[Kamen Rider Lucha]

I stayed home sick from work on Friday and ended up watching the pretty much the entirety of STEINS;GATE...

Credit is due to any show that can get me to watch 20 episodes in a day (note: I'd already seen the first 4 eps). It's obviously doing something right.

BUT.

Um...

I guess I thought it was only okay? The first 12 episodes were very slow, but the promise of it "getting good by episode 12" kept me going. And sure, when the plot kicked in around that point, the show became like animated crack. I couldn't stop watching. But by the end, I thought it was like really well made junk food. It's seriously lacking the grander themes and complex characters I require from my "top shelf" anime. It is a very well-structured time travel series, but all that's impressive about it is its structure...

I think my main problem was that I hated pretty much all of the one-note, semi-harem-esque supporting characters and could not connect with Okabe at all. (Because he is intolerable.)

The arc in the middle about Suzu was admittedly excellent, but it's only like 3 episodes. Hardly enough to justify watching a whole 24 episode series.

I def don't understand all the "Best Anime Ever" plaudits the show gets online. The fandom's near-universal praise is a large part of what kept me going, even though I was lukewarm on the series from the beginning. But by the end I was like... "really? This is the show everyone declares a modern masterpiece, in the same breath as Evangelion and Utena? Hardly!"

I guess what I'm saying is, I wish I spent my sick day watching something better.