With rare exception, I watch some REALLY terrible anime. I mean, sure, I’ll occasionally watch something like Psycho-Pass where the show actually has something vaguely like a message and you have to sort of pay attention, but that gets drowned out in a sea of generic moe anime and harem nonsense, with double points if there’s some sort of vague supernatural tinge to the whole thing.

And then there’s the imouto shows. Oh, gods, the imouto shows. I made it through KissXSis, but Oreimo season 2 had me nearly screaming at the screen with how dumb the characters are and then mentally screaming at myself for sitting through the whole thing.

For the record, Kuroneko ending is Truth and Beauty and all else is lies and damnation.

The LEAST paint-by-numbers tropefest I’ve watched recently was Seitokai Yakuindomo and all you can really say about that is that it’s middle-school locker room humor at its most polished.

So with that said, I just finished watching Gatchaman Crowds and it relieved a LITTLE of the guilt that comes from watching nothing but guilty pleasures. I was expecting, with the name and all, that it would be a dozen or so episodes of light action and moderate angst finishing with a Big Dang Battle between our avian-themed superheroes and the pointy-toothed Big Bad, and what I got instead was a show that mostly talked about how to improve your community by being a part of it and contributing what you can.

I mean, sure, there’s SOME fighting and the action bits are nothing to scoff at, but the climactic battle doesn’t even happen on screen, and the details of what must have happened are left entirely to the viewer’s imagination.

One thing that particularly resonated with me was, and here I’m going to go into some light spoilers, a riddle that the previously-mentioned villain hits the main character with – “What do humans find sweetest?”, which she wrestles with for a few episodes.

I was rather expecting “family” or “love” or something in that vein, so having her finally answer “the misfortune of others” was a bit of a shock, because it made me realize that I DO have a tendency to wallow in schadenfreude from time to time and that it’s probably not the healthiest thing. It also solved the “is Hajime actually insane or is she a Tylor-level genius?” question which had been one of the show’s biggest mysteries up to that point.

So. Gatchman Crowds. Worth watching. Ending a bit of a letdown in terms of action but nearly guaranteed to make you ask yourself how you can be a better person.