Roving Thoughts archives

Brief 'early' impressions of the Summer 2015 anime season so far

As before, it's time for another set of early impressions for the shows of this season. So far I'd call this season decently good but not deep, in that I'm watching several enjoyable shows but then there's a sharp falloff in my enthusiasm for everything else.

Clear winners:

• Gatchaman Crowds Insight: This didn't start as strong as the original Crowds did but it's been steadily picking up steam as it goes along. How you feel about this will really depend on how you felt about Crowds; for better or worse, this is a continuation. For me this is great (and I think some aspects of the show are deeper and creepier than people are currently giving them credit for).

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear GX: I gave into the boosterism and caught up on the first and second season in order to be able to watch this, and it was totally worth it. So far Symphogear GX is as much fun as Symphogear G, which makes it a pretty large amount of fun. Everything that you'd expect to be happening is happening; there's new opponents, new crazy weird things, extreme stunts, wacky fun antics among the existing cast, and so on.

• Gangsta.: This isn't anything revolutionary but so far it's been a good implementation of its 'modern era badass killers' action show genre. Since such shows are relatively uncommon, I've been quite enjoying it so far. It's no Black Lagoon, but it's stylish and well done enough to do.

  (Gangsta. is clearly trying to be edgy and adult but I don't find it deeply convincing at that. Its version of 'adult' is a little bit to straightforward and cliched; when your OP starts with a bondage sequence, you're trying too hard.)

I'm enthused by:

• Rokka no Yuusha: Again, this is a decently good implementation of the standard 'quest by the designated heroes to save the world' genre. It's popcorn fodder but enjoyable fodder so far, and the setting (modeled on the Mayans and Aztecs) makes it stand out. I particularly like that the show's willing to be subtle and do a lot with action direction, body language, and voice acting instead of telling us outright. Subtlety is unfortunately rare in anime so I treasure it when I find it.

Enjoying so far:

• GATE: I've read better versions of 'modern people with modern weapons go to fantasy' than this, but for popcorn entertainment it's reasonably well done so far (see also). Any number of aspects are better off not examined closely and I suspect that I sympathize a lot less with at least one character than the show feels I should, but if you care about that stuff this is not the show for you. This is unapologetically a show for people who want to see a modern military rattle around a fantasy setting, get into trouble, and wind up shooting things that deserve it.

  (Well, mostly deserve it.)

  Unlike some people, I don't feel that GATE is particularly well made or well produced; if anything, the first episode was slipshod and cheap. I'm enjoying the show despite this.

• GOD EATER: This isn't anything new or novel and it has that LN scent to it (although it's based on a game), but it has one thing down for me; it knows how to be a surprisingly large amount of fun to watch. I think it's doing a decently good job at enjoyable action direction (and interesting directing in general) and I don't mind the unusual CGI-ish art style. At the same time I pretty much expect to get tired of this sooner or later, probably when it settles into a tedious midseason LN cliche based grind.

• Ushio to Tora: This is pretty much the distilled essence of 90s shonen with modern production values. I've been enjoying it so far but I don't know how long that will last, since I've already seen plenty of 90s shonen in its native habitat.

Misses:

• Classroom Crisis: I want to like this show but its writing flaws are too glaring and too slipshod for me. Among other issues, the writing has a definite habit of just having things happen because they're necessary for the plot, not because they actually make sense (money appearing from nowhere, for example, and see also this twitter thread). For me this is a case of potentially interesting ideas and themes that are trapped inside bad writing. I'm not willing to slog through the bad writing to get to the good themes, not any more.

• Aquarion Logos: This simply lacks the gonzo craziness of EVOL or the interesting characters and plot of the original show (which also had its own collection of over the top stuff to help out). The result is a bland and unappealing monster of the week show.

Not for me:

• Akagami no Shirayukihime: I want to like this but I just found it too bland. Shirayuki and Zen themselves simply don't come across as compelling enough characters to make this interesting; I kept finding myself tuning out as I tried to watch it.

• Ranpo Kitan - Game of Laplace: The two episodes I saw were a horror show with a viewpoint character who was clearly insane (I'm not sure I can rightly describe him as the protagonist). I'm not into horror (or uninteresting mysteries) and I doubt the show is interested in exploring his insanity.

Not even considered, sometimes to my surprise:

• Durarara!! X2: The lackluster first cour of this back at the start of the year wound up completely souring me on continuing onwards, never mind my usual completist nature (cf). It feels liberating to do something like this and I should do it more often; past watching and even past enjoyment is no obligation to continue.

• Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya 2wei Herz!: Not after my reaction to the second season. Every so often I manage to learn better.

