Anime 2022

aka the year Funiroll paywalled most things.

Still I did get to watch some things

Clearing up from the backlog -- Un-Go which was weird detective story in a near/alt-future Japan after a war, with a mix of AI, powersat-politics and battling kami : OK but who comes up with mix-and-match ideas like that to even make them work in the first place?

Heroic Age did what one pretty much might have expected from the initial (and well-trodden in the literature) premise, and thus did manage to stick a satisfactory ending.

Nobunagun turned out to be a fun take on the "super-powered school-girl vs alien greeblies" genre, when ditzy mil-otaku Sio goes all-in when she discovers she can channel Oda Nobunaga in the form of a Gatling gun with moar dakka-dakka. This had the weirdest take yet out of Japan for the secret identity of Jack the Ripper.

Schoolgirl Strikers was a more genre-pure instance of super-powered school-girls vs alien greeblies, with some added power of friendship -- it managed to do things right which Ange Vierge spectacularly fumbled, including having most off the non-combat sections being elsewhere than the hot tub.

In the "Cute Girls Do Cute Activity" corner, New Game! presented a very sanitized -- and very gender-bent -- view of the software development process; New Game!! was more of exactly the same, but I hope that code review, and check-in integration and testing, are handled better than in the anime, in the same way one hopes the code from Senko-san is not representative of real life.

When watched in binge mode, rather than weekly-as-aired, Space Brothers flows much better than it did at the time -- the introductory recaps can be ignored, along with the 3-episode mid-run total to-date recap. Watching 10 years on, there is also the amusement at the near future that has NASA getting to the moon again, with not a hint of SpaceX-style private space activity - at least not this side of the "now read the manga" last episode.

And for something completely different, Akiba's Trip, to see the context for the otaku memes it spawned (e.g. "It doesn't matter what a man's salary is worth; what matters is how much of it he spends on his hobbies!"). It lampoons one otaku hobby a week, including actual Street Fighter V gameplay footage in the vidya episode, before wrapping up with the big boss fight. Also, clothes get removed in every battle. Verdict : entirely harmless.

Interrupted by paywalling at the half-way point, C3 was just slightly weird; 18if, with its witch-of-the-week formula didn't leave things quite as hanging, and in places seemed to be unexpectedly good in its variety (cf Sengoku Collection). It also gets an honourable mention for the episode where the WotW is intending to kill three nasty pieces of work who killed her family - and while MC's mentor is all "then you'll be as bad as they are", the MC says in effect "sounds reasonable to me; do you need any help?", taking over for the boss bad's turn.

From the Winter season the one-shot Sorairo Utility was too short to establish real "a cute girls doing activity" scenario; Sabikui Bisco was crazy enough in its take on the "a random disaster strikes (at least) Japan, and things become weird and anarchic" genre to follow to the end, though the finale echoed Vividred Operation for the way all the characters spent time being heartfelt at each other while the big bad was charging up his lazors -- in all, too many crazy ideas, and not really enough establishing of conflict; and my reaction to Tokyo 24th Ward was simply this

Akebi's Sailor Suit didn't establish itself as an alternative CGD-whatever, and the weird art style didn't help motivate; I ended up finishing it as a backlog item. For most of the season after the first episode, it was not too far from being "creepy lesbian stalker sue adds girl of the week to her harem" (exceptions like the episode where the girl of the week is a stalker herself and they prowl together hardly count). After all these years, I confess that I don't understand the neuroticism about having/making friends in high-school that percolates some series (Uruhara being another example of same that springs to mind). Perhaps it's a girl thing. After a while one habituates to the slightly uncanny character designs, as it works towards the big sports' day climax - a change from the usual school festival trope. Verdict: harmless.

The charge of "too much crazy, too little establishment" for Sabikui Bisco can also be levelled at Spring's (gacha-game tie-in) series Estab-Life, which adds the one-style-fits-all 3DCG characters that are becoming too common these days, including an apparent high-school girl with a long track record as an operative (on a par with the Dirty Pair, but without the associated trail of destruction). In all, mostly harmless, somewhat silly.

At mid-year, everything got paywalled, so I only watched the teaser episodes of LycoReco, and was spared what sounded like a disappointing thud of an ending

With winter came Pui Pui Molcar : Driving School. After the first season's "everything goes" mayhem, it was hard to see where they could take it, but this new set-up makes sense. Which may be why it's just so-so. Still, a harmless few minutes of Saturday morning cartoon.