Other Manga/Anime Awards 2011

[Malintex_Terek]

I don't mean this to be some vote contest like the annual OP award campaign is, but a lot of anime/manga came out in 2011 and not everything was talked about, and we only have a few more days to give recognition to those titles. So, as the Fall 2011 season comes to a close, and we too turn the page on this year, feel free to give awards to titles you enjoyed/didn't enjoy and tell everyone about them. Next season is pretty ugly looking, so maybe hidden gems or loud bombs from last year would be worth looking over to bide the time. Be sure to give a brief description, and feel free to comment off of each other's awards. Try to make it one award → one title.

Terek's Awards: Best Overall, Most Underrated, Most Overrated, Most Ambitious, Guiltiest Pleasure, Most Mediocre, Biggest Bomb, Biggest Implosion, Most Likely Title to Check On in a Year, Nobody Talks About This

Note that an asterisk * indicates the title is an adaption, but the flagged title is the 2011 release.

Best Overall - Puella Magi Madoka Magica (anime)

Madoka was one of the most popular and engaging anime titles in 2011, and popularized a lot of literary critic terms like "deconstruction" and "subversion". I wouldn't say Madoka did anything exceptionally well, but it was a solid, well rounded title that balanced plot, characters, and atmosphere. It was a thrill to watch and talk about, and didn't require a degree in anime to appreciate.

Most Underrated - Fate/Zero (novel/anime*)

This might raise some eyebrows. F/Z is very popular, but it hasn't seemed to click with new viewers. Many of the most passionate voices supporting the series are established TYPE-MOON or Fate/stay night fans, and since the anime is basically a novel to anime transcription, it maintains a novel's prose and is merciless to fans who have inadequate translations or aren't constantly paying attention. For a brand as recognizable as Fate/, FZ is a quality work that isn't getting the attention it probably should.

Most Overrated - Steins;Gate (visual novel/anime*)

I bleached about this anime a lot, but it's not really all that terrible. But it isn't very good, either. It has an intriguing premise, but so-so execution, and is marred by forgettable, shallow characters who hardly develop over the series length. At times, the author struggles with keeping a consistent logic/organization of ideas and everything comes across as amateurish. I haven't seen a show with as much bloated enthusiasm for a "quirky" otaku title since Lucky Star.

Most Ambitious - Mawaru Penguindrum (anime)

A candidate for Guiltiest Pleasure, Penguindrum will top many anime of the year lists, for good reasons. It has an interesting plot but is thematically driven with undertones of strong social criticism. Symbolism is omnipresent, referencing famous anime both as a time constraint and to illustrate points. The viewer is perpetually challenged toward critical thinking. It's well directed title, but too abstract at times, though I suspect this abstraction is not all of the cultural references being understood yet.

Guiltiest Pleasure - Mirai Nikki (manga/anime*)

'nuff said?

Most Mediocre - Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai. (anime)

Ano Hana shares a lot in common with Steins, and these awards are almost inter-changeable. Both had good premises mauled by their characters, though Steins developed its plot better, while Ano Hana managed its character stories more effectively. However, I consider Steins better because it continued to tease/thrill the audience in its later episodes, and made noticeable, incremental progression with each episode. Ano Hana twiddled its thumbs for every episode after the first and continued to stagnate well into its final episodes, with a pedestrian, tepid resolution. "Meh" = perfect one word summary of this title. A lot of people share my sentiments, though, Ano Hana doesn't share the same lop-sided praise Steins gets.

Biggest Bomb - Guilty Crown (anime)

@The:

I dropped this anime 400,000 times…in 12 seconds.

Aspiring to be this season's Geass, Guilty Crown exemplifies everything with anime gone wrong. It is an unholy marriage of incongruous ideas and massive budget, creating a dense, cluttered, incoherent chaos. One can't apply logic, reason, or a liberal coat of paint to this title and expect to come away with anything satisfying. Though I wouldn't call it a waste of time - I actually use the 22 minutes during which Guilty Crown flashes before my eyes to ponder the philosophical mysteries of the universe, like what is the meaning of life, do humans have a destined love set at birth, or if God is omnipotent, is he omniscient?

Biggest Implosion - No.6 (novel/anime*)

No.6 was so popular at one point a wikia was made dedicated to the franchise, which has promptly been abandoned. Like several other titles, it had a strong early premise, but didn't live up to its initial suggestions. Unlike the similar Ano Hana that spluttered, breathless, across the finishing line, No.6 didn't make it that far - it did face plant right into a landmine, resulting in an almost hilariously bad, comic self-destruction. sniff Smell that? It's the sweet scent of anime immolation.

Most Likely Title to Check On in a Year - Magico (manga)

This is a manga released earlier in the year about a mage and his bride. It was marginally unusual premise, but didn't feel like a very strong title to me - it came across as average, un-exceptional shounen. But it's still around, so I am hoping that the author will move beyond the basic conventions he's used to get started and present something different sometime in the future. I'll probably take my own advice and ignore it until sometime in late 2012, if it is still alive by then.

