As always, no wagering.

I started these Girl of the Year awards in 2009 mostly as a goof. Then I kept doing doing it every year and now I can't stop. Can I still pass judgment in a fair and balanced manner even though I watched relatively few shows in 2013? What if I refuse to accept nominations for girls from shows I haven't seen? Not to worry. This contest has always been rigged. Actually, it's not so much a competition as it is an exhibition.

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I couldn't think of a gouda cheese pun to use for this caption.

Summer 2013: Silver Spoon [1-11] > Uchouten Kazoku [1-13] > Symphogear G [1-13] > Love Lab [1-13] > Genshiken Nidaime [1-13] > Prisma☆Illya [1-10] > C3-bu [1-13] > Turning Girls [1-7] > Detective Conan (701-711) > DokiDoki! Precure (23-34) > RailgunS [13-24] > Dog & Scissors [1-12].

These two are pretty upset even though Yoshino's not pregnant.

Dropped: Gatchaman Crowds (1-9) > Servant x Service (1-3) > Kiniro Mosaic (1-4) > Kitakubu Katsudou Kiroku (1-2) > Gen'ei o Kakeru Taiyou: Il Sole Penetra le Illusioni (1-3) > Chou Jigen Game Neptume The Animation (1) > High School DxD NEW (1-4) > Futari wa Milky Holmes (1-2). WORSE THAN COSPRAYERS: Shingeki no Kyojin (13.5-14).

This chart started out as a joke, but has grown kinda out of control. Of course, the whole ranking anime thing started out as a joke too, and then suddenly five years went by.

Yoshino makes me want to eat smoked cheese more than Churuya ever did.

Gin no Saji (Silver Spoon) was easily the best summer 2013 series that I watched. It was consistently entertaining and I was impressed with how Hachiken's character developed over the show's 11 episodes. Even the quandary with "Pork Bowl" ended up much better than I expected. That was the plot point I had the most reservations about, but I'm quite pleased with how Silver Spoon resolved it.

Five will get you tengu he's going to trash the joint.

Uchouten Kazoku (The Eccentric Family) stands out among the summer 2013 shows for being intelligent about idiots and being strange while feeling familiar. The focus is on tanuki family dynamics, but it turns out the problems fuzzball shapeshifters have with their families aren't too different than those experienced by humans, except perhaps tanuki aren't as quick to embrace Shakespearean revenge tragedies. To be fair, all I really learned about tanuki is that they are dumbasses and that they are easily panicked, but maybe that's all anyone needs to know about tanuki.

Tall-collar service.

More importantly, I learned Mamiko can knock 'em dead better than ever. Her work as Benten was transcendent. I've never wanted to be a decrepit old man more. In fact, thanks mostly to Noto Mamiko's superb work, but also because Benten herself is such straight-up trouble, I'm nominating Suzuki Satomi for 2013 Girl of the Year. I'd also like to mention that Nakahara Mai is better than ever, although I encourage her to take more parts like her role in Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita and and fewer roles as young boys.

The Shimogamo matriarch is lucky so many dudes wanted to do her tanuki-style.

Senki Zesshou Symphogear G: In the Distance, That Day, When the Star Became Music... had a great ending. Basically, if you didn't like that final episode then you just don't like anime. That said, the show itself did have a few issues. First of all, Dr. Ver's comically evil persona never seemed particularly threatening, except for maybe when we learned he wanted to make babies with Maria. Second, Maria herself turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. I certainly was not expecting her to spend most of the show crying. I guess it's a good thing there's not going to be a follow-up cour devoted to her efforts at repopulating the planet, because she'd probably cry the entire time then too.

Listen, sugar, either go back to whaling on some deadbeats
or help me repopulate the planet, but get to work.

Sorry, Maria really needed to focus more on tearing shit up and coming up with new cape-fu moves instead of all the moping she did. Still, I'll ignore a lot of faults when a show spends most of its time focusing on mahou shoujo whaling on each other while singing. Shirabe and Kirika were endearing even though their fights lost a lot of impact because there was no danger of anyone getting hurt. Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS already demonstrated that providing lots of collateral damage is not a substitute for emotional resonance.

The fan service in Prisma☆Illya gets out of control.

I've already written about the endings to Love Lab, Genshiken Nidaime, and Fate/kaleid liner Prisma☆Illya.

Oh, hey, it's Evangelion's Train of Despair.

Tokurei Sochi Dantai Stella Jo-Gakuin Koutou-ka C3-Bu spent too much time on Yura taking all the fun out of a game, but that was sort of the point. In a way, C3-bu felt as if Gainax wanted to stretch out a Gainax ending as far as they could. Technically, C3-bu did have a Gainax ending, but then they went ahead and made another episode that seemed to contain material I'd usually expect in a standalone OVA. Maybe that's the way it was originally planned, but someone figured at the last minute that it probably wouldn't sell or something.

