Roving Thoughts archives

Why I don't rate the Rebuild of Evangelion movies all that highly

Back in my best N in 2013 entry I mentioned that while I'd seen all three currently available Rebuild of Evangelion movies in 2013, none of them made my year-end list for reasons beyond the scope of that entry. Today I feel like elaborating on that passing remark.

Fundamentally the reason I don't find the movies really impressive is that I've already seen both Neon Genesis Evangelion (the TV series) and End of Evangelion. Having seen both, there is not much really new and impressive that the Rebuild movies bring to the table. There are two sides to this, one for the TV series and one for EoE.

While the production values of the first two movies are higher than the TV series, the TV series covers basically the same ground in more depth and as a result has more fully developed and interesting characters. This is really what you'd expect because the TV series simply has more time. The movie hits the high points and adds some twists but its limited time forces it to simplify many elements (often ones I quite like) and I don't think it really adds more than one or two new things to compensate for this (the 'seaside' scene was nice but about it). Rebuild's desire to retread most of the same ground confines it and lessens it.

As for the third movie, it's mostly incoherent and unexciting as a movie (although it has some spectacular action sequences). What it really is is yet another giant Anno gesture in the direction of the fans, and as mentioned I've already seen Anno's first version of that. End of Evangelion is in many ways the ultimate middle finger to fans and I saw it years ago. By now yet more gestures from Anno to the fans have lost their ability to shock and impress me; now my reaction is more 'what, again?' (with a side of 'haven't you got tired of this yet?').

(The other difference between You Can (Not) Redo and End of Evangelion is that EoE tells a coherent and powerful story that just happens to be brutally ugly and 3.0 doesn't really. EoE is successful as a movie, not just as a gesture to fans.)

So the short version is: the Rebuild movies look nice but they aren't doing anything particularly new and interesting and they aren't significantly great purely as movies. This still makes them decent movies that I didn't regret watching but they're not 'best N in 2013' material.

(The first two movies are probably close to the best that they could be under the circumstances, but I tend to think that almost any relatively faithful movie retelling of a good TV series is going to suffer because of having less time. The movies did have some stabs at departing from the straight and narrow of the TV series but I didn't find those compelling enough on their own merits.)

I do accept that Anno is trying to say things to and about the Evangelion fandom; see Bobduh for one analysis of this. I'm just not particularly compelled by Anno's commentary, at least wrapped up in this form. To put it unkindly, being meta does not automatically make you interesting.

Why I didn't continue my Project 365 this year

After doing Project 365 (where you take at least a picture a day for a year) from 2008 through 2013 (cf), I decided to not continue it on into this year. Since Project 365 is what got me into photography in the first place, I feel like writing a little bit about why I didn't continue mine. Ultimately there are two major reasons for it.

The first reason is that I'd become more than a little bit tired of going out into grey days and bad weather in order to get a picture. Having done this for six years I think I've more than proved that I can do it if I want to; I just don't want to any more, especially since on bad days Project 365 easily turns into a grind. By the end of 2013 I was really tired of it and I think it showed in my photography on such days.

The other reason is that I want to genuinely experiment with some things, for example black and white photography (I have a vague plan to spend at least a month shooting only black & white in order to train myself to see good B&W pictures). The problem with real experimentation in the context of a Project 365 is that if you are really experimenting and trying to learn something new, you can fail totally and spectacularly and wind up with no usable pictures for your project for that day. Project 365 half-encourages experimentation, but it's safe experimentation, experimentation where you're pretty sure that you'll wind up with a usable picture even if it's not spectacular. I want to do more wild things than that (and I don't want to do two rounds of photography in a day, one focused on a Project 365 picture and then another on the real photography I want to do).

Also I have to admit that I've spent basically every day since January 1st 2008 carrying a camera around and thinking at least a little bit about photography, and I'd like to see what it's like to not do that (and especially what it's like to routinely bike places without my camera bag on my back). The results so far is that it's liberating and I sometimes miss taking pictures.

(I'll see how weird it feels to bike without a camera bag when the weather is actually biking weather.)

