The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture.
Folks, I’ll keep it straight and simple with you. I’ve been showing my family around Chicago for much of the past week and I have been deeply tired. As such I’m not caught up on my seasonals, so the writing here is, for the most part, going to be a bit dated. But hey, you work with what you have.
I’m planning to do a catch-up marathon starting this very evening. So hopefully next week I’ll have some more relevant material for you. Until then, enjoy what I’ve got penned so far.
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Kageki Shoujo – Sarasa’s story has begun tying into a larger dualistic theme of artistic tradition and innovation; how they conflict and otherwise interact. I’ve given Kageki Shoujo some guff in the past for focusing too much on male side characters. To some extent I still kind of think it does, but as the nature of the story has branched out to become as much about the systems that shape those who pour their hearts into their art as it is about any individual person, it feels more earned.
Episode eight, in particular, paints a quietly illuminating portrait of what, exactly, one has to give up in pursuit of dreams this grandiose. Centering around secondary character Kaoru and her brief, bygone romance with a bench-warmer from her high school’s baseball team, it both draws and explicitly denies parallels between the two. Kaoru wants nothing more than to become an actress and live up to her family’s legacy, her would-be boyfriend cannot stand the pressure that the constant comparisons to his literally professional-level older brother produces. The two bond over this half-commonality and are eventually driven apart by it. In the end, they pursue their dreams, but at the cost of each other. The episode ends, though, on a hopeful note, and a promise that this might all circle back around someday. It’s an optimistic, even romantic notion for a show that’s generally as grounded as Kageki Shoujo is.
Sonny Boy – New worlds, evil teachers who are students in disguise, movies that change reality, talking dogs, pariahs, and visions from the heavens. Halfway through its run, Sonny Boy is as wonderfully weird and cryptic as ever. Episode six was the end of a certain version of this drifting classroom’s story, but not the one we’re following. For this treasure box of puzzles and surreal imagery, we can only anticipate what’s to come.
Cut joke from my GGA writeup for this week: “I’m here to kick ass and eat peach cobbler, and I’m almost done with all this peach cobbler.”
Magia Record – As always, my more detailed thoughts are available over on GGA for this series. We must ask ourselves though; is Magia Record the best thing currently airing? This week’s episode and its feat of turning the previously ignorable Kuroe of all people into a character-of-the-week is a sign that points to “yes”. Honestly, what competition does it have? Sonny Boy? That show is great, certainly, but it lacks MagiReco’s series credentials and consequently the sense that we’re seeing something big happen. The real thinker is just whether the remainder of season 2, and the upcoming season 3, are enough to change the question we’re asking into “is Magia Record the best anime of 2021?”.
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As a final note; you’ve probably already read it, but if not, do be sure to check out my review of the final Rebuild of Evangelion film. I really loved the movie and I think it may, in fact, be my favorite ending for the series.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
SPECIAL WARNING: This review contains extensive spoilers for the reviewed material, and assumes familiarity with it and the remainder of the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise.
“You’ve grown to be an adult, Shinji.”
In a very real sense, this is the end of something. Neon Genesis Evangelion has existed as a series since 1995. Long before it became a “franchise” as such, there were those original episodes and the films that followed them, most famously End of Evangelion. The Rebuild movies, always controversial, serve as a way to rewrite and redefine Evangelion, which has remained true through the rocky first, the astonishing second, and the burned-black, emotionally deadened third entries in the series. That Thrice Upon a Time, the fourth and final, will spawn mountains upon mountains of discourse is only natural. This is Eva. One can talk forever about its influences and its impact, but there is nothing else that is truly like it. Twenty-six years of history come to a stop here. Welcome to the end of an era.
Let’s start not at the beginning, but at the end.
After the harrowing of the soul that was You Can (Not) Redo, Thrice Upon a Time concludes as the only iteration of the Evangelion series to receive a wholly unambiguous happy ending. There is no room for confusion here. Shinji Ikari is all grown up, and accordingly, this movie will make you weep like a proud parent on graduation day. For a certain kind of Eva fan, this is a claim to be met with skepticism. Eva derives no small part of its immense reputation from being a truly withering under-the-microscope look at depression. But it’s important to clarify our terms here: Thrice Upon a Time does not rob Eva of that accolade, it reinforces it. After twenty-six years of spiraling, Thrice assures even those of us in the darkest pits of misery that yes, there is a way out of this. As a kind of anti-End of Evangelion, it is an open window disguised as a trap door.