• Prison School: Regardless of Mizushima directing it, the premise alone makes this very much not my kind of thing.

• Monster Musume: Nope. No much people praise this as goofy fun, you're not getting me to take a look.

• Gakkou Gurashi: Horror and cute girls doing cute things at school are both genres that I'm essentially completely uninterested in. Combining them does not improve this situation.

• Overlord: By all reports this is no Log Horizon.

• Charlotte: I might be sort of attracted by the premise but the protagonist is apparently an asshole and so nope.

(I don't have any particular comments on anything else I'm not watching.)

This makes four shows I'm almost certain to stick with, two of which I'm solidly confident of, and I'm likely to keep at least a fifth around. That seems about right. By my standards this isn't a particularly weak season, even if it feels like I may have trouble filling out a full APR ballot in some weeks.

Re-rating Senki Zesshou Symphogear

I tweeted:

It's taken me a while to finish it, but I can now declare Senki Zesshou Symphogear to be the best show I watched in the Winter 2012 season.

Ever since I started hanging out on Twitter, I've been hearing praise and enthusiasm for Symphogear (and there was also enthusiasm from eg Evirus, who is on Twitter but I read directly). Back in winter 2012 I wound up 'suspending' Symphogear for various reasons, but a couple of weeks ago all of the Symphogear enthusiasm (coupled with a somewhat weak season) talked me into catching up so I could watch the third and current season, Symphogear GX. And the end result is what you see above. Looking back, the original Symphogear beats out even the ultimately somewhat disappointing Moretsu Pirates in terms of my enjoyment.

(I was originally tempted to skip straight to GX, but I'm glad that I didn't. It just wouldn't have been the same to have missed all of the great bits on the way there.)

Looking back, I think that it really helped that I was marathoning Symphogear and that I knew a lot more about what the show was like, including that the show had another two seasons. The first episode of Symphogear is very heavy on the doom and grimness (we open being told that the protagonist is dead, and then a stadium full of people die in a flashback), and the show aired the year after Madoka. Looking back at my notes from the time made it clear that I believed in the doom-laden air it projected and that simply wasn't really attractive. Now, of course, we know better; the show is really all goofy cheese and cheerful endings (even if it does kill a lot of bystanders).

(See also 1, 2, 3 for more of my Twitter comments on the misleading doom and gloom impression.)

As for how I feel about Symphogear G, it's even better than the first season (partly because the show got rid of pretty much any pretense of doom). It wouldn't rate as high in its season, but that's because it would have had very strong competition. It has an interesting feeling ending that seems like the production team wasn't entirely expecting a third season.

PS: Synchrogazer is the best Symphogear OP. Maria has the best hair, at least so far.

Sidebar: Symphogear and death

Let me try to do a simple take on this: Symphogear is a cheesy show in a decidedly non-cheesy setting. A lot of devastation has happened and does happen over the course of the show and a fair number of bystanders die, often more or less onscreen. Although the show does not show blood all that often, it does show a certain amount of unpleasant deaths that happen to terrified people. I don't think the show particularly dwelled on any of this unpleasantness, but I'm a jaded anime watcher so I'm not sure I'd have noticed short of it being fairly blatant (I have to admit that my standards are not normal).

For some people this will be a strong turnoff to the show and I won't blame them for it.

Looking back at the Spring 2015 anime season

Once again it's time for my usual look back at the shows I watched this season to see how my early impressions and my midway views stacked up in the end.

Excellent:

• Sound! Euphonium: This stayed excellent right through the end, although much of the real emotional climax was in the second last episode. I said a lot in my midway commentary and recently wrote some more about Euphonium and sports shows. There's so much to praise here that it's a bit daunting; the show pleasantly surprised me repeatedly.

  (Sound! Euphonium will not be to everyone's tastes because it is a character drama and as such it can be cruel from time to time in the way that real life is. Sometimes good people lose out.)

  I wouldn't mind more Euphonium but at the same time I don't think it's necessary. There is more story that could be told but this season has reached a satisfying conclusion on its own in emotional and character terms.

Hard to rate:

• Ghost in the Shell Arise - Alternative Architecture: I think that you should watch the OVAs instead (in order) and then watch the last two episodes, but if you don't the TV series version is a perfectly good way to absorb what is a decent iteration of GitS. I was less enthused about the two new for TV episodes than I expected but I'm still mulling over my overall views (and even what they are).

  On the whole this is no GitS SAC and the last two episodes are not particularly outstanding or up to the standard of the earlier OVA episodes.

