This article contains spoilers.
“It has to be you, Ruka-chan!”
Every few years there seems to come along an anime season that is ridiculously packed with well-liked shows. Spring of 2021 is shaping up to be one such example; long-awaited sequels, spinoffs, and reboots like Zombie Land Saga Revenge, SSSS.DYNAZENON, and Shaman King are competing for cultural real estate with fan-anticipated adaptions like Super Cub, Shadows House, Combatants Will Be Dispatched, Eighty-Six, and I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, and even the odd compelling original like Vivy – Flourite’s Eye Song. There’s something for almost every kind of anime fan airing, and each series in turn seems to have found its audience with a consistency that is rare in the current anime production bubble, which often has more shows broadcasting per season than anyone really knows what to do with.
Among all of this is one notable semi-exception; Blue Reflection Ray.
BRR’s very existence is somewhat puzzling. It’s a spinoff of magical girl RPG BLUE REFLECTION, but BLUE REFLECTION did not exactly set the world on fire commercially when it was released in 2017. It’d be an odd choice for an anime adaption to begin with, but that it’s a spinoff and not a sequel (and thus features none of the game’s characters), and has been greenlit for two consecutive cours, is even odder. This is all evidently part of an effort to continue to expand the franchise; which now includes a mobile game and is getting two more console games. So it’s clear somebody really believes in this thing, but if you were to only glance at Blue Reflection Ray, that confidence might not make a whole lot of sense.
What does make sense is its place within the modern anime zeitgeist. Blue Reflection Ray will immediately make most viewers think of a few touchstones from the past decade of TV anime; namely Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Flip Flappers. Blue Reflection Ray is more traditional than either of those, but it explores some similar territory. It deals, at least so far, primarily in thematics of empathy and human connection coupled with a heavy dose of lesbian subtext. (Enough so that I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns into plaintext before too long.) That, and a particular pastel-y visual style that harkens back to classic shoujo.
Blue Reflection Ray‘s four main characters are simple, but well-used. Hiori is cheerful and outgoing, but tends to neglect her own needs. Ruka is thoughtful and contemplative, but reclusive and has trouble understanding other people. Momo is a half-reformed delinquent perpetually on the run from her past. And Miyako, rounding out the current four, is a neglected rich girl. Hiori and Ruka, especially, form the show’s main pair, and the bubbling lesbian subtext present here defines quite a bit of the series’ tone. Everything, as it often is, is about connection.
Its storytelling, meanwhile, is a curious mix of fairly simple and oddly cryptic. The high concept isn’t too hard to understand; there are (at least) two groups of magical girls called Reflectors, one of which can somehow transform negative emotions into phantasmal lilies called “Fragments” and steal them away for some purpose or another.
Opposing those Reflectors are our protagonists, who, well I’ll let lead character Hiori explain.
The themes of this part of the series are pretty apparent; the Red Reflectors (The Bad Guys) want to simply lock peoples’ emotions away, whereas the Blue Reflectors (The Good Guys) defend the former’s victims. In turn defending their right to process their own feelings and deal with them. Unhealthy vs. healthy coping mechanisms, the importance of compassion (underscored by the rings the Reflectors use also being literal empathy machines); all stuff this genre has done before, but it’s rarely unwelcome. That’s the “simple” side of things.
The “cryptic” side is that, not unlike those touchstones I mentioned earlier, there is clearly more going on here than we can yet see. Some kind of system is in place that’s pitting the Reflector teams, who both think they’re in the right, against each other. And Momo in particular is in contact with a mysterious person via phone and clearly knows more than she’s letting on. I suspect, but can’t prove, that this will come to a head at some point around the episode 12 mark.
So that’s the what of it all, but we’ve yet to answer the why. I’m just not sure how much appetite the broader anime fan community, at least in North America, has for anime like this. Blue Reflection Ray currently seems too “traditional” to appeal to fans of things like Madoka Magica and it is too adult-oriented to appeal to the hardcore Pretty Cure crowd. If someone is a general genre fan they might like it, but only if they can appreciate its slow pace. It struggles to secure a niche, which explains why it is being (or at least is perceived as being) overlooked. Why whoever evidently exists behind the scene has so much faith in it is another question, but one that it’s hard to answer only 4 of a planned 24 episodes into the series.
All works of art reflect, and are in turn, reflected by, their audience. Blue Reflection Ray‘s soft nighttime scenes, gaudy Windows 95 wallpaper otherworld, charmingly simple transformation sequences, and blushing gay subtext all, in the end, simply beg your patience. It is, quite obviously, a very slow series.
I think in the hustle and bustle of the seasonal grind, it may not stand out against more bombastic titles. (Or even those that are simply doing “slow burn” from a more approachable angle, like Super Cub.) But I have a sneaking suspicion that in the long run, it will finally find that audience it’s searching for. The rings may, so to speak, resonate with more of us yet.
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