Roving Thoughts archives

Pacing in manga versus anime

Back in the summer season, I found A Centaur's Life uninspiring and wound up dropping it. As odd as it sounds, this fascinates me, because back in the day I read some of the manga and found it generally fascinating, beautiful, and engaging (including all of the material that I watched in the show). And it's not as if the show was badly produced or badly made; the presentation was simply relatively bland, flat, and unimaginatively straightforward. A Centaur's Life is not the first show where I've liked the manga but found a competently made show uninteresting, and over time I've developed some theories about why. One of them has to do with pacing in manga versus anime.

The obvious difference is that a manga's pacing is substantially under your control, while the pacing of anime is fixed on rails. When you're reading a manga, you can slow down to absorb and soak in a page or a panel, or reread an exchange of dialog to clarify it. Or, if the manga is slow and drawn out, you can speed up. If there's a long exchange of dialog with no important changes in the panels, you can go at your reading speed or skim the panels, and if there's little dialog you can whip through the panels themselves to absorb what's happening.

(Some of the time, low-dialog panels are actively designed for you to go through fast on the first read, to feel the rush of action or events.)

In anime you have none of this freedom. The show advances dialog and events exactly as fast as it's chosen to animate them, no faster and no slower. If there are fascinating things you're not naturally free to linger over them, because the show drags you away; those things are only there for so many frames and so many seconds. Crucially, if things are slow and getting boring, you can't move along any faster; you're locked to the pace of dialog and movement and change that the show has chosen, waiting as the show ticks away seconds in animation or slow pans or characters talking and talking.

(In some video environments you can freeze frame, frame by frame, skip around, and maybe even play things at faster than normal speeds, but it's not at all as natural as reading manga faster or slower and it's likely to have other effects, such as distorting the sound.)

A broader difference is that I've come to believe that much manga is naturally paced faster than anime is, where covering the same story content simply takes longer in anime form. At least for me, I can go through 16 or 32 pages of most manga in under half an hour; in animated form, the same content often takes at least an episode and perhaps more. There are exceptions, primarily for works that are heavy on action, but A Centaur's Life is mostly not one of those. Instead, like many manga, it's got a lot of talking in various settings, accompanied by situations that can be illustrated in a panel or a page or two.

In anime, you have two or three issues that take up (extra) time. First, people can only speak so fast, usually slower than you can read dialog in a manga (although there are exceptions, as anyone who's ever had to pause the video player to read all the subtitles knows). Second, you have to animate things actually happening; you can't imply it with action lines or panel to panel transitions the way that you can in a manga (for a discussion of how action is implied in manga but must be shown in anime, see Kumi Kaoru's analysis of the Nausicaa manga). On top of this, manga drawing can be very dense with implications and many things packed into a single panel or page, which works because readers can slow down to absorb them all; in anime you must draw out all of this long enough to insure that a decent portion of your audience will have seen and absorbed everything. Of course, given that dialog takes more time, this need to draw visual things out can be handy.

An interesting example of speed in manga versus anime comes up in The Ancient Magus' Bride. As covered by Emily in The flower language of The Ancient Magus' Bride, the first episode features in part a number of views of the flowers around Elias' home, as Chise arrives with Elias for the first time. All of this feels perfectly natural and well paced in the anime. In manga, the same events are covered in equally unrushed form in about two and a half pages, with far less detail. On the one hand, this smaller manga space makes it faster to go through (and two of the pages are are a double page splash spread). On the other hand, this means that the manga can't imply or show all of the flowers (and all of the meanings) that the anime can. Sometimes drawing something out at anime pace and filling the time the dialog requires can give you greater depth and interest.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Link: Kumi Kaoru's fascinating analysis of Miyazaki's Nausicaa manga

"At First, I Wanted to be a Manga-ka": Analyzing the Nausicaa Manga by Kumi Kaoru part 1 and the continuation part 2 is a translation of Kaoru Kumi's fascinating visual and technical analysis of Hayao Miyazaki Nausicaa manga. Kaoru Kumi starts her analysis this way:

As soon as the serialization of Nausicaa began, manga lovers began to praise it highly. It seems like the two things you heard the most about it were “it’s quite cinematic” and “its style is dense and hard to read.” [...]

