Rottcodd

Current season:

Initially, the only current series I watched was espisode 26 of MF Ghost, which was fine. I don't expect it to do more than entertain me, and occasionally cynically amuse me with its adherence to the formula, and that's what it does.

But then midweek, I was browsing back through the thread from last week and noticed that wietach had pointed to Ikoku Nikki as a surprisingly early contender for AOTS, so I gave it a shot. And I agree wholeheartedly. That was easily one of the best first episodes I've seen in a long, long time, and it laid the groundwork for much more to come. I loved everything about it - the story, the characters, the art style, the voice acting, the music, the dialogue, the non-linear but seamless timeline, the perfectly placed bits of surrealism... And last week's episode - the second - was more of the same. It's just very, very good, and in every respect.

And the first episode of You and I Are Polar Opposites aired, so I got to see that one too. I was sort of both pleased and underwhelmed - I followed the manga from start to finish and this is a faithful adaptation (even the chibified characters are the same), so it doesn't really add anything for me. But that's likely a good thing, since the manga was very good, and don't mess with what works. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn't read the manga (or who has read it and wants to re-experience it animated) and is interested in a school slice-of-life rom-com (with multiple romances). And I'll keep watching it for certain - my favorite character (Nishi) hasn't even appeared yet.

Past seasons:

First up last week was the rest of Hanasaku Iroha, which I started the previous week.

It's mostly a slice of life, with a bit of romance mixed in, and I was very impressed. The cast is excellent - large and diverse and well fleshed-out. And most of them get at least some development along the way. It's set at a hot spring inn though, and much of the focus of the series is on the inn itself, which is very old and very traditional and very well-loved, but at this point, not very successful, so the ongoing background is the conflict between the desire to maintain the inn's beloved traditions at the expense of commercial success or to attempt to update it to hopefully appeal to a broader range of customers, but at the expense of its traditional appeal. Along the way, different characters take different, and sometimes shifting, positions on that. But that's just the background - the thing that knits everything and everyone together. There's much more to it too, as the characters interact and grow. And the art and voice work were also very good. I would strongly recommend it to anyone who appreciates SOL.

Then, wanting a change of pace, I watched another episode of Mnemosyne no Musume-tachi - episode 5 of 6 total. It's a gritty cyberpunk with 45 minute standalone episodes and an overarching plot that's been slowly playing out (very slowly - the in-universe timespan from episode 1 to episode 5 has been 55 years). Since the episodes are self-contained and long, and tend to be both complex and brutal, I've just been watching them one or two at a time for a few weeks now.

Next up I bounced off of Soul Eater. I really wanted to like it, mostly because of the art style, but it's just so shounen. I made it through the first three prologue episodes hoping it would improve when it got to the story episodes, but I only made it about halfway through the first of them, cringing all the way, and had to give up.

Then I knocked around for a bit, watching a few favorite episodes of favorite series - Apocalypse Hotel 6, Zombieland Saga Revenge 4, Asobi Asobase 4 (I'm laughing just thinking about shogi) - then rewatched Milky Subway for the I-don't-know-how-manyth time, then finally settled on Jijou wo Shiranai Tenkousei ga Guigui Kuru aka The Clueless Transfer Student is Assertive aka My Clueless First Friend. It was good all in all, though the central gimmick wore a bit thin. And the art style left a bit to be desired. But it was cute and wholesome and amusing, and that's good enough.

And at the moment, I'm rewatching Trigun Stampede, getting myself oriented for Stargaze. It's kind of risky, since broadly what I remember is that I enjoyed it in spite of its flaws, so this time around, it's up in the air whether I'll be more aware of the things I enjoy or the flaws. We'll see, but so far so good.

I was mostly excited but a bit apprehensive looking forward to this, since the first episode drew me in so strongly that I have something of a stake in the series now. And happily, it delivered.

It's very much slice of life, but it's just done so well, and littered with neat little moments - happy moments and sad moments and enlightening moments and amusing moments and just... meaningful moments. And it does this fascinating trick in which some of the moments sneak up on me - they're just going along, not seeming to be much of anything notably, and then suddenly some emotion or some realization smacks me in the face with its full weight, almost as if from out of nowhere.

And the story is continuing to unfold gracefully, with well-placed flashbacks and fantasy sequences, so the pacing is near-perfect, as we gradually learn more about who these people were, are and are going to become.

And the art and music and voice acting all continue to be excellent.