Okay:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront: I was partly holding this writeup back in the hopes that BBB's final episode would come out, but not so far. In the end that delay is a decent metaphor for what's happened with the whole show; it's pleasant and stylish enough but in the end it has not delivered anything substantial. Basically everything we've gotten is a stylish slice of life action show; this is not terrible, really, but it's unambitious. I suppose there's only so much you can do with an ongoing manga.

  Yes, I wound up disappointed in BBB. It's okay but not outstanding.

• Knights of Sidonia - The Ninth Planet Crusade: This had a decided dip in the middle for a long run of harem antics and fanservice where nothing very much happened, but the start and the end were the great Sidonia I'm used to. The final episode gave us a solid capstone to the whole show; they could make more (the manga is ongoing), but if they don't the show ended on a solidly triumphant note that feels right.

  (As far as the harem antics, well, I have to accept that the show is what it is and live with it.)

  Sidonia once again took home the prize for what was clearly the best OP of the season.

• Punchline: In the end this ended well and I'm happier with it than I was midway and I expected to be. It wisely didn't try to fully explain things and it never hit the crazed heights of the first few episodes, but the whole thing was pretty fun and managed to be reasonably touching by the end.

I finished it:

• Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works: Sometimes this show could be quite good. But too much of the time this season it was terrible, including a long run of episodes just before the climax where too many people spent too much time spouting stupid philosophy at each other. The movie is unquestionably better just because the scriptwriters had to have the characters shut up; watch it instead.

Overall I think of this as a good season, but that's pulled up by the outstanding performance of Sound! Euphonium. Outside of that there's nothing I feel deeply inspired by on a consistent basis, since I've already seen the GitS Arise OVAs. The other shows I watched were either uneven (Sidonia veered between great and making me sigh) or merely decent.

(And then there was Unlimited Blade Works. Let's not go there.)

Sound! Euphonium and sports shows

In reaction to my spring midway views on Euphonium, Author wrote:

When I mentioned that Euphonium was essentially a sports show with girls, a few folks were sceptical, but that classification seems even more apt now.

My view is that while Euphonium certainly has elements that also appear in sports shows, it is not one itself. A sports show like Ping Pong, Haikyuu!!, Yowamushi Pedal, or even Girls und Panzer strongly features the actual sport. Good characters and their stories are important, but in a normal sports show the overall story is in large part driven by the conflict inherent in the sports competition and actual 'games' feature prominently.

Sound! Euphonium's story is not structured like this. The actual band competition barely appears and there are none of the normal tropes of sports shows, like actual rival bands and rival performers in them; in fact we don't even see a competition performance from another band (we see one preparing to go on in the last episode, but that's quite different). This would be like a baseball sports show that entirely featured training, practice, and team selection and then didn't actually bother showing any baseball games. You could certainly do such a show but to me it wouldn't really feel like a sports show either.

(And in another example, although Cross Game was more about the people than sports, it featured plenty of baseball games and the climax saw a game actually being played out. See also Evirus on Cross Game, which features plenty of images of people actually playing baseball.)

So to me Sound! Euphonium is not a sports show but a show that is using competition as a setting to drive a character study and a meditation on the real costs of taking competition seriously. An actual sports show version of Sound! Euphonium would be structured quite differently (and likely would be less interesting).

Sidebar: Sports shows and nastiness

Author also wrote:

But I have a feeling, Euphonium would not be very welcome in any case. It’s almost a Yamakan or Shinbo show, stylistically and story-wise. Too nasty. I know a lot of people fall for it (see [me] above). They feel that it’s more real that way. [...]

One thing that distinguishes a classical sports show is that, to put it one way, the protagonists almost always win in the end (although they may have stumbles and setbacks on the way). In this sports shows are shows about just rewards; if you're a good, talented person and you work hard, you will get rewarded for it. Good people do not get cut from the team and they and the team do not in the end go down in defeat.

(This is complicated by noble, deserving opponents and rivals, but I wave my hands and restrict my focus to people around the protagonists.)

Real life does not work that way, of course. Real life is not that nice. But our stories do not have to be un-nice in that way and not all of them are. Really, it would be kind of a downer if a sports story did not feature people winning in the end.

In this sense, Euphonium is indeed 'nasty'. Deserving, hard working people do not necessarily get rewarded. Effort is no guarantee of success. Life can be unfair to you and snatch your dreams away (or force you to make harsh choices between a selfish dream and a selfless one). This is perfectly okay with me because I think of Euphonium as a character piece, not a sports show, and I am willing to see people fail in sympathetic ways in character pieces. But other people may not necessarily like that; they may want more strongly upbeat stories.

(That a number of people in Ping Pong do not get rewarded this way is one of the things that makes it an unusual and interesting sports show to me. Ping Pong is harsh in that; desire, work, and even some talent is not necessarily good enough to guarantee success. Note that Ping Pong explicitly admits that this is unfair.)