Putting that aside, what exactly does “cinematic” mean, anyway? [...]

She goes on to provide an explanation for what cinematic means in the context of a manga (drawing evidence from how films connect shots to other shots), give examples from other manga, and then analyze how Nausicaa itself does this. The result is a fascinating breakdown of how the manga works so well and genuinely feels cinematic, with a side discussion of how the same things would have to be presented in anime form in order to work well. In the process she mentions some fascinating details of manga, such as how the production process for commercial manga (with work split between the manga-ka themselves and assistants) influences how panels have to be composed, and how a fast or slow publication pace changes what sort of art can be in a manga.

This is just a taste and an inadequate summary. If this sort of thing is at all to your interest, read the whole thing. If I'm any guide, be prepared to set aside some time, because it completely absorbed me for the duration.

(Via Ogiue Maniax's 10th anniversary post, itself via Author.)

It officially is 'sleigh beggy' in The Ancient Magus' Bride

In The Ancient Magus' Bride, the protagonist, Chise Hatori, is a special kind of mage, and for a long time there's been some confusion over what English language term should be used for what she is. Specifically, there's been confusion and disagreement over whether she is a 'sleigh beggy' (the official Seven Seas manga version) or a 'slay vega'. Last year I wrote an entry about this, after Crunchyroll translated the term as 'slay vega' in the first episode of the OVA, partly because my personal preference is for 'slay vega'.

Since then, two things have happened. First, Crunchyroll is airing The Ancient Magus' Bride TV series, and in the TV series Chise is a 'sleigh beggy'. More importantly, we now have official confirmation from the mangaka:

@drewtnguyen: @EzoYamazaki00 HELLO! QUESTION! First, thank you for the signature at CRX! Second, how did you come up with the name スレイ・ベガ? Thanks!

@EzoYamazaki00: Hello！Thank you for coming. It is words of the Isle of Man.The words hint at a fairy or a fairy and a human child.

(Via @hikaslap. It's relevant to know that a 'sleigh beggy' is a relatively obscure type of faerie from the Isle of Man (see eg here or here, and also the discussion here).)

This pretty much settles any debate over the official English term for what Chise is. Crunchyroll has changed its translation (although its subtitles for the first OVA episode still use 'slay vega') and Kore Yamazaki herself has given us an unambiguous answer. The Seven Seas manga translation was faithful to the mangaka's intentions, wonky explanation and all.

(I do wonder how the Crunchyroll 'slay vega' translation for the first OVA episode came about (and if anyone got yelled at over it), but we'll probably never hear that story.)

I still stand by my view that it's an unfortunate choice, but it probably doesn't matter very much, especially for the TV series. Although 'sleigh beggy' does have a meaning, most people are going to read it as a weird arbitrary combination of words, just like they would have read 'slay vega'. Arguably it has less meaning that 'slay vega', because people would probably read implications into the 'slay' part of that.

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Kemono Friends shows that CG versus drawn animation is ultimately unimportant

Kemono Friends is made almost entirely in CG, and they're famously pretty janky and limited, with a stilted and awkward look (even when it tried). The show was made with so few resources that it took them until episode 7 to make the bus's wheels spin in the opening. Kemono Friends is also really good. Not 'good for its limited budget'; genuinely good, to the extent that it's likely to make any number of people's end of year lists (mine included). Kemono Friends has a depth to it that anime rarely manages, and the show does it without ever losing its lighthearted charm.

