Roving Thoughts archives

Checking in on the Summer 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 this point both my views and my expectations have solidified, although I'm still hoping for a surprise or two.

Still excellent:

• Made in Abyss: I recently characterized this as a quest without active opposition (so far), where the obstacle in the way of Riko and Reg is the Abyss itself, with its creatures and its very nature. The show is doing extremely well at portraying this and making things feel real, and it's been a very enjoyable ride despite the fact that we keep being told that Riko is never coming back from the journey she's making.

  With that said, I have no idea where the show is going and how it's going to come to a satisfying ending point. But the ride is so interesting that I don't care.

Very good, surprisingly:

• Princess Principal: The show has remained fully committed to its core nature and as a result has delivered a whole series of episodes with pretty solid impacts (and a few that were just fun), even if they're nothing novel in terms of plots. I've been particularly taken with the writing, which is often (although not always) willing to let things be indirect and count on us to get it.

  This has turned out much better than I would have expected from the premise.

Good:

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ: It's more Symphogear and it's being very itself by leaning into its over the top stuff and building on bits and pieces of past seasons in a way that makes its world feel real and lived-in. It's absurd, of course, but Symphogear has always been an absurd show.

• My Hero Academia: The show continues to move along pretty well, mostly avoiding the pacing pitfalls of the first season and the tournament pitfalls of the first part of this season. MHA isn't great but I do like watching it. It has charm.

Popcorn watching:

• Knight's & Magic: This remains more or less pure-hearted fun, although in the long shadow of Gundam it's hard to have the cheerful reaction to a war between two groups of humans that I think the show wants me to have, especially when it kills plenty of people on screen. For now I'm ignoring the cognitive dissonance and enjoying it anyway.

• Fate/Apocrypha: This has mostly delivered on a stream of reasonably spectacular fights with only a few diversions into annoying attempts at philosophy and character development and so on (all of which Fate is generally terrible at). Unfortunately, while I enjoy Astolfo and Mordred goofing around, my actual investment in any of the characters is almost nil so all of the action mostly feels empty and pointless.

Dropped:

• A Centaur's Life: I wound up feeling that the only thing the show had going for it was its gimmick, and with the show's bland and so-so production, that wasn't enough to keep me watching. I have some theories about why this material worked much better in manga form than animated, but that's for another entry.

• The Reflection: After watching a number of episodes I realized that I was only interested in it as a peculiar and interesting artifact, not as something to actually watch. I wasn't particularly invested in either the characters or the plot and the writing could be painful.

I've got enough shows that I want to watch that I've felt no particular need to seek out more or dig into my backlog (the latter is kind of a pity, since I have some good stuff I want to get to someday). More shows and more good to excellent shows would be nice, but I'm okay with what I have.

Brief impressions of the Summer 2017 anime season so far

I'm somewhere between three and 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 but alarming:

• Made in Abyss: This is clearly the best show I'm watching and everything so far has been pretty much universally excellent, but it has been building up an increasingly ominous atmosphere and there's all sorts of rumblings that the manga version goes unpleasant places (and if the anime does too, I'm probably going to drop the show). It's also simply an impressive show, in art, animation, writing, and directing.

Good:

• Princess Principal: This is a limited taste, because the show mixes completely serious material side by side with stuff that it's impossible to take seriously. But the show is fully committed to this (in the same way Thunderbolt Fantasy was) and has made it work so far. Not everything has been completely successful but it's solidly entertaining anyway.

• Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ: After a bit of a quiet start where the show did not, say, slice a chunk out of the middle of a mountain in the first episode, AXZ has been steadily ramping up its stakes. It is and remains very Symphogear, which means that it's both over the top and sincere.

Decent to okay:

• A Centaur's Life: This is basically slice of life in a science fiction setting. I read a bit of the manga several years ago and felt that it was both charming overall and reasonably well done, with an interesting mix of genres that could be nicely subtle. The animated version is a little bit less impressive because it's periodically kind of plain and flat in aesthetics and directing.

  Unlike some people, I think that the anime is overall reasonably well done. It's not flashy or 'strong' in some senses, but I've enjoyed elements like some nice character acting. On the other hand, I'm sort of feeling that I'm not going to keep watching the show for its entire run, so maybe I'm fooling myself about the overall production quality.

Popcorn watching:

• Fate/Apocrypha: I'm not watching this for the plot or the Fate lore; seeing as this is a Fate show, both are likely to be stupid or irritating, and in any case both are far too complicated and require far too much background reading for me. Instead I'm watching this for a certain amount of nice animation and a few characters who are amusing and interesting, and so far it has delivered on enough of both to keep me watching.

  (I was actually pleased by a certain plot twist in episode 4, because I found the character involved to be kind of a wet blanket. Of course, Fate shows usually leave me irritated at almost every character.)

• Knight's & Magic: This is what I will call 'competency porn'; you have a character who is very good at something and they do that something a lot, ideally in interesting and amusing situations and with some obstacles in the way. As I've said on Twitter, the show is so earnestly enthusiastic about things that it's charming, despite the basic story-telling limitations. See also this interesting post on K&M's heart-on-sleeve appeal by @iblessall.

  (I've realized that K&M quite reminds me of Rick Cook's Wizardry series, especially Wizard's Bane, the first book.)

In ongoing shows, My Hero Academia continues to be enjoyable to watch, although it has recently started to slip back into the excessive padding habits of the first season. I have tacitly dropped Re:Creators as not sufficiently compelling to make me care enough to watch another episode.

I recently saw the first episode of The Reflection and had some reactions on Twitter. I'm not sure what I feel about the show but it's interesting enough that I'm going to watch the second episode at some point. One way to put my longer term reaction to The Reflection so far is that I'm not sure it really feels like an anime show instead of a show about American superheroes that inexplicably happens to be in Japanese. Not that there's anything wrong with the latter, if it's well done.