Summer 2015 – Week 3 in Review

Welp, there’s no way around it – this is probably the most underwhelming season since I started watching seasonally. Basically the only new show I’m legitimately enthusiastic about is Classroom Crisis, and even that’s just “hey, this is pretty okay, I hope it turns out well.” Aside from Gatchaman Crowds insight, there’s nothing this season on the level of the top three from either of the last two seasons, and things only get more dire in the midrange. This week I’m serving pink slips to both Rokka and Himouto-chan, leaving me with… four new shows I’m watching? Jeez.

Welp, always time for backlog! All this dropping will hopefully give me time to get through Love Live S2 in time for the movie (seeing it in theaters, YEP), and maybe even watch some old classics! If that happens, I’ll likely be adding those to this space, since hey, what else am I gonna talk about? Gotta write about something.

Anyway, let’s run this sad-sack collection down!

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Summer 2015 – Week 2 in Review

Summer season has begun! This may turn out to be just a depressing chronicle of me dropping a whole bunch of shows the moment I continue them, but hey, I gotta do what I gotta do. Basically everything I started this season was in the “okay I guess, I’ll give it another episode” range, and second episodes rarely end up being dramatic improvements over first ones. They often give you a better indication of where the show will consistently go now that it’s gotten over its hook/pilot, but they don’t tend to dazzle as much as the premier. So let’s run down a bunch of also-rans, and see if I end up watching anything more than my sworn writeup duties!

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Summer 2015 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective

Here we go again. With preview week basically over (I’ll add the last couple if/when they show up), it’s time to run down every last goddamn show I’ve watched, including basically every full-length non-sequel premier of the season. That is a disturbing amount of anime, and so today you will be receiving a disturbing amount of High Quality Content. Not high quality anime, mind you, but certainly plenty of Content. Although actually, this season’s premiers largely turned out much less disappointing than I’d expected – there were disappointments and surprises, but the overall crop was fairly reasonable. That comes with a couple caveats, of course. First, there’s the plain that that first episodes lie – they trick you and torture you, stringing you along with one good idea and then collapsing into mediocrity. And second, while there were plenty of “good enough” shows, there were basically no highlights, and many of the reasonable shows are just “good for this genre.” So, like, I gave a three to Monster Musume and Actually, I Am…, but that’s a three harem and a three harem-romcom. Plenty of the shows I think are “generally fine” I will not actually be following – in fact, there’s a decent chance I only stick with the top three.

Anyway! I’ll run things down by broad category, and you can make your own judgments from there. LET’S GET TO IT.

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