2013 was definitely a show filled with many shows of assorted variety. It probably says a lot that I can think of tons of shows of appalling quality yet struggle to come up with more than one show that I genuinely loved. Anyway, let’s rank these things and move on with out lives in 2014 because that’s truly for the better.
This may be the last installment of this feature for a few weeks. I’m not sure whether I should pursue a policy of continuing this in the spring as normal, or if I should do the typical thing done by aniblogs with a readership in 2 figures and write on each first episode. My most popular post (with 0 comments until I mentioned 18 months later) was from writing this way, and it also allowed me to briefly have the top Google search for a term. Damn you ABC News, damn you.
I’m not going to humor you much with tales of how my week went. Needless to say, this post will go up on St. Patrick’s Day. Most of you will know what kind of activity typically happens on that day. I will undoubtedly be engaging in a much sadder version of that, without people. That’s what I would normally say but for the fact that I’m actually feeling a bit under the weather. Sober St. Pat’s for me. In the meantime, I can still pass the time playing Pokemon LeafGreen while doing the Nuzlocke Challenge. Eleven hours in, and I’ve only killed one of the anibloggers I’m using as names for different roosters in Japanese Legal Video Game Cockfighting.
As for the anime this week, the season is beginning to wind down. Or in the case of the Noitamina block, it just comes to an end which feels like the series director was only told they had 22 episodes last week. The terribad viewing actually did happen this week as the group finally decided that hard drive space needed to be cleared after watching Anno attempt to direct real actors. And as a side note, I’m out of town attending a small gaming convention, so won’t be doing a recap. I’ll try to throw something up on next week’s conclusion of Robotics;Notes in 2 weeks.
In the course of watching a series, it’s generally good if something leaves an emotional impact on the viewer. To be honest, I am rarely moved by something I’m watching unless I see that it is making an honest attempt to make a point. To give a recent example, I would point to Older Maid Sister’s speech in the 9th episode of Maoyuu Maou Yuusha. While it lacks in cultural relevance on a basic level, the point was made that all people who try to improve their lives should be treated with respect. A nice positive, uplifting message that can appeal to a wide audience.
If you are looking for discussion of episodes like that, this post isn’t for you. Instead, I’m here to lower the tone of discussion and talk about the shows that made me angry. Not just because they were bad, but because they went beyond that. I wished for terrible things to happen to the characters. I didn’t want a happy end for these characters. Admittedly, these shows worked on a level that I didn’t drop them for one reason or another. It instead became the equivalent of cheering against Duke at basketball. The show may suck, but it’s popular enough to win some fans inexplicably like Duke. And finally, Fuck Duke.
I never thought this recap series would make it to 30 installments. I was due for a week of shows so bad that I would be embarrassed to write about it and then I would eventually stop as it would seem like I hated anime. This was very nearly that week.
So what exactly set the stage for this. First, Maoyuu didn’t air a new episode this week, just some recap special episode 9.5 or something like that. It’s probably a compilation of Female Knight and Demon King in various states of undress trying to seduce Hero. Second, there was epic bed-shitting when it came to shows that were even mildly okay. Third, the prospect of watching live-action Anno-directed terribad was so bad that the time was spent talking about the silliness of societies based entirely around one staple food, deconstructing deconstruction and some sort of music quiz. On the plus side, you get a new show cracking my top 5 this week for the first time. I hadn’t even written more than a comment on it prior to now.
The mundane is something that I’ve had to deal with a lot recently. It has reached the point where late night grocery shopping can now be considered adventurous. I don’t really live in an area where that would truly be the case though, although I could give one of those places near work a shot. At least with it being near the start of baseball season, it means that spring is just around the corner.
This week there was not a wide spread of episodes. There was an epic monologue, romantic comedy centering around films and a swimsuit episode that never ventured outside among other things. As for terribad, it had as catastrophic an ending as any in recent memory.
So I find myself with a little bit more spare time this week. Unfortunately, I happen to live in a place that is little more than a frozen wasteland which basically means I get to sit inside for most of the time. At least winter seems to be coming close to an end since the days are getting noticeably longer now. Or to some it up briefly, it’s cold outside, I want it to be warmer.
