Yukino, those twintails are wearing you.

I dropped the first season of Yahari Ore no Seishun Rabukome wa Machigatteiru. (localized as My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, As I Expected and My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, but also known simply as Oregairu) after three episodes seven years ago. However, the series has a lot of fans who insist it's really good, and its third season does start in a few weeks, so I figured it deserved another try. I've finished the first season now, but most of my complaints from 2013 still hold.

Yui is a fraud. That hair ball is a clip-on. Also, unrelatedly, she is bad at dogs.

Hachiman and Yukino simply aren't endearing characters. Maybe they appeal to viewers who identify with them. I guess Yui is okay, but I'm mostly ambivalent about her. One thing I will give the show credit for is its portrayal of the popular kids. Instead of being backstabbing sadists like you'll typically find in anime school cliques, it's pretty obvious why their classmates gravitate toward Hayato and Yumiko.

This one kid who appeared in two episodes is a better character than most of the regular cast.

Unfortunately, Oregairu also has entirely worthless characters as well. Specifically, the chuuni guy never stopped being annoying, and the fujoshi literally has no scenes or dialogue that don't involve screaming about boys love. These two characters could not be any more one-note if you tried, and they really drag down the rest of the show, especially when the episode is trying to say something insightful about relationships or the challenges facing students who feel as if they don't fit in with their classmates or what society expects of them.

I hope those who compared Hachiman to Batman while Oregairu was airing were doing so in jest.

I'm hoping the second season will be much better, because so far I'm entirely unimpressed with Oregairu. At least the second season (Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru. Zoku) adds Iroha to the cast. Granted, literally everything I know about Iroha comes from this video on the YouTube, but she also seems more popular than either Yukino or Yui, so presumably she has something going for her. Granted, that's sort of a low bar to clear considering how unimpressed I am by the show's two main girls so far. Really, the one to beat is Komachi, Hachiman's surprisingly reliable kid sister. She has her shit together and is clearly more intelligent than her brother, at least.

Shiny Chariot's Magical Festa is a tough act to follow.

Overall, the spring 2013 season was a little bit of a letdown considering it started fairly strong. (I can sort of prove it too.) From a subjective standpoint, it probably felt worse because the start of the season coincided with the release of Little Witch Academia and Death Billiards which are both excellent short films, although not part of the spring 2013 anime season itself. As you can probably predict, both the best show and the worst show I watched were pretty consistent episode to episode.

You can tell Saki is the Best Girl because she has a turntable.

Of the shows I watched spring 2013, the first one to end was the last one I started: Aiura.1 I don't actually have much to say about Aiura because it is such a short show. Practically everything I could say about it I've said before: Crabs. Steve Jobs. Cancer. iUra. Gams. So many gams. Saki is the Best Girl. Are girls named Saki more like to be a show's Best Girl? Sure seems that way. But what I suppose I can do is use Aiura to talk about a show I didn't watch—one that everyone appears to adore: Yuyushiki.

Wet socks are actually kinda gross.

That's right. I didn't watch Yuyushiki at all and know basically nothing about it except for what people have gushed in IRC or on the Twitter. I think there might be heavily implied lesbianism? I know there are girls in it who close their eyes a lot as they let their jaws hang slack—sort of like a reptile's smile. I haven't watched it because I'm not actually a big fan of the Cute Girls Doing Cute Things sub-genre. I struggled to watch K-On! and still dropped it at episode four of the first season.2 I liked Aiura, but its short episode length probably helped quite a bit. For me to enjoy a Cure Girls Doing Cute Things show, the primary draw needs to be its humor or some other gimmick. E.g., Azumanga Daioh, Ichigo Mashimaro, and Natsuiro Kiseki. I never finished Lucky☆Star, though. It's not that I feel it's a "cancer killing anime" or anything like that. I'd just rather see the characters doing something more interesting. Maybe operating tanks.

Note 1: Technically Straight Title Robot Anime ended first, but that was a carryover from winter 2013.

Note 2: I liked the movie well enough though.

It probably doesn't mean she has crabs.

I forgot to mention that I started watching Aiura. It's a pleasant enough show, but I don't have much to say about it because it's so short. (It's another one of those jobbies with four-minute episodes.) I guess I can say I also have no idea why crabs and Steve Jobs are in the OP. There has been some speculation that crabs refer to the zodiac sign Cancer1 since Steve Jobs died of cancer, but I'm calling that one a coincidence absent some more compelling reason why that would be in the OP either.

