Tag Archives: Appare Ranman!

Spring 2020 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective

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Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you – this is looking to be a pretty light season in the land of anime. Even in the lead-up to this season, it was already clear that most of the larger hits would be long-running sequels, and series like Re:Zero and Food Wars lost my interest years ago. Then, of course, the coronavirus started sweeping the globe, leading to a number of entirely justified and frankly welcome delays for some of the season’s key properties. Between those extenuating factors and the season’s inherently limited number of high-profile productions, this is turning out to be a light season on the whole, and a fine time to dig into your backlog.

That said, most anime being crap hasn’t stopped me before, and it certainly didn’t stop me this time. I have successfully waded through this season’s mountain of garbage with my mouth wide open, and having sampled all of its sweetly molding flavors, I am now prepared to spit out the choicest morsels for your collective enjoyment. My list here will run from the season’s top contenders down to its worst offenders, with handy tiers and links to longer reviews over at ANN’s preview guide. Let’s review some cartoons!

Oh shit, right, I always do some gimmicky naming scheme for the quality tiers. Uh, let’s do… tiers based on… colors? I guess? Fuck it.

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Spring 2020 Season Preview

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Hello all, and welcome to Wrong Every Time! Today I am terrified to announce that it is some-fucking-how time for the spring previews, as the winter season is already drawing to a close. As is tradition, today I’ll be breaking down the most promising prospects of the upcoming season – though in this case, that process is somewhat complicated by the fact that spring is so entirely packed with sequels.

Seriously, just look at this friggin’ list. Re:Zero, Kaguya-sama, SAO, Fruits Basket, Food Wars!, Bookworm… heck, even friggin’ Jashin-chan Dropkick is getting a sequel. This is perhaps the point where my current policy of only continuing shows that genuinely thrill me starts to become a problem – when you combine that with the profound risk aversion built into the anime production system, you end up with over half a dozen “long-awaited sequels” to shows I dropped in their first or second episodes.

Fortunately, even if you set aside the majority of the major sequels, this is still looking to be a fine season – certainly more diverse than winter, at least, which mostly broke down into Eizouken and Everything Else. As usual, I won’t be highlighting every single show here – just the ones that I think have significant potential, either due to their staff, acclaimed source material, or whatever else catches my eye. Without further ado, let’s break down the most promising contenders of the Spring 2020 Anime Season!

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