Which is to say, having a happy ending and being a happy movie are two different things. Getting to that ending is quite the ride, a fact only enhanced by Thrice‘s incredible length, clocking in at two and a half hours. Improbably, it earns every second, but one could be forgiven for wondering.
After some action-focused eye candy to start things off with a bang, and which mostly stars Mari, the film refocuses on its protagonist. We open with Shinji in near-catatonic burnout. He is entirely non-verbal for the first forty minutes of the film, and the first words anyone says to him are an accusation that he is a spineless loser. When, at one point, he gets a look at Asuka’s collar, has a PTSD flashback, and vomits on the spot. This, just so you know, is what we’re dealing with here. That he manages to, in the course of only the film’s remaining 110 minutes, go from there to where he is by its finale is nothing short of astonishing. If Thrice Upon a Time did not have two and half decades of cachet to lean on here, it probably wouldn’t work.
Over the course of Thrice Upon a Time, we see Shinji make sustained and–this is key here–permanent character growth for, arguably, the first time ever. His character actually changing in a sustained way, the way one’s character is supposed to change as they grow up, rather than simply shifting. Where You Can (Not) Redo seemed to bitterly mock the very idea of ever growing as a person at all, Thrice demonstrates that it’s possible with nothing more than some genuine care. Village 3, the town of survivors that Shinji, Asuka, and one of Rei’s clones are based in for the first third or so of the film, is a place where people are forced by the aftermath of the near-Third Impact disaster to work together.
It is in this environment, shepherded by two of his old friends; the now-adult Kensuke and Touji, that Shinji is finally able to make real, positive changes to himself. Village 3 shows Shinji what he does not have. His friends have become adults, started families, and, in the way that their circumstances dictate, become healthy and productive people. Shinji has none of that, and although he never says as much out loud it’s clear even early on in the film that he’s keenly aware of it.
But he’s not alone, here. Asuka stands at a distance from Village 3–as she always has from everyone–and the Clone Rei, naïve as a newborn, rapidly integrates into it, only for her to die near the film’s one-third mark. This could easily send Shinji spiraling, but the fact that she appears to die happy seems to spark something inside him, which Kensuke in particular helps nurture, and this becomes the catalyst for his growth.
It’s tempting to map out his entire emotional journey here, but a fair amount of it feels so natural that doing so could be an article unto itself. If we skip ahead to near the film’s climax where Shinji is suddenly not only able to face Gendo but do so unafraid, you could be forgiven for thinking a natural transition impossible. Yet, it simply works, there is no explanation for it beyond the built-up credibility of Shinji’s long history as a character. It makes sense because he’s Shinji.
Further in, the middle stretch or so of the film is a clash of dazzling surrealities. Massive battleships slug it out in conceptual spaces, nonce terms like The Key of Nebuchadnezzar, The Golgotha Object, and The Anti-Universe gain biblical significance fitting their names.
It’s all wonderful, and all Extremely Anime, in the genericized sense of the term that commentators like myself tend to avoid using. Explosions, giant robots and monsters, incomprehensibly vast scales of combat, and of course the plethora of proper nouns. Asuka pulls a plot-significant item out of her eye at one point, you get the idea. Rarely is this done as well as it’s done here. Somehow all of the disparate parts make perfect sense, and one would not be wrong to invoke one of Eva’s own successors in the feeling of how. There really is a bit of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in it.
But, yes, the key thing. Shinji fights Gendo. He fights Gendo bravely and while wholly accepting himself, and this lets him question his father in a meaningful way for the first time. As the two’s bout turns from physical to conversational, Gendo reveals what we’ve all known all along. He is, beneath his monstrous acts, beneath his abuse, beneath the mad scientist and would-be godslayer, a deeply lonely man willing to go to inhumanly great lengths to see his late wife again. The most evil men tend to be simple, and Gendo is no exception. Shinji defeating Gendo is an entire generation conquering shared trauma. The sort of solidarity that is direly needed in an era as grim as ours, and the sort that means even more coming from Evangelion than it might almost any other series.
