So Crunchyroll hosted their first annual Anime Awards this year, where they pretty much hosted their own version of the Golden Globes but with, well, anime. It was a pretty fun concept, at least theoretically, and I say that because the actual awards were nowhere close to being indicative of the 2016 year at all. I should probably provide some context for this. See, the Anime Awards (the “Crunchies,” if you will) were taking place at the end of the year, right as Winter 2017 was getting ready to kick off, and while I do have to give props to Crunchy for including some shows that weren’t airing on their service (My Hero Academia and Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress being the prominent ones), the nominees for some of the categories were…questionable at best.

I won’t lie to you guys: 2016 was a really rough year. My home country went through an extremely divisive election, there were no less than thirty-thousand celebrity deaths, the movie and music industries were not doing well at all, and I personally was barely keeping my head above water during my fall semester of senior year. By most accounts, this year was not kind to most of America, and it showed.

In completely unrelated news, I just finished rewatching ERASED from last winter, and it is just as amazing as I remembered it to be. I’ve always been a big fan of mystery shows both inside and outside of anime, and ERASED satisfied me in a way I haven’t felt in ages. It was a well-told, well-paced and engaging whodunit that admittedly I guessed six episodes in advance of the actual reveal.

Sword Art Online is not a good anime. Already I can hear at least one person furiously slamming away on their keyboard as they launch into a doctoral thesis on just how much they despise Sword Art Online, so I’m saying that up front and off the bat. If we ignore the fact I’m a little hard to impress anyways, SAO is infamous in many circles as one of the worst series to have ever been made.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a seemingly normal teenage boy is mysteriously and abruptly transported to a medieval fantasy setting in a parallel universe, and alongside a cast of colorful characters he begins his journey from square one in this new, fascinating and wonderful world he has stumbled upon. If you’ve been watching anime for as long as I have, you’ve probably thought of no less than 93,162 shows that fit that description somehow.

Well this is one hell of a shift in quality, isn’t it? I debuted my reviewing career with Summer Wars, an absolute trip of a film that I loved very dearly, and now I have to deal with this shambles. Somehow, between then and now, and with very little fanfare in between, I have gone from reviewing something amazing to slashing apart something completely terrible. I’m not entirely convinced this is actually happening to me.

Alright, first review. Let’s get cracking. Straight to the heart of it. Nothing for me to digress about at all. Actually, no, let’s talk about Digimon for a minute. Full disclosure: I honestly don’t know a ton about it. My shounen of choice growing up was DBZ, and if I wanted to see kids use their pets to play Mortal Kombat, I’d throw on Pokémon. But every now and again I’d catch an episode of the original Digimon series and just see if I could keep up with what was happening.

Well, technically Subaru… I think I have your attention now. Good people of the Internet, as the recently hired writer for the blog, I’d like to personally welcome you to kotatsu.club. I am Jared “SnYves” Popelar (rhymes with knives). I study physics and eventually math at Colorado School of Mines, and as I mentioned previously, a reviewer/writer for CSM Anime Club. If you ever do decide to swing by and say hello, there will be a 99% chance I’ll be there as well.