Checking in on the Spring 2015 anime season most of the way through

Once again it's time for the traditional 'midway' update on my initial impressions. You probably saw this one coming; I was overly optimistic in a number of my initial impressions.

Great:

• Sound! Euphonium: This has become the smash hit of the season for me and a strong contender for one of my shows of the year. It continues to be great in many ways; its collection of characters, its excellent directing, how willing it is to tell the story with small things and small gestures, and more. I'm not sure what the show is 'about' as such, which is one measure of (good) quality, but in part I've come to see it as an observation on what 'going for Nationals' really means for the people involved. In your typical sports show the narrative is basically all positive; here, we are seeing the cost spelled out, in strained relationships, crushed people, and so on.

  (Or perhaps I'm reading too much into the show. Who knows.)

  Have I mentioned yet that this show is plain beautiful to look at? Because it is. The animation and visual appearance is lovely and the directing is top notch.

Okay:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront: In my initial impressions I called this 'pretty great for a big action show' and that's still a fair assessment. It's just that BBB is not anything more than that. It's fun to watch, it has a bunch of genuine flair due to Rie Matsumoto's directing, the characters and humour are okay, but it's never going to be great in the way that eg Kyousougiga was.

Things I'm still watching:

• Knights of Sidonia - The Ninth Planet Crusade: When the second season is on, it's on. It's just that Sidonia has spent a bunch of its recent run exploring what you could pretty literally call Tanikaze's harem. This is not what Sidonia is good at and it's been kind of painful to watch.

  Hopefully we're now out of these boring doldrums and back into the stuff that Sidonia does so well. The omens are good, at least.

• Punchline: The quick summary of what happened here is that the show has turned down the mania level and is starting to explain things. I don't really expect this to end well; I'm just hoping for a fun ride on the way there.

  (To be fair, Punchline has a bunch of recent enjoyable twists too. They're just not as big as earlier ones. Possibly I'm too jumpy about how the end is going to go, but I do feel the show has slowed down overall.)

Why am I still watching this award:

• Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works: This has simply not been particularly good or particularly enjoyable, because it tried to hold forth on philosophy. Worse, it tried to be serious about it and then it drew the whole thing out across multiple painful episodes of Shirou and Archer talking vacuously at each other.

  But hey, when it could be bothered to have fights they were generally okay and reasonably pretty, and Lancer wound up being cool, and a few other okay things happened. I'm overly invested in this franchise, okay? Don't ask me to do the sensible thing at this point.

Still cannot rate:

• Ghost in the Shell Arise - Alternative Architecture: This has only just finished rerunning the four OVAs, which I enjoyed plenty but didn't really anticipate as such because I'd seen it already. I'm hoping that the couple of episodes of new material are going to be great, ie up to the usual Arise standards.

My view is that Sound! Euphonium makes this a great season by itself. Without it this would still be a good season; Blood Blockade Battlefront is perfectly good for what it is (I just wanted it to be more), Sidonia has often been excellent, and even Punchline is perfectly good fun with a bunch of enjoyable twists.

Brief 'early' impressions of the Spring 2015 anime season so far

It's time for my usual early impressions post for this season (as before). Every season I seem to be optimistic (I called last season 'strong' in my early impressions post, for example), but this time I think I might really be right. Which would be nice, because I'm enjoying everything I'm still watching (okay, almost everything).

Clear winners:

• Knights of Sidonia - The Ninth Planet Crusade: This is more of the same thing as we got a year ago and it's just as good as before (cf). Things from the manga are definitely getting chopped up and shuffled around, which is great to see; anime is not manga. Sidonia continues to nail real tension.

• Sound! Euphonium (aka Hibike! Euphonium): I didn't expect to enjoy this and in fact only picked it up late after it got a lot of praise. Now it's neck and neck with Sidonia in my regard this season. I called it well observed and I'll stand by that. KyoAni is really on their game here, including showing us things in piles of little moments and gestures (see also my APR comment here).

• Blood Blockade Battlefront aka Kekkai Sensen: This is pretty great for a big action show. Everyone is fun to watch, the whole show is fun to watch (it's directed by the director of Kyousougiga), and it's just plain enjoyable.

• Punchline: This is a polarizing show but I'm enjoying it, partly because of its continual mania and wild ride. The fanservice is becoming more and more perfunctory every week, the jokes are still funny, and I'm interested in what's going on. It's not particularly deep but I am finding it to be quite good simple entertainment.

• Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works: This is what it is. If I was smart I would drop it, but it's just pretty enough and I'm just invested enough in the characters to follow it through to the bitter end. It doesn't help that I know too much about what's going on, in part from having seen the movie version of UBW.

Cannot rate:

• Ghost in the Shell Arise - Alternative Architecture: My overall reaction to Arise is somewhere between liking it and loving it depending on the OVA episode, so the problem with this is that so far none of it is actually new. I'm seeing some of it for the third time and some for the second, and that inevitably robs it of excitement (and it's not so good that it's massively thrilling to rewatch it so soon). It is more than interesting enough to get me to rewatch it, but it's not something I'm on the edge of my seat to see the next episode.

Misses:

• Show By Rock!!: It's okay but it's not anything particularly special, and I feel that I'm watching enough really good stuff this season that I don't need padding.

• Arslan Senki aka The Heroic Legend of Arslan: After three episodes this was slow moving, bland, and relatively generic fantasy. There's nothing wrong with this as such, but I've already read a lot of relatively generic fantasy novels (much of them better written than Arslan). It doesn't help that the Arslan books still aren't finished yet, so the odds of this show having an actual conclusion are basically nil.

• Gunslinger Stratos: This is your typical light novel anime and as such I decided I had better things to do with my time.

• Etotama: This show is neither as funny nor as interesting as it thinks it is. The fourth wall humour didn't help; a show has to be much better than Etotama is in order for that to come off as funny instead of desperate and sad. (From twitter.)

Special down in flames award:

• Plastic Memories: The first episode was impressive, barring one little bit. The second episode was less so and then the third episode went down in flames. Evirus called it 'hot garbage' and I'm not going to disagree, although officially I have no opinion since I didn't even finish the episode.

  Since the show has flushed all of my goodwill down the drain, I am completely uninterested in what it does next even if that turns out to be great (which seems unlikely, to be honest). Episode 3 forever stains Plastic Memories beyond recovery for me.

Nothing else this season has seemed attractive enough to be worth checking out (at least among non-sequel series), and frankly I'm satisfied with my top five (I count Arise AA as one of them). All of them are at least solidly enjoyable shows, with some being excellent ones. It's nice not to be following a massive lot of shows this season, even if it leaves me permuting my top five for APR votes.

On a side note, Knights of Sidonia has clearly the best OP of the season based on my standard metric.

Looking back at the Winter 2015 anime season

Once again it's time for me to look back at the recently finished season to see how the shows I watched wound up, following on my early impressions and my midway views. The short version is that not much changed from my midway views, and especially nothing that was new this season pulled itself up.

Excellent:

• Shirobako: What a show and what a finish. The second last episode was amazing all the way through (especially at the end) and then the last episode brought us home with everything I could have asked for. I laughed helplessly one last time; I got sentimental with everyone. It was great. The whole show is many things, including a love letter to anime itself and an honest but ultimately cheerful look at work and adult life. How much do I love the show? Let me put it this way: it's guaranteed a spot on my 'best N in 2015' list and it may well take #1 (and if it doesn't, this will have been another very good year).

  See also: Author, NovaJinx, Bobduh's ending summary, The Cart Driver.

  (At this point I'm going to plug the Shirobako glossary at A&V if you're interested in the mechanics of animation production.)

Divided opinions:

• Yurikuma Arashi: This was interesting to watch right through the end but I never fully connected with it and with the characters. I feel as if I'm not qualified to really render a verdict on the show, but to the extent that I am I'd say that the symbolism and message overwhelmed the human story theoretically being told. Scamp's description of watching it in pleasant bemusement is basically my experience. It was pretty Ikuhara.

  (Part of it is that the entire setting never felt real; instead it felt overwhelmed by the needs of the symbolism involved.)

Good but falls a bit short:

• Garo - The Animation: Sometimes the show was amazing but all too often it wasn't (sadly including the final episode). I'm not sure how I feel about the whole mixture in the end; part of me wants to call it ordinary but then I remember how excellently it did some bits and I think it deserves bonus credit for that.

• Log Horizon S2 finished off relatively well, with a good final episode that set us up for more if the novels get far enough along and there's still funding for more. The ride this season was ultimately fun but somewhat bumpy, and for me wasn't quite up to the standard set by the first season (partly because the first season packed in so much big stuff about the setting and so on).

Okay:

• Aldnoah.Zero: I expected laughable craziness and spectacle and that's exactly what I got. The show knew how to throw a fun time all the way through right to the end, despite all of the stupidity involved in what was actually happening. AZ is a show where you'll get enraged if you actually think about what's going on, so it's best not to. On the whole this makes it not a particular good show, but it was entertaining for me to watch.

