An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Seasonal Episodes

Seasonal Selection – In/Spectre Episode 8

I love In/Spectre. I really do. The manga does an excellent job of blending detective-style mystery with urban fantasy and giving it a unique twist with Iwanaga’s ultimate disregard for the truth and disinterest in judgment, how she instead seeks solutions or uses the truth for her own ends. But every week this show just reinforces my thought that it shouldn’t have made the transition from text and still images on a page to a medium that has an unavoidable element of time.

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Seasonal Selection – In/Spectre Episode 4

This week, our episode is dedicated to clues!

Which is to say, we are primarily concerned with the facts of Karin Nanase’s life and death, facts that will be very important to be aware of as we attempt to unravel (or something like that) the case of Steel Lady Nanase. We know her impressive bust saw her scouted, but the little fame she had came from a good break and quick wit. We also know that she had some trouble in life, with a rumor circulating that she had been responsible for the otherwise ruled accidental death of her father who resented her. This caused her to go on a temporary hiatus that lasted for the rest of her life, for reasons of being crushed by a steel beam in an empty lot near the hotel she was staying at.

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Seasonal Selection – In/Spectre Episode 2 (Late Update)

Apologies for the tardiness of this entry; real life ensued. All is well and future In/Spectre episodes should run closer to their air time.

Here we get the first real “Investigation” of the series, as it’s being presented here – What the Guardian Serpent Heard. By the end of this episode, I feel like you should know if you’re going to like In/Spectre, because while perhaps not as impressive or dramatic as the main plot, the time this episode is spent doing what In/Spectre mostly does for its Manga run: attempt to explain a mystery to the satisfaction of the characters in the scene through a mixture of deduction and hypothesis.

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Seasonal Selection – In/Spectre Episode 1

It’s a new season of anime, so it’s time to go through a new set of seasonal episodes! This time, I’m going to be watching along with In/Spectre (aka Kyokou Suiri). Now, this one… I’m not exactly going in sight unseen. I’m caught up with the manga (through volume 10, which is past anything we can expect to see out of this season), and I know the anime is going to be following that fairly closely since I got to see Episode 1 at last year’s Anime Expo rather than for the first time today.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 10

What a way to enter a hiatus.

Because, yeah, in case you hadn’t heard, Episodes 11 and 12 of Azur Lane will be delayed… to March. The reasons given for doing this seem to tie back to the animation quality. While I’ve been more interested in the plot and story structure, I have alluded to the state of the animation and… you know, I’ve seen worse telling better stories, but I can’t say I don’t understand having a desire to submit better work. When we get the remastered rerun (assuming the full run gets touched up), I’ll be watching it, but I won’t rerun an episode-by-episode look through. If there are substantive changes, rather than it just looking better, I’ll cover them in an article before Episode 11. Otherwise, this series will just enter hibernation and return when Episode 11 actually debuts.

That out of the way, let’s talk about our last episode for a while.

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Seasonal Selection – Azur Lane Episode 9

And here we get the breather episode before what will presumably be the climactic set, It’s possible we might not launch right back into action; at the least, the common pacing of AL episodes would dictate we have the first half of an episode to talk things over before getting into more action. All the same, there was a lot that needed setting up, so we’ll go through how the show handled those topics.

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