12 Days of Something III: The Definitive List of Best Girls, 2013 Edition

This isn’t a post intended to raise debate. The answers have already been settled. These are the best, acceptable and worst girls from harem anime this year, objectively.

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Oh, you thought you could get away from Origami this week did you?

Sigh. It’s a week where someone forgot to tell these people that their final episodes were this week. The amount of mailing-in was at historic levels for a week that should have concluded this week. Instead, the creative talent decided to go on summer vacation and sent in whatever they could get in as a conclusion. Anyway, as a courtesy to you my loyal single reader, I’m going to put in a bit more effort than that on recapping the week in shows I watched. Not much more than that though.

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Yeah, this isn’t the sort of thing that makes my top 5.

In a little under 2 weeks time I will be heading to one of those other popular conventions with at least a couple of those unidentified figures I used in the Anime Boston post. In the meantime, that means having to deal with making sure I’m not going to end up with a building on fire when I return from work and at least getting somewhat comfortable with the shoes that people are actually watching.

Also on my mind this week was the topic of discussion of anime. My views just so happen to be so far out of touch as to not get anything like that on social networking sites or forums. Then again, those people have to want to care that I exist so it’s really a complete failure on my part. My own relevancy is something I’ve touched on here many times before, but it seems more than ever I watch shows no one else is, and of those I do watch no one else really can be bothered to express a simple opinion. I guess that’s my lot in life.

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With a screenshot like this, it’s a shame Photo Kano had to disappoint this week.

The idea of passion was on my mind this week as I was reading posts on Valvrave of all things. Flawfinder in his post on the episode, really couldn’t be bothered with something that hadn’t earned the right to do a rape scene. It’s all pandering to fans and that sort of thing. The discussion on Twitter took a turn to the classic moral quandry of a series that is Yosuga no Sora since that also had a rape scene in it as well. I really wanted to say that it didn’t handle it badly, but I didn’t think it would find much of an audience. I think it feels like there is just little desire on my part to try to make any sort of passionate argument, so I think of making fence-sitting contrarian crap arguments instead.

So I’m going to try to be different in this week’s recap. Tell me if I fail in the comments to be passionate in my views on any of this week’s entries.

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A certain incident of what was called aniblogger drama, which I’m not going to talk about specifically here, had me thinking of opinions on anime in general. I personally try not to come off as cynical about some of the series I’m watching. There’s the odd Urobuchi hating women moment from time to time, or occasionally there’s a show that I think can do much better than it is capable of. Ultimately, I hope to avoid the whole looking jaded thing as I write for you few readers out there.

Regardless, it got me thinking of opinions in general, plus it also helped that the book I’m reading recreationally covers the same area. Nuance is something I try to value when discussing anything I’ve miraculously happened to be watching at the same time as someone else. Being able to justify the existence of a series I’m not particularly a fan of, which could be something like the Tokyo Mew Mew dub, and convincing someone it isn’t a crime against humanity is a fun exercise. However, what I would say is that it is much easier to build a readership by holding views that have no nuance at all. A world that is black or white is easier to grasp in a brief read than one with nuance. What a terrible world that is.

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I’ve really been thinking hard about this blog lately. Mainly the new season is coming up and on some sites there are polls where the audience is asked what shows should be blogged for the coming season. My big concern is that if I were to do something similar I’d end up with around 4 votes total. I’ve dealt with the relative unpopularity of this place before, but from a perspective of someone writing for an audience it makes it hard.

I can put it down to a single word: expectations. I basically do not have any. No one is holding me to any sort of standard. So I could just post a pile of horribly argued garbage filled with strawmen and it wouldn’t matter a bit. It really makes me wonder if I’m actually any better of a writer than I was when I started this back in 2008. So while I do enjoy writing, I guess I question whether it is doing me any good here. Especially with completely dropping the posts on Maou-sama and no one saying a word on it.

Anyway, on to the actual weekly recap. I’m actually getting really tired of writing on the shows that continue to be bad every week, so I’m going to a top 5 and a list of the rest. If there’s terribad, I’ll throw that in too. If anyone comes in expecting me to cover all 11 shows, you probably should have said something at some point. These will probably be more detailed in later weeks if they stick around, but for now, it’s probably best for my state to only stick to the normal level of detail. Sorry everyone.

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Surprisingly, or maybe not, it’s actually really hard to find pictures of some characters from Photo Kano that aren’t perverted. That above was the best I could do with a few minutes effort from a certain popular Japan-based artist’s hub. It wasn’t a particularly different week or interesting week, rather I’d think of it as just another week in the middle of the season. That didn’t mean there were no standout episodes, there were 2 of those this week, but the spring season is turning into a bit of a letdown.

