From the second to last episode, hopefully not providing any spoilers.

I had fun with Zvezda, but it’s a bit of a kooky show with an approach that is probably as off putting as it is appealing. Essentially, the show simply doesn’t give a damn about providing the audience with any kind of actual context in regards to the world in which it’s set. It’s a experience not entirely unlike watching a spin-off series without having seen the original work, or perhaps watching a slightly more coherent Tomino production.

This is to say, the show has a certain internal consistency to it, and there’s never really any indication that the characters are ever experiencing anything that doesn’t make sense to them outside of some sporadic bouts of confusion from our protagonist early on. It’s a weirdly naturalistic approach to writing for a show as conceptually out-there are Zvezda, in so much as the characters don’t really feel the need to stand around and explain things that they should already know to each other simply for the benefit of the audience.

The show does, eventually, find itself with the need to throw the viewer a narrative life-ring, lest they drown in the shows closing arc, but it’s little more than is necessary. The show still expects you to make your own assumptions and draw your own connections between things, though – it’s a curiously intelligent for a show is actually kind of dumb, even if it does end up making it easy to reach too far and make conclusions about what the show is actually about that are shortly proven completely wrong.

Also Renge-chan da best.
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Finally, at long last, Love Live is back, singlehandedly saving the anime season from being naught but three solid months of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure memes. What a terrific first episode it was, too.

It’s kind of funny going back and reading how strangely lukewarm I was on the first series of Love Live back when it first started – certainly, what I was writing doesn’t exactly match up with my memories of back then, and most assuredly don’t with the way I felt once the series concluded. It doesn’t really ring true with my reaction to re-watching the initial episodes either, though my re-watch has only progressed as far as the sixth episode at this point.

Still, I’ve been looking forward to this show, which rather awkwardly does nothing to denote it’s sequel status in it’s moniker, returning to our screens – pretty much increasingly so as the months have gone on. Maybe it’s just all the Love Live music I’ve been listening to in the interim bolstering my excitement (though still only the stuff actually used in the anime, for the most part – I’ve not listened to any of the subgroup or character singles or anything).
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Wake Up, Girls wrapped up on Friday. I have to admit, going into the last anime season, it was the new show I was looking forward to the most, even if the reasons for that weren’t exactly the purest (or, rather, there was a certain amount of expected Yamakan-related schadenfreude going into it).

As the show progressed, it was probably the new series (as in, not Kill la Kill or Build Fighters or any carryover from the prior season) that I followed most closely week to week, though, ultimately, it ended up being a bit of a weird kettle of fish.
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This is the point where I realise, point out, and apologise for that fact that I’ve not updated in a smidgen over a month now. I’ve done what I was fearing might happen, and fallen into that KanColle hole for some inexplicable reason – I mean, I’m not really engaging with it in much beyond the core game. I’m not reading any of the fan comics, and even as far as the ingame content goes, I’m mostly just scanning the translated character dialogue for the particularly cute shipgirls on the Wikia. I figure it’ll lead to less disappointment when the anime inevitably doesn’t capture the characters personality in the same fashion as [insert fanwork-or-tie-in-manga here].
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In the bottom-left corner of this scene in episode seven of Space Dandy, AKA the episode which is not a little like the movie Redline. It doesn’t actually say Mikan on it, but hey, there’s clearly an orange on it, so I’ll claim it.

I have astonishingly little to say about Space Dandy. I, on aggregate, enjoy it. It’s a little difficult to know what you are going to be getting into every week, not just on and episode by episode basis, but on a half-by-half one – that’s particularly the case with the eighth episode, where the show presents a particularly hard tonal shift between the A and B parts. The unpredictability of the tone and content of the show is one of the things I like about it, but I do sometimes wonder if throwing up a different title card at the midway point, forcing an effective tonal-reset by suggesting the start of a different story, would have relieved some of the complaints leveled at the show on occasion.

Also, Bea has the best shaped head.