Hot tip: it turns out if you drop everything you’re watching except for the really great shows, EVERY week in anime is a great week in anime! So it goes for this particular week, where my likely unsurprising decision to finally drop Angolmois means I’m only watching shows I really, really enjoy. Fortunately for you folks, the less I watch, the more I apparently have to say about it – My Hero Academia, Planet With, and Revue Starlight all left me with plenty to talk about, and I’m eager to get to it. Even without a dedicated character drama this season, both Planet With and Revue Starlight are doing their best to give me meaty drama and thematics to sink into, while My Hero Academia continues to offer a thoroughly engaging mix of sturdy fundamentals and creative embellishments. Let’s start out by exploring My Hero Academia’s uniquely clever adaptation choices, and run the highlights of these excellent shows down!
Tag Archives: Angolmois
Summer 2018 – Week 4 in Review
The anime was pretty darn great this week, folks. First off, I settled into an actual watch schedule, which comes out to… well, all of the same stuff I was watching last week. I tried to pick up Hanebado! again, but to be honest, in a year where I’ve been spamming episodes of Chihayafuru nearly every week, it’s really hard to appreciate a show that’s so much worse at sports drama. When the show tried to dip into its trauma drama I pretty much instantly thought “can’t we just fast forward to the cool matches,” and it was at this point that I realized I wasn’t treating the show fairly enough to genuinely engage with it. “If you’re not enjoying something, just watch something else – you will not learn anything critically by continuing to watch it, you’ll just feed your own sense of superiority” is a lesson I’ve tried hard to internalize lately, and I might as well put it into practice here.
Fortunately, while Hanebado! was a bust, Angolmois actually stepped up enough this week that I feel happy continuing it, meaning I’ve got a pretty sturdy schedule. My list is still perilously low on compelling character dramas, but compelling character dramas are just not something anime is willing to give me every season, to my eternal dismay. Until we can bottle and mass produce Nisio Isin stories, I think that’s just a truth I’m going to have to live with – in the meantime, let’s survey what we’ve got and RUN THIS WEEK DOWN!
Summer 2018 – Week 3 in Review
Holy crap it’s already week three. This season’s extremely drawn-out preview schedule, along with my own vast wisdom in going on vacation directly after preview week, mean it’s taken me a quarter of the season to actually get any sort of handle on this season, and at this point I still haven’t really settled on a schedule. I’m almost certainly keeping up with Revue Starlight, My Hero Academia and Planet With are sticking around no matter what, but beyond that it’s basically open war between Angolmois, Banana Fish, Hanebado, and like three different reasonable comedies.
So far, Angolmois is the only one of that second set that I’ve actually caught up on, but it turns out I still had plenty to say about this week’s shows. Starting with the lovable dorks of class 1-A, let’s talk some shows and run this week down!
Summer 2018 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective
Well folks, the premieres have mostly crash-landed at this point, and it’s finally time to start sifting through the wreckage. My work on the ANN preview guide means I’ve personally watched basically every non-sequel premiere, and thus have a moral responsibility to share my knowledge, lest anyone else suffer this terrible burden. Every new season comes with somewhere around thirty relevant new productions, and it is absolutely not worth anyone’s (unpaid) time to watch all those shows, so today I’ll be breaking down this season’s premieres into vague tiers for your perusal. As always, I should clarify that this isn’t meant to be a hard, “objective” list or anything – I personally think I’m pretty okay at critiquing narrative/aesthetic craft and whatnot, but we all bring unique and valid perspectives to art, and so my list can’t really amount to much more than “I thought this was pretty cool.” Ultimately, if you’re a fan of some show’s given genre, most anime are at least watchable – but hey, you’re here and reading this, so you might as well check out my thoughts.
You can check out the full list of shows/reviews over at ANN, or just keep reading as we run through the season’s offerings. I should also mention that not everything actually has had its premiere yet, and thus last-minute challengers could still shake up the season (looking at you, Revue Starlight). And finally, this season I’ll be delegating the job of tier designation to Chitanda Eru, who I’m certain will do a phenomenal job. Let’s start with the season’s all stars and run through some premieres!