Would Kemono Friends have been better if it was made with adequate resources using traditional 2D drawn animation instead of scrappy shoestring CG? Probably; I'm willing to believe that all of the charm could have been maintained with better art and animation. How about a version of the show made in great 2D drawn animation but without the excellent writing and direction that Kemono Friends had? There are some people who would say that such a show would be better than the Kemono Friends we got because it would look much better, but I'm not among them. The greatness in Kemono Friends doesn't come from how it looks, it comes from what's in the show, and if you take that away it doesn't really matter how pretty what's left looks. A pedestrian but beautiful show is still a pedestrian show. As we've seen more than once, not even KyoAni's many talents can save a show from its own writing.

What Kemono Friends illustrates, once again, is that whether a work is made in CG or with drawn animation is far less important than what's in the work. While we've had illustrations of this before, Kemono Friends is extremely handy because it has such a gulf between its visual appearance and its quality of writing and execution. You almost never get amazing things that were made on a shoestring and show it.

This is what I mean by calling CG versus 2D animation ultimately unimportant. The difference between the two is not nothing, but moving from one to the other moves the overall quality and impact of a show far less than other things do.

(Well, for most people. There are people who care a lot about sakuga; for at least some of these people, CG is pretty much a deal killer in the same way that a mandatory English dub mostly removes my interest.)

As a corollary, that a particular show will be made in CG instead of hand-drawn animation is well down the list of things to worry about. You should be worrying much more about things like who is making it, under what conditions, what they feel about it, and what their goals are, because all of those are far more likely to change whether the end result is good or bad.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Knight's & Magic and the power of honesty

Knight's & Magic doesn't exactly have a promising premise and plot; in fact, it basically sounds like a wince inducing piece of wish-fulfillment fanfiction. A mecha otaku dies and is reincarnated as a kid genius in a world with mecha where he can use his other-worldly ideas to make the best mecha ever and be fawned over by all and sundry? Many people would give such a show a wide berth. But despite this unpromising premise, the actual series was surprisingly good, with an infectiously earnest enthusiasm and a a heart-on-sleeve appeal.

Originally I was going to write about the power of this earnestness and embracing your genre, as Thunderbolt Fantasy did last year. But earnestness by itself doesn't make a show good in the way that Knight's & Magic is; there are plenty of quite earnest works that are actually kind of terrible, and Knight's & Magic could very easily have gone off the rails itself, falling into complete absurdity and losing much of its appeal. Instead, I've come to feel that the crucial ingredient that made the show work is honesty.

Knight's & Magic is a show that is honest with itself, and as part of that it's honest about what it is; it's wish fulfillment and it never pretends otherwise. Knight's & Magic takes things seriously (it's not a satire or a farce), but it's not a serious, realistic work and it doesn't try to be one. As part of this it quite deliberately dials everything up to at least ten, not for comedy but because it's more fun that way. While earnest fun is the heart of Knight's & Magic, I don't think it would have been possible if the people behind it had not understood and appreciated what it was, warts and all.

As part of dialing everything up to at least ten and going straight for fun, K&M is completely transparent about how the plot is on Ernesti's side. This is in a way another side of the show's honesty; the show is always clear about its fundamental nature, including its ultimate niceness (at least as far as the good guys are concerned, and this is a show with very clear good guys).

Another part of this is a surprising honesty about giant robots, because the final showdown is framed as the romanticism of giant robots versus the practicality of other options. Ernesti explicitly admits this and declares that he doesn't care; he's going to defeat Gojass's creation in order to preserve the world for giant robots because that's what he loves. He wins, of course, and it doesn't feel out of place because the thumb of the plot has been on his side all along and has never made any pretense about it. Knight's & Magic is as honest about loving giant robots, with their contradictions and all, as it is about the rest of its nature.

(You can read the ending of the show as partly a nod to this conflict being a never-ending one.)

(This is part of @appropriant's 12 Days of Anime for 2017.)

Sidebar: Ignoring the long shadow of Gundam

Like many giant robot shows, Knight's & Magic winds up wanting to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand, the most interesting giant robot fights are generally against other giant robots, and in situations where there is real tension. On the other hand this means war, literally; people are fighting each other in those giant robots and dying in those pretty explosions. The contradiction between war as a cool thing with awesome giant robots and the brutal, bloody consequences of war is deeply embedded in the genre since at least Gundam.