Nobody Talks About This - Shakugan no Shana III (light novel/movie/anime*)

So weird. Six years ago, Fate/stay night and Shakugan no Shana were two of the most talked about anime titles. But even with the most dramatic part of the entire series, Shana III isn't getting any love. Heck, I'm not even watching it. What gives? o_O

…

Yup.

[All Fiction]

Infinite Stratos is the best anime this year followed by Hidan no Aria.

[Berzerk]

Nobody Talks About This - God of Highschool.

[Malintex_Terek]

@All:

Infinite Stratos is the best anime this year followed by Hidan no Aria.

I haven't heard of Hidan no Aria, thanks for bringing it up. But IS…? I think there's a reason nobody talks about IS here. :P

@Berzerk:

Nobody Talks About This - God of Highschool.

In an effort to talk about it, I read the first chapter and…it's interesting. I mean, for real, there wasn't anything unique to it, but I didn't stop reading. That's a rare quality for a series like that, perhaps the presentation style had something to do with it? At first I was like "this is amateurish" but it grew on me within a minute or so.

Perhaps because it's manwha, and not a "big name shounen" from a popular magazine, is why few bring it up? Great choice!

[zeltrax225]

I thought Madoka is overrated. It's good but it really doesn't feel like it deserves all the praise.
Guilty crown…is really bad. It's a mess..and whoever is writing it is trying too hard to make it epic.
It's like evagelion and geass merging together into a total failure. God knows where it is going..it's basically lost in its own plot.
I really enjoyed Steins despite it's plot holes and contractions, it may be overrated but it's still good.
Nobody talks about this:
I haven't finished it..but..Hanasaku?

I thought biggest bomb is itsuka tenma, considering how great LOL heroes was..itsuka tenma was ...bs.

[Malintex_Terek]

You mean Hanasaku Iroha?

I tried watching it, but I didn't get very far. It just wasn't super interesting because the main girl was so awkward.

I heard in the third episode the anime featured balut, which comes from my country. I wonder how Japan would view it? Even in the Philippines it's not widely liked.

[zeltrax225]

The balut wasn't that impressionable. It was…just there. It had 24 or 26 episodes, and was one of the best slice of life this year, at least from what I hear.
Despite that nobody really knows about it. I didn't get far too, stopped at around episode 8 but I plan to continue it.
I'm not sure about shakugan, I have the entire first season on my hard disk but it was so boring and plain even after 6 episodes.

[Malintex_Terek]

It was well talked about on other forums I browse, and I was pretty retarded earlier in the year and watched almost no anime except Kaiji. Iroha isn't the kind of series that I could marathon, though I suspect it would have gotten fun/awesome once we got past the main girl's fish-out-of-water syndrome. I mean, the scene where the bed she was cleaning fell on a guest was painful.

What about Shana-1 bored you? I was pretty young when I watched it so nostalgia might be clouding my judgement, but I was really into Sakai Yuuji's predicament. He's coping with the fact that not only is he dead, but he's just a copy of the dead him. Does he have a right to life? Does he have a right to love? I felt this transience and balancing of the eternal Yuuji versus what was his mortal life was really interesting.

Of course, there are other titles that examine this theme in greater depth with finer detail, but since Shana was supposed to be an action title, it mixed a lot of elements together that made for a really entertaining story.

It's puzzling, though, that Shana-2, which was absolutely horrible and filler infested, is getting more attention than Shana-3, which is the climax of the story.

[Crossword]

^If I recall right, ''balut'' was used as an insult.

Might as well drop my two cents on a couple of the shows I watched this year.

No. 6
I dropped this one less than halfway through. I found it to be pretty boring for my tastes, and I didn't buy the relationship between Shion and Rat for an instant. I don't mind having relationships in stories, even homosexual ones, as long as I can at least buy into it, which certainly wasn't the case here. I've heard someone observe that the writing for Boy's Love relationships are usually more concerned with getting the uke and the seme into bed with each other than actually giving them plausible development, so I dunno, is it just me who felt that way? Anywho, it distracted from the dystopia plot, and I hear that the show basically imploded in the end due to poor pacing, so I have no regrets on bailing out when I did.

Persona 4 - The Animation As an adaptation, it's adequate. Not amazing, or astounding - adequate. It covers the game material well enough, maybe a little hurriedly at times, my biggest issue is the treatment of Yuu. In the course of twelve episodes he's gone from a piece of stoic cardboard to a piece of stoic cardboard with some amusing one-liners. I know that he was originally a mute protagonist, but that's no excuse to give him the characterization shaft. There are hints there, like the fear of losing his friendships in the Shadow Mitsuo episode, but there's still not much there. The game treats him as this innately magnetic individual but I'm having a hard time seeing it because he sounds so bored with everything three-fourths of the time. Just giving him a couple extra lines per episode would help immensely.

