Welp, the first half of August basically just disappeared in the space of a sneeze or something, so we’ve somehow already arrived at the season’s halfway point. Like last season, I’m not really watching enough airing shows to make any sort of ranking meaningful, and I mean, it’s not like these rankings have ever been meaningful in the first place. Also like last season, I don’t really have any problems with that – I’m much happier watching the shows I genuinely love on an episodic basis, and just dropping the stuff that doesn’t actually thrill me. I have to keep up with at least some seasonal anime for the sake of my actual work, but on the whole, I highly recommend dropping stuff you hope will become or return to being good, and instead check out some shows that people have been loving for years and years.

If we just looked at the airing shows I’d been watching, this would be a pretty bad year for me – the only shows I’ve really loved are After the Rain, Violet Evergarden, Laid-Back Camp, and likely a couple of this season’s shows. But given all the other projects I’ve been working on, this has actually been one of my most rewarding years since I started watching seasonally, offering shows as diverse and fantastic as Princess Tutu, Ojamajo Doremi, Precure Hugtto, and even some non-magical girl shows. The urge to keep up with the airing conversation can definitely be strong, but there’s a wide anime world out there, and I’m still discovering new favorites all the time.

Anyway! Week in Review. I might not be ranking shows any more, but I actually still like the idea of covering my thoughts as a whole at the halfway point, so we’ll be going with a more gentle style of evaluation. With all three of my seasonal titans excelling in their own ways, I’ve got a pretty satisfying spread of visual splendor, thematic poignancy, and just-plain-excellent entertainment. Let’s start with Satoshi Mizukami’s beautiful baby and run this season down!

This week’s Planet With felt like the rousing, anthemic climax of a much longer show, which at this point should come as no surprise. Planet With is essentially operating in its own league in terms of narrative ambition, character writing, and natural theme-weaving, and every single episode has offered both thrilling narrative turns and sharp, poignant thematic lessons. In spite of most of this episode being totally consumed by a satisfying brawl between Takashi and both alien factions, it was actually his father who stole the show, offering the humble yet profound “being able to endure the unfairness of the world and still remain kind is a more noble thing than justice.” It feels like every episode of Planet With contains a sub-moral and sub-conflict that could genuinely support an entire smaller show, and that line’s mix of humanist wisdom and relevance to Planet With’s larger narrative mechanics (after all, the sealing faction is essentially attempting a larger form of Takashi’s goals) put it up there among the show’s best lines.

Planet With’s weaknesses are entirely transparent: the show’s CG isn’t great, and it’s fairly light on animation more generally. But in exchange for accepting those limitations, it’s decided to offer the by-far best written show of the season so far, and possibly year to date. From its simultaneously hilarious and character-infused dialogue to its wild narrative course and compassionate reflections on human nature, this show is throwing haymaker after haymaker, trying to power through ten shows worth of insight and tears in just one season. It feels like it might just pull it off.

As of its presumable halfway point, Revue Starlight is turning out to be maybe a bit less than the sum of its parts, but still an altogether rich and rewarding show. The visual brilliance of its first episode hasn’t really let up since; the show has offered plentiful beautifully animated highlights since, and expanded its visual vocabulary in all sorts of creative directions. Last week’s Mahiru-focused episode offered some fine examples of Starlight’s visual strengths in a variety of ways, from its fancifully constructed final stage to the subtler ways its symmetrical compositions and reliance on visual segue beats kept energy high all through the first half. That episode also demonstrated Starlight’s growing acuity regarding its character stories, doing a fine job of humanizing Mahiru and making her insecurities tangible to the audience.

My one major critique of Starlight so far regards its overarching narrative. I still feel like the nature of being a Top Star is too vague to invest in as character motivation, and Karen’s desire for everyone to shine together hasn’t really been put in any sort of meaningful human context. Starlight’s fights are thrilling enough and characters engaging enough that I really want to invest in Karen’s victory, but so far, the stakes have been too vaguely defined for me to care about the results of this overall competition, as opposed to the immediate fortunes of some given pair of competitors. Most individual episodes of Revue Starlight have been very good, but I’m still waiting for the narrative turn that gives these individual sagas some collective meaning.

While Planet With and Revue Starlight have both proven themselves to be extremely worthwhile but somewhat lopsided productions, My Hero Academia has maintained rigorous consistency all through its provisional license arc. Unfortunately, that consistency falls somewhere below the standard of season three’s first half, and this arc’s lack of emotional or thematic stakes has meant it has had to rely very heavily on the show’s visual execution. When it comes to that, the fact that this provisional arc was so reliant on dramatic full-page spreads in manga form, rather than either tactical interplay or extended physical exchanges, means we’ve been getting a whole bunch of somewhat unsatisfying, still-focused anime bouts.

I suppose I can’t fault the adaptation for not really being able to keep up with the highlight density of the manga, and I’m sure this arc would feel a bit more satisfying if I hadn’t read through it already, but the anime isn’t really elevating this material as it has much of the manga’s other arcs. Hopefully the show is saving up some thrilling highlights for the season’s final quarter; the upcoming chapters offer no shortage of potentially stunning fights, so it’s really up to the anime to bring this season home.