This week, there’s not much in the groundbreaking animation front. It’s about as midseason a week as there possibly can be. Though I would not be surprised if there was a magnificent episode of a show I’m not watching. But that thought happens every week.
I was doing some cleaning this week post-Valentine’s Day and all, when I came across one of them myself. I can’t say it was entirely meaningless, but rather it ends up feeling more like a sign that I still haven’t paid this person back. That’s probably a personality flaw on my part that I keep a running tally on debts or favors owed even if the other person was not expecting anything back. I also found some other strange items along the way, but the most tragic were the Canadian pennies. RIP.
As is typical of this time of year, it was a completely uneventful sort of week. There was a bit of snow around here, but it wasn’t anything like feet of snow. I also made another one of my absurd twitter promises during the week in a desperate attempt to take my mind off of certain things this coming Thursday. At least this one won’t cost me a bunch of money like one of them last year. Although, that one did end up being a pretty nice experience.
So what do we have on store for this week’s recap post? Space Bros begins to revert back to the mean, there’s several holiday-themed episodes and an historically bad terribad anime from the team behind Ice. That one got licensed and dubbed, so that screams quality, doesn’t it?
After last week, I have to admit the knee is feeling a bit better. Not well enough to do anything strenuous on it, but I’m no longer like certain immobile Welshmen. Elsewhere, I’ve also been watching that new Netflix remake of House of Cards. Kevin Spacey is a delight to watch when he is playing asshole characters, and a member of the US House of Representatives would definitely fulfill that role. I just wish the writers would have put some thought into having the policy positions of the respective parties make sense unlike the comical mess they seem to be in that series. However, I digress in taking away from the usual Japanese animation that this blog takes up.
If I’m perfectly honest, it was a fairly tedious week, but it wasn’t entirely uneventful. Psycho-Pass finally drove me over the edge in the first minutes this week, so it will no longer merit a place in these recaps. I can only take so much hack writing before it becomes entirely without merit after all.
Lately I’ve been struggling with a couple of things. The first is this little injury to one of my knees. Well, it probably wasn’t little as I couldn’t extend it for about a week. However, it’s effectively killed one of my non-anime hobbies for at least a few more weeks. Then to top all things off, there is no terribad here this week as a 2 hour project at work turned to a 10 hour failure with all of the addressing failure that will come with in in the next few days. At least I’d get a couple of life-affirming episodes from this week. Also, next week will see the return of the average chart, that I’m going to try to make a bit more accurate.
If I were to describe this week in a single word, it would be bland. I think it’s just the very nature of life in this part of the world having to stay indoors most of the time because of the weather conditions. It’s not the oppressively hot conditions of Australia though. After the two weeks of trimming the waste from my winter watching schedule, I should have been able to have some proper enjoyment, right?
The 2nd week of the new season pretty much finished off most of what new shows were airing this season. The last one remaining is next month’s start to the new PreCure series, but I defer to others in hyping that one up. It was also another week where I happened to continue to pull the trigger on some shows too quickly. It’s become a little cliche out in the community to say that this season is terrible, but for whatever reason it does seem like it’s a little worse. At least there was a returning group of shows to make everything seem better, right?
It was the last week of the year for new shows, and for me to wonder what to do about Christmas gifts like this. As I contemplate heading to the gift returns section of the store from where it was purchased, I’ll leave you with a 2-part post here. The first is the normal recap stuff. It was a really light week with several shows taking a break, so that will be relatively brief. Second will be the full year-long weekly average of every series from 2012. That part will be rather perplexing, even by my standard of taste. Tomorrow, I will give my real top 10 for the year. So consider this one the end result of short-termism. Continue reading The Return of the Recap 20
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.
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.
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.
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. Continue reading The Return of the Recap 16
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. Continue reading The Return of the Recap 14
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. Continue reading The Return of the Recap 13
Well that was a particularly long time off from this blog, probably the longest since I was averaging erm, 2 views a day. Personally I needed a bit of a break from real life as there’s lots of change going on there. So off I went to that country that is most famous for being the setting for the K-On movie, and some other more minor contributions in the last 1000 years. But enough about that, this is the column about what I watched in the last week. And it’s a lot, so let’s just get started.
Continue reading The Return of the Recap 12
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.
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.
Continue reading The Fall 2012 Season in Outlandish Predictions
Lower Mid-Table 