I'm impressed and satisfied, and looking forward to next week.

Mmm... I hadn't thought about it that way, but I think you're exactly right. And this author's skilled enough that that was likely a deliberate decision, so there could be an ongoing focus. Otherwise, it would've had to have been "Naruto studies," which would be boring or 'Naruto doesn't study," which would be tragic.

Sumire does the whoosh thing now too.

Ikoku Nikki – I think it’s the earliest in the season I get my AOTS contender.

I had to check this out, since that's such a bold prediction, and... now it's already an AOTS contender for me too.

That was tremendous, and in so many different ways - the characters, the narration, the art style, the music, the way the story unfolded non-linearly but still somehow seamlessly, the perfectly placed surrealism, the little bits and pieces of buried emotional turmoil (hints of things to come)...

I really didn't expect something that good. Thanks for the heads up.

Sorry - I must not have been clear enough.

I don't mean romantic progress as a whole. I mean things like figuring out what the question "Are you interested in anyone?" is actually asking.

Waku's always in the slow lane, but he always gets there eventually.

I love that when he manages to stammer out all the right things to get her to relax a bit, it's as if a flood gate opens up.

Mmkay...

They sort of skipped right over the whole "but his car's so underpowered" thing and didn't show how Kanata managed to catch up with all of those cars, even on long straightaway sections, so they could focus on the nifty passing moves.

And they're still doing that thing where he drifts a corner to pass on the outside and the other driver can't figure out what he's doing, as if it's some sort of magic.

And why are Nozomi and Yashio still paired up, and with him in front, when she demonstrated last season that's she's far and away the better driver? I was hoping this season would show her up closer to the front, by herself, battling with the supercars. But then that would sort of throw a wrench in the whole "but his car's so underpowered" thing, since hers has even less power. Which wouldn't actually make a difference, but we aren't supposed to know that yet.

And as has been the case since Initial D First Stage, even with all of the things that can be criticized, it still entertains me.

Picked up a wonderful newer series last week, courtesy of Essence_of_Meh - Moriagaranai Date aka Unexciting Date.

As I've noted on the threads, it pretty much immediately jumped all the way to being my favorite new manga, and the two leads are vying for the position of my all-time favorite manga couple. It really is that good, with drily witty dialogue and multiple laugh-out-loud moments per chapter, and a slow-burn romance that couldn't be anything other than slow-burn.

The only new thing I've watched so far is the first episode of the third season of MF Ghost, which was pretty much exactly what I expected.

It can't really be anything else - not only is it following a formula - it's following the same formula Initial D used, with only a few updates (like the droning commentary being supplied by professional race announcers rather than random guys standing by the side of the road). But it's doing a fine job all in all of following the admittedly proven formula, so that's okay.

And speaking of Initial D, this episode of MF Ghost did have one moment of pure awesome, when the announcers are reminiscing about Takumi - the protagonist of Initial D and the mentor of the protagonist of MF Ghost - and I suddenly realized that I could faintly hear Rage Your Dream - the immortal ED of Initial D Stage One - playing in the background.

I do have one issue with the series - an ongoing one - and this'll give me a chance to kick it out of my brain. The whole "but his car's so underpowered" thing, which was central to Initial D and thus central to this as well, is already plainly asinine, since the two dominant cars so far, other than his, have been a Porsche Cayman and an Alpine A110. So every time someone starts rattling on about how he can't win unless he gets a more powerful car to compete with the Ferraris and Lamborghinis, I have to fight the urge to shout at the screen.

The rest of the things that interest me this season - so far, Frieren season 2, Trigun Stargaze and You and I Are Polar Opposites - have yet to air.

I'm also very much looking forward to the movies of All You Need is Kill and Milky Subway

As far as past season watches go:

I started the week off with a fascinating pair of movies - Boku ga Aishita Subete no Kimi e aka To Every You I've Loved Before and Kimi wo Aishita Hitori no Boku e aka To Me the One Who Loved You.

They are literally a pair of movies. They're set in a near future in which the existence of parallel universes has been proven and a new field of science has grown up around them. The protagonist's life branched radically at the point of one choice he made as a child, leading to two notably different futures. Relatively early in his life the two parallel universes briefly overlap, then much later, and by design, they do again. The two movies tell the story of those events, one from the point of view of one timeline and the other from the other. So whichever movie you watch first (I watched them in the order I listed them above), you see the life of that version of the protagonist, and only get the bits of the other version that you can pick up from the times when they overlap. Then with the second movie, you get all of the context behind all of those bits you picked up in the first movie, plus that protagonist's interpretation of the events of the overlaps. It's technically intriguing, but it's also touching and thoughtful, as you see the profound effects seemingly simple choices can have on lives. I really enjoyed them.

