The round eyes aren't as bad in long shots.

I first tried watching Love Live! School Idol Project as it aired winter 2013, but I gave up after five episodes because I just never got into it. I finally gave it another try and watched all 13 episodes of the first cours this month. My recollection regarding the popularity of Love Live! is that the first cours was a mild success, producing some avid fans, but it wasn't until the second cours (Love Live! School Idol Project 2nd Season) started airing spring 2014 that it exploded into a real phenomenon, peaking in the American market when its 2015 movie received a U.S. theater release. This is an outsider's perspective, to be sure, and actual fans of the franchise will likely disagree with me on a number of points, but this how it seemed to me.

The best team in the best show.

I'm undecided as to whether or not the final two episodes of GIRLS und PANZER qualify as part of the winter 2013 season. They were delayed from the autumn 2012 season and should probably belong there with the rest of the series, but then again they did actually air late in winter 2013. There are only 40-some minutes of new material, but that's more than Teekyuu, so it arguably has as much right to be here as the various two-minute shows. Whatever the case, these two final episodes of GIRLS und PANZER were far and away superior to any of the other shows from winter 2013.

Yes, Female Knight, these shows were aggravating.

Since I'm less likely now to start something I'm not certain I'll enjoy, I drop fewer shows these days. However, this trend apparently gets offset by my decreasing patience with shows in general, so I still dropped four shows winter 2013. Moreover, all four were fairly well-regarded by fans who aren't even disreputable. That is, the shows didn't suck; they just didn't appeal to me.

Making faces won't help you.

The "best" show I dropped was Love Live! School Idol Project which I stopped watching after episode five. I can see why other people enjoy it, but I never cared about the characters or the plight of their school. Some of the characters have interesting traits, but I didn't find them to be interesting people. I understand that schools closing due to Japan's declining birthrates is a genuine phenomenon, but it's not a problem that resonates with me personally. Also, I may have exceeded safe school-closure dosage levels after exposure to so many shows invoking that particular plot device.

Haruka is vexed by Manabe's enthusiasm again.

I dropped Kotoura-san at episode nine. This is unusual for two reasons: First, Kotoura-san is a really good show sometimes. Or at least it really has its moments. Second, after watching nine episodes of a single-cour series, I was so close to the end anyway it seems sticking it out and hoping for the best would have been a reasonable proposition. On problem with that though: Kotoura-san also annoyed the Bejesus out of me pretty frequently. Pointless cockblocking, idiotic one-note gags, and some really shitty writing offset the show's good qualities. I guess on average it's still at least okay as a whole, but it just wasn't worth it to me.

Potato-kun in a place that that didn't even have potatoes.
Huge tracts of land, though.

It seems so long ago now, but I dropped Maoyuu Maou Yuusha at episode three. It was frankly kinda boring, and the lengths it went to in order to prevent its lead characters from becoming romantically involved were kinda ridiculous. When the season's starchiest Potato-kun isn't the high school kid in the harem comedy, but rather the skillful warrior in the fantasy epic about economics and logistics, there's a problem.

Go on, mister. Brush the shit out of her.

I had no interest in starting GJ-bu until maybe a couple weeks ago when its vocal fans and their adoration reached critical mass. Something about brushing girls' hair? I dunno, couldn't be that bad. The most passionate fans were particularly enamored of a character named Shion and episode five—the one where she gets her hair brushed. Okay, I guess I can watch five episodes of this thing. Well, it turns out it's not a bad show at all, but it did not appeal to me in the slightest. I guess it's because I prefer "cool," confident, and capable female characters doing things adeptly or with aplomb. Conversely, I dislike "cute" girls who are deliberately broken or inept in some fashion to appear more attractive. As a rule of thumb, I think I should just avoid anything described by other anime fans as "adorable." That seems to be a politically correct code word for "loli" or "mentally deficient" depending on whether the character in question is a small child or an adolescent. (E.g., Rikka from Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!) You may remember that I railed against K-On! for its aggravating Retard Moé shtick.

I never did figure out why she's a cat.

However, GJ-bu wasn't so much Retard Moé as it was Autism Moé. This is not a term I coined or attached to the show, and I can't remember who said it first, but I certainly agree it is apt. These are not normal girls by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not suggesting solidly average boring girls would have been an improvement, but I'm increasingly put off by the "cute girls doing cute things" trope being extended ever further away from merely eccentric (or even neurotic) behavior towards an ideal where anime girls are basically pets or small children. This is not a new or unique criticism of moé to be sure, and I don't even have any opposition towards moé in general. I just can't enjoy the glamorization of these hopeless girl-shaped caricatures, even if they do have flaxen hair. Snow White had that too, but let's face it, she wouldn't have lasted two days alone in that forest without her benevolent animal friends.

