Jormungand Episode 19: A Blast of Fresh Air and/or Buildings

There is something so curiously endearing about a show that tries with no shortage of desperation to be the coolest thing since frozen, sunglass-wearing sliced bread. Where most shows would simply have a character make a one-liner before collectedly planting a bullet through an enemy’s forehead, Jormungand painfully draws it out so the audience can fully appreciate just how totally radical it wants them to think it is, because its sense of what’s hip was originally from the dark age of glam metal and Reaganomics and it wants to catch up to what the kids are into these days, like autotuned Engrish.

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Jinrui Episode 9: The Folly of Fairies

There’s both a good and a bad side to being so sleep deprived that I actually fell asleep three times while writing this sentence. Counting all the positives, we have boundless creativity and a drive to write as many posts as physically possible before the end of the week. Keeping the much vaster swath of negatives in mind though, it doesn’t mean much that I have ideas when I can barely express them coherently. And that, children, is my excuse for getting this post up nearly five days after watching the episode. So yeah, sorry about that.

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Humanity Has Declined Episode 6: Short-Haired Watashi’s Back and Also Space Stuff

Space travel is a concept that’s paradoxically one of the most culturally iconic and divisive among the population, especially since this is a world where economic security takes priority over plumbing the deepest reaches of space in order to discover cosmic monstrosities lurking in the darkest corners of the furthest galaxies. Unlike most moral or economic arguments, where one side is composed entirely of people that think coloreds-only bathrooms were a good idea, and the other is made up of unerring optimists with stars gleaming in their eyes, both sides in this debate have a strong voice of reason embedded in their arguments.

However, nobody takes the time to ask the thoughts of the real heroes, the vehicles engineered to drift through the void of space; after all, they’ve had to weather the loneliness of spending years without any sort of human contact. Jinrui took that fateful step when nobody else would, and the result is touching, if unsurprisingly cynical. Also, it involves a giant cat fighting an equally massive nautilus, which probably registers as some kind of fetish to a small subset of the population.

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Humanity Has Declined Episode 3: Manzine-licious Resurrection

There’s a lot to say about the indomitability of human ingenuity. After all, we discovered how to use fire and agriculture to stake claims on formerly rugged land, etching out the outline of civilization on the wild skeleton of Mother Nature. Electricity, space travel, and penicillin are all monuments to the sheer breadth of boundless creativity that the human mind plays host to. As wonderful as these achievements are, they’re all the products of undoubtedly brilliant men that stand leagues above the herd. Yet, when it comes to the trivial things that we all use to distract from the stress of our lives, we all have it in us to make MacGyver weep in an impotent rage.

Tragically or hilariously, your viewpoint depending on how much schadenfreude you want in your life on any given day, this drive seems to (mostly) only apply to what people want. Do they want to distribute stories of sweaty gay sex across famine-stricken land? They’ll set up a system more efficient than anything run by the government or intervening parties in order to give the huddled masses their daily dose of musky man ‘mance. That’s the third episode of Jinrui in a nutshell: Post-apocalyptic distribution of female-oriented literature featuring male on male romance and intercourse. And it’s enjoyable as fuck.

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Sankarea Episode 12: An Inconclusive and Bloodied Finale

I know that a final in-depth glance at Sankarea has been long overdue, especially by my otherwise loosely standards of puctuality, but I like to finish what I start, and I think a fun weekend at Anime Expo is a fair enough exchange for actually writing about shows on time. Ordinarily if the final episode was complete crap I would have ignored it in favor of getting a running start on the coming season, but I’ll be damned if Sankarea doesn’t pull through again with a poignant, if abrupt finale.

