Re:Zero – Earning its Reputation

Re:Zero isn’t a show that should work on paper.

After all, it’s yet another light novel about a genre-savvy protagonist who ends up in a fantasy world and ends up surrounded by a bunch of cute girls. Nothing we haven’t seen multiple times a year for the past few years. Even on paper, its gimmick doesn’t seem particularly fresh or groundbreaking. It’s a Groundhog Day loop, a type of narrative so common that I can refer to it as a Groundhog Day loop without having to define the term for most readers. What’s more, the characters aren’t particularly well-developed or compelling, and there’s a whole lot of ugly CG.

And yet, somehow, it works. Somehow, despite it being like so many other soulless things we’ve seen before, the show is actually–against everything I assumed–legitimately compelling.

Dropped! Spring 2016 Week 1

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Dropped! This week we’ve started actually watching shows. We’ll be dropping some of them just as quickly. If you want to see how off our preseason predictions were, feel free.

Anyway, this will cover everything that aired from April 1st through April 7th, excluding a few shows that were not picked up or that were simulcast at a later date. In addition, while the titles we use may vary some, the order is based off of the Japanese titles as given by AniChart, with full-length shows first and shorts after.

Dropped! Spring 2016 Preseason

Buggy: Hello, readers, and welcome to “Dropped!” With me is my good friend Chris, who will be joining me on a weekly journey through the Spring 2016 anime season as we figure out which shows are worth sticking with and which ones…aren’t.

Chris: Hello everyone. I just want to see that I am excited to see what the Spring 2016 season is going to have in store for us

B: Before we launch into things weekly, I figured it’d be a good idea to do a sort of pre-season runthrough of the shows, because, while we’re probably going to be giving almost every show a shot, there are some we aren’t for one reason or another, and since the point of Dropped! is to see how long all these shows can last, it’s only natural to include the ones that don’t even get a chance. But also because this allows us to give some of our first impressions, which, admittedly, could end up being very, very wrong.

C: Given how wrong we were with Rakugo, I’m honestly hoping wrong about a lot of shows that I have negative opinion on this season

B: Crazy, huh? I was expecting Phantom World to be my favorite show of the season and Rakugo to suck. But look where we are now.

Anyway, we’re using AniChart‘s list of shows to do this, so if you want more information on the shows you can check there. So shall we start at the beginning of the list?

C: Absolutely!