Roving Thoughts archives

Brief impressions of the Winter 2018 anime season so far

Every year, the onset of January with its freezing cold gives me the urge to just hibernate until spring; my energy and drive drops, and it's very easy to put things off if they take some amount of initiative. This has hit me unusually hard this year, which is a large part of why I'm writing what is normally an 'early impressions' entry so far into the season. But still, I'm writing it, so as usual here's how my views of this season have shaken out so far, following up on my first episode reactions.

Very enjoyable:

• Laid-Back Camp (aka Yuru Camp): This is simply ridiculously charming and comfortable for me, in much the same way that Long Riders was. The show is very good at making fall and winter camping attractive. To my surprise it's also completely sold me on the character I didn't expect to like, and overall it's wound up being one of the two most compelling shows of the season for me.

  (Nick Creamer has convinced me that it's doing some clever structural things too, so this is not the simple show it sort of appears as; it has a lot of smarts and excellent execution behind the scenes.)

• Darling in the FranXX: I don't have very high expectations for this show, which means that sometimes it's surprised me. I'm fairly sure that the show is deliberately working on some big ideas but its implementation so far is merely ordinary and sadly conventional. It is pretty nice looking and well made, which makes it a good popcorn show for me.

  (It's the second most compelling show of the season for me.)

Good:

• Katana Maidens - Toji no Miko: The show has continued to execute pretty well with any number of nice little touches but without doing anything spectacular. I've seen it compared to Mai Hime and I sort of agree with that, although I don't think it's up to Mai Hime's quality. I'm enjoying it as a popcorn watch.

Divided opinions:

• Violet Evergarden: I have wound up feeling that this is good without being compelling. I enjoy episodes when I watch them on a minute to minute basis, but I don't feel much of a push to watch new episodes when they become available (as a result, I'm currently behind). It doesn't help that I find some aspects of the overall story to be hard to believe in if I think about them too hard.

  It is very pretty, though, and also very well directed and made. Kyoto Animation is pulling out the stops for this and it shows.

  (This is close to what I expected before the start of the season, because the whole story premise we were given didn't sound like my kind of thing. I'm pleasantly surprised that I've found VE as interesting as I have; I expected to bounce off it almost immediately, but instead I'm enjoying it on an episode to episode basis.)

I'm not considering Devilman Crybaby as part of this season for the simple reason that I've already watched all of it, since the entire show appeared at once at the start of January. About all I want to try to say here is that watching it was a pretty wild ride and not at all what I expected at the start.

In ongoing shows, The Ancient Magus' Bride has trucked on much as it was last season, with a mixture of competently done stuff, disappointingly ordinary things that should be extraordinary, and some surprisingly great episodes that I've loved. This is not a truly spectacular adaptation, but it has its moments.

I'm theoretically watching March comes in like a Lion but in practice I haven't gotten up enough mental fortitude to face the two remaining episodes in the Hina bullying arc, which means that I haven't watched any of its episodes since the start of January. I understand that things pick up and it has a happy ending, but the whole thing is so heavy that I keep putting it off (my latest excuse is 'I'll catch up while March is off due to the Winter Olympics').

In practice all of this means I'm regularly watching four shows more or less promptly and eventually watching a fifth. I hope to increase that by one by catching up on March and letting it work its magic on me, but that requires energy and gumption instead of hibernation, and hibernation is really easy right now.

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Winter 2018 season

As before I'm collecting here all of my tweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order that I saw them).

• Laid-Back Camp episode 1: That was laid back and charming, plus it had bicycles. Unfortunately I may get tired of the genki maniac girl, which is a pity since the show seems pretty well directed. #yurucamp ♯

• Devilman Crybaby episode 1: It's going somewhere and it's not the personal turn-off I sort of expected from initial commentary. It is very over the top, but I guess that's Go Nagai for you. The man doesn't go small. →

• Violet Evergarden episode 1 was interesting, intriguing, and very pretty (of course). But it was all introduction and setup and as such says very little about what the show will be like in the long run, although it did persuade me to watch the next episode. ♯

• Darling in the FranXX episode 1: That was a solid introductory episode, even if it was a bit narration heavy. But as usual it doesn't say much about what further episodes will be like; it's just doing a good job of selling us the show's basic premise. ♯

• Beatless episode 1: That was flavourlessly generic, with only an occasional flash of anything particularly interesting. Nothing stands out and I have no interest in more. #

• Maerchen Maedchen episode 1: This was popcorn but decently fun and amusing popcorn. It's good enough to entice me into watching the next episode, at least. ♯

• Katana Maidens - Toji no Miko episode 1: That was a quite snappy and interesting first episode, with surprisingly excellent fight scenes and an intriguing setup and more showing than telling. →

I took a brief run at watching the widely acclaimed A Place Further Than the Universe (aka the 'going to Antarctica' show) but didn't feel like watching more than a few minutes of the start, so I've tentatively concluded that it's not for me even though it's clearly very well made. This is not very surprising; I'm almost entirely burned out on watching high school teens in ordinary life.

(Laid-Back Camp is working for me so far because of the camping segments, making it like Long Riders and biking.)

