While I hate to keep mentioning my recent out-of-town trip since it’s not relevant to this site otherwise, it continues to be on my mind because these types of mini-vacations (work trips to other cities where my evenings are basically free to do as I please) are great opportunities for me to keep up on my anime-watching. Aside from The Promised Neverland, the other series that kept my company that week was Dororo. For whatever reason I was getting seriously intermittent access to Crunchyroll where I was staying (I blame it more on the Android app itself, which has always worked spotty for me even with great internet and a brand new cell phone), so I stuck to Amazon Video this time around.
This post discusses plot spoilers through episode 5 of the anime, and links to offsite content with manga spoilers later in the story.
I’m usually not great at keeping up with anime series as they’re being simulcast. A lot of that is due to my personal workflow and my resistance to watching anime where there are still other anime remaining for me to review. I realize how ridiculous that sounds but I’m someone who easily wanders off-track and procrastinates, so I have to set some weird rules in place to keep myself from becoming distracted. There are rare times, though, where watching weekly broadcasts becomes a necessity rather than a luxury, and as soon as I started watching The Promised Neverland I suspected that it might be one of those anime.
I generally try to look past hype and not let internet chatter influence my own opinions, but the discourse around this series was difficult to ignore. I read an essay about the restrictive gender roles as they exist in the story’s universe (caution for both big-time plot spoilers and some disturbing imagery), and from that point I was intrigued. Since the anime adaptation of the manga series had already been announced, I tried to put the spoilers out of my mind (I was at least partly successful due to the length of time in between the post and the first episode, which was helpful!)
I’ve been very lucky in life to have been surrounded by acquaintances and friends whose intelligence and wisdom has served as an inspiration for me. Being an ani-blogger has turned out to be no different, as I’ve had the chance to read some interesting and insightful commentary from other bloggers on a fairly regular basis. Because of that I’ve been given the opportunity on many occasions to examine my own opinions in various ways.
Lita Kino at Lita Kino’s Anime Corner posed an interesting question in a recent post in regards to the responsibility that more experienced fans have towards welcoming new fans into the fold. To paraphrase her question, she asks whether certain types of anime criticism, which can occasionally be laser-focused in on very minute or one-off issues in a series or on trying to extrapolate author viewpoint or intent from limited evidence, deny newer fans the experience of enjoying and engaging with anime on their own terms. As someone whose goal has always been to make anime and anime fandom approachable for many different people, the question definitely struck a chord.
I tell myself that I never intended for my “favorites” lists to get this out of hand, but I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m 4 posts in and only now winding down. There’s a lot of good anime every year, as I always say, but the past year has been exceedingly fruitful in terms of great, unique, or just entertaining anime series. It’s difficult to stop talking about them all!
Aside from a couple in this group which were listed here due to space restrictions on the previous post, these are series that I didn’t have a chance to finish, either due to timing or other factors, but which I wanted to talk about anyway. In some cases I will likely get back to them later and close the loop; in at least one case that’s questionable, for reasons that I hope are clear. In all cases, though, there was something about these series that caught my eye and excited my imagination, so I felt it would be a failure on my part to ignore them.
While I had a lot of top favorites last year (see Part 1 and Part 2), I also watched a lot of anime that I’d classify as good or even great, but which didn’t break through and affect me the way some of the others did. This doesn’t mean that these series weren’t worth talking about, so I’d like to give a little bit of the spotlight to some of the “also-rans,” the series that I think are worth watching from the past year.
I limited this list to series that I’ve either completed, or
in the case of multi-cour series, ones where I’d watched at least half. This
isn’t an exhaustive list of every series I completed last year, just ones I
wanted to talk about and signal boost. As a reminder, my “year” runs from
Autumn 2017 through Summer 2018.
Welcome back! I wasn’t originally planning to split my favorites up between multiple posts, but I realized while writing that there was just too much great anime that I wanted to talk about and it would have been unjust to cram them all into such a tiny space. It may also be that I can get a little long-winded talking about the things that I love… but that’s not necessarily a bad thing (at least if you enjoy my writing).
Just for consistency’s sake, I’ll reiterate that the anime series I’m writing about for my favorites were broadcast from Autumn 2017 through Summer 2018, rather than from the entirety of 2018, not only because I tend to watch things in fits and starts, but because I like to let my opinions crystallize a bit before naming something a favorite. There was obviously a lot of great stuff airing this Autumn… so some of it will probably end up as a favorite next year!
