I’m kind of confused by my own reaction, but not so confused that I want to keep watching.
I have to wonder if I’m remembering the first episode of Quintuplets wrong and thinking that it looked better than it actually did, or if it always looked stilted, choppy and boring. This is not to mention how I really ought to have picked up on how trope-overdosed the entire thing really was going to be, or just how unlikeable the girls would very quickly become as they essentially go from “we’re just not that smart, you know?” to toddlers sticking their fingers in their ears when someone tries to teach them anything in the course of one episode.
I understand that women with infantile personalities are kind of a standard in harem shows, but for a second I just may not have noticed it, I guess? This is not to mention that making the five girls sisters who look almost identical with the only differentiating characteristic being a slight difference in hair color doesn’t make it hard to keep them apart, but it does make them really homogeneous, and giving them all spoiled-child maturity makes them totally unappealing, in a genre that lives or dies on generating waifus. (Say what you want about how one-dimensional the girls of Sword Art Online are, but I can understand why people at least like them!)
Sometimes my first-episode judgements are a little blinded, but by the end of three episodes…
Where does a show with this title get off subverting my expectations so much?
I know, I caved almost immediately to doing Update posts, and I may even make a video out of this one specifically, but I started my seasonal catch-up with Girly Air Force because it was the one I saw myself dropping the most casually and I figured I’d get it out of the way…and six episodes in, basically nothing I had assumed about this show has turned out to be correct. Girly Air Force is much less Kantai Collection…and much more Evangelion?
It’s not a perfect comparison, but honestly if you look at the bones, it’s not far off, and it reads like a more light-hearted version of NGE (which I’m not complaining about, now that we in the present know Evangelion to be the journey into a tortured and depressed creator), but still keeping several of its elements intact – the Xi are standing in for the Angels as supernatural enemies that are completely immune to the normal weapons of war mankind has used until now, the Anima are vaguely supernatural weapons with wills of their own (simply being more obvious on that front), and the characters are very similar too – protagonist Kei is a transplant brought as a refugee to live in Japan near the local military base, the first Anima he comes across is a seemingly emotionless girl who doesn’t have much experience with the outside world but is highly dependent on the man in charge of her project, and the second Anima is a spunky and highly competent fighter who spends a lot of time sucking up to the director.
I’m not crazy, right?
I wouldn’t call Girly Air Force inventive or anything, but thus far it’s very well-executed and well-paced – and, even if it’s the first thing I’ve caught up on for Winter, I can pretty confidently call it my biggest surprise of the season.
I’m not really sure what’s up with the MAL score, though – I’m hoping to see the usual jump up when it finishes airing, assuming it sticks the landing from here (heh, plane puns).
Score so far: 8/10
Final Thoughts – Sirius the Jaeger
It was going fine, right up until it got stupid.
The first half of Sirius is a well-produced action romp that competently executes a lot of well-worn genre tropes enough to make it at least cool fun, but about two-thirds of the way through, a major plot beat happens and pretty much everything following is just a downhill ride to a dumb and predictable ending.
That’s not to say that it’s irredeemable – the atmosphere and high production value of the first few episodes doesn’t peter out completely by the end, but it loses whatever originality it had along the way and looks noticeably worse as it goes on.
My problem ultimately becomes that it’s such a rote regurgitation of tropes that every single element introduced is resolved exactly how you would expect – I spent a lot of the first half joking around with my boyfriend about how “oh, look, it’s this trope, I guess this thing is gonna happen later” and every single one of my predictions came true.
It wouldn’t be a bad show for someone just getting into anime, but for someone who’s been watching for years, it’s just crushingly standard.
6/10.
Premiere Impressions – Winter 2019
ZI still haven’t even finished 2018, but I knew that if I waited any longer I’d never get through any of this, so let’s dive right in!
Winter is usually a light season for me – I can’t spend all my time watching, and I’m much choosier about what I do watch than in other seasons. This is pretty much how I skipped a lot of deserving stuff last year – I was burnt out and totally skipped over Gakuen Babysitters, for example – and looking down the list…Only 29 full-length shows made their premiere this season, and of those, 8 are sequels, 9 if you include the Boogiepop remake. That’s pretty sparse these days, and it made it pretty easy to make a lot of early cuts, made up for by the fact that I’m gonna be spending a lot of it watching the shows from last season that are still going (of which there are a strangely high number).
Before I get too into this, though, I want to clarify my rules now that I’ve nailed them down and it’s a new year.
Lists will be divided into Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, Multi (any show lasting more than thirteen episodes and ending this year) and Netflix (any show picked up by Netflix, because they don’t simulcast and because they have enough original titles now that it’s easiest to rank them against each other). For the sake of these bigger posts, “Multi” impressions will be placed in the masterpost for the season they premiered with, but they’ll be sectioned off.
That means that, for example, Sword Art Online Alicization will be ranked for 2019 even though it started last year. This makes more sense to me than waiting a whole year to write the 2018 wrap-up just for the sake of one show, and Forest of Piano2 and Kakeguruixx won’t be appearing on this list, they’ll go on the Netflix one at the end of the year.
