Anime – Page 26 – Wis[s]e Words

2014: good but not exceptional #12DaysOfAnime (6)

Published on December 19, 2019Leave a comment

2014 is the year Metafilter forced me to watch Aldnoah.Zero. But apart from that it was a pretty good year.

That Witch Craft Works was an …interesting show you can perhaps tell from its ending theme, where cute little chibi witches are singing while stuck in medieval torture devices. It seemws to start as yet another series where an ordinary teenage dirt bag accidently enters the magical backstages of the world to get involved into some sort of secret war and get himself a battle harem. But instead, he’s the hapless princess that needs to be rescued by the most popular girl in the school, who turns out to be a witch. As does his little sister. And the various transfer students that turn up all of a sudden. All of it is done so deadpan that for the longest time I wasn’t sure whether this was all mean to be taken serious or whether the characters really were as dumb as they seemed to be. An urban fantasy series for those who like the Dortmunder crime novels.

Thanks to that Metafilter group watch I got interested into watching anime properly again. Aldnoah.Zero then was the first series I actually watched seasonally, as the episodes came out. Not knowing anything about Crunchyroll or streaming or whatever, I watched it the old fashioned way: torrents. And then only for the first three-four episodes? Because of going to the London SF Worldcon I stopped watching for a while and never picked it up again. I ended up finishing it much much later and getting disappointed like everybody else.

Trinity Seven is not a good series,let me make that clear, but it was one of the first modern anime series I finished when I really started watching anime again in late 2014/2015. Unlike Witch Craft Works this series took its battle harem setting completely serious, with our protagonist being just an ordinary teenager until it turns out he has vast magical powers and must learn to use them to harness the Trinity Seven, the seven most powerful mages at his new magical school. All girls of course. It was a fun series, mostly because it was the first time I’d watched a series like this and all those cliches looked fresh to me.

the Japan Animator Expo on the other hand was very good, a series of stand alone shorts created to showcase the art and range of Japanese animation. If you look closer, you can see the inspirations for several later series pop up here already. It used to be all available on its own website, but as of now you need to scour Youtube to find the individual episodes.

This aside, for me 2014 was more a year of good fun series than a year in which anything really extraordinary came out. Space Dandy was fine but not the saviour of anime that it was proclaimed to be at the time. (And how often has it been mentioned since?) Instead, when I think of 2014 I think of shows like Noragami about a down on his luck, penniless god and the high school girl bound to him. Or Hitsugi no Chaika, about the daughter of the defeated demonic overlord, who is going round the world attempting to find the pieces of his corpse so she can give him a proper burial. Or Ore Twintail ni Narimasu, where a boy with a twintail fetish is transformed in a magical girl by an alien scientist to fight alien invaders with other, lesser fetishes.

On the sports front, Baby Steps was mostly only servicably (ha!) animated tennis show, but with a compelling story that saw me finish the first season in less than a week. Noticable for having our new to sport protagonist being inspired by a female tennis player and the series never weakened her to big him up. Haikyuu!! was the next big thing for those people who like cute boys playing cool sports. Ping Pong on the other hand wasn;t cute at all, but one of the best anime series ever nonetheless. More cute boys were on call in the second season of Free.

Idol wise, we got the launch of Pripara. Every girl in the world, at one point in their lives, will receive a pri ticket, which will give her access to the magical world of PriPara. Where, if they want to, they can become idols. What sets the series apart is its acceptance of all kinds of girls being idols, even girls who some people may think are actually boys. An incredibly positive and affirming series, with a message for our own world. At 140 episodes it is a bit of an investment to watch, but I found it incredibly entertaining. The sort of series I’d never thought I’d watch.

Statistically: 173 series on my to watch list, of which 98 have already been watched.

This is day six of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2015: when all hope was lost and I started watching anime seasonally.

2013: Nico Nico Gatchaman! #12DaysOfAnime (5)

Published on December 18, 2019Leave a comment

2013 was the year of the Nico.