• Durarara!! X2: There was some nice stuff every so often but once the dust settled not very much in it felt terribly necessary and too many of the interesting new characters got sidelined almost immediately. If the whole thing really is going somewhere, it's moving too slowly and feels padded.

  (To be blunt, it feels like the show is spinning out a smash hit in order to milk it for all its worth.)

• Dog Days'' aka S3: I got what I expected and wanted from this, which was actual action and a reasonable running plotline. There was nothing particularly deep, but I wasn't expecting that; this was comfortable, reasonably charming watching.

• The Rolling Girls: This kind of collapsed at the end, promising more than it could deliver. It was enjoyable but far more for the periodic spectacle than the main cast (and some bits were kind of painful in retrospect). At its peak it was very anime in a good way and that gets me to feel reasonably fondly about the whole thing.

• Maria the Virgin Witch: Sometimes the show was sharp and great, but in the end it was just as I was afraid of in my midway views; the show couldn't come through with good answers for its big issues. Maria really dropped the ball in its ending and so undid basically all of its work in raising interesting questions and challenging things and so on.

• Yatterman Night: In the end the show took the easy way out and never recovered the sharp-edged bleakness that made it unusually interesting early on. It didn't help that it suffered a drastic production failure on the last episode, although even without that I'm not sure the ending really makes sense.

As you can see, I didn't wind up thinking all that highly of the shows that started in this season. Aldnoah.Zero was entertaining but not good, and most everything else wound up being relatively ordinary (at best). Yurikuma Arashi is just, well, Ikuhara.

PS: While Death Parade did not quite turn out to be what I was afraid of in my early impressions, it's still not something that I would have enjoyed watching (based on other people's summaries et al). Still, quite a number of people loved it quite a lot and I've seen some amazing clips from it. Call it probably the best show from the winter season that I didn't watch.

Checking in on the Winter 2015 anime season 'midway' through

Once again it's time for the traditional part way through update on my initial impressions, which I can't really call 'midway' any more. On the whole I have somewhat mixed feelings about this season; on the one hand there's a bunch of watchable shows but on the other hand there's relatively little that I feel really enthused about, especially among the new shows (as opposed to the ones continued from last season).

Enjoyable:

• The Rolling Girls: This has turned out to be more episodic stories about people the protagonists run into in their travels and less overall story and spectacular Best fights. The result is still enjoyable but it's far less impressive than the first two episodes, and the protagonists are not really good enough characters to carry the show. Still, the spectacular bits are pretty spectacular when they happen.

  (There's an overall story developing, but the whole thing has moved pretty slowly.)

Things I'm still watching:

• Durarara!! X2: In theory this ought to be exciting. In practice it doesn't feel particularly necessary and the actual goings on have not been all that engrossing much of the time. It's difficult to get really enthused about yet more peculiar, crazy, or violent people showing up in Ikebukuro, since the first season had plenty of those. Some episodes still wind up interesting and engrossing; others wind up flat (and some of the animation has been dire).

  (Things would be different if we were getting interesting answers about the new mysterious people, but we aren't. And some of them are over the top even for Durarara.)

• Yurikuma Arashi: In the other Ikuhara shows I've seen, it's been possible to feel that the characters were real people first and metaphors second. This is not the feeling that YKA gives me and the result robs the show of both investment and impact. If all of the characters are ultimately puppets dancing to the tune of symbolism, it's hard to really care about any of them even if they are interesting when taken in isolation. The show remains interesting for me to watch, but almost entirely at an intellectual level instead of an emotional one. It has managed some pretty nice episodes, though.

  (With that said, sometimes the characters click for me for a while. And I think that I would like them if things were less compressed and they had time to feel like people.)

• Aldnoah.Zero: The show knows how to throw a fun time even if what's going on is stupid, bad writing, or doesn't make any sense. I wholeheartedly applaud the show's decision to focus on Slaine and the action in space, because he's far more interesting than Inaho or anything going on on the Deucalion.

  (I even think Slaine's actions (still) make sense from a character perspective; see the short version.)

• Dog Days'' aka S3: This season has been delivering actual action and a running plotline, making it much more like the first season than the second one. That's enough to keep me watching and enjoying it. At this point I've watched enough that I'll probably finish it no matter what.

On the edge:

• Maria the Virgin Witch: Some jarring bits excepted, there's nothing that's really wrong about the show; I generally quite enjoy episodes when I watch them. But my gut spends a lot of time telling me that I'm not enthused about it and that I don't actively like it, I'm just passively watching it when I can get myself to do so.

  (Perhaps part of the problem is that I don't think I trust the show to give good answers to the serious questions and conflicts it's raising. It partly feels like it's trying to be serious and significant without the chops to carry it off.)

