Yohane's hairball is fuckin' fake.

I watched Love Live! Sunshine!! without watching (all of) First Love Live and thought it was all right, but not great. Having watching all of Love Live! School Idol Project now, I re-watched Sunshine to see if being able to contextualize the show would make me like it better. Well, I do like it more, but it's still mostly just all right, and still not great. To be honest, I can't tell if I like it more thanks to knowing more about the franchise as a whole, or if it's because of the solid barrage of You cheesecake pictures on the Twitter over the past year. Incidentally, Maki > Nico > Yohane > Hanamaru > Kotori > Kanan > You > Umi > Hanayo > Riko > Chika > Yoshiko > Eli > Honoka > Mari > Dia > Nozomi > Rin.

Airborne idol, airborne idol, where have you been?

Naturally, as with A-RISE before them, I absolutely favor Saint Snow over Aqours as far as their idol-type credibility goes. Saint Snow only has one song, but two different arrangements appear in the show, and it is an actual duet with two people singing simultaneously (as opposed to sequentially, which seems to be the more common practice in these idol-type tunes). Really, though, my main reasons for liking Saint Snow are because everyone says their name with such overly dramatic awe (SAAAINT SNOOOWW!) and because half of Saint Snow ninja flipped over Aquors for no goddamn reason when they first met other than to show them that she could. What's not to love?

Best couple.

Tsuredure Children started out as an online comic that turned into a published 4-koma before getting an anime adaptation. It consists mostly of relationship gags involving the students who go to the same high school, thus showcasing a variety of different attitudes and personalities among would-be lovebirds who generally know each other. I say "would-be" because it seems the majority of these couples are of the "he likes her, she likes, him, and both are too chickenshit to tell each other" variety. This is not to say they are all like this; there's a whole range of folks in this spectrum. On one end, we have the aggressive student body president whose forward approach seems to bother quite a few people on the Twitter, and on the other end we have Potato-kun, the spastic otaku who irritates the shit out of me. The main focus of the various stories concerns the difficulty of expressing feelings honestly, and depicts the various consequences of each approach

Girlfriend 1, Imouto 0.

The show as a whole is pretty amusing, and a mostly straightforward adaptation of the comic, albeit in a truncated fashion because there are a whole mess of different couples in the comics. With only a single cours of half-length episodes to work with, a lot of my favorite characters only appear as cameos, if at all. Notably, the anime is sorely lacking in Patricia, whose running gags spill over into the stories of a number of other couples, including the (also missing) teacher-student pair. The anime also omits the musician who hides her secret identity (poorly) behind a mask that she refuses to remove. Thankfully, the anime does properly retain the visual gags involving the couples it does feature, and the timing for the gags are impeccable. I would be in favor of Tsuredure Children getting another season, but chances are it will remain in the single-cours pit along with other good romantic comedies that feature intersecting narratives such as Nijiiro Days and Hatsukoi Limited, alas.

Spoilers all over these covers. Maybe.

I enjoyed the Shūmatsu Nani Shitemasu ka? Isogashii Desu ka? Sukutte Moratte Ii Desu ka? anime enough to import the first two (so far, anyway) Blu-ray discs and all five light novels. Fortuitously, a fan has translated all five of these books, leaving only the EX volumes and the SukaMoka sequels remaining. As you might expect, anime adaptations of light novels can benefit quite a bit in how they interpret the original works, presumably in ways not available to anime adaptations of manga. Anime adaptations of manga seem to be a bit more straightforward (often to their detriment), I assume out of deference to the mangaka or to avoid dealing with irate fans who won't accept an anime that changed something from the original manga.

But I digress.

I wanted to like Kuromukuro. It didn't work out.

Spreadsheets killed anime blogging. At least that's my excuse for not even having a Kuromukuro category until now. I wanted to like this show, but it turned out to be too irritating to watch. I mostly bitched about it on the IRC and probably also the Twitter when it aired in spring 2016. (I dropped it before the second cours began summer 2016.) Anyway, here is a tardy, low-effort collection of gripes for y'all to skim over.

It's not easy being the Best Girls.

If you caught the last installment, then you know I finished the first season of Love Live! School Idol Project with the characters ranked in the following order:

Preliminary Ruling: Maki > Nico > Umi > Kotori > [GOOD/BAD LINE] > Hanayo > Eli > Honoka > Nozomi > Rin.

Notably, last-place Rin had no redeeming qualities. Well, all of that was based entirely on the first season of the anime. Now that I've watched the OVA, the second cours, and the movie, I hereby present the final standings:

Maki > Nico > Kotori > Umi > Hanayo > [GOOD/BAD LINE] > Eli > Honoka > Nozomi > Rin.

Princess Principal also features some good hats.

Princess Principal features steampunk alternate history, Kajiura Yuki music, and copious helpings of espionage. Moreover, it's an original anime. Those don't appear to be quite as common these days; everything seems to be a light novel or mobile video game adaptation. Based on these elements, I was guaranteed to at least give the show a try. And, hey, it turns out it's pretty good. At a minimum, the action is a lot better than I was expecting, and the stories frequently take unexpected turns away from anticipated norms when the plot encounters common tropes. Nothing too crazy, but enough of a twist to make each resolution more satisfying than I was expecting.

Princess Mode activated.

I do agree with critics who noted it wasn't really necessary to introduce the princess in the first episode. It probably would have made the payoffs in the second and third episodes stronger. Then again, she's right in the title of the anime, so it's not as if she could have caught viewers by total surprise. Incidentally, the episodes are not in chronological order, seemingly to produce the same effects as when Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuuutsu aired out of order. It works so far, but the titles also imply there are more episodes than I'd expect in a single cours. Maybe this suggests they're teeing it up for a second season, or maybe it means nothing at all. In either case, I'm at least optimistic the season will end in a sensible, satisfying way and not the non-ending-ending bullshit that is too often the norm. As an original anime, Princess Principal doesn't have an excuse to screw up its second half, particularly considering the first half has been so strong.

You can't tell from a still, but Mordred has, like, mecha armor.

Experts predict that at the current rate of growth, all anime will be Fate/stay night by 2062. There is, shall we say, at lot of Fate anime. Besides the first television series in 2006, there is the Unlimited Blade Works movie from 2010, the Fate/Zero anime from 2011-12, the Unlimited Blade Works series from 2014-15, the Fate/Grand Order: First Order movie from 2016, and Fate/Extra coming in 2018. This doesn't even count Carnival Phantasm or anything else I might have overlooked. One does not explicitly need to watch all the other Fate/stay night properties in order to watch Fate/Apocrypha, but I think it's sort of expected a fan will make at least a token effort before attempting a 25-episode Netflix binge once it becomes available.

What, another year already?