Checking in on the Winter 2014 anime season midway through

It's time for the usual midway check in on my early impressions of this season. I don't think that this is a really strong season so far and it also feels kind of odd to me; despite watching a reasonable number of shows I've wound up somehow feeling that this season is a slow one (perhaps because many of the shows I'm watching are packed into the weekend with basically nothing coming out during the week). This is tempting me towards probably unwise ideas, like say trying to get into the frequently praised Hunter x Hunter.

(A less ambitious version would be giving Gundam Build Fighters a try.)

Things I'm still watching:

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: This is being generally fun and funny with periodic additions of pointed commentary and weirdness. As I hoped it's playing the absurdism straight but not seriously and managing to be surprisingly charming in the process.

• Witch Craft Works: This was a surprise midseason pickup after I read enough praise of it to push me over the edge. I have to tell you that what people say about it being entertaining is true; it doesn't aspire to being deep but it is both funny and clever. Part of the enjoyment for someone like me is watching it thoroughly invert the usual gender tropes of this genre in all sorts of ways.

  So far the Tower Witches are never not funny.

  (One of the reasons the show is genuinely funny is that it doesn't overplay its hand with jokes. There's no standing around extending the joke or repeating it to make sure you got it; the show brushes over the joke and moves on.)

• Noragami: The execution continues to be very well done and the twists of the story are reasonably surprising and interesting (Nora's story was not was I was expecting and is in some ways worse and sadder). Hiyori is the clear best character of the show and is really what makes it.

  (One sign of quality execution is that Hiyori has more than one out of school outfit. Sometimes she has more than one in a single episode.)

• Seitokai Yakuindomo season 2: It continues to reliably hit my funny bone and in fact makes me laugh on a regular basis.

  (I admit that I'm watching this somewhat slowly, as there's no plot anticipation or 'what will they do next' to make watching it feel urgent.)

Perpetually on the edge:

• Space Dandy: This show is more or less the humour equivalent of a decently well done action show. If it sounds like I'm making excuses for Space Dandy it's because I am. Overall I feel that the show is much better at the small stuff than assembling it into an interesting and compelling framework.

  (To be unkind, this is much more Kids on the Slope than Cowboy Bebop.)

• Robot Girls Z: It turns out they got a new joke or two for the second episode. It's probably amusing enough for me to finish it (so far I've seen one of the three sections of the second episode).

Dropped:

• Nobunagun: My gut is unenthused about this and I've learned the hard way that I should trust it. I think the problem is that I'm just not that interested in any of the characters or what's going on. That the show keeps doing crazy things can only carry it so far.

  (I'd say that the show's low animation budget is showing but to be honest it did right from the start. I was just willing to overlook its use of style to cover the lack of actual animation in the early days.)

In shows carried over from last season, both KILL la KILL and Log Horizon are still doing excellent work. Both have reached the point where stuff is really starting to happen and Log Horizon especially is coming through in all sorts of interesting ways. If I ranked them here they would both come before anything from this season, with KILL la KILL first.

My memorable anime from 2005

See the initial 2000 entry for the full background. I'm doing this based on the show's start date and memorable is not the same as either good or significant. Date information comes from Wikipedia and Anime-Planet. As before I'm mostly listing shows in alphabetical order instead of trying to come up with preference order.

Standouts (in order):

• Mushishi: Better people than me have written lyrical appreciations for this quiet and beautiful work. It is about a lot of things but most of all it's about people; it simply explores them through the marvelously fantastic.

• Honey and Clover: This is one of the handful of ordinary life shows that I like, and in fact I pretty much love it. It's the characters and their interactions that make Honey and Clover, but the art and the direction is pretty good too. One reason the show works so well is that it's set in university and has reasonably mature characters and even actual adults.

  (My heresy is that I've never finished watching the second season because I found the ending of Honey and Clover itself to be perfectly satisfying. Someday I'll fix that.)

• Noein: This had some great science fiction concepts and excellent animation mixed in with an art style that can sometimes be offputting, characters that sometimes irritate people (while at the same time often being great), and a complex series of events that can be hard to follow. I wave my hands. I loved it when I saw it and I remember it fondly even now. It has any number of stunning moments, including a number of fight scenes.