With that, the numbers!
28 shows premiered for simulcasting that should end this season and last 13 episodes or less.
8 shows were skipped entirely, for the following reasons:
* Date A Live III, Kemono Friends 2, B Project: Zeccho Emotion, BanG Dream Season 2, and Real Girl Season 2 because I didn’t watch/finish the previous seasons. Techincally W’z should be here too, but I wound up making a post about it.
* Wataten! because I don’t give attention to that crap.
* VIRTUALSAN LOOKING because I don’t understand why Crunchyroll even picked up a show that relies entirely on virtual youtubers in Japan when Americans might be familiar with Kizuna Ai.
* Bermuda Triangle because I forgot it existed right up until the end and had no indication that it was worth my time anyway.
10 shows were dropped after the first episode. In no particular order:
* The Price of Smiles, Meiji Tokyo Renka and Pastel Memories because the ending twist wasn’t as compelling as the show thought it was.
* W’z for being a passion project from a director and producer whose only talent is wasting the potential of their staff on this story concept.
* Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka for not having enough original ideas to prop up incredibly lackluster execution.
* Grimms Notes the Animation for not having the execution to make its original ideas work in the show’s favor. (see what I did there, they’re parallel)
* Domestic Girlfriend for giving me a melodrama without an interesting lead. (This is the one I’m most likely to give another chance, should I drop too many of the shows I picked up.)
* Dimension High School but only because I don’t want anyone to think I’m recommending it because it’s good or anything. Would still be perfect for a good drunk weeb night.
* Saint Seiya: Saintia Sho for being the worst-looking show of the season and staining the name of a long-standing franchise.
* Kemurikusa for proving that its director didn’t learn much from the success of his previous work, including how to make his shows look better.
9 shows were picked up after the first episode, 2 of which I was unsure of:
* Kaguya-sama: Love is War because I love the direction and characters but can see myself growing annoyed with the concept.
* Girly Air Force because my judgment of its quality will be based heavily on the female cast, and we didn’t get to see much of them in the first episode.
And 7 of which I was more confident in:
* Mob Psycho 100 II and The Morose Mononokean II for obvious reasons (they’re sequels to shows I enjoyed).
* The Magnificent Kotobukifor being the only decent-looking CG show of the season and providing an excellent (and lengthy) action sequence in the first episode that totally sold me on watching dogfights.
* Endro!for being incredibly charming and creating a fun fantasy world that doesn’t get bogged down in RPG details.
* My Roommate is a Cat for giving me some much-needed accuracy in the field of cat-based anime.
* The Quintessential Quintuplets for being a harem show that looked like it might have an interesting plot and non-excessive fanservice.
* The Promised Neverland for having a ton of creative verve put behind a show that follows the current trend of kid-based horror.
3 shows premiered that are already confirmed to have more than 13 episodes, 1 of which I dropped:
* The Rising of the Shield Hero for just being okay right up to the point that it gave me blinding, seething fury.
And 2 of which I picked up, 1 of which I was cautious of:
* Boogiepop and Others, for being interesting but possibly a little too slow on the burn and very lazily made.
And 1 I was much, much more confident in:
* Dororo for being a very cool-looking interpretation of the work of Osamu Tezuka and having the coolest fight scene out of any of these premieres.
MOST IMPRESSIVE PREMIERE: The Promised Neverland
Maybe I’m predictable, but come on, when the first thing I can think to compare a show to is Made in Abyss, it’s doing something right. The Promised Neverland was probably the most-hyped show of Winter, and it gave us a premiere that demonstrated exactly why by tantalizing us with its mysterious setting before the big twist turned the atmosphere from “weirdly muted” to “complete horror”, and pulling off the only good bait and switch in a season that was fucking full of them.
Speaking of which…
WORST PREMIERE: The Rising of the Shield Hero
I’m not putting a GIF here because the first three pages of GIFs that Tumblr offered me for Shield Hero were all of Raphtalia, who appears to be the designated best girl of the season despite the show in question being easily the worst of the bunch and a strong contender for worst of the year already. My problem with this show is already known (and surprisingly, I only got one comment with the word “triggered” in it) and nothing besides Saintia Sho enraged me this much, but at least Saintia Sho just revealed itself to be poorly-made schlock instead of well-produced propaganda! Fuck this show.
And that’s it! The last lists for 2018 are coming soon, I promise, and I probably won’t be doing updated impressions this time around (because the season is already nearly over anyway), so stay tuned for my thoughts on the last few things I haven’t covered yet. Catch you guys soon.
I saved this one for last specifically because it was one of the most high-profile shows of the season, and now that I’ve seen it, my feelings are…mixed.
If a show gets an anime adaptation, I specifically won’t read the manga until the show is finished so it doesn’t color my opinion too much, so I’m going in totally blind here, and as much as I like the three characters here, I’m really not sure how long I can handle a romantic comedy entirely based on passive-aggression.