There are so many reasons to crucify the ending of Sankarea, or the show as a whole for that matter, and set its splayed corpse as a warning for all prospective writers to see. Most grievously it ends on a terrible cliffhanger, one that most assuredly points toward a second season, though there are so many other niggling things that take away from the show’s whole that I can’t in good faith recommend it. But at the same time I can’t help but marvel at how such a decent, if unspectacular manga ended up with as visually creative animated adaptation as it did. Most of all, I’m surprised how well the relationship between Rea and Chihiro was handled in the finale, far and away different from Sankarea’s almost cringe-inducing romcom antics.

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Sankarea Episode 11: Bunny Girl Zombies Are Plot Kryptonite

No matter how genuine a show’s eagerness to make a point, it doesn’t help if it sabotages itself right away by doing exactly what it’s trying to avoid or bring attention to. It’s like if Batman robbed a bank after foiling a potential robbery, or if somebody on a diet moved next door to a bakery specializing in their favorite pastry; yeah, there could be factors that lead to it being their only option, but it still undermines whatever argument’s being made if seven jelly doughnuts are bought on the way to work. I guess what I’m trying to say is that bakeries are terrible places to move next to, and Sankarea couldn’t have missed its own point by a larger margin if it tried.

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Fate/Zero Episode 25: Bittersweet Ends, Silly Faces, and Chiseled Physiques

Fate/Zero’s finale isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. It isn’t exactly outrageous and controversial to scream that from the world’s tallest peaks, or to more realistically type it on an anime blog, but it’s nonetheless necessary to preface by saying that there are many little chinks in the otherwise flawless armor that take away from the overall merit of the show; microscopic blemishes noticed only with the utmost scrutiny, but blemishes nonetheless. And, as much as I could gush about the continued excellence of the production values or the tragic yet fitting end of Kariya, which was handled far better than I’d hoped, it wouldn’t help me maintain a thin veil of professionalism if I didn’t harp on the negatives with as much enthusiasm and vitriol as three cups of coffee and a cursory glance at political news can muster.

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Jormungand Episode 11: Her Name is Valmet, She Likes Chardonnay (I Said Yay)

It’s often said that craziness only attracts more craziness, like schizophrenic moths to a psychopathic flame. While the validity of that statement remains to be seen, that seems to be the only consistent thread of logic that Jormungand seems to have running through it. Every action is apparently only in search of finding a way to upstage the collective psychopathy and disregard for self preservation that precedes it, leading to a bizarre snowball effect that it feels the need to add to with each passing episode, seemingly with little rhyme or reason.

To use a more palatable analogy, any excess zaniness that doesn’t add to the plot should only be the frosting on the cake of dismembered limbs and gunpowder, not the actual cake itself. If Episode 10 executed this magnificently by spreading it just enough without laying it on too thick, Episode 11 decided to make the cake entirely out of crazy-frosting, sacrificing consistency and any semblance of nutrition just to add its favored plot device.

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Fate/Zero Episode 24: Staying the Course, or Fate/Zero’s Continued Character Neglect

Say what you will about the problems gnawing away at Fate/Zero like ravenous locusts in a lush cornfield fertilized with blood and decapitated limbs, but it certainly has a sense of consistency about it. Whether this is good or bad depends on how much the viewer is put off by the lack of focus on Berserker’s history with Saber, or how much they enjoy seeing two ideologically opposed men get in a scuffle in Batman’s spacious garage, but the best way to describe this episode in relation with the rest of the series is “consistent”. Unfortunately, part of that consistency is neglecting elements that would add richness to particularly thin areas of the story, and that’s where the show fumbles considerably.

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Tsuritama Episode 10: Originality is Overrated

All three or four of you that have religiously followed my Tsuritama posts are probably still reeling from how I didn’t write on it last week—or not, seeing as the only new thing it brought to the table was a group of silly people in squeaky suits. This week was no different, unfortunately, since all it did was continue building up to the grand finale while ending on an unbearable cliffhanger, a nasty habit that otherwise great shows of this season seem to have. And yet, even if I’m finding it nightmarishly difficult to write about, there’s still an underlying charm that leaves me looking forward to it week to week, something that has stopped happening for almost every other show airing this season. 

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