In this week’s Oshi no Ko, it feels like the house of cards is fully falling apart. Aqua revealed his and Ruby’s parentage at the end of the last episode. In doing so, he’s completed the alienation of everyone he cares for at all; Akane rightly told him off for putting trackers on her last week, here, Ruby chews him out for posthumously ruining their mother’s reputation, and even his surrogate second mom, the agency head Miyako, is clearly quite upset about the entire thing. Kana is really the only person here who still gives him the time of day, and it’s partly out of feeling she owes him for burying the scandal about her and that director, whether he meant to or not. Aqua spends this episode looking for all the world like a man already dead, and to the show’s credit, that much is definitely intentional, and it’s largely well-executed. There is also this line from Kana, who reveals that she plans on quitting the idol business in the near future. That much is not a surprise—we’ve always known that acting is her real passion—but combined with the rest of the episode it ends up feeling prescient, and not in a good way.
More than ever, Oshi no Ko is two different anime fighting each other for dominance. On the one hand, the showbiz stuff that took up most of the story when I last wrote about the series a couple weeks back. On the other, the psychological thriller aspects that have defined Aqua as a protagonist this entire time. I’ve thought about what the anime be like if it just picked one or the other, but ultimately it’s impossible to know. (And there’s no guarantee that such changes would make Oshi no Ko a better story. Or even a more coherent one.)
I’m sure to longtime readers it must seem like I keep going back and forth on this show. That is because I do keep going back and forth on this show. It’s trying to walk a very delicate tightrope, and because of that, how much this show succeeds at what it’s trying to do is going to come down to its final moments, be those moments counted in episodes or mere minutes I am not yet sure. For most of this season, and even most of this episode, I was willing to entertain the idea that it could still pull it off. Now, I’m not really so sure. I would like to be wrong, but we’ll get to why my opinion’s changed yet again.
First, let’s talk about a favorite storytelling technique of the series. One of Oshi no Ko‘s recurring tricks has been to have a character explain how to extract a certain feeling from the audience in some in-universe context while, at the same time, the series is doing that metatextually to its audience. Often with that same character. It’s been consistently fantastic at this, most notably so during the second season but as recently as just a few weeks back. Here, it makes its biggest play yet. This part of the story will be divisive, and perhaps sensing that, Oshi no Ko seeks to quell some of that division by returning to the one character that every fan of the series almost universally still has positive feelings for.
Yes. Via flashback, this is the first episode since the premiere of the series where Hoshino Ai [Takahashi Rie, if you’ve forgotten] herself is a major character.
At this point, I was already getting a bit worried. That is a big play, and it’s not one you want to make carelessly.
On the set of a film, she bothers Gotanda Taishi (the director who served as Aqua’s mentor) into filming a documentary about B*Komachi—the originals, recall—that her agency has wanted to do for some time. This is to be a grandiose thing, with shooting wrapping up on the day of the Tokyo Dome concert for B*Komachi that never actually came to be. Gotanda is serious about making this a truthful, genuine documentary of the B*Komachi girls, including Ai herself, and he doesn’t want her putting up her usual front. Despite warning Gotanda that the footage might be unusable if she isn’t “lying all the time”, Ai acquiesces to his request.
And then, somewhere between that conversation and the day when the concert was supposed to happen, Ai died. Gotanda has been sitting on this script, which he’s rewritten into a lightly fictionalized account of Ai’s story, for some time. Actual parallels in the real world to this are in very short supply. In theory, it’s an interesting idea. And depending on how much you pop for minor characters returning, you’ll be interested to know that in addition to the usual suspects, New B*Komachi, Aqua himself, and Akane, the film’s producer, Kaburagi, also wants to cast Melt and Shiranui Frill, as well as a completely new character in the role of Ai herself. For a minute, it might seem like the final arc of Oshi no Ko will be about immortalizing Ai’s story on the big screen, essentially an in-universe version of Oshi no Ko itself.
And, unfortunately, for the first time, I think Oshi no Ko‘s usual bag of tricks fails it here. Pretty much completely, in fact. It is wonderful to see Ai again, no matter what side of her we’re seeing, don’t get me wrong, but pushing Ai back to the center of the story as an actual character as opposed to just an idealized ghost haunting the narrative and everyone’s minds shines a very harsh light on OnK’s own complicity in the exact pop media machine it’s trying to critique. This has ramifications mere minutes later in the episode, but let’s talk about that in of itself first.
Do you know how many commercials Ai, the character, is in? Not fictional commercials within the world of Oshi no Ko, real ones.
Hint: More than you’d assume.
There’s a couple of these, although sadly not that many seem to have made it on to Youtube. Even if it were just this one, the point would remain; it’s weird that you’d use a dead person for this, right?
She’s not really dead of course. Fictional characters exist outside linear time, they are alive when they’re alive in the story and dead when they’re dead in the story. Vague, wobbly, out-of-universe stuff like a commercial is even less committal. Someone decided it would be funny to have a dead girl hawk this stuff, or even maybe just that she was so charming that it didn’t matter that she was dead, so there she is. I’m not stupid, and I’m well aware that this is far less of a problem than it would be if Ai had been a flesh and blood human being. But it’s still a little weird, right? There’s something a bit off about that?