• Shakugan no Shana: Regardless of what came after it, the first season of Shana was an excellent show that I look back on fondly. It has all sorts of good characters, a collection of disturbing antagonists, a number of interesting and sometimes creepy concepts, and pretty good animation and action. It's also one of the few action shows with a girl as their primary protagonist, which is a refreshing change.

Ordinarily memorable (in alphabetical order):

• Air: This has the distinction of being the only Key-based show that I've ever liked, and at that I much preferred the odd modern age segments to the much more standard-fantasy ones set in the past. It's possible my opinion of it would drop if I ever rewatched it, so I'm unlikely to ever do so.

• Fairy Musketeers Akazukin OVA: This had an interesting concept with a bunch of kick-ass characters but unfortunately is not exactly a complete story. Although the subsequent TV show has more depth, I never really forgave it for turning Akazukin herself into basically a moe goof (the OVA Akazukin is competent and outright dangerous; the TV series one, not so much).

• Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid: TSR is basically the payoff for all of the character and plot development throughout FMP. We got to see any number of people flower and do cool things, especially Chidori.

• Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu: Bittersweet but touching, this was a quiet little OVA series that managed to be periodically spectacular, sometimes funny, and surprisingly realistic (in ways that are spoilers to discuss).

• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's: This is where the Nanoha series really hits its stride and becomes excellent. Everything clicks, from characters through the multi-layered plot.

  (Note that yes, it still has those questionable transformation sequences and it's still a magical girls show primarily aimed at otaku, not actual girls.)

• Sousei no Aquarion: Although it involves giant robots and sometimes they do crazy things, the show actually has a solid plot, story, setting, and even a set of characters that I rather like (because, among other things, they're interesting people going through interesting conflicts).

Honorable mentions for shows that were fun but nothing more:

• Black Cat: A decent adventure and action series with some nice characters. I am sort of underselling this show here, but.

• Gun x Sword: Underneath a bunch of other things I remember it as having some reasonably interesting things to say about people being driven by revenge. I don't think they were novel things, but at least it was trying.

• Zettai Shonen: This was, well, weird (and deliberately so, and successfully). I remember enjoying it and thinking it was good but in practice I can't really remember any details, which means that listing it here is sort of a guilty reaction.

As before this is not all of the 2005 shows that I've seen, but the other ones don't make this entry for various reasons. Also, I probably should include Jigoku Shoujo here since I have very vivid memories from trying to watch it.

Want to see:

• Eureka Seven: This has been repeatedly praised as the great show that Eureka Seven AO isn't in the end.

• Kamichu! (maybe): On the one hand I watched a few episodes of this and liked it quite a bit. On the other hand I've heard that it decays by the end.

At this point I will mention that Aria also aired in 2005. I've never watched it but a lot of people praise it highly.

Perfect Blue and the importance of genre

(This entry has spoilers for Perfect Blue that you should avoid if you haven't seen it already.)

Perfect Blue presents itself as a psychological thriller. That's what the advertising copy will tell you, that's what Wikipedia will tell you, that's how people tend to describe it, and that's the face that the film first puts forward when you see it, especially at the start. As a psychological thriller the film is powerful, affecting, and genuinely suspenseful and mysterious; almost right up until the end you're not sure what's going on and so on.

(The reveals themselves are powerful and clever and beautiful. Really, Perfect Blue is a great film. It's not too late to stop reading and see it yourself.)

This is how I saw Perfect Blue when I saw it and probably how most people see it. But in thinking about it shortly afterwards I realized that this is not the only way to see Perfect Blue, because it's also a murder mystery. And if it's watched as a murder mystery Perfect Blue is a quite different experience, one that's a lot less mysterious and in fact somewhat obvious. There are two reasons for this.

To start with, if you're told that Perfect Blue is a murder mystery you're going to put less weight on a bunch of the odd stuff that happens because you know it's just there to throw you off the scent and the real explanation is, say, someone hallucinating. You know it can't be real because the rules of the genre say that it isn't. Second, it's actually not that difficult to work out who the guilty party is fairly early on and figure out a fair amount of what's really going on. This isn't so much because the film directly scatters in-world clues around (although I think it does some of that) but because as a murder mystery Perfect Blue follows the rules of the genre and there are a number of spots where these genre rules draw your attention to something important and get you to interpret it in a particular way.

