Roving Thoughts archives

Brief sort of early impressions of the Fall 2014 anime season

It's time for another early impressions post, as before. I have to admit that these early impressions are actually rather late in the 'early' stage of things, for no particularly good reason (although Mushishi did only start airing last week). My overall view is that this is a really strong season with a major good surprise and I'm very happy with how things have come out. Any season where I worry that I'm watching too many shows to be sustainable is a good season.

Clear winners:

• Mushishi second season continued: There really isn't anything to say about Mushishi that I haven't already said, but the first two episodes of this resumption have been especially strong.

• Shingeki no Bahamut - Genesis: This is the surprise hit of the season for me and it came basically out of nowhere. The show is simply excellently done, with lovely directing, good animation, interesting characters, and an interesting series of change-up storylines.

  (This is the bit where I wave my hands because it's really hard to describe why Bahamut impresses me as much as it does. It has so many little touches.)

• Psycho-Pass 2: Before this continuation started I really wondered if the show would have anything more interesting to say after the first season, but after a weak first episode the show's picked itself up and staked out some interesting themes (well, as far as I'm guessing).

Things I'm enthused by:

• Hitsugi no Chaika - Avenging Battle: It's more Chaika and there's really nothing more to say than my description of its virtues at the end of the first half. I'm probably enjoying this more than Psycho-Pass 2, but it's more lightweight.

• Fate/Stay-Night - Unlimited Blade Works: The Fate-verse may be dead people all the way down but damn, this production has money and talent and it mostly shows (sometimes they fail). I'd much rather the show followed Rin and Archer rather than Shirou and Saber (cf), but the production (and the core story) is at least making the latter two tolerable right now, even if I sometimes feel like I'm watching in spite of myself.

  One of the interesting things about watching this iteration of F/SN is that I already know so many spoilers for it (including from the earlier UBW movie). On the one hand this drains a bunch of tension; on the other hand this means I can spot little details that might otherwise have passed me by and understand what they're signalling.

• Garo - The Animation: This is very nicely done and from the same studio as Bahamut, but it misses being an out of the park hit because it feels much more conventional than Bahamut. But it has set up a quite complex background and set of story lines, so I think it has potential to be quite powerful and really good. It's still good right now, it's just not great the way that Bahamut is.

  Garo has by far the best OP of the season of what I've seen. There isn't any contest.

  (See also 1, 2. I may be down on Garo right now because the third and fourth episodes were kind of conventional.)

• Log Horizon second season: The show feels slower and less exciting than before, but it's still Log Horizon. I'm on board for more evil Shiroe and so on, although I could do with less angst. I don't really have anything to say otherwise; at this point either you know you like Log Horizon or you know that it's not of interest.

Interesting:

• Shirobako: This is a show that I think is interesting without necessarily being good as such. I quite like the look inside an animation studio but at the same time it's chaotic and hard to follow and I have relatively little engagement with the characters. It badly needs a guide to what's going on and what all of the various people do, because if you aren't reasonably well informed about who does what and why various bits are important it's really hard to understand the problems the studio is facing. Even I'm getting confused and I've picked up a reasonable amount of the terminology and the anime production process.

  (For instance, in the first episode if you don't understand the crucial role of the sakkan it's not clear why the sakkan can take over animation for one sequence or why it's such a bad thing to lose the sakkan for a while.)

Entertaining but sitting on the edge:

• Madan no Ou to Vanadis: What I like about this is that almost all of the characters involved are functional and mature adults with heads on their shoulders (and the one character who isn't is the one that irritates me). Adults who act it are a decided novelty in anime and it's refreshing to have a whole cast of them. With that said, the charm may well wear off this at some point and it definitely has its awkward bits.

Marginal, where I'll be amazed if I watch them all season:

• Seven Deadly Sins (aka Nanatsu no Taizai): This is a kid's shonen fighting story and it makes no bones about it. What's kept my interest so far is how over the top the power levels are; for example, the climactic big fight in the first episode had them blow up the entire top of a hill. In other words, I'm watching for grand fights and I expect to keep watching only as long as it delivers that.

• Ore, Twintail ni Narimasu: People have very divergent reactions to this depending on whether its non-stop more or less single note jokes work for them. So far the jokes have been making me laugh; since that's pretty rare, I'm willing to keep watching. However I won't be surprised if the laughter wears off abruptly and because painful instead, at which point I'll drop this like a hot potato.

Probably not for me:

• Amagi Brilliant Park: This is well made but after watching two episodes it hasn't really grabbed me. I may watch more to see if clicks (especially since various people praise it and it keeps ranking high on APR) and in a slower season I'm pretty sure I'd be watching it, but this season is already really busy for me.

• Parasyte - the maxim: This is probably the best show of the season that I'm not watching (I saw the first episode and that was it). I think a large part of it is that a good part of Parasyte is some degree of horror and I'm just not a horror person. I can see how good the show is, my gut just signals the rest of me with 'nope nope nope not interested try again'. I think I might enjoy it better in manga form.

Definitely not for me:

• Gundam Build Fighters Try: There's nothing wrong with this show. It just has the misfortune of being a sports show about mecha, which are two things that almost never work for me. I gave the first episode a try and while I could see the quality and the appeal, it just didn't make me want to watch more.

