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".

Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child both have good Anime adaptations actually.

I can't claim to have no understanding of why people think at least Chaos;Head's Anime is bad when I myself had originally given up after a few episodes and mentioned that on this blog before.  However what I speculated on in that prior reference was that my issue with Chaos;Head was probably the story itself not the Anime as an adaptation.  And I never said it was horrible or anything, just that I was having trouble getting into it.

In the years since that first attempt I've gotten more used to VN based Anime of it's type, while still not actually playing VNs themselves.  I started the show over from the beginning and wound up giving it a 9 out of 10, then I gave Chaos;Child a bull blown 10.

I give Child a higher score partly because Head is more difficult to get into, the early episodes are a bit disorienting but ultimately that served a purpose and things will get clarified.

What gets me about how hostile to these Anime their VN fanboys who've made YouTube videos on them are, is they keep saying these "horrible" Anime give people bad impressions of these brilliant ingenious Visual Novel masterpieces.  But the truth is the only people who think these Anime are horrible abomination are VN fanboys overreacting to even the slightest creative adaptation choices they don't like.  Non VN fans who just watched it like they did any other Anime at worst simply went "meh" and moved on.

Their average MAL rating is between a 6 and 7, that's between Fine and Good.  Given all the 1s and 2s being hurled at these shows from those haters, clearly there are many who also gave it higher ratings then the average.  I haven't written any reviews for these shows on MAL, among those who have are people giving them 8s, 9s and even 10s.

Most 5s, 6s and 7s given on an out of 10 rating system generally mean one of two things.  Either that person respected the execution but just couldn't get into the premise or the characters, or they see the potential value in the premise, characters and story but had issues with the execution.  The latter group are probably fully prepared to assume it's something great in it's source material.  And the former were not going to get into that VN even if VNs are a medium they're into.

To RedBard specifically, the problem with these Anime seems to begin with them being single cour, unlike Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes which had 2 cour Anime.  Everything more specific is really the same stuff VN fanboys whine about in the VN based Anime widely considered to be great, even Steins;Gate isn't immune to these complaints.  Every YT video about recommending these VNs with little comment on the Anime doesn't mention any vital story element or themes the Anime hadn't already conveyed to me.  Information about how they're played however does tell me I wouldn't enjoy playing them as much as I do watching the Anime, even compared to other VNs.

I do prefer 2 cour shows in general, but these I felt worked as 1 cour just as well as Madoka did, which means I don't think dragging them out longer would have resulted in anything good. I did not feel like anything was missing, no criticism I might have would be fixed by adding more context.  It's only people comparing to the source material and know what's missing that can't stop themselves from thinking about it's absence.  But their perspective is the wrong one, most Visual Novels are longer then they need to be, that lack of restraint is largely what's holding the medium back, and I'm saying this as someone who defends three hour cuts of Superhero movies.  I recently tried to play YU-NO and I'll probably try again, but I was not prepared for it to take half an hour to get through the first 5 seconds of the Anime, I gave up before even reaching a save point.

I spend a lot of time watching Adaptations of things I have no source material familiarity for.  And often I can tell when something is missing, when an issue I'm having is probably because of something that was cut, that is where criticism of something as an adaptation and criticism of it as it's own stand alone piece of Art overlap.  

However any criticism that does not exist without comparison to the source material is irrelevant to judging the adaptation on it's own terms.  So you're not gonna convince me an Anime I enjoyed watching, and maybe even made my cry (as Chaos;Child and Umineko both did), is actually very bad because it left out some memorable internal monologue you really liked.

I am a defender of voice over narration and internal monologues in Anime and movies, I HATE the popular YT reviewer use of "show don't tell".  But Visual Novels aren't like the way these tropes pop up in Light Novel based Anime or Hard Boiled Detective novels. VNs are incredibly over indulgent with massive amounts of text of the protagonist pondering things that I'm sure build on the themes and characterization but really are not nearly as intrisincly necessary as their fanatics think they are.

