So, I've loved Mushi-shi since it started, I have all the anime, I have all the manga, I love it to little pieces. I was hugely excited to learn that the second half of the manga would be animated.

Only, instead, after the first few episodes, this set of adaptations is changing in some very peculiar ways, and skipping stories to boot. This is not to the advantage of the series. One of the things I love about Mushi-shi is the tension of Ginko's character. His compassion for mushi and humans alike means that he is, at the same time, the character who always tries to give people information and let them make their own choices, and also the character who, if he sees harm being done, will act and take risks in a way that no one else dares. There are issues of the manga that don't foreground this as powerfully as most, to be sure, but the second season of the anime is not only selecting those in particular, it's also tweaking the dialogue and action to cut back on Ginko's centrality even further. I think the idea may be to make the people experiencing the contretemps more central, to make the anime a more classic drama/action series, but that completely misses the point of Ginko, the one who always travels on, being the axis of the manga, the thread that ties all the episodes together. His values are the ones that give the whole deeply episodic series a consistent theme and flavor.

To take that away is to take away what make the series so beautiful.

As long as we end on "Drops of Bells", as the manga does, I suspect I'll forgive the production team. But I'm not going to be very happy in the meantime.