Winter 2017 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective

Hello and welcome! With the new anime season’s first week having come and gone, we are left with an immense pile of new series to investigate. A great part of the fun of new media is the joy of discovery, but I detest joy and your acquisition of it in particular, and so I’m here to steal that pleasure from you. Instead, you will now read my list of impressions for basically every new show that came out, which will dictate the terms of your entertainment for the next three months.

Working for ANN’s preview guide means I really do watch basically every new show, and offer a reasonably sized take on all of them (you can check out ANN’s full list here, and find my thoughts under Nick Creamer). But even that is so much material that it’s kind of ridiculous to engage with, and so here at the blog I group everything I watched into vague descending categories, with both brief thoughts and a link to my longer ones. This has been a fairly iffy season so far, so I’m sorry to say the lower brackets will be kind of stacked this time, but there’s still plenty of worthwhile anime to discover! Feel free to skim at your leisure, or just skip to the part where I start rambling incoherently and losing hope in existence. THE CHOICE IS YOURS.

Incidentally, I won’t be covering the shows that are chained to various awful licensing situations here, so just imagine my thoughts on Little Witch Academia are “please Netflix, please spare us from the pain of this empty season.” Alright, I think that covers it. Let’s run this season down!

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Winter 2017 Season Preview

I’ll be honest – this upcoming anime season is looking pretty sparse. Perhaps this is our punishment for having such a strong current season, or perhaps the good and just anime gods are displeased with Flip Flappers’ low sales numbers, but either way, we’re going to be scavenging for scraps come January. That said, there are still some bright spots here and there – sequels to strong first seasons, shows with promising creators, originals that might have have some kind of special spark. And we’ve certainly had weak winter seasons before – in fact, this winter may just end up being a repeat of last year’s, where Rakugo stood head and shoulders above the rest of the pack. We’ll get by, as we always do. And we’ll probably have some nice cartoons to help us.

As usual, I won’t be previewing every single show of the coming season, and I also won’t be providing traditional synopses. You can check a site like anichart for all that stuff – instead, I’ll be highlighting the specific shows that seem to have potential, along with the generally staff-related reasons I feel that way. Plot is cheap, but strong artists are irreplaceable. So let’s start at the vague peak of my interest level and run this next season down!

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