In general, if someone tells you that Perfect Blue is a murder mystery and you watch it that way you're probably going to be less affected by the psychological thriller aspects of it. Rather than being the core of the film they are more of an (interesting) distraction from the mystery that you already know is there. As you follow Mima's increasingly disturbing life there's likely to be a little voice in your head that's looking for whodunit and what they're doing and so on, a voice that's simply not there if you watch Perfect Blue as the psychological thriller that its publicity pushes you towards.

I'm not certain I've seen anything besides Perfect Blue where the genre I thought the work was in was so important; if someone had told me that Perfect Blue was a murder mystery I would have watched it in a quite different way and seen different things when I did so. But just the thought that perceived genre can significantly alter my perceptions of a work has stayed with me ever since, and sometimes I look at other works and wonder.

(Godannar is the closest I've come to this feeling. If I knew for sure that Godannar had been intended as straight up serious, I think my opinion of it would drop for reasons beyond this aside.)

Sidebar: Why I think Perfect Blue follows the genre rules

To put it simply, the genre rules exist in part to make the mystery comprehensible. We want things to have explanations so we want to be able to look backwards and see what actually happened and why (and to feel that the whole thing makes sense). That look backwards requires the basics of motives and opportunity and so on to be present from the start.

Sidebar: Genre rules and one bit in Perfect Blue

I mentioned above that mystery genre rules point some things out to you. For instance, in a murder mystery you pretty much don't have people who are simply upset at some early development. For good story reasons, their emotions are going to figure into the mystery later; either they'll show up as explicit red herrings to draw out the investigation or they've just acquired a motive to do something. The more that the work doesn't use them as a red herring, the more you suspect them.

The culprit in Perfect Blue basically jumps up and down at one point to show that they have a motive. Watching the movie as a psychological thriller I didn't think anything of it because it felt like a natural character reaction; thinking back through the lens of the mystery genre that moment stood out like a sore thumb and made the character suspect number one, especially since the movie didn't really give us any others.

(When you watch Perfect Blue as a psychological thriller you don't think about 'who did it' at all and so you don't think about things like the paucity of suspects, because the film doesn't need suspects. Mima is having some sort of increasing breakdown and that's sufficient explanation by itself, right up until the film reaches its climax.)

My memorable anime from 2004

See the initial 2000 entry for the full background. I'm doing this based on the show's start date and memorable is not the same as either good or significant; in fact there is one show in this list that stands out based on how much I viscerally disliked something it did. Date information comes from Wikipedia and Anime-Planet.

2004 is not the awesome year that 2002 was but it turns out to have a lot of plain good shows. The highs are not as high as 2002 but there's a lot more depth to the field, if that makes sense.

The biggest standouts (in preference order):

• Paranoia Agent: This show is amazing. I have no coherent words for it, especially ones that aren't spoilers. Episode 8 is a work of joyous art (and yes, I know that that's an odd thing to say given its contents).

• Windy Tales: Although this has an unconventional art style, I'm going to call it simply beautiful. It starts out with a flying cat (yes, really) and goes on from there to tell a series of affecting quiet stories. I love it unreasonably.

• Melody of Oblivion: What MoO does really well is be disturbingly weird. If the weirdness doesn't resonate with you, you're going to hate it; if it does, the entire show is a whole succession of wild rides. I loved the show, including all of the crazy mythological things it does, and think that it's underappreciated. And yes, I think it's supposed to be a somewhat uncomfortable watch all throughout, including the ending and the fanservice.

  (To pique your interest I'll note that it's written by Yoji Enokido, who also worked on Utena and Star Driver. This should give you a good idea of what you're in for.)

Standouts (in alphabetical order):

• Fantastic Children: The best description I can come up with is that this is an excellent children's science fiction adventure story, one that's good enough to be appreciated by all ages. Please note that I consider this strong praise.

• Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo: This oozes style and visual flair (some of it distracting), and the writing is decent and interesting; many people love it and rate it very highly. I can't, because late in the show's run it threw a melodramatic and gratuitous character death in my face and immediately lost me (and it's a death that doesn't occur in the original source material). That one moment made me want to throw the show against the wall and I dropped it on the spot.