  (Even my favorite Gundam works are my favorites for reasons other than the mecha, although it turns out the mecha are surprisingly integral to their stories.)

Misses:

• Inou Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de: Congratulations, show, you made the irritating chuuni guy so irritating that I can't stand him. Whatever else it is (and it may or may not be decent), this show is not for me at all.

• World Trigger: The first episode was a potentially interesting concept wrapped up in what was in retrospect a rather boring and lazy execution.

Have not looked at due to bad initial reports or other reasons:

• Akatsuki no Yona: On the one hand I theoretically like this genre in general. On the other hand I seem to only really like shows in this genre when they're unusually well done and early reports are that Yona's execution is kind of pedestrian and ordinary. In a less busy season I might have looked at this anyways; in this season I have triaged it pending effusive praise (which so far has not been forthcoming).

• Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru: This had the misfortune of airing late in a very busy season and not generating massive praise, so I've triaged it just like I have Yona.

• Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso: On the one hand I really liked Nodame Cantabile. On the other hand this involves characters in high school instead of university (which I consider a general warning sign) and may have excessive amounts of melodrama and hammering the audience. So far what praise it's gotten has not been effusive enough to get me to take a look.

• Cross Ange: Nope. I actually find this a pity because I kind of would like to watch a Sunrise mecha action show, partly because we haven't had one of those for a while. I just have no interest in watching one with this one's reported sort of content.

• Trinity Seven: Apparently your generic fighting harem LN adaptation in a very busy season.

• Terra Formars: From all reports this falls into the 'over-censored carnography' bucket without very much interesting in its execution.

• Gundam Reconquista in G: Gundam? Tomino incoherence? In a busy season? Nope.

(There are others that I haven't looked at due to their genre not being my kind of thing. And there may be some that I've just plain overlooked.)

Since I'm currently following eleven shows (with at least Amagi whispering to me to watch more), something is clearly going to give in what I'm watching. Sadly one of the losers may well be Shirobako, despite its appeal.

The importance (or lack of it) of Gundams in my favorite Gundam works

I am generally not a mecha fan, Gundam included, but I've wound up seeing some Gundam works that have genuinely impressed me and stuck with me; right now I'd say that my two top works are The 08th MS Team and War in the Pocket. For reasons that don't fit in the margins of this entry I recently wound up thinking about how important the presence of Gundams is in those two shows. Could you take the mobile suits out and replace them with something else without fundamentally damaging or changing those shows?

(This question makes more sense for me than for a Gundam fan, because what I like about these shows has almost nothing to do with the Gundams in them.)

I think that The 08th MS Team is actually surprisingly dependent on mobile suits in specific, because to make the whole feel of the show work you need a specific combination of attributes in your military machinery. They have to be ground based, because it very much matters that the MS Team is down there slogging along in the mud instead of flying distantly over it all. They have to be single pilot, because the whole dynamics of the situation would change if the pilots (especially Shiro) were working in a close team with other people in their vehicle instead of being alone. And they have to be powerful because people react to this; things would feel very different if the team was using, say, armed motorcycles instead of something that dominates the battlefield.

(That they dominate the battlefield also gives the MS team's actions special weight and their position special importance.)

War in the Pocket is a more ambivalent case. A lot of the situation and impact are not particularly dependent on mobile suits in specific so it feels like you should be able to swap them out for something else, but at the same time it's hard to figure out any alternative that leads to the crucial final confrontation while keeping Al so involved in it. To keep him so involved in the confrontation you probably have to keep it on the ground, so once again you need ground-based military machinery that has a single pilot and is sufficiently scary to force the defenders to sortie expensive and rare experimental hardware instead of relying on standard military vehicles and forces.

(Of course the background and settings for both shows are completely entangled in the Gundam Universal Century mythos as it is. But I think you could contrive some relatively similar setting that removed the mobile suits. After all, mobile suits are arguably an analogy for aircraft in the first place, although if we take this too far we wind up saying that the Federation is the US and Zeon is Japan in World War II.)

Looking back at the Summer 2014 anime season

As before, it's time (and long past time) for my usual retrospective look back at the season to see how well the final result matched up with my early impressions and my midway views. This has been delayed partly because the summer season turned out to be an almost total bust for me; I only managed to watch one show all the way through as it aired.

Watched and finished:

• Aldnoah.Zero: This was a reasonably entertaining show but I wouldn't call it particularly great; however, the show did manage to make watching it be enjoyable (for all of its absurdities). Following my usual rule that whoever gets the most character development is probably it, Slaine is the real protagonist; sadly, I suspect that the show disagrees with me. This is the only show I wound up following on a weekly basis through ths season.

  If I took this as a serious dramatic work, it would be a failure; it simply has far too many flaws. As popcorn entertainment I rather enjoyed it because I could laugh at all of the crazy and nonsensical bits and admire all of the ways the show found to make Slaine suffer. I agree with all of the people who say that it's impossible to believe that the show is serious about the events in its first-half climax.

  (Also, if this was a serious work it would be an extremely grim one given how large the show's onscreen and offscreen body count is.)

  I'm looking forward to the second half although it may well turn out like Valvrave, where the magic and charm wore off very fast.

  (Yes, this is a lot of words in an attempt to justify both sides of Author's collected impressions at once. As usual I see both the virtues and the flaws of the show but I weigh them in my own way.)