Now is the time when many of my favorite anime bloggers are posting their picks for their favorite (and sometimes least favorite) anime of the year. While this is something I’ve always wanted to do, what’s prevented me from posting lists like this in the past is the fact that I tend not to finish watching the Autumn season shows in a timely manner, and so feel ill-equipped to participate. I also like to let the series I have finished watching settle for a while so that I can ensure that my opinions hold up over time; sometimes I may feel one way about an anime immediately after completing it, but after some further thought my opinion becomes more nuanced and even completely different.
My solution, then, is to operate on a slightly different time-table. For this list of favorites, I’ll be drawing from the anime I viewed from Autumn season 2017 through Summer season 2018 (basically October 2017 through the end of September 2018). While that will offset my picks a bit from others’, I feel like this is the best way to confidently represent how I feel about the anime I’ve completed.
This list is in no particular order, other than chronological based on time of broadcast. I’m terrible at assigning rankings to things, and would rather feature these different anime for their specific good traits rather than attempt to figure out which ones I liked more or less. I also hope that through this list I’m able to feature a few underrated gems that readers might want to give a second look.
This was getting lengthy, so I split it up into two parts. Stay tuned for the second half!
I’d planned to finish seasonal anime stuff before my husband and I left on an out-of-town vacation – obviously, that didn’t happen (the vacation was fun and much-needed, though!). It’s funny, though, how I start looking forward to the next season when I’m done with the current one, but while I’m still in the midst of the current season I always have the urge to write about unrelated things. I’m sure it’s a side-effect of my anxious and avoidant personality issues. Anyway, I spend a decent amount of time keeping up with ani-Twitter in general and recently caught a thread in passing regarding the state of anime simulcast streaming. The specific conversation was in regards to some of the less user-friendly aspects of streaming websites, as well as how those sites might be disinclined to make changes or updates because of a (specific?) group folks who “evangelize” legal streaming in spite of its perceived problems. The thread got me thinking about the situation we’re in to the point I thought it was worth writing about.
To put it plainly, one could argue that I’m one of those streaming evangelists. When I present panels at anime conventions, part of the information I often provide to the audience are the legal channels by which they can view the anime I’m discussing. I also use the official English translations of the titles when they’re available, so that when people are searching for anime they’re more likely to find those viewing avenues instead of “unofficial” ones. To me, operating this way isn’t as much out of a sense of duty (although I do know a couple people who work within the US industry side of things), as it is a perception of how much easier it is than what I used to have to deal with to watch anime.
Like a lot of fans of my generation, I’ve had a long-standing relationship with fan-subs and other unofficial means of viewing anime. Let me tell you, the means of access that we have now is leaps and bounds more user-friendly than the mish-mash of torrent or direct-download websites and video formats that were the norm many years ago. Without going too far into it (again), for a long time there were no good central hubs of anime acquisition, no standardization of formats until much later in the game, and there was often some kind of delay between broadcast and episode availability for the simple reason that people were volunteering their time to perform unpaid fan-work to translate and encode video files. And you often didn’t have much of a choice in the quality of the translation; I still have some video files from the early-ish 2000’s where a native Italian-speaker translated a series into English because no one else was doing it – it was a good service to the community, but it definitely doesn’t read that well. On the upside, there was a much more direct line to translators in those days, along with supplementary notes about translations. I feel like I learned a lot from people whose language and cultural knowledge of Japan was more expansive than mine and I suspect (and hope) some of those individuals are able to do paid translation work nowadays.
“Chotto, shitsukoi desu yo!” – Shitsukoi (しつこい) translates to “obstinate” or “persistent.” The context is that a man has approached this woman on the street about a “job” (forced prostitution) and won’t leave her alone. From “Tokyo Tribe 2” translated by Kanji Subs.
That isn’t to say that modern streaming translations are altogether infallible or always superior to fan translations. While I suspect that some criticisms of streaming translations come from fans whose familiarity with the techniques of translation and understanding of the Japanese language might not always be top-notch, I’ve also been in situations where my rusty grasp of Japanese and my decent English ability have been able to suss-out some unsatisfying “official” translation choices. In some cases the problem may be as minor as dialog that doesn’t “flow” properly in English; translation is always a push-and-pull between forces that demand slavish accuracy and those that translate more liberally in service of fuller localization. I’m more on the side of liberal translations myself, as long as the original intent is preserved, but there’s absolutely a great deal of wiggle room.
Panty says, “yarou” (野郎), a suffix meaning “wild or uncouth” (literally “field boy”) that, in context, often has negative connotations. Panty is mad because the announcer was wrong about her career. The word “yarou” doesn’t have a sexuality component; a better and less problematic choice (imo) would have been a term implying a lack of intelligence. Official Funimation streaming translation.