A strange year for me personally. The long time assignment I’d been on at one boring Dutch bank finished in March and it would take until August before my next assignment, at the same boring Dutch bank. Which meant I spent almost half a year getting paid but underemployed, being stuck at home with nothing to do but play video games. Which sounds nice, but not so much when dealing with the anxiety of finding a new assignment but getting rejected over and over again. I still wasn’t watching anime regularly at the time, but I was getting curious about it, looking for something that I had already found in games like Mass Effect, but not enough off.

Slice of moe anime never came as mellow as Non Non Biyori, a series about four school girls way out in the sticks, where school is one single class and the greatest entertainment comes from going to that one konbini store on the other side of the mountains. The setting was beautiful, the girls were funny, the mood was relaxing. A perfect anime to unwind with. Yama no Susume was similar, a short length series of two childhood friends reuniting in high school and going mountain climbing. Yuyushiki was a more traditional high school club sort of series, but incredibly funny, while Aiura was another short length series and incredibly horny. We also got a new series of Tamayura, Tamayura: More Aggressive.

Gatchaman Crowds was a very well done attempt to update the venerable Gatchaman franchise, first broadcast in the seventies. We still have transforming heroes fighting space monsters, but things aren’t so black and white anymore. When I first saw it, I argued that it is a classic Hegelian dialectic masquerading as a manic pixie dream girl rom-com. The traditional role of the Gatchaman as masked fighter protecting a passive public versus the internet utopian idea of the people helping themselves by the judicious use of social media. The latter looking a bit naive in 2019 to be honest. What also set this series apart was the great music. The opening theme above is great in itself, but if you’ve watched the show the Gatchaman theme is now stuck in your head.

Kyousougiga was a strange series about a magical “mirror capital” hidden set in Kyoto, based loosely on one of the oldest comics still existing. It started out as one shot net animation, directed by one of Toei Animation’s up and coming young directors, Matsumoto Rie, got a few follow-up ONAs and then a full length anime series. It’s strange and hard to describe, full of Japanese mythology and the like, all remixed and reworked, but at heart it is about family and how to find your way back to them. Beautifully animated, this is perhaps the best series of the year and that’s high praise.

Because let’s not forget that 2013 was the year of Kill La Kill, Attack on Titan and Love Live, three titles that would help define the rest of the decade. The first proved that Trigger was a worthy heir to Gainax, the second was the greatest ‘breakout’ anime of the decade, bigger even than Sword Art Online was the year before and Love Live well and truly established idol fandom in the west. Other influential series include Yowamushi Pedal, the biking sports anime that would provide to be a big hit with the boys’ love crowd. Though not as big a hit as the money maker KyoAni stumbled on: Free. The advantage of a swimming sports anime about a cycling sports anime is that in the former, your hot boys can be topless throughout. The ending theme made no bones about what its main attraction was…

Good series this year I haven’t seen yet include baseball drama Diamond no Ace, superhero thriller Samuari Flamenco, teenage angst fest Aky no Hana and nerd drama Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!: No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular! I tried, but that particular series is so cringeworthy it makes me die from secondhand embarassement. I literally had to turn it off when she tries to sneak past her classmates in disguise because it hurt to watch any further. Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru was somewhat similar in that regard, in that it hit far too close to home for me, but it was just bearable enough I kept watching.

Hataraku Maou Sama is a reverse isekai: the demonic overlord of a fantasy world is cast out of it into modern day Japan and has to make a living working as a part timer at “MgRonalds”, while his sidekick does the house work. Little do they know the hero who banished them, Emilia, is also in Japan. Epic battles … do mostly not occur. Instead, it’s a comedy harem show that really needs a second season.

151 shows this year in my library; 82 seen in total. Shows I liked not yet mentioned: Symphogear G (determination to punch fist), the first Fate/Kaleid Liner Prisma Illya (my first Fate show), Ghost in the Shell: Arise, Coppelion (radio active proof girls go exploring irradiated Tokyo), Love Lab (inexperienced ojo-sama and tomboy explore romance together), Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi, Hentai Ouji to Warawanai Neko (otaku harem show), Gj-Bu (otaku harem show), Tamako Market, Kotoura-san (esper meets pervert and falls in love because he accepts her) and OreShura (an otaku harem show). 2013 had a lot of harem shows it seems like. I mention them because when I’d seriously started watching anime, two years later, that staple diet after I’d branched out from the science fiction action genres I used to watch.

