I wonder if she has her eyes open.

I look forward to Bocchi the Rock! each week because it's excellent, not because I'm anticipating big surprises or anxiously awaiting the resolution of cliffhangers. If I thought about it some more, I could probably reasonably chart out how the rest of the season is going to go, but it doesn't matter. The key to Bocchi's tremendous appeal is its impeccable execution. This is a great show, top to bottom, back to front.

Despite what you might think, this gesture is definitely threatening.

I'm not quite prepared to call Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury) a great show even though it's also doing everything well so far. Nevertheless, I do look forward to each episode even more than I look forward to Bocchi the Rock! each week. I think the biggest contributing factor is that Witch Gundam has greater potential for unpredictable (and unsettling) developments. Even though it's been good so far, basically anything can happen because it's Gundam and because there aren't really any constraints on the possible directions the story may take.

Chu-squared is one of the good people, okay.

In light of this distinction, is it worth pointing out Bocchi the Rock! is about a character with anxiety, whereas Witch Gundam is about generating anxiety in the viewer? I suppose it's not really about generating anxiety, but I don't think I'm alone in experiencing some apprehension as to how the series will play out. I do mean this in a good way, though. Consequently, on some level, this means I look forward to Bocchi the Rock! each week because I'm eager to see good things to happen to good people, while I look forward to Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury because I'm concerned bad things might happen to good people.

Everybody has a plan until they get Gundamed in the face.

Despite blogging about anime for more than 20 years, I know surprisingly little about the Gundam franchise as a whole. Aside from some inescapable tropes and details, basically everything that I do know comes from Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny (the only installments that I've watched). Oh, and the compilation movies for the original Mobile Suit Gundam, but that was a long time ago. However, after the prologue to and the first episode of Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo (Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury), I'm fairly confident in assuming regular-type Gundam TV ain't normally like this. And I'm not just saying that because the lead character is a girl.

Be nice to the new girl.

I've seem multiple fans describe Mercury Witch Gundam as Utena Gundam, which seems about right to me, with the heavy caveat that I don't know anything about Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena) either. It at least fits the stereotypes I've encountered related to Utena. Maybe nobody has turned into a car yet, but it's only been one episode. Basically everything that did happen in the first episode was absurd, and that also fits with my secondhand impression of Utena. Y'know, maybe it's not that weird. Maybe Gundam is always like this and I just never knew. I'm at least aware people get slapped in Gundam, and there is slapping in the first episode of Kidou Senshi Gundam: Suisei no Majo. Maybe it's not that different after all.

This is a picture of Mujina that doesn't show her thighs.

First off, SSSS.DYNAZENON is excellent. After this show and SSSS.GRIDMAN, I feel like Studio Trigger has finally figured out how to convey the sort of interpersonal tension and emotional baggage that they were trying to get right in Kiznaiver. As you may have surmised, the kaiju monster v. robot battles in SSSS.DYNAZENON are sort of incidental to the show's success. I mean, they're entertaining, but the series really is about the characters.

Both of them get their shit together. P.S. Spoilers.

If there's a weak spot, it's that I never cared that much about Yomogi. He's fine, but Koyomi (the NEET) had a much more interesting character arc. The bait & switch SSSS.GRIDMAN pulled with its leads was critical to its success, and I was sort of hoping SSSS.DYNAZENON would do something similar, but it worked out anyway. I don't know what this next thing is going to be, but I am looking forward to more.

I like it when they show the hidden eye of hidden-eye characters.

As I said recently, Back Arrow is bullshit. Appropriately, its ending is also bullshit, and none of that matters because I wouldn't have it any other way. Do the end-of-series reveals make any sense? Enough so, I guess. Do I wish they seemed more sensible? Not at all. How much you enjoy this show very much depends on your expectations for it. Ideally, you should expect scenery to get chewed. And how.

I came here to sing songs and kick ass, and I'm all out of songs. (Well, except one.)