  (I have to admit that even before the death totally irritated me I was sort of feeling that the show's stylishness was overcoming the story.)

• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig: I don't love this quite as much as I love the first season, but that merely makes it my second favorite Ghost in the Shell work. Everything good about the first season continues on in this, it's just not quite as shiny and new and exceptional this time around. The show is still excellent.

• Jubei-chan 2: This is an excellent followup to the first Jubei-chan (which can't really be called a 'season' because it's complete in and of itself). It reinforces what was good about Jubei-chan while adding its own layer of nice work and contributing its own set of great moments and subtle nuances.

  (Note that it can't be watched without having seen the first Jubei-chan.)

• My-HiME: This is Sunrise doing magical girls with mecha and carefully breaking any number of genre conventions in the process (but throwing in once-standard Sunrise elements like the midseason shock plot twist). The whole thing is simply a well put together package; characters, mecha designs, animation, story, everything. Some people hate the ending but I think it's fine and is perfectly appropriate for the show as a whole. I love the anti-cliche things that the show does with a number of the characters.

  (In many ways I think that this is Sunrise at the height of their powers and appeal.)

• Samurai Champloo: This show is a masterclass in how you do style and mix up your genres and settings, as Watanabe makes a whole series of crazy mashups work (primarily crossing classical samurai with hip-hop). One of the things that I always liked is how Mugen and Jin have such different (and fitting) sword styles.

• Uta Kata: The show starts out as a relatively normal magical girl story (of the old kind where the magical girl is given powers that she explores instead of given powers to fight things) and then goes into increasingly darker and more disturbing territory. This is not shock for the sake of shock; it's much more interesting and affecting than that.

Ordinarily memorable:

• Tweeny Witches aka Magical Girl Squad Arusu: Don't let the somewhat odd art style or setting put you off; this show has heart and a lot of appeal, and over the course of its run actually delivers a pretty darn epic adventure story.

  (This is also known as Mahou Shoujotai Arusu or sometimes Mahou Shoujo Tai.)

• Diebuster: This has one epic moment and a lot of decent work in the rest of it. It's Gainax trying hard and actually succeeding; while not as epic as the original Gunbuster it is a worthy followup.

• Le Portrait de Petit Cossette: This is one of the few works of more or less horror that I actually like (or liked when I saw it). It's spooky and disturbing and more psychological than anything else.

  (It's possible that I'd rate this lower if I rewatched it.)

• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: The original TV series that launched what has become more or less an epic (once you roll in the successor TV series, the movies, the multiple manga, and so on). Nanoha more or less pioneered the otaku-focused fighting magical girls show and created a number of archetypes in the process. It has all sorts of epic beam-spam fights, a reasonably affecting storyline, some number of laughs, decent characters that have become classics, a few bits of unpleasant brutality when a character gets whipped, and some pieces of fanservice that are more than a bit creepy if you pay much attention to them.

  (I'd like to give it points for raising issues like Nanoha's increasing isolation from her friends, but the show never really goes anywhere with these issues.)

• Rozen Maiden: Underneath the flash and fire and dolls fighting each other, the first season is an affecting portrait of a shut-in recovering his spirit and willingness to interact with other people and the world.

• Tsukuyomi -Moon Phase-: One part charming, one part potentially irritating, one part vaguely disturbing, okay, this show has a lot of parts. It has a bunch of good characters, an understated romance between some people in the background, and a decently good story.

  Oh, and it sort of marks the start of Shaft's and Shinbo's wacky style of art and directing. Don't worry, it's relatively toned down and sensible here.

Honorable mentions, sometimes sort of:

• Bleach: For a while, this was a great shonen fighting show with some excellent characters. I still have fond memories of most of first year or so of episodes (up to the infamous first filler arc).

• Elfen Lied: This is notoriously bloody, graphically violent, graphical in general, and brutal. Take those out and there's nothing particularly novel here, but with them in the series is extremely memorable.

• Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence: I feel sort of obliged to mention this somewhere even though I'm not really enthused about it in general. It's GitS, which means that it's pretty decent, and a GitS movie, which means that it looks amazing. It's a GitS movie by Oshii, which means that it's loaded with philosophy (some of it administered by blunt instruments).

