Spring 2015 Anime Season

ARE YOU DOUBTING THE MOENESS OF SPEEDWAGON!? YURUZAN!!!

Euphonium as 'most likely to crash and burn after a promising start'? When Plastic Memories is in the same season? You kidding? So far, it's been an extremely confident, deliberately-paced show, establishing its setting and conflict with expert cinematography and deft characterisation (Kumiko attending a breathing class she obviously doesn't need because that's what first-years do, the exquisite shot framing in her meeting with her sister, and so on). There's no reason to assume it'll all fall apart, and plenty of reason to have faith. PM, meanwhile, has a cast overpopulated with crude archetypes and severe issues with maintaining tone, huge warning signs in a show's early episodes. It still has many of Euphonium's abovementioned assets, but just doesn't feel like such a confident, professional work.

I said it was the series I was most worried about turning into a trainwreck. I'm not worried about series I'm not watching

...I could argue the rest of your points, (at least about Euphonium), but I'm not sure there'd be a point to it

So what's good this season?

BBB, F/SN, Euphonium, JJBA, Ore Monogatarai, Sidonia, and I guess maybe Seraph if you're jonesing for some charmingly stupid action. Plastic Memories started good, but is a bit wobbly at present.

I hear good things about Arslan, too, even if the presentation's slightly spotty.

edited 25th Apr '15 4:26:22 AM by Iaculus

Kekkai Sensen/Blood Blockade Battlefront is fantastic. Euphonium, Show By Rock, Seraph, Ore Monogatari, and Mikagura all seem to have their fans

Also sequels

Arslan is excellent. Once you get past the shit animation, that is.

Also, Iaculus, you seem to think that Plastic Memories' tone shifts are accidental. They aren't.

edited 25th Apr '15 6:36:52 AM by Logograph

I think the animation's fine. I don't mind the Conspicuous CGI since I've seen worse.

Few things in a work of fiction are accidental. My problem with PM's Mood Whiplash is that it's clunkily implemented and manages to dilute both the silly and serious parts of the plot. Sharp enough swerves between extreme comedy and extreme tragedy make it hard for the audience to catch its breath and decide how they're supposed to feel about a situation.

That said there does seem to be some legit indecision over how seriously the show wants us to take Isla's decline. The general idea seems to be to set up the standard rom-com hijinks with an undercurrent of something darker and then peel away the fluff to expose the horribleness wriggling beneath (the 'hahaha oh shit' technique), but they use the comedy as a tension-deflater a bit too often, detracting from the unfolding tragedy (the 'oh shit... hahaha never mind it's OK' technique). The toilet humour at the end of Episode One is a good example.

Well, I can't say much beyond "I disagree". The humour connected well with me and so did the tragedy bits. Oh well.

Miscellaneous thoughts on the stuff that I've picked up:

• Gintama: I've never seen the other +250 episodes or so, yet I decided to jump right into the newest season for the heck of it. It's a very entertaining gag series so far.
• Hibike Euphonium: As with Shigatsu Wa, I came for the musical shenanigans. It's alright.
• Ninja Slayer: I think it's attempting to be a satire or a parody of something, but...I'm not really feeling it. I'll watch it anyways.
• Ore Monogatari: Suna deserves an award for being the greatest bro ever by saving the cast from a season full of painful misunderstandings. Where is the show gonna go from here, though?
• Shokugeki No Soma: Would've dropped this at Episode 1 had I not known that the story was going to tone the disturbing imagery down eventually. The art is a step-down from the source material, but it compensates by making the cooking segments look gorgeous.

Carrying over from last season:

• Assassination Classroom: The pacing has sped up considerably, but the adaptation is still solid.
• World Trigger: The pacing...might have gotten better? The story is finally getting kind of interesting, but I think I'm doing myself a huge disservice by not reading the manga instead.

