My girlfriend and I recently finished watching Bakemonogatari, albeit skipping a few episodes and including Nekomonogatari (it's sometimes categorized into Nisemonogatari, but I find that it's best watched after Bake 11.) For her, this would be the frst time she's watched it, but for me, it'd be at least the third.While it generally reviews well, and it sold like hotcakes, it's a problematic series to recommend. Bakemonogatari is a collection of short stories - that's why it's broken up into 2-4 episode arcs that each have their own name. "Nekomonogatari", "Hanamonogatari", "Koimonogatari", each of these arcs is a short story. As each short story features a different character, themes between each story can differ wildly. In one, we have a murder mystery-esque story. In another, we might get an uncomfortable basically tentacle-porn spectacle, which I decided to skip for the time being.

Moving right along, I asked my girlfriend a bunch of questions and had her spill her thoughts on Bakeonogatari.

In general, she liked it. She thought the characters were written well and more dimensional than the average anime character (which tend to skew towards trope than personality). She thought the direction was great, handling potentially triggering scenes in  a way that maintains the scene's gravity, but not making it graphically objectionable. Lastly, a big win for the series, in her eyes, was how well it did things that the majority of anime don't usually do - like using SHAFT's distinct "weird" animation style to "censor" scenes, rather than going for an all out gore-violence shock factor.

All in all, she enjoyed the series, but is a bit wary of continuing on into the next seasons.

More details after the jump