Upotte!! should have focused more on the battle rifle high school.

Upotte!! is much less tasteless and much more informative than the first episode and initial viewer impressions might have you believe. In those respects, it's sort of like Chu-Bra!! only with rifles instead of brassieres. Notably, the befuddled human teacher has a much smaller role in the series than I expected.

And the Alpine guns with the way they shoot
They keep their riflemen warm at night.

Overall, Upotte!! is a trite sitcom with anthropomorphic military small arms and several historical and factual capsules interspersed among the action. Some of the stereotyping is heavy-handed, but I'm mostly in agreement with the show's criticism of the British SA80 bullpup and her comical failings. Upotte!! does love the Sig 550 way too much, though. Fanboys.

The moé war has already begun. People simply haven't noticed.

AKB0048 is mostly terrible, but it does have good stuff in it. At a minimum, it gave us NO IDOL! missiles and wota cavalry riding to the rescue in their itasha mecha amidst an Itano Circus swarm of glow-stick missiles. There is that. [P.S. Spoilers.] But aside from the absurd battles, very little of AKB0048 is memorable. In fact, at the moment I can only remember the name of one girl: Cherry, whom I've designated as the the AKB0048 Best Girl mostly by default because she has the best hair.

Actually, maybe they're mechanized infantry and not cavalry.

Aside from that, AKB0048 (properly called A-K-B zero zero forty-eight, as the show constantly reminds us, as opposed to A-K-B double-'aught forty-eight, as I prefer) seems little more than a celebration of the real-word AKB48 idol troop. There are numerous in-show references presumably aimed at AKB48 fans, a collective fanbase which I view as a curious lot, to be quite honest. The impression I get is that AKB48 fans are not fans of the music, nor even necessarily fans of the girls (despite their vocal and occasionally socially inappropriate expressions of devotion), but rather fans of AKB48 as a phenomenon or as an entity, much as rabid sports fans are loyal to their favorite teams despite the regularly changing roster of star players.

I bet Miki could strike out Cherry with just three pitches.

If you think this is a seque to bootstrap an idol-based fantasy league team that I'll match up against The iDOLM@STER 765PROs...you're wrong. I don't know crap about AKB48, and I'm pretty sure the AKB0048 candidates would get shellacked by the 765PROs even with Kotori pitching both ends of a double-header. It might be a different story if the AKB0048 farm team gets to include scenery-chewing Ayako and cyborg Yukarin in the lineup as ringers, though.

Rin, Saki, and Natsumi realize by now that Yuka
with an idea can be a dangerous thing.

I've already explained why Natsuiro Kiseki is my favorite show from spring 2012. However, I didn't mention how shabby the animation looks at times. I'm really surprised to see such lapses from Sunrise, but the show is otherwise so good I'm willing to ignore those faults.

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.

This was a proof of concept that I will never use
again (because I bought a fourth monitor).

I get the sense I wasn't exposed to a large portion of the shows that aired this season—an obvious consequence of not watching all that much compared to past seasons. Nevertheless, I'm not convinced I actually missed anything, although I do admit a curious fascination with Sword Art Online (despite the profoundly negative reactions to its cour-ending climax). I haven't yet watched a single minute of it, but I have read the first four volumes of the light novels (which I'm expecting the first two cours to cover). Learning that Kajiura Yuki is providing the music has put the show over the top, and I'll probably marathon the summer 2012 segment to catch up with the autumn 2012 episodes. Naturally, this will change my summer 2012 anime summary rankings, but it is late enough already and I can always reflect the addition with an update, so here goes:

If you haven't seen this by now...

This is a little earlier than I typically like to post initial impressions for a new season, since I consider it premature to make assumptions about shows after only a couple of episodes. However, I'm already more or less familiar with most of the shows I'm following this season because they are either continuations or adaptations of things I've read. Only Vividred Operation and Love Live! School Idol Project remain unknowns at this point.

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.

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.

This one?

Omar writes:

I want to WUG the fuck out of that bitch from I-1 Club. The one who was a cunt to Mayu.

I'm afraid I don't actually know the names of anyone from I-1 Club. Maybe that's as intended, since they're all expendable drones contributing a small part to the larger collective identity. I do want to see I-1 Club and AKB0048 fight with mic sabers, though.