Also, a bit of news. Next week I will be blending into the scenery at various locations in downtown Boston, so I will not be doing the recap. Also the Maou-sama post will be delayed if I post it at all. No repeats of the 3-state Koichoco post from last year.

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I decided to do something a bit different than I’ve normally done this season when putting together the weekly rankings. Instead of keeping a running ranking as I have done, I waited until the end of the week to put them together. Then I came to find out that I’d rated 2 series in my top 5 for the first time this season, including the number 1 vote. So why not do something entirely different for the whole post? This won’t end well will it?

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Since it’s Cinco de Mayo, may as well throw in Mexico’s greatest anime character.

Yet another week has passed in the world of animation from Japan, as well as real time of course. It’s safe to say that we are now firmly entrenched in the middle of the season. Typically, I find that this isn’t a very interesting part of the season. Usually, the really terrible shows have been weeded out by now. Those that do fail in the end will be known about 5-7 weeks from now. So what we are left with is a bunch of shows trying to make things interesting. So how did they do this week?

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Since the last installment of this particular feature, the following has happened to all of the shows I had been watching:

• Oregairu – since picked back up after I dropped it on episode 1, see I can change.
• Space Brothers – Dropped after the 3 consecutive recap episodes reminded me of how badly this series has been edited.
• Devil Survivor 2, Attack on Titan, Aku no Hana all dropped for being too boring in my opinion

I sometimes worry about stuff like this, probably too often. I find a series boring, it then becomes popular. Or the reverse, I like a show so much early only to have it go in a terrible direction. It feels like I cannot win sometimes. It just becomes a problem having my finger so far off the pulse of what the rest of this community is watching  that I just kill conversation, or get left out entirely. Perhaps I intentionally isolate myself when it comes to the series I watch. Yet it just feels like I’m insulting people by responding “oh, I dropped that” when a show comes up in conversation.

Anyway, that’s obviously not of much concern to you my readers, you want my thoughts on the shows that I’m still watching instead, so here you go.

We Don’t Need Another Spring Preview Post

I’ve always tried to make my preview posts a little different. Whether that is through projecting my own ending based on the title name, or just writing crap all over a chart, I’ve tried to make them all different from each other. To be honest, you shouldn’t really go to me for season previews since I hardly know what I’m talking about, and there are better options available. I’ll try to do my best to make this interesting since there are a small number of you out there that subscribe. Fortunately, the anime getting the most buzz is

SEED Destiny Remaster

I had to try that once. There’s no way in hell this is getting 13 comments let alone 130.

LMT’s Best of 2012

I think they got some things reversed here.

After yesterday’s rather absurd end-of-year ranking based solely on week-to-week viewing, I thought it may be best to provide a real ranking of the series that finished in the year 2012. Rather than just settle for just a simple top 10, I went over the top and just went for all 37 I completed this year. The first 27 of these will just be short descriptions of why I did, or did not like a particular series. After that, there’s a bit more detail. I hope you enjoy this, and feel free to let me know how wrong/right I was about the anime that aired in 2012 in the comments.

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No, you haven’t wandered into a lost edition of Metafap

Now it is almost the holidays, and that means stuff like preparing my body for the amount of alcohol that will be ingested come Tuesday and then having to recover for work on the Wednesday. Oh how I wished we celebrated Boxing Day here. Alright, the family isn’t that bad, but for dramatic effect I had to put it that way.

So for the anime this week (that is what you read it/find the images in GIS for, right?), the season is just about to wrap up. That doesn’t mean a lot for several of the shows that I am watching now, but I did ultimately finish off four shows.

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Hopefully shopping for the holidays doesn’t go as bad as this particular trip

With the holidays rapidly approaching, I have been trying to finish things off as far as the usual stuff. Buying gifts for people (which I can do well), then wrapping them (which I can’t do so well) is a surprisingly normal thing to do. Now as far as the shows that have been airing, it’s been pretty much the same. Conclusions are approaching, so the final twists and turns are being written. And there was plenty of that this week.

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Finally, the epic battle everyone has been waiting for this season

I’m going to give this space just another chance as my last entry seemed to be uninteresting to pretty much everyone. At least I know one person read it in the middle of the famous /sp/ Sunday football call, but that’s about it. Then again, I once again have to point out that no one actually reads this part, so I’ll move on to the week’s content as that is what you really want.

So on the docket this week is a bunch of shows that performed better than expected, however, come the end of the week and terribad I realized just how bad some of the stuff that aired this year really was. So all-in-all, it was really a mixed bag for the week.

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What greeted me Tuesday morning…also we use such weeb team names.

