It's January 8th, Do you Know where your copy of "A Memory of Light" is?

Seriously, drop everything and go buy this book.  It's the last book of the Wheel of Time, the greatest work of English literature of all time.

Until today, January has been pretty slow.  The winter anime season has started with a whimper, only revealing a bunch of short anime series that I'm in principle opposed to -- (because short stories aren't long enough to be stories, and therefore nothing interesting can possibly happen within them) -- and a bunch of crummy series no one should possibly want to watch.

I didn't even bother watching Cuticle Tantei whatever, because the entire premise was stupid.

The same for Senran Kagura, I didn't even look at it before rejecting it.

And the same for Bakumatsu Gijinden.  Pachinko games don't make for interesting plots, so why even try watching?

I knew Hakkenden plus blah blah blah long title would be bad, but I sat through the entire episode before rejecting it.  It has all the things I hate about bad anime -- everyone trying to look cool and be a badass, reluctant heroes who don't actually want to get involved in the plot but are forced to do so through some contrivance, and a bunch of jerks who don't get along with each other in any way forming the 'party' of 'heroes.'  The art's terrible too.  It looks awful.  There isn't even a single pretty girl.  There's no redeeming quality whatsoever to this show.

Maoyuu Maou Yuusha is also bad, which could be gleaned based solely on the title, though I did watch the first episode anyway.  There isn't a single good anime story that has 'Yuusha' or "Maou" anywhere in the title or plot.  The moment they throw in these tired tropes, you know exactly how the story will run --  the hero isn't actually that heroic, and the evil demon lord is actually a good guy, and the outside world that's bigoted towards demons is the true villain.  Every single time.  This story doesn't fail to use the same dumb trope "Look, the words describing our characters are the exact opposite of what you think they should mean!", but actually manages to fail even more by including constant bouncing breasts and dumb sex jokes.  It's like the story already knows how worn thin it is, so it tries to become porn instead, but can't even do that either because the boy is a complete pussy loser so it just fails at everything.

Naturally, sequels to already good series started off in excellent fashion.  AKB0048 and Da Capo III were perfect, like usual, and obviously should be watched just like their predecessors should be.  And naturally, now that we're back to non-filler episodes, everyone should be watching One Piece, Fairy Tail and Naruto.  Little Busters, Smile Precure, Shin Sekai Yori, Bakuman and Hunter x Hunter are still their excellent selves.  Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is even getting better, just like all those fans were saying it would all this time.  The winter season does have some good points so far.  But there's only one winter anime series that's both new and possibly good:

Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru, or Oreshura.

The longer I watched this first episode, the more I grew to like it.  The story, the characters, the art, the voice acting, everything started appealing to me more and more.  Trust A-1 pictures to actually try to make a quality work and not just talk about Maou's and Yuusha's and bounce some breasts around.

You see, in this story, there's a reason why girls might like our male lead -- he's a dedicated and proficient student whose goal is to become a doctor and get a full scholarship to medical school.  He's got a good sense of humor and exhibits self control over his emotions.  He doesn't start slavering over every piece of female meat thrown in front of him, because he has something more important to him than sex.  He's even good looking.  So we have a quality male lead that should be a chick magnet.  The next question is why doesn't he indulge like any normal boy?  This is the second tripping stone most harem anime series fall over.  Unaccountably, boys surrounded by cute girls will go for ten, twenty, fifty episodes without being charmed by any of the girls who confess to him, generally because they're too 'stupid' to notice the girls' hints.  Sorry, but no boy is that stupid, so it really begins to grate.  However, this male-harem-anime-lead is different.  It's not that he doesn't notice girls coming on to him, it's that he actively distrusts love and romance as such.  Since his own parents got divorced, he has no reason to believe that any romance he engages in will fare any better.  In fact, he is positively certain that any investment into love is a complete waste of time and energy, which will inevitably only hurt him, while distracting him from his realizable goal of getting into medical school.  It doesn't matter what the girls do to try to convince him otherwise, because who can trust anything anyone says, when even marriage vows are broken at a whim?

Here we've got a story.  Cool girls any guy would like, but a guy who doesn't foolishly fall into the trap of liking any of them and keeps his distance, thus preserving the central focus of all tension in harem anime series "Who will he choose in the end?" until the end.  A cool guy any girl would like, but not just because that's convenient to the plot, but because he's a genuinely cool guy any guy would like too.  If even I've fallen for this guy, why wouldn't every girl he meets swoon too?

It's still possible that this great beginning can spiral into another tailwind disaster, it's only the first episode after all, but at least there's still some hope that new anime series can still be good, even in this new year.  I was beginning to wonder if that was still the case.

Coming up, there's still a ton of winter anime that haven't aired yet and thus can't be previewed.  Tamako Market, for instance.  And Vividred Operation.  And Sasami-san.  Love Live is guaranteed to be good based on all the music videos it's put out in the past, but technically I can't say it's great yet because the first episode still hasn't been subbed.  That will be amended shortly.

But for now it's okay that the winter anime season isn't ready for the ball yet -- because A Memory of Light comes out today.  The last portion of a story that has spanned two authors and twenty years to write.  We finally get to see how prophecy is fulfilled, how the Dark One is defeated, how the Seanchan are tamed, everything.  Issues that have taken endless books to get to grips with will suddenly all be resolved, one after the other, like punching through a series of brick walls, in an instant.  There can't be a more satisfying feeling than seeing every single line of tension be cut, leaving the reader with only relief about every single unaddressed issue and ever single unaddressed character, for the rest of time.  A Memory of Light will automatically, just by its nature, have to be the best book in the series.  Without it, none of the other books would have been any good at all.

It's been such a long, long wait.  And now, the wait is over.