This is day five of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2014: when Metafilter made me watch Aldnoah.Zero

2012: the world didn’t end, not even in anime #12DaysOfAnime (4)

Published on December 17, 2019Leave a comment

2012 was the year of tankery.

Not the first series to notice that geeks liked cute girls and geeks like military stuff, so why not combine the two, but one of the more succesful. One season, several OVAs, a movie sequel, another movie sequel, in six parts and the revival of the local economy of the town in which it was set thanks to geek tourism. The idea of tanks battles being a typical female sport, a pastime to make young girls “loveable like the clatter of iron tracks is hilarious and the series took it all serious enough. Making warfare look all cute and moe isn’t necessarily the most progressive thing to do, but the series was great fun and the battles were awesome. At heart, this was basically a high school sports series, just with tanks. You got the setup, the assembly of teams, the challenges to get to the final, the inevitable training and powering up sequences to take on increasingly stronger enemies and a ragtag bunch of underdogs taking on the elites of the tankery world and winning despite the odds.

Another was another type of anime altogether. Supposed to be an atmospheric, terrifying horror series, it’s instead most remembered for its incredible camp, over the top death scenes like the one above. Who the hell sharpens their umbrella this much? Naff as it was, I did like it though. Horror being rare in anime, beggars cannot be choosers. The only other series that even touched horror were the comedy zombie romp Kore wa Zombie Desu ka? in its second season and the also zombie based romcom Sankarea. You might also count the survival death game Btooom while High School of the Death got an OVA, but that was it.

Moving from horror to comedy, this was in much better shape this year. Kill Me Baby stoner humour may not have been to everybody’s tastes, but surely nobody disliked the the ending theme with its strange dance. Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou/the Daily Lives of High School Boys was somewhat similar to last year’s Nichijou, consisting of a mix of slapstick and character based humour, each episode have multiple sketches and a largish cast to act them out. Also like Nichijou, it’s one of the best comedies of the decade. A much more niche sort comedy was provided by Joshiraku, with a quartet of four rakugo storytellers talking to each other, the voice over each episode reminding the viewer that even if the dialogue is uninteresting, at least the girls were cute. Even more niche: Teekyuu a short, rapid fire tennis based comedy that has gotten seven or eight sequels since. You need more knowledge of Japanese than I have to get the most of it though.

On the romance side of things, I liked Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun enough to also finish the original manga, but you have to be able to move past the very early scene in which the male lead threatens to rape the female protagonist. In general the story revolves around a stoic 16 year old girl only interested in getting a good job and career and therefore rejecting anything that threatens her studying. the male lead on the other hand is a wild child who in the end only she can tame. What makes the series is the humour and the characters, as well as the supporting cast. Sukitte Li Na Yo meanwhile revolved around a shy girl without friends who catches the attention of her school’s prince and slowly comes out of her shell as a result. Their relationship is established relatively quickly, rather than keeping the will they won’t they pattern of most romance series.

If you’re more in the mood fo a harem series, Oniichan dakedo Ai Sae Areba Kankeinai yo ne! was fairly typical but with the added zest of incest. Something also present, but much less so in To Love-Ru: Darkness, based on one of the most succesful ecchi manga romances of the 21st century. Fun with various alien princesses and their love for an unremarkable high school boy. The protagonist of Seitokai no Ichizon Lv. 2 might want it to be a harem series, but his harem mates refused. High School DxD was a pervy harem show, with the protagonist literally sell his soul to be surrounded by a bevy of demonic beauties. Completely basic, but popular enough to get several sequels over the course of the decade.