Steins;Gate I liked this one for the most part. I'm guessing that it helps that I've had little exposure to the visual novel-dom beforehand. A lot of the otaku subculture elements made me groan, but most of the send-ups I found mildly amusing, and the plot itself was constructed well-enough that I'm willing to overlook some of its technical flaws. I feel that it did a good enough job of explaining its time travel mechanics in such a way that I could understand it and not be overwhelmed by technical jargon. As a casual watcher, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Guilty Crown If this were an ensemble show about Funeral Parlor's crusade against GHQ I'd probably like it a lot more despite the fact that it would probably be even more derivative of Code Geass than it is already. But instead it focuses on Shuu and Inori, the former of whom is a very unsympathetic and unimpressive protagonist, and the latter is emotionless anime girl #36542. It's a shame, because the show's very pretty to look at, and I think the setting's fine as far as near-future science fiction goes, but the way things unfold and the characters and situations are pretty derivative and cookiecutter. And why are the villains such evil, puppy killing bastards? What does that accomplish? Hell if I know. At least Segai is affable and subtle enough in his evil.

The worst part is, I don't even get the feeling that the writers are, how should I put this, going out of their way to turn out such a trite product. I know this may sound weird, but it's like there's no malevolence there; they're not being dicks, they're just messing up.

Okay, that's a lot more than two cents, so I should probably stop there for now.

[Malintex_Terek]

Silence talked me out of watching the Persona anime. He said the pacing is bad and it'll probably polarize people who don't know anything about Persona to begin with, which I don't. Numbers don't lie, it's a massively successful show by any barometer, but I have no idea how much of those sales are due to per-existing game fans. I feel pretty out of the loop not watching it, though. It's worse than when Devil May Cry had an anime several years back, because DMC isn't as well written as Persona supposedly is.

[Psywar1]

@All:

Infinite Stratos is the best anime this year followed by Hidan no Aria.

Most Overrated - Puella Magi Madoka Magica

[Silence]

I'm more or less in line with Terek when it comes to much of the stuff above, but less harsh,
and more or less in line with Crossword when it comes to what he said, but more harsh.
There were indeed some very good series in 2011, it was a good year for anime. So let's get this shit reviewed: Best Overall - AKA Homura's My Homie Award

