December Updates:

Working! has finally finished.  The ending went pretty much as expected, but there were some funny jokes, some really well animated cute Poplar scenes, and a long awaited confession scene that made the whole series worthwhile.  It took five years, but Working! ended up being a 40 episode series that went all the way from the beginning to the end.  There are very few animes that can boast of such a feat, which makes Working a truly worthwhile #32 in my rankings.

Yuru Yuri recently ended with exactly 40 episodes as well, but it's nowhere near done as far as the manga source is concerned.  This is why Yuru Yuri is stuck at #50 whereas Working, with its concise storytelling method that actually reaches a destination, is up at #32.  I think a lesson can be learned for all anime series from this comparative example.

Meanwhile, The Force Awakens came out.  There was nothing juvenile or obnoxious in the movie, which is a plus.  However, the plot was horribly unrealistic and nonsensical.  Virtually nothing that happened in the movie made sense or could have actually happened the way they said it did.  It was a harmless movie with good effects, good acting and good jokes, but that just puts it on par with a typical Marvel movie.  It fell well below any of the previous Star Wars movies, that had a real heart and a soul, and a story based around internal conflicts, not external ones.  I guess that's really all you can expect when your story is no longer being told by the original inventor of the series.  Filler is ultimately filler, no matter how you prop it up.

Fairy Tail's Tartaros Arc ending was amazing and perfectly summed up the entire arc without a single wasted second.  It was a far cry from the long dragged out Dressrosa arc of One Piece.  Even so, I've probably been too harsh on One Piece's manga, which doesn't have as annoying pacing issues as the anime, so I propped it back up to #13 in my manga rankings.

Berserk is getting a new anime.  It seems to be a computer graphics based show, which will look awful, but so long as it faithfully follows the manga I'm willing to watch anything.  Since Berserk is actually getting a new anime, I took it off my wishlist (wish fulfilled!), and added in Ojamajo Doremi 16+ instead.  The ending of the original Doremi was awful, but maybe the light novel sequels fix that and make Doremi great again.  I'd love to see if that's the case with a sequel anime based on the novels, since the novels will naturally never get translated, which is the common fate of all light novels.  Even if they are translated, they're inevitably hit with takedown notices (even when they aren't licensed in English, so they're literally not losing a single customer.  Anti-piracy is so damn stupid.)

I read the light novel sections of SAO and Oreimo that weren't adapted into the anime, and I can't say we were actually missing that much.  It was probably wise to just skip these non-juicy sections and stick to the heart of the storyline which was much more interesting anyway.

Rewrite is slated to come out in the summer of 2016.  The Rio Olympics are not the most important thing coming out this summer.  Rewrite is.  Rewrite is going to be amazing.