Four shows on my season roster fall under the “slice of life” umbrella, but they’re not very similar to each other, are they?
• Flying Witch is very much on the “pure iyashikei” end of the spectrum. See also: Aria, Non Non Biyori.
• Sansha Sanyou sticks very close to the “school friends just hanging out being goofy” approach, where (this is what separates them from the first category) the atmosphere is secondary to whatever gags are going on. See also: Yuyushiki, Hidamari Sketch, Azumanga Daiou, Sakura Trick, Kinmosa, etc – this may be the biggest category.
• Bakuon leans heavily into the “club” (sometimes a hobby, sometimes even an occupation) sub-genre which has characters coming together though some common interest. See also: K-ON!, Hanayamata, Yama no Susume, Manabi Straight. I’d exclude shows explicitly about competition – Garupan and Saki are more properly sports shows, really.
• Anne Happy’s main distinction is the “Happiness Class”. It doesn’t really function like a club in the sense that it’s not a “shared interest”, it’s something they’re unwillingly thrust into. And there’s too much focus on the consequences of what it means to be in that class for it to pass as a pure “goofing off” show like Sansan. I can’t say it’s more “plot-based” than the other types because the school machinations as narrative device doesn’t really constitute a coherent story, it just generates weird scenarios to which the characters have to react. But there’s something noticeably different about how most Anne Happy episodes play out because of it.

That’s an overly long preface all to say that Anne Happy might send people running if they wanted a type 1-3 slice of life show. I guess the weirdo school portion of it just needs to click with you, at least enough not to be an annoyance.

I can’t tell if I’m disappointed or not that there wasn’t some overarching story behind the school’s weird happiness curriculum, at least in the anime. It would have been easy to mess that up so it might be for the best, although early on I was intrigued to know what exactly was going on at the school. But in the end, it all worked out. While I didn’t really dig Timothy and their teacher was hit or miss, I really enjoyed the situations the girls were put in and how it ended up drawing them together.

Episode 4 (searching for the flower of happiness) was the first episode to signal that this show was capable of delivering big emotionally affecting scenes. All the character chemistry snapped into place, and the episode built into a really solid climax. Hibiki was irreversibly attached to the group at that point, whether she’d admit it or not.

Then just when I thought the show would have trouble topping episode 4, the very next episode was a major Hibiki/Ren episode. Unsurprisingly they were my favorite aspect of the show. While the show never “went anywhere” with them in the sense of canonically recognizing a relationship, I felt like it let Hibiki own her feelings for Ren a bit more honestly than most slice of life shows with ambiguous yuri couples. There was something matter-of-fact about Hibiki’s love for Ren, and something about the way Ren comported herself around Hibiki avoided the “hilarious” misunderstandings and denseness of characters like Rize in Gochiusa or Youko in Kinmosa towards their own Hibikis (Sharo and Ayaya respectively). Everything about Ren conveys the feeling that she knows how Hibiki feels. She’s not ready to openly respond, but she’s not dense either. It’s a subtle thing, but it stripped away a lot of the frustrations I tend to have with the not-quite-recognized relationships in these shows.

Pulling Hibiki into the main group’s orbit using Hibari was also an excellent choice. From early on I found Hibari the weak link in the group, but every scene she had with Hibiki was gold. It’s good writing when you pull characters out of their niches and throw them together and greatly improve both characters in the process.

After these two episodes, the show was set. It had established humor I liked, characters I found interesting, and enough chemistry between them to make any situation thrown their way into something enjoyable. It capitalized on that throughout the remaining episodes, through to a really solid ending.

Bakuon is good for all the reasons any competent slice of life show is, so there isn’t anything too exceptional going on here. I’m not interested in motorcycles or the whole culture around bikes, so what I got out of Bakuon was nice character designs and quirky character interactions. No less enjoyable for it, but pretty standard stuff...

...Except when it decides to go off the deep end. There’s a couple really bizarre aspects to this show and when it leaned into those it delivered its best gags. Hane’s meeting with Bike Jesus, all of Rin’s ridiculous dad stories, Onsa’s shady bike dealership, Rin’s contagious Suzuki disease, Raimu’s… whatever is going on with her. I’m still convinced she’s a ghost. This stuff was great, it was the zest an otherwise vanilla premise needed to stand out.

