Monday, March 28, 2016

Weekly Round-UP: March 20th -27th and winter 2016 anime post-moratem

Right, so it looks like my Erased review is going up tomorrow instead of tonight (curses, fell too far behind in my watching) so let me give you guys at least some content tonight. First up, what I actually did get posted last week!


And I might start posting even more posts each week! "Helen you can barely do three reviews a week". Four-thank-you-very-much (although OASG was delayed this past week, my fault), but here's the thing, when OASG switched sites at the beginning of the year the old site went offline and all of my old links are bad. However, thanks to the miracle of website cacheing, I should be able to recover a lot of my old posts and plan to start uploading them here as well! I'm not sure how many it will be (in theory, several months worth if not a full year) but I'm gonna try to post those on Thursday.

Okay, now onto the new stuff, it's time to talk about how the winter anime season ended as a whole!


I still need to finish up a few shows but I don't expect that most of them are going to really change my mind on them with only one or two episodes left. In general, one thing the season lacked for me was a really strong, think-about-it-later show. Erased provided some of this for me early on but about halfway through it became clear that the show was more of a thriller than a mystery ("how can the story scare me" vs "how do they solve this?") which I find less filling and Rakugo Shinjuu was great to talk about but had surprisingly little to chew over. In some ways, despite the fact that the characters' actions have so many layers there's not a ton to discuss and debate beyond that, which isn't a flaw but again, not a show I found myself obsessively thinking about days later and I've usually got at least one show in a season like that! Heck, I didn't even feel like I got into any of the fandoms either, usually there's at least one where I check out the tumblr tag on a regular basis for discussions and screenshots but again, nothing really made me seek out discussions I wasn't already part of and while Akagami and Grimgar were nice looking they just didn't grab me as much. 

So in that sense it was a disappointing season, winter is usually the weakest for me but even last year we had Shirobako, YKA, and Death Parade which all fulfilled both of those areas for me, seeking out discussion and just generally mixing with their small fandoms (plus other strong shows in the season as well). Honestly I'm not looking forward to spring that much either since, aside from ConRevo which is a known element (well, to a degree anyway lol), nothing looks like it's going to capture my interest in those two areas either! I'm hoping something surprises me, Joker Game may and I'm sure that I will enjoy some of the other titles, but aside from ConRevo nothing seems to be catered to any of my tastes.