Shadows of the Starlight

Remember when I said Snowball Earth was likely to be the show I was recommending to Hugo voters for the rest of the year? Yes, I think I will be.

It's a hard one to categorize; it kept bouncing around between action and horror and the protagonist's social flailing. But it's solid and it's got heart, whatever it happens to be doing at the moment. I am moderately hyped that season 2 is already in production.

As for the rest:

Nippon Sangoku is the runner-up of the season for me. There's no getting around the fact that it starts with a fridging, and it is occasionally a little too self-indulgent in a way that feels familiar from a lot of English-language military sf, but it is so good the rest of the time that I can still recommend it. Particularly to English-language military sf fans.

Kujima never turned into the horror comedy it's billed as. It's just a quirky slice-of-life show. I don't normally like quirky slice-of-life shows, but this one worked for me, either because it was sufficiently weird or because of the way the title character is voiced (which I guess could also fall under "sufficiently weird").

Rooster Fighter continued to be a very serious show about badass chickens all the way to the end. It had a notable step up at mid-season when Piyoko suddenly got a powerup and more of Elizabeth's background was revealed, making them real team members and not just the girls who happen to be around when things are happening.

I gave up on Daemons of the Shadow Realm due to mood whiplash and implausibly fast developments. You could practically see where the chapter breaks are from the way people suddenly start behaving differently toward each other. The point where I walked away was when the protagonist comes face-to-face with someone who was casually murdering his lifelong neighbors less than 24 hours previously, and they just get into a comical argument about which of them is younger.

Welcome to Demon School had a great time with the Music Festival arc, with a glorious climactic class performance. It's been more of a mixed bag since then but there continue to be good moments. Unfortunately, it has also teased the return of my least favorite character (Ami Kirio).

And Witch Hat Atelier is the big disappointment. Don't get me wrong, it is gorgeous and I continued to love seeing a world that is visually coherent for once. But I don't like any of the characters. The adults are either incompetent, malevolent, or both, and the students are anime standard kids with color-coded hair and one character trait each. Plus the society as a whole has what I call the Starship Troopers problem, where a large number of people have some dangerous knowledge and training but they are fed into a system designed to have a high failure rate for those trying to become part of the ruling elite, which should result in a brewing popular uprising by the disenfranchised, but we don't see that because the author has not thought this setup through.