Roving Thoughts archives

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.

The best N anime that I saw in 2013

This is much like last year's best N, namely what I consider to be the best or most enjoyable N anime that I saw in calendar 2013 (regardless of when they were made or released). The top three shows this year are extremely close, so close they're almost a tie. I could wimp out by declaring it an actual tie but if I'm being honest the three shows are not quite equal in my affections.

(See also the winter, spring, summer, and fall retrospectives.)

In order:

• Shin Sekai Yori: This was an excellent but not flawless show for most of its run that is pulled up to greatness by the power of its ending, especially the last episode; I wrote a bunch of words about this. If I had done a '12 days of anime' series of entries, the climactic one would and could only have been:

  MY NAME IS SQUEALER!

  A perhaps underappreciated aspect of Shin Sekai Yori is its mastery of disturbing atmosphere. Over and over the show manages to be quietly creepy in visuals, directing, and so on, and it has quite a number of genuinely disturbing or tense moments.

  I've written enough about the show that I've made an index of my Shin Sekai Yori entries.

• Kyousougiga: I've come to think that Kyousougiga is a triumph of spectacle in service to story. It is visually stunning and crazy but pretty much everything (including some things that you'll initially dismiss) is there because the story calls for it. And the story is good enough to carry the weight of expectations created by the visuals. I also think this story could only have been told through anime, at least in anything like this form; it fundamentally needed to be told visually. See also. Some people will dock it style points because it was not necessarily clear in spots, but that's part of why I love it; it pushes a bunch of my style buttons. I like shows that throw you into the action ('in media res' as some people like to say) and leave it to you to decode things as you go along. I personally thought that Kyousougiga did this very well.

  (Bobduh has written a quite interesting discussion of Kyousougiga if you want to read more.)

• Uchouten Kazoku aka Eccentric Family: This is a small, quiet, but great show and one that pushes many of my buttons; I wrote a bunch in my summer wrapup. I don't love it quite as much as Kyousougiga only because it is more quiet and less visually spectacular, although it's full of its own beautiful moments.

  (I actually find it hard to directly compare the two and I sort of consider them tied here. Also I'll refer you to Bobduh's review of the show once again for more informed commentary.)

Because my top three are very close to being a tie, I want to add some more words on where each of them excels. Shin Sekai Yori is the most ambitious show; it aims very high and hits what it's aiming for, although at the expense of its characters. It confronts us with uncomfortable questions and doesn't give us easy ways out and it's the show that most makes me think and talk this year, as you can see. Uchouten Kazoku has the most fully realized characters and the best and most interesting story, but it's a small story in a small setting (it's both fantasy and ordinary life at once, and that's part of its power). Kyousougiga is the most spectacular and enthusiastic of the three shows, the most anime of the three, and it has the most interesting characters.

(For example, Koto is a great character and great fun, but I don't think she's as fully realized and human as Yasaburou or Yaichirou. She's closer to Benten and Benten is deliberately mostly a cipher.)

• Gatchaman Crowds: I really liked Crowds and it made me think; it's a very smart and aware show, one that repeatedly subverts your expectations in order to do interesting things. At the moment I feel that I can't rate it properly because I think that the Blu-Ray release is likely to involve a significant restructuring of the last two episodes. As it is, the TV broadcast version loses some style points for the first half of episode 11. See also and also, and relatedly some entries: 1, 2, 3 (all may have spoilers). As usual Bobduh has interesting things to say.

• KILL la KILL: As I like to say, this is BURNING ANIME. While it hasn't finished airing, how much I've unconditionally enjoyed the 12 episodes produced so far means that the show has shoved its way into this list anyways (which is perfectly appropriate). Besides, I don't think that this is the kind of show where the ending can ruin the overall experience; even if it goes down in flames in the end, we'll always have things like two-star banchou Mako.

  (I'm pretty sure that KILL la KILL is going to be remembered more for a succession of epic moments than for the stirring depths of its plotting and characterization. And it's delivered plenty of those moments so far.)

• Ghost in the Shell ARISE episode 1: Call this the special merit award for the best cyberpunk anime of the year. The first episode of ARISE is everything I could have asked for here, complete with genuine surprises and chilling moments that could only really have been done in this genre. I really like this new version of the Major, and of course it delivers good action and animation too.

  (I did not love the second episode as much and the whole thing is incomplete so far.)

• Space Battleship Yamato 2199: See my views on the show, which are too complex to try to summarize here.

