We’re into the proving grounds at this point, folks. With the season over halfway over, we’re now entering the episodes that demonstrate whether our seasonal crop are merely capable of pulling off a couple great episodes, no more than a strong aesthetic sensibility, or a genuinely lasting work of fiction. Our various contenders are all answering this question through whatever means they can muster, but so far, it’s the action team-up of Thunderbolt/JoJo and the relentless consistency of Run with the Wind that are setting the pace. Both Gridman and Tsurune are still perfectly engaging shows, but they haven’t really presented that hard sell yet – Tsurune’s emotional drama still feels a little underwritten, while Gridman’s many mysteries haven’t quite congealed into a thrilling whole. Still, it’s the messiness of fiction that’s often most satisfying to write about, and we’ve got plenty to celebrate even in the season’s shakier shows. Let’s run down one more week in anime!

Run with the Wind’s seventh episode was a truly stunning accomplishment, and brought our ramshackle team’s first official event to life with an absurd buffet of steady, naturalistic animation. “Genuinely animating an entire run meet” feels like it’d be an effort as herculean as Euphonium’s big concert scenes, and this episode not only succeeded in accomplishing that feat, but also managed to make Kakeru’s path along the track feel like a satisfying battle in its own right. It is very difficult to satisfyingly convey drama in sports with as few tactical elements and as much pure exertion as running; it takes a tremendous attention to tone, and a purposeful focus on a clearly illustrated personal mountain. Kakeru’s attempts to actually win this race served as a sturdy anchor point for the drama, while the build of the music and focus on the tempo of movement naturally evoked the tense, crowded atmosphere of a big race. Run with the Wind has passed its greatest challenge so far with flying colors, and demonstrated it can work just as well as a genuine sports drama as it does as a character piece.

The latest episode of SSSS.Gridman felt pretty slow to me, in spite of furthering a variety of the show’s threads and capping off with another ferocious battle. My central complaint with this episode was that unlike last week, where we were actually learning a great deal of new information about this show’s characters and its world, this week mostly focused on characters who weren’t initially privy to that information slowly accepting it as true. Rikka and Utsumi doubting Akane’s involvement in this conflict didn’t really provoke any satisfying conflicts; it just meant we had to wait around for a fair amount of the episode to pass until they were convinced Yuta wasn’t lying. Watching characters slowly learn things we already know is only compelling when it serves some genuine dramatic purpose, and that didn’t seem true here. That said, the more fundamental issue might simply be that this episode’s focus kept us close to Yuta’s perspective throughout, and Yuta is still just not an interesting person. Gridman is running out of time for some of its ongoing issues to not end up as overall flaws, and the mystery of Yuta still feels like the biggest of them.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure continued its stunning streak of episodes this week, offering essentially a coda between big fights that nonetheless felt like a highlight in its own right. The psychedelic torture dance of Bucciarati’s shitty boys was as unexpected as it was entertaining, demonstrating a welcome willingness to dive into both new visual territory and absurd dramatic farce. And even the more traditionally animated scenes demonstrated a keen eye for engaging direction, like this episode’s many swooping cuts featuring those cawing gulls. On top of that, Mista absolutely made the most of his formal debut, from the absurd comedy of his Stand introduction to his thrilling collaboration with Giorno. Mista’s careful approach to engaging with an enemy Stand user really helped amplify the tension of this encounter, and there was an inherent thrill in seeing a uniquely thoughtful hero frankly assess his chances. Golden Wind’s cast already seems like it might be the strongest group of JoJo so far, and the challenges they’re facing are making brilliant use of their personalities, Stands, and the various environments they inhabit. I’m not sure JoJo has ever felt quite as confident as this.

This week’s Tsurune left me with somewhat conflicted feelings. In larger narrative terms, I appreciated this episode’s intended role, as well as its ultimate reinforcement of archery being an unexpectedly team-oriented sport. Masaki’s ploy to have the team build unity through shared drudgery was smart and effective, and the ultimate payoff of their team order felt like a testament to his style of thinking. The actual, material training of these boys isn’t all that important at the moment – if they can learn to think and act like a team, they’ll actually raise each other up far faster than if they were constantly at each other’s throats. On the other hand, a fair amount of this episode still felt needlessly slow and unfocused, and the central friction between Kaito and Minato just wasn’t all that poignant or interesting. Tsurune feels like it’s a show I can appreciate more than one I can love – it’s smartly executed, but never cuts deeply enough to genuinely move me.

Finally, while Thunderbolt Fantasy‘s latest couldn’t match the action-packed theatrics of the last two episodes, it was still a perfectly satisfying episode in its own right. I was very happy to learn we hadn’t truly lost the sanity of this season’s kinda-sorta heroine, the Princess of Cruelty, who’s actually undergone the most character development of all our newcomers. Her quest to find meaning in her life is actually pretty sympathetic, even if that meaning generally requires killing many innocent bystanders, and her totally honest feelings make for a necessary counterpoint among all these scheming sociopaths. As for those sociopaths, the latest ramblings from our resident monk served as a firm reminder of Urobuchi’s grand talent for writing the biggest assholes in the universe. Not only did he fail to accept responsibility for getting an innocent couple killed, but he actually spun their deaths into one more justification for his own shallow, nihilistic philosophy. Constantly claiming to possess no philosophy while twisting all events to support his own terrible worldview, the monk is one of those characters I just want to reach through the screen and shake until his hair buns fall off. Congratulations on making yet another villain I love to hate, Urobuchi.