In other cases I find that language sensitivity is an issue that even official, vetted translations have trouble avoiding. The examples that stick out to me are those that use gendered or sexual slurs in place of more general or neutral words. While I love Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt in large part due to its general vulgarity, the official English translation makes some of these kinds of missteps. It definitely says something about our culture when insults towards male characters are so frequently focused on their lack of perceived masculinity, and the series is full of them. Even back in 2010 when this series was released, though, I feel as though words like “f*g” or “s*ssy” were already perceived as insensitive and generally off-limits, even if the reasoning wasn’t as clear to many people; the fact that these subtitles were not only produced, but were also not subsequently edited and finessed when I think it would have been easy enough to fix at least the online version, just goes to show that paid professionals have their blind-spots and other subjective challenges. For every Land of the Lustrous or Made in Abyss, which have translations that consciously use gender-neutral language for non-binary characters, there are several other anime translations that stumble. Let’s not forget thatYuri!!! On Ice, an anime released only 2 years ago that’s largely about a romantic relationship between two men, still had a subtitle translation that assumed a potential lover’s gender when none was implied by the Japanese word used.
Here, Victor uses the term “koibito” (恋人), which translates to “lover” and is gender-neutral. This line takes place after mentioning Minako, Yuri’s ballet instructor – it’s an understandable (though somewhat careless) error which was corrected in Funimation’s English Dub. Official Crunchyroll streaming translation.
It’s easy enough to be an armchair translator when you’re not the one sweating to complete an episode translation under a deadline, and I think that’s something many of us, whether we’re enthusiastic about anime streaming services or not, forget to acknowledge. Language is full of nuances, idioms, and complications; to expect a translation put together at odd-hours of the day (which sometimes becomes a reality if an anime’s scripts aren’t available with enough lead-time), quickly and with little opportunity for translation-checking, to be perfect right out of the gate is always going to be unreasonable, no matter how talented the translator.
I agree, though, with some criticisms of streaming services, mostly in regards to the inability of viewers to provide feedback about errors or other aspects of the viewing experience. While I do think that some translation criticisms boil down to pedantry or one’s desire for one language to reflect another one like a mirror (rather than as, for example, a different instrumental arrangement of a popular song), as I’ve mentioned there are choices that are more obviously actual mistakes – mistakes that have remained in place for months or years, based on the screen captures I took for this piece today. If there were some obvious feedback button on an episode’s streaming page where users could report a language issue, time-stamped at the appropriate point in the episode, that might be helpful to quell some of the complaints. This would, of course, require a new set of resources, including employees available to read and determine the veracity of the complaints, as well as a way to easily change subtitles or re-upload files, but it could be an avenue for innovation that hasn’t been explored yet. To Crunchyroll’s credit, they’ve already shown that they can respond to ad-hoc user feedback; earlier this anime season, they added a content warning to the first episode of Goblin Slayer after users responded to the unexpected shocking nature of certain scenes.
Oh, Lupin… from “Lupin III: Part 2,” Episode 155, screen cap from Crunchyroll.
Ultimately, though, some rough translations and other relatively minor issues aren’t enough to scare me off from being a streaming evangelist. While I hate to beleaguer the point, as I’ve said my earlier fandom years were defined by fly-by-night translation groups, hard-to-acquire digi-subs, and a general decentralization of fan spaces that made it a lot of work to be an anime fan. This time period had its perks, not the least of which was its frontier spirit and its enduring illusion of being somehow more “special” because of its niche qualities. Unfortunately, anime fandom was also a bastion of sexist gate-keeping and online (and in-person) harassment, both things I experienced many a time in supposedly “welcoming” spaces. Streaming services, many of which, like Amazon or Netflix, are general-use and present anime alongside other popular media, have helped bring anime out into the light, thus inviting new and more diverse fans and helping to drown-out at least some of the jerks. A lot of non-anime fans I know have at least heard of Crunchyroll and are familiar with what anime is and what some of the popular series are (and I no longer have to keep explaining that anime isn’t “Japanese cartoon porn!”). And streaming is easy, relatively inexpensive, and available in high-definition – all things my college-aged self only dreamed about. The only thing streaming isn’t is permanent, and that’s something I hope changes; while buying digital downloaded episodes on Amazon or iTunes is definitely an option, it’s still an imperfect one. As someone with a collector’s tendencies, I prefer to own the things I like, and that’s becoming more difficult.