Then I knocked around for a bit and damned if I didn't end up watching Honey Lemon Soda again. That's the fifth time now. I had no intention of watching it - I was just browsing, waiting for something to jump out at me, and came across it, and smiled, and went ahead and clicked on episode 1, and that was pretty much that.

A lot of what I like about it is that Uka is an unusually accurate portrayal of social anxiety (something with which I'm all too familiar). Most portrayals don't get it right (the Bocchi the Rock adaptations are especially bad, but that's another rant for another day), presumably because the people writing it haven't actually experienced it, so they're just sort of guessing. But Honey Lemon Soda nails it with Uka.

But the thing that I really appreciate about it - it's often compared to Kimi ni Todoke, and I can see the similarities, but Kimi ni Todoke gets it all entirely wrong. Shouta treats Sawako one of two ways, alternating between being overly considerate and being awkward and avoiding her, and both of those are awful ways to deal with social anxiety, since the first is demeaning and the second is only what you pessimistically expect. With Honey Lemon Soda though, Kai forces himself into Uka's life just enough to get her attention, then just sort of points her in the right direction and waits for her to sort things out for herself, while making sure that she knows that if she really needs saving, he'll be there, but other than that, she's pretty much on her own. And that's perfect - it's enough of a goad to keep her going, and enough security to give her the courage she needs, but without making her his focal point, which would just make her feel pressured. And the whole thing is neatly summed up when Serina - Kai's gorgeous ex-girlfriend who's introduced as a suspected love rival - says that the difference between them is that being with Kai made her weaker, but it makes Uka stronger. And it does.

Then, refreshed with a dose of comfy, familiar fluff, I dove into a series I've been wanting to watch, when the time was right, for years - The Promised Neverland.

And it was brutal and frightening and sad, and oddly, stubbornly optimistic, and very, very good. I liked pretty much everything about it (even the ending, which is a montage of scenes presumably from events from the manga, and a pretty significant timeskip). A particularly notable thing about it to me was that the animation and the sound were both very good, but I only noticed them from time to time because I was so caught up in the characters and the story. That's the way it should be IMO.

And I'm currently in the middle of a very nice series I just stumbled across - Hanasaku Iroha.

It's about a naively earnest and determined girl who had basically been the grown-up to her irresponsible mother, right up until her mother took off with her boyfriend, and dumped Iroha off on her grandmother - a cold and domineering taskmaster who runs a hot spring inn. It's pretty much pure SOL, with very little ongoing plot to speak of, but as should be the case with SOLs, the characters and their interactions and growth more than make up for it. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The only downside so far is that the OP of the first cour is so far up into high-pitched little girl voice range that it makes my ears hurt, but that's what skip is for.

Yeah - that's it. Two days and 15 chapters and this is my new favorite manga, and these two are vying for my all-time favorite couple.

These two might have just leapfrogged all the way up to my all-time favorite couple in one afternoon and 14 chapters.

Finally made it to this - I had to refresh myself on where we were first, so I watched the last few episodes of last season. And that's right - Kanata's elbow. Because we needed some reason why the inevitable best driver does something amazing but still doesn't quite win. Yet.

And beyond that, it was pretty much what I expected - lots of hot blood and gritted teeth, lots of excruciating detail about cars and racing, and lots of rattling on about how underpowered his car is.

Not that that's a bad thing - it's a niche that I can and do enjoy. It's still very much a niche though.

I have to admit that it was very cool when the announcers were reminiscing about Takumi and I suddenly realized I could faintly hear Rage Your Dream playing in the background.

Year end impressions:

Objectively good IMO:

Milky Subway was refreshingly original - especially in the natural way it presented dialogue - and consistently laugh out loud funny. Even at only four minutes per episode, I think I got more pure enjoyment out of it than about anything else this year.

Apocalypse Hotel was probably my overall favorite of the year. Over the course of its run, it hit on lots of different genres, but mostly because Yachiyo (later on with the admirable assistance of Ponko) is so conscientious and so determined, it's ultimately more iyashikei than anything else.

The Fragrant Flower Blooms with Dignity was charming from start to finish, and not just the best and most rewarding rom-com of the year, but arguably one of the best ever.