I finished watching Turning Girls weeks ago.

Ran shows off her crazy metabolism again.

I fell behind on Detective Conan but managed to catch up by the time I finally got this thing written. As for Meitantei Conan itself, it's still a reliable control for comparing shows season-to-season. It does need more Kazuha, though. I was concerned maybe her prolonged absence was related to Miyamura Yuko's longer commuting requirements. (She moved to Australia a few years ago.) I'm not sure if that's a factor, but it appears autumn 2013 starts off with at least four Heiji (with Kazuha in tow) episodes to follow the two that finished up the summer 2013 season. I'm certainly in favor of a six-episode block of Kazuha episodes, but I'm curious if they would have been spaced out instead if Miyamura Yuko still lived in Japan.

Relax, yo. Cure Rosetta has got this.

DokiDoki! Precure did two notable things during the summer 2013 cour. One, it introduced a sass-talking Kugimiya Rie Cure. Two, it raised the stakes in the all-singing, all-dancing 3DCG ED wars. Aside from that, DokiDoki! is turning out to be one of the less interesting Pretty Cure generations, although episode 34 did have some rad Cure Rosetta beatdowns.

This made no sense, but I'll allow it.

To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S needed more SATEN, but I'm glad it found excuses to trot her out in different hairstyles and various street clothes. The ending of the series was rather ridiculous with its casualty-free battle between espers and drones. I guess I was pleased to see SATEN behind the controls of a giant robot, though. P.S. Spoilers.

I already covered Dog and Scissors.

I won't revisit the shows I dropped except to say I also dropped Gatchaman Crowds. This one comes as a bit of a surprise because it seemed so promising after a strong start. However, I was unable to take the villain seriously and never cared what he did. I also did not sympathize with Rui at all nor had any interest in his reasons for crossdressing. The turning point was the episode where Rui is mercilessly beaten for what ended up being a hilariously long time and I realized I had absolutely no emotional investment in any of the characters and was only still watching to see how long Hajime could prolong her violently upbeat attitude. I fell behind after that, and once I learned how disappointed other fans were with the series finale, I decided to simply quit watching altogether.

Hey, sweetie, eyes on the God damn road.

This season summary is a lot more piecemeal than previous ones, but I kinda get the feeling the amount of time required to compile these things does not expand linearly with the number of additional shows watched. Maybe the one I write three months from now for the autumn 2013 shows will be a lot more cohesive and contain greater detail and not be dragged out over several weeks. At least, maybe it will be that way if I continue to watch only three shows. I've got up to 10 I might consider, but I can't see following more than seven for the time being.

This is because of anti-dakimakura prejudice.

Love Lab was a fairly successful comedy despite not having a lot of depth to its jokes. The basic premise is interesting (provided you don't have violent aversions to male characters in your all-girls-all-the-time anime), although the characters did not do as much with it as I had hoped. I think diverting so much attention away from the main effort and focusing instead on Riko's inability to confess about her lies was a mistake. As a consequence, it made the ending somewhat weak, whereas if the resolution had occurred during the mid-season mark there would have been more opportunities for meeting-boys hijinks.

Mixed success at being more feminine.

Despite its flaws, Love Lab still had enough charm to be enjoyable each week, even with a deadweight character or two. Where it really succeeds, however, is in breaking conventions regarding anime hair. I did not diligently catalog all the changes and variations (but surely some obsessive fan somewhere on the Internet has), but it seems Riko changes her hair style and accessories every episode and sometimes once or twice during each episode as well. Oddly enough, I was able to recognize her even though her hair accessories cum charm points weren't fixed. It's frankly more daring than anime characters who don't wear the same clothes every single day. In fact, I'm nominating Riko for 2013 Girl of the Year just for her hair alone.

Riko's Doritos duvet is pretty awesome.

Additionally, I wasn't really a fan of Hibiki's speaking voice in The iDOLM@STER but Numakura Manami's delivery as Riko works well in Love Lab, even though it still feels to me that Riko is a character of an in-iM@S-universe television show starring Ganaha Hibiki, if that makes any sense.

I wonder if the First Girl He Sees Clause is in effect?

I started watching too many shows this season to prepare a single comprehensive summary of how they're all shaking out so far; it would take hours. So I'll just divvy out these introductions individually or in chunks. The best show thus far is Gin no Saji, also known as Silver Spoon. It's a comedy about a boy who enters an agricultural high school and discovers farm life is more difficult than he anticipated. It's based on a manga by the author of Fullmetal Alchemist, Arakawa Hiromu, who grew up on a farm herself. The consensus regarding Gin no Saji appears to be generally positive, but it seems you have to think farms are funny to enjoy it as much as I do.

I predict Tamako will be the BEST GIRL in Silver Spoon.

