2025: My Fourth Quarter in Anime
Dec. 31st, 2025 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerHeading past the thirty-year mark since attending my first anime club show at university (which, plotted as a day on a calendar, would fall in between my fortieth anniversaries of happening on Thunder Sub and Robotech on television), my viewing schedule was full yet constrained. The titles I intended to watch, and the varied numbers of their episodes to see per week to wrap most of them up at specific points, managed again to squeeze out any thought of taking chances on new series now streaming. I have to admit to not dwelling too much on that, consoling myself with occasional thoughts there might be a bit of “variety” yet to what I was watching and finding interest in different things.
As I started into the Attack on Titan episodes that would fill the fourth and final box I’d bought over the years, I was quite conscious of the disdain other fans had displayed towards them as they’d streamed. Production had been moved to a different studio with a bad reputation for overworking its animators, and despite the episodes having the secondary title “The Final Season” there’d been a long break between three-month chunks of them for production’s sake, and then another break had followed before the very last of the manga was adapted as two long “specials.” As for the manga they adapted, I’d known its own final chapters had carried controversy forward and amplified it further.
The “Final Season” began in a new place and with new characters, although it didn’t take long before that could be seen to link back to the unsettling revelations that had widened the world of the story. I did wonder now, though, if the hard truth of just what the grotesque, people-eating Titans were was leading to a situation a bit like 86 to get in the way of a straight invocation of a troubling part of history. After that, though, the story as we’d known it crashed into this new world with a new sort of unsettling effect even given the production values.
I’d known from the manga that the angry young man Eren Yeager (now a little older), who’d started off driven by a familiar kind of trauma and had emerged from a shocking fate early in the series through one of the sudden reconfigurations of its world, had reacted to the revelation of the wider world and its hostility towards everything he’d known with a singlehanded declaration of war. His comrades struggled to keep up even with the story shifting back to familiar ground and slowing down for a while, at least until Eren’s war escalated to total extermination underfoot. I can suppose I’m the fan I am of certain things because of an ability, however peculiar (even if only in those certain cases), to keep taking interest in “heroes gone wrong” (although maybe it’s just dumb luck I haven’t run into efforts to put down one thing or another, or both, alluded to here by comparison...) I also realised that, facing a complex mixture of things I remembered from the manga and things I didn’t recall, there was a certain wrinkle to Eren’s motivations that hadn’t stuck in my mind, something that might have given me more to chew on. I could add that to my previous understanding that a certain bit of the manga had been changed to some slight extent in the anime and some, at least, had judged that change an improvement. It is possible that after these new understandings of Eren’s motivations, something was revealed about an even deeper motivation in the story that left me thinking it was fortunate that, so far as I knew, that revelation hadn’t been turned into fresh condemnations of something else unpleasant now being invoked. Still, I was also contemplating comments that part of the problem for characters inside the story involved the wider world not being what they’d expected. After everything, and a certain amount of managing to be surprised a second time, I got through Attack on Titan with reactions including continued interest.
I managed to watch more than one episode of Urusei Yatsura a week “on average”; by the end of the year I’d finished half of the discs in the final TV series collection. This brought me to the final opening credits sequence sooner than I’d quite expected, and I have to admit it took me a while to start warming up to it while thinking back to the penultimate opening. For some reason, those final opening credits had me wondering if the single story I remain convinced I saw back in university was in fact one of the OVAs I also have a collection of to get to, but I suppose there’s the possibility I’ll never come to the point of recognition and have to realise I somehow “made it all up.” The episodes might have slowed down a bit again still some distance from the fourth movie, but I’m not at the point of dismissing these final months of the series as “a slow fade out.” I did ponder the episodes I was watching involving and invoking summer heat even as I approached winter myself; there were also a few mentions of 1985 thrown in.
It was almost a last-minute thought that my initial plans of what to watch this quarter involved “too many titles on Blu-Ray”; trips home for Thanksgiving and Christmas would mean being away from ways to watch them for some weekends at least. The idea that came to me first was to look into streaming back catalogues, but it took a little longer for a recent instalment to the Pretty Cure magical girl franchise to come to mind. As I’d said at the time I was watching Soaring Sky Pretty Cure, partway through that show the perhaps peculiar yet distinct feeling that its own tweaks to a general formula I’d supposed established in my own mind watching the three series preceding it were appealing to me to an extent where I’d rather not “take a chance on what would follow” but rather go back quite a ways and see where everything had begun. While watching the original Pretty Cure, though, I did gather an impression other people were impressed with the particulars of that very latest show now streaming I’d not begun, even including the potential controversy of it being “a non-violent Pretty Cure.” After finding a point to stop in the original Pretty Cure well short of its actual conclusion I hadn’t quite found the time to go straight on to another part of the franchise, but now I was interested in checking out Wonderful Precure!
