The Winter 2016 season of anime was a weird one for me—one where the unexpected winners of the season were shows I had fully intended to ignore from the start and one where old standbys didn’t manage to impress me the way they had in the past. That all being said, I’m pleased with this season, even as I look forward to the bounties of spring.
Whew, it’s been a while, huh? Apologies for the delay—weekend trip and video games have a bad habit of messing up my routines so thoroughly that I can’t get other things done even if I have the time.
Durarara!! x2 has…not been the best the franchise has ever been, that’s for sure. With a seemingly unending stream of new characters flooding into Ikebukuro over the last two and a half seasons and a plot that’s become tangled beyond anyone’s ability to follow, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking the show had gone entirely bonkers—and not in the good way. And so, believe me when I was it was somewhat to my surprise that I discovered that I had been noticing those elusive things called “themes” cropping up in the show.
What follows is the account of my discoveries. Here’s the link~
As I was writing out the title to this post, I had a horrible sensation that I’d accidentally typed “Winter 2015” for last week’s post—but I didn’t.
In which I attempt to chronicle the full extent of my anime life from the past week or so, and lay out the path forward through the Winter 2016 anime season…
Eh, how do you blog, again?
Another season has passed. Despite being a rather slow season and mostly lacking in shows I would consider worthy of serious superlatives, I was generally amused, entertained, and engaged by the stuff I ended up watching all the way to the end. As always, there were some up weeks and some down weeks, but on the whole I’m pretty happy with the way this season ended up. It certainly won’t go down as one of the best in anime history—but when you come away from a season with an episode of a bubble dropping on Lelei’s head, how can you really complain?
I can’t really figure out how to say this well, so I’ll just go for blunt: this is probably going to be my last post on here for a while. The lead-off is that I’m leaving tomorrow on a 10-day business trip. I’ll be staffing a big conference put on by my workplace, and I’m not anticipating much free time to watch anime—let alone write about it. The second part is that I’m feeling kind of burned out these days. As seriously as I take this blog as something I’ve made a commitment to (primarily because of my readers), continuing on like I have been for the past month or so seems like a surefire way to entirely sap the joy out of writing. To a large extent, the pressure I’ve been putting on myself to continue churning out content is probably mostly to blame—and the only way I can see to purge myself of that mentality is to put myself in a blogging time-out of sorts; that is, a hiatus.
I don’t expect it’ll last forever (and maybe even that long). If I continue to watch anime, I’m going to have things to say. And if I have things to say, you can be darn sure I’ll start writing again! But, for now, forcing myself to write stuff I’m not excited to write is making me feel like I’m not putting out stuff that’ll make people excited to read it. When I can do that again, I’ll be back!
It’s week five, and things are just trucking along now. Pretty much all of my shows are away from the potential drop bubble at this point, leaving me with a bunch of stuff I’m really enjoying watching each week. Some shows are getting better by the week, others hitting some rough patches, but overall there’s nary a one among them that I’m not excited to watch each week. And that’s the way a weekly schedule should be.
This was the week the charms of newness started to wear off for a lot of shows. I always feel like early on in seasons, I’m kind of breezing through shows and liking them just because they’re new, but by the time they’re started to kick into their real stories in the fourth episode (note, the fourth, not the stupid third) is when they start to show their cracks or I start to tire of them. How much those two things are related…I’m not sure and I’m not enthused enough to think it through. Anyways!
This is the good batch. The eight shows I was most looking forward to out of the whole season. As I begin this post, I’ve not watched a single episode of any of them—and I’ve avoided most reactions to them as well. Come the end of this post, I’ll either be joyful…or miserable, depending on how it all shakes out.
And, for fun, I’m trying something new: live blogging. For the rest of the night, I’m just going to be watching anime and blogging my thoughts on them—one at a time. That rounds out to something like an update every 30 minutes. Strap in—it’s gonna be a fun ride (I hope…)!
Mage in a Barrel 