So, I have two things that I enjoy that I never admit to on first dates. They consume inordinate amounts of my time when I let them, and I can get super passionate when discussing them, so I never really get to bring them up with "normal humans." These things are Wrestling and Anime.

Coincidentally, 95% of both of those things are trash. Like fuck-off terrible garbage that insults you for spending your precious time watching it. Oddly enough, that's kind of why I enjoy it, because when something is good, it's really, really good - just look at the Sasha Banks v. Bayley match on NXT Takeover for an example of that. Don't worry, I won't talk any more about wrestling until later (SummerSlam was kind of laammmeee though). Instead I will talk about anime.

This summer I powered through a metric fuck ton of anime. Not for any particular reason, mind you, but because that's just how you end up watching it. You watch one series, go "man I'll just watch another anime, fuck it" and suddenly you're balls deep in to a Masaaki production and wondering how the fuck you got there. To put this in the form of a list, I watched:

1. Eureka 7 (Again) 2. Gargantia of the Verduous Planet (or something spelled like that) 3. Log Horizon (1 & 2) 4. Half of Samurai Flamenco 5. Arpeggio of Blue Steel 6. ToraDora! 7. Kaiba

I'll do short reviews for all of them, and tell you where you can find most of them. Also watch Welcome to the NHK when you get the chance. At this point you need to pirate it or buy the DVDs, because it's off every streaming service I have checked. Continues to be my favorite anime ever produced, even if it's not the best one I've ever watched.

1. Eureka 7

Eureka 7 is a favorite series of mine. I watched this a year ago originally, and hated it at first. I found the main character to be frustrating, I thought the anime tropes presented were annoying, and it just wasn't what I wanted at the time. Midway through the first season, it all clicked. The dumb shit that I just thought was anime bullshit? It was given at least a bit of explanation. The character being kind of pathetic? Made sense. In the least "look how meta we are deconstructing this genre" way, it subverted most of my expectations and told a very genuine if kind of sadly idealistic love story, dressed in the trappings of a mecha anime. All of it was very fluidly animated on top of it, and the animation bumps at key moments were well appreciated.

There isn't any anime quite like Eureka 7, and that's a good thing. It tugs at the heartstrings, the action is very limited but propels the story forward when present, and it has some of the best music in any series ever. Characters are not necessarily realistic, but they are believable, and more importantly, likeable. Just about everything has a resolution or an explanation. It's cute, it's charming, and even now I'd rank it as maybe my 5th favorite ever made. It's also what started this whole summer of anime; I rewatched it and wanted more. Overall, heavily recommended.

2. Gargantia of the Verduous Plante

After Eureka, I wanted something in a similar vein, but not just a direct sequel. I had a list of recommendation that I compiled and mostly ignored, and Gargantia was towards the top. Why? Well, it was short. I believe only 12 episodes (may be 13). I finished the entire series in about 2-3 days.

Gargantia is a story about poorly mixed and ineffectually animated space battles that are later replaced by a pretty good science fiction story that unfortunately doesn't give itself enough breathing room. Short synopsis. Humans have mechs. We fight space crustaceans. Humans are bred basically to just do that, and are fanatically devoted to their cause.

Overall I will say that you should watch this series, but it is the least "action-y" series presented, so if you are looking for awesome mech battles just skip this. The story is overall very generic but with a few twists, and I wish that the studio behind it dropped the weird anime trope of never wanting to directly pursue romance subplots, because there's potentially a really good one present that is mostly ignored by the end. Characters are fairly shallow but given how short the series is, you can kind of see why. Like Eureka 7, it is a coming of age story first, and everything presented is used to advance that theme.

I would not rank this anywhere near my favorite shows, but it's well made and they had a fairly solid idea. If Gargantia had been given 26 episodes with more breathing room for characters, better focus on the relationship between characters, and a little bit more exploration of the world around them, it'd have been one of my favorites fairly easily, but as it stands it's very heavily reliant on the twists presented and a little bit backloaded in terms of character development.

3. Log Horizon

This will be my shortest review. It's an anime about people being sucked in to an MMO that focuses on the socio-political elements of that transition more than something like Sword Art. It is very, very much an anime and carries with it all of the flaws of other major series. I enjoyed it despite these issues because I enjoyed the setting enough to forgive the glaring issues presented.

The biggest strength of the series it that it deals with the concept of reality as an extension of the game rules very well. The entire first episode has them operating things from a menu like they were playing the game. It also feels like it was written by someone who plays MMOs rather extensively, and is more akin to a love note to say, FF11/Ultima Online/WoW than a really good story. The character design is actually fairly clever as well; when they flashback to the real world, the animation style switches to a more realistic look, which drives home the point that the weird appearances of the characters we see is just what they've chosen for themselves, rather than just a copy of their looks outside of the computer.

If you don't like anime, you can skip it, but it's fairly enjoyable. Season 2 spins its wheels far too much for my taste though.

4. Samurai Flamenco

I lied. Samurai Flamenco will be my shortest review.

You remember Super? Imagine if Super was a little bit more optimistic and was an anime. Now imagine that about halfway through Super, it suddenly shit the bed so hard that you stopped watching.

There's this really awesome scene in Flamenco where it just 180s from a very light hearted action-comedy to a very dark subversion of exactly that. Legitimately a great moment. The following episode the animation budget nose dives and the characters go to sort of space and it becomes a parody of Power Rangers, robbing the audience of the chance to reflect on what just happened and shooting the entire series in the food.

You can go ahead and watch it, but end halfway through and just pretend like he gave up being a super hero and went on to have PTSD because it got fucked fast.

