…stop reading my blog and go watch 花火 and light sparklers with your high school friends and the girl you like, but won’t tell, and your pervy best friend who has more of a personality than you do and the cute alien girl who transferred to your class this semester and somebody’s hot older sister.
Seriously, guys…
Happy Fourth of July!
To everyone else in the world…happy Friday!
It’s kind of crazy to think that I was still in England when this season started. Where I am now, both as an anime watcher and and blogger, seems quite far away from where I was then. It was a good season, though—one that saw my entry into Reddit, the start up of an ambitious Best Girl tournament on the Crunchyroll forums and my first steps into the aniblogger world. But about that anime…. I picked up a lot more shows than I wanted to actually watch, discovered a new show that I really like (Love Live!), was let down by numerous shows, dropped way more shows than I usually do, was charmed by Chaika and wowed by my first Masaaski Yuasa show. So, yeah. Spring 2014 wasn’t a bad season for me. I won’t say some shows didn’t become tedious at times, but overall it was a pretty good season, with Week 8 (headlined by Hunter x Hunter, of course) standing head and shoulders above all the rest. Here’s how things shook out.
So, my first venture into the realm of shoujo content…I liked it. Are you listening, rest of the anime world? This, right here…
This is how you do romance.
Sometimes it’s really easy to point to a specific part of a show and say, “This is where it went wrong.” Sometimes, a show is just bad from top to bottom, making it even easier to categorize a show’s flaws. Mekaku City Actors [SHAFT, 2014], appropriately for the studio from whence it hails, is not such an easy case to deal with. Straight up confusing at times, genuinely emotional at others, and just plain weird frequently, it feels like a classic case of misused potential. Even after twelve episodes of generally feeling ambivalent about the show as a whole, I still think Mekaku City Actors was trying desperately to tell an important story, and to be different enough that people would listen. Good intentions aren’t always enough, but for what Mekaku City Actors tried to be and for what it was, I’m giving the show a 6/10 (Ranking).
Do you like SHAFT? SHAFT likes SHAFT, too.
Spring 2014 is just about over, with quite a number of my shows ending this week. Review season is almost upon us!
Eat things; become overpowered. If only real life worked the same way…
I once had a dream: that I would have a Hitsugi no Chaika gif for any potential occasion. And yet, my imgur album had only a mere two gifs. And so, with the end of Chaika‘s first season approaching swiftly, I took it upon myself to create the greatest collection of Chaika gifs known to man—all in one place.
Gifs are nearly impossible to track back and credit to anyone person, but if you see your work included here and want to be mentioned, please leave a comment and I will add your name to my list of credits.
NOTE: I do not own any of the following images. Feel free to use them as you see fit. There is a Chaika gif for all occasions.
I sometimes wonder if people realize that criticizing the premise of most fiction is a useless exercise. As I’ll demonstrate later on, if you approach any work of fiction in the right way, you can make the premise sound stupid. An attitude that seeks to find a reason to dislike a premise will always find one.
But what defines a story as good or bad isn’t the premise itself; that’s simply the foundation. What’s important is how well that premise is executed. Can they make you suspend your disbelief well enough to make you accept that there’s a kid who just won’t get in the freaking robot? Can they make you accept that there’s a kid whose face is naturally attractive to beautiful alien girls and beautiful alien boys who look like girls?
Sometimes, I feel like selector infected WIXOSS is deliberately trying to be a deconstruction of Madoka Magica. I think Madoka is a good show, but I don’t really like it. I haven’t seen the movies, but I always felt like the show itself was just a little bit too…easy. Everything fell together too perfectly, the ending was too convenient and the characters served their purposes a little bit too well. Weird complaints, I know, but seeing as WIXOSS currently feels like a more engaging, more interesting and more substantial version of Madoka, those little differences mean a lot.
J.C. Staff doing their best SHAFT impression.
And this is the last time I’m going to compare the two shows, because WIXOSS has obviously diverged from the path Madoka took. Essentially, episode 12 reached the end of Madoka and showed what happens when you have all the right pieces (enough wins, a grand battle, even a special power), but everyone isn’t on the same page. And now heading into selector spread WIXOSS (sweet name) in the fall, WIXOSS is firmly out of Madoka territory.
There are some shows that I consider “moments” shows. They’re shows you watch for the few seconds or few shots of brilliant beauty interspersed between a lot of reasonably good, but not great material. Ping Pong the Animation [Tatsunoko Productions, 2014] is what happens when you take a “moments” show and bring all the in between moments up to the level of the moments. It’s an unreservedly ambitious, glowingly creative and masterfully executed show worthy of the rating I’m about to give it. For all of the above, and everything I haven’t said yet, I’m giving Ping Pong the Animation a 9/10. (Ranking)
Welcome to Week 11, the week the season starts to end!
This is a really serious show, you guys.
Mage in a Barrel 
