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.)

Waver's moral development over the course of Fate/Zero

Here's a little theory of mine.

(Spoilers for a bit of the last episode of Fate/Zero.)

In the epilogue of Fate/Zero, there's a telling little scene with Waver that I feel shows his moral development over the course of the series. Over supper with his host family the Mackenzies, he tells them that he's decided to start traveling and he's going to be taking a part time job to raise money for this, so can he stay at their place for somewhat longer?

There's two interesting things about this. The obvious thing is that he bothers to ask them them instead of coercing them with magic, as he did earlier in the series. However you can argue that he has no choice here because Glen Mackenzie already saw through his earlier magical coercion, but I still think that this shows a shift in his attitude towards his host family.

More interesting and less obvious is that Waver is bothering to get a part time job at all. All through the previous parts of Fate/Zero, Waver never showed any signs of worrying about money; if anything, he and Iskandar seemed to spend it freely and casually. My assumption is that Waver was using magic to deal with the problem, either to get money or to coerce people into believing that they'd been paid (probably the former since Iskandar seems to have had no problems buying things without Waver present). But now something has changed and Waver wants to get the money he needs honestly and legitimately, even if it takes more work and time.

(It seems unlikely that Iskandar was the source of Waver's money and he has no choice with Iskandar gone. We know that Iskandar was summoned in Fuyuki City, after Waver traveled all the way from England to Japan.)

Is Ano Natsu de Matteru a romantic comedy or a lighthearted romance?

Author on Ano Natsu:

Overall, I think the anime was expertly executed. I am struggling to identify a romantic comedy equally good. [...]

(He then identifies Nodame Cantabile as a strong contender but feels its focus was more or less elsewhere.)

I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure that Ano Natsu is really a romantic comedy; it's a romance, but not so much a comedy in the way that, say, Nodame Cantabile is.

Ano Natsu is certainly a lighthearted romance where amusing and funny things happen (mostly because of Remon), but I'm hard put to think of actual comedy that happens in the show. In fact it's strikingly missing many or all of the painful stock comedy elements you find in ordinary romantic comedies. I think it's a 'romantic comedy' only by default, because we don't have a better name for a lighthearted, amusing romance that doesn't focus on melodrama or straightforward love.

(Since I don't watch mainstream American TV or movies, I'm actually stretching my mind all the way back to memories of to Shakespeare's romantic comedies as my basis for comparison here.)

Nodame Cantabile makes an especially good comparison for this because it's clear that Nodame has significant comedy elements that are played that way deliberately. For example, Milch spends a lot of the time being a comedic character that we are supposed to laugh at, we have several secondary characters as exaggerated comedic foils (even if they develop their own depths in time), and we have the ongoing saga of Nodame's messiness versus Chiaki's obsessive neatness. Fundamentally all of these are played for laughs in a way that I don't think any element of Ano Natsu is. Even Remon yanking people's chains has an edge; it's funny because she's making people be truthful (even if other characters don't realize it).

(The closest element in Ano Natsu is perhaps what's up with Mio's odd behavior, but there is very little actual comedy with that and it becomes a strong dramatic element almost the moment it's really focused on.)

PS: this entry is brought to you by insomnia; despite the posting time most of it was written at 4am.

Thinking about why Upotte! goes too far for me

Author:

Upotte was supposed to be this filthy innuendo vehicle for dirty perverts… but it really is not. It turned out to be a comedy, and honestly I liked its comedic payload more than that of Naruto SD. Funco dealing with puberty gave the haters the excuse to lash out, but it’s entirely up to the viewer where to focus.

I had a strongly negative reaction to the first episode of Upotte! when I tried to watch it, but that's far from universal and a number of people with good taste actively like the show. Author's entry has pushed me into thinking in more detail about my reaction.

