Roving Thoughts archives

Looking back at the Spring 2013 anime season

It's time and past time for another one of these post-season looks back, to go with my early impressions. I didn't do a midterm view this season because, frankly, my anime viewing flagged a lot in the middle of this season (that's also why this retrospective is delayed).

For this season, in order:

• Space Battleship Yamato 2199 (2012): This is so good that paradoxically I only watch it sporadically (partly because I spent a bunch of the season hammered by my usual spring allergies). It continues to be excellent. I don't really have anything coherent to say about it apart from that.

  Oh wait, yes I do: this is epic in an excellent way. This is (lovingly produced) space opera and I cannot help but love it for that.

• Ginga Kikoutai Majestic Prince: The show has gone from strength to strength, having a heart and being quietly serious without losing its goofy charm and weirdness. Chunks of the story are kind of silly and over the top but MJP makes them work by taking them seriously but not too seriously. I'm really enjoying it as it continues.

  Let me summarize it this way: MJP paints in broad strokes and then quietly goes back to fill in little subtle details here and there.

• Valvrave the Liberator: The show spent most of the season being utterly crazy, dipped into unpleasant territory at the end of the infamous episode ten (see Evirus), and in the end did manage to convince me to sort of care about some of the characters. I've wound up looking forward to when it resumes in the fall season.

  (I actually think that this show is crazier than Aquarion EVOL, which is quite an accomplishment. In EVOL most of the stuff sort of makes sense within the context of the show, where Valvrave comes across as simply piling escalation on escalation.)

• To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S: I stalled on this for most of the season (and I'm still behind). I've found this very erratic because I'm not really interested in anything except the action and action-related bits. The character interaction, goofing around, and much of the angst isn't terribly exciting but the Mikoto fights have been good. When the show focuses on action it's nice; when people are standing around talking we get into the Railgun cycle.

  Despite stalling out on it much more than I did on Gargantia, I'm more fond of Railgun S because I like it more on the whole. Our cast of characters continues to be great, I just wish that most of them had more substantial things to do with the story (as opposed to either being excluded entirely or nattering away on side things).

• Suisei no Gargantia: My feelings on Gargantia aren't amenable to easy summaries. On the whole I think the show was emotionally satisfying and well made at a technical level (some of the battle sequences were great and the animation always felt decent). Unlike a lot of shows it's willing to shut up and let things speak for themselves, which lends it a certain air of subtlety; sadly, that air is misleading because the overall plot often uses a sledgehammer. And while the show is emotionally satisfying, any number of things don't actually make much sense if you look at them at all closely. The plot sledgehammer meant that I felt very unenthused about the low points of the show (the latter parts of episode 9 through much of episode 11) and stalled out on it for a significant amount of time.

  (But those low bits are actually a great illustration of how it's hard to call this show: with a few exceptions, Ledo's emotional turmoil and ultimate decision was handled subtly and much more gracefully than, say, Mikoto's angst in Railgun S. The overall plot used a sledgehammer but the execution had a light touch.)

  I believe that I've seen Gargantia called a well-executed collection of cliches designed to appeal to the fans. This is not a bad way to put it and goes well with how almost all of the female characters are designed to be (overly) fanservice-y. Unlike Evirus I have no desire to see more. This story is done and nothing about the show makes me interested in seeing the same sort of execution of any others.

  I'm not convinced that Gargantia was ultimately worth my time. I don't really think I would have missed anything I'd regret much if I hadn't watched it and if I'm being honest I only finished it out of some sense of completeness given that people were saying that the last few episodes were quite good (which they mostly are).

Stalled:

• Hataraku Maou-sama!: I stalled out on this immediately after writing my early impressions for fuzzy reasons. I theoretically intend to try picking this up again because people praise it but I just haven't had the energy.

Excluding Yamato as a special case I genuinely enjoyed MJP and Valvrave and sort of slogged my way through Railgun S and Gargantia. At my low and slow points in the season I was watching only MJP and Valvrave; only after the end of the season am I catching up on the other two.

Brief impressions of the anime of the Spring 2013 season

As before this is my early impressions of the spring's crop of new shows, or at least the small number of them that I've bothered to watch. This time around I've been unusually selective about the shows that I've tried out, so I've rejected any number of things sight unseen based purely on premise descriptions and so on. This may have caused me to miss gems but I haven't really seen any sign of that so far.

(In particular there's a number of action and adventure series that I might normally have auditioned but that I'm actively skipping due to bad reports.)

Hits (so far):

• Space Battleship Yamato 2199 (2012): A well produced incarnation of one of the classic stories of the genre. It's high time I watched some version of this classic and this is by all accounts a good one. I'm quite enjoying it after two episodes and I expect to keep on going.

  (Yes, I know, episodes have been out on Blu-ray for some time. I'm counting it as part of this season because it starting to air now is a large part of what's prompted me to start watching it. I was hoping that one of the regular subtitling groups would take the airing as their cue to give it a go-over, but apparently not.)

• Suisei no Gargantia: The adventures of a castaway soldier and his very powerful, nicely deadpan mecha in a somewhat silly world. I don't have much to say about this besides that it's interesting and amusing. The male protagonist is no Sagara Sousuke but he'll do.

• Ginga Kikoutai Majestic Prince: This is managing to be both goofy and serious at the same time without fumbling things. The goofiness predominates, which is one reason I find it fun to watch; the show is frequently painting with a relatively broad brush. As takes on the 'war is hell and so is what people do in it' genre go, I think this approach is much more interesting than the grim Gundam one.

• To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S: My mixed feelings about the first season of Railgun came roaring back when I saw the first episode of this, but I remain determinedly optimistic. It'll probably be worthwhile on the whole once the dust settles. Apart from that I don't really have anything to say; it's Railgun. I did rather enjoy the second episode and I kind of wish they'd started the show with it rather than spend almost all of the first one reintroducing us to the important characters (as if we could have forgotten them).