@Logograph: I'm going to have to agree with @Iaculus on the matter of PM. Outside of the attempted super jump in episode 1, I haven't found the show that funny. And I also have an additional problem with the "standard jokes with a dark twist" thing they're doing, namely that I know what the dark twist is but Tsukasa doesn't, leading me to frequently yell "FIGURE IT OUT, YOU DOLT!" at my screen.

I mean, am I expecting too much of him to consider the possibility of Isla nearing her expiration date when

• Michiru has told him that Isla is a veteran (who has for some reason gone out of active duty)
• He's been informed that Giftias only live for roughly 9 years and 2 months, and
• He's had a look at Isla's declining stats (with Yasutaka telling him point blank that a Giftia's skills can't deteriorate from lack of practice).

Maybe I am, maybe I only think the clues are enough to reach the conclusion because I have the advantage of the bigger picture, so I'd really like to know if I'm being unreasonable here...

edited 27th Apr '15 5:49:15 AM by Elfhunter

Why is Seraph so slow. I feel like there's a good series in there, but it needs to increase the pace, oh, 100% or so

Some people have said to me to stick with it because it'll get really good around ep 10-11.

Here's the thing; even if that's true, it'll still be crap. It wasted an entire cour.

I'll say it once and I'll say it again: a good series is good since the beginning. At best, you have at best until episode 3 to get things going. You need something to hook your viewers with, and Seraph still has nothing. The characters are mediocre (Yu) to grating (Shinoa), the exposition is boring, the plot is thin and laden with transparent attempts to shock and it's all just really painful to watch.

edited 2nd May '15 8:54:19 PM by Logograph

I happen to rather like Shinoa. It's the rest of the humans that grate on me (well, Mustang Guren is okay)

Shinoa grates on me because she's the source of much of the humor and it turns out that the humour is really lousy.

It doesn't get better. It gets faster.

I don't like the implications of that statement...

But for me Seraph of the End is my anime of the season only marginally beating out Kekkai Sensen thanks to actually being a cohesive story instead of all flash (albeit entertaining flash that makes it nigh undroppable). I think I might have mentioned it before a few pages back but it feels tastefully dark instead of being dark for darkness' sake (Akame ga Kiru) or being completely overbearing and unwatchable (Attack on Titan).

'All flash' seems pretty unfair to BBB. It's an episodic show about exploring a weird alien world, and there's some clever character work and cool thematics under the giant explosions and gribbly monsters. To be honest, Seraph seems rather more aggressively dumb and reliant on spectacle - it doesn't reach as far or as interestingly in its storytelling as BBB's meditation on humanity and inhumanity in Episode Three or its immersive, claustrophobic look into Leo's personality and powers in Episode Two. You can see a half-dozen ways a director like Matsumoto could have added a little more nuance to Mikaela's life as a vampire and relationship with his fellow monsters just with clever visual tricks if she'd been running the show, for instance.

Even discounting this season's excellent quiet shows (Euphonium, OreMono), it's hard to call Seraph AOTS when it's running alongside two action shows with similarly (or more) jaw-dropping spectacle and more to say as stories (BBB and Sidonia S2) - it's dumb, cheesy fun, nothing more.

Shinoa is a lovably smug asshole, though, and serves as a nice deflater for the rest of the cast's self-importance and self-seriousness.

Thank you!

edited 3rd May '15 1:50:26 AM by Elfhunter

I'd also note that Kekkai Sensen does have a cohesive story running in the background

So, time to start a thread for Seraph?

@Silentedge89: A cohesive story? Probably. Boring as hell? Definitely.

Also: tastefully dark? Hahahahahahahahaha. Please, Seraph is laden with so many transparent attempts to shock the audience and so many emotionally manipulative moments to the point it's on par with a 13-year-old's emo fanfic.

edited 3rd May '15 9:01:29 AM by Logograph

No need to! I found one.

edited 3rd May '15 10:02:42 AM by Diamite

And here I am thinking that Gunslinger Stratos is the most underrated show of the season.