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei!: In the end I got bored enough (and desperate enough) to pick this up again after dropping it in the hopes that I would at least get some nice mindless action. I more or less got that, but it was competent instead of spectacularly stunning like I was kind of hoping for. I should really just resign myself to the fact that nothing in Prisma Illya will ever top the episode six fight from the first series and leave it permanently dropped. See also my Twitter capsule summary.

Dropped:

• Zankyou no Terror: I realized that I had essentially no interest in finding out what happened next to the characters or what was going on with the whole situation. So I stopped watching it.

Towards the end of the season I tried out two highly praised series that I had not previously given a chance to. My reactions:

• Barakamon: After three episodes my overall reaction is that I find the show charming and I can see why people like this a lot, but I don't find it compelling enough to drive me to watch more with any particular urgency (especially now that it's not a currently airing show). Part of it is certainly that the show is a bit too obvious and heavy-handed with its moral lessons for Handa. The segments when it wasn't concerned with that were much more enjoyable but unfortunately not all that frequent in the first three episodes.

• Sabagebu: The highest recommendation I can give this is that it makes me laugh on a regular basis (which is not common, most anime comedy fails for me). However in practice it's fallen into the same problem as Seitokai Yakuindomo, which is that plotless humor doesn't have much to strongly drive me to see the next episode. See also eg Evirus.

I expect to watch more of both of these shows, but in practice neither has grabbed me by the labels and demanded to be watched. Someday, when I feel like it or I want something to fill in a block of anime watching time.

I also tried out Strike The Blood for vague reasons, partly in the hopes that it would be another Tokyo Ravens. My capsule summary is that it hasn't proved to be anywhere near as compelling a watch as Tokyo Ravens was and is otherwise a perfectly ordinary shonen fighting show. I suspect that I'm not going to wind up watching much more of it; I just don't find it all that compelling.

Why I found Joshiraku an interesting series

I watch anime in translation (via subtitles), and almost all of the time I passively assume that the translation is essentially seamless and more or less transparent; what I'm reading on the screen is close enough to the original Japanese dialog that I'm missing at most minor nuances. Every so often there are stumbling blocks and near non-sequiturs and the rare moment where I can make out a Japanese word that I recognize and tell that the translated dialog is not quite what the characters actually said, but in those moments I assume that the translators have dropped the ball and done a bad job. I think this is an easy mindset to get into and to be honest I think that almost all of the time it's accurate; to put it one way, most shows likely don't have dialog that is all that complex.

(Most shows are not all that complex.)

Joshiraku demolishes this illusion. In Joshiraku the seams of the translation show frequently, not just in the puns but also in dialog that was clearly supposed to be funny and full of jokes but that went completely over my head. Watching Joshiraku was in part a continual process of being reminded that I was watching something in a foreign language and I very much was not getting all of the nuances. As a result, even (or especially) the jokes that I didn't get were interesting because they vividly show me those rarely-visible seams in the translations and my understanding of what was really going on. My puzzled silence when I was supposed to laugh made this gap quite visible.

I generally didn't find Joshiraku funny per se (although it had quite a lot of fun and enjoyable bits), but I always found it interesting to watch because of this and I'm very glad I saw it all. It's not often that I get such a useful and pointed reminder that yes, translation is happening and what I'm following is actually a simulacrum of the real thing (even if it's often probably a very close one).

(This is another aspect of the problem of interpretation, of course.)

PS: This is the reason I was talking about in my Summer 2012 midseason comments on Joshiraku. Yes, sometimes the wheels of blogging grind very slowly around here.

Checking in on the Summer 2014 anime season midway through

It's time for the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season. This 'midway' check has been delayed in large part because this season has turned out to be pretty much a bust for me, which has not left me with enthusiasm for writing this.

Things I'm still watching:

• Aldnoah.Zero: This has quietly turned into the one show that I actively look forward to watching this season. It's not great and the writing is periodically clumsy, but it's generally well done and interesting. The secondary characters really make the show for me; Inaho is so far mostly interesting as a cryptic mystery instead of a character to be engaged with.

• Zankyou no Terror: This has plenty of beautiful cinematography and animation, but the characters are and remain fairly much ciphers, the actual events are getting increasingly absurd, and I'm not entranced by the plotting. Still it's good enough that I keep watching, although often after some delay (I'm an episode behind right now, for example).

Dropped:

• Space Dandy second season: Theoretically this is just suspended, but I don't think I've ever continued a suspended series. I wrote an entire entry about why this failed for me, but I can boil it down to a tweet: pure artistry in a show isn't enough for me.

Misses:

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei!: As I thought I might, I got tired of this. I decided that the conclusion of the first story was far enough, especially as it apparently shifted to comedy hijinks for at least the episode after that. To put it one way, comedy hijinks is not what I was watching Prisma Illya for.

• Sword Art Online II: I came to my senses. SAO II has good production values and some ideas that could be really interesting stories if well handled, but it also has the usual generally terrible and overdone writing, a slavish adaptation process that hurts the anime-only part of the audience, and overhanging it all the long absurd shadow of Kirito poisoning everything he's involved with. I won't say that SAO II would be a good show if it starred someone other than Kirito, but at least it would have a chance.

So far I haven't used my free time to dig into my backlog of anime. I've just been taking it as downtime and fiddling around with other things (mostly other diversions on the Internet). It's been kind of nice as a break but I sure hope that the fall season is better than this.

