Roving Thoughts archives

Brief early impressions of the anime of the Summer 2012 season

As before, here are my impressions of another season's first few episodes, or at least of the shows that I have bothered to watch. This time around I'm using a different format, partly because I hope to be much harsher about what I will continue watching.

(The order within each section is roughly how good or interesting I think each show is.)

Hits:

• Moyashimon Returns: I really liked the original Moyashimon and I'm glad to see that this continues the wackiness of before, educational interludes and all. You probably want to watch the first series before trying this one out because it pretty much starts in the middle without bothering to explain very much.

• Dog Days': I liked the first series, as lightweight as it was, because it was genuinely cheerful and fun. The second series is delivering more of the same (so far, but I have no reason to think that will change).

Hits that could easily fumble things in future episodes:

• Hagure Yuusha no Estetica: I'm with SDB here; the first episode is a refreshingly different take on the whole collective of usual light novel cliches. I like that the protagonist is competent, confident, and has things together; you might even call him sort of grown up. On the other hand the setting and basic premise mean that the show could easily go downhill from here.

• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (aka Humanity has Declined): I'll be honest; I didn't find the first two episodes of this as darkly humorous or as funny as the rest of the ani-sphere seems to have. What has hooked me for now is a moment that was the punchline and logical consequence of a series of things that we were shown through the first two episodes. I can't help but feel affection for a show that's willing to be that clever, subtle, and patient.

  (Despite that I'm not so taken with Jinrui that I'm willing to elevate it to a hit just yet.)

• Campione: based on the near universal thumbs down of this that I saw in my slice of the anime twitter-sphere and blog-o-sphere, I was expecting something terrible or at least utterly boring. Well, that's not what I got. This may be a collection of light novel cliches but it's a well assembled one; I was entertained throughout the entire first episode. With that said, the first episode was all background and who knows what happens next.

  I expect to keep watching this as long as it avoids falling into boring cliches and then drop it like a hot potato. My cynical side gives that an episode or two.

  (Having watched (part of) both Hidan no Aria and Dragon Crisis, among other bleah-inducing light novel adoptions, I feel qualified to say that Campione's first episode is no Dragon Crisis (much less HnA) and that I am not entertained by everything. Execution matters.)

Need to see more of before I can say one way or another:

• Sword Art Online: Time for me to be contrarian. The first episode of SAO was workmanlike and pretty but also disappointing; it was a barely disguised massive info-dump to set up the background to the actual show, which might perhaps start next episode. We haven't even seen one of the major characters yet and the characters that we have seen are mostly ciphers so far. Since lots of people praise this, I'm willing to give it another episode to see if the actual story is engaging.

  (The difference between SAO's first episode and Campione's first episode is that the latter managed to say a lot about the characters and the former basically didn't.)

  Beyond that, I have no idea if I'll be able to tolerate the premise or if it will turn out to be too close to what I've called the 'trapped protagonist' genre. If the show plays up the angst of the protagonists seeing people die around them or similar things, I'm out.

  (I've read some people praising SAO as compared to Accel World because the stakes are higher in SAO than in AW (where the characters aren't risking anything except the ability to keep playing a game). I, uh, disagree with this view, to put it one way. Shows are not necessarily improved by the grim prospect of death.)

The core difference between SAO, Campione, and Estetica is that the latter two had first episodes that were engaging but potentially highly atypical while the former had an unengaging first episode but I'm willing to give it another episode to see if it gets better.

• Muv-Luv Alternative - Total Eclipse: To be blunt, the first two episodes were a waste of time (and the second episode was an exercise in brutality). The first episode almost put me to sleep with a barrage of stuff about characters I could barely be bothered to tell apart, as well as a moment that had me yelling at the screen. The second episode then bloodily slaughtered everyone except the show's protagonist just to make sure we got the point that this war was horrible and dangerous and that the alien menace was thoroughly unpleasant. Apparently the real story starts in the third episode and people say it is much better, honest. I suppose I'll watch the next episode to see, since I've already invested the time to watch the first two. (This is the fallacy of sunk costs in action.)

