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Apr 17 2014

Categories: best of 2013

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A restaurant. And a meal.

#3: Hataraku Maou-sama!

Also wins for 2013:

• Employee of the Month
• Best Housewife
• Most Evil Demon
• Best Advertisement for UNIQLO

I really enjoyed Hataraku Maou-sama!. It isn’t the fish out of water aspect that got me, or like how desperately Maou wants to fit into our world. The scenes where he’s working at MgRonald are pure gold. I enjoyed them so much that the rest of the demon vs. human conflict felt like filler and wanted to see Maou tackling the arduous task of running a fast food franchise. I would have been totally fine if the major plot points continued to revolve around Maou and his job (which, despite the show’s title, he is a full-time employee). I also really enjoyed Ashiya’s housewife routine (top notch housewifing), Sasaki’s cute love interest routine (poor girl), Yusa’s pencil skirts (anime needs more pencil skirts), and Lucifer’s slow transformation into a hikikomori (I can totally see him day trading bitcoins). The animation and production values by White Fox were quite strong as well

#2: Attack on Titan

Also wins for 2013:

• Most Hungry
• Highest Walls
• Very Naked
• Most Merchandised

Holy shit, the defining show of 2013 is only #2?! What kind of fucked up blog is this? Attack on Titan is a fantastic show. It has pretty much captured the anime zeitgeist for 2013. Everywhere I go in Japantown, downtown Los Gatos, or when I was in Taiwan, it was titans everywhere. Rightfully so. The show did some thing seriously well: worldbuilding, presenting the titans as serious yet somehow loveable threat, the despair, the idiocy of the humans (unrivaled except for maybe the cast of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica), the OP (literally carried the show at the beginning), and the trio of Eren, Mikasa, and Armin… err… no wait, I meant Potato Girl, Captain Levi, and Zoe. But the thing it did the best? The show never let go of the throttle. It was constantly high octane, and you didn’t know when the next gruesome death will occur. When Female Titan took out Levi’s elite troop towards the end, it was almost anime’s version of the Red Wedding. Just brutal.

What Attack on Titan has that Maou-sama! does not have is the fervent fan following. It just made the show more fun and more enjoyable. I liked checking Twitter and YouTube for the most recent Guren no Yumiya parodies. (Sadly, YouTube and Funimation had to spoil the fun and took down most of the Guren no Yumiya parodies.) I liked seeing all the cute titan toys or all the crazy fan theories about the titans. The community the show created is part of the fun. It brought me back to the old Haruhi days, and that’s why Attack on Titan is #2… and why the #1 show is #1…

(Production IG has three shows in the top twelve. Kyoto can match them if Free! is #1.)