So what happened is that I saw someone on Twitter wondering if theyshould catch up on Made in Abyss , because they'd heard (and seenfrom screenshots) that some brutal and unpleasant things happenedto the characters and were partly wondering if the show was beinggratuitous with them. This sparked a stream of thoughts on Twitter :

Made in Abyss's latest episodes are wrenching and powerful, but arethey necessary? And is this a question that matters?

I don't think MiA's events were gratuitous

It's time once again for a much of the way through update on my earlierimpressions of this season . By this point both myviews and my expectations have solidified, although I'm still hoping fora surprise or two.

Still excellent:

• Made in Abyss : I recently characterized this as a quest withoutactive opposition (so far) , where theobstacle in the way of Riko and Reg is the Abyss itself, with itscreatures and its very nature. The show is doing extremely well atportraying this

I'm somewhere between three and five episodes into everything I'mwatching, which is long enough for most shows to show their cards andfor my opinions to firm up. So, as usual , here'show my views of this season have shaken out, to follow up on my firstepisode reactions .

Excellent but alarming:

• Made in Abyss : This is clearly the best show I'm watching andeverything so far has been pretty much universally excellent, but ithas been building up an increasingly ominous

Once again it's time for my traditionallook back at what I watched in this past Spring season, to followup on my early impressions and my midway views . I could say that nothing really changed from themidway, but that's actually not quite true; I think that two showsactually picked themselves up at the end ( WorldEnd and Alice &Zoroku ).

Pretty much excellent:

• Eccentric Family second season: Okay, however painful it is for meto admit this, I will; Eccentric Family '

I've said before a number of times that what I find satisfying in theendings of shows isn't necessarily what other people do. Today I wantto write a bit about that and about some different ways that endingscan be satisfying.

As humans, we have a natural desire for our stories to make sense. Wecan tolerate a certain amount of not understanding things during thestory, but by the end we would really like to know what happened and whyit happened and so on; we would like

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

• Hina Logic ep #1: A perfectly competent but uninspiring episode inthe 'girls have adventures at school' genre. It lacks any great spark. →

• Katsugeki Touken Ranbu episode 1: The action is decent but thewriting comes across as pedestrian and merely functional. It's kindaempty. →

• Knight's & Magic episode 1: This is goofy popcorn

(There are spoilers here.)

For the last couple of episodes of Re:Creators I'vebeen griping about something on Twitter, first indirectly and now explicitly :

And the people in Re:Creators really need to stop allowing Altair tohave a platform to build a larger audience & more powers with.

In the spirit of not doing all my blogging on Twitter , I'm going to write more here, mostly in the formof tweets with added commentary.

@UgokiGyokuyou :lol you want censorship? Take

(There are spoilers here, in as much as I can spoil a show that's beenover for a year.)

In the first season of Concrete Revolutio , one of the mysteries waswhat happened to Raito Shiba to turn him from a police detective intowhat he became instead (however you want to describe it). The firstepisode in Concrete Revolutio 's second season finally answered this,and in the process it made Raito Shiba the most tragic character in Concrete Revolutio for me, because he is the

Normally I write my 'best N' yearly entries relatively soon after the endof the year, although 2015's slipped into February. Thistime around things have been extensively delayed, and while part of thatis because I got lazy after I initially missed my usual window, part ofthat is because I've felt genuinely conflicted and confused about my viewsthis time around. This delay matters to me because the more I delay, themore my feelings can fade and the more perspective I can