Knight's & Magic basically ignores this. It's not that it pretends that there aren't people dying in the pretty explosions (it's pretty explicit that there are, actually). Instead, it pretends that this is no different than when the characters were fighting giant monsters earlier in the series. The opponents are different and more challenging and the fights are cooler because they are giant robot versus giant robot (or giant robot versus giant flying robo-dragon), but that's it.

(To be fair to Knight's & Magic, the show also ignored how there were plenty of people dying 'heroically' against the giant monsters. It did have one little plot section about how scary fighting is, but promptly brushed it off.)

Within the show this pretense works, but that's by authorial fiat. Outside of the show, well, there's at least a long history of doing this and the audience is probably used to it. Knight's & Magic is not a show you think deeply about, anyway. I twitch here because I'm quietly scarred by Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket.

Checking in on the Fall 2017 anime season 'midway' through

It's time once again for a much of the way through update on my earlier impressions of this season. By now the shows have all shown their cards and my views and expectations have been solidified. In the process one show is turning itself into something amazing.

Excellent:

• Land of the Lustrous: This has just gotten more and more stunning as it goes along. The show has steadily ratcheted up the tension and the stakes, all the while with excellent execution in so many ways. The latest episode (episode 9) is a stunning peak of atmosphere and all of the crows coming home to roost at once, and nothing bad even happened in it.

  (LotL was good from the start but the early episodes weren't as excellent as the later ones have been. Not because they were bad, but simply because the show had to patiently build up the background and the overall situation before it could start all the rocks rolling downhill.)

• Girls' Last Tour: This continues to be beautiful and touching, among other things; it's been quietly and subtly exploring various bits of philosophy amidst the ruins of humanity's time on Earth. Each episode always pulls me in so well that I blink and it's over.

  (Recent episodes increasingly make it feel like the show as a whole is going somewhere, in a way that's slowly increasing an unseen tension. Parly this is because the show's increasingly making it clear that this setting is basically the end of the road.)

  One thing worth mentioning is that Girls' Last Tour has really amazingly good sound direction and design. The show's sound work is an important part of the overall atmosphere and mood it achieves, and the show make it sound effortless; the music and atmospheric sounds simply work so well.

• March comes in like a Lion: The recent arc around Kawamoto Hina has been generally stunning and wrenching in a good way, and in the process has pulled March back from brink of semi-boredom. Hina's story is so oppressive that I'm glad March has moved the focus mostly off it for the past few episodes.

Land of the Lustrous is more my kind of thing than Girls' Last Tour is, but otherwise I wouldn't want to rate them against each other. Land of the Lustrous is more straightforward and so comes across as more powerful to me; Girls' Last Tour is a lot more quiet and indirect, and it seems very likely that we'll get less answers from it (partly because answers aren't the point).

Very enjoyable to me:

• The Ancient Magus' Bride: This has continued to be a solid anime of a manga that I love. I don't think it's stunning and there have been some bits that were awfully anime in a conventional way, but the whole thing remains very enjoyable to watch; I really like seeing these stories animated and enjoying my foreknowledge of what's coming. To its credit, the superdeformed comedy bits have gotten better and better integrated over time.

They're okay and I'm getting what I expected:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond: I've recently realized that this is basically an anime version of an American superhero team comic book. We have the same team of powerful people who have reasonably spectacular episodic fights and adventures, and the same fact that there is no overall plot or story movement. As an anime this is far more hard-edged than an American superhero comic would be, but it's basically the same experience.

  I'd probably be more enthused about BBB & Beyond if I cared about the characters, but I don't. Not even Leo, not any more.

• Kino's Journey (2017): I've realized that a major problem with the show is that it's simply shallow. It wants to address big philosophical issues, but its approach is bluntly obvious and feels like we're being beaten over the head. This would be okay if the show was otherwise beautiful or interesting, but it's not; it's generally flat otherwise.