It's certainly possible to deal comedically (and tastefully) with puberty in the way that Upotte!'s sort of trying to do; I even quite enjoyed a highschool comedy that went much further than Upotte!'s relatively tame innuendo. What I think got to me is the presence of the male teacher and the focus of Funco's thoughts on him; this gave the jokes and especially Funco's daydreaming involving him an uncomfortable edge, especially since Funco is in middle school. In hindsight I don't think it's a coincidence that I stopped being able to watch right at the point where Funco was fantasizing about him being the one to work her trigger.

(Looking back on Seitokai Yakuindomo, I think that part of what made it work for me is that basically everyone involved in the sex jokes were peers; adults rarely or never got pulled into them.)

Of course, it doesn't help that comedy is hit or miss with me and usually misses. The odds were always that I wasn't going to follow Upotte! even if I didn't bounce off of it with a strong reaction, but every season I check out a comedy or two in the hopes that they will really click with me. When comedy works, it's great.

Why I'm still watching Aquarion EVOL

Back when I wrote about reducing what I was watching in the winter, I was somewhat negative about Aquarion EVOL. However I'm still watching it, somewhat to my surprise. It's not because of EVOL's plot, characters, or story; I don't like any of them half as much as I do in the original Aquarion. But what EVOL has going for it over the original is that EVOL has completely embraced the crazy, and doing this makes it easily watchable just in order to see what they're going to come up with next.

The original Aquarion was always somewhat crazy but it mostly put the crazy on the backburner in order to have room for the story and the characters. EVOL hasn't bothered with this, so in pretty much every episode it has been free to have something really over the top going on. Electric bracelets that shock the pilots when they get too lovey-dovey for each other? Music that can kill? Burying everyone in a graveyard to connect them to each other? EVOL will do all of that without blinking, and more. The old standby of Aquarion's Mugen Punch turned out just to be the starting point. For me, this makes EVOL quite entertaining to follow; I can always count on something interesting and absurd going on, something I would never have predicted.

Although I'm not a mecha fan, the mecha fights are part of this too. The EVOL Aquarion has far more craziness, crazy combos, and weird powers than the original did. As of the last episode I saw there are even two of them (at least). Crazy unpredictable fights go a long way to making mecha interesting to me.

Sidebar: elaborating my relative views of the two shows

In a move that's sure to irritate fans of EVOL, I find the main plot to date laughable (really, 'Mars needs women'?), the story uninspiring (although there are flashes of promise if it makes a real stab at developing the 'fighting apparent fate' issue with Amata and Mikono), and the characters mostly reduced to barely developed cliches. As usual, the melodramatic romantic angst between the protagonists makes me wish they'd shut up (Mix and Andy are more interesting, partly because they are more low key).

By contrast I actually have fond memories of the main characters and plot of Aquarion, partly because the original focused on far fewer characters and so was able to develop them much better and partly because it actually bothered to give its characters real backgrounds and then tell us about them.

(I am not particularly grumpy about Aquarion EVOL's faults here, I just don't expect much from it beyond easy entertainment.)

Brief early impressions of the shows of the Spring 2012 season

As before, here are my sort of early impressions of another season's worth of shows. These are more or less in the order I watched the shows (which is not necessarily the order they aired in), although I'm not sure this order is useful for anyone but me. As usual for seasons (but unlike last season), the start of the season has been fairly strung out and so have these early impressions; in fact, not publishing this entry is getting embarrassing.

• Ozma (or Ozuma): I watched a couple of episodes of this and it just didn't grab me. It has a potentially interesting setting and basic plot (and I normally like action SF), but the execution leaves me unmoved and indifferent.

  (I also gave this a lot of allowances for being a Leiji Matsumoto work from an earlier era. Pickier people may have stronger reactions to it.)

• Hiiro no Kakera: Based on two episodes, this is a relatively bland and inoffensive example of its genre with nothing particularly interesting about its characters or its setting. I don't think I'm going to watch any more; watching the second episode made me realize that I want the female protagonist to be something more than a basically passive, helpless doormat.