This series begins in a town filled with pets and other animals. An ordinary junior girl named Iroha runs into a monstrous animal; however, her own pet, a small dog named Komugi, manages with the aid of a mystic landmark to change first into a human girl Iroha’s age and then into the magical girl Cure Wonderful. (I’d known the Japanese onomatopeia for a dog’s bark is “wan!”) An episode later, Iroha finds her own resolve and can turn into Cure Friendly; these transformation sequences struck me as shorter than the elaborate productions in Soaring Sky Pretty Cure but impressed in their own way through sheer speed and energy. With goal of restoring the monsters-of-the-episode back to animals from a fantasy realm rather than just everyday objects, I could think back to comments I’d seen before and see their point that the usual Pretty Cure tactic of hitting monsters before unleashing a final (stock footage) attack would have carried worrisome connotations; the magical girls instead dodge, chase, and calm before they can deploy their own (stock footage) healing tactic. The general cheerfulness of things made watching two episodes every weekend become quite appealing. Even at that higher speed it was a bit of a wait for the two additional magical girls in the opening credits to show up, but that very wait might have increased the impact of their appearance. I should also admit that I’d turned to “fansubs” of Soaring Sky Pretty Cure after thinking the official translations of the series preceding it had been a bit stilted, and had been a little concerned starting off with that specific option now being unavailable; these new official translations, though, seemed quite acceptable.
Shinkalion Change the World kept chugging along. I was able to get past a certain half-wry thought I’d had three months ago, namely that the series might have just set up an interesting situation and then annulled it right away; what followed that annulment was interesting enough. Some more Shinkansen bullet trains that transform into giant robots were added to the series; one of them even had me wondering a little if its train form was a new design not used in a previous series. New teenaged boys were also added to to pilot those robots, working through the complications of their initial situations in a way that didn’t leave me quite as ready to suppose “this feels like a more familiar sort of mecha series because the pilots mope all the time.” Instead, I did get around to comparing and contrasting this series to Wonderful Precure! I have to admit “the girls’ show” seemed a bit more polished and appealing in general than “the boys’ show” (its stock footage, anyway, involved more hand-drawn footage), but I was willing to suppose both them felt sort of “honest” about what they were, and that had a certain appeal when compared to a certain amount of anime I could suppose was targeted at adolescents (or, worse yet, “arrested adolescents.”) I even got to thinking a bit of the way some anime series from the 1970s get talked up, although there I can imagine rejoinders that those older shows “were intended for all ages!”
When one recent series kept being mentioned here and there even after its “season’s end” summaries had wrapped up, I decided that, even though it felt at least possible I’d seen it summarized to start with and not taken a chance on it then, I could see about watching Apocalypse Hotel. The hotel the title referred to was a fancy establishment still intact in a Tokyo abandoned and overgrown, the Earth having been evacuated due to a deadly virus. One last humanoid robot still operational among the hotel’s dwindling staff of machines is starting to worry humanity might not return when an alien shows up one day, and business picks up from there. Robots trying to carry on after mankind has vanished from the scene is a familiar science fiction idea; this series had a light enough touch and enough strange variety to wind up appealing to me, at least approaching that rewarding impression of an anime presenting an absurd situation with a straight face. Partway through I did think a bit of how “everyone else likes it” can be a heavy burden for a series to carry when it’s too late to just happen on it yourself as a standout or a pleasant surprise, but even that didn’t affect the interest I was taking in this show.
Watching all of this “older” anime, a certain temptation might have cropped up to insist to myself “it’s not all from the twentieth century, anyway.” I did head back to that vintage by returning to Bubblegum Crisis for the first time since university, but after that I crossed the millennium’s border by getting back to Macross Zero as well. I’ve already commented on both of those experiences; both were to some slight extent “mixed,” although the second surprise might have been a bit more pleasant regardless of what I did get out of the older OVAs. (I forgot to mention before, anyway, that I did once happen on in a used-and-remaindered book-and-disc store what at the time would surely have been a bootleg Macross Zero DVD case. I have to admit that, while I didn’t buy the disc, I didn’t “report” it either.)
