Several Sequels

Symphogear G:  C+
Toaru Railgun S:  C
Infinite Stratos 2:  F

So I gave Chuunibyou Ren a full post, though it's very relevant to what I'm talking about, as is Haganai Next.  The three shows I'm actually reviewing all came out last year but none of them were good or bad enough to justify their own posts (though I did make a funny gif about Railgun S), and all of them are different kinds of bad sequels.


There are lots of bad sequels. In the context of anime, most sequels are worse than the original series, because most first seasons are coherent individual stories, and sequels necessitate new reasons for conflict, new enemies, new macguffins.  None of the above series are slice of life series, which are by far the best at accepting additional material.  I will say that ironically, of the three, Symphogear was set up the worst for sequels, having no light novel or manga series for expansion material, additional plots and characters to squeeze into an existing world.  On the other hand, they didn't have an existing body of work to get overly concerned with and tie down any good ideas that might come up in a second season.  Railgun is a  now the fourth series in the Toaru meta-series, and was in dangerous straits from square one for being a re-telling of part of one of the other three.  Infinite Stratos 2... well, it was terrible and I'll get to it in a bit.

In case you've forgotten, I thought the first season of Symphogear was a diamond in the rough, a series with a fairly base concept that happened to rise above its early pacing issues and tendency to end on a dramatic moment that wasn't followed through with at the beginning of the next episode with good characters, good music, an excellent ending and generally positive execution throughout.  The fact is that one of the reasons Symphogear was so good was because you heard the premise 'Magical girls who sing and fight with ancient mythic weapons,' and you don't expect to much, and then you can be surprised when it's better than you expected.

And the second season could not possibly be extended that particular olive branch, second seasons just don't get that.  If it's worth making a second season of, you've got to improve on it.  And Symphogear G just doesn't.  The music, the fighting, the drama, it's still there, but it gets stretched out and the writing is worse and the ending this time doesn't even register on the Gurren Lagann scale.  It's by no means bad (we'll get to that in a sec), and if you come into it with even lower expectations than the first season, you can probably like it, but there's just nothing really there to adore.  Tragically I hear there's going to be a third season, which I suspect to decay further, the cast is already getting large, it can't afford another doubling in size to match all six heroes up with villains, and the side-switching was already a little bit stale.

I never reviewed Railgun's first season on its own, but it's not very different from its sister series, Index: it's awesome but not good, and it falls apart almost instantly if you look at it the plots too closely, especially in the motivations of villains.  Railgun S further dilutes its good qualities by being, for the first 14 or so episodes, a retelling of the Sisters arc from Misaka's point of view.  As a brief explanation: Misaka is the protagonist of Railgun, and a main character of Index, but not THE main character, and this retelling from a different perspective gives greater depth, but takes quite a bit longer and changes nothing.  (It also hinges on a large group of scientists agreeing that having an incredibly powerful superhuman fight 10,000ish teenage girls to the death so that he can become even more powerful is a great idea.)  The second arc is the one I discuss in my gif, and pretty much nothing I say in that gif is more than a few inches stretch at best.

Railgun as a sequel is competent, and is true to the series' quality as a whole.  In some ways of these three it is the 'best' sequel in that it is the most consistent to what the show is about: some guys being stupidly evil, some girls getting in trouble and our heroes saving them with the application of determination and brokenly effective superpowers.  It's well animated and the execution is usually good enough that if you get excited about it you won't think about how the villains almost never think things through.

Infinite Stratos.  Oh, man.  So it was the series I was watching when I first started this blog, and I feel kinda betrayed for how completely terrible the second season was, because, like I said, "This show has potential!  If they made a second season and focused on deepening the characters and going somewhere with them it could be really good!"

I was younger then.  Optimistic.  Foolish.

Infinite Stratos 2 is absolutely everything that is wrong with anime.  I maintain my stance that it COULD have been good: the mecha designs were cool and the aerial combats in the first season are still some of my favorite scenes in anime.  But when I first watched Infinite Stratos I hadn't watched as much anime as I have now, so I didn't know to see the pattern of that time.  The pattern throughout the first season of a character having personality and motivation, but at some point being set down by the director and being told 'welcome to the main cast, now you need to just shut up and fawn over the male lead for the rest of the series, even though as written you should be clever, take initiative or move forward as a person.'

Infinite Stratos' second season not only continues this problem, but makes all the wrong choices for its sequel.  In the second episode we get our new girl, who immediately jumps ahead of all previously extant characters, being more competent and perhaps most bizarrely, student council president: a position you'd think would have been important enough to mention in the first season if the character was going to be relevant.  In short, it introduces a new character in pretty much the least dignified way possible.  Then we get her younger sister.  Note that the five girls we spent the first season with are technically present for all this, but are essentially irrelevant except for their various brands of fan service.  We don't even get their awesome mecha.

In short, Infinite Stratos 2 deliberately abandons its own coherence and continuity for the sake of putting new girls on the screen.  There are no characters in the second season that are even believable, much less interesting.  Something that could have been intelligent, beautiful or at least competent was stripped down and had tits painted on it instead.  Infinite Stratos is overall better than Sekirei, despite also getting the F, but only because of the things that the series abandoned when it got its second season, namely the mecha.

I should mention the exceptions: Dog Days second season was actually quite good.  I liked Gundam SEED Destiny better than SEED, overall.  I liked Zeta Gundam better than the original MSG.  I consider both Slayers Next and Nanoha A's to be dramatically superior to their original incarnations and Haganai Next not only is a better season but retroactively turns the first season from 'good' to 'utter genius'. While I'm talking about good sequels I guess I'll say that I liked the second season of Stand Alone Complex more than the first, though that's a close call.

But the entertainment industry in general and anime in particular has taught me that more often than not, a sequel is an attempt to cash in on a brand you built up with a random success, not provide meaningful follow-up to an excellent opening.  There are exceptions, and there are series that lend themselves well to sequels (Dog Days, the upcoming Durarara second season), and there are series that plan for sequels (Index, Monogatari, Slayers) and there are some that just manage to magically make them more or less work (Nanoha, Chuunibyou), but it's always best to come into a second season assuming it will suck.  That way, at least, you're not disappointed.