If there’s a pervasive theme to 2024, I think it’s the constant sense of there never being enough time. This has been a noticeable trend for years, but this year it became impossible to ignore that a lot of anime were materially compromised, either in episode count or fidelity. The age of the 52 episode TV anime is dead, and I think the end of the 26 episode TV anime is not far off. We now live in the era of 13 episode seasons; a frankly inadequate number of episodes for many kinds of stories. Watching familiar stories try to fit themselves into this new format has been awkward to say the least. The shows I’ll be talking about are the ones I think are most significant, either good or ill, to my 2024 anime watching experience.