Notably, Gin no Saji lacks any of the high school bullshit (at least through the first two episodes) that plagues other anime set in high school. Because of the hands-on nature of the instruction, it seems more like a trade school and quite alien compared to they typical seat-by-the-window, beautiful-mysterious-transfer-student, oops-I-fell-on-your-boobs, let's-prepare-for-the-culture-festival drudgery that you see in every other school comedy. The anime is already past the few chapters of the manga that I read, so perhaps Silver Spoon will, in fact, get a mysterious transfer student who sits by the window and helps out during the culture festival after a normal boy falls on her boobs, but I'm at least reasonably confident that the execution will be creative and different if that actually happens.

LARGE BEER.

Gatchaman Crowds is ostensibly based on the Kagaku Ninjatai Gatchaman (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) anime from the '70s, but thus far bears little resemblance to what I know of the original (which admittedly only comes from its two English adaptations, Battle of the Planets and G-Force: Guardians of Space). The biggest difference is the apparent focus on Hajime. I.e., a female lead instead of the familiar male-dominated team of five members: The leader guy, the angry guy, the fat guy, the token kid, and the aerodynamic girl.

A man's romance.

Hajime, I should point out, is making a solid run for the 2013's Girl of the Year crown with her unrelenting TOP FUEL GENKI attitude. Maybe it will be revealed in a shocking twist later that Hajime is actually broken inside, but for now her ebullience appears ready to overcome all challenges, even the bane of social media. Also in her favor is her bizarre love of notebooks and planners, an obsession I sheepishly admit to sharing (although, unlike Hajime, I don't fornicate with my notebooks and planners).

I'm so glad nobody broadcasts in Smell-O-Vision.

For now, Gin no Saji and Gatchaman Crowds are the top two shows of the season, at least according to my tongue-in-cheek ranking system. Whether a comedy about farms and a superhero show arguably about Facebook games can survive the onslaught of a moon-destroying mahou shoujo opera and the return of a college circle of degenerate perverts remains yet to be seen.

Full-size version.

This post is about something that might be a simple typographical error. Or it might be about spoilers. Or it might be about nothing at all. It is about Shingeki no Kyojin, and although I have read all the manga chapters currently available and seen all the anime episodes that have aired, I will attempt to avoid discussing anything that would be an actual spoiler. Well, unless the above image is itself a spoiler, in which case...oops. I will also discuss all characters in the present tense, but do not assume that has any bearing on whether or not a character lives or dies. Knowing who doesn't die is as much of a spoiler as knowing who does die. Right? [Spoilers: Chiyo lives.] According to this image, Mikasa is 170 cm tall and weighs 68 kg. That seems unusually heavy for an anime character, particularly one of her apparent build. It's not inappropriate for a sufficiently muscular real life girl of her proportions to weigh that much, but from an anime standpoint she's a beast.1 This would not be noteworthy at all if the rest of the characters depicted in that picture had similar builds, but if you accept all those numbers as accurate, Mikasa's fellow soldiers are kinda shrimpy compared to her. Every depicted character who weighs more than Mikasa is both male and at least 5 cm taller.

There is a third explanation....

So, why is that? Well, the simple answer is that Mikasa is a badass. She's the BEST GIRL in Attack on Titan (even though Sasha can tear into a hot potato like none other) and she's probably my current front runner for 2013 Girl of the Year. Being hard core enough to do the things she does, it's sensible that she would be much more muscular than the other characters, even if they're all drawn pretty much the same way in the anime and the manga. The other answer is purely speculation based on something that has already been depicted in the anime but has not been explicitly explained in the first 45 chapters of the manga. For that reason, maybe it counts as spoilers, and maybe it's pure bullshit. I guess it's minor spoilers for people either not watching or a few episodes behind on the anime, and spoilers about what probably won't get explained anytime soon in the anime: In the flashback where young Eren convinces Mikasa to fight, the anime and manga both show a brief "power up" sequence of liquid kickass coursing through her muscles before she attacks, gripping the knife so hard she crushes its hilt and launching herself at her target with such ferocity she shatters a floorboard. Did these things literally happen? Are they unusual events within the in-universe laws of physics? (Which, remember, allow people to Spider-Man their way around town with cans of compressed gas and spring-coiled cables.) We know that childhood bullies were terrified of her and that she's freakishly strong, but does she actually have the ability to Hulk out with superhuman strength that nobody seems willing to question? We know Eren's possibly-up-to-no-good dad visited Mikasa for undefined purposes and has some Important Thing in the basement that everyone's forgotten about after the first episode, but is Mikasa different because she's Just That Good or is she different because of some sort of genetic/magic enhancement? (One that makes her weigh more than her fellow soldiers who seem to have tears and anxiety in the places where Mikasa stores extra beatdowns.)

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Note 1: The Body Mass Index calculator for 15-year-old girls at CDC.gov reports Mikasa has a healthy weight.