The preview guide has come to a close, and I covered every damn show except “that Warring States Thing That’s Apparently Just A Worse Sengoku Basara,” so we’ve got plenty to talk about. We get a lot of anime every season, and none of you guys are receiving hazard pay for suffering through the worst of it, so I’m very ready to run down what demands to be watched, what you could maybe watch I guess if you feel like it, and what should be handled with lead-lined gloves and disposed of in a properly licensed waste treatment facility. I wasn’t really expecting much of this season, but the opening episodes ended up offering a stellar first and second tier of shows – yeah, first episodes are often liars, but it’s still nice to start off on the right foot. This post here will give you brief rankings and descriptions of everything I muddled through this week, along with links to the ANN pages containing my longer thoughts. Let’s run them down!
Author Archives: Bobduh
Yuri Kuma Arashi – Episode 2
Hey guys. I don’t know if I’ll be keeping this up, but I really can’t resist doing a writeup or two for a new Ikuhara show. Almost nothing else in anime lends itself to close reading as consistently and necessarily as his work – he’s basically always constructing a conversation on the level of metaphor and theme, and Yuri Kuma Arashi seems to have almost disposed of the base narrative level entirely in preference to that stuff.
Yuri Kuma Arashi is also a show about bears who are lesbians having fun naked times together. So… yeah. Ikuhara’s definitely decided to embrace his own niche, but I certainly don’t have a problem with that. You can check out my writeup of the first episode if you’d like, as we’re already knee-deep in plenty of potential thematic threads, but who knows where this will all end up. Let’s hang out with some lesbian bears!
Winter 2015 – First Impressions, Part Two
The preview guide continues! I’m happy to say this season has completely surpassed my expectations so far, with all the shows I was looking forward to and more besides coming out swinging with strong first episodes. First episodes can certainly be deceiving, but given my preseason expectations were “well, at least some great shows are continuing from the fall,” I’m very pleased to see such an initially strong crop of episodes.
Here’s the link to the preview guide, where you can once again check out all my posts as they arrive. Today’s recommendations are Death Parade, The Idolmaster – Cinderella Girls, and especially The Rolling Girls. Death Parade pretty much fulfills all the macabre promise of Death Billiards with a trashy, beautifully articulated first episode, Cinderella Girls offers understated drama and humor in the KyoAni school, and The Rolling Girls feels like a breathless combination of Kyousogiga and Yozakura Quartet. You’ll find links to all my new reviews with scores below. Hope you find something you enjoy!
Log Horizon II – Episode 14
Once again, one of Log Horizon’s one-off diversions ends up being one of its best episodes. This one wasn’t an unexpected character study like William’s speech, though – it was just all the stuff Log Horizon normally does, except executed way better than usual with an entirely new cast. Natural worldbuilding, fun characters, a very cute riff on Journey to the West, and some actually solid fight scenes. If this is a sign of things to come, we’re in for a real treat in this Kanami-Nureha-Shiroe conflict.
Here’s my full ANN post. Notes are below!
Winter 2015 – First Impressions, Part One
The winter season has begun, meaning it’s once again time for my endless, soul-crushing adventure into the preview guide. Winters are fortunately kind of light relative to most seasons, and this winter in particular is completely dominated by sequels, so I won’t be approaching the back-breaking thirty episode flood of fall. There’s still plenty to cover though, and so I’ll be releasing my thoughts in installments.
First off, here’s the link to the preview guide itself, where you can check out my condensed thoughts on all the shows so far. Blurbs I particularly recommend checking out would be Yuri Kuma Arashi, where I dig into some of the already-apparent symbolism (more of that available in my full episode post from yesterday), and Saekano, where I talk briefly about a recent anime trend I can’t friggin’ stand. My immediate scores for everything are included in the list below (yay, scores), and clicking on any title will jump you to that episode’s full post. Please enjoy!
Yuri Kuma Arashi – Episode 1
Hey guys! So, this isn’t exactly a classic time stamp writeup, but I took a whole damn lot of pictures during the first episode of Bear Storm, and plenty of notes besides, and so I figured I might as well assemble what I do have. What writeups I eventually settle on is still an open question – I might actually be covering this show for ANN (you can check out my more structured thoughts on this episode over there), I might do my own writeups, or I might collapse in a heap if I try to do any more work than I’m currently doing. We live in a world of uncertainty.
I will say I loved this first episode, and that there’s plenty of rich stuff to dig into already, and that it’s clear that Ikuhara hasn’t given up on any of the stuff that makes his work so compelling. Watching an Ikuhara show feels like some kind of thematic symphony – different repeating refrains and meaning-infused symbols all flow past each other and reflect on one another, the variant ideas charging all of his points with the depth of interconnectedness that only narrative can achieve. It’s a hell of a ride. Let’s run this first episode down!
Parasyte – Episode 13
And we’re back, with a real sad-sack episode for Shinichi. Kana’s dead, his girlfriend doesn’t trust him, Tamiya is sending private investigators after him… things aren’t going so great for our hero right now. We also got some pretty interesting developments on the parasite side, which I end up spending most of this episode’s article rambling about. Doing a lot of rambling in general at the moment – preview week’s in full swing, I’m alternating between sleeping, doing ten hour shifts, and writing about cartoons, and the weather outside is approaching the opposite of livable degrees. I might be hallucinating, because I’m pretty sure I also watched a show about lesbian bears. G’bye everybody…
Here’s my full post on ANN. Hopefully lucid notes below!
Sword Art Online Extra Edition – Review
Pretty happy with this one. Not the show itself – Extra Edition’s a hot sack of garbage, there’s no reason to watch it. But I think the review itself gave me a pretty cathartic opportunity to give one last goodbye to SAO… at least until season three comes out. Or until I have to review season two’s blurays. Or until…
Alright, maybe SAO isn’t actually done with me at all. Still, I had fun with this review, and I have to say I’ve really developed a fondness for the show in spite of it all. Until we meet again, Sword Art Online.
My full ANN review is available here. My copious fanservice special notes are below!
Chaika the Coffin Princess: Avenging Battle – Review
Another review is out! This time I hit Chaika’s second half, which entertained me plenty in spite of its problems. Chaika definitely remained reliably entertaining this season, but it’s a shame it didn’t get the extra couple episodes it needed to really nail the dismount. Maybe a little rejiggering of the Gaz’s Island arc could have also made space for a proper conclusion… but who knows. Either way, at least we’ll always have all those wonderful Chaika gifs.
You can check out the full ANN review here!
Fall 2014 – Week 13 in Review
We got a few show endings this week, which were scattered between great and mediocre. Amagi’s real ending was last week, which allowed this episode to be… well, a kind of lukewarm one-off. But Bahamut ended well, and Fate Stay Night at least had good scenes within a weaker overall episode. So I guess what I’m saying is Shirobako saved Christmas, like we always knew it would. Let’s run ’em down!