Roving Thoughts archives

Looking back at the Winter 2017 anime season

Once again it's time for my traditional look back at what I watched in the past Winter season, to follow up on my early impressions and my midway views. This time around there is a surprise new appearance, which is part of why I haven't written this retrospective before now.

Excellent:

• ACCA - 13-Territory Inspection Department: Some of the plot twists in the last episode were awfully convenient even if they had sort of been set up in advance and there were a few aspects of the setting that made me raise my eyebrows, but ultimately neither of those mattered. What made the show was both the characters and their interactions and the sheer atmosphere of the show, and it nailed both. ACCA was a show that was a lot about style and it had the style to make everything work. And I have to admit that some of the twists in the last episode were great.

  (One surprise given what happened in ACCA is how little violence it had, even when it could have.)

• March comes in like a Lion: This didn't conclude so much as more or less resolve some ongoing character threads, which is perfectly fine since we're getting more later. But even if we weren't, I feel that the show picked a good point to pause; it carefully showed us how Rei had made genuine progress in moving forwards out of his paralyzed stasis (cf).

• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: What started out as a comedy turned into a show that was very explicitly and heartwarmingly about family. Oh, sure, there were still funny bits by and in the end, but family was the heart of everything going on and the epilogue of the show made it explicit. KyoAni did very good work here. In quiet little things, I liked how the mood shifted over the course of the show; for example, Kobayashi stopped exploiting Tohru, and the cast no longer staying late at work.

  (Kanna was a vital part of making things work. Her presence didn't create the family as such, but she made its existence obvious. And she got a beautiful part of an episode where the point wasn't what happened but what didn't.)

• Kemono Friends: This is ultimately a kid's show, by which I mean that its episodic stories were generally relatively straightforward; there was friendship with new Friends (all of whom were nice people), obstacles to overcome with interesting but straightforward solutions, and so on. This doesn't mean that it was bad, though, or even merely ordinary; works for kids and young adults are quite capable of having significant depths once you start looking and being extremely good, and Kemono Friends definitely qualified here.

  Over its run Kemono Friends slowly and carefully built up a coherent world and overall plotline, built narrative momentum around everything going on, and used all of this to create a very powerful climax with genuine surprises, an epic title drop that really worked, and a happy ending that felt completely justified, partly because it used elements the show had been carefully feeding us all along. A lot of shows fumble their endings in some ways, but Kemono Friends delivered one of the best ones I've seen in a while . The show had both heart and smarts (and looking back, always had some interesting things quietly in the background).

  I don't know how Kemono Friends happened, especially from a staff that doesn't seem to have done much before, but I hope we get something more from this group of people. They have proven they can make excellent work even under challenging situations, so I'd love to see what they can do with another chance (on Kemono Friends or something else).

  (I'm someone who is not bothered by CGI if the rest of the show works, so I came to accept Kemono Friends' CGI even when it was pretty special.)

  (See also how watching Kemono Friends benefits from knowing some general spoilers.)

This season wound up being pretty thin on things to watch (since I only followed three shows during it; I started Kemono Friends basically after the season finished). However, everything I watched was somewhere between quite good and excellent (Kemono Friends is merely good a lot of the time; it back-loads its excellence as things get really rolling towards the end).

I do kind of regret that none of my secondary shows worked out for me this season. In the past I probably would have kept on watching Little Witch Academia, Blue Exorcist - Kyoto Saga, and maybe even KonoSuba and Akiba's Trip. But these days apparently I'm getting less interested in watching things I find merely ordinary or marginal, so out they all went by midway.

Brief impressions of the Spring 2017 anime season so far

We're somewhere between three and five episodes into everything I'm watching, which is long enough for most shows to show their cards and my opinions to firm up (and for me to drop some things). So, as usual, here's how my views of this season have shaken out, to follow up on my first episode reactions.

Excellent:

• Eccentric Family second season: This doesn't have as explosive a start as I remember the first season having, but then we know a lot more of the background this time around. It's still great, with all of the good stuff from the first season and more things being thrown into the pot. I like that we're sort of seeing a different side of Yasaboru this time around, and he's certainly getting to sparkle.

Good:

• WorldEnd (aka SukaSuka): I refuse to use the show's gigantic full name, which is very light novel (which it is). To my surprise, I've wound up feeling that the show is unreasonably good, much better than I expected, and it's ended up as my current second favorite show of the season. It has ordinary looks (in terms of character designs, background, colours, and so on) and some straightforward LN elements, but its characters and writing are surprisingly deep and good and it's convincingly sold me on its actual drama. It's also quite well directed and storyboarded, which really helps hold my interest despite its generally ordinary looks.