May I Ask For One Final Thing? was a rollicking adventure, and Scarlet is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Silent Witch was a wonderful combination of fluff, intrigue and action, as Monica showed that being sweet and shy doesn't mean you can't also be a terrifying badass when necessary.

Personal favorites:

I've watched Honey Lemon Soda all the way through four times now, and have enjoyed it every time. I recognize its flaws, but I love it anyway.

Maebashi Witches was a pleasant surprise - on the surface it's just fluff about magical girl/idols who grant wishes, but it ends up being an intriguing exploration of hope, desire, fulfillment and disappointment, and especially of the possible gap between what you might think you want and what will actually make you happy.

Taken by itself, I May Be a Guild Receptionist, But I'll Solo Any Boss to Clock Out on Time was only so-so, but that was mostly because it spent too much time telling too little story. I suspect that if it can get another season or two or three, it's going to turn out to be excellent.

Disappointments:

Food Court de Mata Ashita is one of my all-time favorite manga, but the adaptation didn't even begin to do it justice. It still boggles my mind that the manga did a better job at comedic timing than the anime did - how is it even possible, when you have direct control over the timing of line delivery, to get it so wrong?

After standing out in season 1 by nicely fleshing out its relatively tropish characters and making them interesting and distinctive, Sono Bisque Doll season 2 unfortunately reduced them to dull, one dimensional caricatures of themselves.

Gonna get my week's watches out of the way first, and do my end-of-year impressions separately:

So first off last week, I bounced off of Nisekoi.

I went into it knowing that it was an essentially automatically cheesy fake romance between two people who initially hate each other, and that it was a Shaft, which meant lots of oddly unpopulated geometric abstract liminal spaces and insipid conversations pretending to be profound, and even that the already cheesy set-up went the extra cheese mile by making the fake romance a mechanism to prevent a rival gang family war. And even prepared as I was, it overwhelmed my suspension of disbelief. Mostly it was the ensemble scenes of groups of scarfaced gangsters all simultaneously cheering on this make-believe high school romance, as if it was the single most important thing in the universe, but in the end it was that one guy with scary shiny glasses who decided that the actual most important thing in the universe was proving that the romance was a fake. It's anime, so I have a very low bar for suspension of disbelief, and this one couldn't even manage to meet that. Now that said, I can't imagine that they'll go 20 episodes with gangsters constantly popping up like Broadway choruses to squee with delight over the fake romance of two high-schoolers while scary shiny glasses stands off to the side and fumes, so I might give it another shot sometime, since the three main characters were actually relatively appealing. We'll see...

So then, wanting something a bit meatier, I watched a movie I happened to stumble across the other day - Ame wo Tsugeru Hyouryuu Danchi aka Drifting Home.

It's a sort of contrived drama (certainly not coincidentally) in the spirit of Drifting Classroom, but aside from a few broad strokes and basic concepts, it's very much its own thing. The thing that's drifting in this case is the scheduled-to-be-demolished apartment building in which the two main characters, currently estranged from each other, grew up happily together, and it's literally drifting - floating - out to sea, trapping those two and a handful of their mutual friends. And to reach back a bit, that's certainly an even less believable scenario than Nisekoi, but they handled it well enough that my suspension of disbelief was never even challenged. It was quite good all in all - it's a difficult but ultimately rewarding watch. The only real issue I had with it was a personal one - the male lead was the Japanese character archetype I hate the most - the angry coward. He was one of those prideful assholes who's desperately insecure and self-doubting and unhappy, and tries to make up for it by scowling and being angry essentially full time, and they're just like fingernails on a chalkboard for me. But it was fairly obvious he was on a redemption arc, so I stuck with it, and eventually he pulled his head out of his ass. And it was all worth it in the long run.

Next was an OVA - Kowarekake no Orgel - which was impressive.

It's about a depressed and very down-on-his-luck musician when ends up adopting a sweetly naive but barely functional and unrepairable robot he finds abandoned on a scrap heap. It could've easily tipped over into being devastatingly sad, since it's made clear from early on that she really is unrepairable, so the ending is pretty much preordained, but it still managed to mix in enough hope and joy that it worked out to charmingly bittersweet and even a bit optimistic in the end. I liked it.

Then I knocked around for a bit, then ended up binging the just ended Tomodachi no Imouto ga Ore ni dake Uzai, which I sort of unintentionally dropped mid-season just because it didn't hold my attention. I wanted to see how it all worked out, and it was... strange.

