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ShardPhoenix comments on March 2015 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Mushishi. A relaxing and atmospheric anime series consisting of episodic, folk-tale-esque stories set in a slightly mystical old Japan where a man travels the countryside dealing with problems caused by insect-like spirits. The stories are generally really tightly written and satisfying with an above-average level of rationality for the subject matter. Several times I felt that the story was going somewhere dumb, only to be pleasantly surprised by the actual outcome. Also quite unpredictable in the sense that good, bad, and ambiguous outcomes are all common.
Touches on horror tropes often but I didn't find it scary (and I'm quite sensitive to horror). Also suitable for those who don't like typical anime tropes - it's quite serious and doesn't feature boob-falling reaction-face type shenanigans.
Watched it with a group not so long ago. Started very well but it felt repetitive by the end of the first series; this is a very strictly episodic show, nothing is learnt or changes from episode to episode. And it's often quite grim - not the scary kind of horror, but remorseless fate crushing humans who stray from the path. It became a running joke for us that characters we saw early on would die by the end of the episode.
Rational for the subject matter perhaps, but these are still fundamentally folktales; there is no logic to what constraints any given mushi will have, and so you can't use reason to predict what will happen in a given episode (storytelling logic, and the idea that the ending is at absolute best going to be bittersweet, yield much more reliable predictions).
I see where you're coming from and I usually wouldn't particularly like this kind of show myself, but I found the execution here to be unusually strong, so for me the stories continued to feel fresh and smart despite the somewhat repetitive structure.