Welp. I’m back. This time I’ve decided on my 6 good shows, and I’m sticking to a solid routine, so I don’t go mad again. True enough, I may end up having picked enough shows so that they will have me at the walls once more, but at least they won’t be entire posts about them. But I have a good feeling about the shows I picked. I’ll be in sunny Atlanta and at two west UK conventions for part of this cour, but hey, con season is con season…
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After my deep deep digging through the stream sites, my first find out of the 6 was Love Live! Sunshine!!…and my fears were pretty much spot on…except the 9 girls have slightly different characteristics than what I thought. Spunky Chika is no different from the spunky Honkers, and student council president Dia is no different from student council president Eli. Not being really familiar with the show (the girls feature, in part, in the Love Live! game), I had a bit of trouble recognising who were first, second and third-years. One character has stood out already, and I’m already head-over-heels with:
You’d think I’d choose the first-year chuunibyou girl (yep, you heard me! There’s a chuunibyou affected girl in this!), but no. In the 10 minutes she’s been in, Rika has won me over completely. I mean look at her: she’s like a grown-up non-tsundere Maki! Well actually, she’s sort of modelled on Umi, the level-headed second year in the older shows.
The show’s looking good, so far, and the town of Uchiura looks amazing, compared to the Tokyo clone the older seasons had. Just hope it won’t immediately switch to the exact story its predecessors had.
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Now truth be told, I was expecting Rewrite to be not that much different from any other Key adaptations. One male MC and a harem of strange girls (one of which is relatively normal). Well, it seems Studio 8bit decided it would be the best thing to introduce all of them extensively in one extra-long show! Seriously. About 20 minutes in (I wasn’t paying attention to the episode clock at all), I was wondering/worrying about how long this would take. Kotarou had met a good bunch of them, had shown that he wasn’t your average generic male MC (he has superhuman powers….and no, I won’t mention that show!), the obligatory comedy guy showed up doing obligatory comedy things, and so I was thinking…what’s next? Yes, the first episode showed off a lot, but it just went on for way too long. I really hope it isn’t going to go on like this.
orange disappointed me. It seriously did. It seems I was more-or-less spot-on when it came to the show having a Butterfly Effect theme. I read about the reaction it got and I thought to myself, “Why don’t I agree with them? They empathise with these characters, so why don’t I?” All of them, even poor Kakeru, just seem too shallow to me. Naho has just gotten her letter after all, and stuff she might have to change may become more important and noticeable, but right now, all I see are a bunch of average populars doing average popular things. Well I was among the tiny nerd bunch at all my schools and in college, so the populars and their little world is something I can never ever understand.
What about you Shokugeki no Soma? Well, you never change. No seriously! You have not changed in any way since we left you in Season 1!! The preliminaries are over, and there are only 8 left. While the first season was cool in that we got to know all of the characters more (the dorm students, the alumni, Soma’s dad, so on), now that it’s been whittled down to 8 (of course Megumi couldn’t not be in the 8!), I think we’ll get more of an opportunity to see how better the chefs are. I was suddenly curious in this episode about Alice (since I never really paid that much attention to her before), and how she was constantly fighting a losing battle with her cousin, who has, to be perfectly frank, become slightly more bitchy this season so far. This is all a competition but I’m hoping that, when people are whittled down, they will have more respect for each other (ha!)…because the way I see it, the real antagonist is Erina who, having been humiliated several times in season 1, seems to be putting her own personal and social life on a back step so she can watch Soma squirm……which will never happen.
I was sort of relieved to hear this wasn’t to be a two-cour show. Only the Autumn Elections matter now and nothing else.
The Danganronpa shows won’t start for a while and Prisma Illya starts towards the end of this week…so both of them will have to wait.
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In some other unrelated news, even though it’s literally just finished, I’ve decided to attend Anime Expo 2017. A recent anime meet has put me off UK cons for good. Muse just came back from this year’s one, so expect some wild tales from her soon.