It was pretty poor all in all, but not because there was anything specific wrong with it. It was more as if someone took dozens of separate ingredients for a decent anime and mixed them all together and ended up with... dozens of separate ingredients for a decent anime arbitrarily mixed together. Taken by themselves, the characters were at least okay, the set-up was potentially interesting and the way the story unfolded was potentially satisfying. But nothing fit with anything else. It almost felt like it was done by a committee - as if one team built a framework and designated a bunch of slots in the framework for different characters and different story events while a different team designed a bunch of characters and events to spec, then a third team just wedged the characters and events they were given into the corresponding slots and called it good. And for all I know, that might be pretty much exactly how it did happen. In any event, it was pretty bad, though in an oddly interesting way.

After that, I wasn't in the mood to gamble, so I just rewatched Joshiraku, and liked it even more the second time around.

The characters are terrific (and, as they constantly remind us, cute) and the dialogue is bizarre and intriguing and stupidly funny, so it works as a sort of surreal SOL CGDCT iyashikei comedy - sort of a cross between Nichijou, K-On and Food Court de Mata Ashita - and I love it.

Next up was a movie I happened on a while back - On-Gaku: Our Sound, which was fascinating.

At no point in that entire movie could I predict what was going to happen next, and I finally just gave up and let it wash over me. It seems like it should've ended up feeling arbitrary, since it all unfolded so unpredictably, but somehow it all made sense. Sort of. I think. In any event, I enjoyed it. And odd though it was, I loved the art style. :::

Then I was in the mood for something raw and brutal and dramatic, so watched a couple of episodes of an early 2000s gritty cyberpunk called Mnemosyne no Musume-tachi aka Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne.

::: spoiler read more I intended to just watch the whole series, but it's one of those series - more than anything else, it reminded me of the Kara no Kyoukai movie series, which is to say each of the six 45 minute episodes is an independent story from some point along the shared timeline of the main characters, and while there is an overarching plot of sorts, it's being revealed in bits and pieces along the way rather than playing out straightforwardly. It's quite good, but the individual episodes are a bit exhausting and the way it's playing out means that I don't necessarily have to watch it straight through, and after two episodes, I was ready for a break.

So I switched to one I sort of gently bounced off of a few weeks ago - Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru aka OreShura, which turned out to be a really strange harem.

It started off with a childhood friend, then added a fake girlfriend, then a meek chuuni, then finally a particularly cute tsundere. It was mostly pretty standard, but with a couple of oddities. First, the protagonist is probably the most incredibly dense harem protag I've ever seen. That was actually okay though. I think the thing that made it okay was that it wasn't just a gimmick that showed up as necessary to keep the harem intact - he really was just that dense, pretty much full time. The other oddity though was that the fake girlfriend was an entirely foul and loathsome bitch, and that's not just my opinion - that was the stated reality in-universe. Even the protag thought she was awful. And as it went on, her continued presence in the harem just made less and less sense, particularly after the protag finally figured out what was going on with the other three and the other three figured out that she was a fake. But still, there she was, poisoning everything and everyone around her.

I think the author was trying to make a point about redemption or hidden value or tolerance or something like that, but since the basic arc was that she was utterly loathsome, but the protag was kind to her anyway, and... she continued to be utterly loathsome, there was never any pay-off, so whatever the point was supposed to be, it got lost. More than anything else, it struck me as a failed effort.

And at the moment, I have no idea what's next. I watched one more episode of Mnemosyne, but I'm more in the mood for something else...

I think it's worth it. The ending is a bit weak (I cant explain exactly how without spoiling things) but all of the loose ends get tied up satisfactorily.

Um... no.

For better of worse, Endless Eight was eight full episodes. They seemed identical, but the actual point was that they only seemed identical and were in fact not.

And I'm reasonably certain that the underlying point, ill-considered though it might've been to try to make it the way they did, was specifically to frustrate viewers by repeating the same events eight times, to really drive home the point that Yuki experienced those same events, with the same full awareness of the repetition, 15,532 times.

Frieren season 2 is a gimme, as is Trigun Stargaze (I quite liked Stampede and am looking forward to seeing the rebooted version of Millie). I'll undoubtedly end up watching the third season of Oshi no Ko, but I'm actually only sort of lukewarm on the series, so I don't feel any great urge to watch it, and might end up letting it go for now and binging it later on. Same for MF Ghost season 3 - it's safe to presume that it'll be the same as the first two seasons, which is to say tediously drawn out (at the rate the story's going, I expect it to be finished, if it lasts that long, by about season 8, in about 2040).

