The End of 2021 marks 5 years of me following Seasonal Anime.

Since I really started following currently airing shows with the Winter season of 2017.  I had some vague awareness of currently airing Anime in 2016, but that was basically just the most well known stuff.

So I figured I should celebrate this landmark by talking about some of my favorite shows from each of these 5 years, maybe even sometimes specific seasons, it depends.

For the winter of 2017 Dragon-Maid was probably the stand out, but I also enjoyed ACCA, Tanya the Evil and Gabriel Dropout.  But that's just stuff I watched at or near the time, I eventually watched Scum's Wish and now would say my favorite of that season was Chaos;Child.

For the rest of the year, Fate/Apocrypha, In Another World With My Smartphone, Princess Principle, and Anime Gataris are what I consider the best new shows, but also season 2 of Yuki Yuna Is a Hero and it's prequel episodes that came with it were great too.

For 2018 it's perhaps easier for me to name my favorites of the movies.  Both Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms and Pokémon: The Power of Us were fantastic.  For TV Anime, Citrus was awesome, Legend of The Galactic Heroes The New Thesis was very good, Hugtto Pretty Cure was fantastic. Meanwhile Darling in The FranXX was decent and SSSS.Gridman was great. And then at the end of the year That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime started, and the early part is what I liked best of that show.

For 2019 YU-NO: The Girl Who Chants Love at The Bound of This World was definitely the best TV Anime, Boogiepop and Others has great material, but some big flaws early on.  And then Weathering With You was a great movie.  Also we got some fun Lupin The Third content that year.

For 2020 A Certain Scientific Railgun T I still consider the best, Bofuri was also fun, while In/Spectre and Tower of God are both interesting.  Most everything else I consider notable from 2020 was in the Fall season, and that stuff like everything I've watched in 2021 is perhaps still a bit too recent for me to fully parse yet.

But I'll attempt to list some 2021 Favorites anyway.  Pokémon: Secrets of The Jungle was another satisfying PokeFlick, and then Pokémon Evolutions was pretty cool as well.  High-Rise Invasion which dropped on Netflix was a big stand out, as was Eden later on.  So I'm A Spider, So What was perhaps the most fun I had for much of the year, and Wonder Egg Priority was an interesting little experiment even though the ending fell off a bit.  Star Wars Visions I did a post on already.  And also at the end of the year Yuki Yuna Is a Hero The Great Mankai Chapter was a good Coda to season 2, nothing else from Fall I've really gotten to watch yet, same with some of what interested me back in the Summer, and there's also some Movies I haven't seen yet  So my 2021 faves will probably need revision in the future.

Catching ya'll up to speed

I just watched the 8th and final episode of Pokémon Evolutions, and LEAF IS FINALLY ANIMATED!!!!!!  I was not expecting that, I had basically given up hope.  And she was Bad @$$.  They called her Green, but I'm gonna it was Blue in the Japanese, throwing back to the Manga names.

All of Pokemon Evolutions was great, what they chose to do for the Johto Generation last week I found very cool.  I recommend all of it.

I also today watched the first Fate/Grand Order Camelot movie, it was decent.  And the the first episode of Girls Und Panzer Das Finale was also quite fun.

Last Friday I finished Yuki Yuna Is a Hero The Great Mankai Chapter, it was great as well.

Soon after I made my last update I finished Legend of The Legendary Heroes, which it turns is an unfinished Anime, it was fun though.

Besides that's I've mostly been re-watching stuff.  I finished the YU-NO Re-watch I was talking about, then I did Pretear, then Serial Experiments Lain, then Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child and the first few episodes of Godzilla Singular Point.  

I'm planning soon to re-watch Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya for Christmas, then probably also Robotics;Notes and Steins;Gate, and Kanon once it starts snowing here, I want to re-watch that show in the proper seasonal mood.  I think I'm gonna wait till sometime in January to start Binge watching a bunch of Fall and Summer 2021 shows i haven't finished or in some cases even started yet.

Outside the realm of Anime, Wheel of Time I can't make a verdict on yet, my feels towards it are mixed.  The Dune movie was very good though I have some complaints, and Matrix Resurrections was great, to me it was the perfect way to epilogue to the trilogy.

Raildex Watch Order Again

I feel like giving another Update on my recommended Raildex watch order, which is strictly neither the chorological order or the broadcast order.