This week began on a rather low note. I lost to Kevo by the aggregate distance of 2.6 yards. 237.74 centimeters of crushing fantasy football defeat in the SCCSAV fantasy football league. No matter, I’m probably making the playoffs and he isn’t. There were some other conversations of note if you follow me on twitter, but I’d rather not use this space to talk about it here. Those are for the terrible anniversary posts after all.

So what’s on the agenda this week. Among other things, there’s a great episode that probably ruins a series, comedies failing at getting serious and a good episode of something I almost dropped. Plus the terribad had time-traveling Nazis. Who would not want to see that? Trust me you don’t.

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If this doesn’t bring as much joy to your life as it did mine on Thursday, you have a heart of ice.

There were all sorts of wacky tales that were told over the family table on Thanksgiving. The sorts of re-imagining of the modern world that would make all sorts of amazing fictional dystopian tales. Unfortunately, these were all told to each other unironically . Sometimes you just have to sit back and realize there are some battles that aren’t worth fighting. Especially when you have to see the same group in 5 weeks for more Amazing Tales Without Irony.

So what’s on the docket this week? For the most part a typical week. The terribad entry happens to be one of those early works that made it to the west in an era when anything was considered good if it was on TV. The erratic availability of Seitokai no Ichizon means that it returns this week after having last week off. And I probably completely miss the point on Chu2koi again.

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To endure some of the shows that I watch requires Koko-esque drinking ability.

Beginning one’s Christmas shopping is probably a good idea for those who actually celebrate or are condemned to go to a celebration at some point in the next 6 weeks. For the most part, it’s been a week of trying to cram in those unfortunate Secret Santa series that I will be writing on around the holiday. It could be worse I suppose, but I’m judging that entirely by a writer for another blog go off on streams of obscenities as they watch another episode of Sword Art Online.

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Unlike a certain other show, the blood being sprayed on another character actually had impact here.

What a way to kick off year five of this adventure with a recap of what I have watched over the last week. Without having to watch 50 odd episodes, I can actually provide a little more detail than I did last time. That doesn’t mean there is little on my plate, however, so I haven’t been compelled to catch up on anything I dropped earlier. As far as the real life stuff that this space is known for, I’m in a bit of a transition career-wise, but I still have the time to engage in experimental cooking in my spare time.

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Please don’t move your hand Hibito

This will be the last one of these for a few weeks. I’m taking a real vacation for once, though that doesn’t mean I’m going to be quitting to pursue other ventures. I’m nowhere near good enough for that. Anyway, nothing really about the week passed. It would only be a long story of tear-filled disappointment and crushed dreams. Another action packed week as far as cramming stuff in. Also, I waffled massively on some of the shows I said I dropped last week. I can’t get a grip on this season either.

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So she has more phone contacts than I do?

So the full season started up, and where was I? Writing posts on Horizon, suffering racial abuse playing a video game and contemplating my own purpose in this blogosphere while watching another Go Nagai “classic.” Actually, none of you read this introduction part. It’s all about what follows, isn’t it? Catching up on anything old is difficult during this time of the season, so there’s none of that. It’s all new airing here, with my catastrophic taste showing through all the way as my. Plus, there’s that terribad thing at the end.

The Fall 2012 Season in Outlandish Predictions

It’s that time of year again to bust out the charts to see what exactly there is to watch for the coming season. As I have meticulously tracked this, the fall season is the lowest rated of all when it comes to my own rankings. Needless to say, the notion that the spring and fall seasons are the best does not apply to me. So in an effort to spice things up and maybe laugh in the unlikely event these actually happen, I present predictions that should not happen this season for each show.

40 Seasons in 40 Days: Spring 2009

Oh no! I don't want to relive those episodes all over again!

With talk of global economic meltdowns and other complicated things that made life terrible in the year following the spring of 2008, the spring of 2009 was about cutting costs and maybe not making so many new series. While the latter was true, the former showed probably a bit too much, though one studio would forget that part. I wouldn’t say it was a spring for the ages, it was just a bit different in its own way.

40 Seasons in 40 Days: Spring 2007

Part 4 of this series moves us to a mere 2.5 years ago. While I haven’t actually checked, this season marked a high point in number of series produced, anecdotally at least. This season for me was defined by my earliest exposures to inexplicable hatred toward mediocre series, the inability for me to finish off other series and perhaps 2 of the best examples of social commentary I have seen in anime.

The End of a Spring Which Will Seem Fantastic in 3 Months Time

This man's transfer fee to Real Madrid was approximately 12.7 billion yen, or beyond the reach of any of the Seleçao.

So I’ve gone from weekly recaps of new stuff with occasional other posts, but since no one ever comments on those it’s now LoGH and torturing myself with absolute crap. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped watching current anime, it’s just that I can’t be bothered to write about it every week. So what have I been doing with the last 3 months in that regard…