Once again it's time for one of these now-traditional midway updates on my early impressions of the season. While there havebeen some surprises so far, things have broadly turned out the way thatI expected.

Great:

• One-Punch Man : I didn't expect this to become basically my favoriteshow of the season, but it has. The humour has been working for me(partly because the show is willing to be understated and just letthe funny bits sit there without comment) and I

Here's something that I've not so much discovered as realized recently:I generally don't really enjoy a show where there's doom looming over thecharacters. This was a factor in my initial reaction to Symphogear and it's come up again this season in Mobile SuitGundam - Iron-Blooded Orphans .

It's not that I'm opposed to character death (although certain formsof it turn me off ) or that I require happy endingsfrom my shows. I think it'

Scamp of The Cart Driver somewhat recently wrote Anime Archetypes: The Superior Appealof the Tsundere for MAL ( via ),in which he said:

There are some debates over who the original tsundere is. I've seen itargued that Lum from Urusei Yatsura was, but she's very open abouther affection so I don't think it counts. However there's no doubtwhich character became the popular face for the term with anime fans.That would be the hot-headed robot pilot, Asuka

As before it's time for another set of myearly impressions, this time supplementing my first episode takes after I've watched some more of the shows I'mactually following.

Clear winners:

• Subete ga F ni Naru - The Perfect Insider : This is still not reallyshowing its cards, but on the other hand I love how the charactersinteract. It's a grown up show with flawed characters who are toosmart and too smug for their own good.

• Concrete Revolutio : It's now

Once again it's time for my usual look backat the shows I watched this past season to see how my early impressions and my midway views wound up inthe end.

Excellent:

• Gatchaman Crowds Insight : In the end the show didn't give us anyreally easy answers, which is not unexpected; the issues Insight was dealing with aren't problems you can solve easily. Sadly the showfelt it had to explain itself to people who might not have gotten itin the last episode, which I

Since I want to do less of my blogging just on Twitter ( cf ), I've decided to collect here all of my tweetedreactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order I saw them).

• Heavy Object episode 1: Meh. It's a reasonably well made, reasonablywell done generic work. You know the drill by now. →

• Noragami Aragoto episode 1: Maybe I'm in a grumpy mood, but nothing inthis episode really (re)hooked me.

If you follow my Twitter as well asthis blog, you've probably noticed that I write a lot more commentaryon Twitter these days, commentary that maybe could be blog entries.I think there's a number of reasons why I've wound up doing so much onTwitter compared to here:

• It's simpler and lower-friction. I don't have to come up with anentry title, open up my editor, and so on; I can just Tweet. My client's

In my early views of the season I listed Akagamino Shirayuki-hime as 'not for me' after watching two episodes. Recently I decided topick it up again, partly because this season leaves me bored during theweek and partly because it kept getting praised on Twitter. I wound upquite liking it.

Part of the problem the show has is best exemplified by an Evirustweet to me in reaction to my watching it :

@cks_anime How many kidnappings are you up to now?

If you saw

I almost decided to not write a 'midway' update since I'd delayed it solong and I felt I didn't have anything really to say, but I've abruptlychanged my mind. So now it's time to update my early impressions .

Based on my Twitter reading, some people have been feeling that thisis a weak season. I don't feel that myself; I've been watching aboutmy typical number of shows and I've been about as enthused for them