Second seasons, when it comes to anime, are a bit hit or miss if you ask me. For those of you who don't know, most anime is limited to between 12 and 26 episodes. None of this "drags on for ten seasons and has lost absolutely all popularity by the time it's over" stuff we get in the West. For better or for worse, studios generally have that one season limit on telling their story. Ocasionally, however, a series generates enough popularity to warrant a second season, or at least an OVA. There are some benefits and some drawbacks to this scenario.

For one, if the show was popular enough to get a second season, there's a good chance that the production values will have been increased from the first season. You may notice an increase in animation quality, or heck, even a longer season (24 episodes instead of 12). A good example of this is Genshiken, whose first season looked at best reasonable and at worst like I could have drawn it, but whose second season was quite presentable.

The troublesome territory that can occur with a second season has less to do with art and more to do with writing. Generally, it seems a studio won't know ahead of time that they're getting a second season, so the first season is designed to have some degree of closure at the end. It's the complete opposite than in Western television, because rather than end a season on a cliffhanger in hopes of bringing your audience back next season, the aim is to conclude all open story lines, giving the audience a sense of closure, like any good story has. In these cases, starting a second season can break the sense of closure offered by the first, which in terms of story-flow is a bit halting and uncomfortable. However, trying to avoid this by assuming a second season will occur can turn out even worse. Kare Kano is a perfect example of this kind of scenario going horribly wrong. Granted, the director left the studio about half way through the production, which is guaranteed to fudge everything up, but watching this particular series will leave any viewer with a tremendous sense of unfulfillment, with it ending abruptly smack in the middle of a major plot point. For those of us who generally prefer anime to manga (however few we may be), this meant never really knowing how the story turns out.

And speaking of manga, anyone who enjoys anime can tell you that the biggest problem with a long-running or multi-season series is filler episodes or in worse cases, entire filler arcs. These occur when the original manga author has not finished writing the story, but the anime has caught up with the available content, and thus runs out of material. In these cases, the producers of the anime have to basically wing it and come up with new original material for their series, to keep it on the air in the meantime until the manga author pumps out a few more volumes. This filler material is, in general, decidely of lower quality than the original work, has little relevance to the overall plot, and is basically a transparent stall for time. Occasionally, it's entertaining and can also provide some added character development, but on most occasions, it's a hindrance. Fortunately, this is less of a problem for one-shot second seasons and more of a problem for those unnecessarily long shounen action shows like Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece, which go on for hundreds of episodes to tell a story that could probably have been told in like 70, tops.

I guess I bring this up because of the second seasons of favourite shows of mine that have been airing recently. I mentioned Genshiken II, which recently finished its run and I honestly, thoroughly enjoyed it! It used plenty of untold story from the manga (or so I'm told) and added a few entertaining bits of its own (read: hilarious yaoi episode) while wowing us (well, me, anyway) with much nicer art and animation than the first season. Shakugan no Shana's season two is also airing, currently and is a little less impressive. The animation doesn't seem all that much different from the first series (especially given the recently released feature film, which looked very nice) and the story is dragging it's legs like an anemic, elderly tortoise. It has occurred to me that maybe I just look back on the first season too fondly. My tastes and views on anime may have changed enough since 2005 to alter my perception of a series. Still, though, as much as I may complain that the second season isn't as good as the first, I'll still watch it through to the end, in hopes that I'll recapture that same feeling I felt at the end of the first 24 episodes and that brought me back when that 25th aired.