditional midway updates on my early impressions of the season. While there have been some surprises so far, things have broadly turned out the way that I expected.
Great:
- One-Punch Man: I didn't expect this to become basically my favorite
show of the season, but it has. The humour has been working for me
(partly because the show is willing to be understated and just let
the funny bits sit there without comment) and I like the overall
developments. It even recently managed an episode
that was mostly drama and that still worked for me. The presence of
Genos is very important for making everything work; Saitama is mostly
a force of nature, but Genos is someone we can connect to.
- Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider: I go hot and cool on
this show as it oscillates around, but I can't deny that at its
best it is really good. It has a great grasp of understated
atmosphere and how to be horrifying, even if sometimes it spends
time ambling around in ways that make me kind of roll my eyes.
It understands that it's just as important to explore the characters
we're interested in as to explore the mystery, and both Moe and
Saikawa are great for this (Moe more so than Saikawa).
- Concrete Revolutio: This isn't as spectacularly great as Perfect
Insider sometimes is but I think it has more consistency and it's
doing a bunch of increasingly interesting things. Its stories can lack
subtlety in both themes and execution, but it still winds up making
them be interesting and periodically (visually) spectacular. And I
quite like what its doing with its structure as it circles around
both a central revelation that we know is coming and a whole series
of reveals about the characters and the history of the show.
This is a show that you absolutely have to pay attention to in order to get everything. @GuyShalev maintains a very handy accumulated timeline in his Concrete Revolutio episode posts on his blog.
Okay:
- Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: This is not a great show, as you'd expect,
but it's been a consistently enjoyable watch for me. The show is
simply well constructed and well made, and the characters are nicely
drawn and interesting. It's also mostly been free of what I'll call
'LN anime bullshit'; I barely roll my eyes when watching.
This is one of the two shows I watch the fastest once it becomes available (the other one being One-Punch Man).
- K - Return of Kings: I like these characters and this setting,
but gosh the story is moving slowly. One of the things that made
the first series work is that there was always something relatively
crazy happening (whether it was action, happenings, or revelations
about what was going on); this series has mostly lacked that.
- Owarimonogatari: I'm too invested in the Monogatari series to stop watching, but I still don't feel any real investment in the characters here because they feel less like people and more like cardboard cutouts spouting dialog. That could change (Monogatari has been able to get me to care) or the show could become visually interesting to watch, but I'm not holding my breath.
Hanging on on the edge:
- Utawarerumono - Itsuwari no Kamen: Kuon and Haku are great characters
but the show itself has mostly been going in circles recently as it
dragged in more and more other characters. This might be okay if the
new people were interesting too, but mostly they aren't and they don't
really contribute much to the interesting core characters that we do
have.
- Mobile Suit Gundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans: Apart from the issue
of looming doom, the problem here is that nothing
here has really made me get emotionally invested. The characters and
story arcs are certainly interesting, but so far they haven't got me
on a gut level. It's nice seeing everyone maneuver around and have
problems and grow and so on, but it doesn't leave me with any sort of
burning desire to see the next episode. I almost dropped the show
before episode 7 (after a twitter ramble), but
reconsidered.
I suspect I'm simply not up for two cours of this and will drop it
at some point, although I don't know exactly when.
(As I found out with Space Dandy, mere animation firepower and so on is not enough to keep me watching if I don't actually care.)
Dropped:
- Heavy Object: To be impolite, the bullshit involved with this show got to me, including the character dialog. I decided that the uninspiring conclusion of the uninspiring second arc was a good place to stop watching, because it was never going to offer me anything more interesting than what I'd already seen.
My top three shows this season are great and Asterisk is enjoyable popcorn, so I'm happy overall with this season; from my perspective, it's quite a good season. Certainly I haven't been tempted to pick up or watch anything else to fill in the time, and in fact I have pending stuff that I'd like to get to but I haven't found the time for.