Of course the most important series of 2012 was a series whose succes would reshape anime for the next decade thanks to its setting, characters and well done wishfulfilment, a series based on Kawahara Reki’s already popular light novels. I’m talking of course about Accel World. Kidding. Sword Art Online, for all its flaws, for all that everybody got sick of it, was and is hugely influential, kicking off the whole Trapped in Fantasyland/Isekai genre. Whether videogameland or a more traditional but still RPG based fantasyland, the idea that your innate nerd ability to play games would make you king in another world was seductive to say the least. Personally, I’d argue that had the first SAO series stopped with Kirito coming out of his coma, it would’ve been a great series, but the second half of that first series undid most of the good it did. Nevertheless I’ve kept watching each new SAO series as they’ve come out. Best way to watch it is still the abridged series though.

It was a good year for idols. Yesterday I completely forgot to mention that Pretty Rhythm, which would evolve into the Pripara series, debuted in 2011, while this year saw the debut of its main rival, Aikatsu. Both are based on a range of arcade collectable card games and both are arguably the modern equivalents of the traditional Mahou Shoujo series: aimed at preteen and teen girls, featuring transformations, pretty dresses and everyday problems resolved through some form of magic, be it singing or otherwise. And whereas magical girl shows had the monster of the week as the highlight of each episode, the magical idol show has the performance of the week. When I got back into anime some five years ago I’d never suspect that I would be watching this sort of kid show, shows that aren’t even picked up by any of the streaming services here, but still fansubbed the old fashioned way. But I love them. They have heart, a surprising amount of depth and cute characters. On the more adult side, there was the biggest idol group in the world getting its own anime: AKB48 became AKB0048, underground freedom fighters in a Galaxy that had forbidden any kind of entertainment and especially idols. A pretty out there idea that was handled very well creating a series that worked well both as an idol series and a sort of space opera.

Good series not yet mentioned include two KyoAni series: Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!, a lovely and hilarious romance between an embarassed ex-nerd and the girl who still believes in his dark history. That was almost as good as anime could get, but the more serious Hyouka has a shot at being the anime of the decade. So has Kyousougiga, a strange little story about three kids stuck in a mirror city. There were also two Monogatari series: Nisemonogatari and Nekomonogatari, combining somewhat pretensious philosophy with being horny on main. Nazo no Kanojo X managed to go even further with the latter, taking horny and perverting it into something unique if slightly nauseating if you’re sensitive to its kinks.

Statistically: I’ve gotten 164 shows in my library this year, showing that anime production was still increasing, having watched 90 of them, all of them after they aired. We’re sort of getting an idea of what modern anime is starting to look like this year, what with the debut of SAO, but also the establishment of the great Aikatsu/PriPara rivalry. There are more slice of moe series and fewer old fashioned harem shows as well.

This is day four of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2013, the year I started noticing anime again.

2011: A Certain Magical Girl #12DaysOfAnime (3)

Published on December 16, 2019Leave a comment

2011 is the year of Madoka Magica, the poster child for the idea that you should give a series at least three episodes before deciding to drop it.

Madoka Magica: do not lose your head

In 2011 I wasn’t really watching anime yet, though I had gotten my first media player to hook up to the unwieldy deep screen CRT television I still used at the time. At that point, what I was looking for was stuff I’d watched before, things like Macross and FLCL rather than new series. Yet, like Haruhi, Madoka was a series that broke out of anime fandom and was talked about in the more general nerd circles I was moving in at the time. Almost a decade later, it has lost nothing of its punch, a masterpiece of ‘revisionist’ Magical Girl storytelling. Though honestly? So much of what it does was inspired by ‘traditional’ Mahou Shoujo shows, which always have been much darker than people assume for a genre usually aimed at teen and preteen girls. The original series was tight, punchy, did everything it set out to do in only twelve episodes and really didn’t need anything more. It still got two recap movies and a sequel that completely undermined the original ending though, which was disappointing.

