Anime 2021

A generally disappointing year in all.

Spring season had a few "might watch" titles, but Crunchy picked up none of them, so I only picked up Odd Taxi, a noir-ish story of modern social-media driven ennui, which ends up being AOTY (long-form) pretty much by default.

Summer had the global release of Shin Eva, which was as much of a mess as it had seemed from original accounts, the painful and wildly mislabelled Fena, Pirate Princess (dropped after one episode of Fena being a vapid gold-digging whore), and Aquatope which began by looking like it would be cute girls doing cute aquarium things, with a little bit of low-key magic (from a local sprite wandering around in the first couple of episodes, and the occasional trippy underwater sequence), but rapidly turned into family drama and "welcome to the world of work", rather like Hanasaku Iroha, only without the bondage; and got dropped after 5 episodes.

Autumn brought just the tried and dropped Takt Op. Destiny, Sakugan and Digimon Ghost Game -- the latter being an episodic "urban legend kids' horror" series, a world away from Adventure, Adventure 02 and Adventure: that were a background to much of the year and now form an indistinguishable melange in my memory.

From the backlog, I went through Berserk in both '97 and '16 flavours, which passed some autumn evenings; but I still don't see what the fuss was about (except for the detailed crafting of the art in the original manga).