Roving Thoughts archives

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

It's time for a slow-moving midway update on my early impressions. This update has been delayed in part because I didn't want to admit something, and that was partly because of the tacit pressure of conformity.

Excellent:

• ACCA - 13-Territory Inspection Department: This has continually been the most interesting show I've been watching this season. It wasn't always clear where it was going (and it's still not), but it had such a sense of style, atmosphere, and character that that didn't matter. And while I wasn't really looking, in its quiet, atmospheric way the show has covered a huge amount of plot territory, especially in the past few episodes. I can't wait to see where it goes next.

• Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: This is still a comedy but it's a lot more than that too; at its heart it's about family. I don't like all of it, but enough of every episode lands that it's great. It has a real mastery of quiet moments, background things, and little gestures.

In ongoing shows, March comes in like a Lion has continued to be quietly great. There are less fireworks now than there used to be, but more development and progression. Shimada has been a great addition to the cast.

Not for me:

• Little Witch Academia: In the end, this is basically a kids show (that's made by Trigger, and is airing at midnight because apparently the TV anime model is fundamentally broken). There's nothing wrong with LWA being a kid's show, but kids shows generally don't really appeal to me and LWA has not been the exception.

  This is kind of what I was worried about before LWA started airing, although not exactly it. In the end it was less the cliched stuff and more the general style that didn't work for me. I have a bunch of issues with what happened in the episodes I watched, but in the end all of them come from looking at a kids show with the eyes of an adult.

Dropped:

• Blue Exorcist - Kyoto Saga: In the end, the slow pacing killed it for me. This has the leisurely execution of a show that knows it's adapting a manga arc and is thus ultimately not particularly going anywhere. I like the characters, but no.

• Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! 2: Episode 4 was all about Darkness and I hate what the show does with Darkness, so I bounced off it and then realized I wasn't particularly interested in the show as a whole. The show had one core joke and mostly wore it out in the first season; the things it did in the first three episodes of the second season weren't enough to keep me (and some of them I disliked).

I have continued to not watch Saga of Tanya the Evil, and what I've heard about recent developments have convinced me that this is the right decision (partly because I'm on Tanya's side in one small aspect of the show, although everything else I've heard about her makes me think I'd dislike her).

In the past I've felt antsy when I was down to this few shows I was watching. This season I have no such issues so far, and I think that that's partly because the three remaining shows are all really good ones. They each leave me happily contented when I watch an episode and I eagerly anticipate the next one when it gets close.

Where I think each Pure Illusion world comes from in Flip Flappers (part 2)

(This won't make much sense if you haven't seen Flip Flappers, plus it sort of has spoilers.)

To follow on my original entry on the sources of the Pure Illusion worlds, here are some additional notes that are really too big to be added on as an update to the original entry.

• episode 3: As of episode 11, the episode 3 desert world is pretty strongly attributed to Sayuri, per @PeterFobian and @B0bduh. Nick Creamer's tour of the Pure Illusions worlds contains a longer explanation of the evidence (and some additional details).

• episode 5: I'm basically persuaded by Emily Rand's argument in Yayaka's world (and a few stray thoughts on Flip Flappers' Pure Illusion) that episode 5's setting comes from Yayaka. And frankly it's just neat for it to be that way, because (as Emily Rand notes) there are a whole lot of thematic resonances and reflections between Yayaka and the setting. It's the kind of thing that makes me slap my forehead and go 'wow, it so totally makes sense'.

  (I'll also note that despite the horror movie overtones, the setting of episode 5 is not intrinsically dangerous. There are no monsters, no deprivation, no threats. If anything, the school is a refuge from the dangerous outside.)

• episode 9: I'm not persuaded by Emily Rand's argument (from the above-mentioned entry) that the world here is (mostly) the twins. I stand by my views that it primarily draws on Yayaka, although I'm willing to believe that it's intended to reflect and draw on the twins as well. Another person also feels that the episode 9 world is likely the twins. But I still feel that the visual resemblance to Yayaka's locker room scene at the start of the episode is too on-point for Yayaka to not be deeply involved.

In a show as deliberately constructed as Flip Flappers is, I can't help but read something into the last-minute revelation about the source of the episode 3 world. What I personally see it as is a message from the creators to us that we're not overlooking clues to where all the worlds come from; for some of them, we don't necessarily have enough information because the show has simply not shown it to us, just as the show hadn't shown us the necessary information about episode 3's world until the last moment in episode 11.

As a result, I don't think any of the remaining uncertainties can be settled with evidence from within the show. If we find out for (relatively) sure, it will be through future interviews with the creators, BD booklet notes, and other external sources of information.

(Apparently the director wanted to add at least some additional things to the BD releases of Flip Flappers, so it's possible that BD versions of episodes will also reveal more things. But I haven't heard anything about that so far.)