But not as disappointing as the flood of imitators we’ve seen in the nine years since. Just like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns unleashed a slew of bd grim ‘n gritty superhero series, Madoka ‘inspired’ a lot of mediocre ‘revisonist’ Mahou Shoujo series. Most of those imitations never understood what made this series, rather focusing on the surface elements of making things dark and grim and having lots of deaths and an unhealthy dose of contempt for actual magical girls. One of the better sort of Madoka-inspired series, Houkago no Pleiades actually made its debut in the same season, as a series of car ads for Subaru, which would years later be used as the base for a proper series…

You know what hasn’t aged well, next to Madoka? Infinite Stratos. That series was still relatively popular when I first dove into anime fandom a few years later, but have you’ve recently heard anybody talk about it? IS was what I call an “only boy in magical school” series, where you have some random dude gaining powers normally only women posses and is shipped off to the magical school for it. In this case it’s the ability to use powered armour, though his real ability was to be dense to the intentions of all the girls surrounding him at school. A classic waifu bait show with nothing to commend it beyond it, it’s probably not surprising it has been largely forgotten.

My priorities in anime are such I watched Fractale and actually enjoyed it, rather than the critically acclaimed Wandering Son, one of the few respectful treatments of trans people in anime. Fractale, directed by the notorious Yamakan, — who has threatened to flounce out of the anime industry more often than he finished series — was supposed to save anime. Instead it became a laughing stock. On its own merits though it was an enjoyable little science fiction series, but nothing special.

One series I haven’t been able to finish from this year is Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai, “We still don’t know the name of the flower we found that day”, which I first discovered only weeks after Sandra had died and at the time it seemed the perfect series to watch. But it was too difficult, too raw and I’ve never been able to get back to it. Perhaps this year.

2011 saw the launch of a new entry in the Fate franchise, one of the best and a great entry point into the whole Nasuverse. Yes, it was the debut of Carnival Phantasm! Oh and also Fate/Zero. The first was a riot, hilarious even fif your knowledge of the Fateverse is somewhat basic, as it was for me when I first watched this. Fate/Zero took itself a bit too seriously to be honest, but it looked stunning. I wouldn’t recommend it as your first entry in the series though: start with the less well animated Studio Deen Fate/Stay Night of a few years before, then this, then the Ufotable Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works. In any case, this was a good year for Fate and the real start of the franchise.

Of arguably the best series debuting this year I’ve only watched 55 of its 148 episodes: Hunter X Hunter. Based on a shounen battle manga, the quality of this series is amazing, being kept up for its entire run. Another excellent series debuting this year was the karuta based sports series Chihayafuru, currently in its third season. Then there was P.A. Works’ Hanasaku Iroha, another of their patented stories about a young girl finding new meaning in life in a picturesque part of Japan. In this case our protagonist is kicked out by her mother to stay with her estranged grandmother and is forced to work in the latter’s traditional inn. It’s very good, but I still think mummy dearest got off too light.

The funniest series of the year has to be Nichijou, perhaps KyoAni’s funniest series ever. Seemingly another slice of moe high school girls show, it was brutal in its humour. The clip above, from episode 16, is typical. What I like about it is the absurd levels of slapstick the series had, along more subtle forms of humour.

on the skeevier side, there were two lolicon/pedobait series running this year. Astarotte no Omocha is about a guy kidnapped to fantasyland to become the lover of the way under age succubus princess, while Rou Kyuu Bu! was about a teenage basketball player coaching a team of elementary school girls. Which is innocent in itself but the series does more than hint at their interest in him and goes for unnecessary fan service far too often.

More palatable was Penguin Drum, from one of the creators of Revolutionary Girl Utena and just as good. Just one of the amazing number of excellent series that were released this year. Apart from the ones discussed already there was the original Idolm@ster series: based on a video game, it would be the leading aimed at adults idol seris next to Love Live. It had had a previous adaptation, from Sunrise, recreated as a mecha series….

Then there’s Usagi Drop, a touching story of a thirtysomething adopting the young daughter of his recently deceased grandfather, in the process learning to be a parent. It’s a great anime based on a good manga that unfortunately went bad halfway through as it insisted on romancing the two, luckily left out of the adaptation.

