It’s that time of year again, halfway through the year, which means it’s time for Chris’ top ten from 2 years back! But I don’t even remember what I watched yesterday Rules for the list: Anime on this list are those that finished in 2014. That means that anime that finished airing in 2015 were not considered for this list; conversely, anime that began in 2013 and finished in 2014 are fair game.

No, we’re not going to marathon Pretty Cure: All Stars, the Eureka 7 movie, and M.D. Geist (although if you were going to kill yourself, I can think of no more effective way).  Instead, we’re celebrating having survived the Mayan Apocalypse with the 5 greatest anime of 2012.  Why only 5?  Because writing a Top 10 for 2012 would only distinguish the decent anime from the rest of the dirt.  This list forces us to think about which anime will still rattle in our brains after 2012, when a new wave of anime and video games further degrades our ADD-riddled minds.  So, for now, set aside your thoughts of impending doom, and settle in for a defense of this year’s most memorable series.

Last day of the year? Sounds like a fine time for the club president to write up a Top 10 list for anime!

Luckily for me I only watched about 15 shows this year, which made putting together the list pretty easy. I’m also limiting listees to shows that finished in 2012, which means I’ll have an “Honorable Mentions”/”Continuing” list at the end of this post.

Hey all, Steve here.  For the freshmen who don’t know me, it’s because I haven’t been at anime club this semester, being wrapped up instead captaining the CSM eSports DotA team.  Rest assured, however, that I have been keeping up with anime this year.  Gene has been harassing me for the past week to post my top 10 anime of 2012.  So I though I would oblige him.

(Warning, superfluous vulgarity to follow)

Hello!

Many of you probably don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Gene and Steve’s, and have met many members of the club. A few days ago, Gene asked me to write a list of my favorite anime this year, and when I had nowhere to post it, I was asked to come here instead. I’ll refrain from adding a bunch of information that nobody cares about relating to myself, and just get right into this.

Hope everyone had a merry Christmas (Hanukah, etc) and a happy New Years.

And so 2011 comes to a close. A good year for school, conspiracy theories, and surprisingly, a pretty good year for anime. Which means it’s time for top 10s!

I’m glad anime isn’t dead yet. I even did my homework this year, as this list is compiled from a pool of 20 candidates. And those were pulled from like 50 shows I actually tried (and failed) watching. I even almost watched everything I wanted to (sorry Wandering Son and Mawaru Penguindrum)! And I played a couple good Visual Novels, and finally beat that damn .hack series (just in time for the announcement of the next installment ;_;), and wasted 60 hours on Skyrim. Good year.

So onward, into my favorite Chinese cartoons from 2011, and my endless ranting.

Note 1: Anime on this list are those that finished in 2011. That means that anime that have not finished airing yet were not considered for this list; conversely, anime that began in 2010 and finished this year are fair game.

Note 2: While I will avoid significant spoilers, it’s pretty difficult to review a show in any detail without revealing something. If you’re the type that’s afraid to watch commercials or read the back cover for fear of spoilers, you may consider skipping over entries you haven’t seen. If I do plan to spoil huge things, I will leave huge tags. You’ve been warned.

So, it seems like I gotta do a list too… Well, I was gonna do 10, but it seems like almost all the list is top 10 this and that. It’s even 20 10. You know, it’s too non-unique. So  I decided to do 11.

Okay, to be honest, I couldn’t pick 10.

So, here we go.

Yeah, yeah, it’s late, but at least it’s still 2010.

After looking up and down gg’s list of 2010 Anime, rubbing my chin thoughtfully, gazing wistfully into the sunset, meditating upon my learnings for 10 days and nights, and shoveling snow in my driveway, I concluded two things.

Of eligible shows in 2010, I had started 28.

I had finished 7.

As I don’t feel qualified to review anything I haven’t completed, this clearly presents a problem. So, instead of reading Wikipedia and /a about random shows and pretending like I knew what I was talking about, I instead decided to review the 7 I actually watched, and add some filler top-picks at the bottom. Note that while this will be a “worst-to-best” list ala Grant, the fact that any show appears on this list at all means it was in the 25% I felt was worth watching, so it’s more like a “worst-of-the-best to best-of-the-best.” Or maybe, since I didn’t like 2010 that much, it’s a “worst-of-the-best-of-the-worst to best-of-the-best-of-the-worst.”

I went through about 4 iterations of this list. I had to think hard, something I’m not used to doing when it comes to anime. Especially this year. Not a lot of particularly “deep” anime series came out this year. The only reason any became deep was when I heard Chris talk about “loldark” explanations for most anime (I shat bricks when he told me the one about Squid Girl). 2010 didn’t have any anime that I would elevate to the point of “timeless,” but there were a few that were definitely at a different caliber of entertainment than others.

Then we have the various adaptations. There were a ton of those this year, including Bakuman, B Gata H Kei, Giant Killing, and RAINBOW, none of previously mentioned made this list (due to making me really bored most or part of the way through). On the plus side, I’m proud that we got through all the anime I had wanted to get through this year. The club got entirely caught up on the worthwhile 2009 anime, and in turn we managed to get to the 2010 stuff this semester, aka “the stuff nobody but me likes.”

So read on, because I have really bad taste in anime. It’s a miracle I’m your President at all.

I probably shouldn’t even post this, since I don’t do well at keeping up with new anime. As it turns out, the number of anime I have seen from this year pretty much adds up to exactly 10 different shows/movies/OVAs that I would consider myself to have ‘watched’ (I guess I count watched as having been upwards of 10 episodes, since Shiki will be on this list, and I haven’t really watched Shiki all the way through).

I will probably just list out each of the ten anime I gave attention to, give a short summary of my thoughts on each, and call it good. Hopefully my opinions invite discussion. However, this probably shouldn’t be considered a ‘top 10′ since I’ve only seen 10 different shows. Instead, it will be what I watched listed from least to greatest, in terms of the measure of enjoyment I got from them. Note that I’m just going off of the list Gene provided in his last post.

Before I really begin, let me just say that, even though this is more of a ‘worst to best’ list than a ‘top 10′ list, I don’t think that any of these shows are actually awful. As I put the list together, I realized just how hard it was placing some of them. Some of the placements I’m still unhappy with, but I feel like placing shows next to each other as ‘equals’ is sort of a cop-out, so the list is the list. I’ll try to keep spoilers out along the way, but no promises!

Here we go!