By my standards, Kyoukai no Kanata is not a particularly great show onthe whole ( cf ). But I had a very positive reaction toepisode 10 andtoday I feel like explaining why I feel that episode 10 is an excellentsingle episode and in fact retroactively improves the whole show.

(There are spoilers in here, especially by the end. Also, if you want anidea of what actually happened in the episode see eg Bobduh's coverage ,which of course contains full spoilers.)

Episode

It's time for the traditional midway update to my early impressions . Past time, really, but this time the delay hasn't beenbecause I've been disenchanted with stuff.

Clear winners:

• Kyousougiga : I have nothing coherent to say about this that otherpeople aren't saying better. It's hitting lots of my buttons and beingclever about it. Both Koto (the younger one) and Myoe are excellentcharacters and the others aren't bad.

• Kill la Kill : This has sustained

I wanted to like Yowamushi Pedal , I really did (in part because thestory resonates with my own experiences), but instead it's become thefirst show I've dropped this season. I've spent a bit of time thinkingabout why and I'm going to put it this way.

Roughly speaking, a sports anime has two options. It can take the fast Initial D approach of almost immediately throwing us into importantaction, or it can take the slow Cross Game approach of getting us

One of the thematic clashes in Gatchaman Crowds is between Rui'sidealistic vision of the world as a place where the population takescare of things through altruism without needing leaders and powerstructures and his actual implementation of this vision, both with thecarefully selected Crowds users and that GALAX gives people rewards fortheir actions (and sometimes frames things as contests). By the end ofthe series Rui has thought better of one of these, giving the Crowdspower to everyone instead of a select few, but that still leaves

‘Gatchaman Crowds’: Four Flights InsideThe Most Radical Superhero Reboot of Right This Minute is an excellent and well-informed 5,000 words or so on GatchamanCrowds that says a lot of smart things about it. One of the reasonsI love it is that it points out negative things too and makes me(somewhat reluctantly) agree with them, despite my fondness for theshow . Because the essay's on Comics Allianceit takes a comics oriented view of the show, although one that'

As before , so again. Every season I do an earlyimpressions post to organize my thoughts on what I'm watching and alsoso I can laugh sadly at my naive views later in retrospect.

Clear winners (so far):

• Kyousougiga (aka Capital Craze , sometimes Kyousogiga ): I lovedthis when I saw the low-resolution webrip in 2011 and I love it even more now that it looks good and I can follow theaction. The second episode is a start on making the story

This is the kind of thing where I'll start out by quoting some text:

HISTORY MUST BE CURVED, for there is a horizon in the affairsof mankind. Beyond this horizon, events pass out of historicalconsciousness and into myth. Accounts are shortened, complexitiessloughed off, analogous figures fused, traditions “abraded intoanecdotes.” Real people become culture heroes: archetypical beingsperforming iconic deeds. (Vansina 1985)

This is from the conclusion of Michael Flynn's masterfulnine part essay on

(There are spoilers here. Also, I ramble.)

I called Berg-Katze a magnificent villain who hadbeen one step ahead of everyone all the time, so let me explain that.Berg-Katze said two significant things during its conversations: thathumans would destroy themselves (in a big conflagration) and that whatit was looking for was a suitable source of lots of fuel for this blaze.Berg-Katze's plan all along was to engineer this.

First, BK got Rui to create GALAX

With both the season and my watching of it basically wrapped up, it'stime for another one of my now customary post-season looks back ( asbefore ) to go with my early impressions and my midway views . As hasbecome typical, not much has changed from the latter.

Shows from this season that I've finished, in order (with a big gapbetween second and third):

• Uchouten Kazoku (aka Eccentric Family ): As mentioned before, thispushes a bunch of my storytelling and