What Space Dandy has just taught me about my tastes in anime

Despite what I said in my early impressions of this season, I've effectively suspended Space Dandy because I just felt no particular motivation to watch the fourth episode. As before, this has brought me around to a realization about my tastes.

Put simply, interesting animation turns out to not be enough by itself to get me to watch a show. Space Dandy is clearly a showcase (of both animation and storytelling) and this season it has been doing quite a good job of that, but as I mulled over it on Twitter the problem for me is that there is nothing more there than that. I clearly want my shows to be doing something and going somewhere, or at a minimum to be really funny (cf Seitokai Yakuindomo, and even that has ongoing developments that build on themselves).

(This may also be one of the reasons that the 'cute girls doing cute things' genre doesn't resonate with me. There's a part of me that watches and goes 'yes, and?'. There's also season 2 of Dog Days', where I articulated basically the same issue. Apparently things take a while to get through my skull.)

The short way of putting this is that Space Dandy is the anime equivalent of empty calories, even if they're pretty tasty empty calories. I've evidently had my fill of those and as a result Space Dandy is not for me.

(There's an irrational bit of me that regrets this and really wants to be able to fully enjoy the skilled artistry on display in Space Dandy, and an even more irrational bit that thinks it's necessary to that to be an anime fan with good taste. And it's not like I haven't enjoyed the episodes when I watch them. It's just that every time I think about watching episode four of S2 I decide that I have other things I'd rather do.)

Brief early impressions of the Summer 2014 anime season

It's time for another early impressions post, as before. This entry has been delayed mostly because I needed several episodes to make up my mind about some shows (and on top of that one important show aired a week later than everything else). I'm once again feeling like grading very harshly, so shows that might get passes in previous seasons are getting ejected this time around. Overall this is not a particularly great season; there is nothing that I'm feeling particularly deeply enthused about and a lot that is rather questionable.

Reasonably enthused by:

• Zankyou no Terror: After two episodes this is at least a promising start, although I have no idea where it's going. It also hasn't particularly done anything that makes me roll my eyes, which puts it significantly ahead of everything else this season. Because the show is playing almost everything mysteriously so far, there isn't very much to say about the content yet. It's well directed and can do action sequences, and at least some of the characters seem interesting. But this doesn't particularly seem like a character-based series so far and it's very early in the plot, so.

Entertaining for now:

• Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya 2wei!: I didn't wind up with a high opinion of the first season but the first episode of this was just entertaining enough by the end to get me to watch some more. I may tire of it rapidly, though.

• Space Dandy second season: It's almost exactly what the first season was, namely mostly an indulgent showcase for animation instead of anything more coherent or entertaining. But occasionally it pulls a rabbit out of the hat to manage an excellent episode, as was the case with the second episode. For now, a hope for more of these is enough to keep me watching.

  (Yes, yes, this may be optimistic, but Space Dandy has now demonstrated that it can be excellent in the right hands. Since the people involved pretty much change every episode, there's at least the potential of excellence striking again.)

• Aldnoah.Zero: This is well produced and mostly competently written so far, with some quite interesting characters and a fair amount of potential. The downside is that the writing is periodically clumsy, predictable, and crudely emotionally manipulative (such as the slaughter at the end of the first episode and in chunks of the second). I'm not sure how much further I'll last. The princess and the daughter of the <spoilers redacted> are the most interesting two characters so far, purely on promise and the little glimpses we've had of them; at the moment the protagonist is your basic bland spud.

  (The writing here feels quite like the writing in Gargantia in some ways, which also veered between quite clever and utterly clumsy.)

Barely entertaining by being absurd:

• Sword Art Online II: This is this season's JoJo's for me. I don't know how long I'll last, but it promises to be absurd in the best straight faced SAO manner. The problem with this (as compared to JoJo's) is that SAO is perfectly capable of terribly boring episodes because it takes itself seriously. JoJo's at least has Stand fights pretty much every episode.

  (If I'm being honest about this, a good part of why I'm bothering with SAO II is so that I can fully enjoy Bobduh's writeups over at Wrong Every Time. This motivation may not exactly sustain me over the long term.)

Not for me:

• Tokyo Ghoul: This is horror, which I'm almost never interested in, and nothing about the first episode hooked me in the face of that.

• Sailor Moon Crystal: What it boils down to is that I would be watching this out of something akin to a sense of loyalty or obligation instead of any expectation of seeing things that are new and interesting, given that reports so far are that the first episode is basically a complete remake of the original first episode. If it deviates significantly from the original show, maybe I'll tune in; otherwise, it's not for me.

  (There are also a number of reports that it is just not all that well executed in terms of animation, directing, and so on.)

Misses:

• Tokyo ESP: I found the second episode to be painfully boring and cliched. In retrospect the first episode was too, it was just playing with a different set of cliches. In the end an anitwitter conversation (1, 2) helped me figure out one of my big problems with the show: the characters and situations just don't seem real but instead seem calculated to aim at funny cliches.

  (I just may give this another try if I get bored and desperate, because the premise certainly could make an interesting show.)

• Argevollen: This has pretty much everything I don't like about mecha and basically nothing that's appealing. I was grinding my teeth and rolling my eyes basically continuously through the first episode. I haven't bothered to watch further episodes; if it becomes amazing, I'm sure anitwitter will let me know.

