Just a small note
Now that the discussions about the autumn anime season have started, I might as well note that for those who are wondering: I’m not planning to make a preview of the upcoming season.
It just feels like everyone and his dog is already doing one, so I don’t see what my attempts can add, since they were never that good anyway. The only advantage I had was that I wrote my previews always relatively early, but this time the first previews for the autumn season already popped up around the half of July. There’s no way I’m going to compete with that. If you want to see an autumn season preview, just go to Animenano and search for “fall preview”. I personally recommend waiting until Hashihime publishes his/hers (I’m still not sure about his/her gender…), as his/her thoughts are always very interesting to read.
The second reason is that I wanted to try a little experiment. For the past few years, I’ve always tried to prepare myself as best as possible, by reading synopsises, staff lists, et cetera, so that I knew what to expect. That doesn’t make much sense, though. I mean, I can understand how someone who’s only planning to watch a handful of series needs to separate the cream from the crop, but I’m going to watch the first episode of every new series anyway. Then what’s the point about getting excited about a series that might disappoint, or dismissing a potential gem because it doesn’t look interesting enough at first glance. Quite a few of my favourite series actually didn’t make too good of a first impression when I first saw them (Simoun, Shion no Ou, Kaiba, Mahou Shoujotai), and I’ve often been disappointed by a series that looked good because of its staff list and promo-art, but turned out to be complete garbage.
Hence why for this season, I wondered what it’d be like to go into a season without knowing anything about the upcoming series, save from possible sequels of course. With that mindset, I obviously can’t write a fall preview at the same time. I personally love being surprised by a series, so who knows? All I know is that I’m going to be enjoying the second seasons of Gundam 00 and Jigoku Shoujo, and for now I’ll just assume that the rest of the season will consist out of dull and uninspired shounen-series.