The reason Steins;Gate's Anime was much more successful then any other SciADV Anime was because it simply had better luck getting seen by the non VN fans who would be into it's premise.  Part of that is how the Chaos;Head Anime kind of wears it's VN roots on it's sleeve a lot more.  Part of it might be Steins;Gate being more actively promoted in general (Chaos;Child was the only spring 2017 show I never even knew about while it was airing).  But it mostly comes down to something I'm going to say that might shock some people.  Steins;Gate is the most Normie friendly of the SciADV franchises, while both Chaos; shows are the least.

Trixie The Golden Witch likes citing Steins;Gate as one of the top Otaku Pride shows because it's set in Akihabara.  Yes Steins;Gate has lots of Otaku references, but it's really not actually about any of that.  Being set in Akihabara is perhaps itself a cause of this, like how people who live in New York have never visited the Statue of Liberty.  The status of Akihabara as an Otaku center is most relevant to Ferris's subplot.  Akihabara's older significance as a tech hub is probably more relevant to the main plot, since that's why it's a place one would look for an IBN 5100.

I know exactly how to recommend Steins;Gate to Normies, I tell them it's the best SciFi Anime and in my opinion best Time Travel story in any medium.  If they like the Denzel Washington film Deja Vu, you can tell them Steins;Gate has a premise like that but much more elaborated on due to it's serialized format.  

Even the Hououin Kyōma persona seems more like an American B Movie Mad Scientist then anything specifically Anime.

Steins;Gate became the only one of these that most non VN players have even heard of not because it's Anime is sooo much better at being an Anime, frankly I think it's Animation style and Art design is much blander then Chaos;Head.  It simply is a far more accessible story with inherently wider appeal then the rest.

Robotics;Notes is a giant love letter to the Mecha Genre, but more specifically a Sub Genre of Mecha the American fanbase never got into (Glass Reflection saying the in-universe Mecha show is basically Gundam really annoys me, it's clearly a Shounen Super Robot show like Mazinger Z).  I do consider it and even Occultic;Nine potentially Normie accessible, but still a tougher sell then Steins;Gate, one tactic I use is to describe Robotics;Notes as the msot Speilbergian Anime.  But with Robotics;Notes it's precisely what's more Otaku about it that makes me personally like it more.

Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child however are the embodiment of almost everything Anti-Otaku Anime fans hate, they will never respect them in any medium.  Going back to the discussion of MAL scores, if any non VN players have given these Anime truly low scores on MAL, it's probably those Anti-Otaku types being disgusted by their very premise.

Chaos;Head is about an antisocial shut-in literally named Taku who'd rather talk to his hallucination of his favorite Anime Girl then real people becoming the only person who can save this town that he hates.  That's a true Otaku Hero's Journey.

Then Chaos;Child..... well I'm gonna have to spoil it's central twists here.

Overdue update

If my blog has regular followers, you've probably deduced I've given up on consistently posting updates on my Seasonal Anime viewing.

I've dedicated to start more often waiting to binge.  I've finished the simuldubs I was following and all of them were good shows.  I'm now only still following Yuki Yuna is A Hero and once that ends I'll probably be following nothing for awhile.

The shows I do want to still follow weekly are ones that are more episodic with minimal overarching plot.  But it's difficult to know what shows are going to be like that up front, your seasonal round up videos on AniTube are usually going off just pilots.  I do know I'll at least start the new PreCure.  

LN adaptations I would be interested in binging by Novel or Arc, if I can know for certain when a given arc ends.

In the meantime I've bouncing around between semi-binges.  Re-watching YU-NO as I already mentioned and I may have even more to say primarily about that show, I've also obtained the Switch version of the VN which I'll give a try after finishing the re-watch.  I'm also 7 episodes into EdensZero and 20 into Legend of The Legendary Heroes.

I also watched D-Frag which I think is the most underrated comedy Anime of the 20tens.  I watched the movie Aura: Koga Maryuin's Last War which was good, what distinguished it from Love, Chunibyo and Other Delusions can't be communicated by a plot description, it has a very different tone which makes it a good a companion piece.  I also enjoy what I've seen of Sabagebu and would like to see it get dubbed.  Also the show Shattered Angels is fantastic Shoujo Melodrama with cool action thrown in.

On November 19th (today as I'm typing this and hoping still when it will be posted) I watched the first three episodes of Wheel of Time on Amazon and all 10 episodes of Netflix's Cowboy bebop.

