Because I’ve not done one of these for a while – infact, I seem to have forgotten to click the “publish” version on the last one of these posts – and I figure I should at least strive to maintain a two-post-a-week minimum. Not that I really have much to discuss to pad out a full one of these posts with.

My viewlist for the season is settling down somewhat, though it’s largely panning out to be the shows I was expecting to watch. The thing I was probably most surprised by was probably Vividred Operation, mostly because it manages not to take it’s still plentiful male-gaze to the kind of Strike Witches levels that I find myself allergic to. It is one of the couple of shows this season that feel perhaps a little too perfect – conceptualized within an inch of it’s life for maximum nerd-appeal – but it’s not quite crossing that line where it’d start to feel like a parent trying to be “down with” the kids, if you get what I mean. It’s pandering to almost an excess, borrowing liberally from other popular titles, but at least it’s being produced by people who actually seem to understand why those things were popular in the first place, as opposed to mimicking them on a purely superficial level. The Aniplex logo on the Crunchy stream is annoying – I guess you US-types get it on Magi as well, though it’s missing on the AoD stream of that we get over here.

I’m already writing about Love Live! on a weekly basis, which is the other show that comes across as being somewhat over-engineered, and somehow feels more-so than Vividred. Which probably shouldn’t be surprising given it’s background, I guess. I dunno, I probably come across as being incredibly negative on it every week, but I do actually enjoy it a great deal. Honest, guv’nor!

AKB0048 was pretty much a given, given that I loved the first season. The follow-up hasn’t disappointed. Makoto, against all odds, is still my favourite, though her election poster was pretty terrible. Space Ninja Takamina kind of set a high comparative bar, though.

I’m still watching The UNLIMITED for some reason. I guess The Children are turning up next week, though I’ve actually seen precious little of the original work. I think I’ve got the first US volume of the anime lying around here somewhere, so I guess I should at least watch a couple of episodes in order to get a slightly better grasp of what is going on. Maybe, though franchise content that old is probably irrelevant by this point. The show itself is pretty OK, I suppose – it’s all rather predictable and well-trodden stuff, but the execution is decent enough.

I would say that Sasami@Ganbaranai is hilariously behind on Anime-on-Demand at this point, except it seriously hampers my ability to watch it in a legal fashion. Only God knows what’s going on with their stream of Mondaiji (didn’t the US just get episode 3 this week?). At least they’re being relatively prompt with Tamako Market, which continues to be great.

I think that’s pretty much it in terms of new pick-ups, unless I’m forgetting something. Let me know if there’s anything that I should absolutely be watching and maybe I’ll endeavour to check it out, but I would kind of like to spend at least some time in the next few months catching up on the pile of unwatched physical media I’ve had piling up for a while. Ni no Kuni may end up eating a considerable amount of time, though.

As for other things going on this season, whilst I wasn’t going to go to the Glasgow Youth Film Festivals anime screenings, being that I’ve already seen From Up On Poppy Hill and Wolf Children, the lure of The Fushigi Mi~~strii~~~ movie has proved too tempting. As such, I’ll be heading up to Scotland in a couple of weeks – if anyone sees me hanging around, feel free to say “hi” or something. If the movie actually proves to be something interesting, I’ll report back.

Speaking of events, I’ll probably be heading to the ‘States for Otakon this year, which I thought I’d mentioned publicly previously, but maybe not given the surprise an offhand comment generated on Twitter. There’s still a few things I need to sort out in regards to confirming that, and the fact that I’m already locked into heading to the final Ayacon over here the weekend afterwards may well result in me dying from exhaustion before the end of August.

I’m not really sure what other events I’ll be hitting this year. Scotland Loves Anime, in October, is pretty much a given, as per every year. Hyper Japan, not sure much – they’ve went and stuck the event the usually hold in February slap-bang in the middle of the year, pulling it a little too close to Otakon and Ayacon and the like. I guess it makes sense given their new end-of-year Christmas show in November, but even that itself is a little too close to MCM Expo (which, Japanese junk-food aside, is somewhat better for nerd-shopping if nothing else).