  (See NovaJinx on the Railgun cycle, because he's right about it.)

• Valvrave the Liberator: After two episodes this is a glorious, epic trainwreck that's utterly impossible to take seriously. Of course it could be serious about itself and become boring, but hope springs eternal.

  (Now I kind of understand people's feelings for Code Geass, which was apparently also this kind of epic crazy trainwreck.)

On the edge:

• Hataraku Maou-sama!: The comedy doesn't work for me but the plot that's developed at the end of the second episode is just holding my interest for now. With that said this may not last long.

  (I know, I'm an episode behind right now. This may be a bad sign.)

Miss:

• Devil Survivor 2 The Animation: My first draft of these impressions contained what was in retrospect a bunch of excuses for this show to explain why I was still watching it. If I have to make excuses for a show, it's not good and I should admit it to myself (even if I did watch three episodes sort of in hope).

  One of the several strikes against it is that it is trying too hard to have a steampunk Evangelion feel. The result is more bemusing than the creators probably intended.

Sadly a miss:

• Namiuchigiwa no Muromi-san: This is probably a fine comedy but sadly and as usual I didn't find it really funny. It makes me smile every so often and it's watchable, but without laughs it's not really compelling. For what it's worth it strikes me as well executed and well paced; if its humour clicks with you, I suspect that you'll enjoy it a fair bit.

  (I actually feel a bit frustrated that I'm not laughing at Muromi's rapid-fire humour. I'd like to be enjoying it.)

Not for me:

• Aku no Hana: I am completely and utterly uninterested in the story, no matter how impressive or well executed it is.

• Shingeki no Kyojin: Everything I've heard says that it's bleak, bloody, grim, and so on. I've decided that I'm simply not interested in that sort of thing right now, regardless of how good it is or how much it might be my kind of thing with less blood and bleakness.

Just no:

• Haiyore! Nyaruko-san W: I eventually found the first season to be (boringly) ordinary so I'm not getting sucked into the second season.

• Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Bride: Just no, because sometimes I'm smart enough to not get caught in the same trap twice.

Other shows probably fall into the 'I read bad things about them' category mentioned above.

(This specifically includes Karneval, Mushibugyou, Crime Edge, Red Data Girl, and Arata Kangatari. As always, I may wind up checking out some or all of them out later due to future good reports, boredom with the shows I'm watching, or both.)

Darktable versus Rawtherapee

When I wrote my entry on Linux RAW processors I said that Rawtherapee was a better choice than darktable. I have to take that back because it turns out my quick tests weren't a good representation of using either program for real.

I formed my initial views after test-processing just a couple of photos with each program. Now that I've used both to process batches of photos for real (and in one case I've run the same batch through both), I've had to change my opinion. It turns out that darktable is what you want to use, not Rawtherapee. For all of darktable's irritations, it works better. I summarized the main reasons why in a tweet:

Darktable drives me up the wall and I hate the experience of using it, but it delivers better results than Rawtherapee and does it faster.

(I've since become more acclimatized (or numb) to darktable's interface issues.)

The first issue is that Rawtherapee turns out to be relatively terrible for sorting through a bunch of photos and figuring out which ones are worthwhile. I could do it, but it took too long and was a pain in the rear in all sorts of ways because Rawtherapee has fumbled multiple aspects of doing this efficiently. Darktable is not great at this but in practice I can go through a bunch of photos much quicker and more efficiently with it. Since this is a major part of my daily workflow, this matters a lot to me.

(For example, Rawtherapee has absolutely and utterly terrible downsizing of thumbnails in its directory overview, to the point where they are basically useless for telling you anything about the quality of the photos. Think of the most crude and jagged downsizing you've seen; that's Rawtherapee.)

The other part is that I get better processed photos with darktable, in that I like how they look and it's (much) easier to produce what I think of as good looking photos. Again, darktable is not perfect and there are some things that Rawtherapee unquestionably does better, but darktable wins overall for me. I find it very hard to argue with clearly better results, especially when I can get them surprisingly rapidly and easily.

Now I'm going to say something that may make people especially unhappy, because there's a third advantage to darktable. Namely, it's under much more active development than Rawtherapee (I track the source repositories for both and darktable sees multiple commits a day whereas Rawtherapee moves much slower). I know that development activity doesn't necessarily equal quality, but both programs are highly imperfect right now so the one that's under much more active development is much more likely to improve into something good (or at least have your favorite irritation fixed).

(Note that with either program you want to be using the latest version compiled from the project's source repository. Both are under active development and improvement and yes, it really makes a difference. Probably not as much a difference as in my initial tests (where the then-current release versions produced bad output), but you'll find that both are better experiences.)

(As before, you should pay attention to the publication date of this entry if you're coming here through a web search. It's quite possible that things will be different in a year or two. I certainly hope that Rawtherapee improves substantially over time and at least some of its issues should be relatively fixable.)

Sidebar: what happened to make me discover this

I didn't set out to try out both on a batch of real photos; instead, I set out to process a batch with Rawtherapee because I thought it was the program for me. After slogging through the whole process and getting a trio of processed photos that I wasn't really enthused with, I decided to re-run the same batch through darktable just to see. Much to my surprise I was able to do so much faster and I was uniformly much happier with the results, to the point where I immediately replaced all of the Rawtherapee versions I'd uploaded to Flickr with the darktable versions.

(The extra speed with darktable didn't come because I immediately zeroed in on the 'best' photos and only dealt with them. I reconsidered all of the batch from scratch in darktable, although I wasn't surprised to wind up with the same set of selects.)