Tag Archives: Active Raid

Active Raid – Episode 8

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Active Raid drifted back into the good lane this week, pulling off an episode that starred an understandable conflict that built off the show’s core political themes and also illustrated new things about the main characters. And hey, waddayaknow, just executing on those obvious storytelling fundamentals resulted in a much better story than the episodes that are about basically nothing. It seems weird to be offering criticism that boils down to “stop making bad decisions, instead try making good ones,” but that really does seem to be what it sometimes takes. Active Raid made good decisions this week, and was rewarded with a satisfying episode for it.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Winter 2016 – Week 7 in Review

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This week in anime was a week in anime. We’re entering that stretch of the season where shows often become kinda tough to write about – they’ve established a firm rhythm and personality at this point, but they’re not quite into the leadup to the climax, and so episodes can oftentimes just be described as “pretty much like the last episode, I guess.” Even a show like Konosuba, one of this season’s most inconsistent wildcards, is now at least becoming steady in its inconsistency. There were some slight dips and slight rises among individual shows, but everything is at the moment falling within the margin of error of its existing expectations. That doesn’t mean things are impossible to talk about – that just means I have to work harder to find good points of interest. So sit there and appreciate my hard work as I run this week down!

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Active Raid – Episode 7

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Well, that was fast. After an unlikely episode that demonstrated Active Raid at its absolute best, we were back to the scrapheap this week, as the show rambled through what was almost certainly its worst episode so far. This episode was bad enough that I’m still not quite sure if it was intentionally bad – if the show has somehow realized its episodic drama could not be more emotionally or dramatically hollow, and is thus leaning into that in the most ridiculous way possible. But there were plenty of scenes here that basically had no purpose if you assume the show was trying to be funny, so no, this was just a really supremely terrible episode of anime.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Winter 2016 – First Half in Review

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And suddenly, six weeks have passed. Fortunately for me, it’s actually hard to pretend the winter season has rushed by; not because the shows themselves have proceeded slowly, but because I live in goddamn New England, and so every day is an interminable march of suffering through sub-arctic temperatures and mocking snow. I hate winter, and I’d rather live in a place where it doesn’t exist, but for the moment I’m stuck here. As far as anime goes, this has actually been a perfectly reasonable season.

This seems like one of those seasons where, to an even greater degree than normally, the show quality just drops off a cliff after the second tier. In an ordinary season, there are a decent number of shows I’m not watching that people in a general sense are still enjoying – things that don’t appeal to me genre-wise, or whose writing or art style don’t gel with me, or some other quirk of preference. But this time, it seems like nearly everyone I know is watching the same shortlist of anime, and then there’s just a vast desert of nothing. But this actually doesn’t affect my viewing habits at all – I never tend to find more than half a dozen or so shows watchable, and as far as that small crop goes, as long as I have two to three shows that seem genuinely good, I’m satisfied. But it’d be far too mature of me to just say “I’m enjoying a fair number of shows for a variety of reasons,” and besides, we’ve got traditions to uphold. So let’s start at the top and ruthlessly rank this season’s claimants to the throne!

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Active Raid – Episode 6

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Active Raid pulled off a pretty great episode this week, indulging in some classic giant robot love and putting the show’s themes to work. It was clearly a canned genre story, but there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as the ingredients are good and they’re mixed together well. And here, the archaic but compelling nature of giant robots fit perfectly into Active Raid’s usual mix of idealism and pragmatism, offering fun dramatic highlights and plenty of melancholy thoughts on dreams and aging. It wasn’t an overwhelmingly great episode or anything, but it was heartfelt and well-told. More of this please!

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below.

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Winter 2016 – Week 5 in Review

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I hate to say it, but this was not a good week in anime. Everything beyond Rakugo Shinju and ERASED has been kinda iffy this season, but this week, not only did ERASED put out its worst episode by far, but both Dimension W and KonoSuba were so bad that I’m probably dropping them until further notice. I was already sort of on the edge with both of those shows, and it honestly wouldn’t take that much to convince me to give KonoSuba another episode, but when half the shows you’re watching disappoint you, it’s not a good scene. ERASED in particular was a real disappointment – the show’s existing issues of overselling dramatic peaks and just being too much of a boilerplate thriller took over entirely this week, leaving me with an episode that felt more silly than dramatically effective. But that said, there were also highlights to make up the difference, and I can always use the time saved to work on more Current Projects! Let’s start at the top and RUN ‘EM DOWN.

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Active Raid – Episode 5

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Active Raid had another episode in what is turning out to be its usual pattern – fairly boring episodic thriller, reasonably compelling worldbuilding/thematic background details. These procedural plots just wholly lack the creativity, narrative momentum, or aesthetic execution to sell their own stories, but the most of the ways they reflect on this show’s world are pretty interesting. Active Raid isn’t really a good show, but it’s the kind of mediocre show I don’t have any trouble watching, because the stuff it’s bad at is the stuff I don’t tend to prioritize anyway. It’d be nice if all these neat little ideas had a story that could actually support them, but I wouldn’t be watching anime if I didn’t like broken stories that still have glimmers of beauty in them.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below!

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Winter 2016 – Week 4 in Review

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Things are still settling to some extent here in the fourth week, largely due to the fact that a full third of my current watch group consists of comedies. Comedies are tricky, and comedies are inconsistent, and comedies have much less of a tendency to settle into a reliable groove than most genres. So while Rakugo and ERASED continue to be excellent week after week, this time Konosuba was pretty terrible, while Dagashi Kashi was actually consistently funny. Other than that, I’m beginning to lose patience with Dimension W – the show is reasonably watchable, but absolutely nothing beyond that, possessing virtually no personality and being more interesting as a demographic artifact than an actual piece of media. Grimgar, on the other hand, is all personality, personality to a fault, and that actually makes it my third-favorite show at the moment. All that and more in this week’s Week in Review! Let’s RUN ‘EM DOWN!

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Active Raid – Episode 4

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Very little to report for this episode of Active Raid, unfortunately. The show itself is in a holding pattern of sorts (aw yeah, dunking on the episode by making use of its title, classic critic trick), slowly elaborating obvious relationship beats and generally just idling until its main narrative can actually start. Active Raid’s episodic stories are just not interesting, and that becomes a real problem when any given episode fails to entertain in other ways. Hopefully the characters actually learn to work together soon, because their bickering is not particularly engaging, but they’d probably work pretty well as friends. Or failing that, just give Asami and Rin the spotlight again – they’re way more interesting than this episode’s leads.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below.

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Winter 2016 – Week 3 in Review

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The season’s shows are still jostling at this point, jockeying for position and demonstrating which of their early strengths they can maintain and as-of-yet not quite imploding. Rakugo Shinju and ERASED are the easy top contenders, but beyond that, it’s a mixed field of shows that are either imbalanced, lacking in ambition, or somewhat inconsistent, but all still more or less worth watching. It’s probably not the generally strongest member of this pack, but Grimgar is actually the one I have the highest hopes for. The show’s weaknesses are loud and frustrating and obvious, but its strengths are very unique, and that appeals to me more than something like Dimension W’s straightforward but somewhat flavorless polish. But the overall crop still makes this easily the best season since last spring, so I’d say this is a good place to be. Let’s RUN ‘EM DOWN!

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