19 July 2012: Iriya's Sky, Summer of Re-Runs
This blog post is presented in Feel-A-Round.
Summer 2012 is shaping up to be a quiet season of anime for me. Aside from shows continuing from spring 2012, not much from the current season interests me. This might be the quarter where I catch up on my re-watching backlog and finish reading those books on Byzantine history I've been meaning to complete. At the moment, I'm only watching Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, Smile Precure!, Binbogami ga!, AKB0048, and Dakara Boku wa, H ga Dekinai.
Unnamed Female Protagonist also has awesome hair.
I wasn't interested in Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (Humanity Has Declined) during the pre-season run-up, but learning Nakahara Mai returns in a starring role guaranteed at least a look. I'm more accustomed to her brassy, aggressive voice, but her matter-of-fact narration in Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita lends a great deal to the show's comedy. It's great to have Nakahara Mai back, and a pleasure to learn Humanity Has Declined carries more bite than its soft pastels might lead you to expect.
What time is it? IT'S MAJORINA TIME!
Smile Precure! is finally starting to include entertaining fights. I'm sure the viewers who are in it merely to moé over Cure Peace don't give a damn, but I'm pretty glad to see these junior varsity Cures finally hold their own in a real scrape. They've still got a long way to go before they can be plausibly reliable Cure-senpai to next year's crew, though.
Sakura is also lucky against gravity.
Binbogami ga! is reasonably good, but not great through two episodes. I do like that Sakura has no intention of surrendering her lopsided good fortune. I'm a fan of characters in general who manifest good or bad luck as genuine characteristics, such as Milfeulle in Galaxy Angel and Keiichi in Aa! Megami-sama. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the rest of the show has much more to offer, but it's too soon to tell just yet.
AKB0048 is a late-start spring 2012 show closing out its lackluster season in summer 2012. I have no idea why ani-nouto is so hyped for it. It's a pretty weak effort all around if you ask me.
"This boner of mine glows with an awesome power."
Dakara Boku wa, H ga Dekinai (So, I Can't Play H?) is terrible but in an entertaining way so I'll keep watching. After Seikon no Qwaser, even a show about a shinigami who gets her powers from a teenage boy's indefatigable erections doesn't seem like a big deal anymore. I like Endo Aya's work so far as Risara, although she needs to say, "HAAA?" and "ANTA BAKA?" more often.
Nadia finally decides to put on some clothes.
So far, that's it for summer 2012 shows that I'm currently watching. I'm not even watching current episodes of Detective Conan because the subs dried up, so I'm back into the enormous backlog of unwatched earlier episodes. I've also moved the HD re-broadcast of Gundam SEED into my "Also Watching" category because the subs are too far behind the current episodes. I'm still re-watching Ai Yori Aoshi and Full Moon wo Sagashite, and I've added HD Fushigi no Umi no Nadia as well. With regard to other summer 2012 shows, I guess I might start some of the other series if I hear a lot of positive buzz about them. Then again, the closest thing to a borderline show right now is Sword Art Online, the show with the most negative buzz I've heard. Readers of the light novel tell me the reports of "glopping" quantities of in-game semen directed at one of the show's few female characters are either apocryphal or based on poor translations, but I'm not here to judge. Granted, this would be a fairly crass reason to start watching an anime based on a light novel about a video game, but if you think about it there's not really any high ground here.
