I got a little tied up in January with everything that was going on, so this was a lighter month for reviews—a lot of time went to the start of the new season and getting up first impressions here and over on Otaku Review. But, I still got to review two really fun pieces and I’m set to tackle a few more in February!
“Bro before holes?”
How many different narrative threads does KimiUso think it can handle at once?
I’d be lying if I said I’m a little ambivalent about the introduction of Hiroko’s new student, Nagi. We’ve already got plenty of different stories going on in this show right now with most of our mainstay characters in some sort of flux, so to have an entirely new character introduced…well, it both excites me and irritates me. I like Kousei, Tsubaki, Watari, Kaori, Takeshi, and (former Best Girl) Emi quite a lot, so taking more time away from them to spend it on another character makes me wonder if we’re ever going to actually deal with everyone else’s storylines.
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.
Well, to be totally honest, this episode would have been a total disappointment if not for the post-festival scenes and, even then, this was probably one of the weakest episodes Akatsuki no Yona has produced. Unlike the comparable comedy-laden, mostly plotless episode spent in Ki-ja’s village, there were not cultural constructions at work until the very end—meaning that, due to the relatively dull nature of the war games, the episode was relatively boring, something Yona‘s never really fallen to even in its weakest moments.
A transparent attempt to cash in on the popular tropes and trends of the day, but Is it Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is not without its charms.
For those of you who don’t know, Evangelion director Hideaki Anno’s Studio Khara, in conjunction with media company Dwango have been running a cool little project called Animator Expo (there is an English language version of the site) for the past couple weeks. 30 short anime productions are planned for the Expo, with a new one coming out every week starting on November 7, 2014. So far, 10 of the 30 shorts have aired, so here are my thoughts on the last five of them. Rather than giving them a standard rating, I’m just going to go with a [bad/decent/good/great] scale.
Previous Posts: Part 1
On these five shorts as a whole: Overall, I was a bigger fan of this set of shorts than the last. We basically got three music videos in this bunch, a format I think lends itself really naturally to the kind of creative experimentation that the Expo seems to want to encourage. Having “Tomorrow from there”—easily by favorite short thus far—in this group definitely bumps it up a notch, but (unlike the first batch) I genuinely enjoyed every short on this list and would recommend checking out each of them.
Ahahahaha Tsubaki made her way back to the top of the Best Girl rankings last week just in time for this episode—awesome. Just my luck. I’m sorry, Tsubaki-chan. It seems I doomed you.
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, I realized that, as far behind as I was, if I tried to write individual posts for these episodes I would never ever ever catch up. I’m also not sure I could really make full episode posts out of each of these episode (14, I could have, I think), so it’s nice to be able to just focus on a few moments from each and then move on to the next one. In any case, we’ll be back on schedule next week. Woo!
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.
Mage in a Barrel 