  (I'm going into TE basically cold. I understand that it's at the tail end of a series of spinoffs of spinoffs of spinoffs or something, but I don't know or care about any of the details and I expect the show to stand on its own.)

On the edge:

• Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon II: The first episode delivered crazy action but I remember what happened after the first episode of the first season (and it did not involve more crazy action). Still it looks like there's probably going to be at least one more episode of fighting and Horizon is good at making that interesting.

  With my new found determination to drop things rapidly instead of sticking grimly to them, I think I'm going to watch this until people start standing around and talking to much and then immediately drop it.

• Rinne no Lagrange season 2: The first season was kind of like a lightweight, inoffensive version of an action show, and the first episode of this season is much the same. I feel conflicted because once again this is just good enough to be casually enjoyable and entertaining while I'm actually watching an episode.

  If I was smart, I would probably drop this now and use my time for something more productive. I'm probably not that smart (and watching this is pretty certain to be brainless, which is sometimes useful).

Misses:

• Arcana Famiglia: I would really like to like this show because the premise of a strong female character kicking ass and taking charge of her own life is rare and attractive. Unfortunately the execution of the first episode was basically a paint by numbers exercise that left me disinterested in all of the characters, the heroine included. I have no enthusiasm for seeing more, especially since descriptions of the second episode do not exactly make it sound thrilling (or even vaguely exciting).

I haven't watched anything else from this season yet and at the moment I'm not planning to; none of the remaining shows sound interesting enough to draw my attention (at least not now that I'm trying to be pickier than I have been in the past). As always, this could change if Twitter and blogs manage to make something sound sufficiently attractive.

(Sometimes that even works out and I wind up watching a good show.)

My problem with Fate/Zero: the characters

One of the reasons that I wound up watching Fate/Zero only sporadically and without any particularly burning enthusiasm is that I found basically all of the characters to be, in Author's phrasing, jerkfaces. Out of the entire collection of Masters and Servants and secondary characters, the only one I actually found likable was Waver (and even then he's only truly likable after he's matured). Even the much-admired Iskandar is not all that nice when you get down to it, for all that he serves as a good father figure for Waver.

(The closest any Servant comes to being likable are Saber and Lancer but they're both what I'll call 'Heroic Stupid', each blindly heroic in their own different ways. They're both capable of doing cool things but that doesn't mean that I find them sympathetic.)

There are two areas of special failure that I want to single out. The first is that Fate/Zero reduces a number of characters to cartoon villainy or close to it, most noticeably Ryuunosuke and Caster but also people like Kayneth to a lesser extent. This is lazy storytelling and pretty much made these characters boring, which was not helped by the story's ham-handed attempts to make them vaguely sympathetic (often at literally the last moment).

(It's possible to make totally evil characters still be interesting, but it takes being clever instead of just kicking dogs. Caster pretty much just kicked dogs, metaphorically speaking.)

The second is Kiritsugu. The story's attempt to make him sympathetic by giving him a tortured background simply persuaded me that he had been damaged from the start. I felt that his actions and reactions were too unrealistic for anything approaching a normal child and the story didn't convince me that he'd been broken by excessive stress; instead I wound up feeling that Kiritsugu was a natural killer who had latched on to the idea of 'justice' as a substitute for any innate sense of morality.

(In the Fate-verse, this struck me as completely unsurprising for a mage and the child of a mage. Let's face it, a lot of mages in the Fate series are badly morally damaged; just look at Tokiomi's actions with Sakura for one example.)

(I was prodded to write this entry by Schneider's entry (via Author). I entirely agree with him on the Fate/Stay Night characters versus the FZ ones; the cast in F/SN is much more likable and interesting to me and as a result I found F/SN much more engaging than I did F/Z.)