  (Passive doormat female protagonists seem to be par for the course in this general genre, so I expect that in the future I can rule out basically all reverse harem shows like this.)

• Lupin III - The Woman Called Mine Fujiko: I've seen some Lupin movies and bits of the TV series and I've had the chance to skim through a bit of the original Lupin manga. This series is not very much like the anime but a fair bit like the manga. My short summary is that I liked it (and I don't mind the change). This is adult in the general meaning of the word; the animation is stylish and quite different from normal anime, and the show is willing to be subtle and put little details in. It remains to be seen if the show can sustain the mood and the style over its run, or if it will descend to pandering and offensiveness.

  (I could live without the fanservice. I hope it will get better, but probably not; the manga has a bunch of that sort of stuff.)

  A lot of people have written much better commentaries about this show. See, for example, Altair and Vega's colloquium (NSFW).

• Medaka Box: Medaka is so over the top that this becomes peculiarly amusing; it's impossible for me to take her or anyone around her entirely seriously. I suspect that this won't support the show for very long, but I'm willing to watch an episode or two more (at least in theory, I seem to not be getting around to it in practice).

  Update: two episodes and I'm out. This isn't amusing enough to overcome Medaka.

• Sankarea: The first episode was kind of slow moving but did manage to hold my interest and make me want to see the next one. The second one continued this trend.

  (See this interesting blog post on the cinematography in Sankarea; I think this sort of thing is one reason the show is holding my interest despite the pace.)

• Kore wa Zombie Desu? of the Dead: This is more of the same as the first season, at least based on the first episode. I liked the first season (apart from the last episode, let us never speak of that), so I will keep watching for now. I'm finding myself much less enthused than I was expecting, partly because I'm not sure what the show has left to say after the first season.

• Zetman: It's hard to tell what this is going to be about from the first episode because the OP/ED makes it clear that what the first episode covers is just backstory. Going only on the first episode's execution this seems like a decent but relatively generic shounen action story; in this season it's probably not going to sustain my interest.

• Fate/Zero #14+: It's more of the same, except that now things are slowly starting to happen. This isn't really a new show, this is just a long gap between two episodes. Since they are running out of episodes, I can hope for actual decisive fights soon.

• Nazo no Kanojo X (aka Mysterious Girlfriend X): This is different, in a good way. It strikes me as a much more grown up and interesting take on the high school romance genre with characters that are far more interesting than usual. Unfortunately the second episode has shown that I'm highly ambivalent about this; I liked the unusual stuff but found the stock high school romantic fumblings just about unwatchable.

  (Commentary suggests that the third episode continues the stock high school romantic fumblings, so I think I'm out; the genre is almost never my thing, no matter how fresh the take on it is.)

• Accel World: This wears its heart on its sleeve from the get-go; this is going to be a shonen action show about secret battles. I'm fine with that and it seems reasonably well executed so far, with some interesting gimmicks and clever characters.

  (Future episodes could very easily shoot all of this in the foot.)

• Tasogare Otome x Amnesia: I do admire the gimmick of showing most of the first episode twice, but I hope they never repeat it; once was enough to get the point. Overall, though, it was definitely fun. I like the characters and it doesn't seem like it's going to be horror.

  (I may eat those last words in an episode or two.)

• Haiyore! Nyaruko-san: What makes this work for me is that Nyaruko is both cute and horrifying, and may or may not give much of a damn about our protagonist's actual feelings. Without those elements, this would be yet another vaguely amusing, decently done show featuring a magical wish-fulfillment girlfriend. With those elements it has an interesting sharp edge. Also I actually found it funny, unlike most comedies.

  (Only time will tell if the show keeps these elements, of course. If Nyaruko doesn't do a few creepy things every episode, I'll be disappointed and get bored.)

• Jormungand: This is no Black Lagoon, but then very few things are. It's an acceptable and interesting entrant in the same genre, even if the only character I'm really interested in is Jonah himself.

  (I think this show has the most addictive OP song of this season, broken English and all.)

