Uma Musume S2 Rewatched:

How do you describe a season that leaves you in tears for half the eps?  Episode 2, episode 8, episode 10, episode 12, episode 13. . . I almost want to call it the greatest anime ever.  But I need to restrain myself a tiny bit.  The series is only 29 episodes long, and it's competing with series that are over 700 episodes in length.  No 29 episode series can ever surmount a hurdle like that.  Even if horse girls can jump really high. . .

Plus the second season is better than the first season and infinitely better than the oav's so we're really only talking 13 episodes here.  How can a 13 episode series compete with 200 episode juggernauts?

There's another weakness to Uma Musume that keeps it from the top -- the lack of quality characters.  So many horses are there only for comic relief or as bit roles, few really have the chance to impress.  The second best character in Uma Musume isn't even Special Week, who has too many comic foibles to take seriously, or Mejiro McQueen who is too Johnny One-Note.  It's Rice Shower, a girl who only gets speaking lines in a couple episodes.  Tokai Teio is being asked to shoulder the entire weight of the series on her own small nimble frame because there's no one else to help her.

Compare that to Kanon, another short but amazing series, which is probably the most similar case -- there are so many great girls with so many lines across so many episodes in that series!  Nayuki, Shiori, Ayu, Makoto, Mai, Yuichi -- even Akiko and Sayuri have more lines than Rice Shower.  Is Tokai Teio supposed to be more charming and magnetic than all those girls combined?  Since the makers of Uma Musume turned everyone else into comic relief apparently that really was their plan.  Tokai Teio is amazing and perfect, but not that perfect.  That's asking too much of anyone.

I can't thank Uma Musume enough for all the wonderful memories.  But if it wants to keep climbing it needs a third season or more, because Teio can't do it all alone.  We'll need more relatable characters and more exciting events like all the 100 episode series have.

I rewatched Uma Musume only a couple weeks after I finished watching it but I probably loved it even more this time.  That's a powerful story if it can do something like that.  Now I need to do the same with Non Non Biyori so I can make the 'full clear' dream a reality.

In unrelated news, Macross 7 is out in blu-ray over at nyaa.si, I believe for the first time ever.  I really like Macross 7 because it features mai waifu Mylene, but at the same time it's the series that wasted the most time on the most repetitive nonsense imaginable.  Rewatching it yet again is going to be quite the chore, but there's no sense downloading and owning the blu-ray version unless I do so.  For people who have never watched Macross 7 this is a golden opportunity, though.