Just on the edge:

• Psycho-Pass: As I said at the time this is far from flawless but it managed to become a good show by trying hard and having Akane. I wrote about Sybil and the ending. For all of its flaws, I will give it this: the show had ambition and it tried, and in the process it raised a number of interesting questions (some actively, some just passively and thus possibly not deliberately). That is fundamentally why I am reluctantly listing it here.

  (This is not as good as some of the shows below but more memorable, which shows that my classification scheme here has a bug or two.)

Shows that I consider good but not memorable over the long term:

• Girls und Panzer: This is an extremely well executed sports action show; it was fun and interesting and enjoyable throughout. It delivered a stirring climax that was worth the wait, although I kind of wish it had managed to air all of its episodes last year so that I could put it among better company in last year's list.

• Little Witch Academia: This is a great little adventure story of a sort that we rarely see any more because everyone insists on complicating things (and often putting darkness and grimness into them). It was also very well made. Again, though, there is no real depth to it; it was simply fun. Not that fun is bad, but fun by itself usually lacks staying power.

• RahXephon: For all that I wound up somewhat down on it in the end the show was compulsively watchable, well made, and generally good throughout its run. It's the best and most interesting reaction to Neon Genesis Evangelion that I've seen.

• Ginga Kikoutai Majestic Prince: It had heart and affection for all of its characters and the result delivered a good show. It is not the show's fault that I am not a big mecha fan or that it did not have anything really new to bring to the table, just a good execution of relatively standard concepts. However it is laced with great little moments.

• Zetsuen no Tempest: In retrospect I didn't quite enjoy the second half of the show as much as the first half (as usual the romance plot was not quite successful with me) but it remains a very solid show. See my winter retrospective for more commentary.

Honorable mentions:

• Suisei no Gargantia: It was technically well made, it had a number of good characters and good ideas, and Chambers stole the show by the end. I think I've warmed to it somewhat since my views at the end of spring.

In the end I completed 28 shows, OVAs, and movies this year, which turns out to be exactly the same as last year (I also looked at and dropped a lot of shows). If I'm counting right, six of these were movies, also the same as last year. Overall I think that this was an excellent year, as I saw at least three shows that I consider great and a bunch more than I consider excellent. Shin Sekai Yori alone would have made for a good year; that I have at least two other shows jostling it for the top of the list is amazing.

While I saw all three Rebirth Rebuild of Evangelion movies this year, they do not make this entry for reasons beyond the scope of this margin. The third movie was the most interesting one.

Sidebar: Noteworthy things that I have not watched this year

I have not seen Wolf Children, Aku no Hana, Attack on Titan, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (which I tried out but couldn't get into), Silver Spoon, Watamote, the Madoka movies, or pretty much any of the 'cute girls doing cute stuff' shows. I understand that many of these are well done and appear on other people's top-N lists for good reasons.

More words on the ending of Shin Sekai Yori and the show overall

(There are plenty of spoilers here.)

This is sort of a reaction to Bobduh's articulate review, where he covers both why the show is excellent and why despite this it leaves him cold. While I've come to sort of agree with him about some of its flaws, what elevates Shin Sekai Yori to greatness for me anyways is the power of its ending, specifically roughly the second half of the last episode, and how I read it. Rather than simply give us an action show resolution to the situation in the ruins of Tokyo and then a straightforward upbeat epilogue, Shin Sekai Yori instead went out of its way to give us an uncomfortable ending that grants humanity to previously inhuman characters and systematically strips away the idea that the Cantus humans are the clear heroes; even Saki, our sympathetic protagonist character, is revealed to still be reflexively prejudiced. If there is a hero of the ending it's shown to be someone viewers had probably been looking down on and hating. This is a dramatic and powerful reversal of the situation that leaves us without comfortable or easy answers (and the revelation in the final coda of the show drives that home).

To be specific, I think that the staging and presentation of the ending makes it clear that we're supposed to sympathize with Squealer, not the Cantus humans running the trial. The whole visual vocabulary of the trial is that of a humiliating show trial, Squealer engages our sympathies throughout with both logic and bravery, and what happens to him is horrible. The final revelation at the end of the show finishes this off by giving the viewer no refuge for prejudice and no grounds to look down on the queerrats. I am not at Bobduh's level of 'burn down the Cantus humans' but the ending makes me believe that we're supposed to feel uncomfortable about what happened with Squealer (and even that it was unjust), and I do. At the same time the show has spent the entire run building up Saki (and Satoru) as our viewpoint and people we like, so we didn't want to see them die either. This dilemma is where and why I think the show becomes great.

