The Lost Village

Spring 2016 – season end ranking

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Spring has finally drawn to a close, and man was it crazy. I burned myself out half-way through the season, and apparently so did the CR staff handling the newsletter. As a result, NONE of my articles were ever published this spring, leaving a bitter taste in an otherwise enjoyable season. But my “enjoyment” was only to the extent that the shows were pretty much there to fill a void. It certainly wasn’t as dismal as the winter season, which only had one or two titles which I could consider worthwhile. But at the same time, Spring 2016 wasn’t exactly what I would call stellar, either. Sure, I was quite delighted mid-way through to have a pretty good spread of titles, but as the season dragged on, things began to stagnate. In the end, majority of the shows were pretty ho-hum with one ending up in the “dropped” category on its final episode before proceeding on to a double-length cour (which I’ll get to in a bit). So after all is said and done, though nothing was really “bad”, nothing was all too memorable, either.

So just what happened this season? Let’s run down all the titles, season end ranking, from worst to best! Continue reading →

Spring 2016 – Week 3 in Review

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I’m wondering if I should retime these week-in-reviews to mid Wednesday to accommodate the first half of shows, then a second week-in-review to handle the remainder. Because as it stands, there are just so many shows on my watchlist, that these week in reviews are getting really long. And that’s troublesome because there are times that I have quite a lot I want to say about certain shows, but I have to limit myself in the interest of not boring you to death.

And it didn’t help much that this week had lots of shows giving pretty good arguments to warrant further watching. It’s been a solid season of anime thus far, and majority of the shows that have been shaved off of my list were pretty easy to let go of. The remainder, not so.

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Any, enough of that. Let’s do this! Continue reading →

Spring 2016 – Initial Impressions

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So this is what it feels like.

I’ve been writing casual articles for Crunchyroll for a while now, but ever since I started this blog, I’ve come to realize how taxing this kind of work is. I have to watch shows I normally wouldn’t watch, but even then I probably only watched a fraction of what other seasoned writers had to go through. Plus the fact that for whatever shows I did watch, I had to go through them with a sharper eye for detail to actually piece together the thoughts I’d use in my articles.

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It’s been a very humbling experience to be honest. Writers may look like they’re simply watching anime and spewing out criticisms and whatnot, but it’s actually a very carefully calculated process of discerning the media we consume. To all the writers out there, I salute you.

Of course, it didn’t help that this season was just full of really great shows — shows that have a lot of potential, or have a strong premise — and for once, I went back on my promise to actually cut down on shows to watch. But that’s precisely what this post is for; this is the tl;dr of the past four entries. Though it’s only a smattering of what other writers probably had to dig through, I hope this helps in trimming down your own list of things to watch. I ranked them based on overall (personal) impression, not just the initial scores I gave in previous posts. Think of it as a sort of prospective list of hopefuls that is bound to change throughout the course of the season.

Anyway, enough talk. Let’s do this! Continue reading →