Wednesday was in many ways an unusually strong opening day. Thursday, by contrast, is usually expected to be one of the heavy hitters, largely because it’s the non-weekend day with the largest number of open timeslots. noitaminA doesn’t bring its heavy guns until next week, but there’s still some [nominally] A-list fare on the block.

Nagi no Asukara didn’t exactly wow with its characters from the get-go. It’s got a world that’s obviously running on more than a touch of mundane fantastic, which was intriguing and led to some fun situations, like the fisherman’s kid reeling up the female lead by accident. But right now it doesn’t seem particularly promising as unique environments go, the script is full of forced coincidences, and I don’t trust those shallow kids to carry that plot. Especially not with Mari Okada spoiling to break her NTR record from Hanasaku Iroha minutes out of the gate.* And all of those were things I felt before the girl was punished for not being calmly molested by an asshole god by having her knee turned into a fish. Dropped like a hot potato.

Infinite Stratos’s comeback episode was a slow plod, methodically reintroducing the cast of a show less than 2 years old. The presentation was very vanilla, mimicking the Date A Live strategy of slowing down every gimmick and trying to force the audience to acknowledge subpar bits as good ones; there was a fight scene halfway through the episode that started out all kinds of lazy, or at least the opposite of intense, and got to SWOT levels of poor visual presentation. I may have liked the first season, but this season doesn’t look like something that will hold my interest for any length of time. Dropped.

Kill La Kill may have lacked subtlety, but it packed plenty of spectacle and did a pretty good job keeping that spectacle varied with quirky tweaks of animation. The plot and writing did feel rather canned, if not entirely inappropriate for the type of atmosphere the show was going for. I feel like the series is trying to get away with too much stylistically without really considering what each choice is doing, and it lacked polish in parts, but it was fun through one episode. I’m following this one on a week-by-week basis.

*Okada belongs to the tier of scriptwriters that included Makoto Uezu and Hiroyuki Yoshino, who have the ability to make a good show, but not to salvage a bad one.