Nothing else really grabbed my attention as far as series go (seems to be even more cheese than normal), but I'm definitely looking forward to the All You Need is Kill movie. I hate that the most popular adaptation it's gotten yet is that Americanized Tom Cruise movie, which doesn't even come close to doing justice to the original story.

Edit to add: just browsing the list some more and noticed that there's an adaptation of Seihantai na Kimi to Boku (You and I Are Polar Opposites) coming. I loved the manga, so even though I already know the story, I'll likely give the anime a shot.

As far as the current season goes, the final episode of May I Ask For One Final Thing? was just what I'd hoped. The story had been obviously drawing together for a couple of episodes now, and sure enough, the final episode wrapped all of the immediate issues up in a neat little package, while still leaving enough longer term and more distant issues around which to build a second season. I have no notable complaints about the episode, or about the season as a whole for that matter. The characters are great (Scarlet and Julius in particular), the story was a bit rushed, but satisfying, the art is gorgeous and both the OP and the ED are excellent, each in their own way. The only minor criticism I have is that the story unfolded a bit too easily and smoothly, mostly because Scarlet is massively OP. But more complication would've drug the story out too long to fit it into a single season, so I'm okay with that. And like Julius, I'm fine with Scarlet being OP, because it's always amusing to watch.

Past:

Looking for a sort of counter to the rule of cool mayhem of the Gridman series, I went back to one I've watched a couple of times before - a spoof called Robot Girls Z. It's about three (plus more over time) girls who go through sort of magical girl transformations and end up in costumes not coincidentally patterned after super robots (the original three are Mazingers, but pretty much every franchise in existence gets a nod somewhere along the way), then proceed to fight with standard super robot attacks - drills, beams and of course rocket punches. And the basic arc of each episode is the really pathetic super villains hatching some really feeble scheme (the first episode shows them dining and dashing at at ramen restaurant), then the robot girls responding by unleashing city-block leveling attacks on them (the first episode culminates with the robot girls triggering an Akira-style hemispherical explosion that destroys most of the city. To punish the villains for dining and dashing). It's just goofy fun that completely deflates all of the super robot tropes.

Then I somehow ended up with Yuasa's OVA Kick Heart. It's a mostly unvoiced portrayal of something that might become a romance between a professional wrestler and a nun, done in the rough but highly dynamic style that he later (in my opinion over-) used for Ping Pong: The Animation. It was amusing and interesting and a nice diversion.

Then I bounced off a few things and browsed some episode 1s, then remembered that I still hadn't seen the latest season of Konosuba, so that became the obvious choice. And it was... pretty good, with a dash of excellent. It wasn't quite as funny as the past seasons, and there seemed to be entirely too much yelling - they've always yelled at each other, and especially Kazuma and Aqua, but for whatever reason, there seemed to be much more of it this time around, to the point that it got sort of tedious. But it was still worth it all in all, and the latter half of the season was excellent, and it was especially nice to see Darkness get some focus.

Next, wanting something a bit more peaceful, I decided it was time for Silent Witch, which has been resting near the top of my TBW for a while now. And it was everything I hoped it'd be and more - great characters, interesting story, beautiful art and just a pleasure from start to finish. I adored it, and am looking forward to a second season.

Then, on a whim, I finished off the week with an oddity that caught my eye a while back - Gleipnir. I quite enjoyed it all in all, though Shuichi grated on my nerves after a while (flashbacks to Claymore - it seems that if there's a female main character named Claire, there also has to be a sniveling wretch male character to cry out, "Cwaaaaaiiiwww!"). The only real downside to it in the long run (sniveling wretch Shuichi was eventually replaced by determinator Shuichi, which was a bit forced and contrived, but welcome) was that there's obviously a lot more story left. It was interesting enough that I think I'll just go ahead and read the manga and be done with it.

And at the moment, I'm rewatching Gabriel DropOut, which I only saw for the first time last year, but which immediately claimed the number 2 spot on my list of all time favorite CGDCTs, second only to YuruYuri.

A solid and satisfying ending to a great anime.

I love this feeling - it's like the moment when a tightrope walker steps off onto the platform at the other end.

And Scarlet is easily one of the best characters of the year.