Have not looked at due to bad initial reports or other reasons:

• Rail Wars!

• Akame ga Kill: Initial reports are not positive, to say the least, and apparently various unpleasant aspects get worse later on.

• Hanayamata: This is apparently mostly a 'cute girls doing cute things' show and I have historically not enjoyed them. I don't think the sprinkling of supernatural elements is enough to offset that.

Not my thing, whether or not they are good: Glasslip, Locodol, Free sequel, Barakamon, and in general anything not mentioned here.

I may give in to temptation and watch at least some of the second season of Yama no Susume, despite my eventual unenthused views of the first season. It's the kind of show that I want to like, even if I don't in practice.

Dropped from last season:

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventures - Stardust Crusaders: In the end this proved to be too much shonen fighting show for me, which is to say that it's dragging on and on and on. JoJo's has been vaguely entertaining in an absurdist way but I've realized that it's not so entertaining that I want to watch what is apparently going to be another 26 episodes of Stand fight after Stand fight before we even get to the main villain, and then another 13 episodes or so of fighting him.

  (I vacillated over this decision quite a lot but what really tells me that I'm making the right choice is the sense of relief I feel about not watching the next episode.)

Since I've dropped JoJo's, there's no ongoing shows that have carried over from the past season.

I suppose five shows is reasonably typical for me in a season, but this time around I'm not really enthused about almost any of them. At least I have something to watch.

(Although that's not all good. If this season had been a near-total bust I might have dug into my backlog and watched excellent series like Big O, Figure 17, or Banner of the Stars. That seems unlikely now unless I flame out on most of these shows.)

Looking back at the Spring 2014 anime season

As before, it's time for my usual retrospective look back at the season to see how well my final views match up with my early impressions and my midway views. Sort of as I did in my winter season retrospective, there's one show I'm ranking based on how much I'm enjoying it instead of how good I think it is (for everything else I think the two match up quite well).

Excellent:

• Ping Pong: This is the total surprise of the season for me, far more than I expected at the start of the season. My best description of it (borrowed from somewhere else) is that in the end it's a character piece carefully disguised as a sports story, and what a character piece it is. It is full of interesting real people and it covers its events with a beautifully understated touch. It is unafraid to show instead of tell and more than that, to show without jumping up and down to point out certain things. I found it powerful, affecting, and in the end touching.

  I liked the art style. I think it worked very well for how the story was told and how the story was told really helped the impact of the story.

  For more raving about how good Ping Pong is, see eg Bobduh (also).

• Knights of Sidonia: This is far from a flawless show but what elevates it here is that it absolutely nails a certain sense of atmosphere and ambivalence, and it's also a gorgeously SF show. I have come around to feeling that it absolutely needs to be in full CGI to work, not just for the stunningly well done battle scenes but also to draw a real distance between it and more 'anime' shows. The show is also genuinely well directed and well written, things that are unfortunately rare in anime. One sign of this is that it's willing to confidently depart from strict adherence to the manga storyline in order to improve the experience of the anime.

  (Some people feel that the large scale death rate in the show has caused this aspect of it to lose its impact. I disagree personally because I think that the show is going for a different sort of impact that is less about people dying and more about the massive death rate among the pilots.)

  I'm eagerly looking forward to its continuation in the fall.

  (See eg Bobduh's reaction to episode 11 for both praise and criticism.)

• Mushishi second season: This is still an excellent show, one that I think is better than Sidonia, but I've wound up feeling at a distance from it for most of the season. My current theory for why is that the episodes have lacked any sort of ongoing thread that runs between them. Sure, Ginko shows up in each of them, but for most episodes he's just been an oracular presence that solves problems or watches things happen; we haven't really been pulled into him emotionally. The exception that proves the rule is the marvelous episode 10, which is all about Ginko being unsettled and getting yanked around and us seeing the really weird side of the mushi.

  To put it one way, Mushishi has been great to watch but Sidonia has affected me when I watch it.

  (Mushishi was unfortunately hit with production delays that pushed back episodes 11 and 12 to its fall season continuation. Some rumours say that these are more plot and Ginko-heavy episodes; if they'd aired this season I might well have a much stronger opinion of Mushishi overall, based on my reaction to episode 10.)

Plain good fun:

• Hitsugi no Chaika: This wrapped up its first big arc with a nice big bang and a well done pivot to move the overall story forward. It continues to be a solid show with competence all around in its execution and I'm quite looking forward to the second season.

  (I have little to say here because this is effectively a midseason pause instead of anything more climactic. Of course the show is executing a midseason story pivot now; it was about time if things weren't going to drag.)

Relatively ordinary:

• Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin: This wound up being a perfectly competent and decently interesting show with some interesting and intriguing characters. It's just not particularly memorable as these shows go because it's not particularly exceptional. Tensai is the best and most interesting character, with Juugo second.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Stardust Crusaders: I've continued to watch this basically as a comedy and it's continued to deliver that way. Things have stayed absurd and crazy and there have been some nice moments. I have no particularly deep emotional engagement with anyone in the show the way I have in every show from Chaika on up.