Not that it always hit its mark. Episode five stumbled badly, with a fairly gross drunken groping incident courtesy of one of their female teachers, and then a questionable scene of the girls soaping up their bikes with their bodies. Everything involving Baita’s dialogue was pretty cringe-worthy too. Bakuon is more fanservicey than your average slice of life show and doesn’t always use it well. Although, given the mangaka’s questionable background, maybe we got off easy.

But the most important part of Bakuon is, of course, Rin. She (like Hibiki in Anne Happy) is the bulls-eye in my character archetype strike zone. Cute, hard-working girls who are passionate about what they love but have trouble being honest with their feelings around others are just. the. best. Not because their inability to express themselves is in and of itself “adorable” (that way lies Kuma Miko, from what I understand), but because that struggle is accompanied by moments in which he characters score little victories or open up more to others which make it all that much more rewarding.

Rin also works in the archetype of the character eternally bullied by her own show. Even the goddamn shopping district Santa shits on Rin. But the bullying doesn’t feel fundamentally malicious to me. It’s very much comedic, and she does it to herself as much as others do it to her. The message of the show isn’t “Rin is bad and deserves to be mocked” by any stretch.

Bakuon isn’t trying to hurt Rin, and if it were we wouldn’t get endearing scenes like her working hard delivering pizzas on Christmas Eve, or her victory in the culture festival race. The latter was the culmination of a lot of silly gags but I legitimately teared up when she realized she won the race. Ahhhhh, Rin, you’re the best. Without her this would be a very different and less enjoyable show.

Humor, atmosphere, and character interaction are the ingredients that drive any slice of life story. Flying Witch excels in humor, effortlessly delivers delightful character interactions, and manages a pretty solid atmosphere too. It may not quite have the character interactions of K-ON!, the atmosphere of Aria, or the humor of Yuyushiki – but it gets exemplary marks in all three categories regardless. They combine into without question the strongest show of the first half of the year.

Honestly, I had to reach pretty far to provide a better example of humor, and I’d *still* confidently put Flying Witch alongside the funniest slice of life shows. A mixture of impeccable timing and intentionally muted reactions form the core of Flying Witch’s comedic identity, and time after time those jokes landed with the intended effect.

Whether it’s the mom’s easygoing reaction to everything, Inukai’s hamster’s traumatic relationship with Chito, or the desperately funny attempt to cure Inukai, jokes in this show just don’t miss their mark. It’s as if I’m under one of Akane’s spells that makes everything feel inexplicably hilarious. Flying Witch shows that timing and reactions can deliver effortlessly organic laughs.

“Rural supernatural” is my description of Flying Witch’s mood, something of a cross between Non Non Biyori’s relaxed meandering and Natsume Yuujin-chou’s parade of fantastical youkai. It’s shot through with the supernatural and the strange in ways that Non Non is not, but entirely located within the gentler, calmer side of life in ways the sometimes dramatic Natsume is not.

The balance leans towards relaxed meandering but the menagerie of other-worldly beings is noteworthy: the imposing Harbinger of Spring, the ghostly waitress, the flying whale, the one who brings the night, the mysterious postman of the witchy realm, and so on. Flying Witch presents them to us largely though Chinatsu’s eyes, and as she grows more accustomed to them, so do we. Eventually they’re as (delightfully!) mundane as the show makes being a witch look. But these strange visitors leave their mark anyway, and Flying Witch would be a very different show without them.

The background music really pulls its weight in conveying this mood. Most of the tracks tease a mysterious undercurrent while largely giving way to a playful beat. The titular “Flying Witch” is one good example, as is “Chito-san”. But a handful of tracks like “Haru no Hakobiya”, “Hen na Ikimono”, “Uranaishi”, “Majo no Yume”, and “Kokucho no Mai” lean the other way. It’s an effective mix of emotions conveyed through music as much as through visuals.