I may at some point look at Hakumei and Mikochi, but it doesn't seem compelling based on current descriptions. Perhaps I will look at Pop Team Epic briefly just to experience it a bit, but I can't imagine watching even an entire episode much less the entire show.

Looking back at the Fall 2017 anime season

Once again it's time for my traditional look back at what I watched in this past Fall season, to follow up on my early impressions and my midway views. In general this has been a very good season for anime for me, with a couple of amazing shows.

(None of these shows changed what they were from my midway report, so I'll refer you there for fuller descriptions of all of the shows rather than trying to paraphrase them here.)

Excellent to amazing:

• Land of the Lustrous: The show was many things, but above all it was stunning. It didn't have a conclusion or an ending or really a climax, but as a story about how Phos changed it was a complete success, including the generally contemplative last episode. I'll hope for more some day, and if not there's the manga.

  (I'm glad that Land of the Lustrous didn't try to sail off on an anime-original tangent to try to deliver an ending or a climax, because I honestly can't see how it could have delivered on everything LoL had built up.)

• Girls' Last Tour: The show did not give us a conclusion but it did give us basically the perfect ending. We got as many answers as we needed and a confirmation of what we already knew about what happens next; the girls will continue their last tour, because there is nothing else. To quote myself, the show as a whole was a quiet, beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking gem.

  (Girls' Last Tour is what Kino's Journey (2017) should have been but it was also very much more.)

Excellent but wrenching:

• March comes in like a Lion: March has been very good lately but also kind of oppressive, because it keeps coming back to Hina being bullied. I'm honestly reaching the point where I'm not sure I want to keep watching because it's just so painfully real and the emotional doom and pressure is unrelenting. Rei wallowing in depression was a lot easier to watch than Hina metaphorically getting kicked repeatedly, and anyway we got to watch him emerge from that, grow, and learn life lessons. No such thing seems to be on offer for Hina's situation, which is extremely realistic but not exactly comfortable watching.

  (You can see how much of an impact the Hina story has had on my impressions of March given that the episodes since my midway views have only lightly touched on it, yet I'm still spooked at the idea of a full chapter (aka half episode) putting us back in the middle of that oppressive environment.)

Very enjoyable:

• The Ancient Magus' Bride: I continue to be unable to evaluate this objectively. The anime hasn't surpassed the manga version in general, but the manga version is extremely good (and the anime just doesn't have the capabilities of, say, Made in Abyss's production). I think the anime is starting to show the spots where it can shine over the manga, and also to do things a little bit differently.

  (On the not entirely great side, it also continues to periodically be awfully anime in conventional ways I don't think the story needed.)

A not good show that I still watched all of:

• Kino's Journey (2017): This certainly went out with a bang in its last episode, which basically exemplified all of the overall failures of the show. But even before then it was underwhelming in multiple ways. Despite that, I finished watching the show and in a perverse way I don't regret it, because thinking about all of its failures was interesting and informative (eg).

  I'm willing to believe that the basic stories here can be done in versions with genuine depth, feeling, and resonance (partly because Girls' Last Tour did it), but this incarnation of the show was almost never capable of delivering any of that.

Dropped:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond (#10): This turned out to be a late season drop. To condense a bunch more words, I discovered that I needed this show to have an overall story and it didn't; it was just episodic meanderings around Hellsalem's Lot. That it ended with a Leo-focused two episode story didn't change this enough to make me want to watch the last two episodes.

I watched the first episode of Just Because! but it didn't hook me and I wound up not watching any more. I think ultimately this was because all of the people in it were regular high school kids, which basically made them too ordinary for me even with very good execution. I can see why people love it so much, though.

My top two shows of this season are something else entirely, and March and AMB are quite good (in my biased opinion about the latter). As for the rest, well, things happen. I'm starting to expect it; my tastes have apparently shifted to watching fewer shows that I'm completely happy with, and there generally just aren't that many of them in any given season.

PS: Looking back, it's clear that my views of a season are now mostly driven by the best shows that I watched, not the number of shows that I found worth following. In past years I'd probably have considered this season decidedly mixed, what with a number of promising shows ending up being subpar.

Sidebar: My reading of the manga for some of these shows

I'm well ahead of the anime in The Ancient Magus' Bride and I intend to keep on going with that, partly because that's how I started and partly because comparing and contrasting the two versions has been part of my enjoyment of the anime version. If the anime goes as far into the manga as I think it's hinted it will, it's going to be a wild ride; I look forward to seeing how anime-only people react.

While Girls' Last Tour has an ongoing manga, I'm not sure I want to read any more of the story, at least right now. To put it one way, the ending we got allows me to maintain the illusion of a non-tragic conclusion to things. The manga may be heading toward its own ending, so once we know how it finishes I may re-evaluate this.

I believe that the Land of the Lustrous manga is currently about to catch up to and pass the show (in the fourth translated volume that came out last week). In theory I could read onward to follow the story; in practice, I'm going to wait both to give it time and to see if the show gets a second season. If the show does, I'm going to sit on reading the manga until after the second season.

(I've picked up the first three Land of the Lustrous manga volumes, although I haven't done more than look at small portions of them, and I intend to continue doing so with future volumes. Even if I don't read them right away, I'm going to do it sooner or later.)