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 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.

This is the sort of happiness you can only achieve by eating animal brains.

Some questionable publicity concerning some really jarring 3DCG got Golden Kamuy off to a bad start, but the strength of its source material pulled through. I'm one of those people who believe it's better to watch an anime first before reading its source manga, so basically all of the second cours was new to me. I'm told that the show truncated quite a bit of material in order to reach the second season's climax (and that it also cut out scenes that would have otherwise included more 3DCG animals). And what a climax it was. Basically, without going into spoilers, CRAZY SHIT HAPPENS, and there are real payoffs regarding characters that the viewer has gotten to know over the course of 24 episodes. With so many strong episodes this season, the second cours of Golden Kamuy is even better than SSSS.GRIDMAN.

It turns out Akane was the show's real protagonist. P.S. Spoilers.

Hopefully, word has gotten out by now that Studio Trigger did an excellent job with SSSS.GRIDMAN. I was a bit hesitant going in, since Trigger does falter somewhat frequently, and I was entirely ignorant of the GRIDMAN franchise. In fact, I'm ignorant when it comes to the entire genre, for that matter. Basically everything I know comes from posts by @TheIvanhobe on the Twitter. It turns out SSSS.GRIDMAN is satisfying even for viewers like me. I can only imagine how stoked people who recognized the various callbacks and references must have been. I should probably point out that while I put the second half of Golden Kamuy over SSSS.GRIDMAN, I find SSSS.GRIDMAN to be better if you compare its 12 episodes to the full 24 episodes of Golden Kamuy.

That is one blue sky.

I should also mention that while I regard SSSS.GRIDMAN and Golden Kamuy to be among the best shows of the year, both were surpassed by five other shows from earlier in 2018. At the very peak is Sora yori mo Tooi Basho (A Place Further Than the Universe), an anime that even The New York Times recognized as being one of 2018's best. I put Hinamatsuri not too far behind, and then (for pretty different reasons), Hanebado!, Yuru Camp△, and Shoujo☆Kageki Revue Starlight. Overall, a pretty good year for anime. I can't claim that Winter 2019 looks ready to compare with Winter 2018, but maybe there will be some surprises coming up again as well.

She'll make point five past lightspeed.

If you've been paying attention to the anime Twitter, you've probably noticed the flood of Takarada Rikka pictures. Rikka is a character from SSSS.GRIDMAN who is notable for having unusually large thighs for a tiny anime girl, and also for wearing a long sweater that makes it appear as if she is not wearing any pants. It seems The Fandom deemed this to be a noteworthy combination, and fan artists took note. P.S. Fuck pants.

You know, I should probably get some blue-light-filtering glasses.

With regard to SSSS.GRIDMAN itself, there is also a bit of buzz about the show since it is a Studio Trigger production that adapts the '90s television series Denkou Choujin Gridman (Gridman the Hyper Agent). I'm not familiar with this series, but I am familiar with Studio Trigger staff's penchant for moments of occasional greatness. (Likewise, I'm also familiar with their penchant for disappointing overly optimistic fans.) Through four episodes, I am enjoying it more than I liked DARLING in the FRANXX from spring and summer 2018, at least.

This railroad apartment was the perfect place.

The highlight of SSSS.GRIDMAN for me, as you might expect, is the Ueda Reina-voiced Shinjo Akane. I am 100% Team Akane, although she does occasionally kill innocent anime girls. Even more concerning, she's a bit of a slob and inexplicably seems to never take out her garbage. I guess at least it's all bagged, but sheesh. To tell you the truth, I'm not entirely certain whether I find Akane appealing because she's voiced by Ueda Reina or if it's because she's a psychopath, but I suppose there isn't any reason why it can't be both.

Look, it ain't that bad, okay.

Depending on which corner of the anime fandom you find yourself, I imagine you're either on the side that doesn't believe DARLING in the FRANXX needs defending, or in the camp that doesn't believe it deserves defending. My basic perspective on the show is that it is not capital-G Good, nor is it part of the "bad but has good parts in it" category, but rather that it is a flawed result of some efforts that I genuinely appreciate.

The robots are named after flowers, but I don't know if there is any meaning to it.

Studio Trigger's Gainax heritage basically guarantees I'll give any of its shows a try. They haven't all been hits, but I'll generally find at least something to enjoy. DARLING in the FRANXX is Studio Trigger's two-cours science fiction partnership with A-1 Pictures featuring giant robots and lots of sexual allegories. The show is not at all subtle, with wall-to-wall metaphors about marriage, intercourse, orgasm, infidelity, and polyandry. And that's just the first three episodes. Unfortunately, it also stars an exceptionally dull teenage boy (because of course it does). At least he isn't a whiny brat, I guess. (That role was already taken by one of the supporting cast.)

What? You can't see it?

I'm calling it. Re:CREATORS will end (next season) with Potato-kun re-drawing and re-writing Altair as a wall-to-wall dere-dere moé-moé...kyun! schoolgirl whose MAD gets super popular on the NicoVideo. Still the best show this season, though. Even ahead of Little Witch Academia TV which is also really good. I should write about that before it ends.

15-love.

I put Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de (When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace) on hold halfway through the autumn 2014 season to watch different shows, but I came back to it and finished it off a year later. There wasn't anything particularly bad about the series when I put it on the shelf last year, except I felt it was a rather unremarkable effort by Studio Trigger, a company better known for KILL la KILL and the Little Witch Academia movies. But now that I've finished Inou-Battle, I believe it is a excellent show—not relative to anime in general, mind you—relative to other harem comedies. You see, harem comedies tend to be mediocre at best and typically cursed with one or both of the following typical flaws: (1) Uninteresting harem candidates, or (2) an unlikable male lead.