A Look Back At Spring 2020’s Anime / Railgun T Review

Well, this will be pretty short. This essentially became the season of Jashin-chan. Every other show was being cancelled outright, rather, delayed until “we have no idea lol” or had episodes postponed every week for a couple to a weeks at a time every-other-episode, making them impossible to watch. Jashin-chan was fully completed and released all at once and became essentially the only show of the season, which I’m grateful for as honestly it was what I was looking forward to the absolute most. I mostly ended up watching a lot of Stargate SG-1, the entirety of dang ol King of the Hill, Coppelion, and a few random things (now including Konosuba). Oh, and Death Note which ended up too long ago for me to remember enough now to properly review, I’ll still try but I dunno.

Aside that, well, I basically dropped everything else because none of it was being completed or still coming out. Well, okay, I “plan to watch”ed everything, not truly dropped, but they are now part of my massive near-1000 title long backlog and by the time they’re finished I’ll probably be through all 1000 shows ahead of them anyway. Most anime is either completed before airing or stays a few weeks ahead of airing – but sometimes the voice acting isn’t done until the airing date comes closer which makes this virus still get in the way even if the entire episodes are fully animated and edited already aside mouth flaps so almost nothing survived.

To be honest I forgot most of what I was even planning to watch while trying to write this so I looked through the chart and so much of it either still hasn’t restarted production months later (Appare Ranman, Gal and Dino, etc) or had so many fucking weeks-upon-weeks breaks that it wasn’t worth it. I mean nothing was, it’s why I basically quit this entire season, but I still have a couple to say some stuff about, I guess?

Well, no, it turned into just being a review for Railgun T – and that’s about as much attention as I’d like to give to that show anyway so, sure, whatever.

Jashin-chan Dropkick’ (Season 2/Dash)

I fucking loved Jashin-chan season 1, it’s the only genuine throwback to old anime gag comedy in almost a decade in how far it goes to be exactly like stuff from back then and I love it. Season 2 continues it perfectly.

Railgun T

I’m pretty sure that Railgun T has actually set some records, or is at least in the running, for most cumulative time of delays for any anime series after it began airing in the history of the industry. The only thing that I can even think of that was nearly as bad, let alone worse at all, was the wait for the final episode of season 1 of Blood Blockade Battlefront which if I recall was like 2 or 3 months and that DOESN’T EVEN COME CLOSE to this. Railgun T had like 7 weeks of non-airing between various episodes total for the first 14 episodes…and then is on an already planned months-long hiatus to continue on top of that. It is absolutely ridiculous.

However, it doesn’t matter anymore. There were loads of problems with Railgun T from YEARS before it aired – you might notice the copyrights are from over a year before it actually aired because they delayed actually putting it on TV for ages, then they finally aired it and the first 4 or so episodes used rehashed assets from Railgun S for most scenes, practically just recycled the entire show but put new dialogue and changed some clothing. Then the Wuhan got to it because for some reason this season wasn’t given to the usual A-team, then it got hit again by the Wuhan later, and it probably will continue to be even months from now when it restarts.

But I didn’t say why it doesn’t matter. For some reason on top of all of that, they’ve thrown away what has traditionally been the best part of the anime adaptations of this series; the TV-only second-half of each season. This time they’re just going right into the next manga arc…which means I’m dropping it. The next arc is the arc dedicated to Kamachi living out his fantasies of having sex with Mikoto through graphic visual and detailed spoken sequences about raping her with these magical dream-cards. I won’t support that and my plan has, ever since that arc came to be in the manga, to stop reading (and I did) and stop watching when the series got to that point. Sadly, I was expecting it for the next season, but without the usual TV only arc they’ve announced this is happening instead. It’s bad enough when their head character designer sells official hentai of the cast when he didn’t even actually create them, but now that the show is deciding to do the same I’m out.

Even before the next half, the entire season started weak and only got worse from there even aside the delays; the actual writing itself was just atrocious shit and felt like it was an Index arc. Mikoto is barely a character in it at all, the entire chemistry which makes Railgun so good is completely written out with all the group having their minds wiped, and it is mostly an arc about Shokuhou for some reason when she was was barely even a character in Railgun to begin with. It was boring, stupid, again it reused loads of assets from S which is unforgivable and inexcusable, and I hated every episode of it – only forcing myself through because of the sunken cost fallacy and hoping for that TV arc (that isn’t coming now) to save it.

This was a massive disappointment and the news about the second half just made it worse. I’ll miss you, Academy City.

Sing “Yesterday” For Me

This started great and, while it did continue without stopping for the virus, it sort of got really fucking stupid. It’s not over yet and because it’s the only fucking thing I kept up with for whatever reason I might finish it (it’s only still going because its 18 episodes rather than the usual length – okay nevermind, as of finishing writing this the official count went from 18 to 12; wuhan?), but I don’t know if I’ll bother. I loved the start and the crow girl but then it became this weird thing where every single episode has some new character from the past that doesn’t matter and fucking leaves within the same episode after causing drama for 17 minutes. I understand conceptually what they’re doing, it just doesn’t work and feels stupid instead while also seeming to completely forget about the main story and characters every step of the way. Hell, they skip 3 months without telling the viewer and also skip what the entire show was about (romance and a love triangle) by randomly having two of the leads in a relationship with no explanation of how or when it happened. She’s also been hiding it from her OTHER relationship partner and the last episode is about her being shitty, but we never even saw it so why would we care?

Then they break up in the same episode.

This show really went to shit. Couldn’t help it – 30 minutes or so after posting this I wrote up and posted a review of this shit too.

Arte

Cute girl does art stuff in the olden times. It’s nice but another one I fell super far behind on because everything else was being fucking cancelled so I didn’t see a point in continuing something that was near inevitably going to stop like everything else. I do keep trying to catch up but its a show that is hard to watch more than an episode or two in a row of just because of the pacing and storytelling being such a soft calm type of thing.

Zasshiki Warashi something something

I actually like this a good bit, it’s 5 minute little shorts about this cute little smushy monster girl trying to acclimate to modern Tokyo. Just a fun comedy but it has some good bits and is so short that it never overstays its welcome – its also one of the only things that didn’t stop!

And, uh, that’s it! Yup. I have a feeling next season will be even worse off.