I love the direction here, clearly heavily inspired by Akiyuki Shinbo, though my appreciation of it is completely unsurprising given that it’s the director who made Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, though he seems to need very strong source material to really create something memorable (he also made Grancrest War, which bored me two episodes in and I completely forgot the existence of), so clearly this speaks to the manga’s quality.
I’ll keep an eye on this one, but unless it introduces a little variety I don’t know that it’s going to keep my attention.
Look, I have a cat. I love her very much. She is also frequently a stupid brat, and there are many shows about people with cats, but most of them are fluffy and cute all the time, and cats are definitely not that.
This is fucking refreshing content right here.
Because if you ever get a cat in real life, there’s a strong chance that that animal is going to spend 60%+ of it’s time ignoring and not giving a crap about you, and you just have to deal with that because there is no training them. Cats have personalities, and most of them are real-life tsunderes.
I don’t have a lot of non-cat-related news on this show, unfortunately, but I do like the main character Subaru and his excitement over having inspiration for his books – I sort of imagine him writing cozy mystery stories, and there are a lot of those that cater specifically to cat people. He gets so engrossed in his own work that he forgets to eat until he passes out – and, honestly, same – and I love that the show demonstrates the effect that this can have on his new friend, who tries to get him to eat his kitty kibble for lack of anything else.
That being said, I think this concept would have worked much better as a twelve-minute short series, because I don’t know how far you can really extrapolate this idea to make 288 minutes of content without getting really repetitive – but it’s definitely going to appeal to any otaku with their own furry little friend.
Okay, it’s a world of fairy tales where everyone has the phone from Future Diary?
Not literally, but this story takes place in a world where fairy tales are both known stories and also actually happen in real life, and everyone receives a book at birth that details their entire lives start to finish. This is a very high-concept idea that I have absolutely no faith in a show this boring to actually explore, because it looks like it’s just going to be an episodic snooze where the Story Police go around and make sure everyone’s following the script. This one’s a safe drop.
Also, side note: I know that “the animation” is not in the Japanese title, and I would really like to know why localizers keep adding it to English titles as if it signifies something good. It makes sense in shows like Persona 4 the Animation where the source game is well-known and there are story differences that should be kept track of between the two continuities, but the mobile game this one is based on isn’t especially popular, and it’s a mobile game. No good mobile adaptation I’ve ever seen has used this stupid naming convention, I’m just saying.
Might honestly make me drop Girly Air Force, or at least consider both of them more carefully.
What are the odds that we get two cute girl with plane shows in one season? This one is, at least, the more unique of the two, being that a) the cast is all-female and b) it’s made in impressive CG! Like, from this premiere, I can’t say much about the characters, but I can say a lot about how good the extended dogfight sequence looked. For that, I can thank director Tsutomu Mizushima, who is behind a bunch of my favorite shows, including Shirobako, Big Windup! and The Lost Village.
For this one, it looks like he drew direct experience from his direction of Girls und Panzer, because the CG in this is certainly more impressive and the lighting work during the sequence is phenomenal.
The most shocking thing about this show, though, is the studio behind it – it’s a co-production between the little-known WAO World (with whom I’m mostly familiar from Animegataris) and GEMBA, best known for ruining Berserk. I don’t have much to account for this – Berserk was directed by Shin Itagaki, who has as many good director credits (Ben-To, Black Cat) as he does bad ones (last season’s Ulysses) – so perhaps it’s also a choice in studio collaborators?
Regardless, this is turning out to be a shockingly good winter season and Kotobuki looks like it’s going to be near the bottom of the popularity poll, but I would highly recommend that more people give it a shot.
A harem show with a surprising amount of creative energy and an utterly awful title.
And I can already identify where the verve is coming from – a veteran director from the team at Tezuka Productions, who for some reason are behind both this and Dororo this season. I don’t usually have a lot of patience for harem shows, but I’ll at least give this one a few more episodes to get me hooked, given that it is shockingly normal in a landscape where I’m completely passing over Wataten! for being yet another show where an adult pervs out on a literal child.
And this seems like the kind of harem that might actually appeal to me – our protagonist is an actual character rather than a self-insert Nice Guy, the sisters have the potential to be two-dimensional, and there is something actually driving the plot forward – not to mention that in the entire first episode, Fuutarou never once walks in on a girl in a state of undress, in fact, one of the sisters actually follows him to the guys’ changing room just to make a point! Yes, there’s a little fanservice, but thus far it’s tame enough that I can give it a pass.
Is it predictable? Yes, but it might actually go somewhere, so I’ll give it a try!
I’m as surprised as anyone else that I’m picking this one up, but the first episode ended right as we received a proper introduction to the female lead, and this show’s quality is going to depend on her characterization.
Girly Air Force is definitely riding on the Cute-Girls-Doing-War-Things trend, but it goes a little differently from, say, Kantai Collection, where rather than the girls being planes, the girls are more like the manifestation of the planes’ sentience, which I guess at least makes more sense than just writing the girls as literal war machines.
I’ll have more to say here when I follow up on the second episode, but I’m not allowed until I’ve finished the rest of the premieres, so stay tuned, I guess?
The Arcane Archive 