! Madoka. Duh. It's basically tits. Metaphorically.
You're a Damn Fine Woman, Kim! Damn Fine!
! Fate/Zero -
The writing, focus on multiple, multifaceted ADULT characters (thank FUCK) and extremely high production values are going to make this the one to beat come this spring. Prior knowledge of FS/N isn't required but helps in this vn adaptation leaps and bounds better than that piece of shit. An awesome premise with Urobuchi Gen behind the script and an extremely promising first 13 episodes behind it. I would basically fellate it if it was a dick.
! Hourou Musuko -
Despite concern over the volumes skipped over to tell a small portion of the story rather than the whole thing from the get go, Hourou Musuko remained a jaw-droppingly beautiful and poignant look into gender identity issues in very young children. Very well directed, just damn heartbreaking at times. An extremely good character story.
Fabulous MAX Award
! Mawaru Penguindrum -
Reach for the stars, Ikuhara, you crazy SOB. Chock full of surrealism and symbolism and second-viewing revelations, Penguindrum requires critical thinking and is full of nuanced imagery and language that a secondary source can really help with - the show is almost impenetrable without it. A story about damaged children, fate, punishment, social criticism, wacky penguin antics and 70's shojo manga nonsequiturs. Almost as crazy as Utena, with lots of callbacks to other anime, the show is a colorful, visual feast and purposefully directed with some of the most epic music this year. Don't expect it to care if you don't understand it, though.
Very Good, Minor Stumbles
! Stein's;Gate -
Though it wasn't at all perfect, and there were some characters that made you want to file off your ears with a cheese grater, ultimately despite problems I had with the leaps of logic the show required you to take to make it believable, Okabe's earnestness in his struggle won me over. Though the plot contorted itself into funny shapes for its ending, ultimately I felt it was an ending well earned, despite it's lack of realism. Heavily plot driven, with some scenes that only reveal their meaning on second viewing.
! Level E -
Another well-written show, surprisingly old fashioned in its presentation. A collection of self-contained stories that deal with surreal scenarios Togashi loves to play with with an added alien element - literally.
! Hanasaku Iroha -
Another very pretty show with mostly solid characterization and a surprisingly good finale (animes usually botch these). The big draw is the hot/cold relationships between Hana, her mother, and her grandmother, all headstrong women who have very different ideas about the aging inn that ties them all together. There are some wasted episodes, but overall the show was well done. Probably one of the best slice-of-life shows of the year.
Merely Solid
! Kamisama Dolls.
Lots of Other Shit. Overrated
! Ano Hana No Pretentious Long Name -
You know, it had promise going in. But like Terek says: it twiddled its thumbs ("MAKE HER PICK SOMETHING UP ASSHOLE") and wasted a lot of time when it really didn't need to. It had good character development but a false climax and a lame, outrageously overacted conclusion. A lot of people backpedaled on their opinions of this one after the show was over, and with good reason - it just wasn't that great.
! Tiger & Bunny -
I feel like I'm one of the few people who didn't enjoy this series as much as everybody else did. For all that it was supposed to be a send-up/parody of the struggles of a modern day superheroes - and for all the potential that such an imaginative setting would offer, I found Tiger & Bunny stopping just short of my expectations time and time again. Fun to watch, but its own popularity prevented it from being the self-contained show it deserved to be. There were some very solid individual episodes (When Kotetsu returns home, the Skyhigh episode) but Tiger & Bunny's inability to commit to being daring really did it a disservice, imv.
! I would probably not be so harsh on this one if its ending wasn't so pointless.
Disappointing
! Every JUMP Adaptation -
First episode filler? Oh we're in for a fucking ride aren't we. (exception! Hunter X Hunter)
STAR DRIVER -
Too much daily life, self-defeating premise by forcing the story to have an unbeatable main character. Distressingly formulaic, except in the episodes where it wasn't, which were far and away its best. Still, the most ~FABULOUS~ show since Code Geass, in a campy good way, a send-up to old robot anime with a dash of Utena. The finale was fantastic, so it's a shame the rest fell short due to lack of plot focus when it really needed it.
Persona 4 -
I'm basically going to copy-paste my conversation with Terek, but basically Persona 4 doesn't succeed as an anime in its current form.
! For those who have played the game, it hits all the main plot points with the regularity of a metronome but isn't structured like the game was, where the character development was interspersed throughout the game and thus spaced out between dungeon exploration and the progression of the story. In Persona 4, each character's character development happens well after their initial introduction. The anime seems to be cutting that, ripping out what is probably the best part of the game in the first place. IEverything regarding characterization is going to be pushed towards the ass-end of the series – if it happens at all. This anime all too literally follows the main storyline, so things that might get you invested into the characters and push them away from stereotypes won't appear until you're well in.
! In the game, all the plotlines via other characters and the main story are running alongside each other. The anime separates them, making the story less about each character coming to understand the negative parts of themselves they don't like, and more about the -as far as anime viewers know - cardboard cutout cast going through the motions. Which just isn't interesting - the investigation itself, frankly, is the weakest part of the game until the end. The game's slice-of-life focus helps build atmosphere: the time inbetween investigations and crises is spread out to allow you time to become invested in the characters and avoid the mood whiplash between creepy psycho murder demon land and sleepy, dull Inaba drudgery. Without the little scenes inbetween where characters slowly open up to Yu with their problems, you've got what Crossword describes: a hurried, stop-go story.
! It is not making the translation from the game well. As an anime it's merely average: it could be MUCH better.
Guilty Pleasure
! Mirai Nikki -
Pros: Yuno is very, very crazy. Convincingly yandere. Cons: Yuki is very, very whiny. Convincingly Shinji.
! Ben-To! -
Very stupid but very self-aware of it: its dedication to its stupidity is commendable. Music by Taku Iwasaki, some of the best this year. Believable fanservice? Is that a plus?
! Stein's;Gate -
Whatever its faults, they convinced me, damnit. All the romantic subtext, all the bickering, all the flirting had a payoff. For a fucking change. Okabe and Kirisu, whatever other flaws they had as characters, made me believe. For that, I will forgive a whole lot.

---

The rest are "awards" for the Special Olympics of 2011.
4th Quarter Fumble of the Year Tiger & Bunny - Return everything to zero!

Just Can't Watch It Usagi Drop - Woody Allen manga-only ending is why we can't have nice things. Usagi DROPPED.

Ashlotte no Omocha.
Lowest Common Denominator Award Infinite Stratos - Mucking Foe Shullbit.

Still Ashlotte no Omocha.
Troll of the Year Rage ni Todoke - Gave me a hernia.

Get Fucked Blood C - how dare you waste so much of my time.

Loli Mystery Series I Don't Give a Shit About All of them
Code Geass R2 of the Year Guilty Crown - swill.

[Chicken]

Hmm, I guess I should be glad that the only thing I saw this year was Madoka.

@Silence:

Guilty Pleasure

! Mirai Nikki -
Pros: Yuno is very, very crazy. Convincingly yandere. Cons: Yuki is very, very whiny. Convincingly Shinji.

The author has started on a new series called Big Order. It features another crazy yandere(ish) girl. Tried it?