None of this means much if the characters aren’t endearing and possessing great chemistry, but the Flying Witch cast is both of those things. It works in plenty of ways: Nao and Makoto have a really great casual friendship. Kei is a delightfully easy-going dude who the show never shoehorns into romantic nonsense. Akane and Inukai are painfully shippable. Anzu’s and Inukai’s integration into the core group is something I’d love to see developed further. Akane alternates between uncontrollable tornado and responsible older sister (when she has to be).

But Chinatsu is the emotional heart of the series. Her eyes are ours, and through her we’re introduced to the world’s hidden side. Her excitement about witchery and ambition to become a witch drives the story. Chinatsu’s journey from shy kid to excitable apprentice witch who has no inhibitions about bugging this thing with questions is something I came back to over and over again when discussing this show during the season. Compare the Chinatsu who met the Harbinger to the Chinatsu interacting with the cake shop’s patrons and begging Akane to train her as a witch. It’s endlessly satisfying.

This growing comfort with the supernatural is mirrored in her relationship with Makoto. They grow closer together every episode, and I feel like Chinatsu’s interest in witchcraft motivates Makoto to work harder on her own training. Whether it’s planting a garden or sewing up a new witch robe or practicing simple spells, Makoto and Chinatsu end up doing everything together.

I’m not sure who or what we need to sacrifice to the witchy dark arts to get a sequel, but one is sorely needed. There’s such a clear sequel premise too – Chinatsu’s journey to become a witch, and Makoto’s to become a full-fledged one. Just keep on the flight path that’s already been established! Flying Witch surely has a ton of stories left to share with us.

Lovepon is love.

Lovepon is life.

Lovepon is also death, but what a wonderful way to go.

Mayoiga is a very flawed little thing. At times I thought it 100% understood its dumb appeal. Other times I felt it had actually convinced itself it was marginally serious story – and that’s no good. Its appeal was tied directly to how stupid it was being at any given time. Its insistence in the latter half of presenting Mitsumune, Hayato and Masaki as characters with story arcs worth telling simply didn’t work for me. They brought the crazy train – or bus – to a screeching halt. Whenever that happened, the wheels fell off the whole thing.

After Lovepon carried the first half, her position in the second was regrettably diminished. While I dug all the stupid explanations of Nanaki and the goofy shit with the researcher and the reveal of the villain, none of that really made up for being asked to engage even a little bit more seriously with the material.

And then in the final episode, they separate Lion and Nanko for no reason I can discern. That left a bitter taste in my mouth right at the end, and probably wound up docking the show a full point. I’d actually gotten really invested in their growing relationship. Nanko was in so many ways what Lion needed, and Lion’s trust in Nanko seemed reassuring for the latter. Maimai did a great job rounding out this unexpectedly precious trio. Then it just dissolves – while dull shit Mitsumune and his dull shit girlfriend get to stay together despite having zero chemistry. How exasperating. If you’re going to ask me to take anything seriously, make it the one thing you actually did a good job with!

I really liked some of the characters. I liked its subversion of horror tropes (nobody dies!). But I guess I expected it to commit harder to chaos than it did. So I ended up somewhat disappointed in Mayoiga. I can enjoy stupid shows up until the point they ask me to take boring characters even semi-seriously.

Mayoiga was not a bad show (at least not unintentionally). It just petered out in a disheartening way.

In a genre that uncritically pats its MCs on the back, Re:Zero distinguishes itself by asking, meaningfully, what would happen if the world rejected their preconceived notions about who they are and what the world owes them.

Subaru approaches his abrupt arrival in a new world by the usual script: apprehension masked with genre-aware humor, quickly giving way to a sense of excitement, of opportunity. It’s the essence of the genre: you were a nobody out there, but you can be somebody here. This is a world that Subaru thinks he understands. He survives a run-in with scummy thieves, meets a pretty girl, and it’s going according to plan (mostly – she saved him, not the reverse). That is, until his insides become his outsides and he’s lying dead on the floor.

If Subaru’s setbacks were purely external in origin, Re:Zero would have been largely unremarkable. But he made many bad situations worse through his own actions. Only as the failures mount does his tendency to quickly bounce back to a persona of flirty over-confidence give way to something much darker, much uglier. His character arc drags the audience through genuinely unpleasant territory, but it works because the show’s intentions always seemed to be clear.

