By the time Winter 2017 arrived, people were pretty open to the idea of leaving this world and restarting their life in another world. The success of recent anime like Re Zero and Overlord showed the market was much larger than just Sword Art Online. But we also started to get some of the more imaginative versions of the isekai genre around this period and they weren’t all set in the exact same fantasy RPG world. Only 97% of them were set in the exact same fantasy RPG world. But occasionally one would be set during magical world war 1, as was the case with my favourite anime of this season: Tanya the Evil.
Tanya the Evil is a fascinating anime that is set as a sort of critique of Japanese corporate culture. Specifically the kind of sociopathy that corporate culture promotes to get ahead. It does this by having the main character in the real world get high on a comfy career ladder through being sociopathic, then as a by those same actions is killed. Then “god” saves her – sorta – gets into a big argument about morality and logic, and the isekai part begins. Then all the same things happen where she gets ahead only for every step she makes thinking it moves her to comfort and safety only shoves her deeper into the shit, resulting in loads of incredible Tanya faces. It was the debut for the wonderfully named Studio Nut and boy oh boy is this one of the most incredibly directed TV anime of the decade. The way they frame Tanya during her inner rage moments, showing the expression changing in reflections, is ingenious, and the sky battle sequences are some of the best action shots of the decade. There are some people who didn’t watch this because it gained a reputation as the Nazi Loli Anime, but that really couldn’t be further from what the themes of the show actually are.
For the rest of the TV anime, we finally got a full TV series for Little Witch Academia. The story of Little Witch Academia is quite a feel-good story. Starting as a government funded short anime by the brand new studio Trigger aimed at training young animators. It then was put up on Youtube for free by Trigger with pink English subtitles and got a lot of attention in the west – enough for a successful Kickstarter for a movie. It then did well enough to be grabbed up by Netflix for a full 24 episode series, all while being fairly ignored in Japan. the anime itself isn’t that special. It’s just Anime Harry Potter. But it’s fun and colourful and well animated and I’m very glad it was made. Also on the TV front was Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, a KyoAni joint that was pretty popular in its own right. The sad thing about Dragon Maid was it was set to get a second season, but then the KyoAni fire happened and the director was one of the biggest names who died in that fire, so I doubt we are ever going to get that second season.
Most of the rest of the anime from this season didn’t leave much of an impact. Scum’s Wish is a trashy anime pretending to be very deep, about teenagers who hate themselves fucking each other a lot. Interviews With Monster Girls was a very tame monster girl anime that lacked the SNAKE TITTIES that made the other monster girl anime so infamous. Acca was something I watched all of. It was a really stylish, laid back political drama that kinda ruined everything it was building by having really troubling themes it espoused at the end. ChäoS;Child was just another piece of proof that the only good semi colon anime is Steins;Gate and that was kind of a miracle. Bang Dream barely made any impact abroad but did help push the game in Japan and I’m pretty sure prints money. Hand Shakers was a sign that someone needs to save GoHands from themselves and take all their colour filters from this world before they destroy the world.
Aside from that, it was a fairly quiet the season. Well, I suppose there was the most bizarre hit anime of the season with Kemono Friends. It was a shoddily 3D animated series about anthropomorphised animals. It was intended as an advertisement for a phone game but then the game didn’t come out so they just shoved it onto the air to make it disappear…but then it blew up in a huge way. The anime itself had a weird post-apocalyptic story going and the director became something of a cult hero. Especially when the producers tried to take him off the second season, leading to a boycott by people who liked Kemono Friends in the first place. There is a ton of merch for this series in Japan too. I don’t really get it I must admit, but it’s a nice feel good story that it became the success it was.
There is one last anime that I do have to mention though. This was the season that Naruto Shippuden finally ended. After over 15 years, the franchise came to a close. To be honest too, there isn’t another anime this decade that can claim to have the same lasting cultural impact that Naruto had. There’s very few anime ever that can claim to have hit the popularity Naruto had. When it aired alongside Bleach, people used to talk about the pair of them together, but looking back it is abundantly clear which is more fondly remembered. Bleach ending was greeted with relief. Naruto ending brought about a flood of emotion front so many sources, many from people who had long stopped watching the series. People still do the silly Naruto run today for example. I never got into Naruto, although I did read and enjoy a couple of volumes of the manga. But with the way people watch a larger variety of anime series versus the hoards of Naruto-only fans there used to be, I’m not sure when we will ever see another series garner the reach and popularity of the omnipresent Naruto.