This season has turned out to be excellent, with several shows that are basically certain to rank highly in my eventual 'Best N in 2014' entry. While I'm disappointed with the failure of a few shows, this is much better than I expected at the start of the season; both Sidonia and especially Ping Pong turned out to be far more powerful shows than I anticipated.

(Looking back at my early Ping Pong impressions kind of makes me laugh now. And it's not that the show drastically improved over the course of its run. Its excellence was there from the start but I didn't trust the show to sustain it all the way through, so I was cautious.)

Checking in on the Spring 2014 anime season midway through

It's time for the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season and as usual, it's a bit delayed. The headline news is that I've wound up feeling that this season is a pretty strong one, although I've also wound up dropping a number of shows.

Things I'm still watching:

• Mushishi second season: Either I have rosy memories of the first season or this season is tilting much more towards horror than the first season did. Whichever it is, the show still has Mushishi's deft and understated touch. And it's made me genuinely laugh.

• Ping Pong: What makes me so enthused about Ping Pong is that it's mostly doing a sort of story and exploring a collection of characters that I haven't really seen before in sports shows. Pretty much everyone both feels human and is interesting. I find the stylistic animation mostly just interesting, although I do think it helps the story and helps things stand out.

• Knights of Sidonia: If I had to describe this in one word I'd call it relentless; in animated form the show has acquired a visceral punch that the manga lacked for me. The battles are not soaring action affirmations but claustrophobic, tense exercises in people being all too human, things that you dread instead of looking forward to.

  (This is not as uncomfortable as, say, RideBack, but it is not exactly pleasant and cheerful.)

• Hitsugi no Chaika: This has slowed down some from the early episodes but it's staying solid and interesting, and it keeps pushing the plot forward at a decent pace. I'm glad that it's getting a second season. And as they say, 'Chaika a cute'.

  (Plus, casting all your magic with giant sniper rifles is always amusing. Wands, pah.)

• Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin: This was trucking along as an ordinary show and then episode 4 happened and made pretty much everyone much more interesting. The show hasn't always delivered since then but it has come through pretty regularly, so I'm happy.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Stardust Crusaders: It took a while for the show to really grow on me, but it has. JoJo's is plain flat out absurd, crazy, and over the top and I just roll with it on those terms and enjoy the spectacle. I suppose what I'm saying here is that it's really a comedy.

Dropped:

• Haikyuu!!: This is a perfectly good sports show with perfectly good animation, characters, and so on. It's just not exceptional enough to overcome the fact that I generally don't get really enthused about straightforward sports shows, so I took the end of a recent storyline as a good point to stop watching.

• Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii: Despite everything nice I said about it in my initial impressions it turned out that I wasn't all that taken with the show after all. When it hit my least favorite manga storyline at episode 4 I found myself with no motivation to keep watching.

Now declared as misses:

• Captain Earth: I patiently gave this seven episodes to do anything sufficiently interesting and coherent and it didn't. It doesn't help that the show is periodically wince-inducingly clumsy and stupid (cf).

• Mekakucity Actors: This is basically the same as with Captain Earth. There is probably more here in the show than with CE (and certainly less stupidity), but the slow pace and the obscurity irritated me. I likely gave the show too many chances given my previous standard of 'stop promising, start delivering'.

• Black Bullet: After three episodes I concluded that this was just a typical light novel adaptation that had managed some flashes of being good. This was not enough to continue watching it.

  (It does have one of the better opening songs of the season, though.)

• Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei: I came to my senses immediately after writing my initial impressions and never watched any more. From all reports I made the right decision.

Six shows, with three of them being solidly good, is enough to make me happy about this season.

Sidebar: My favorite OP songs of the season

For my tastes, Knights of Sidonia first, Black Bullet a relatively distant second, and then Ping Pong. Nothing else really ranks, sadly including Mushishi (the first season's OP is great although somewhat creepy if you listen to the lyrics, but I don't like this season's OP at all and always skip it). After some qualms the full version of the Sidonia OP has been growing on me.

As far as EDs go, you can't really top JoJo's.

Brief early impressions of the Spring 2014 anime season

It's time for my early impressions of this season so that I can organize my thoughts and then later see how badly I did at predicting what would be good and what would make me throw up my hands in despair. Early in the run of first episodes I thought I was going to have real difficulty sorting out what to watch, but as time went on I realized that there was a clear dividing line poking up out of my early confusion. Unlike back in winter this was not a line of active failure but instead a line of indifference.

Shows are ranked in rough order of how much I'm enjoying them.

Clear winners:

• Mushishi second season: It's just like the first series continued, which is great. I can't think of anything to say about Mushishi that I haven't already said in my entry on 2005.

• Hitsugi no Chaika: This had the most interesting and enticing first episode of the season, one that demonstrated a mastery of throwing us into the middle of things and illuminating the world through actions instead of exposition lumps. Never boring, always active, this episode went places. Now I just have to hope that the rest of the show keeps delivering (which the second episode did decently).

• Knights of Sidonia: I don't know how I'd feel about this if I hadn't read a lot of the manga but as it is the first episode works very well for me, partly because I know what's going on with a lot of the mysterious bits. But beyond that I think it did a good job of pushing the story forward, quietly setting up the world without infodumps, and so on. The CGI doesn't bother me but then I'm not picky about that stuff. The second episode did decently with the action and continuing the good work of the first episode and had some nice little touches.

