After yet another supremely boring episode where no one speaks earnestly about anything until they get back to recovering a corpse's dead body parts, one of the least interesting imaginable quests in history, I'm giving up on this show.
I don't like any of the characters, and the plot seems utterly meaningless. Whether they achieve their objective or not seems to me indifferent. Therefore, all the actions they are taking in order to achieve it are overkill. The idea that they'd be willing to kill innocent, good people just in order to bury a corpse is offensive. Life matters far more than what happens to a dead body. As a result, getting into fights over an issue like this is just asinine.
Black Bullet is pretty dumb too. If you can beat a level 5 gastrea with a railgun, a mere product of technology which any schmo can wield, then you don't need cursed children in the first place. As a result, using them is just child abuse, and shouldn't even be allowed. By making the cursed children irrelevant when push comes to shove in battle, they made this whole series, presumably about cursed children, equally irrelevant. What a stupid decision. I can think of a lot of better uses for my time than a series that contradicts itself. We were told explicitly that there was no answer to a level 5 gastrea, and then the very next episode we're told, for the first time, that there's actually an easy answer conveniently right near by they could have used all along. Well gee. I guess all the artificial hype and tension they created last episode sure was a waste of our time.
Likewise, the entire Chimera Ant arc in Hunter x Hunter is ruined, because it turns out the hunters never had to fight the ants in the first place. We could have just dropped a few bombs on them from afar at any time and won the fight effortlessly at any moment. What a contrived, stupid turn of events. The bombs were never mentioned before in the series, and everyone was treating the chimera ants like dangerous, fearsome menaces. If they could be slaughtered at will from the beginning, why was anyone taking the threat seriously from the very beginning? The whole arc is ruined and made ridiculous. Hunter x Hunter has good moments, but it's times like this that betray and undermine the series to continuous mediocrity. Even if you have 150 episodes, if your story contradicts and betrays itself, you're better off with just a 10 episode short series that maintains internal cohesion instead.
Gokukoku no Brynhildr pulled a similarly lame device when they had the characters, prophesied to die, die, and then come back to life via time travel. They built up all that tension and then cheated their way out of it, a complete letdown from what they had promised. They kept it secret from the audience that time travel was even possible until after everything had played out, so the viewers were artificially manipulated into feeling something they shouldn't have. That's a rotten trick to play on your own fans, and if this keeps up my opinion of this show is going to radically drop just like the others I've been discussing.
On the bright side, the latest episodes of No Game No Life, Mekaku City Actors, Love Live and Soul Eater Not have been getting steadily better. Which means stocks are rising just as quickly as they're falling. For a short series, Mangaka-san to Assistant-san to is simply amazing. This is probably the best short series ever. However, I'm hesitant to praise it too much because I really hate shows that are 1/2 or 1/4 length compared to normal anime. They leave you wanting more but never satisfying you, just like some worthless high class restaurant. As a result, here's my new excitement caliber rankings:
1. Fairy Tail
2. Dragonball Kai
3. Love Live 2
4. One Piece
5. No Game No Life
6. Gokukoku no Brynhildr
7. Atelier Escha & Logy
8. Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
9. Soul Eater Not
10. Mangaka-san to Assistant-san
11. Hunter x Hunter
12. Happiness Charge Precure
13. Isshukan Friends
14. Soredemo, Sekai wa Utsukushii
15. Tonari no Seki-kun
16. Break Blade
17. Mekaku City Actors
18. Hanamonogatari (when it airs)
19. Naruto (when it gets off filler)
In other news, Sailor Moon Crystal will be 26 episodes, aired once every two weeks starting this summer. I'm not sure how much content they'll be able to cover in that many episodes, but it seems to me they should be able to at least cover the first two arcs of manga at that rate. Which means as things stand we'll not actually get the Sailor Moon remake we originally desired. Maybe if it sells well, more Sailor Moon will be made? But it's pretty disappointing either way. Dragon Ball Kai got a full remake, as did Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood. Why didn't Sailor Moon? The decisions of anime studios are as always inscrutable.
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