Author trolls us with yet another dumb truism, but I will one up him. He asks, “should anime aspire to greatness and fall on its face, like Fractale, or should it aim for competent mediocrity and succeed?”

My answer is “What are you smoking? Is not Localdol great and exceeds mere mediocrity by all measures?”

This comes from a man who has finished watching Rail Wars, and kind of regret it. To that end, however, I am not alone. And I think this Brit puts it plainly. That is truly mediocre, if successfully so.

Rail Wars, more precisely, is actually aiming for mediocrity and achieving it. I finished the series not only because I am partial to seiyuu of certain types and trains, but because it is fairly well-executed fluff, bearing Vania600’s designs. If you can do that with a fanservice-oriented show, I would consider it a success, at least artistically.

But as someone who has watched Rail Wars, I can tell you that the gap between it and something like Locodol is night and day. For starters, I do not end Locodol with an excessive (albeit just a little in whole) feeling of regret in the form of “what the hell did I just waste my time doing?” I suspect Author has no idea what mediocrity really is, in the sense that I don’t know how many series he has finished is truly mediocre. And by that I don’t mean just “of only moderate quality,” I mean most shows he can afford the time are probably above average by a discernible amount, that the shows he finish are questionable in terms of their true conceits–do they even have any? Does he enjoy shows oriented to male titillation, for example? There’s an entire mountain’s worth of stuff under that category, and they vary greatly by quality.

Alternatively, we don’t have to go so far. It’s well-documented that people have different standards, even what passes for some literary parallel to the arithmetic mean. What we consider a regretful use of time will vary from person to person.