The same is true of Oshi no Ko‘s endless barrage of merch. Look in any of these merch sets and there she is, frozen in eternal youth right alongside her children, who are of course represented as also being their teenage selves and thus roughly Ai’s own age. There is no explanation for this, because why would there be? It’s character merch, essentially just an art board put on some kind of collectible good. And in any other series I’d completely agree with that assessment, but the problem is that Oshi no Ko is in part a critique of fame. Ai isn’t real, but the systems she was written in part to criticize certainly are, even if they’re intangible, and this cuts against those ideas in an offputting way. I don’t know how much control original author Akasaka Aka has over the series’ merchandizing, but I’m criticizing a work of art, here, not one guy in particular. (And even if I was, I think the bit about figure rights in the cosplay episode several weeks back would put me entirely within my rights to do so.)
This has always been a problem with the series, a kind of deep-baked hypocrisy that’s never truly been absent. Until now, it’s been easy to ignore it if you were so inclined, the storytelling was good enough to warrant that. The Drama was worth it, if you ignored that it would have to build up to something at some point. Unfortunately, we’re now at “some point”, and it’s consequently become much harder to avoid the elephant in the room. The hypocrisy really hits a fever pitch toward the end of this episode, where we’re finally properly introduced to our main villain.
I strongly suspect that in the future, if I am asked to point to a single moment where Oshi no Ko just falls off for good and never recovers, it will be this sequence.
In the closing minutes of the episode, we are introduced to two characters. One is Katayose Yura [Hasegawa Ikumi], a red-hot superstar actress. She’s Kaburagi’s choice to play Ai.
Introduced alongside her is some mysterious and obviously-sinister blonde guy. They talk a bit as she drinks her stress away and she mentions her love of hiking. The blonde guy makes the deeply weird comment that she should be careful on her hiking trips, since if anything happens to her it’ll look like an accident. Hilariously, she doesn’t think twice about this, and either he or some accomplice of his promptly murders her the next time she’s on a hike, shoving her off a cliff, into a ditch where she dies painfully.
It’s probably obvious, but this blonde guy is in fact Kamiki Hikaru [Miyano Mamoru]. The twins’ father, the man who orchestrated Ai’s murder, and so on and so forth. This is our main bad guy, and while we’ve seen him from the shadows and briefly in passing a few times, this is our first opportunity to spend any real time with him. While he’s definitely intended to be unpleasant, the unfortunate reality is that this guy sucks in precisely the wrong way. In his brief few lines here, he comes off as the kind of supernaturally-competent murderous dickhead who riddles essentially the entire output of seinen manga magazines. Accordingly, his first impression is that of a character who is not only unpleasant, but corny and really boring. God bless the team at Doga Kobo, because they really try their hardest to make this guy look properly sinister, and Miyano Mamoru delivers his lines with as much malice as he can muster, but there’s a deeper problem here, and it’s on the writing level.
Look, I’m not saying every character necessarily needs the most realistic motivation in the world. Hell, even if they did, serial thrill-killers are a real thing. My problem is not that this is unrealistic, or “too dark”, or anything like that. My problem, to put it in the only way I can really think of, is that it’s stupid. And it is stupid! It’s corny! It’s cheesy, and not even in a fun way! Worse is that her death is framed in basically the same way that Ai’s was. What’s the term? Once as tragedy, twice as farce?
Honestly this might’ve worked more if it was darker. Part of the reason this is so out-of-nowhere and scans as so ridiculous is that we have no idea who this girl is! She’s alive for all of five minutes of screentime, and it’s clear that the reason she exists is that the show wanted to kill a character similar enough to Kana to make the similarities obvious but was either too chickenshit to actually kill Kana herself or was prevented from doing so—editorial intervening in the manga writing process? Who knows. Either way: eat me, this blows.
If you want to defend the show, it’s easy to try to offload responsibility onto the viewer: “Well, you’re still watching, aren’t you? Clearly the fact that you are means this kind of lurid shlock works on you!” The problem of course is that I didn’t write this. In defaulting to not just this kind of plot but this execution of this kind of plot, the show’s undercurrent of hypocrisy boils over into something rank, ugly, and nasty. Earlier in the episode, on the set of the movie he’s filming with Ai, Goshanta says you can’t half-ass emotion, not even for the sake of plot. This is one of many bits of pithy wisdom about the arts that Oshi no Ko has put into the air over the years, some of them more meaningful than others. Yet, here we have the show doing exactly that, killing a random one-off character for no reason other than to establish a villain’s bad guy cred. We are given nothing to latch onto, and the entire sequence inspires no emotion but annoyance. Commit to the dark shit or don’t do it in the first place, you cowards. There is nothing worse than a half-assed tragedy.
Is it possible for the show to recover from this? Possible, yes. If you want to, you can read all of those comments people make to Aqua in this episode, that he’s ruining his mother’s reputation and basically digging up her grave, as comments the series is making about itself. I acknowledge that, and if it somehow pulls this off in a way that feels worthwhile then I’ll look like a naysayer. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take, because if I’m being asked if a righting of the ship is likely? Not at all. A fuckup this dramatic is usually the sign of an incoming plane crash of an ending. I am of course aware that Oshi no Ko‘s manga already has a reputation as a story that fucks it up in the final stretch, so I am not optimistic. We’ll see what the remaining three weeks bring.
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