Haven't seen any of these...but I'll plug a Gundam show...

So, I'm sick in bed with strep throat (yuck), which means I've had a lot of time to watch TV. This is fortunate, because while I can list off quite a few things I'd rather be doing, I don't really have the stamina to do much else right now.

So I've watched/finished three animes. And now I'm going to tell all of you about it. Why? because they were good shows! Also, I am bored.

First off, I finally finished the first season of Log Horizon. And if you have not seen Log Horizon, you should totally go watch Log Horizon, because it is great. Easily the best of the three shows I've seen recently.

For those of you who are unaware, the best way to describe Log Horizon is "Sword Art Online done right": It's a show about a bunch of people who get trapped inside an MMO and can't get home, which is a concept that has been so overdone that I'm not surprised if you're falling asleep just listening to me describe it. However, Log Horizon really stands about from every other show in this genre by being smarter, more interesting, and just flat-out better.

First off, the show tosses out the tired "If you die in the game you die in real life" trope, and all the players can respawn at any time, just like back when it was a game. This means that combat is de-emphasized because the stakes are lowered, and pushes the show from being a pure action series to being more of a character or political drama. Which is really what it is. It also creates an interesting power dynamic because for once, NPCs actually appear. Only now that our protagonists have entered the game, those NPCs are sentient people with their own thoughts and feelings. And they can die. In fact, they're a heck of a lot more human than our fearless immortal protagonists. That's interesting. And once again, it pushes the show into being more thoughtful than its contemporaries. It's telling that this a show that starts with an action scene and ends with a sequence where one of the characters is making infinitely more of an impact on the world... by filing paperwork particularly well.

The show's other real advantage (aside from a likeable, memorable cast, good world-building, and an actually unique setting) is the fact that it was written by someone who very clearly has actually played MMOs and cares about them. This is a show where there's an entire arc dedicated to teaching a bunch of new players about the fundamentals of MMO combat (healer, tank, DPS, managing aggro, etc) because that actually matters because this is a real MMO. Well, not actually real, but it feels real, like something people would actually play. That's a big deal.

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The theme of an author profoundly caring about the subject matter also comes up in the next anime I'm going to talk about, High Score Girl. A show I found on Netflix that looked interesting. It's a romance story about a game-obsessed boy who slowly develops a relationship with a girl who appears to be his total opposite but shares his passion for games. It's honestly a pretty standard romance in a lot of ways, but I still really enjoyed watching these characters grow and develop, and the whole show is just... charming. It's as much a romance as it is a tribute to Saturdays wasted in front of a console, days after school dumping quarters into arcade machines, and the friendships and rivalries that would spring up out of that, all set right in the middle of the 90's fighting game boom. And it is really clear that the author was as in love with the games in this story as the characters are. Which is fitting, because this is very much a story, in the broader strokes, about passion. About doing the things you love, even when it doesn't make sense, not because you think it will make things better, but because you love doing them. I'd highly recommend it, especially to anyone who ever burned an afternoon at an arcade (I have, when I was very young. I wish I could again...).

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And the final show I watched was Amagi Brilliant Park. Which... oh boy. This is a show about a high-school student who ends up getting hired (read: forced at gunpoint) to save a failing amusement park where all the mascots are real magical creatures. And it is just as gloriously insane as that premise makes it sound. Our protagonist is an unabashed egotist (so naturally the author named him after Kanye West—yes, really), his second-in-command's solution to every problem is to shoot it (and she can literally pull guns out of thin air), the park's actual head is perpetually 14 years old, and her uncle is an alcoholic teddy-bear/mouse...thing in a bowler hat with a proclivity for beating up guests that get too mouthy. And that's just maybe a tenth of the main cast: this show has way too many characters and it's great and I love it.

So yeah, I think that's everything. Feel free to plug whatever else or talk about things.

...because of course I will.
So here goes: I'm rec'ing Gundam Build Fighters (which is free on YouTube officially) because it manages to be a toy commercial a la Transformers yet keep a decent heart and plot to it at the same time. Basically, it's Beyblade but with Gundam models instead of spinning thingies. Also, the soundtrack is amazing...though the voice acting less so. But it manages to be, as someone on a Gundam discord server put it, a 'lovable trainwreck.' And there are tons of easter eggs for other Gundam series in there as well--Ramba Ral from the original Mobile Suit Gundam gets a place as a minor character with a custom model of his Gouf, and tons of other series' characters and mobile suits get cameos--seriously, fans call this Gundam Valhalla for a reason, and Word of God confirms that characters who died in other series live on happily in Build Fighters.

So, basically, it's a mostly traditional merch-pushing tie-in series but it manages to have heart, generally likeable characters, and it doesn't take itself too seriously (unlike its sort-of successor, Gundam Build Divers)...(even if the Gunpla Mafia is an utterly absurd concept...though the protagonist, Sei, lampshades it a bit with his disbelieving reaction.)