I’m sure in 10 years we’ll all be preoccupied with some other very passionate debate about anime consumerism. The streaming landscape may have changed completely by then, and with every improvement there may be an equal amount of new, unforeseen problems to deal with. I don’t fault people for wanting more convenience and user-friendliness from their hobbies and experiences. However, I also think it’s important to take stock of what we have now, and to be thankful for the challenges that have been addressed and overcome; myself from 10 years ago would be blown away by the things we fans have access to today. Though I’m not trying to come across as some old crone waving her broom around and yelling at kids to “get off my lawn!” I do think that seeing the transformation firsthand (similar to the transition between analog to digital video and audio formats and the continual increase in internet speeds, to name a few other technological advances from my lifetime) has allowed me the perspective to give a little leeway toward companies providing me a much-welcome service that I thought I may never see. And I’ll definitely keep letting people know that it exists!
And as a palate cleanser, an actual parody sub. “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” by Duwang subs.
Though I assume most people who were planning to have already watched the first episode by now, I’ll warn that the first episode of Goblin Slayer – and by extension this discussion of it – includes references to sexual assault and rape, both generally and specifically.
As I mentioned in my Goblin Slayer first impressions post, I had the desire to write further about some of the extreme content that appears in the episode. This isn’t because other bloggers and reviewers haven’t been writing about it, but more because I haven’t seen my thoughts and feelings reflected in most of the reactions and I’d like to provide my perspective. A lot of what I’ve been reading in the past week has been very analytical, weighing various points in an attempt to come to some kind of logical conclusion about whether the episode’s content is warranted or appropriate. I believe that kind of disaffected point-by-point examination of scenes and images is the luxury and privilege of those whose lives are untouched by crimes of sexual aggression. I’m not trying to make enemies by saying as much, but I feel that there’s a certain survivors’ perspective on this matter that can be difficult for others to understand except from first-hand experience (or an incredibly robust sense of empathy).
"Laid-Back Camp" lets us soak up pleasant feelings without really having anywhere to go.
“Laid-Back Camp” lets us soak up pleasant feelings without really having anywhere to go.
I think a lot about anime (obviously), and also about the way in which I consume it, as should be evident by my earlier post regarding my totally-not-superhuman ability to watch a lot of it in a short amount of time. Years of reading reviews and lurking on message boards, as well as trying and failing to participate in message board discussions without getting into weird, unintended arguments, has told me that my way of thinking about anime (and other storytelling media, by extension) is probably kind of strange and a little contrary to the norm. This isn’t a “look at me, I’m such a special snowflake” statement, just an acknowledgement that I recognize my critical eye has some… astigmatism.
I hear people chatting all the time about an anime’s “plot.” Where the plot is going, what should happen next in the plot, is this or that thing that happened indicative of a plot hole (don’t get me started on that one)… examining this structural aspect of an anime series is very important to a lot of people, and certainly one broad way of discussing and interpreting media in general. In the modern anime fandom, this type of discussion is a huge part of participating in that fandom, and writers ranging from amateur-level bloggers (for example, myself) to professional staff writers for bigger anime and fandom websites post recaps and dissections of weekly episodes from their favorite (or occasionally obligatory) series all the time. This is awesome for people like me who are put off by certain things and might want to seek out more details about certain kinds of content (for example, I needed to be sure that After the Rain was not actually a romance between its two protagonists before I was willing to invest the time to finish it).
However, speaking as someone who’s written them, the downside of weekly recaps is that one can feel compelled to pick at every last detail with a fine-toothed comb and analyze every single action of the characters and movement of the story, because otherwise a half-hour episode of your typical anime series can be exceedingly difficult to write about at length. With a word count to reach and a deadline to meet, what’s the easiest thing to write about? What happened, who it happened to, and where they might be going, that’s what. There are writers who are definitely better than I am at this, but I only read these types of reviews piecemeal and occasionally so I can’t really call out the “good” ones. I personally have a lot of trouble with that format because it’s just not the way I feel comfortable interacting with media and I don’t gain much pleasure from it. At best, it can be a satisfying way to go back and examine something I’ve already watched or read once I’m familiar with it.
It wasn’t until fairly recently that I got a better handle on my beef with this line of thinking. Maybe this is more a function of being a woman in internet fandom circles, or maybe it’s that I tend to be emotional and sensitive in general as part of my nature, but I’ve had several run-ins with people during which I’ve been criticized for having a strong feeling about something, instead of basing my opinions on some sort of measurable “logic.” Man, almost nothing rankles me like someone telling me that pure, unfeeling logic is somehow superior to emotion-based reactions. Never mind the fact that “pure logic” almost always seems to actually mean “cherry-picked realities that align with my own emotional investment in the topic that I refuse to acknowledge as being emotional,” the simple truth is that our lives are informed every single day by the facts and realities of daily life and emotional fallout from our many ways of perceiving them. And sometimes the things that people say and do, or the things that happen, just don’t align with some nonexistent grand logical scheme running the universe. Our lives are full of dead-ends, poor decisions, standalone moments of extreme elation, fruitful conversations, wasted time… we’re a mess. Society is a mess. The stories we tell are sometimes (always) just an extension of that.