  I've said on Twitter that Girls' Last Tour is what Kino's Journey should be and I stand by that. GLT is graceful and beautiful where KJ is straightforward and plain.

  (I don't remember what I saw of the original Kino's Journey being like this, so I should definitely go watch it at some point. Probably not this season, though.)

Neither of these shows are exactly good, but they're okay and at the moment I'm willing to keep watching them at a popcorn show level. To be honest, part of that is due to the name and history behind each of them. If I hadn't seen the first season of BBB, I might not be watching this one.

I'm getting tempted to check out Just Because!, so I may have something to say about it soon. I've officially dropped Recovery of an MMO Junkie after pausing it early on; the romance story may be charming, but I'm apparently not in the mood for that particular take on it.

Comedy and seriousness with the Kawamoto cats in March comes in like a Lion

March comes in like a Lion has always tried to blend some comedy into its serious overall tone. This has not always worked very well, because it's mostly been broad, silly comedy that could easily feel out of place amidst the rest of the show (and that was when the comedy even worked, which I feel it often didn't). One of those somewhat jarring comedy elements has been the Kawamoto family's cats, who've generally been presented as goofy things that the show went as far as giving voices to, so the cats could natter on about wanting some of the food on the table and so on.

Then came the most recent run of episodes, starting with episode 26, where Kawamoto Hina is in real emotional distress and the household is roiled with emotions. Now suddenly the Kawamoto cats are cats, presented with realistic looks, and we see them pressing up against their humans, trying to reassure them, or hiding under the table from the tensions around them. None of them speak, none of them are comedic or goofy. The mood has shifted and the cats are one of our bellweathers of that shift.

I really like this and think it's quite clever. It's not obtrusive; the cats and their behavior is a background thing in these scenes that you wouldn't consciously notice unless you were looking for it. But both that behavior and the shift from their previous behavior and presentation quietly helps reinforce the whole mood. And I think it wouldn't work as well as it does if the show had kept the Kawamoto cats as merely ordinary cats before; it is the shift from broad and unreal comedy cats to silent real ones that helps sell it so well.

(This elaborates on a tweet or two of mine, because I feel like it.)

On Princess Principal's ending

(There are some spoilers here.)

In my retrospective on the summer season, I said that Princess Principal wound up as more of a prequel than a story and waved my hands a bit about why that was so. Today I want to write more details about that. The first question to ask is if Princess Principal has a conventional ending. Usefully I can answer that based purely on story structure, without having to talk about the specifics of what happened.

There are two ways to have a conventional ending to a story; you can resolve a significant ongoing plot issue or you can move some dramatic characters significantly forward in their character arcs (or you can do both). If you're ending an entire work you wrap up the big things (for characters and/or the plot); if you're just ending a season, you just wrap up a medium-scale plot or move characters forward but not all the way to the end of their stories. Looked at purely through this structural lens, Princess Principal does neither. The show had no large scale plot as such (although it did have an overall situation that created the fundamental story conflict), and while the protagonists were all dramatic characters, none of them resolved their character arcs or ostensibly made dramatic changes.

At the same time, things very clearly happened over the course of Princess Principal; the protagonists all wound up in a significantly different place than they started out. The show is not simply an episodic collection of adventures where at most we find out character backgrounds and then get a brief two-episode 'climax' at the end. That these changes happen and what they are is why I call Princess Principal a prequel.

In the very first aired episode of Princess Principal, Dorothy and Chise have what is in retrospect a crucial conversation after Dorothy casually lies to some normal students:

Chise: That was a bold move.
Dorothy: It's best not to sneak around with these things.
Chise: I see Ange isn't the only one with a knack for lying.
Dorothy: Spies are all liars. You're lying to me now, Chise.
Chise: As are you.
Dorothy: So what do you say we try being honest with each other?
Chise: The idea has its charm. But if we stopped lying, we wouldn't be able to stay friends.
Dorothy: Is that really friendship?
Chise: Even parents and children lie to each other.

