The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!
The season is winding down, and the winds of the upcoming Summer season are already on the horizon (we’ll hopefully get to that tomorrow, if my writing schedule holds up). We’ll be kicking off with the three finales that aired over the last week, one of which only came out today. I realized after compiling this that in all three finale writeups, I quoted a character from the show in summarizing how I felt about the show itself. That was not intentional! But it’s kind of funny. I’ll also be blunt in saying I liked some of these more than others. Read on to learn why.
Anime
Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night – Episode 12 (Finale)
I’ve compared Jellyfish to other anime a lot while writing these off-the-cuff posts, but to pull from an otherwise very different series, the ending here almost reminds me of that of Witch From Mercury? Decidedly pretty good, and definitely fine-tuned to make you feel happy that our main pair are back together, but with just enough that doesn’t quite add up that I feel remiss not to mention it. It’s now been a few days since I wrote the original version of this entry over on Tumblr, and it’s clear to me that most people did not like this ending. I mostly did! But I don’t think it redeems the series largely faceplanting in its second half, so I’m not sure how willing I am to contest the consensus. Personally I think this is a case where I like the characters more than the show they’re from.
To be clear, if the series’ representational efforts—more in the realm of Kiwi than the Mahiru / Yoru thing, which the show largely drops for its final stretch—outlive the actual text of the show itself, as may well happen, that’s not actually a bad thing. Most anime would be lucky to have that legacy.
I want to zero in on one moment during the episode, though. Kano during the concert, where we’re early in the episode and she’s clearly nervous. Flashbacks, intrusive-thoughts-as-voiceover. The literally-faceless masses. This is imagery we’ve seen associated with her before, as she’s clearly reliving her trauma from her days with the Sunflower Dolls.
We see her basically bomb; the backing track kicks in but she can’t sing, and suddenly the sound cuts out entirely, putting her in the bottom of the ocean. Mero, surprisingly, is the one who calls out to her to egg her on, although it’s Mahiru’s jellyfish that she looks at as Mahiru calls out to her as well. We get our big, swelling concert song, and then the moment is over. Jellyfish‘s actual narrative ends the second the music dies, for better and worse.
We get a mirror of the first episode as the two meet again for the first time in a while after Kano’s performance. Ultimately, the conclusion they come to is that they kept their promises to each other, so everything’s basically fine. This is clearly to some extent what the show wants us collectively to think, as well. Kano as the aimless singer who’s finally found something to sing for, Mahiru as the ever down-on-herself visual artist who’s found someone inspired by her paintings. Kano says she wants to be a reason for people to keep looking forward, an interesting thought. But I’m not sure how much I agree with the show’s assertion here. The two definitely seem like they’ll be fine in the long-term, but given that we aren’t going to get to see the long-term, that’s a bit of a bittersweet pill.
In the Sunflower Dolls / JELEE show’s credit roll, Kano is credited under her preferred name. Yukine, the closest thing Jellyfish has had to an antagonist, seems to mean this as—and certainly the show wants us to take it as—a gesture that despite her past treatment of her daughter, she respects her now. (An analogy is also drawn between the virtual audience the show draws and the 50,000 person capacity of the Tokyo Dome. Originally referred to several episodes ago, having one of her artists sing there was a long-term goal of Yukine’s. The rest of JELEE is a little weirded out by Kano bringing this up, and that much is obviously intentional.) Clearly, not all is forgiven, as Kano playfully spurns her mother in the finale’s closing minutes. Still, something about this feels…a little wishy-washy in a way I can’t entirely put my finger on. It’s a good ending, maybe the best ending this iteration of the series could’ve had, but not a great one. There’s a distinction there, and this is the sort of show that practically begs rumination on distinctions of that nature. Yukine herself says, and I quote directly, “The difference between buzz and backlash ultimately hinges on an idea being meaningful.” Are Jellyfish‘s ideas meaningful? I think that’s an open question. Despite everything—Kano’s trauma, the falling out with Mahiru and Mahiru’s own impostor syndrome, the show’s own strange pacing, Kiwi being bullied for their gender expression and for being “weird”, the discrimination Mei faced as a child, Mero detonating the careers of the Sunflower Dolls’ onetime rivals The Rainbow Girls—this ends as a feelgood story, despite its gestures otherwise. That may be a bit too neat for me, I’m not sure.
I hate to bring up That Other Music Anime Airing Right Now while writing about this one yet again, but the main distinction between the two, I’ve finally realized, is that Girls Band Cry‘s emotional material feels much more consistently raw. Jellyfish’s best episodes hit those nerves as well, but the show on the whole feels like it can’t quite thread the needle in the same way. The comparison is perhaps unflattering to both anime, but I can’t help myself here. Jellyfish clearly wants to have a complex, somewhat open-ended ending, but it also wants to leave us on a positive note, not unlike fellow polarizing aftermath anime Wonder Egg Priority. In that show’s case, I felt that it was doing enough both overall and with its ending in particular that I felt compelled to defend it. I can’t really do that, here. I’m not as disappointed as some have been, for sure, but if someone feels significantly more let down than I do, I can’t really blame them.