It’s prudent to take an aside here to say that the film is of course not perfect. There are faults to be found, but they’re minor and mostly on the production side. Studio Khara’s CGI-heavy, live action film-influenced visual style has always been divisive, and it will never be moreso than it is here, putting the capstone on what is far and away their most well-known series. For my money, I’d say it works in some contexts better than others. Truly disturbing and otherworldly imagery, like Asuka’s loss against Unit 13, or a bizarrely photorealistic, haunting echo of End of Evangelion‘s “floating Rei” are excellent.
In other places, especially in certain battle scenes, one can’t escape the feeling that there’s a grandiosity that these fights should have that they don’t always quite pull off. Mostly in the form of the sheer scale of the actors involved–especially the battleships–not always coming through. Still, these criticisms are easily offset by the other, aforementioned visual merits.
On a slightly more substantial level, one could argue that limiting the film’s perspective to mostly Shinji limits its impact. The death of the Clone Rei relatively early on being the example I suspect many will glom onto. But I think this is the wrong tack to take. Shinji, despite everything, has been all of us. Which is not to say he is all of us. Some folks, even some who love Evangelion dearly, have left that particularly dark phase of our mental illnesses long behind us. But we have all been “back there”, where every room is suffocating, and any activity is a distraction from our mind’s attempt to eat itself. And the fear of going “back there”, of possibly hurting yourself or worse, hurting others, is very real. Which is the exact thing that makes it so cathartic when, pushing back against twenty-six years of history, his own initial characterization, and the countless reductionist depictions of the character as a spineless wimp, Shinji wins. The Son, finally understanding his Father, vanquishes him without further struggle.
The new world he creates, as he is made able to do, is not some perfect paradise. It is a world not unlike ours, though I suspect, perhaps, a little brighter. Of course any distance between the two is a mere illusion. After such a long time clawing at one’s own soul, any daylight is welcome.
If the film’s climax seems to leave some questions unanswered, they simply don’t feel relevant. It’s Mari who pulls Shinji from his rapidly-fading sketch world into the new universe he’s created. The ending scene depicts Shinji, now an adult, living a truly, peacefully, ordinary life.
And so, the Sun shines on a world without Evangelions, and, for us, without Evangelion.
I am reminded by Thrice’s finale not so much of any other piece of Eva media, or indeed any of Gainax’s other marquee properties. Instead, my mind turns to the finale of the largely-overlooked Wish Upon The Pleiades. In that series’ finale, which marked the end of Studio Gainax’s time as a going concern as a producer of TV anime, no words are wasted on complicated, overwrought goodbyes. Instead, as here, it’s simply on to the next. The next universe, the next adventure, the next dawn, or, if you prefer, the neon genesis.
The final remarkable thing about Thrice Upon a Time is that it puts Neon Genesis Evangelion on the whole in the past, and at the same time, immortalizes it for the future. The end of an era, but the beginning of a new day. It is over, but it will be with us forever.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture.
Hi folks, relatively lean update this week because I haven’t been sleeping well and am still sick. Hopefully what I’ve got written is interesting to you!
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Kageki Shoujo!! – For whatever reason, I’ve held Kageki Shoujo!! at arm’s length. I’m not entirely sure why. Was I afraid it would disappoint me somehow? I like to think of myself as above that kind of behavior (shows are going to be what they’re going to be, going into them “bracing for them to get bad” doesn’t actually change anything, natch). But I’m as inclined toward the ‘aimless skeptic’ impulse as anyone who spends too much time on the internet. Still, the series’ fifth episode has proved to me that it’s the real thing. Arguably I should’ve caught on back when it managed to competently tackle something as deadly-serious as sexual assault a few episodes back. But, while I’ve been lucky enough to lead a life free of that particular evil, I have absolutely felt ugly, untalented, and worthless before. Which brings us to Ayako Yamada, a supporting character who developed an eating disorder a few episodes back, and who the latter half of episode five centers on.
Dealing with Yamada’s eating disorder is necessary for keeping the series’ thematic core coherent. But the episode opens with a reprieve; the conclusion of the prior week’s plot-line, where Ai and Sarasa both finally become friends and commit themselves fully to their goal of becoming the top stars in the Kouka Troupe. In particular, there are hints of Sarasa’s abilities as an actress, which may far exceed what anyone expected of her, something I really hoped the show would lean into.