That's bad luck, Eita.

Okay, Google Reader isn't quite all dead. It'll be around until July. My dismay at its loss is based on pretty much the same reasons everyone else who used it is upset to see it go. In particular, I use it to follow feeds that update irregularly and ones I don't want to miss. Attempting to extract this kind of same functionality from some sort of short-attention-span Social Media Buzzword ephemeral construct is pretty undesirable from my point of view. Unfortunately, I have to admit I'm the only person I know in real life who even knows what RSS is, let alone used Google Reader, so I'm not entirely surprised to see it go. (My own subscription list has been linked on the sidebar for years.)

I like how Ai conjures her brassard out of thin air.

According to the statistics Google Reader provides, I have a little more than a hundred subscribers, which I guess isn't very many. I don't know how many readers use different RSS clients (I'm transitioning to Akregator), but I doubt it's more than that combined. (In fact, I don't even know how much traffic this site gets anymore since I disabled my web logs several months ago.) Still, I've been providing bonus content for more than four years specifically for these subscribers. I intend to continue doing so (even though I've now officially blown the lid off this poorly kept secret), but I wonder if I'll have to identify another segment of quasi-techno-savvy curmudgeons to cater to after July?

No, this update didn't really have anything to do with Oreshura.

It's clenched buttocks all the way down.

I have no idea how Vividred Operation will wrap itself up in its remaining three or four episodes. Seeing as how it's still introducing and developing the relationships among the characters, it will either feel really rushed or we'll be blessed with a second cour of clenching butts in tiny short shorts. It's possible my expectations are a little too high for this show, now that I think about it. Either way, this is still far and away the best show of the season, even if Princess Kraehe never performs any ballet.

Still the Oreshura Best Girl.

Because Mazusu accomplished her only known goal before the end of the first episode of Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru, it leaves the subsequent episodes of Oreshura with a troubling lack of direction. Since Masuzu hasn't stated any other objectives, the viewer is sort of left watching stuff happen instead of being engaged in wondering what will happen.

Head tilt.

This is particularly problematic for viewers like me who consider Masuzu the only girl in the show worth rooting for (although Ai is starting to grow on me now that she's willing to also be honest with Eita). So even though Masuzu is the only character in the show I can actively root for, I can't actually do it because I have no idea what she wants. This in turn makes it difficult to follow Oreshura because from a narrative standpoint it no longer has anything worth watching. It has Masuzu spending all her free time fucking with people, but that's not a narrative. I suppose you can kinda describe Eita's efforts to reconcile with his chuunibyou past a narrative. Some may also call it "symbarrassing," but I just don't care.

I like the cuts on Ai's sleeves.

I think the real problem with Oreshura is one common to many harem comedies in general. I think the author was inspired to develop ideas for various female characters that he really liked, expecting that they would be very popular, and subsequently shoehorned them all into a single show. [Episode nine spoilers for the rest of this paragraph: I think the idea of a childhood friend who—instead of being treasured forever like every other osananajimi ever—was forgotten entirely and, in fact, vilified upon reunion is sympathetic enough to support a show on its own.]

SHIT? SHIT? SHIT? MIDNIGHT! TONIGHT!

The problem here is that when it comes to determining which girl will prevail, the answer ends up being none of them. Had Oreshura simply been about one girl and her relationship with Eita, it would probably be a much better show, but having so many individual characters competing with each other simultaneously diminishes all of the characters collectively. At least this is the case with Chiwa, Masuzu, and Ai. (Not Hime because she sucks and and would remain dead weight regardless.) A show about Eita and one of those three falling in love despite his general-principle opposition to romance would be much better than having him pulled in different directions by all three and going nowhere.

Numerous sources, including Anime News Network reported seiyuu Honda Chieko died 18 February 2013 at the age of 49 from cancer. Among her many roles, she voiced the shinigami Meroko in Full Moon wo Sagashite, the show I consider to be the best anime of all time.

49, sigh. That's much too soon.

Tiny pictures are the way of love.

People have mostly stopped trying to make Haruka miserable. I guess that's good, but with the show only at the halfway mark I wonder if it's on the path towards a non-ending ending, or if there will be some sort of phony melodrama that escalates out of control just out of nowhere? Seeing as how the show started out with a broken home and a dead mom, it's going to take more than a little bullying to pull off the Big Finish. Maybe Sentinels?