• Yatterman Night: The show oscillates back and forth between painful jokes, go-nowhere episodes, blatantly obvious foreshadowing, amusing developments and humour, and sharp-edged bleakness wrapped in a cute exterior. The good bits hurt in a good way, but there's a lot of bland ordinary things that I really wish weren't even there. The result is mixed and kind of weak overall.

Dropped:

• Soukyuu no Fafner Dead Aggressor - Exodus: In the end this simply had too little excitement mixed with far too many things I didn't care about. Part of the problem was that the show made basically no effort to catch people up on the background and the very large cast of characters, despite how long it's been since the last Fafner; this left me basically indifferent to the entire cast.

In shows that carried over from last season:

• Shirobako has remained excellent although not flawless; it's continued to deliver excellent drama and hard moments while being ultimately cheerful. One of the things the show is doing amazingly is creating characters that you love to hate while reluctantly coming to accept; it's managed at least three.

• Garo has really picked itself up lately from a string of genuinely painful episodes (some of which were just filler and others were Garo's usual awkward execution). See also. Garo has been in its 'on' phase a lot lately as it heads into the final plot arc.

• Log Horizon S2 has been variable; generally okay, sometimes a bit painful, but sometimes really good. We've just finished what's probably the last high point and so I expect we'll be winding down for the rest of the season; I'm just hoping for no goofy episodes that jump up and down on the show's weak point.

  (Apparently there's not enough of the light novels out to make a third season yet. After this season I find that I'm actually fine with that.)

On the whole this is a good season, even if I'm feeling disappointed that none of the new shows I'm watching even come close to Shirobako or even Garo (on its good days). After all, I'm still watching ten shows, which is very high for me (especially at this point in the season).

Why I like the first season of Mushishi much more than the second

When I look back at the first season of Mushishi, what really sticks in my memory is not the individual stories but the things we learn about the mushi, the mushishi, several recurring characters, and especially Ginko himself. In particular, learning more about Ginko over the course of the first season added special poignancy to any number of moments; for example, when Ginko turns down an attractive offer to stay longer with a family rather than venture out into the snowy winter, we already know that he can't accept because too many mushi will accumulate around him if he stays in one place. One of the joys of the first series for me is the slow illumination of who Ginko is and how the series quietly explores his character over the course of the show.

The second series is almost entirely lacking in this and many of its efforts in this direction seem half-hearted. I don't think this is the fault of the series itself as such, because the honest truth is that the first series already covered a great deal of ground as far as the mushi, the mushishi, and Ginko himself go. This leaves the second series with not that much extra it can say. But the unfortunate result is that the second series has wound up being far less about Ginko than the first series was and there are only a few moments that are amplified by what we know about Ginko.

For me, this creates a series that feels nice but not essential in the way the first series was. By the time it finished, the first series had pretty much given me all the answers I feel I needed about the world and Ginko and so on (although it didn't resolve some things as such). The second series then basically goes around in circles, doing nothing much new with the things I cared the most about in the first series. There's nothing in it that I can point to and say 'yes, that was necessary, that changed or deepened my view of things', even though there were plenty of nice things.

Assigning fault here is hard if not impossible. The first series did everything right in terms of pacing and story selection, especially given that people had no expectation that it would be continued. The second series then has to work with the (remaining) underlying material it has, which is probably generally episodic in the first place, and it likely isn't in any position to significantly evolve or change Ginko's situation (especially if the source material doesn't). That leaves it pretty much stuck, with little left to do except tell its episodic stories. It tells them very well (cf) and it's not anyone's fault that they're less entrancing and engaging to me than finding out more about Ginko and his world.

I expect that this is a quite personal take on Mushishi as a whole. My strong impression is that most people who watch the show are far more deeply touched by the individual stories in the episodes than I am.

(I do find the individual episode engaging and often powerful, for what it's worth; they're good observations on people and the human condition. But to me they're just not as memorable and powerful as the overall story of Ginko and his world.)

Brief not really early impressions of the Winter 2015 anime season

It's time for my usual early impressions post for this season (as before), which has been delayed mostly because I foolishly decided I'd write my best N in 2014 entry first and then didn't do that very fast. But hey, I've also been distracted by how strong this season is and how many shows I'm still watching.

Clear winners:

• Durarara!! X2: The first episode was bland, with too much reintroduction of characters and too little plot happening, but since then things have woken up and we're back to the good old Durarara that I have fond memories of.

