Thursday, December 31, 2015

2015 ROUND-UP

Well this sucks, I totally planned to put up a couple of regular reviews this week but got hit with a killer head cold and I've had a hard time being coherent/awake the past few days. Thankfully this post should be shorter than it usually is so let's get down to it:

ANIME
I actually already did my top of the year list for one of my 12 Days of Anime posts and I did another one about potentially great shows that I just haven't finished yet, at this point the only fall shows I still haven't finished yet are Go Princess Precure and Seraph of the End so consider these complete lists. I did have a few on-the-cusp titles that didn't quite make my top list so, for my best of the rest list:

  • Log Horizon 2
  • GBFT
  • Classroom*Crisis
  • Garo
  • Yamada and the Seven Witches (although yeah the manga is better)
  • BBB (review coming soon!)
These guys, except C*C, also suffered from airing really early in the year so it's hard to summon the same enthusiasm for them a few months later, well for BBB having such a large gap between the last two episodes just didn't help for me. Oh and Space Bros, Yozakura Quartet Hana no Uta etc, Haikyuu 2, and ConRevo are honorable mentions since they were all great but don't fit my end of year requirements (provided that ConRevo doesn't fall flat on it's face in the spring, pleasepleaseplease).

Sadly I didn't get through very many shows in my backlog this year, only about 5 but that was it, gonna try and work on that more next year!

BOOKS
Like last year, I feel like I haven't read enough 2015 books to do a proper list yet! This past year I decided to wait until June to make my list but honestly that was too late, I'm planning on making my list by the end of the March so stay tuned!

COMICS
I read comics this year, thank you library! I enjoyed Ms Marvel and This One Summer and I'm growing more interested in trying out more Marvel/DC comics but as usual, it's still a question of "where do I start and how do I get them?" I know that there are some (legal) online back catalogs of stories but I've been so busy with everything else that I haven't actually had the time to look into them yet.

MANGA
I read a lot of manga this year, holy cow! I started reviewing over on Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses and I'm shifting more and more of my manga reviews over there since alternating comics and movies means that I sometimes get really behind in talking about manga. Favorite discoveries of the year are Orange, The Morose Mononokean, finding that the Inari Kon Kon manga is just as adorable as the anime (I will still post full series reviews here so expect one of the full series here in a little bit) and I also had a lot of fun with the Shoujo You Should Know series. Looking forward to another year of doing reviews with them, especially since BookWalker has had a lot of promotions recently so I'm all stocked up with potentially terrible first volumes to try out!

MOVIES/TV
There weren't a lot of movies which interested me this year and even then I didn't get around to seeing a lot of them. I still haven't seen Jupiter Ascending, Ex Machina, Fury Road, Mr Holmes, even Star Wars, plus stuff from last year, I saw fewer backlog titles here than I did with anime!. Did see a bit of Home and decided it was more of a "kids" film than a "family" film so nothing for me there.
I liked The Martian though so at least it's not like I hated the films I saw, plus the JICC let me see a lot of bad-okay-great animated films this year and a couple of live action ones that I haven't reviewed yet. Also didn't see a lot of TV this year, I did finish the second season of Agents of SHIELD and the first season of Agent Carter but I haven't mustered the effort to watch the current season of SHIELD or to catch up with Elementary which I also loved. Part of this is just the timing, my new work really buckled down in the fall when SHIELD started back up and American tv shows are tough to catch up on what with them only being online for a limited amount of time etc. As an anime fan I find these set-ups rather bizarre, just give me a way to watch older seasons so I can watch the current one dammit!

WEBCOMICS
In 2015 I decided to review a webcomic every month to try and put my money where my mouth was and just get more people reading the series I liked. I was afraid one a month might seem like a little but I think it ended up being a good number since the year has ended and I'm almost out of material. The thing is, I've been reviewing webcomics since I started this blog so a lot of them have been covered twice here now and I think I'm going to cut back on reviews of them next year since there simply aren't a lot I haven't talked about yet. I will still review newer series when they reach good reviewing points (and there is about a half dozen series I'm dying to talk about once they get a bit farther along) but I'm not going to set a schedule for those.

And that's it folks, happy new year and I swear I'll be over this cold enough to write more reviews next week! (no lie, was coughing so hard that my landlady started suggesting home remedies to me, colds are so troublesome)