The series ends on a short run-through of denouement scenes, for the individual members of JELEE both apart and together as a group. Tellingly, it might be Kiwi’s that works the best. The relatively straightforward nature of their arc makes their development feel the most earned and the most logical. The whole thing with Koharu is, to say the least, odd, but even that fits in pretty well with their arc in coming to accept themself as a queer person in a world of queer people. At the same time—and I couldn’t quite pin this down the other day when I was first writing this—that same coherence just isn’t there for the other characters. Perhaps because Mei was never particularly well-developed to begin with, and Kano and Mahiru’s reunion feels contrived. I can forgive letting a kiss on the cheek hang for six episodes. Letting that falling-out hang for, what, 3? Is a bit harder to stomach though. The entire plot there takes away a bit from what the show is trying to do, and when what you’re trying to do is this delicate, “a bit” can feel like a lot.
The over-painting scenes in the last few minutes of the episode being drawn as though they’re shot through the phone is a cool touch, I like it. On the note of that scene, something that Jellyfish does manage to capture is the warm mundanities of friendship and life in the digital age, and I like Kano’s little speech to the others at the end here. That’s worth something, I think. Not many anime end with their casts literally waving goodbye to the camera.
Time, as my memories of the show crystalize and harden, will tell whether I end up truly feeling that those warm feelings are “enough” to rate Jellyfish particularly highly, both on its own terms and as compared to other anime that have come and gone (and will come and go) this year. But that’s also sort of a way of looking at art that is ruthless enough to not always be appropriate. So I’ll say it here if I never remember to again, the people who made this clearly cared about it a lot. There’s love in it, and love does matter. I can’t speak for anyone else, though. Some songs just don’t reach everybody.
A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 12 (Finale)
So ends one of the season’s true hidden gems. A series that combines a freewheeling and loosey-goosey sensibility to both its worldbuilding and characters with just enough emotional warmth to make it worth connecting to. Good chance this ends up being my favorite of the two finales I’m watching tonight!
An aside: the live action screen camera-point screen recording of some random-ass actual pachinko machine is really funny.
It’s either astounding luck or meticulous planning that a pretty funny parody of a band performance episode dropped here, in the gay girl band season. It’s obviously nowhere near the bowl-you-over powerchord of say Girls Band Cry‘s eleventh episode, but Grasshopper the Savior put in an okay (and more importantly, amusing) showing here. How does that whole plot conclude? With Noa getting arrested for insider trading. Roll credits!
Sara, meanwhile, exits her ongoing plot by graduating the school she was enrolled in just three months prior, universally acclaimed and beloved by her fellow students and their parents alike. She sings an idol song. It’s all pretty great.
All told the main takeaway here is that Salad Bowl is, true to its title, a gathering of truly eccentric souls and bizarre situations. Sousuke’s reaction to Olivia’s band getting broken up because of Noa’s antics? “I see this is all insane as usual.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. The series ends on what passes for a cliffhanger in a show that has never really been focused on its plot. I can’t imagine this getting a second season, but who knows? I’d be pleasantly surprised.
Train To The End of The World – Episode 12 (Finale)
Here, we have easily the best of this past week’s finales. A pitch-perfect ending to a show that was not always so effortless. An ending I appreciate a lot, the sort of thing that makes me view the whole series in a better light.
A brief summary of the literal events here; We get a final battle while the two trains drive through what I’m going to call Windows 95 screensavers. We get Shizuru and Youka making up for lost time. We get the world returning to something that’s not normalcy but at least approximates it. (Another theme running through this show is acceptance of inevitable change, naturally.) We get to see scumbag techbro villain Pontarou get his comeuppance. It’s all very nice.
I think with hindsight the show is perhaps best considered as a longform metaphor for anxiety, specifically that stemming from social conflict. You fuck up, and the fucking up is blown up so big in your mind that it becomes impossible to move past. As somebody who just spent a few hours agonizing over and then rescheduling a doctor’s appointment, and then agonizing over the fact that I did reschedule it, I get it. It happens. It usually doesn’t result in the world degrading into a surreal hell of the senses that threatens to drive all within it to death or madness, but it happens. If you want to stretch a little, you can rope in the show’s technological motifs—the externalization of the internal through the medium of the Internet, as turned outward by the 7G Phenomenon—into all this. You could argue that Shuumatsu Train advocates for resolving conflicts of the social media age by talking to each other and treating each other as humans. I’m not sure how intentional that read is, but if it is, it’s a fine thesis, and the series pulls it off pretty well.
