Are you serious right now Japan? Just cause something can be made doesn't mean it should.
Mari Okada I'm not even concerned about, I frankly never felt she was anything approaching good and talented as a writer and lately have realized that the one series I thought she did that was any decent in Ano Hana was actually the result of the director saving it from her mediocre ideas. So yeah nuts to Okada, it's Kawamori that is fastly getting concerning. Lately I'm sensing something of a death knell for Kawamori's relevance as a creator. The guy that gave us Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Macross Plus and The Vision of Escaflowne and worked on many series with broad appeal like Cowboy Bebop, Patlabor and Gundam as a mecha designer or writer has clearly started to make the full transition to the other side of the equation as yet another otaku friendly/pandering director. Basquash and Macross Frontier were where he kind of started morphing (as those were kind of where I noticed his shows coming more with the flavor of an otaku series while hiding behind the mask of something more ambitious) and I clearly saw it coming too and this will all but certainly complete his metamorphosis. Shame that lately he's been dragging Yoko Kanno down with him as well since her new music is nothing like the old stuff and now I'm kind of starting to piece together why.
Fortunately she should have absolutely nothing to do with this...I hope.
Better keep enjoying this season, cause with what's been announced so far for next year it's looking like all the otaku pandering trends with TV series are only getting that much worse from here on out and that it is just indeed brief resurgence of decent animated fair....possibly the last hurrah.