The Cart Driver 
Kemono friends blew up in Japan like a certain power plant, but as with Love Live, I have no idea why, I just woke up one day and became aware that Kemono friends is now a phenomenon in Japan.
Naruto’s one of those series that you’d just have to know something about once you introduced yourself as somebody who knows something about anime. I haven’t watched more than 1 complete episode in its entire run but over the years though online and offline discussions it was almost impossible not to know who the main characters were.
It’s the same for Star Wars for me, I’ve never watched any of the films but of course it’s impossible not to know who Yoda or Darth Vader is.
Youjo Senki – I’ve recently watched the movie so the memory is kind of fresh for me. There are many things to point out here, the isekai part which people sometimes forget, the absurdity of the most brilliant soldier in NotGermany being a toddler who hasn’t hit puberty yet and the militaristic or atheistic elements which are kind of controversial to put it mildly but I’ve always disregarded those elements and watched this thing for the fight scenes. Those aerial battles are very well made, and the movie reminded me again of that.
Masamune-kun no Revenge – the story had an interesting premise, which if executed properly could’ve been a hit, and that’s what drew me to it, but the anime stopped halfway though, the OVA skipped parts of the plot and the source material readers were raging about the ending, but I don’t care about all that since the OP and ED of this series are great!
Ao no Exorcist: Kyoto Fujouou-hen – More of the same really, I don’t know why this isn’t more mainstream when it hits all the right shounen tropes.
Gintama. – If you put off the inevitable end of one of your favorite series by not watching the last few episodes, did that show really end for you? lol.
ACCA: 13-ku Kansatsu-ka – Sometimes a series having a definite end is enough to satisfy me and rate the series as good, and this is one of those that had an actual ending. But sometimes there are lingering questions that will never be answered, such as “why did the sister disregard the fact that her aunt almost succeeded in assassinating them and still went to her to have cakes and tea?”
ChäoS;Child – Chaos;Head’s story was already a mess, so this series’ story is almost guaranteed to be a mess too. This is my seasonal “I knew I watched this but I can’t remember anything from it” series.
Kuroshitsuji Movie: Book of the Atlantic – I’ve said this before, almost everything related to this series produced after the second season is above average, and you almost need no background to enjoy and understand the story.
Sword Art Online Movie: Ordinal Scale – I actually contributed something to the industry with this movie because I watched this one in theaters. The action was nice but there was that guy near me that explained the entire plot of SAO to his friend while the movie was playing.
Lupin the IIIrd: Chikemuri no Ishikawa Goemon – Zenigata’s grumpier in this film if that’s even possible.
I got so salty when you said LWA was just anime Harry Potter, that I somehow didn’t read the next sentence until I came back to comment today. Glad we both like the show for the same reasons! The characters are very fun to watch, the episodic world building episodes of the first cour are surprisingly really good, and Trigger does another HYPE AF final episode. It’s a perfect anime to recommend to younger audiences. Maybe LWA is actually anime The Worst Witch? (I vaguely remember watching 2 or 3 episodes of that show as a kid).
Although I stopped watching Naruto years ago (around the beginning of Shippuden), it was the first long running shounen I enjoyed as a teenager. Flashbacks to watching early episodes of the show in 10 minute snippets on Youtube, the Curry filler arc, and the always iconic OP that was used in Germany and Australia.
What I finished:
Little Witch Academia
Need to watch:
Tanya the Evil
Lupin the IIIrd: Chikemuri no Ishikawa Goemon
Bored in the Tatami Galaxy:
ACCA: 13-ku Kansatsu-ka
Actually, almost every good isekai is on Isekai Quartet for some reason. With Tanya really up there in the top, Re Zero and Konosuba being quite enjoyable. And Overlord, well, at least the 1st season wasn’t bad, don’t know about the other seasons.
And time for a sightly unpopular opinion. Little Witch Academia is:
1.- Better than Harry Potter, despite being a copy. Maybe because is quite short and doesn’t have the parts when JK Rowling forgets she was a writer. It helps that the asspull Deus Ex Machinas fit better with the tone of LWA than HP.
2.- One of the best Trigger anime (but wait, I’m not finished) with the other being Gridman and Inferno Cop. Yeah, the main point is that Trigger is mostly overrated garbage