This deliberately sets up the usual genre atmosphere for spy stories where all of the characters have their own interests, trust is purely temporary, things aren't as they seem, and betrayal may lurk around the corner at any time. All of the protagonists have their characteristic roles in this atmosphere; Ange, Dorothy, and Chise are outright spies with their own interests and secrets, Princess is the mystery, and Beatrice is the naif outsider. In fact the entire first episode is there partly to establish this overall atmosphere, since the episode's plot is a classical spy story of deception, hidden motives, and betrayal.

Over the course of the rest of the series, all of that changes. As all of the protagonists undergo character development, we see them quietly transmute from a collection of spies thrown together into a group of comrades. This reaches its climax in the ending of the show, where over the course of the show's only real plot arc, one by one all of the characters deliberately choose to turn their backs on their previous associations and instead choose the people who've now become their friends. By the ending epilogue, these people have stopped being a group of spies thrown together and become a team that happens to work as spies. It's to Princess Principal's credit that all of these decisions feel inevitable in the light of everything we've seen the characters go through together. Of course Chise is going to come back. Of course Dorothy is ultimately going to quietly choose the people who've become her friends, and to let Ange know that.

In other words, Princess Principal is the origin story of a team, the prequel that explains how they came to be before they go on to have thrilling adventures together (if Princess Principal ever gets another season). It's not a whole story in and of itself, because it doesn't really go anywhere or resolve anything (either in plot or in character development), but the characters themselves change in important ways; they end as different people than they started and they've made real decisions in the process.

Brief impressions of the Fall 2017 anime season so far

I'm now anywhere from three to five episodes into everything I'm watching, which is long enough for most shows to show their cards and for my opinions to firm up. So, as usual, here's how my views of this season have shaken out, to follow up on my first episode reactions.

Excellent:

• Girls' Last Tour: This is beautiful and touching and funny; it makes cartoony character art fit into its scratchy desolate setting art, and has very good use of background music. I called this 'slice of post-apocalyptic life' initially, and it is that but it's also much more. It's also quietly sad and tragic, because this is life after life has stopped and periodically Chito and Yuuri will have conversations that remind you that their lives are startlingly desolate. I keep hoping for a good ending for the two, but I don't think we're going to get it.

• Land of the Lustrous: Above all, what makes LoL great is the characters and their interactions, especially Phos. There are plenty of excellent things in the rest of the show; it's beautiful (in an unconventional way), the setting is full of interesting and intriguing questions, the building they live in is great, the show makes excellent use of CG and integrates it wonderfully with conventional 2D animation, and so on. But none of them would matter half as much without the compelling characters.

  (Following my standard views, I hope that the show never tries to explain the mysteries of the setting. It's based on an ongoing manga, so I suspect that this is a good bet.)

Very enjoyable for me:

• The Ancient Magus' Bride: I love the manga and this is very much my kind of thing, so I can't possibly be unbiased here. With that said, this is a good, solid anime version of the manga, but there's nothing so far to elevate it over the manga or add much unique to the manga. It's beautiful but not stunning, and if you've read the manga I don't think this is essential to watch (although you'll probably enjoy seeing Ancient Magus' Bride animated well, in a solid adaption). People who haven't seen the manga are apparently enjoying this, too.

  In a side note, I continue to think that AMB's periodic brief digressions into superdeformed comedy are a mistake in animated form. They work in the manga, but I think that's because manga panels are more isolated from each other than moments in a TV show are. In the animated version, the SD moments undercut the mood and impact of the beautiful regular animation. The comedy would be just as good without the characters going so SD.

  (The realities of TV anime production were always sort of tilted against AMB being stunning in the way I wanted it to be. But then, Flying Witch arguably managed it, although the manga was sparser than Ancient Magus' Bride.)

As good as always:

• March comes in like a Lion: On the one hand, this is still the same show it was before it paused. On the other hand, I'd like things to be moving more than they are; the first few episodes this season have mostly been fiddling around with small things.