5. Arpeggio of Blue Steel

Ranking in as my least favorite anime that I have seen in almost a decade, Arpeggio of Blue Steel is a show about ships run by A.I. anime girls who all end up falling in love with a high school student and is total fucking bullshit, fuck everything, fuck anime.

This series hurt to watch. It is unfunny levels of bad. First and foremost it's a disappointing way to handle a cool concept. If you were to tell me you had an anime where a human captain had to outwit a bunch of A.I. boats in sick naval battles with all of the limited resources and strategic sacrifices made in that situation I'd be hype as shit. If the fights in this series played out like a game of chess instead of a game of "who can masturbate the most furiously in to their own mouth" then I'd be all about what it was offering.

Instead the hero just kind of outwits everyone, fights are visually overwhelming in the worst way, characters range from abysmal to non-existent, none of the art design makes any sense, and to top it all of it's one of those shit-tier 3D animated animes so it looks like trash all the fucking time. The opening song is shit, the ending song is shit, the music during it is shit, and the concept is shit.

You can't just have a military grade A.I. fall in love with a fucking human in one episode you assholes. That's bad writing in a genre that is notorious for bad writing. The whole series is written like it's a hentai game, except the payoff isn't poorly animated, overly sized tits it's poorly animated, overly busy naval warfare. Fuck this series. Don't watch it. Even as a funny "haha it'll be so bad" don't watch it. It's not funny bad it's just boring or cringe inducing and it wavers between the two. A fucking shame too, I really like naval combat and I think it shows characters well, but if you're going to use it for bullshit then the end result is still just fucking bullshit.

6. ToraDora!

ToraDora! was the most relationship focused anime I watched this summer, so if you don't like those just skip past it. The anime focuses on the friendship-turned-romance of the two main characters as they try to help each other get close to their respective crushes. Like all anime, it's set in high school for some reason. Also like most anime, especially romances, it ends rather weakly as it becomes clear that the writers either don't know how to resolve the relationship or aren't allowed to resolve it in a satisfying way.

Like Eureka, ToraDora! has a cast of characters that start off rather irritating but become likeable as you learn more about them. It's fairly well written and has some good character moments where the curtains are peeled back and the tropes normally associated with them are revealed. I enjoyed my time with it overall, but it has a lot of issues, and these really hampered my opinion of it.

First, the relationship. I would say that revealing that the two main characters end up developing romantic feelings is a spoiler but it's a very tired trope and even in the series the fact that it's coming is obvious from just about episode 3 onwards. Second, I don't buy it.

For both Eureka and Welcome to the NHK, the relationships between the characters made sense. Eureka and Renton are both two fairly innocent people struggling to deal with a world that they don't fully understand, they both have trust issues and try not to show their vulnerability to each other. In NHK, Satou and Misaki are both immensely vulnerable all the time, but totally unaware of it. They are both outcasts from society, and to cope with the loneliness that comes with being on the fringes of civilization, they bond with each other.

With ToraDora! Ryuuji (the main character) is a smart, organized, fairly successful student who happens to be poor. Taiga (the other main character) is kind of a mess, and while that's fine, they never really delve that deeply in to Ryuuji's problems. He opens up more to other female characters in the series, and while the romance with Taiga does make some amount of sense (they do spend most of the day together), it feels like their relationship isn't really based on anything all that deep, where Renton and Eureka or Satou and Misaki had that sort of depth.

The ending itself is also fairly unsatisfying. The second to last episode actually has a pretty good conclusion to the series, but then the last episode decides to create one last spurt of drama, which is fine I guess but removes the feeling of fulfillment that these romances normally provide. You want to see the characters resolve their relationship in some way, sad or happy, but with ToraDora! you don't see that until a 15 second post credit scene. It has enough moments throughout it that I did like it, but the ending brings out a lot of problems that it had as a series.

7. Kaiba

First. Please watch this with a good stream. The animation is aggressively important to the series, it conveys so much information that a poor quality stream will harm your enjoyment of the series.

Kaiba is a story told through it's art. It is entirely character driven; the setting is absurd to the point where it becomes background noise for the characters and little else. The setting is a tool to drive the characters, who in turn drive the story forward. The animation is incredibly well done, the sound design is often minimalist but appropriate, and I have to give a shout out for having a fantastic opening theme. In fact, here ya go:

It's a very weird series and you don't expect it to be so downright sad at times, but it is. Every character gets a little bit of development, even if it's done in just some small way, and the development is often very subtle. Despite the crazy art design, Kaiba is one of the more subdued series that I've had the pleasure of seeing.

I will make one criticism of it, and I don't even know if it's a negative. This series is not shy about characters being creepy and it tackles some really strange issues when you scratch past the surface. The crux of it all is that in this series, memories can be stored in information chips and transferred to a new body. The poor sell their bodies to the rich for money. Bodies can be created with the proper materials without needing memories. As a result, parts of this series touch on subjects that are fairly off-putting.

None of it is handled in a way that's disgusting, but this series not what I'd call light hearted. There's a great deal of discussion that the whole thing can prompt that I don't want to get in to because of how many spoilers would come out of it, but boy. It goes places. Sometimes those places are happy, sometimes they're very dark.

If you have to watch one series from the list, watch Kaiba. While nothing can ever really unseated Welcome to the NHK from it's position as my favorite, Kaiba is masterfully done and if I didn't so personally identify with Satou from NHK, it would be #1. Few pieces of media are created with such care. One episode was animated by a single person over the course of 9 months. Just a really fantastic series that everyone, fans of anime or not, should give a chance.

And there you have it. That was my summer of anime in a nutshell. Right now I've got Stein's Gate to finish as well as Planetes, so look forward to an autumn version of this at some point, where I bet I end up watching more fucking garbage like Arpeggio.