In the spring of 2006, I'd reached a point where I felt I hadthings to say about anime but I didn't quite feel like runningmy own blog for it for various reasons (despite already having atechnical blog ). A friend I knew onlinevery generously offered to let me write guest posts on his blog and I decided that my first post would bea summary of the season's episodes that I'd seen so far. I wrote up myviews but for

(This won't make much sense without reading part 1 first.)

If you remember the Spring season of 2006 reasonably well, you may noticea striking omission from the list of shows I'd looked at in part 1 .Namely, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya aired that season but I didn'teven mention it. How could I possibly write about the Spring 2006 seasonand not cover Haruhi ?

As it happens, I have a record of my initial reaction to Haruhi

Through a complicated chain of conversation, I recentlywound up watching Digibro's "10 Killer Cuts in Evangelion Ep. 1" ( via ).Starting at 03:04 in that video, Digibro discusses one of his choicesand, well, let me show you what startled me here with a frame fromDigibro's video:

( full-sized , and Digibroprimarily discusses this scene assuming that they are special sci-fi glasses)

According to his MAL profile ,Digibro was born in 1

(There are going to be massive spoilers here for Flip Flappers , and of course this isspeculation.)

At this point it seems pretty clear that some or many settings (or worlds)in Pure Illusion are not arbitrary but instead come from something orsomeone (or maybe in some cases represent things). So here are my theoriesabout the source of the main worlds from each episode so far, up throughepisode 8 (at the moment).

• episode 1: tentatively Cocona herself. The world is frozen over

In The Ancient Magus' Bride , the protagonist,Chise Hatori, is a special kind of human magus. As I wrote about inpassing once before , the English language termthat should be used for Chise's status is somewhat unclear; the initialfan translations of the manga used one term and then the official SevenSeas version used another. Then something interesting happened when thefirst OVA episode came out recently on Crunchyroll , as I wound updiscussing on Twitter.

@cks_anime :Well I'll be

At the end of the series back in 2009 I wrote about my uncertainfeelings about its ending , but I was of coursecompletely oblique about it all for fear of spoilers. The whole thing hasstuck with me since then, and today it came bubbling out on Twitter soI'm going to dump it here as well. This time around there are spoilers and there will be even more spoilers in my elaboration after my tweets.

(Probably no one cares about DtB: Gemini spoilers by now.

I'll admit it; I've been lazy about putting fingers to keyboard and justgetting on with this entry. So before things get too far along, here'show my views of this season have coagulated so far, following up on myfirst episode reactions , and it turns out thatthis is a rather unusual season for me.

Solidly good and enjoyable:

• Flip Flappers : I'm quite enjoying this so far, weirdness and all,and yes I know that it could all fall apart spectacularly

As before I'm collecting here all of mytweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order thatI saw them).

• Izetta episode 1: Now that's how you start an (action) episode andmake me like the characters. And want to see more, of course. ♯

• BBK/BRNK episode 13: It's back, it's fun, and I liked seeing thecore cast again. We'll have to see where this storyline goes,

Once again it's time for my usual look backat what I watched this past season, to follow up on my early impressions and my midway views . This one hasturned out a lot shorter than it is in many seasons, because, well, let'srun down the shows:

Great:

• Thunderbolt Fantasy : Puppets and all, this remained very strong allthe way through. We had twists and turns and revelations and surprises,even things that pleasantly surprised me. This was over the top wuxia,