• Eureka Seven AO: I haven't seen the original Eureka Seven so I'm undoubtedly missing all sorts of things, but the first episode of this felt merely ordinary to me. I'll likely continue watching it out of hope because a lot of people seem enthused.

  (The second episode makes some of the first episode's characters more interesting and complex than they initially seemed, which I like.)

• Sakamichi no Apollon: Given the ordinary setting I wouldn't normally have watched this, but its pedigree made me check it out. I've wound up more interested than I expected, although I don't know how long I'll continue watching.

• Tsuritama: I really enjoyed the first episode; it was crazy, stunning, peculiar, and above all interesting. It's not afraid to mix crazy metaphors into a crazy reality and take both to the limit. I am eagerly looking forward to future episodes; if they can sustain the power of the first episode, this will be a show to remember. I can think of no greater praise than to say that the first episode at least is truly a noitaminA show, a show that could only be made by people who're willing to take chances.

  (Apollon is not really a noitaminA show in this sense; it's different but not daring.)

  The second episode is more conventional and less stunning than the first one, but it's still sustaining my interest.

• Hyouka: This has visual style, interesting characters, and subtle storytelling. I like it. The larger story it's aiming for may not be original but it looks like it will be well done.

  (This season seems to be a quite good one for shows that are trying for something besides the standard anime visual style.)

  For a contrarian take you can read Shinde Iie. I can see all of the flaws that this review points out, but for me they don't (currently) matter; I'm happy to enjoy the execution.

My best show of the season so far is Lupin by a mile. Nothing else is even attempting to be as interesting. Note that Lupin could fail massively, because this is nature of taking big risks by being unconventional.

This season has so many decent-or-better shows that I have no idea what I'm going to watch for the full season. It's clear that I'm going to have to trim from what I'd normally watch, possibly quite aggressively. As it is I'm already backlogged on episodes for some shows in this list.

Passing on very aggressively:

• Upotte!!!: When I initially heard about it, the premise seemed merely goofy (and decent anime has been made from goofy premises before). What they decided to do with the premise is cringe inducing and left me somewhere between utterly disinterested and actively repulsed; I didn't even finish the episode.

Not watching even though it may be very good:

• Space Brothers: All of my impressions so far from commentary around the net are that this is a well done and probably moving slice of life show. I don't watch slice of life shows, not even when they are salted with some promise of space, especially when they are apparently 50+ episodes long.

(This is my flaw and should not deter anyone else.)

I've basically not looked at or considered other shows for various reasons that I'm not going to try to put here. I may be missing some good stuff, but that's always the case and this season is pretty overwhelming (even with potential insomnia ).

My Sai Mecha 2012 nominations, in which I commit all sorts of heresy

I was completely oblivious to Sai Mecha last year, but this year I'm on Twitter and so I'm getting a lot more exposure to the whole anime blogosphere thing. So here are my nominations for Sai Mecha 2012, made partly so I can be amused by ghostlightning's scorn and be burned at the stake as a heretic.

My big heresy is that I'm not particularly a mecha fan. Very few mecha persuade me to actually believe in them; usually I am somewhere between passively accepting them as a necessary background element and rolling my eyes. In general I'm not a fan of giant humanoid mecha and especially not a fan of giant humanoid mecha that are presented as 'realistic' (because they aren't, not even with aggressive hand waving, and don't get me started about the control schemes that people use for those realistic mecha).

So my list:

• The GD-42 Battlemover, Vision's crab (or spider) mecha from Bubblegum Crisis #7 ('Double Vision'). This is the first mecha that made me believe in it and think that it was cool, and it will always hold a place in my heart for that reason. Besides, how can you not like something that completely owned the Knight Sabers when they fought?

  (I expect this nomination to meet either blank looks or laughter.)

• EVA-01 (Neon Genesis Evangelion): this is the giant robot that created whatever acceptance of giant humanoid mecha that I currently have. EVA-01 was humanoid but not at all human, simultaneously cool and disturbing even from its first appearance.