Things that I'm reasonably enthused with:

• Ping Pong: The fact that none of the protagonists are particularly likable people makes me think that this may be doing something unusual with its plot instead of being yet another standard sports story. If it has something interesting to say I'm willing to keep watching.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Stardust Crusaders: I'm taking another shot at watching JoJo's with this and so far it's going pretty well. The second episode had a surprisingly brutal bit and it remains very much the essence of action shonen. Hopefully I won't find it too over the top.

• Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii: Again, I've read the manga so I know what's going on and a bunch of what's coming, which inevitably influences my reactions. Nike and the other major characters are as charming (and sometimes irritating) as they were in the manga and I'm on board for watching more of the antics in animated form.

• Mekakucity Actors: The first episode was interesting but also deliberately opaque. The latter was well enough done that I want to watch more, although it could all collapse like a house of cards. I don't think its collection of standard Shaft stylistic tics either helps or hurts it, but other people may have stronger feelings about this than I do and I'll admit that not much actually happened in the first two episodes.

At least a bit marginal already:

• Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin: I like the idea of the premise and the two episodes were decent although not spectacular, which is good enough to keep me watching for now.

• Black Bullet: The first episode was a sodden, charm-less light novel adaptation, complete with exposition lumps and vaguely cringe-inducing fanservice. People said good things about the second episode so I gave it another chance and the result was an order of magnitude better, in that it was reasonably watchable and interesting. I may not stay with this for long but I'm at least willing to give it a third episode.

• Captain Earth: This show is well done overall but has two strikes against it. It's a mecha show and I'm not particularly a mecha fan, and the second episode had one the most eye-rollingly cartoonish bad characters I've seen since the second half of Sword Art Online. Oh, and while it's well done there's nothing here that's really compelling.

  In short, sadly this is no Star Driver. It's much more conventional than that, to its detriment.

• Haikyuu!!: On the good side this has production values and decent characters, but on the other side it seems to be doing a relatively standard sports story and I'm historically not too attracted to those. This may fall down into the 'not for me' category. At the moment I feel like continuing to watch until the action slows down.

Watching despite myself:

• Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei: This isn't really a good show and it's not even good competence porn, but it is kind of fascinating to see the next way that the protagonist is going to turn out to be a special, misunderstood, and amazingly overpowered snowflake. He's already been revealed as a ninja master and special combat mage, so what will they come up with next? I expect to get bored of this at some point, probably when the show starts taking the 'plot' seriously and stops having the protagonist show off all the time. In short I'm watching this purely for the spectacle and I'm not all that engaged with the spectacle at that.

  (It's possible to do this kind of premise well but Mahouka is not even coming close.)

  Mahouka is sort of like Sword Art Online in that both clearly have a bunch of money and effort put into their production but suffer from defects in the actual core content. The result is something that's mostly quite watchable on a moment to moment level (because it looks good, scenes are decently well staged, and so on) but then you wake up and ask 'I was watching what happen?' See also Bobduh's takedown of episode 2.

The line of 'meh', where the shows are not actively repulsive but don't particularly inspire any interest in more:

• Seikoku no Dragonar: Bland but not actively irritating. There is nothing here that we haven't seen before and the execution isn't well enough done to overcome that. It deserves special note for particularly clumsily and badly executed fanservice.

• Akuma no Riddle (at 2 eps): This is teasing us with stuff I don't expect it to really deliver on, especially as it's adopted from an incomplete manga and we know how that one goes as far as answering mysteries and delivering satisfying conclusions.

• Soul Eater Not!: If I strip away all of my fond memories of Soul Eater, there's just not very much novel or compelling in here. We had one nice fight scene but apparently that's going to be a rarity and the character chemistry is too over the top to be really interesting.

• Brynhildr in the Darkness: Meh. The first episode was okay but not at all inspiring.

(Having written all that I'm feeling the temptation to give some of these another episode or two. Not so much because I think that they're better than I've rated them here but instead because I want them to be better than that and I keep hoping that maybe another episode will change things. This is a foolish hope but it tempts me.)

Outright miss:

• Atelier Escha & Logy - Alchemists of the Dusk Sky: I want to like the quiet and low-key mood, but after two episodes it's just too slow for me. To be honest part of it is that I'm simply finding Escha to be kind of irritating; she's a bit too squeaky and immature and over-genki.

• M3 - Sono Kuroki Hagane: Total failure to engage my interest. It's bland, absurd, and infuriating, combining an entire collection of lazy cliches with completely uninspiring production and writing that veers between clumsy and insulting.

So very clearly not my thing:

• One Week Friends: I've heard praise for this but at the same time the praise makes it pretty clear that this is not in my area of interest.

Have not looked at due to bad initial reports:

• No Game, No Life: I don't expect this to measure up to last year's Mondaiji (cf).

• selector infected WIXOSS

• Broken Blade: I've watched four out of the six movies already but have stalled out there, which I'm taking as a sign that I'm not going to be particularly enthused about the TV series version either. If I feel the urge I'll finish the movies instead of the TV series.

There are no ongoing shows that have carried over from last season, so I get to start with a clean slate this time around. I suspect that I'm going to wind up dropping at least some shows above the line of meh just because following eleven or twelve shows is a relatively lot for me.

