Winter 2010 Season Start Overview – The Initial Power Levels

I think onee-chan is pretty cool guy. eh eats imoutos and doesn’t afraid of anything.

I suppose it’s about time to crank one of these posts out. I got some nice specimen piled up for another image site rage, but let me get over and done with this first. Your usual initial ranking of shows running this season plus a few words I may have to say about each.

Starting from the top, Durarara!! absolutely dominates the start of the season with its excellent mix of realistic human issues and supernatural elements, all packed in pleasant audiovisual execution. Brains Base is off for a very strong start and I expect them to maintain this level of quality throughout the show’s run.

In the top tier we got Baka to Test and Hidamari X***, former of which managed to deliver performance I totally did not expect. Baka to Test is an excellent comedy with an interesting story setting and a good range of characters. It also did a bold move by playing in the romance cards right at the start, which I believe is a good thing. Dragging a budding romance and letting it gather too much impact to divert the focus from the comedy itself was one of the mistakes that ruined Nyan Koi! and I’m pleased to see that Baka to Test doesn’t seem to follow down that path. The show looks and sounds awesome, and the jokes are excellent – I spent most of the second episode laughing my butt off. Hell, I even had to pause the show a few times to catch my breath. I love Baka to Test already and as it has some solid names in its production crew, I believe I won’t be disappointed. Now about Hidamari X***…it’s Hidamari in good and bad. By now pretty much everyone knows whether they like it or not so I won’t waste my time writing about it.

Going down to the mid tier, I must express my slight disappointment over Letter Bee. The show isn’t bad by all means but seems to be missing that certain something. Not to mention that Lag is getting really annoying and they sure could cut down on the Niche-nopan-jokes. That said, at least it’s trying and I can’t hate it for that. Talking about last season shows, Railgun is still hanging in there but we’ve come a long way down from the top tier where I initially placed it when it started airing. The first half of the show was largely spent on pointless fanservice and banal fillers with a rather rushed mid-ending. There is hardly any doubt about JC Staff continuing with this formula in this season as well. Right now the only interesting things left in Railgun are Saten’s circumstances but otherwise the show has pretty much abandoned all the numerous chances offered by its solid background setting. Then again the original Railgun manga was barely more than Kamachi’s attempt to get people to shut the fuck up about Mikoto, so I guess Railgun is sort of a bastard child to begin with.

Okay faggots, there’s the SoRaNoWoTo for you. I placed it in the mid tier but I recognize its potential to make it to the top class if A-1 plays its cards right (thus the plus). Now listen up because I’m (probably) only going to say this once: SoRaNoWoTo has nothing to do with K-ON!. Stop being fucking idiots and comparing these shows because there are no similarities whatsoever aside from the character art. It’s just that in these times of Western fans wasting their time on shit hives like /a/ and AnimeSuki, people immediately draw a = between two shows when there’s some utterly irrelevant similarity between them. Such as the character art. I remember people drawing a line between K-ON! and Lucky Star last spring and as I stated back then already, the two shows represent entirely different aspects of school comedy and the similarity between characters works between K-ON! and Azumanga Daioh but no way in hell with Lucky Star. And there are even less comparable points between SoRaNoWoTo and K-ON!, which should be so damn obvious once you stop to actually think about it instead of listening to some faggot pouring his bullshit on an image board. Okay, Kanata and Yui share the similarity of being dojikkos, although their personalities could hardly be more different. But Mio and Rio? Just what is the basis for that? Both have long hair and big boobs? Oh please. Same goes for the rest of the cast but too bad, I guess it’s just too hard to get over the somewhat similar graphics. Of course conveniently ignoring the world of difference that exists in the general atmosphere, story setting, background art and the fact that SoRaNoWoTo is not even a comedy.

Anyway, moving on to Vampire Bund. SHAFT, I am disappoint. I expected a smart presentation of what would really happen if vampires announced their existence to the world. Instead I got a bit of that and then a bunch B-movie monsters doing stuff B-movie monsters do. Hell, the fight scenes don’t even look that great. And I have a nagging feeling that this is the direction the show wants to keep going, so I expect it to dive down to the low tier (thus the minus). SHAFT, get your shit together. We already have one shitty demon fighting anime around down in the shit tier and it doesn’t need a companion.

Down in the gray depths of low tier we have Ookami Kakushi and Ladies vs Butlers!, neither of which have really surprised me with their poor performance. Ookami would be in the mid tier otherwise but its impending fail is just too obvious. It will turn into bullshit within a few more episodes without a shred of doubt. I have spoken. As for LvB, I’m not going to even bother explaining. It’s from the makers of Kanokon! for the fans of Kanokon!, whoever sick bastards they are.

Finally the shit tier and its sole resident is not very surprisingly Omamori Himari, a show with horrible performance in almost every aspect. Remember, we bloggers watch this shit so you don’t have to! Oh well, could be worse…

Yes, I did give it a try since people insisted. I hope you’re happy now.