Summer 2021 – Closing Thoughts

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Right so I’m going to be doing something I’ve never done before and that’s give my final thoughts on a season. Today’s closing thoughts will be on the Summer 2021 season. Now I cannot speak on the entirety of all the summer anime, but I can speak on what I’ve watched, which are the following.

• Mahouka Koukou no Yuutousei
• Bokutachi no Remake
• Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru.
• Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon S
• Shiroi Suna no Aquatope
• Genjitsu Shugi Yuusha no Oukoku Saikenki

This is probably the first time, in a long time where I decided to load up on anime to watch. After this experience, something I will say is that six anime is probably the maximum I can do at any given time. If I decided to watch more, then it definitely would have been to much. Out of the six anime I watched this season, what was my favourite? That goes without saying, it’s Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon S. Like come on who wouldn’t pick Kobayashi-san as one of their favourites. It had a mix of everything, the Slice of Life aspect was strong, the humor was lighthearted and wholesome, everything about the show was beautifully animated, and character development was second to none. Without a doubt, Kobayashi-san was one of the highlights of the Summer 2021 season. It was definitely a well rounded anime that had a little bit of everything, Kobayashi-san was your “Jack of all Trades”. You couldn’t go wrong.

The anime that could have been way better are Bokutachi no Remake and Genjitsu Shugi Yuusha no Oukoku Saikenki. I won’t go in detail because I’ve already done that, instead I’ll quickly go over things I would have liked changed.

For Bokutachi no Remake, the biggest thing I would liked changed would have been how Kyouya centric the story became during the later stages of the anime. Kyouya just wasn’t interesting enough to carry the anime to its conclusion. There wasn’t a sense of urgency or desperation once he found out that he had changed the lives of the Platinum Generation. Furthermore this ‘don’t worry, I’ll fix everything’ mentality got really boring really fast, to the point where it became a little bit of a nuisance for me by the end of the anime. I also didn’t like how despite changing the Platinum Generation’s lives forever, he was perfectly content with living out his new life he found himself for a little while before deciding that he’s had his fun. In many ways, despite Kyouya’s good intentions, a lot of what he did felt very self-centered. If the anime had used its other characters more instead of using them as Kyouya’s sidekicks, I believe Bokutachi no Remake would have turned out way better.

With regards to Genjitsu Shugi Yuusha no Oukoku Saikenki. The main issue was that as a viewer part of the experience is seeing the fruits of labor. I wanted to see first hand all the reforms Souma has done to the kingdom and what kind of effects it has had on everyone. But that was something we did not get and to me that was very disappointing. Furthermore, I do not think they properly animated the significance of the One Week War. In the anime, the arc itself felt like an afterthought, thrown in at the very end as the anime’s climax. While in the manga, the arc itself is very entertaining and a lot more in-depth than what is animated. So yeah, if I could go back in time, those are the two major things I would have changed for sure.

Out of all the anime I’ve watched this season, Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru. was the worst. There were many things I didn’t like about the show. The characters felt stiff and at times very uninteresting. A lot of the fight scenes were poorly animated and were extremely static. In my opinion it was almost as if to best animate the action scenes, the studio thought it would be best to present such scenes in a form a slideshow. Which was something I disliked, along with the enormous amount of dialogue that filled and took up the majority of each episode. By the end of Tantei wa Mou, Shindeiru you couldn’t help but feel like the anime was left unfinished, it felt rushed and it left a lot of unanswered questions.

Overall, based on the anime I watched. The Summer 2021 season, wasn’t a great season for anime. Summer 2021 was a season of extremes, there were anime on both sides of the scale. There were amazing, best of the year anime; then there was the bad, ones that definitely shouldn’t have aired. A mixed bag is what best describes Summer 2021.