WoT is one of those classic Fantasy franchises I have bene aware of for a long time.  These opening episodes are interesting,  I don't think it'll feel worthy of it's source material's legacy till we actually visit a setting that makes me go "wow, that could have been in a movie".

Cowboy Bebop I decided needed the perspective of someone not simply comparing it to the original all the time, a role I've given myself before.  It's a fun Space Western with likeable characters, that is perhaps goofier then some old school fans would prefer, but it does get serious when it needs to.

Cowboy Bebop was originally a homage to certain American genres like Western and Film Noirs and other pulpy stuff.  This show having more "Whedonesque" dialogue then the original fits how those genres have changed.  We're now in the era of Guardians of The Galaxy rather then The Fifth Element.

YU-NO again

I'm currently doing my third watch of the 2019 Anime adaptation of YU-NO: A Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound of This World.  My first time was following the Simuldub one episode a week for half of the year, my second was in early or mid 2020 doing a standard binge watch of all the episodes in a day or too.  This time I'm doing it at a more fluid pace.

I'm also re-watching it in the context of how much more Anime I've seen since, dedicating a good chunk of 2021 to watching more Anime adapted from Visual Novels, both highly revered and poorly regarded.  With an emphasis on some of the earliest stuff, and seeking to learn more about VNs and their history in general.

YU-NO didn't get the attention it deserved because the Western Fandom never got the memo on how old and influential the source material was.  It's like the frustrations many western media Nerds had at seeing people who didn't hear of Dune till this year calling it an attempted next Star Wars.  But YU-NO's simultamious influence and obscurity runs deeper then that even, perhaps more comparable to John Carter of Mars, or for a comparison to how it's tied to the English speaking world being deprived of it till we'd gotten used to it's imitators, Paul Feval's The Blackcoats or Ponson Du Terril's Rocambole.

YU-NO is probably the most important Visual Novel left out of Bowl of Lentils The Origins of Visual Novels video.  The culmination of that history lesson is chiefly Leaf's Visual Novel Trilogy which originally coined the term.  YU-NO was first released in January of 1996 between the second and third instalments of that trilogy.  The Leaf VN trilogy however becomes less focused on it's fantastical and genre elements as it goes on with To Heart being the first primarily High School Harem VN, the foundation on which's Key's Seasons Trilogy built.  YU-NO's importance however partly lies in how the sheer ambition of it's story dwarfs anything else that can be called a Visual Novel or Sound Novel that came before it or it seems for awhile after.

YU-NO is pretty much the genesis of at least two sub-genres of Otaku media, the time looping to thwart a bad end scenario exemplified by Higurashi and Steins;Gate.  And Isekai in the form it's most commonly associated with today.  But like Sailor Moon's relationship to the fully developed form of the Genre it started, it lacks a certain core conviction I would be less forgiving of if it weren't the innovator.  The fact that Takuya is forced to accept that Mitsuki can't be saved, the later Otaku media spawned from it are about defeating Fate, and later in the story that applies to more then just her.  [Turns out an epilogue OVA I didn't know about resolves this issue somewhat.]

One of the few pieces of discussion about this Anime as an adaption that was floating around when it started airing was a statement from the people making it about Mio being "even more Tsundere" and some parallel statements about other characters, which was taken as a bad sign for the adaptation and I understand why as someone who's reacted similarly to quotes related to Batman projects.  But trust me Mio in the 2019 Anime has not been flanderized into a standard modern Tsundere caricature.  In fact when I compare her to the characters usually propped up by even the most cynical AniTubers as the good "well written" Tsunderes, I consider her more balanced and stable then any of them.

I had observed on this blog before I knew about YU-NO how in the early and mid 90s the Anime characters who were doing the Tsundere bit were mainly the protagonists of Shoujo Anime.  The term Tsundere was coined probably on 2channel in the early or mid 2000s mainly in reference to Visual Novel characters who at the time mostly hadn't been animated yet.  Mio is the model on whom that VN archetype was based, and as such is perhaps the missing link to verify my observation, I really think she was written to be like a 90s Shoujo protagonist.