I have a thing for urban fantasy, books like Emma Bull's War for theOaks , much of Charles de Lint's output, quite a lot of Tanya Huff'swork , and soon. Unsurprisingly this has carried over into my anime watching. Addinga dash of fantasy and magic will attract me to shows that I otherwisewould have bounced off of.

As with basically every manga I wind up checking out these days, Istumbled across The Ancient Magus' Bride through anitwitter, thegeneral collection

KonoSuba was not a particularly good show, but it was justfunny enough to keep me watching in the winter season (apart from episode 9, which falls into the'burn it with fire now' category). Part of what made it funny was someof its cast of characters and how they bounced off each other; theyweren't great people, but they were generally flawed in interestingways. In the process of this, KonoSuba did something that I have togrudgingly admire it for.

It would have

Let me admit something that I didn't really say at the time: neither Arpeggio of Blue Steel nor even Knights of Sidonia lookedparticularly great as anime shows. Arpeggio was serviceable; Sidonia did better, partly because it leaned into its particular grittySF aesthetics , but that trick only worksfor a certain sort of show. Based on these shows, you would not beparticularly enthused about the future of CG-based general anime.

The good news is that we don't have to worry about that now,

(There will be spoilers.)

Under the surface, Thunderbolt Fantasy has an unusual structure.Although it has the expected big spectacular ending in thelast episode, the real high point comes a bit less than halfway through the second-last episode. The rest of the show isinteresting and necessary, but it's also all denouement witha kind of inevitability to it and little real tension ( cf ). You mightwonder how this can be.

Jo Walton has written about what she calls spear-points

I was not as enthused about the second season of Akagami noShirayukihime (aka Snow White with the Red Hair ) as I was of thefirst season , as I mentioned in my winter seasonretrospective . But as I also said, the secondseason gave us some excellent episodes and excellent moments in thoseepisodes. Even now I remember some moments in particular, and so hereis one of them, from episode 20 (the 8th episode of the second season).

Shirayuki has just been rescued from the pirates

My best N in 2015 agreed pretty well with my year-endAPR votes ,but my 2014 best N did not. In 2014, my APR vote rated Mushishi 's second season as my top show; almost a month later, mypost demoted it all the way down to being only my thirdAPR-eligible choice and I was not entirely enthused about it. So, whathappened?

Here's the simple version: Mushishi 's second season was a

I'm a cyclist, so I'm attuned to little nuances and oddities of howbikes are shown in shows. The one I've been noticing recently is how itseems to have become common, maybe even universal, to show road bikeswith bicycle lights on their handlebars.This comes up quite visibly in Long Riders! , where any number of roadbikes clearly show them, but it's not the only recent case I remember. Regalia - The Three Sacred Stars had a scene with a road

Science Fiction has an informationproblem. When you set a story in the modern era, your audience alreadyknows a great deal about the setting and how things work; they alreadyhave a good picture of what the world looks like. But when you set yourstory in space, or on an alien planet, or in the future, the audiencestarts out knowing very little about the setting and so you have a lotof information to communicate to them; you have to create the world forthem. Even if you