Based on reactions I saw on the Twitter and elsewhere, reactions to the ending of Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song- are generally negative. I think most of the dissatisfaction has to do with logical inconsistencies, lazy storytelling, and not making any damn sense. Basically every criticism I've seen has been valid, although I'm considerably more positive about the show overall than its detractors. Potentially, this has to do with expectations and me setting a pretty low narrative hurdle for Vivy to clear. Possibly, I just have a soft spot for singing robots the way Jenny Nicholson has a soft spot for animatronics.

Extremely loose birth control glasses is somebody's fetish.

Godzilla Singular Point also recently ended. Y'know, there was a lot less Godzilla in a show about Godzilla than I was expecting. Unfortunately, what the show was mostly about was barely comprehensible technobabble. It had some neat ideas, but I'm not really sure a Godzilla anime was the right vehicle for it. Really, they could have just done that story on its own, separately, without involving Godzilla at all. (And they almost sort of did.) The other part of Singular Point, though, with the dudes and their extremely Kugimiya Rie robot, was a lot more fun, even if none of those characters wore birth control glasses.

Lucky for Mei, her extremely loose birth control glasses stay on when she runs.

I still enjoyed Godzilla Singular Point overall, but I don't know that I would recommend it to anyone who isn't obsessed with grad students who always dress like it's laundry day. For that matter, SSSS.DYNAZENON is probably the only one of these four that I would recommend without qualification. Back Arrow, I can recommend to people who enjoy bullshit and fucked-up bangs. Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song-, I can recommend to people with fond memories of Chuck E. Cheese. Also, robosexuals.

I like Atlee even though I don't know how her hat stays on.

Back Arrow caught my eye prior to the Winter 2021 anime season because it was listed as a two-cours original anime. That suggested the show would have a reasonably well-developed story leading to a conclusive, coherent ending. Through 21 episodes so far, it's definitely got a story, and it seems to be headed toward an actual ending, but I don't know if I'd call it well-developed or coherent. Fortunately, Back Arrow doesn't really seem to need to be either of those things. It's gotten pretty entertaining simply by layering on more and more inexplicable developments. I suspect the ending will still leave a number of aspects unaddressed, but—based on the way it's getting there—it sort of doesn't matter. What I'm saying is Back Arrow is not only bullshit, it is now wall-to-wall bullshit and has been all season. It's pretty great.

I want to see what Ren's hair looks like right out of a shower.

Moreover, Back Arrow has also done a reasonably good job juggling its fairly sizable cast. Before the show started, I had preconceptions about which characters would get the most screen time. Thankfully, nearly all of my predictions were wrong, and the show devotes a considerable amount of attention to the more interesting characters while sidelining the, frankly, more boring-er ones. Nevertheless, I do still wish Ren Sin and her Han Megumi brilliance would get more scenes. I've still got quite an appetite for her constantly angry attitude, even if she does have fucked-up bangs.

Mei stares a lot in this show.

I don't actually know that much about the Godzilla franchise, but I'm under the impression that the movies typically start with people noticing something unusual, and then something really unsettling happens, and then everyone gets their shit wrecked, sometimes by Godzilla, sometimes by whatever Godzilla is fighting. This at least holds true of the few Godzilla properties I have seen, and it seems to hold true in the Godzilla Singular Point anime.

Have harpoon gun. Will travel.

Godzilla doesn't appear in the first six episodes of Godzilla S.P, but there is a nerdy grad student who wears birth control glasses that are constantly on the verge of sliding off her face. There's also an AI that's probably technically malware, and an old man with a bitchin' car and a totally sweet garage-built robot, and some regular dudes who don't have the greatest survival instincts, but are getting by so far nevertheless.

You have to be the size of a child to fit in this robot.

As an anime, Godzilla Singular Point is pretty good so far, and is probably worth your time once it hits the U.S. Netflix at, I dunno, some later date. Or at least it's worth your time providing you have any sort of interest in either Godzilla or nerdy girls who wear birth control glasses. At a minimum, it's better than the three-movie 3DCG thing that's already on the Netflix. That one just wasn't very compelling. I did feature Ueda Reina, though.

I love how unaccommodating the ergonomics are for flying this thing.