But first I've talked about how I like Railgun the most, I do enjoy Index and even Accelerator, but I can imagine there being some people who'll only be able to find Railgun watchable.  I've also said that I recommend newcomers on your first watch of Railgun to skip episode 2.

But it has occurred to me to recommend to people who might give up on Index early on, that between watching Railgun S (the Second season) and Railgun T (the third season) there are two episodes of Index season 2 that are very specifically about Railgun stuff that did not get an equivalent depiction on Railgun proper.  Those are episodes 6 and 7 of Index II (30 and 31 of the series as a whole), the Tree Remnant Arc.

Alright so here is my new updated recommended watch order.

A Certain Scientific Railgun (season 1)

A Certain Magical Index (season 1)

A Certain Scientific Railgun S

A Certain Scientific Accelerator (season 1)

A Certain Magical Index The Movie: The Miracle of The Endymion

A Certain Magical Index II

A Certain Scientific Railgun T

A Certain Magical Index III

The Problem with Show don't Tell as Film or TV criticism.

I did an anti "Show Don't Tell" post on this blog once already, but this time I'm going to try to be more nuanced about it since I've learned more.

The origin of "Show Don't Tell" as a writing rule was specifically in the context of Prose, and in that context "tell" refers only to information simply told to be audience by the author, "showing" refers to anything that happens within the story itself, including dialogue spoken by a character within the story. 

So the problem with how YouTube angry reviews and analytical Video Essays apply this to talking about Movies or TV shows or Anime, is that in those mediums unless there is a third person omniscient voice over narration, nothing actually fits the proper original literary definition of "tell".  So instead it just becomes an excuse for these critics to treat their personal dislike of expositional dialogue as some objective criticism, when it's absolutely not.

"But Film is a visual medium" one might shout from the roof tops to justify finding a way to make "show don't tell" relevant to film criticism.

Paintings, and maybe like Comics are the purely visual mediums of storytelling.  Silent Films could perhaps be considered more visual then anything else.  But modern film is a multimedia art form, as explained in this Video Essay criticizing when a Director simply uses Classical Music instead of composing an original score.  All the tools of that medium need to be respected as part of how it works, not simply the visual ones.

Not all Films or TV shows or Anime are going to be the same.  Some creators might choose to be minimalist when it comes to the talking and I can respect that artistic choice, but it won't appeal as much to my personal tastes.  Dialogue is what I enjoy more then anything else, including the world building expositional dialogue that conventional YT critics find lazy and/or boring.

I'm the kind of person who'll for fun watch hour long seminars of an Evangelical Christian I no longer even agree with on most things explain their interpretation of History and Theology and how they fit together, and the equivalents of that from people with other world views as well.  A World Building Exposition dump is just the in universe version of that for a Fantasy or SciFi setting, it can be inherently entertaining so long as you make the character giving it charismatic or interesting to watch/listen to.

And you know I've been in real life conversions that in a movie would absolutely look like "explaining something everyone already knows for the sake of the audience".  Sometimes real life isn't "well written" by the standards of some critics.  But what about the opposite of that Trope?

Early in episode 5 of Fate/Apocrypha the rest of the Black Faction shows up after a few vital plot developments just happened.  Right when the characters who were there for that are about to explain what happened to those who weren't, it jumps cuts to after that conversation, because they figured why show the audience characters talking about what the audience already knows.  That annoyed me, because you see I already made a post on how if the audience already knows is the last thing I care about, after all on a re-watch I'll absolutely know everything already.  I like watching characters react to learning things, as well as seeing how a character would explain what just happened.  This show basically skipped exactly what I wanted to watch, and created an awkward looking Jump Cut in the process of doing so.  All to appease critics who think "pointless " dialogue is the worst thing an Anime can have.

Another product of trying to apply "show don't tell" to mediums it wasn't meant for is an overuse of flashback scenes.  Flashback scenes can be good, but sometimes TV writers feel the need to flashback to any past event they've made even mildly important, sometimes it's best to just leave exactly what happened to the audience's imagination in a way that "showing" rather then "telling" doesn't allow.

And even in the present, sometimes what we don't see can be more impactful then what we do.  This is a lessen that I feel creators of Horror and Suspense and War films should always keep in mind.  But they wind up being in tension with this popular misuse of "show don't tell".