As I started into the Attack on Titan episodes that would fill the fourth and final box I’d bought over the years, I was quite conscious of the disdain other fans had displayed towards them as they’d streamed. Production had been moved to a different studio with a bad reputation for overworking its animators, and despite the episodes having the secondary title “The Final Season” there’d been a long break between three-month chunks of them for production’s sake, and then another break had followed before the very last of the manga was adapted as two long “specials.” As for the manga they adapted, I’d known its own final chapters had carried controversy forward and amplified it further.
The “Final Season” began in a new place and with new characters, although it didn’t take long before that could be seen to link back to the unsettling revelations that had widened the world of the story. I did wonder now, though, if the hard truth of just what the grotesque, people-eating Titans were was leading to a situation a bit like 86 to get in the way of a straight invocation of a troubling part of history. After that, though, the story as we’d known it crashed into this new world with a new sort of unsettling effect even given the production values.
I’d known from the manga that the angry young man Eren Yeager (now a little older), who’d started off driven by a familiar kind of trauma and had emerged from a shocking fate early in the series through one of the sudden reconfigurations of its world, had reacted to the revelation of the wider world and its hostility towards everything he’d known with a singlehanded declaration of war. His comrades struggled to keep up even with the story shifting back to familiar ground and slowing down for a while, at least until Eren’s war escalated to total extermination underfoot. I can suppose I’m the fan I am of certain things because of an ability, however peculiar (even if only in those certain cases), to keep taking interest in “heroes gone wrong” (although maybe it’s just dumb luck I haven’t run into efforts to put down one thing or another, or both, alluded to here by comparison...) I also realised that, facing a complex mixture of things I remembered from the manga and things I didn’t recall, there was a certain wrinkle to Eren’s motivations that hadn’t stuck in my mind, something that might have given me more to chew on. I could add that to my previous understanding that a certain bit of the manga had been changed to some slight extent in the anime and some, at least, had judged that change an improvement. It is possible that after these new understandings of Eren’s motivations, something was revealed about an even deeper motivation in the story that left me thinking it was fortunate that, so far as I knew, that revelation hadn’t been turned into fresh condemnations of something else unpleasant now being invoked. Still, I was also contemplating comments that part of the problem for characters inside the story involved the wider world not being what they’d expected. After everything, and a certain amount of managing to be surprised a second time, I got through Attack on Titan with reactions including continued interest.
I managed to watch more than one episode of Urusei Yatsura a week “on average”; by the end of the year I’d finished half of the discs in the final TV series collection. This brought me to the final opening credits sequence sooner than I’d quite expected, and I have to admit it took me a while to start warming up to it while thinking back to the penultimate opening. For some reason, those final opening credits had me wondering if the single story I remain convinced I saw back in university was in fact one of the OVAs I also have a collection of to get to, but I suppose there’s the possibility I’ll never come to the point of recognition and have to realise I somehow “made it all up.” The episodes might have slowed down a bit again still some distance from the fourth movie, but I’m not at the point of dismissing these final months of the series as “a slow fade out.” I did ponder the episodes I was watching involving and invoking summer heat even as I approached winter myself; there were also a few mentions of 1985 thrown in.
It was almost a last-minute thought that my initial plans of what to watch this quarter involved “too many titles on Blu-Ray”; trips home for Thanksgiving and Christmas would mean being away from ways to watch them for some weekends at least. The idea that came to me first was to look into streaming back catalogues, but it took a little longer for a recent instalment to the Pretty Cure magical girl franchise to come to mind. As I’d said at the time I was watching Soaring Sky Pretty Cure, partway through that show the perhaps peculiar yet distinct feeling that its own tweaks to a general formula I’d supposed established in my own mind watching the three series preceding it were appealing to me to an extent where I’d rather not “take a chance on what would follow” but rather go back quite a ways and see where everything had begun. While watching the original Pretty Cure, though, I did gather an impression other people were impressed with the particulars of that very latest show now streaming I’d not begun, even including the potential controversy of it being “a non-violent Pretty Cure.” After finding a point to stop in the original Pretty Cure well short of its actual conclusion I hadn’t quite found the time to go straight on to another part of the franchise, but now I was interested in checking out Wonderful Precure!