Looking back at the Winter 2014 anime season

It's time for the usual retrospective look back at the season to go with my early impressions and my midway views. This time I've decided to be different in my ranking; instead of ranking series more or less on how good they are, which I usually do, I'm going to rank by pure enjoyment.

Plain good fun:

• Witch Craft Works: This show demonstrates the power of understanding that your basic premise comes straight out of bad light novel cliches (although it's actually adopted from a manga) and therefor should be ignored as much as possible. In the hands of anyone who took the basic plot seriously WCW would have been a disaster; instead it succeeds brilliantly at being entertaining by de-emphasizing the core plot in favour of a parade of diversions, from Tanpopo's antics to Kagari's deadpan craziness.

  WCW has no pretensions of being any deeper than a pothole after a rainstorm but it more than makes up for this with pure amusement value. That made it the most consistently enjoyable show I watched all season and gets it the first place ranking here.

• Seitokai Yakuindomo season 2: It delivered almost exactly what I was expecting, including an excellent troll in the last episode. Every episode made me laugh, often several times. I could ask for no more in a comedy.

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: Zvezda is the best show I watched this season. It had heart, intelligence, and a solid sense of fun and humour and was far more ambitious than WCW and SY. The problem is that while it quietly aimed high it didn't always hit that mark; while perfectly decent, the result sometimes felt like a bit of a letdown. This came to a head in the final episode, which was perfectly good but couldn't quite deliver on the promise of either the previous few episodes or the opening of the first episode.

• Noragami: This continued its good execution through the end and as a result I wouldn't mind a second season (as you might expect for a 12-episode series based on an ongoing manga, the major things are in no way resolved or concluded). I liked that it was willing to be subtle about some things. I disagree with people about the idea that the season should have ended with Yukine's plotline but that argument doesn't fit in the margins of this summary.

  (Whatever you do, don't watch the OAD. The OAD might as well be a different and significantly worse show, or at least a bad dream version.)

(In a way these four shows neatly split into two shows that were mostly about spectacle and two shows that were primarily about substance. The spectacle based shows executed it better than the substance based ones.)

Ordinary:

• Space Dandy: Ultimately this is an indulgent show, in that it indulges the animators, the writers, and the directors involved by allowing them to do pretty much whatever they want. The result is very uneven, kind of interesting on occasion, and not very compelling (I didn't find even the good episodes to be particularly powerful). In essence what we're getting here is a bunch of art cinema experiments and like most experiments many of them are only really interesting as 'look what we can do' things. Still, the zombies episode.

  Apparently this may be just what Watanabe wanted, so I can't exactly call Space Dandy a failure as such. But I don't think it's a success.

• Robot Girls Z: I wound up watching all three episodes, mostly out of a feeling that I might as well. It was okay, which makes it the kind of thing I've been trying to stop watching. Fans of old giant robot shows apparently got more out of it than I did.

Carried over from the fall:

• KILL la KILL: As I put it on Twitter KLK is an epic and spectacular show, and I'd add 'showy' to that list of adjectives. I think it clearly succeeded at what it set out to do, namely being BURNING ANIME in a good way. To deal with one issue: I don't think KLK (strongly) intended to have messages, although I do think it had themes that it worked into the narrative.

  Episode 22 and its ending and how people reacted to it is really the encapsulated KILL la KILL experience in one moment. KLK is all about delivering fanservice of the sort that doesn't involve nearly naked people (although it has them too, and in a much less fanservicy way than you might think).

• Log Horizon: This stayed strong through the nominal end. Since the show is getting a second season it didn't bother to invent some sort of temporary finish to things but just wrapped up the current story and hung out a 'here is your second season introduction cliffhanger' sign. I'm perfectly fine with this; the last few episodes were a good way to wind down from the more intense earlier ones. Log Horizon took a while to build up but the eventual payoffs were good.

  As peculiar as it sounds, I think that Log Horizon is above all thoughtful and intelligent. It did any number of interesting things with the intersection of MMO mechanics, MMO players, and a real world, and the smart characters in it felt genuinely smart. And I really liked a number of 'well of course' moments that it gave me, such as Crusty's enthusiasm for combat once he got into it. See also my fall retrospective.

• Tokyo Ravens: For reasons that boil down to 'I was bored and it was made to look appealing' I marathoned this right at the end of the season despite having dismissed it back in the fall. I don't regret this overall but I also don't regret skipping the show in the fall; I think it was drastically improved by being marathoned instead of doled out week by week. The first two episodes are weak and the final episode induced eye-rolling, but apart from that I found it surprisingly fun.

  (I also benefited from having been spoiled on one or two plot twists ahead of time, which made it easier to enjoy watching some bits.)

  One refreshing thing about TR is that it never beat around the bush about issues. Several times it raised suspicions and then immediately confirmed them in the next episode or two rather than drawing things out the way that many other shows would. The protagonist was still as dense as lead but the other characters were pretty smart and aware and not at all confused about who liked who and what was going on; as a result it skipped any number of tedious cliches that are common to the genre.

If I did a merged ranking of the carried over fall shows with this season's shows KILL la KILL would be clearly on top and Log Horizon might beat Witch Craft Works. Tokyo Ravens would be on the boundary of ordinary (and I would rate it much higher than Space Dandy, which spent the entire season on the edge of being dropped).

Ignoring the shows that carried over from the fall, I think this was a good but not great season. Four solidly enjoyable shows is not a bad number.