It's not easy being best.

I can also say that the show does appear to be the labor of love of somebody with a deep appreciation of the bare thighs of teenage girls. There is that. Oh, and it's the second show this season (along with Valvrave the Liberator) where the BEST GIRL is named Saki. If you include Saki from Natsuiro Kiseki, that makes girls named Saki three-for-three in shows from recent memory seizing BEST GIRL honors. When Genshiken Nidaime starts in a few weeks, girls named Saki will go four-for-four. I might be on to something here.

Note 1: Or possibly the genus, since hardly anyone in anime outside of The Melody of Oblivion seems to care about the western zodiac.

Even the band must face the music.

Although it is not anime, Game of Thrones attracts many of the same fans. As such, the outrage over the penultimate season-three episode somewhat overshadowed the near contemporaneous shock some fans felt this week over Suisei no Gargantia episode nine. (Not the ones who saw this coming from a league away, but some viewers nonetheless.)

Looking for love in all the wrong places.

I am, of course, referring to Melty's inexplicable ongoing inability to find a partner with whom to mate despite her open enthusiasm for courtship rituals and her eye for desirable phenotypes. It also doesn't help that she has drastically reduced the size of her available population by joining the squid-squishing diaspora comprised of greedy seabed scavengers and other folk hoping to avert certain death when Team Rocket rapes and pillages the fleet after learning its command now lies in the hands of a myopic 22-year-old girl who appears to have achieved supreme executive power largely thanks to nepotism.

P.S. Pooterballs are made out of people! [Spoilers]

It's a good thing proles in this world know their place.

I understand that random evil merchant guy was supposed to be deliberately loathsome in order to make Mikasa look even more heroic when she steps in refusing to listen to any of his shit, but this was some really terrible juvenile writing in an episode of Shingeki no Kyojin which was otherwise punctuated by some pretty cool scenes, even if the animators apparently struggled to meet their demands. I don't expect a show about giants eating people to be subtle, but the writing in Attack on Titan really is a weak point. It's so over-the-top with its melodrama that it detracts from the impact of its shocking moments. Characters are understandably traumatized by horrific events unfolding in front of them, but from a narrative standpoint they are simply too traumatized and in shock just a little too long. It's kinda telling that the moment generating the biggest reaction to the show thus far is the scene of a potato being eaten, not the one of [spoilers] being eaten.

I wonder how long Emi is going to keep that bandage?

For the past few years now I've kept a running update of anime rankings, mostly for use in spamming IRC. At the season's end, I also use those rankings to determine each show's position in my season summaries. This season, I've started keeping a spreadsheet on Google Drive, illustrating the changes in episode-by-episode rankings on charts. At the same time, I still maintain my IRC list of show rankings, based entirely on how I subjectively feel shows compare against other titles within the same cour.

Making the impossible possible since 850.

The newfangled spreadsheet is ostensibly objective, but the data that goes into it is still derived subjectively since all the figures come from how I personally score episodes on a linear scale of one to five. What I've noticed though is that the rankings determined via the spreadsheet method don't necessarily agree with my overall subjective rankings. For example, at this point I currently consider Hataraku Maou-sama! to be the best show of the season, mostly because Shingeki no Kyojin has had some pretty annoying Ellen moments, and because Suisei no Gargantia—although consistently good—has not had as many bits that wowed me.

"Not entirely stable? I'm glad you're here to tell us these things."

But looking at the spreadsheet experiment, Maou-sama! should be tied for second based on median scores or arithmetic means. If comparing geometric means, then it's no longer tied with Attack on Titan, but it's still in second place behind Gargantia, the undisputed leader. Does this mean anything other than that opinions are opinions? I suppose not, but I wonder if some people would be tempted to game the scores to correct for what is arguably a flaw in methodology (or I guess philosophy).

The Hustler.

The preseason buzz for spring 2013 seemed fairly pessimistic. (Sort of seems that way more often than not lately.) Thankfully, this quarter is shaping out to be pretty decent, at least through the first third of the cour. I guess I was looking forward to Death Billiards from the name alone—turns out it's another excellent Anime Mirai short movie, by the way—and that show about giants eating people, and the second season of Railgun, so it's not as if I believed spring 2013 would be a total write-off. It turns out there are at least a couple of gems and one shiny rock to admire.