• Gokusen: The granddaughter of a Yakuza boss becomes a teacher and of course is not at all bothered, scared, or impressed by the delinquents she winds up having as her students. This is basically a 'dedicated teacher' story (to steal the phrase from the Wikipedia entry) like eg GTO, but it's a well done and charming little series.

• Keroro Gunso aka Sgt. Frog: I gave up on this after a while, but it delivered both good entertainment and comedy that I actually liked. It understood that good comedy needs to be built around strong characters.

• Kurau Phantom Memory: This is a good science fiction show and character study that is somewhat marred by issues with the pacing. I remember it as well made and pretty exciting when it did action.

• 2x2 = Shinobuden: Funny and goofy and with a heart. One of the shows where the comedy works for me. Onsokumaru is a marvel who has to be heard to be appreciated; Norio Wakamoto really cuts loose and the result is glorious.

• This Ugly Yet Beautiful World: This was Gainax's 20th anniversary work and was theoretically supposed to be a showcase of them at their best. It didn't work out that way.

It looks like 2004 is the first year of the 00's where I can't spot anything obvious that I want to watch. Perhaps Sunabozu (aka Desert Punk), which I saw part of back in the days and which I've seen recommended since. I haven't seen Howl's Moving Castle yet but I've heard mixed reviews of it and I want to read the original book first.

Oh, and there's Futari wa Precure aka the starting point of the Precure juggernaut (which is still speeding along ten years later). I saw an episode or two back in the days and it was decent but not exceptional. I'd kind of like to see some Precure, but these days I'm probably not going get through an old year long series of any genre.

(A number of shows from 2004 that I've seen don't make this list for the usual reasons. Yes, believe it or not, I'm trimmed this instead of saying something about everything from 2004 that I've seen.)

The problem with flashbacks

Aroduc famously dislikes flashbacks. I've never entirely understood that, because I have a more moderate view on them (as I do on most narrative devices); most of the time I just go with the flow, although I admit that some of the long ones in shonen fighting shows have gotten to me (Naruto's, say, where we might spend an episode or several in one). But recently, writing about Space Battleship Yamato 2199's episode 14 caused a little coherent light to go on in my head about the problem with flashbacks.

Put simply, flashbacks stop the current action in the show to divert us off sideways. We were in the present day with something interesting happening and now all of that gets put on hold while we traipse off to the past for a while, where we have to establish context and build up momentum to do stuff in the past-story. Then afterwards we come back to the present time and have to pick up the momentum of the action all over again (and to remind the viewers just what was going on in the present day before we dropped it for a while). At a minimum the show loses some of the impact from the present day action that was interrupted, because viewers just can't sustain that impact and momentum over the interruption; it falls out of our heads to be replaced by whatever's going on in the flashback. At the worst the show loses a major amount of energy as it thrashes back and forth between the past and the present.

(There are minor spoilers for Yamato 2199 episode 14 here.)

All of this points to why the 'flashbacks' in Yamato 2199's episode 14 work so well: they're actually part of the action in the present. While the flashbacks are of the past, they're being experienced by the characters in the current time. There is no diversion from the action because the characters going through these flashbacks and reacting to them in various ways is the action. The whole thing flows as an unbroken strand from the start of the episode right through to the end, with nothing to yank us out and dissipate the momentum.

I'm sure that there's a bunch of structural techniques that can do similar things, it's just that I haven't had them rubbed in my face so vividly. After all, flashbacks are in theory just one form of having multiple narrative threads running simultaneously as in eg Kyoukai no Kanata episode 10, where in fact one of the story threads was a flashback.

(All of this must be well known to people with actual experience in fiction writing, story structure, and so on. I'm a naif here, though, so I get to work this stuff out for myself when I stumble over it.)

Brief early impressions of the Winter 2014 anime season

As before, so again. Every season I do an early impressions post to organize my thoughts and also so that later on I can laugh sadly at my naive and optimistic views. This season I am either grumpy or being more selective than usual, depending on your perspective; as I put it on Twitter:

I'm increasingly feeling that I've been burned too many times by shows with 'promise'. Stop the excuses. Deliver something right here and now.