This series begins in a town filled with pets and other animals. An ordinary junior girl named Iroha runs into a monstrous animal; however, her own pet, a small dog named Komugi, manages with the aid of a mystic landmark to change first into a human girl Iroha’s age and then into the magical girl Cure Wonderful. (I’d known the Japanese onomatopeia for a dog’s bark is “wan!”) An episode later, Iroha finds her own resolve and can turn into Cure Friendly; these transformation sequences struck me as shorter than the elaborate productions in Soaring Sky Pretty Cure but impressed in their own way through sheer speed and energy. With goal of restoring the monsters-of-the-episode back to animals from a fantasy realm rather than just everyday objects, I could think back to comments I’d seen before and see their point that the usual Pretty Cure tactic of hitting monsters before unleashing a final (stock footage) attack would have carried worrisome connotations; the magical girls instead dodge, chase, and calm before they can deploy their own (stock footage) healing tactic. The general cheerfulness of things made watching two episodes every weekend become quite appealing. Even at that higher speed it was a bit of a wait for the two additional magical girls in the opening credits to show up, but that very wait might have increased the impact of their appearance. I should also admit that I’d turned to “fansubs” of Soaring Sky Pretty Cure after thinking the official translations of the series preceding it had been a bit stilted, and had been a little concerned starting off with that specific option now being unavailable; these new official translations, though, seemed quite acceptable.
Shinkalion Change the World kept chugging along. I was able to get past a certain half-wry thought I’d had three months ago, namely that the series might have just set up an interesting situation and then annulled it right away; what followed that annulment was interesting enough. Some more Shinkansen bullet trains that transform into giant robots were added to the series; one of them even had me wondering a little if its train form was a new design not used in a previous series. New teenaged boys were also added to to pilot those robots, working through the complications of their initial situations in a way that didn’t leave me quite as ready to suppose “this feels like a more familiar sort of mecha series because the pilots mope all the time.” Instead, I did get around to comparing and contrasting this series to Wonderful Precure! I have to admit “the girls’ show” seemed a bit more polished and appealing in general than “the boys’ show” (its stock footage, anyway, involved more hand-drawn footage), but I was willing to suppose both them felt sort of “honest” about what they were, and that had a certain appeal when compared to a certain amount of anime I could suppose was targeted at adolescents (or, worse yet, “arrested adolescents.”) I even got to thinking a bit of the way some anime series from the 1970s get talked up, although there I can imagine rejoinders that those older shows “were intended for all ages!”
When one recent series kept being mentioned here and there even after its “season’s end” summaries had wrapped up, I decided that, even though it felt at least possible I’d seen it summarized to start with and not taken a chance on it then, I could see about watching Apocalypse Hotel. The hotel the title referred to was a fancy establishment still intact in a Tokyo abandoned and overgrown, the Earth having been evacuated due to a deadly virus. One last humanoid robot still operational among the hotel’s dwindling staff of machines is starting to worry humanity might not return when an alien shows up one day, and business picks up from there. Robots trying to carry on after mankind has vanished from the scene is a familiar science fiction idea; this series had a light enough touch and enough strange variety to wind up appealing to me, at least approaching that rewarding impression of an anime presenting an absurd situation with a straight face. Partway through I did think a bit of how “everyone else likes it” can be a heavy burden for a series to carry when it’s too late to just happen on it yourself as a standout or a pleasant surprise, but even that didn’t affect the interest I was taking in this show.
Watching all of this “older” anime, a certain temptation might have cropped up to insist to myself “it’s not all from the twentieth century, anyway.” I did head back to that vintage by returning to Bubblegum Crisis for the first time since university, but after that I crossed the millennium’s border by getting back to Macross Zero as well. I’ve already commented on both of those experiences; both were to some slight extent “mixed,” although the second surprise might have been a bit more pleasant regardless of what I did get out of the older OVAs. (I forgot to mention before, anyway, that I did once happen on in a used-and-remaindered book-and-disc store what at the time would surely have been a bootleg Macross Zero DVD case. I have to admit that, while I didn’t buy the disc, I didn’t “report” it either.)