• The Rolling Girls: Let's go for 'colourful' as the concise description of the show. The setting is colourful, the action is colourful, the actual look is colourful, and so on. It's got a real verve to it and I've been really enjoying watching. The third episode slowed down from the breakneck pace and verve of the first two episodes but I still enjoyed it. Also, the show's got a good sense of how to be funny, and better yet it lets funny things just be there and speak for themselves instead of hammering on you to get the point home.

  (I hope we get more Best fights because the first two episodes were really entertaining there. But I'm willing to believe that the show will do interesting things from now onwards, partly because the show's dropped plenty of hints about a real, serious plot going on underneath all of the shenanigans.)

• Yatterman Night: I don't know how to concisely describe this. It has a weird dystopian future setting, a bunch of heart and sentimentality, a good sense of humour, a periodic injection of black comedy and bleak reality, and a bunch of things going on. I'm enjoying it quite a bit even if I have no real idea where it's going to wind up. This is the show that I can most easily believe might become a really powerful and affecting show by the time it ends.

Things I'm enthused by:

• Yurikuma Arashi: This is Ikuhara so I'm predisposed to like it, but most of the episodes so far have been so stylized, dense with symbolism and mythology, and so devoid of actual characters for me to relate to that I'm mostly watching it passively and intellectually instead of getting emotionally involved. Episode four changed the pattern and was pretty good.

  In short, it's fun to watch this and speculate about what everything means but I can't say I actually care about anyone in it (yet).

Entertaining, at least so far:

• Aldnoah.Zero: What is going on makes me roll my eyes and laugh a bunch, but so far the show is actually delivering episodes that I like watching. As I put it, the show knows how to throw a fun time. Slaine is the best character because he does interesting things. I may be shaking my head at AZ, but I'm smiling while I do it. Oh, and this show has good production values, which helps for good action sequences.

  It really surprises me to say this, but I can see myself putting an AZ episode on my APR votes some time this season.

  (The charm may well wear off at some point.)

• Maria the Virgin Witch: This is a pretty decent show with a real grasp of action (the fight sequence in the second episode was genuinely well staged) and a good sense of humour that is only occasionally mean spirited and cringe inducing. In many ways it has the most interesting plot and conflicts of this season (and they're very thoroughly grounded ones; Maria may be a witch with magic, but what she cares about is very human). I say this as real praise: this show is plain well made.

  People who care about historical and theological accuracy in their anime may want to give this one a miss. I'm pretty sure that the author is using the medieval Catholic church (and medieval times in general) mostly as a convenient punching bag, with relatively little care for deep accuracy and sympathy.

• Dog Days'' aka S3: The first three episodes of this third season have been much more like the action oriented first season than the slice of life amblings of the second season. Since I liked the first season but found there to be nothing there for me in the second season, I like this and I expect to continue watching until this changes.

On the edge:

• Soukyuu no Fafner Dead Aggressor - Exodus: The first two episodes were pretty interesting (and the beginning of the first episode was very Fafner). The third and fourth episodes got rid of that in favour of a lot of not particularly interesting drama. The drama might be more involving if I remembered who all the original Fafner characters were and what happened in the original show. The whole decision to throw us in at the deep end in this continuation really puzzles me, seeing as the first season was ten years ago and even the movie (which I haven't seen) came out in 2010.

  (I'm probably dropping this.)

Misses:

• Kantai Collection: The characters are cardboard cutouts and the first episode gave me no reason to care about seeing any more of it.

• Military!: As comedy this was short but flat.

Not for me:

• Binan Koukou Chikyuu Bouei-bu Love!: This is a comedy show and like almost all of them, it doesn't work for me; I smiled a bit during the first episode but not enough to be interested in watching any more.

• Death Parade: Everything I've read has made me believe that this show falls under my Hell Girl clause. I love the OP but I think I would throw the actual show through the nearest window if I watched it.

This season I made the smart decision to skip all of the LN action harem shows entirely, instead of letting myself be tempted to watch the first episodes of the most promising sounding ones. By all accounts this was the right decision and this season features an unusually dire crop of them. I've also consciously skipped Assassination Classroom because the reactions I've read have been too lukewarm to leave me enthused in a very busy season.

In continuing shows, Shirobako is still excellent, Log Horizon is going on as it is or has actually improved a bit, and I'm growing increasingly disenchanted with Garo. I'm disappointed by this disenchantment, but more and more Garo makes me wince, sigh at the lack of animation, and not want to watch the latest episode.

(Having written this and made my feelings clearer, I may actually drop Garo entirely.)

I'm currently following eleven shows (or nine if I drop Fafner and Garo right now), which I think means that something is going to start giving soon. Or maybe this just be one of my busiest seasons for a while. I'd honestly like it if everything stayed awesome and interesting, even if it means I spent an awful lot of time watching anime.