Subaru isn’t rewarded for his arrogance. This. Is. Crucial. It’s the linchpin of the show and culminates in the most powerful scene of the entire run: Emilia’s renunciation of him after his shockingly petty behavior in front of the royal selection committee.

Subaru’s collapse into raw desperation in episode 7 and Rem’s radiant smile in episode 11 were both powerful show-defining moments, but it’s this scene that ultimately sold me on Emilia, on Subaru, and on the fundamental aspirations of the show. I gave my thoughts on the matter here so I won’t restate them all, but it was a deeply moving moment. Part of it was the catharsis of seeing a Subaru at his ugliest get slapped down unambiguously. A larger part of it was seeing Emilia assert herself in a way she had unquestionably earned. It also has some important things to say about not projecting your unfair expectations onto others, a message I don’t think the show entirely follows through with, but it makes an effort. It’s a scene I wish we could gift to a hundred other heroines.

My feelings on the second half of the show are… complicated? Where do you go after making a very conscious statement about pampered protagonists by rejecting every deeply-held belief of your own lead? Re:Zero goes with despair, then deeper despair, then unfathomable despair, then an angelic light of redemption, a reset from zero, a hard-won comeback, and a triumphant finale. (Yes, I have heard the anime chose to end in a very, hmm, “particular” spot, right before something else happens. But I don’t want to know anything about that, given how a sequel is likely.)

Eventually, yes, Subaru was going to triumph. But I don’t think this necessarily negates the show’s critique on isekai conventions. Even when I did not like quite everything about how the latter arcs played out, I feel the show took pains to show us that Subaru had changed. That he earned his turnaround. That he succeeded by relying on others, not protagonist exceptionalism.

But I do of course have criticisms. Many of them, but we’ll stick with the big ones.

While the broad strokes of Subaru’s redemption were solid, I still don’t feel convinced by his relationship with Emilia, which is a problem given it’s his primary motivation. The finale stretched credulity regarding the depth of Emilia’s feelings for him (I’ll accept his feelings for her, however grudgingly). Her “nobody has loved me before” spiel isn’t enough to sell me. I also have serious misgivings about how this episode partially walks back her justified and anger in episode 13. By no means should she be apologizing for that, regardless of what Subaru did right afterward.

For a show that tried so hard to eschew convention, the reconciliation with Emilia felt so very average. It suffers doubly for being compared to the much stronger romantic chemistry with Rem. Subaru and Rem survived a lot together, and Re:Zero doesn’t lock down their feelings for each other until quite late. By contrast, his relationship with Emilia feels like it’s at roughly the same spot Rem and Subaru were in episode 11. We’ve been sold an incomplete product.

I could say so much more on this but I really just want to bring it up as an example of a broader structural issue the show had from the White Whale onward – it lost some of its mystery, some of its spark. It stopped surprising me as much, stopped defying conventions as much. The tricky thing is that I don’t have great suggestions for what it could have done differently on the big picture level. In details I could poke at a lot. But the overall trajectory seems… right? Defensible, at the least. Despair creates exciting twists, but it isn’t a complete story in itself. For the story to move, Subaru had to successfully overcome the most immediate internal and external threats, and that’s what happened.

If we do get a season two, I want to see the following. Do not confirm or deny anything if you’ve read the novels, I want to be free to speculate without getting hints:
• Felt totally fucking up the status quo, without becoming the tragic puppet of a hidden hand. I want that spunky little brat to have as much agency over her own destiny as possible, because she’s been buffeted around by events thus far with little control. And she’s still my favorite character in the show, so I’m biased.
• Rem finding a new passion outside of being Subaru’s #1 fan. While I think she’s become a much freer, happier, outgoing person since expressing her feelings to Subaru, I also understand where the “trophy wife” (or I guess mistress now) criticisms come from. I think that’s quite reductive criticism and doesn’t reflect her character very accurately, but I totally see where the fear comes from and I’d hate for Rem to fall prey to that.
• Ram to take on a bigger role, hopefully one that doesn’t revolve around being completely subordinate to Rosewaal. His absence from most of the show mitigated that this season, but their scene together early on (and their quite literal master-servant relationship) leaves her under a deeply unbalanced power dynamic.
• Emilia being more directly involved. She’s a complex and interesting character, my second favorite overall actually, but she spent most of the series off-screen. I was disappointed at how passive and apologetic she was in the final episode. Her entirely warranted indignation in episode 13 was the highlight of the show and walking that back at all concerns me. Did Re:Zero really take its own messages to heart? To be clear I don’t think the show has treated her badly, but I think her potential remians almost entirely untapped. Since we aren’t getting my dream scenario of Emilia escaping romance with Subaru entirely, I at least want her to be an equal participant with him in the coming events.
• More Betty. I don’t care how, just gimmie.
• Interestingly, I don’t have any idea what I want from Subaru. The main thrust of his character arc has been largely resolved, so they need to do something different with him now. But the most important thing is that he retains the growth he’s managed thus far. Just don’t rehash past struggles and we’ll be good, probably?