(In fact I think most people will have been reflexively rooting for Saki right through the action in the ruins of Tokyo. Only when the show pulls back afterwards to give Squealer's side of things do doubts start seeping into our minds. I'm pretty sure that this is deliberate on the show's part; it wants us to be caught up in Saki's viewpoint and then come to a skidding halt as things look more and more disturbing afterwards. Some people may pull themselves away beforehand but I didn't really.)

To me, where Shin Sekai Yori excels is in raising hard questions and then not giving us comfortable answers. As I wrote at the time everyone is doing horrible things because they are all trapped in horrible situations. Over and over the show gives us a clear evil to rage against and then shows us why that evil exists and how it is the result of well intentioned people doing the best that they can in a terrible situation. There are no morally bright characters that we can root for without qualms, not even Saki and Satoru at the end. For all that Squealer is not a nice person, even his rebellion is morally defensible, as he carefully explains to Saki (and us, the viewers). I could do worse here than quoting @llvn from Twitter:

I love how it presents complexity without judgment. Everyone is wrong. But they deserve life, freedom.

Shin Sekai Yori is both a picture of fallible people trapped in a terrible situation making the best life that they can, mistakes and all, and a show that confronts us with hard questions that it doesn't give us any comfortable answers to. It doesn't give us any heroes or any clear villains; instead it makes us uncomfortably understand all sorts of people who are doing terrible things.

(Similarly, what happened with the queerrats is extremely unpleasant but it's also pretty much the result of relentless logic. Also note that even Kiromaru, the 'good' queerrat, is a complex character with his own motivations that don't neatly align with those of the Cantus humans. After all, the entire reason Kiromaru came to the ruins of Tokyo the first time was to see if he could find some effective way to rebel.)

By the way, I would probably have a somewhat different reaction to the end of the show if I thought that the show was presenting the Cantus humans as being successful. My view is that it's rather to the contrary; the Cantus humans are on a not so slow decline due to a shrinking population base and repeated horrifying incidents such as what happened with Shun (cf the worldbuilding bits pointed out in this comment). Since I don't like the Cantus humans and think that the world would be better off if they didn't exist, this is okay with me.

(I'm pretty sure that the show also agrees with this position since I don't see any particular sign that the show considers its world of the future to be a better place than today.)

As for the flaws (or at least one ongoing flaw), I have to agree with Bobduh that in retrospect the protagonists are the weak point of Shin Sekai Yori. I don't want to sound too negative here because I don't think they're bad (I found them and their interactions perfectly believable), but they are pretty passive. Shin Sekai Yori is not a story about Saki acting forthrightly to change her world, it is mostly a story about her experiencing and coming to understand it. In that sense Bobduh is right; this is more a science fiction story about setting and ideas than a story about actual people.

(This was also Inushide's major criticism of the show.)

Sidebar: an alternate reading of the show

To be fair, you can also read Shin Sekai Yori in a different way. I can construct a plausible reading where the Cantus humans are right to be as cruel and brutal as they are to everything and where the show is an argument from utilitarianism. In this version of the show, Saki's life is the story of a tragedy (and she even tells us this in a voiceover); her moments of rebellion against the proper way of the village lead first to the rise of Squealer and second to the tragedy of his rebellion.

(Squealer's life arguably revolves around his first encounter with Saki and her friends. That fateful meeting not only saved his life and his colony, it also may well have put him on the path to rebellion by showing him weak, fallible, and manipulable Cantus humans.)

My justification against this simple reading of the show is how it handled Squealer's trial, specifically how it doesn't show the Cantus humans in a good light. They are not people handing out justice, they are the masters punishing an uppity slave.

What School Rumble taught me about my tastes in anime

One of the things I've found is that I learn more about my tastes from the anime that I strongly dislike than from the anime that I like. It can be hard to figure out why I like something, whereas with stuff that I dislike there's often something in specific that I can point at and say 'that, I can't stand it'.

Which brings me to School Rumble, a well regarded 2004 comedy series, which I watched two episodes of once upon a time. The first episode was cute and decently funny (and had an Initial D parody that I found hysterical). Then I watched the second episode and bounced off it very, very hard because it was full of the lead characters humiliating themselves in various ways.

What School Rumble taught me is that I can't stand this. Not only do I not find it funny to see decent people doing embarrassing things and humiliating themselves, it's an active turnoff. It makes me cringe in sympathy for them and just no. I don't watch anything to cringe like that. Somewhere there is a dividing line between poking gentle fun at people and humiliating them and the second episode of School Rumble was well over it for me.

