Anime

The only series I'm following so far this season is Apocalypse Hotel. Last week's episode was fine all in all, but it did an odd thing. They showed the OP for the first time, and it was uncomfortably dissonant - both downbeat and off-key, and ultimately sort of dirge-like. But it was disconcerting enough that it has to have neen deliberate, and it sort of fits, because at the point we picked up the story, both the hotel and the MC have just about run their course, and have just at this late stage found a glimmer of hope. So I suspect that as their fortunes improve, the OP is going to evolve to reflect it. Or at least I hope so, since that would be awesome, and without something like that, the OP will just remain inexplicably awkward.

As far as day-to-day viewing goes, I started off the week with season 1 of Baka to Test. It was fine but sort of oddly dull. I'm not quite sure how it managed that, since all of the individual parts seem like they should add up to more than that. The setup's interesting and the characters are relatively well developed and the art style is intriguing and it's consistently funny, but it still somehow manages to be sort of drab all in all. The subs were sort of meta-amusing though - very much "localized," and by era as well as place.

Then after a bit of wandering, I watched Saekano Or more precisely, I watched half of Saekano, then dropped it. It was strange - the "boring girlfriend" of the title was the only engaging character in the whole cast. She's intriguing and distinctive and very much her own character, while all of the rest are just awkward conglomerations of tropes that aren't even internally coherent. I never got a sense of any of them as distinct, recognizable individuals - they were just sort of blank ciphers assigned some combination of stereotypes - and their actions never seemed to spin off from their characters, but to just be whatever was necessary to move the plot along. And most notably, the qualities and actions assigned to the MMC tended to be tedious, insufferable and obnoxious, in addition to arbitrary, which is most of what led me to drop it.

Then I ended up on something only sort of anime-adjacent - Pantheon - which was excellent and highly recommended, but not technically anime, so I guess I'll leave it at that.