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!