As with SSSS.GRIDMAN before it, SSSS.DYNAZENON is not really about either giant robots or kaiju. Rather, it is about the human struggles affecting the characters themselves. After five episodes, the most consequential plot line in the show appears to be Yume's quest to learn more about her older sister and come to grips with her death. Sure, there is that whole kaiju thing and people reappearing from 5000 years ago, but Yume's got a lot going on, okay.

Yume is basically an entirely different person around someone she trusts.

Nevertheless, she still finds time to go to giant-robot practice (I love that they have actual giant-robot practice) and seems to have embraced this whole fighting monsters thing as a reasonable part of her life. Unfortunately, SSSS.DYNAZENON has not yet abandoned Potato-kun as a protagonist. Sidelining Yuuta in favor of Rikka and Akane was one of the best things SSSS.GRIDMAN ever did. I'm not saying Yomogi is entirely worthless, but I really got my hopes up when Chise took an interest in learning how to pilot as well.

Here is the stupidest character flanked by the smartest one and the second-smartest one.

I think I enjoy Back Arrow, but these characters are all so dumb. I mean, they're supposed to be, for comedic effect, but it's sort of extraordinary. The villagers are the worst offenders. The series introduces one of the main characters in the first episode by having her rescue—at the last possible second—a child who pretends to accidentally fall off a cliff because she enjoys the thrill of being saved in mid-air. Later, an amnesiac plummets from the sky in a pod. The villagers assume it contains food and start a large fire under it to cook its contents (without checking to see what's in it first). This inspires the pod's mysterious passenger to leap out and create a ruckus. If this is how the village prepares all of its meals, remind me to never eat there.

Actually, the lady with the fucked-up bangs is probably second-smartest.

Anyway, this is the sort of cartoonish logic that governs the characters' behavior. But at some point, Back Arrow just needs to ditch these villagers. First of all, they worship The Wall because they're superstitious nincompoops. And they are literally dead weight. Like, they're all on this massive mobile battle fortress, and none of them figured out how to turn on the lights. They're still huddling in tents and burning wood to stay warm instead of just taking up inside the dreadnought's living quarters. Maybe they're distrustful of these accommodations because their captive was the one who informed them of these facilities and the galley (which they're also not using, of course, but I've already gone over their culinary failures). Again, this is all done for laughs, but I don't think the gags are going to stay amusing enough to justify dragging these hicks around for two cours. Especially Bit. Fuckin' hate Bit. Kid's worthless.

Every word in Wonder Egg Priority is English, but that combination has no meaning!

The Winter 2021 anime season is going to be a busy one. Not only are there a mess of sequels coming out, there are also a fair number of anime-original offerings for anyone exhausted from years of light novel adaptations. One such show is Wonder Egg Priority from CloverWorks which recently released a PV but offered basically no other information. I know it features a character with heterochromia and there is at least one dekochin, but I'm otherwise entirely ignorant about it. However, I am curious enough to watch at least the first episode, and it seems likely the anime will at least look good.

I guess this post is getting the "Girls With Guns" tag.

The promotional material for another original anime, Back Arrow, features cowboys and giant robots. These are not things I associate with each other (well, there was Bakuretsu Tenshi years ago), so there's the potential for some originality here. It's reportedly going to be at least two cours and I'm reasonably confident Bones isn't going to just half-ass this project. It looks like it has a fairly large cast, too, and I spotted Ueda Reina's name associated with the show. The combination of these factors are enough to get me to at least check it out. The PV could use more robots, though.

Prince of Stride: Alternative at least had Hanakana supporting its racers.

Among the remaining original anime offerings, I'm almost certainly going to ignore all the ones about idols. I'm also staying away from the GoHands project which looks suspiciously like another secret sequel to Hand Shakers. You're not getting me twice, fuckers. On the upside, there is a racing show called SK∞ (SK8 the Infinity) about dudes skateboarding down into a mine shaft while beating the shit out of each other. It probably suffers from not-enough-anime-girls syndrome, but it might turn out to still be entertaining anyway.