That’s why I don’t really care that much to pick-apart plot. It’s true, there are some stories that are entertaining to me just because they’re what I’d call “page-turners” (each episode ends in a cliffhanger, and the show doesn’t seem to have a super-deep message – Attack on Titan is one of these types of series I’ve really liked), there are so many more I find enjoyable because they provide a window into a character’s life, or create a fascinating new world, or speak to some truth about being human. Sometimes these series might initially imply a certain story arc but start to turn in a different direction, or sometimes there’s not really a grand story to tell in the first place. I’m more than willing to let a show with a fascinating premise carry me where it wants to go and I’ll then consider the whole package, even if it’s not where I expected to be going. I’m also on-board when an anime exists to cultivate an emotion, rather than drag me along to some concrete destination where a person does a thing because of reasons.
“The Perfect Insider” is as much Nishinosono’s story as anyone else’s.
Whenever I start mulling over this topic, I inevitably start thinking of examples of anime that I really liked for the above stated reasons, which anime fandom as a whole was cold towards. The Perfect Insider is one of those shows that I really loved (and wrote weekly recaps of… whoops), but which the larger fandom and many other reviewers just did not like at all. The series is a tough nut to crack, not only because of some of its subject matter (murder, statutory rape, the nature of genius, etc.), but because it (wrongfully, in my opinion) markets itself as a murder mystery tale. Contrary to first impressions, the point of story has more to do with deciding whether the type of intellectual existence Saikawa-Sensei and Dr. Magata strive towards has any value and less to do with figuring out the identity of the murderer. It’s also a snapshot of the consequences of nourishing and celebrating a gifted, precocious intelligence without also encouraging (or insisting upon!) normal, age-appropriate emotional development. There were a lot of critics and fans who seemed to be frustrated over the series as they watched its final few episodes, not just because of the ways in which the “mystery” resolved itself, but even more so because the enigmatic figure at the center of it all, the striking young genius Dr. Magata, was ultimately motivated by a set of rules and standards that were perceived as illogical and ridiculous.
To me, The Perfect Insider was a real punch in the gut, though I’d be hard-pressed to provide a concrete reason. I think I connected with it because it reaffirmed for me that, as much as humankind worships the notion of transcending the limitations of its basic meat-based form and reaching some higher plane of mental existence (as Dr. Magata ostensibly has done and Saikawa-sensei wishes like hell he could figure out how to do), what defines them is their infallible passion, pain, joy, feeling as represented by Nishinosono Moe, who is highly intelligent, but not an intellectual the way that Saikawa or Magata are portrayed. I didn’t care so much about the details of how the perpetrator overwrote the lab’s security camera footage (though that was neat, too!), or how a second person arrived in Dr. Magata’s locked room without anyone realizing it (that was easy to figure out after a certain point). What I connected with was the story of Nishinosono’s past and her passionate devotion to bringing Saikawa back to reality time and again (two things that are actually related), as well as Dr. Magata’s truly tragic life, the sadness of which I don’t think many people must have realized.
I have too many examples of these types of anime experiences to list here, but I hope this one helps to at least explain what I look for in a viewing experience. Watching anime, to me, isn’t like clutching a map in one hand and a compass in the other, marking off landmarks as I make my way from A to B. Watching anime is more like hiking to the top of a tall hill and breathing the crisp, clean air as the sun warms my face, or a summer storm drops rain suddenly, or fog drifts by below. If I decide I’m where I want to be, then I can be open to almost anything that happens (unless it’s that one-in-a-million time that a bird flies by and poops in my mouth – I’m looking at you, Gangsta.). As my husband likes to say, some of the best series out there are those with the lowest stakes; shows in which no demon king needs defeating, no items need to be obtained, and no damsels/dudes/cute animals need rescuing from the clutches of evil. Sometimes it’s better to stop anticipating the next step and just enjoy the way that life unfolds around us. Or to just accept that anime series don’t always cater to our own expectations, and maybe being passive and open in the face of the unexpected is okay, too.
We all consume media in our own way – this is just an explanation of mine. And heck, it’s served me well for years. What’s your favorite way of enjoying the shows you like? Let me know in the comments!
