This is just like last time . This season featuresan unusually large number of shows where I need to see more episodesto really make up my mind, which doesn't inspire me with confidence.

(Technically this is not just first episodes, I've seen a few secondepisodes too by now.)

Shows I've seen, more or less in the order seen:

• Infinite Stratos : the opening of the first episode shows us justwhere this show is going. Since I expect the accumulation of the

This is my best N anime list, not other people's, and as traditional itis really a 'most enjoyable N anime' list except that that sounds muchmore wishy-washy. This covers things that I saw in calendar 2010, notnecessarily things that were released then. It is definitely in orderfor the early entries, after which things get fuzzy.

• Haibane Renmei : I finally saw this. Everything they say about howgood it is is true. The climax of the last episode

Initial reactions to Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica have mostlylabeled Homura as Fate to Madoka's Nanoha, partly based on herconfrontations with Madoka. However, Steven Den Beste speculates that Homura's remarks to Madoka are not a threat, but a sincere andwell-meant warning. I agree with him; this is exactly how I read thefirst episode.

Unlike SDB I don't think we need to posit any peculiar unreality inthe pleasant world that Madoka inhabits to explain this. One of thebackground themes of

Author :

An episode before I jotted "sick of Ritos hazing Salza", but now theydecided to outstrip my wildest expectations.

My impression was that Ritos didn't hate her sister Salsa, shejust liked tormenting her. The whole thing struck me as a terriblyexaggerated version of a certain sort of sibling dynamics.

(In fact I have vague memories that every so often, Ritos does somethingsubtle to help out Salsa's dreams of romance.)

Update : oops, I have just demonstrated the perils of

Since I wrote about my first reactions , I feel likewriting a retrospective of the season. I wound up regularly watchingfive fall shows this season, and this time around this list isdefinitely in order:

• Star Driver : if pressed, I would have to summarize this as anUtena-oid magical girls show except with giant robots and boys(mostly). It's the clear standout of the season for me, partlybecause it is so novel and unusual instead of being yet anotherretread. I like seeing

I wound up watching SYD because Author did and liked it .I liked it a fair bit; it was not deep, but the jokes reliably made mesmile and even laugh, and they were (mostly) a style of humour that Ienjoy.

As characters themselves note in episode 3, the humour generally reallydoes need the straight man (usually Takatoshi, although Hagimurasometimes fills this role). I'm not going to try to figure out just why,but without the straight man many of the episode

Prompted by Author's entry :

A story like TWGOK generally livesor dies based on how interesting you find the character of the week (orcouple of weeks) whose story is being explored, and so my initialinterest was because the first girl that Keima hadto deal with had an interesting story. The second character lookedpromising, but I dropped the show shortly into the third episode when Iwound up feeling that she was an unsympathetic idiot and I didn't carewhat her story was or what happened to

As I mentioned before , I hada couple of speculations and theories about Gemini that I got completely wrong. Today I feel like writing them up (afterall, why waste my notes on them).

Note that there are spoilers here.

So, my misses:

• I thought that Suo was not actually a contractor and thus did not have arenumeration. Having gotten Hei's power, sucked in by the stone andfocused through her own imagination, she just thought she had to bea contractor and so she

Here is my theory (springing from the aside in the last entry ):

At one point, the heroine of Pumpkin Scissors has to finally grit herteeth and meet her arranged fiancee. There's a lot of ways this couldgo badly for her, but actually he's a cool guy; he's nice, competent,powerful, understanding, and of course it turns out that he's one ofthe lead villains. How predictable .

But let's think of it from the other side