Quite a lot of shows failed this test for me, some of them well regarded ones. Even the ones that survived are not all that strong, so this looks like being one of those not so great winter seasons.

Clear winners (so far):

• Seitokai Yakuindomo season 2: The show reliably hits my funny bone just as the first season did.

  (This is extremely rare. Most anime comedies aren't for me.)

• Noragami: There's nothing exceptional here as far as genre and broad plot go but the show is very well executed and I like the characters. I'm with Aroduc in that it's refreshing to have a protagonist who gets powers and considers them really quite neat instead of something to be horrified about. I hope that she gets to kick more monsters.

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: It's hard to tell where this is going after just one episode but the first episode did a great job at holding my interest. My best guess is that the show will play its absurdisms straight but not seriously; if it manages to do a good job, I expect to like it a lot.

In ongoing shows, both KILL la KILL and Log Horizon continue to rock in their own ways.

Things I am reasonably enthused about so far:

• Space Dandy: This had an absolutely terrible first episode that was marred by any number of problems including bad writing that thoroughly alienated me; even people who liked it overall were saying out loud that the first half was pretty bad. Although it was an instant drop I just couldn't let go and very reluctantly watched the second episode, mostly out of masochism (there was a bit of me that didn't want to believe that something with SD's pedigree could be that terrible, although objectively I know better). To my total surprise, everything changed for the much better. The second episode was actually a nice show that did a good job telling a story and throwing in interesting and funny events without beating us over the head and even being subtle periodically. More to the point, it's a show that I want to see more of. So I've undropped it for now.

  At this point I have no idea if the good Space Dandy will continue or if the bad one will come back, so I have no idea if this is going to be something that I stay with. I'm honestly expecting an uneven and bumpy ride and probably a bunch of frustration.

• Nobunagun: This is nice and it's doing interesting things, but it doesn't have Noragami's quality of execution (or animation budget). It is clearly and consciously aiming to be over the top and to have a definite style; both of these are things that I can get behind. Better to have personality even if it doesn't always work than to be safely bland.

Not for me (tentatively):

• Tonari no Seki-kun: I read the first chapter of the manga and didn't find it particularly funny, plus there is something about the basic premise of 'boy does something that irritates girl until she reacts and then gets blamed for it while the boy always gets away with it' that rubs me the wrong way. I've seen the show's OP and frankly I think it has a good version of the joke that delivers most of the amusement value I'd get out of the show.

  I call this a not-for-me because lots of people seem to like the show quite a lot. Clearly the humour doesn't click for me and does for them.

Misses (in descending order of quality):

• Toaru Hikuushi e no Koiuta aka The Pilot's Love Song: There's nothing wrong with this as such. It's just bland and unimpressive and comes with impending grim doom (because the show has carefully told us that everything goes to hell later).

• Robot Girls Z: The first installment of RGZ has basically one core joke. Unfortunately neither that joke nor the show's execution of several variations of it are anywhere near funny enough or good enough to sustain an entire episode. As I put it on Twitter, the version of the joke done in the opening sequence is about the right length. You might as well watch that and stop.

• Wizard Barristers - Benmashi Cecil: By all logic I should really like this but instead it somehow irritates me quite a bit and I lack any interest in seeing the further activities of these characters. Perhaps part of it is that the whole exercise feels kind of soulless. The protagonist especially rubs me the wrong way with her collection of moe tropes (sleeping in late on her first day of work, jumping in apparently over her head, tragic past that gives her burning motivation, etc etc).

  (I'm also not sure I have much enthusiasm for watching a courtroom drama, even if it comes with magic.)

• Nobunaga the Fool: The first episode of this is a lot of chaos and incoherent things happening without explanation or much context. I'm all for starting in the middle of the action (it beats infodumps), but there has to be something there to get a grip on. There wasn't here and so I'm left with no interest in these characters or what's going on.

• Hamatora: This is the generic and cheaply made shonen show that Noragami wasn't.

I haven't checked out any of the four (I think) high school romcoms that are airing this season and I haven't heard anything about any of them that would change my mind. This is not a genre that generally works for me. Similarly I haven't looked at any of the other comedies, as none of them sounded like they would at all work for me.