I may have a muted and mostly intellectual reaction to Revue Starlight as a whole ( per my summer comments ), butthere is one character that the show completely sold me on and got meemotionally invested in, and that was Daiba Nana. And whatever else Imay feel about the show, episode 7, her focus episode, was an excellentand amazing thing. For me, it was unquestionably the highlight of theentire show.

At one level it's not surprising that I like episode 7, because one

Last year I wrote about some shows that didn't work out for me , and this year I've decided to do it again for my ownreasons. As with last year, these are shows that I started with highhopes, shows that by all rights should work for me, and then thingsdidn't work out. I'm almost always sad when this happens, because I wantto enjoy everything I watch and I want to have more things to watch thatI enjoy. As with last

(There's a bit of a spoiler for SSSS.Gridman here.)

One of my ongoing interests is things around the anicamera ,the imaginary camera that 'films' anime, and along with it the variousdeliberate artistic distortions animation uses ( including in CG ), such as smears and super-deformed things. Studio Trigger is ofcourse no stranger to any of this, as anyone who's watched their showslike Space Patrol Luluco or Kill la Kill knows, and so it is notsurprising that various

Looking back on this year in anime for me, one thing that definitelystands out is that I've watched a lot less shows than I usually do. Ithasn't been because I'm out of time, or because I have some limit onhow many shows I want to watch. Instead it's because I've become a lotmore willing to listen to my gut, to mostly not watch things unlessI'm actually enjoying them, and to drop shows that I've stopped

There's a lot of reasons that I like Gun Gale Online , starting withit being great fun to watch, but certainly one of them is that it is avery exceptional show in a couple of ways. To put it simply, Gun GaleOnline is an action show that's all about a bunch of women, and it'salmost completely free of fanservice (and romance). Gun Gale Online is about a bunch of women gleefully having fun together shooting eachother up in a game, and

I usually think of myself as someone who watches anime as a prettysolitary activity. It's not really true, as I've understood for sometime (for instance, I know I face the tacit pressure of conformity ), but most of the time I can not really beconscious of the social side of my watching; it's just sort of there,as something that happens. This year, Netflix provided an interestingreminder of that social side.

With a weekly show, there's always

In the beginning of Laid-Back Camp , Nadeshiko comesacross as mostly your typical progatonist for these sorts of shows;an energetic but ditzy newbie, all full of both enthusiasm (to drag usalong) and ignorance (so we can have things explained to us). She hadher moments, but in the beginning I was worried that I'd get tired ofher .

In the fourth episode, Nadeshiko and the other two members of theOutclub head off to a campsite in what turns out to be a

So, yeah, I watched Devilman Crybaby . It was an experience.

Before I started watching, what I knew was that this a Yuasa adaptation of a famous early70s Go Nagai manga, funded byNetflix and so without broadcast content restrictions. The first episodepretty much delivered what I expected in that regard; as I said onTwitter , it wasvery over the top in Go Nagai's usual way, and gleefully and faithfullyrendered by Yuasa ( eg ). Ialso said something that I didn

I know, in my fall brief impressions I said that Iprobably wouldn't do a 'midway' post. I changed my mind because thereare a couple of things I want to note before the shows end and my viewschange again.

Excellent:

• SSSS.Gridman : This show is amazing, and it's also reached the pointwhere the giant robots and kaiju fights are essential driversfor the compelling character drama. It also continues tosneak in straight faced jokes and absurd situations thatare both funny and