(I'm not even really interested in seeing characters that I dislike get humiliated.)

There are probably some situations where this sort of humour can work for me (I'm pretty sure I've seen and enjoyed classic black and white era film comedies in which this was a part). But as presented in School Rumble or other typical anime shows it doesn't work at all. Very few things will get me to turn off a show faster than the show asking me to laugh at someone because they are doing stupid, foolish things.

PS: I don't know if School Rumble continued with this sort of humour because I never watched any more of it. I doubt I could get the bad taste out of my mouth even today. Yes, I know, it's a pity, I'm probably missing out on a good show. That's how things go.

(This entry goes with what I learned from Jigoku Shoujo. Yes, this is a very slowly written entry; I've had it planned from the start of Roving Thoughts but never got to it until now.)

The necessity of queerrat biology in Shin Sekai Yori

(Major spoilers here.)

The following is probably obvious, but once you start following the dots at the end of the show it's clear that what happened with the queerrats is almost inevitable. Right now I feel like laying out why this is so.

A core ingredient in the precarious stability of Cantus humans is death feedback, which makes it so that almost no Cantus human can use Cantus on another human to any dangerous degree. In its flashbacks to history the show gave us a fair number of examples of what happened without this precaution (and then the false minashiro explained it). But death feedback presents a problem for Cantus humans as they interact with regular humans, especially after the history we were shown. Put simply, Cantus is what keeps Cantus humans safe from humans but death feedback means Cantus humans can't actually use it; regular humans are thus free to come after Cantus humans with everything from sharp rocks to firearms and kill them all.

This gave Cantus humans not very many options. They could completely wipe out regular humans, they could somehow completely isolate themselves from regular humans (and make a very big bet on that isolation lasting forever), or they could somehow make it possible to safely use Cantus on regular humans without invoking death feedback. The latter is what they did: they made regular humans non-human enough that they would not trigger death feedback (or at least that they would not usually trigger death feedback; as we saw during the show, killing queerrats can still trigger it under some circumstances). Cantus humans still needed to keep an eye on queerrats, especially initially; as Squealer showed, Cantus is not guaranteed protection in many ways.

(I suppose they could also somehow make it so that regular humans couldn't attack Cantus humans, but I don't think that that's a reliable protection. Note that death feedback itself is not reliable, cf fiends.)

I don't think that the Cantus humans initially warped humans into queerrats to have slaves. I think that was just a side effect of having queerrats around and keeping an eye on them.

I see the biology of queerrat queens as a measure to make it easier to control and limit queerrats. Queerrat queens are implied to be large and mostly immobile, and they are the only breeding source of queerrats. This makes it much easier to keep track of them and much easier to eliminate rogue colonies (just kill the queen and ignore everything else) and control the spread of colonies. Cantus humans were undoubtedly already very familiar with how hard it is to control the population of people who can breed freely and widely.

The morality of the queerrat rebellion in Shin Sekai Yori

It all started when @A_Libellule and I got into a Twitter discussion about this particular issue. In the course of the discussion I had a realization about my core moral position here:

If a group has to choose between living as slaves or committing genocide, picking the latter is morally legitimate.

It would certainly be nice if the queerrats (and interested Cantus humans) could find some solution short of genocide (genocide is ugly and invites counter-genocides and so on), but they are not obliged to do so and they are not obliged to remain slaves instead of committing genocide. The Cantus humans lost all moral standing to complain about it the moment that they started keeping queerrats as slaves (and, lest we forget, wiping out entire queerrat colonies when they felt like it), just as if you try to keep someone as a slave you lose the grounds to complain if they kill you to regain their freedom.

By the way all of this applies if a group is choosing between living as slaves or 'merely' killing some (significant) number of the people keeping them as slaves. I am just taking it all the way to genocide as an extreme case.

(Naturally this deeply colours my view of Squealer's rebellion and his fate and also my overall views on the Cantus humans.)

I could go on at greater length here but I suspect that this is the kind of thing where either you agree immediately or where you are not going to be convinced at all.

Note that you can make a functional argument over whether the queerrats were going to commit genocide or simply kill some number of humans and then stop. My personal view is that they were going to have to go all the way to genocide and they knew it; one surviving breeding pair of Cantus humans was potentially all that was necessary to take over the world again and destroy all queerrats, so none could really be allowed to survive.