  Yes, I know, it rests in GARhalla to make a reappearance in the final rounds. I'm still putting it on my list because it's a touchstone of my giant robot experience.

• Tachikoma (GitS: SAC). The Major rides around in them so this totally makes them count as mecha, right?

  (The great thing about Tachikoma as a nomination is how hard it is to separate their appeal as mecha from their appeal as characters. I look forward to the rage if they get into the voting.)

• Tauburn (Star Driver), because you cannot get crazier than this if you try hard. Tauburn is the endpoint of crazy, nonsensical, yet totally beautiful and stylish mecha.

• Aquarion (Aquarion EVOL): The EVOL Aquarion is better than the original one because it has far more craziness, crazy combos, and weird powers. Also there are apparently at least two of them, maybe more, and if that doesn't scare you it should.

• Giant Robo (Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still). Giant Robo (the show) is in large part an extended love letter to all of the old classical giant robot shows of past eras. How can I not nominate its titular mecha?

• Godannar (Godannar). I'm still not sure if Godannar is supposed to be serious or a straight-faced, over the top parody of the genre. Either way, I choose to view it as a love letter to the more Go Nagai-esque 'disturbingly excessively human' giant robot shows of yesteryear, and so I nominate its titular giant robot for the same reason as Giant Robo.

  (Besides, I've actually seen both Giant Robo and Godannar, unlike any of those giant robot shows of yesteryear.)

To round out my list to ten, I will also nominate the following:

• Gurren Lagann (Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann)
• Gunbuster (Aim for the Top! Gunbuster)
• Takemikazuchi (Sora no Woto), because I can't think of a tenth nominee that I like better once I was reminded that this is eligible.

Bonus 11th nominee to make up for EVA-01 not counting:

• Uranus (Giant Robo). In several ways this is a cooler robot than Giant Robo itself, with more style and wackiness. Uranus is the comedian to Giant Robo's straight man.

(It seems that Big O is everyone's tenth nominee but I don't really like it that strongly; it'd be kind of an unenthused default 'can't think of anything better' choice for me.)

As kind of mentioned above, all mecha from shows that present their humanoid mecha as in-show realistic or even plausible are automatically excluded because I cannot take them seriously. So, despite the fact that I can admire the aesthetics and all of mecha like Gundams and Macross variable fighters, none of them are getting a nomination from me.

(If I was forced to nominate a mecha from Gundam or Macross it would be the Zaku II, which is in many ways the ubiquitous Gundam mecha that everyone can recognize even if it's brutally ugly and rather silly. But even apart from other issues, it rests in GARhalla so there's no point.)

PS: I am aware that there are some mobile weapons from Gundam that are not giant humanoids. I kind of like them, but they're contaminated by being in Gundam and the shows never treated them seriously as a viable option; they were obviously just there to be monsters to be defeated, never as feasible design ideas to be embraced. If the show isn't going to respect them, I'm not going to either.

A thought on what Moretsu Pirates is about

When I started hearing about it and during the early episodes, I expected Moretsu Pirates to be an action show. You know, with pirating (or at least privateering), space battles, and so on. Since then I've come around to the feeling that Pirates is actually a character study, primarily of Marika.

As an action show, Pirates is kind of disappointing because there hasn't been much action; the show's been 'slow-moving' (from an action point of view). Viewed as a show about the characters, I think it's more interesting and the pacing, plots, and focus make more sense and fit better.

(For example, as an action show the resolution of events at the end of episode 12 is terribly disappointing; you have a tense charged situation that should be resolved through exciting action and instead, well, it isn't. But as a character piece it's an interesting view at a side of Marika that we hadn't seen before, among other things.)

All of this leads me to not expect Pirates to have some big action finish in the later parts of the show.

(This is almost short enough for Twitter but not quite. Well, maybe if I was cleverer about writing short things.)