But it’s Yamada’s story that definitely does steal the show here, marking Kageki Shoujo!! as the first anime of the season to make me tear up. Yamada has been a minor character in the series, and the eating disorder that she developed several episodes ago threatened to take her out of the series entirely. Indeed, in episode five a conflux of her waning health, her dance instructor’s nasty attitude, her failing grades, and a spat with Ai send her spiraling, and it does look for a while like she’s going to drop out. It’s only an impassioned plea from her music teacher that convinces her to stay. A time skip later, we’re rewarded at the end of the episode with her leading the music class in song and showing off her wonderfully bright, expressive, timbre.
Would I choose to, I could criticize that the series does not spend enough time “working” this development for it to feel “natural”. The entirety of what I summarized is over in about 15 minutes of footage. I could too criticize that the series does not explicitly condemn her dance instructor, but that would be willfully ignoring that her motives are presented as understandable but not remotely sympathetic. The tightly-wound storytelling, I would argue, actually helps a lot in keeping the anime from dragging, something that is a real concern when writing stories that deal with material this heavy. (And of course I have yet to get to episode six, given that the show comes out on Sundays. Sigh!)
Magia Record – As last week, my recap sums up my thoughts here. It’s no episode one but I still loved it a lot.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column series where I take a look at single specific anime that shaped my experience with the medium, were important to me in some other way, or that I just really, really like. These columns contain spoilers.
“I’ll tie up my hair, swaying in the wind, take one giant leap onto the earth, and then hold my head up high and go see him.“
Eureka Seven is a series that deals with big ideas and has a large cast. But for nearly all of its 50 episodes, the story remains centered on Renton Thurston and the titular Eureka, with tangents and leaps over to other characters being generally tied to one or the other in some way. This makes sense, it gives the anime a solid grounding and provides a foundation on which to build up those big ideas. It is completely and totally understandable that Eureka Seven, at its core, is the story of Renton and Eureka.
Except, of course, when it’s not. Arguably, the single best episode of the anime, and the one that embodies some of those big ideas the best, is one of the few that isn’t really about either of those characters.
For about twenty-four minutes, Eureka Seven ceases to be the story of Renton and Eureka, and becomes the story of Anemone and Dominic. A girl who has hidden herself for so long that she’s forced herself to forget how to smile, and a young man so desperate to right the wrong he’s committed by not telling her how he feels that he’ll go to any lengths to finally do it. One of Dewey Novac’s surgically-altered child soldiers, and someone who used to believe in the man. “Ballet Mechanique” does not, as some similar episodes in other anime do, turn Eureka Seven into a different show, because the themes and emotional core remain the same. But it is a fascinating, heart-rending, but ultimately, uplifting look at what the series is like through different eyes.
“Ballet Mechanique” opens, after some basic scene-setting, with Anemone, deployed on what looks to be a suicide mission, and her internal monologue.
It’s faux-casual. Anemone lists her regrets; she’d like to go shopping more, she wants to try different foods. And of course, tossed in with a careful, pained fake-indifference, she would just love to have a real romance. Certainly, she seems to imply, there is no way a certain lieutenant who she at this point believes has abandoned her is at all on her mind. She tries to downplay her own heartbreak. The defense mechanism of someone who has never been allowed to express pain.
By this point in the series, anyone watching blind (a category I myself was in) is holding their breath. Eureka Seven is an anime with several emotional peaks and valleys, and there is a long stretch in the middle of the series where it seems like things are going to go very badly indeed. By “Ballet Mechanique”, the tone has been more hopeful for some time, but at least for me, there was a lingering thought in the back of my mind that I was hearing a teenage soldier’s last thoughts before her tragic demise.
As she moves out, alone with only her LFO (the theatrically-named Type the:END) to keep her company, the façade rapidly starts to crack. She starts to wish that she had told Dominic how she felt when she still had the time, and that when she dies (tacitly accepting it as inevitable) that she’s reborn as someone smarter.
Meanwhile, the moment Dominic learns that Anemone is involved, he springs into action. Dominic is not normally that sort of character by any means–he’s not even an LFO pilot–so it takes real guts for him to hijack one of the Izumo’s escape pods to intercept the:END himself. He even balks at Holland’s attempt to get him to turn back.