• Alice & Zoroku: While the action isn't bad, it's the character interactions that continue to make this show, especially anything involving Zoroku. The show is sufficiently well written and directed to have given what could have been an over the top villain an affecting back-story that made her basically a tragic character (still a villain, though).

• Rage of Bahamut - Virgin Soul: This is not as great as the start of the original Bahamut was, but it's pretty good. It helps that Nina is a solid, interesting character with a lot of appealing elements, plus there's Rita. Unfortunately the show has not sold me on the actual plot going on, partly because it feels a bit too crazy and so I've wound up feeling detached from it.

• Re:Creators: This has an interesting concept but a concept is nothing if a show can't execute it well. The good news is that RC has been executing pretty well so far, not just with good action but also with good characters and good character and story interaction. It's not perfect, and in particular it has leaned a bit too much on exposition in sections. Of the shows I'm watching, this is the one that I feel is most balanced on an edge where it could easily tip over into merely okay or tolerable.

Same as it ever was:

• My Hero Academia: This continues the original's frustrating mix of excellent work and slow, padded pacing that robs that work of a lot of its impact. I enjoy watching it but it's always frustrating to see how it could be better if only it would stop with all of the delaying tactics.

  In short, this is probably a great shonen show dragged down to being okay by its pacing. I'll still miss it when the season is over, though, just as I did the first installment.

Dropped:

• Grimoire of Zero: The characters and their interactions were very nice, but they couldn't make up for the bland, cookie cutter overall story writing. The second episode was especially painful for me, as it plodded through entirely predictable story elements without any particular spark, so I dropped the show.

Misses:

• Granblue Fantasy: Far, far too generic, as I tweeted. Unlike Grimoire of Zero, this didn't even have interesting characters to make up for its painfully generic storyline.

Not considered for fuzzy reasons:

• Atom The Beginning: This might ordinarily be my kind of thing, but the ANN preview guide failed to make it sound appealing enough to sample.

• Eromanga Sensei: Despite Author's praise, I have various reasons for giving this a pass, including the setting.

• Seven Mortal Sins: Not my kind of thing in general (I generally don't wind up liking fanservice-heavy shows even if they throw in action as well), and like last season's Gabriel Dropout it's probably more entertaining to sometimes watch people watching it on Twitter rather than actually watch it myself.

• KADO: The Right Answer
• Frame Arms Girl
• Clockwork Planet
• Twin Angels Break

As seems to have become my pattern, I'm not watching any popcorn shows, by which I mean merely okay or passable shows that I watch primarily to pass the time while I have some coffee or whatever. There are such shows airing this season (Grimoire of Zero probably qualifies, for example), but I'm just not interested these days. If I'm not actively enjoying it, I appear to drop it aggressively or not even consider it.

I continue to not look at Sakura Quest, as covered earlier here. Some commentary suggests that the fourth episode is a significant step down, so I feel justified in this so far. There are some fairly acclaimed shows airing in this season that are just not in my area of interest as far as plot and setting go, such as Tsuki ga Kirei (see eg Nick Creamer's writing on it).

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Spring 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).

• My Hero Academia episode 14 is just the same as always; I like the characters but the pacing is still really slow and hurting the show. →

• Granblue Fantasy episode 1 is not interesting enough for me to even finish the episode; I made it 15 minutes before quitting. →

• Alice & Zouroku episode 1 was fun, interesting, and intriguing, but the character interactions really made it. I especially like Zoroku. →

• Rage of Bahamut - Virgin Soul episode 1 was slower and not as exciting as ep 1 of the original, but the ending portion made up for it. →

• Re:Creators ep 1 was interesting & well done, but so far it just sets up the premise; it doesn't tell us what the show'll be like or about. ♯

• Eccentric Family S2 episode 1: The tanuki are back, Kyoto is beautiful, and things are spooky & quietly tense. It's everything I could want. →

• SukaSuka episode 1: Now that's how you start a slow-build show. There's nothing new here but it's very well assembled & pretty appealing. →

• Grimoire of Zero ep 1 was very light novel but also surprisingly appealing and well done. The characters are cliches, but interesting ones. →

These are all the first episodes I've felt energized enough to watch so far and I'm probably not interested in adding more so I'm going to call it here, even with a few potentially interesting ones unwatched. Notably missing is Sakura Quest, which is frequently praised but has a setting that usually doesn't work for me, and I'm not certain the premise sounds like my thing either. Perhaps I will get around to it later, but so far I've felt like watching Kemono Friends instead.