Okay:

• Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond: This second season is a perfectly acceptable and decent episodic action/comedy show. It's competently directed, with decent production values, animation, background art, and so on. But it's not anything more, and the first season definitely was more, for all that it was also flawed; the first season had Leo learning about his powers and an overall plot arc.

  I'm watching BBB & Beyond this season as my empty popcorn action show watch, which it's reasonably decent at.

• Kino's Journey: At first I thought that this had some interesting editorial things to say about Kino through its choice of which stories to adopt (and when). Then I discovered that the stories it was adopting had been chosen by an audience vote. A popularity contest is not the way you get a good adoption that has something of its own to say, or even one that illuminates the characters to people who aren't already familiar with the material.

  If I was a smart person, I might drop this and use the time to watch the original Kino's Journey series, which didn't suffer from this issue and apparently does have things to say.

Probably being dropped after the next episode:

• Children of the Whales (#4): I can't do better than my Twitter summary:

  I would have to describe Children of the Whales as some combination between 'lethargic' and 'tiresome'. But it's very pretty so far.

  I'm watching the next episode only because I want to find out some secrets about the setting and they're probably going to explain them next episode. Otherwise, this has turned out to be an essentially empty and flat show, one that is paced far too slowly for its own good (some of the character dialog is also pretty painfully direct and obvious).

Paused and probably dropped as not for me:

• Recovery of an MMO Junkie (#2): This is charming but I haven't found it particularly compelling. Perhaps some parts of it also cut a little bit too close to the bone for me.

Dropped:

• Garo - Vanishing Line (#3): This is a completely straightforward but unexceptional show, and unfortunately what it's about isn't very interesting to me; it's a monster of the week tokusatsu show in animated form with a specific and not entirely attractive atmosphere. The result is an okay action show and I like Sophie, but it has no spark and this season my slot for an empty action show is better filled by BBB & Beyond.

  (Some people like Gina but I'm not entirely sold on her.)

I keep hearing good things about Just Because!, so I may look at it at some point despite what I said in my first episode reactions, partly because the season is slowing down for me (I've basically dropped three shows at this point).

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Fall 2017 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).

• Kino's Journey episode 1: That was solid as an exercise in setting and philosophy, with a reasonably appealing viewpoint character. →

• Girls' Last Tour episode 1: That was a nice mood piece, full of great little moments & willing to be quiet. Slice of post-apocalyptic life. →

• Land of the Lustrous ep 1: That was a solid and interesting start, even if I don't entirely like one of the character archetypes on display. →

• The Ancient Magus' Bride ep 1: A good solid adaptation of a marvelous manga. It's not as exceptional as the original but it does a good job. →

• BBB & Beyond episode 1: That was a perfectly okay adventure story that said little beyond itself. Basically a reintroduction of everyone. →

• Garo - Vanishing Line episode 1: This was decent popcorn action, with some nice touches, some teeth-grinding bits, and not the best fights. →

• Code Realize episode 1: An unexceptional implementation that doesn't exceed its genre and thus is not for me. ♯

• Children of the Whales ep 1: That was reasonably nice and reasonably pretty, but it sure had a lot of exposition narration & infodumping. →

• Recovery of an MMO Junkie episode 1: That was okay, but probably not good enough to get me to watch what's going to be a romance show. →

• March comes in like a Lion episode 23: A solid restart, emphasizing the positive growth in Rei's situation and probably setting things up. ♯

I've decided to skip Inuyashiki for various reasons (and Crunchyroll has the manga if I feel interested in skimming at some point). This season is probably too busy for me to look into Just Because!, since I've mostly sworn off shows set in high school, although it's getting good reviews. Finally, Juni Taisen is just not my kind of show.

(High schools and especially high school romances are basically played out for me at this point; I've seen so many that a show has to be exceptional to keep my interest. March comes in like a Lion is an exception (in the non-romance category); Toradora was an exception in the romance category.)