Incidentally, anxiety like that, which can end up fracturing friend groups as it has in Shuumatsu Train, doesn’t usually involve one of the parties being a near-omnipotent goddess either. Nonetheless that is what Shizuru and co. have to deal with at this episode’s climax, and while the results are a little saccharine, I think this whole arrangement works better than not. The final argument (such that it is) between Shizuru and Yoka is just great all around, and ties up their interpersonal conflict perfectly.
Shuumatsu Train was hardly a perfect show (I ask readers to remember the run of relatively weak episodes at about the 2/3rds mark. We probably could’ve skipped the ecchi zombie plot) but it did what it wanted to do and it did it well. This is another one in the grand tradition of oddball fare like The Rolling Girls or even the Akiba’s Trip anime, and it’s a worthy addition to whatever you’d like to call that genre, regardless of any flaws. To quote Shizuru herself, it’s better to try and have regrets than to do nothing at all.
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 55
This episode is mostly just an excuse for a procession of several fun, short battles. I say “just”, but that’s hardly a bad thing, since at the end of the day that’s what this series is about.
The second is the best of these, with an impressive showing from Elite Four artiste Hassel and his Baxcalibur and Flapple. Roy and his partner, the Grass-type gym leader Brassius pull off a number of coordinated double moves. Our brief detour over into what Coral’s doing is also pretty fun, since “what she’s doing” is having her Glalie blow everybody up again.
The real treat seems like it will be next week, though, when Liko faces off against Rika. I will spare you all the gay rant, although I can’t promise I will do the same when next week rolls around.
Wonderful Precure – Episode 21
I must say, my main surprise in watching this episode was how much of it was an episode of a Class S yuri school comedy. Yuki transfers in to the gang’s school in this episode, and most of the episode, accordingly, focuses on that.
Her personality, or at least, the one she sort of grows out of here is—and I realize that what I’m about to say is very silly—almost a little Homura-esque? It’s something about her single-minded fixation on Mayu that makes me think that, I think. I assume she’ll continue to develop out of it as the show goes on. (Something Homura never had the chance to do given the way her show is structured but, well, they’re very different anime to say the very least. It’s a loose comparison at best, but let me have my fun here.)
We get a pretty melancholy little flashback here where we learn about Mayu drifting away from a friend at her previous school. The anecdote, I think more than anything before it, seems to position Mayu as neurodivergent, as what drives a wedge between Mayu and her former friend is simply Mayu’s tendency to become fixated on tasks, and, implicitly, her more general habit of keeping to herself. Yuki is the one who tells Komugi and Iroha (and, well, us) all this, and I don’t think it’s a reach to say she’s projecting her own hurt into the anecdote as well. Much of this episode’s focus is her learning to deal with her own reluctance to get close to people. That’s all a bit heavy for a kids’ show, but Precure being Precure, it handles it all with relative ease.
Of course, all that and the action part of the episode involves waking up a sleeping panda garugaru by using the fox fairy to transform Komugi into a giant tire. The animation goes all out for this, of course, and around here I started to wonder if this might honestly be the best Precure season, or at least a new personal favorite.
Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 11
What would be a fairly nice transitory episode leading into the finale is once again held back by a lackluster visual presentation.
Honestly this one shoots past “workmanlike” into just generally pretty bad to look at all around, especially in its first half it’s just remarkably shoddy. (I can’t even meaningfully directly compare to the manga, as this is after the point where I stopped reading, but I almost guarantee you it looks better there, and anyone can read any of my Dungeon Meshi writeups to know I’m not normally a “haw haw manga better” person.)
If you can look past that—and the fairly gratuitous pool scene a bit after the halfway point—this is a decent bit of plotting. Rei and Oto possibly having a way back home is a decent final conflict. What I will say, the secret Rei is keeping where he plans to become the ticket is a compellingly dark twist. My main hope is just that things can get back in order visually by the time the anime ends next week. I’m also interested to see how the cat boss youkai factors in.
Girls Band Cry – Episode 12
A slower episode this week, but certainly an eventful one. TogeToge are officially signed! Rupa and Tomo are working their last day at their job! I am very happy for these people who don’t exist!
As one might predict, Nina seems almost as anxious about their current situation as she is happy. After all, Diamond Dust were still the main attraction at the concert TogeToge played at. And despite Nina claiming her band is better (she’s right) and that they completely rocked (she’s right about that, too), they aren’t the ones being talked about on socials. Rarely do the best artists get the most coverage, as Nina is learning.
The callbacks to the first episode are absolutely adorable, as is Tomo’s cute but muted reaction to the card and flowers Subaru buys her. The hotpot party scene is nice; a restrained sort of comfort and a chance to recuperate after the big, billowing emotions of last episode.