2011 also saw the not so good, but very entertaining Mirai Nikki, about a death tournament, which remains famous mainly for its very yandere main girl. Over the top, hysterical and far too convinced of its own cleverness, this is one for the so bad it’s good again column. Kyousougiga on the other hand was just good, but it would be a few more years before the actual series came out. Tiger & bunny was an actual superhero series which became a cult hit in the boyslove crowd, the main characters proving very shippable. Ikoku Meiro no Croisée a slice of moe series set in fin de siecle Paris and worth watching just for the setting, though it is very good anyway, as is the second Tamayura series: Tamayura: Hitotose. Also worth mentioning: the K-On movie comes out this year.

Statistics: I’ve got 138 series/OVAs listed for this year, having seen 79, an improvement on 2010. It’s hard what to say about the year as a whole. There’s plenty of dreck among the gems, but no clear direction in which anime as a whole is heading. There are an increasing number of slice of moe series, including the first series of Yuru Yuri. There are also a number of more old fashioned harem series like Mayo Chiki!. Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai was a bit of a mixture, a harem series, but with slice of moe/school club series elements. In general, this is a better year for anime than 2010 was.

This is day three of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2012, the year the world was supposed to end.

2010: Moe fan service and football #12DaysOfAnime (2)

Published on December 15, 2019Leave a comment

If you’re the type of person who likes to ration out their sweets, to prolong the pleasure of knowing you have them, you will understand why I still haven’t finished K-On! Season II. Only ten more episodes, one special, the movie and then I’d be done with K-On and I don’t want to be done with it quite yet. The biggest, most influential title of 2010, its influence still felt almost a decade later. I wasn’t there for all the fan blather and mass hysteria about the Rise of Moe blobs, but K-On is what made Cute Girls Doing Cute Things/Slice of Moe anime respectable and I wouldn’t want it any other way. I don’t want to talk too much about it though as y’all will have made up your opinion about it anyway.

Rather, let’s talk about lesser known titles that ran in 2010. Sora no Woto was one of A-1’s earliest productions and one of its early gems. Revolving around a small squad of female soldiers guarding the borders of Helvetia in a world in which the apocalypse has already happened, but life goes on for as long as it can. The setting is rural and idyllic but in the back of everybody’s mind is the fact that humanity has declined and this is the end. Most of it is pure slice of life though as we follow our protagonist as she tries to fit in with her new squad and become a trumpetist.Don’t expect answers. This is one for those who like Haibane Renmei, or 2017’s Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou/Girl’s Last Tour. There’s a wistful, nostalgic feeling underscoring the series and if you like that sort of thing this is one to watch out for.

Looking at 2010 as a whole, if K-On heralds the future, anime’s dead past is represented by the slew of old fashioned harem, ecchi and other fan service series. There’s no isekai in sight, but quite a few titles in which some ordinary teenage dirt bag either gathers a battle harem or turns out to be the most powerful boy in the world. Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls, Sekirei: Pure Engagement, Sora no Otoshimono, Omamori Himari, Seikon No Qwaser, Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou, Sora no Otoshimono. All are more or less terrible, but all were poular once. Add in things like Queen’s Blade or Koihime†Musou, where the audience standin has been done away with entirely and you have a wish fulfilment subgenre that easily had fifteen or so shows this year, almost as omnipresent as isekai wish fulfilment is these days. Perhaps the best of these series, breast phsyics be damned, was High School of the Dead, let’s survive the zombie apocalypse with my harem of high school girls, nurses and that one fat classmate who is scarily good at improvising weaponry.

Baseball is a given in sports anime and there were at least two typical, earnest series this year, with new seasons of Ookiku Furikabutte and Major, neither of which I’ve actually watched. Instead the sports title of 2010 I’d like to recommend is Giant Killing. Football (soccer), not baseball and professional, not high school tournaments. East Tokyo United is a football team struggling to avoid relegation. Time for a new manager and who better than a former wunderkid who abandoned the team when they needed his talents the most? Well, he did prove his worth in the lower rungs of English football as a coach and if you can make it there, a scrappy relegation battle should be no problem. If you play Football Manager this is the anime for you.

