A Record of Past Seasons
But iblessall, you’re a week late! Hush, hush, I can do my midseason report whenever I feel like it! Also, shows are all over the place in terms of episode count this season, so this is as good a time as any (plus 13 doesn’t divide in half evenly anyways). Anyways, there are the anime I’m watching and what I think about them so far. Scores are a projected range for the final score of the show.
Phew, it’s been a long, long week since last Wednesday. The retreat went really well last weekend, but now I’ve got a career fair coming up a week from today and then I’m hoping things will really have settled by the time that ends, hopefully leaving me with more time to knock out some of the blog posts I’m really itching to write.
Well, that’s another week in the books! If I’m being honest, I sort of felt like this was a weaker week in general, although being as busy as I was makes it a bit harder to pin that on the episodes themselves—a lot of time my mental state when watching has a big effect on how I feel about stuff.
This is also just a note that I’ll be gone this upcoming weekend leading a retreat, so after the KimiUso post tomorrow (and maybe some pictures of some new stuff I got on Friday), I’ll be gone until next Tuesday. After that, I’m hoping my schedule will start to be less crazy so I can crank out some of the posts I’ve had on the backburner for a while. Until then, cheers~!
Cuts are finally complete at 11 shows for the season. With the end of the week bearing the bulk of the season’s weight, this is a manageable schedule for me with everything that’s going in real life and with all the project I’m hoping to do in the coming months with the blog.
It’s been a tough week-ish for the blog in terms of page views as it looks like my SEO ranking were pretty much reset with the new domain fully taking over. That’s…kind of a disappointment after it took literal months to build up my rankings to what they were before the crash, but I’m trying to look at this as a new challenge for me as I continue to hone my content creation and digital marketing skills. I’ve got a plan to work my way back up the list and a big part of it is continuing to create new, interesting content! Hope you guys enjoy!
More shows dropped this week (including Isuca‘s premier managing a paltry 51 seconds before I gave up on it), meaning my schedule for this season is more or less set. There are still a few shows that could get knocked out, but I’m pretty happy with everything on a daily basis, so there would have to be some serious stumbles for any of the remaining bubble shows to get dropped.
I wasn’t sure about this after the first week, but now…I’m sure. I have too many shows on this schedule, especially in the later half of the week. What’s killing me are the five ongoing shows, but none of them are even close to drop territory. Here’s what did bite the bullet this week:
So, the headline here is that I’m dropping Junketsu no Maria and that I’m pretty bummed about doing so. I like, even adore, a lot of the peripheral elements of the show—Maria herself, her little posse of misfits, the character designs—but the show’s handling of Catholicism and the Catholic Church, which was more or less the focus of this episode, has left me both uncomfortable and a bit upset after watching the second episode. And, as much as I want to, I just can’t ignore those warning bells in my head.
With the premieres of new shows taking up most of my writing time lately, the five ongoing shows I’ve carried over from the fall have taken something of a back seat. Which, you know, is kind of a shame considering how good these five shows are. I didn’t want to let a whole week go by without talking about them at all, so we’ll have a short Highlights of the Week this week to chat about Garo, Shirobako, Your Lie in April, Log Horizon, and Akatsuki no Yona.
My schedule for this season is still coming together, but I’m hoping to aim for ~4 posts/week: Yona and KimiUso episodics, Highlights of the Week, and some kind of craft/editorial piece over the weekends. We’ll see how that goes. But, for now, on to this week!
Alright, Part 2 of my Winter 2015 first impressions is here (Part 1 available here)! For me, this was the bigger selection of shows I was excited for and, as you’ll see, there were both some really easy keepers and some really easy drops. There really aren’t too many bubble shows this season after the first week, and Isuca is the only show left to air that I care about. I’m currently at 16 shows (including carryovers), but I’m expecting that number to go down by 2-4 shows. The spread is pretty good, too, with both Mondays and Wednesdays being empty. Anyhow, this was a very, very good batch of shows. Lots of fun times ahead in Winter 2015!
Still to Watch: Isuca
Obligatory Reminder: Garo is also still airing, and you should be watching it.
This piece was originally published in the tri-weekly Crunchyroll Newsletter. You can read the article, and others on the Newsletter page.
There are lots of ways to build an anime. You can take a particular thematic thread and spin an entire narrative out of that single thought. You can seek to provide titillation for a target audience and use every possible chance to create it. Or you can take a few indomitable truths about the way we humans live and infuse your story with them. This final way (although these three are by no means a comprehensive list) is the way Shirobako has chosen; however, in a different way than many anime have chosen. Where great fantasy epics explore the vast darknesses and lights of humanity, Shirobako illuminates the ways in which we work and communicate in the modern world.
Mage in a Barrel 