Time for this season’s silly awards!

• Most thorough product placement: Shuumatsu Touring. I really hope Honda paid them well for that episode.
• Most disappointing: To Your Eternity. Not that it was bad, exactly, but it wasn’t up to the standards of the previous seasons. I’ve come to the conclusion that much of the problem is Mizuha and the heavy focus on her. While her situation is interesting, she is not an appealing character, and I really don’t want to spend any more time with her. Hopefully the second cours will return the primary focus to Fushi. (I also could have done without the rope bondage bit, which seemed to come out of left field in a manner more appropriate to Golden Kamuy.)
• Stupidest smart person award: Towasa from Towa no Yuugure. Apparently she not only knew nothing about human nature, she also lacked fundamental knowledge about computer programming. All non-trivial software has bugs, and directly hooking up a human brain to the Internet with no method to block it again afterwards is so stupidly risky that I can’t even.
• Biggest bait-and-switch: Towa no Yuugure again. The first couple of episodes are set up to look like plucky-band-of-misfits-against-SF-dystopia, but instead we end up getting SF relationship drama. If that was what they wanted to do, they should have toned down the evil-dystopia scenes.
• Where-can-I-get-some-of-what-they-were-smoking award: Sanda. The last thing I saw that managed to be both this batshit and this thoughtful was maybe Sarazanmai (and that was from Kunihiko Ikuhara, who’s always that way). Come for the bizarre premise, stay for the fact that this thing is surprisingly good.
• Best dragon award: May I Ask for One Final Thing? narrowly beat out the dragon from Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! begging for royal moodle. (Sorry, Bee, you’re just not dragonlike enough, and they tried too hard to make you cute. Gap moe works better with dragons.)
• Most unexpectedly entertaining: Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! for a narrow win over a quite large field of candidates. (A Wild Last Boss Appears! might have won if I hadn’t given it a higher evaluation than the other based on pre-airing summaries.) Having the central plot be a romance is a tough sell for me in general, but this time it worked.

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My Christmas rewatch for this year was Suisei no Gargantia (Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet). It still holds up pretty well for the most part—the Gundam + Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind + Waterworld setting comes together (even though from that description, it really shouldn’t), and the character arcs, including the mecha’s, work. The thing that doesn’t hold up is the visuals. There is way too much 3D water that does not blend with the rest of the artwork at all, proving that sometimes trying to be more realistic causes problems rather than solving them.