Two little videos dropped in early August that quietly established major franchises. First on August 10, Sunrise released Mokei Senshi Gunpla Builders Beginning G, a oneshot about kids learning to build Gundam modesl and have fun with it. A few years later this would’ve evolved into the Gundam Build series, where young boys and the occasional girl would build Gundam models and then use them to fight in VR. In general for mecha like most years this decade, the pickings were slim. The big title this time was Star Driver, which I saw two years ago but can’t remember much about. Other than that there was gundam Unicorn, which I still need to see.

But the more important video launched three days later, Love Live‘s first single, Bokura no Live Kimi to no Life. Funnily enough, the original anime video for this was also done by Sunrise. No, they don’t do just mecha. It’s a fun little video but you can’t find it anywhere unless you want to sail the seven seas. But the live version by the actual voice actresses is good too. Love Live would be hyuuge in a few years, but for the moment you had to make do with this as well as what’s probably μ’s best song, Snow Halation which came out just before Christmas.

The title of the year for me is Angel Beats!, of which I’ve written before. It’s a messy, over-ambitious series that was intended to be a 2-cour series of twentyfour or twentysix episodes but in the end only got half. Written by Maeda Jun, who has a habit of trying to elevate his stories with psychobabble and pretentious philosophical musings, yet this hit me right in the feels nonetheless. I watched this one hot august night on holiday in the South of France with the family in 2013, not even two years after Sandra had died. angel Beats ultimately is about grief and coming to terms with death. It was just what I needed. Some of the songs in it, like this one, still make me cry hearing them today.

Good series I didn’t watch: shiki, Durarara, Kuragehime, Arakawa Under the Bridge, Nodame Cantabile Finale, Tatami Galaxy. Harem incest trash I did see from this year: Oreimo, which would’ve been a great little series about a teenage wastrel finally bonding with his younger sister, but which instead revitalised the little sister subgenre for the 2010s. And that after KissxSis tried to kill it off through pure boredom. But really, if you need to watch any little sister anime, make it Yosuga no Sora, in which they actually do fuck in the end. Otherwise, the best harem/romcom wish fulfilment fantasy series this year was Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai/The World God Only Knows, in which the protagonist has to help an angel heal the hearts of girls using his godlike romance game skills…

What else is there? Heartcatch Pretty Cure is many people’s best Precure series. Black Lagoon got a new OVA in 2010. Tamayura, a neat slice of moe series about a teenage girl moving back to the city of her father a few years after he died, debuted this year. It’s another series that makes me gently choke up sometimes. Amagami SS was a dating sim adaptation that wasn’t terrible and distinguished itself by not going the harem route, but rather by doing a story for each heroine. When I first watched it I was obsessed by it for a little while but I haven’t managed to finish the sequel yet. Hidamari Sketch had another outing, as did A Certain Magical Index and Yozakura Quartet. Index was a mess, Yozakura Quartet was fun and Hidamari Sketch is another series I don’t want to finish. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what 2010 has to offer: I got 129 series registrered on MAL broadcast this year and I’ve watched 56 of them. I haven’t even mentioned Panty and Stocking yet, Gainax’s last hurrah before all the interesting talent went and founded Trigger.

2010: a busy year. A good year? I’m not sure. Plenty of cult classics and solid entertaining shows this year, one or two true essentials (but none I’d watched) but nothing that stands out on the level of an Evangelion or a Gurren Lagann. K-On is the biggest series this year, but it debuted earlier even if the second season is so much better. In all, you can see some signs of what anime would evolve into over this decade, but hindsight is twenty twenty. Had I written this review in December 2010, I’m sure I would’ve emphasised different series as important, let alone that I’d know about something like Love Live

This is day two of Twelve Days of Anime 2019. Tomorrow: 2011 and a certain magical girl show setting the world on fire enough I heard about it.