Their songwriting sessions are motivated by a desire not just to one-up Diamond Dust, but also, as you might recall, to get to the Budokan, a feat that would put them on par with many famous bands up to and including The Beatles, but most amusingly, Cheap Trick. These are subject to montage, the first in the series I think. We cap with a little scene of Momoka asleep on Nina’s shoulder, on the train home. It’s so cute, I wanted to cry.
The show’s final twist seems to be to make the whole Diamond Dust / TogeToge fight very literal. TogeToge are offered a co-bill, with composing the theme for a TV series on the line for the band that draws a bigger crowd. This is a stacked fight at best, and TogeToge have a lot to lose. Ultimately, the band put it to a vote, and, despite Nina’s misgivings (and being collectively unsure of what DiaDust’s actual goal was, here), they opt to decline. This leaves Nina in something of an emotional rut. Being a rockstar, she has learned, is not all about huge bursts of emotional catharsis. There’s a lot of boring bookkeeping and shady politicking, too. (I would refer her to the wisdom of KRS-One on this topic, myself.)
Momoka, however, knows that. There’s a running B-plot through this episode about a song she’s working on, first mentioned during the hotpot party. Throughout, she’s stuck on a specific part of it (we’re not shown what, specifically). Why exactly is left unstated, but it seems to be at least in part because, in her own way, Momoka wants to beat Diamond Dust, too. She’s just being more subtle about it.
Or at least, she thinks she is. Nina seems to pick up on this, and the rest of the band are convinced to accept DiaDust’s challenge after all. There’s fear in Momoka’s shadowed mood throughout the episode too. That much she says herself. She lost everything once before, and she’s afraid to lose it again.
The episode ends with an upturn of mood; Momoka admitting that she wants to win against Diamond Dust too, TogeToge’s sound engineer and manager telling them they really like the new song (which Momoka finally finishes, naturally), and all seems to be going well in the leadup to the finale.
And then, at the last possible second, we get this; the new song releases, Nina goes to check the metrics. 103 views. Ouch.
It is hard to tie genuine emotion to numbers floating up and down. This is a big mistake that frankly a lot of music anime make these days, but here, that 103 feels like a legit punch to the gut. We only have one episode left! What the hell is going to happen?! It’s hard to know, and there’s of course the knot of anxiety that GBC won’t “stick the landing” so to speak, but I have a lot of faith in the series. TogeToge will figure it out.
Anime – Non-Seasonal
Ruin Explorers Fam & Ihrie
A fun, if not particularly challenging, fantasy action-comedy romp from the heyday of the 90s OVA boom.
On the one hand, there’s not a ton to say about this one; we’ve got a very basic fantasy premise here with our two lead protagonists—a pair of treasure hunters named Ihrie [Neya Michiko] and Fam [Shiina Hekiru]—who seek an ancient wish-granting treasure. (That’s “Fam” pronounced to rhyme with “fawn” by the way. Don’t ask her if she’s cheesin’, though.) This eventually spirals out into a quest to help the last prince of a destroyed kingdom reclaim his throne from a very classic wizardly overlord bad guy. It’s all solid stuff and the main strengths here are visual; the show’s choices of color and shadow are consistently fantastic and the animation is similarly excellent with a lot of standout moments both in more action-oriented scenes and in the more comedic ones that make use of a lot of good character acting. (This is most obvious with Fam, whose kitty tail gets to telegraph her mood sometimes. It’s a cute touch.)
On the writing side, while the plot is truly nothing special, the characters, broadly-written as they are, are solid and likeable. Aside from the two leads, my favorites ended up being Rasha [Matsumoto Rika], a snarky and full-of herself wizardess who starts out as an antagonist before she and her partner Migel [Yamadera Kouichi] join the main party to help them take down the bad guy, and surprisingly, the cowardly merchant Galuff [Ootsuka Chikao]. Usually such characters come off as vaguely uncomfortable, and he’s not entirely free of that, but he’s such a petty and ineffective scoundrel that it becomes kind of endearing.
All told, this is a pretty fun and accessible watch. I dock a few points for some of the thematic material in the fourth and final episode (I’ve never been a big fan of the whole ‘divine right of kings’ thing, even in inherited form as a stock genre plot in fantasy stuff like this.) But all around, it’s a good time, and there are way worse ways to burn two hours. This is a strain of fantasy anime that still exists albeit in somewhat reduced form, so it’s not like this stuff has really gone away, but obviously something like eg. Dungeon Meshi (or even like, I dunno, Helck) is a fair bit more sophisticated on the writing and thematic level, so the comparison isn’t direct. Either way, yeah, fun time. Enjoyed myself here.
That’s all for this week, anime fans. Consider tipping your girl if you liked any of the entries this week, every penny helps me cover basic life necessities like food and medicine. As for this week’s Bonus Thought, I wanted to give it to Train, since we won’t be seeing it in this column again. Take it away, Akira!
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