Sidebar: On Iskandar

My view of Iskandar is kind of tangled. On the one hand, he spends a lot of time in the show being a likable guy and a good person for Waver to be around. On the other hand, I can't watch those segments without remembering what Iskandar ultimately believes in and that at the core he is not a good person (no matter how nicely he may act); instead, he is the King of Conquerors, larger than life in vices as well as virtues. I can't listen to even his early enthusiasm for taking over this new world he finds himself in without thinking about what his words imply.

(We may laugh at his ambition, but Iskandar is serious. He would throw the world into fire and sword simply because he wants it. I can't forget this even when he's personally nice to people.)

Looking back at the Winter 2012 anime season

This is what you could call 'extensively delayed'. Since the Winter 2012 season is well over by now, it's more than past time for another one of my retrospectives to go with my early impressions and my followup on what I was probably going to actually watch.

(If I was clever I'd claim that I'm doing this so late in order to wait for Moretsu Pirates to finish so I could have a proper view on it, but the truth is that I just sat on this for various reasons.)

The short summary is that I finished everything that I thought I was actually going to. That would be:

• Moretsu Pirates: This wound up never being deep but generally managed to be entertaining. The details were best not thought about too deeply, because it turned out that the show's attitude towards zero-g was typical of its attitudes towards almost everything. Still, it was a fun ride and the kind of light entertainment that we don't often see these days.

  (I sympathize with Author, but I've long ago managed to gain the ability to turn off my brain when watching a lot of anime.)

  My concise summary is that Pirates turned out to be entertaining but not serious, nowhere near up to the overall level of Sato's various famous series (which managed to be both entertaining and substantive). I don't know if this is the fault of the source material, the adaptation process, or both. If you want more depth on this view, see Jonathan Tappan (via Author).

• Nisemonogatari: I didn't like this as much as Bakemonogatari (and there were parts of it that made me twitch), but on the whole I enjoyed it. At this distance I find I don't have anything substantive to say about it. It delivers the *monogatari experience, which is either good or bad depending on your views of that experience.

  (The twitch inducing stuff in Nisemonogatari is a sufficiently complex subject that it does not fit in the margins of this entry.)

• Ano Natsu de Matteru: I enjoyed it and have already written enough words about it.

• Rinne no Lagrange: This is not finished as such, since we've only seen the first half so far; the second half is coming up in the summer season. While I enjoyed the first half I'm not quite sure I enjoyed it enough to actively watch the second half. Overall I would say that its flaw is being a bit lightweight without the characters, setting, and situation being sufficiently intrinsically interesting to offset this.

• Inu x Boku SS: This was charming and generally made me smile, and had the grace to end at a good spot (the manga series is ongoing). It delivered more or less what I was expecting, with somewhat less supernatural stuff than I was hoping for.

  (My attitudes on the anime are tangled because I read ahead in the manga, so now I find it hard to cleanly evaluate either. I will say that the anime was well enough done that I found myself enjoying watching stuff that I'd already read.)

Theoretically going to finish real soon now:

• Aquarion EVOL: I wrote something about why I was still watching EVOL and then kind of stalled out on it when it appeared to be starting to mix plot into its crazy hijinks (plot is not what I was watching EVOL for). Still, what I've read says that it finished quite well and certainly I watched it all through the actual Winter 2012 season.

I managed to not watch any more of Shana III, although I may change that someday. I also didn't watch any more of Senki Zesshou Symphogear (in fact I think I stopped immediately after writing that it was teetering on the edge back in this).

As a general comment: giving up on watching shows partway through instead of grimly sticking to them out of a misplaced, neurotic sense of completeness turned out to be a remarkably liberating thing and feels quite good. I don't regret anything in Winter 2012 that I stopped following, even if (as in the case of Shana III) they may ultimately turn out to be kind of good. I really should have started doing this long ago and I hope to do more of it in the future.

(Well, okay, I already have with the Spring 2012 season, but that calls for another entry.)

(As before, my reasons for wanting to do this retrospective are more or less covered here.)