I guess the theme is more explicitly exercised agency for the ladies of the cast. They actually have quite a lot of structural power over Subaru given their socio-political roles and/or physical/magical abilities. But the nature of the time resets limits how much power they can wield over the narrative.

All in all, I have respect for Re:Zero. Not everything it did worked, and it had to work very hard to sell me on a genre and premise I’m not inherently disposed towards liking. But it pulled it off. It didn’t quite make the case for a BD import from me, but I would without question watch a season two.

Sansan is a slice of life show that maybe cut the slice a little too thin. Something about it felt insubstantial, and not in the “light and breezy” way I want a slice of life show to feel. While I found it consistently watchable, it always felt lacking in direction.

“But slice of life means not having to have a direction!” you say. Sure but I guess I mean that Sansan never carved out its own niche. Anne Happy and Bakuon had more outright missteps than Sansan but they also had a sense of identity that I didn’t feel as strongly from this. Pretty animation aside, it comes off as something I won’t remember for very long, because I’m not sure I can describe to you a particular attribute that made it special.

If you asked me to describe the aspect of Sansan that distinguished it from its peers, I’d actually come up with a negative: half the secondary cast was unusually annoying. While Kou, Nishiyama, Kondou, and Sonobe were great, we also got saddled with some really dismal characters: Yamaji, Yuu, Sakura, Hajime, and Sasame. The last showed brief sparks of promise in her interactions with Youko, but by and large they were all unwelcome distractions in every scene they invaded.

The best way I could spin them is that they gave the better characters a chance to do some heavy lifting, usually pretty successfully. Sonobe was a good foil to he exasperating Yamaji. Futaba delivered some of her best lines when crushing Hajime and Sasame’s hopes. Youko’s one or two more intimate scenes with Sasame were a saving grace. There was really nothing the show could do to redeem Yuu/Sakura scenes though. I guess the “sing into a bucket” scene was pretty funny?

Sansan had some of the quiet character moments that -really- endear me to these shows. Teru and Kou’s conversation when walking home in episode two. The girls stopping by Youko’s place to cook a meal with her. A few Nishiyama scenes. They feel sparser than in other shows though. More of those moments would have really helped the show click with me harder.

And it’s not purely a shipping thing, but I do wish the characters had felt closer to one another. Nishiyama and Teru were in a classic frenemies position but it just kinda simmered without going anywhere. Nishiyama is my favorite character in this show, but unlike Rin or Hibiki (who I liked for similar reasons) I don’t think the show provided her a equally strong support structure which meant that her scenes lacked the same punch. I do think she show did a good job rewarding Youko’s gradual opening up to her friends with some nice scenes between her and Teru/Futaba though.

As I’ve said before, Sansan is the kind of show I actually -liked- even if my comments always come out negative. Maybe it’s because episode one blew me away so hard and I expected the rest to live up to it, or maybe it’s because the delightful character animation felt like it was just dressing up a rather plain core.

I know I liked it because I’m -importing- it, although I’d probably describe it as not-quite-import tier if I didn’t feel compelled to support most Kirara anime adaptations. Still, even when I’d put a show near the bottom of the slice of life totem pole, it’s still a competently executed slice of life show and as such it’s so inherently My Thing™ that it’s hard to turn me off completely. As long as you avoid injecting bad het romance or something similarly catastrophic, I’m probably going to enjoy the show!