At the start of a new season I tend to give anime some leniency with whether I'll watch it or not, since there are plenty of shows I've watched that I didn't think sounded good from the initial premise or the first episode (Any new show I start, I wait until episode 2 or 3 before I decide to commit or quit, unless the first episode is
really bad, like, painful to sit through.), but I always tend to miss or opt out of the late arrivals (ie: the tail end of the new season premiers that pop up when the other shows are already 2-3 episodes in) because I get overloaded on new shows. This season I'm actually fairly low on shows that caught my interest, so I caught a gem of a late arrival.
Hyouka. The initial premise seemed kind of dry, since it's a Mystery Genre show that isn't also horror or supernatural, and I've found with mysteries that are prone to sticking to reality, I either get bored because I've figured out the mystery really fast and have to wait for the cast to catch up (usually due to the creators being bad at mysteries, giving way to many clues to the audience, or using a totally dried up "mystery" that anyone who's every seen a few mystery shows will already know) or because they end up suddenly veering off from their "sticking to normalcy" shtick and throwing the entire show into horror, supernatural, fantasy, or whatever else, and the sudden shift is too jarring to my attention to let me enjoy it.
tl;dr: I'm really, really, really picky about Mystery Genre shows.
Anyway, hyouka sets up kind of dull, but the main character really caught my attention simply by being pretty much the exact definition of my highschool self (low energy, not out of laziness but "I don't want to do it because it's a waste of time/not worth the effort." ie: fully capable of doing ****, and do stuff when it needs to be done, but not doing anything that doesn't
need to be done. He gets strongarmed (apparently; she requested he do it by letter, and he said that she's trained in aikido and some other form of martial combat (it wasn't a name I recognize, so I forgot it)) by his older sister into joining a club at his high school so that it doesn't get shut down. Proceed to him meeting a girl in the club room who somehow manages to unknowingly enchant him into action (solving the present mystery), which shocks him. The episode's first mystery surrounds the fact that the door was unlocked when she got there, and locked when he did 3-4 minutes later, with her inside, despite the fact that the door can only be locked with the key he had just gotten from the teacher's office. It's pretty obvious what happened when everything's set up, but the funny thing is that he figured it out at the exact same time I did. Second half is pretty standard high school mystery intro fodder; investigating one of the school's "seven legends" and it seemed to play out pretty plainly, but the ending of the episode pretty much hooked me.
sooooo let's see, my list for this season, since I haven't actually thought about it and want to note it down somewhere; in no particular order:
Continuations/Second Seasons of shows I've already watched:
- Kore wa Zombie de
su ka? Of The Dead (lol, forgot that filter)
- Fate/zero
- Moretsu Pirates (not that it actually stopped airing, or anything)
New Shows:
- Sankarea
- Zetman
- Accel world
- Jormundgand
- Medaka Box
- Tasogare Otome X Amnesia
- Saint Seiya Omega (guilty pleasure. It's
baaaaad, but that makes it good. It's basically a modern style remastery of the 1970-80's style of story telling)
- Hyouka
I-want-to-see-another-episode-or-two-before-I-decide's:
- Hairyore! Nyarko-san (I really can't tell whether I love this or hate it.)
- Ozuma (I need to actually sit down and watch the 2nd/3rd episodes to get my opinion, I just haven't yet. I'll probably end up watching it, though)
I knew I was right when I thought this felt like light load... I usually end up watching more from a new season than this
. A bunch of the new shows are totally out of my interest, genre-wise, though, so that's probably a big part of it.