Eureka and Renton’s involvement in “Ballet Mechanique” centers around their initial interception of Anemone. This being the rare episode where they’re more supporting characters than the main focus. They first fight, and then attempt to save, Anemone when the Nirvash’s drive (a literal empathy machine) makes it clear to them that she can be. But, it’s key to note, Renton and Eureka cannot, and do not, save Anemone.
That is up to Dominic. He arrives, falling from the sky and screaming his heart out. The episode’s climax is a tangle of shouted emotion and pained declarations of love. Anemone and Dominic kiss while falling through the air, a piece of imagery Eureka Seven had a notable fascination with and that it would repeat two episodes later in its finale.
Even the:END gets a brief turn here, as he’s “purified” by Anemone’s change of heart, only to die minutes later when he protects her and Dominic from Dewey’s orbital cannon.
Eureka Seven is a messy series, and it’s one that, despite being very strong overall, has few single standout episodes, since they tend to rather immediately flow from one to the next.
Even “Ballet Mechanique”, I must admit, became just a touch harder to follow among some of the finer points upon my revisiting the episode nearly a year later to finish this article. (I don’t really remember what that laser cannon was about. Do you?) But still, it remains one of the show’s strongest cases for its core theme of love as a salve to the world’s many evils. Plus, if I can admit my own bias, it’s an incredibly cathartic end to the character arc of Anemone, who was and remains my single favorite character from the series.
At Eureka Seven‘s end, she and Dominic stand as the title couple take center stage. They lock hands the entire time, quieter than the leads, but no less in love.
“I once was lost but now am found was blind, but now I see”
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad.These articles contain spoilers.
“Are we cinephiles because we watch masterpieces? No! We’re cinephiles because we watch whatever we damn well please!”
It’s a known phenomenon. Occasionally, a writer will get an idea stuck in their head. A challenge to themselves, a way to prove that they can write compellingly about anything. Yet, even more occasionally, the world itself will present you with this sort of challenge entirely of its own accord. As if to say “hey bozo, you think you’re so smart? Review this.”
This, in the form of a pair of close friends who I’ll here call H. and Z., is how Kine-san no 1-ri de Cinema, (I Love Cinema, I am Lonely or Kine-san’s Solo Cinema as it’s been variously unofficially known in English) entered my life. What prompted this thought that I simply must read and review Kine-san? Well, that’s down to its premise. Kine-san‘s title character, Kine Machiko, is a 30-year old businesswoman, whose main hobby is watching western action films and writing about them on her blog.
I could belabor the point, but there’s no reason to. Yes, I was curious as to how this fictional woman’s habits would reflect my own. Our interests are, in a way, a mirror of each other’s. She is a Japanese woman who loves American live action films. I am an American woman who loves Japanese animated television.
Not unlike my own preference for TV anime, Kine’s interests skew toward pop action films. Early on she names Michael Bay as a favorite director (a man who I mostly associate with defacing the Transformers franchise, myself), a later chapter is about the then-timely process of avoiding spoilers for the 2015 Star Wars film. Etc. This interest is what colors the manga the most. Kine-san is certainly the only manga I have ever read in my life to feature a shadowed gag-cameo from Jar-Jar Binks.
What Kine-san excels at is tapping into the universal etiquette dance that we build around the stories that mean things to us. Chapter 7 has Kine’s coworkers gawk in disbelief when she tells them she’s never seen a Ghibli movie. I briefly sympathized more with the coworkers–after all, my own interest in anime was sparked by seeing Spirited Away at a young age–but then yours truly remembered she’s never seen any of the Star Wars films, and the entire point of the sequence clicked into place.
Young girl DESTROYS possessive fanboyism with HEARTFELT PASSION and LOGIC.
On the other side of things, when Kine does vibe with someone (often her recently-divorced coworker and sometimes-roommate, Kasumi Satou) it’s a moment of joy. What we all ultimately want is just to be understood, and works of art are basic cultural units we trade with each other to expand that understanding. Satou in general is a fun character, and I often found myself relating to her particular brand of projective Letterboxd logorrhea a bit more than Kine’s own largely uncritical fangirlism.
Visually the manga is competent, with a particular knack for wide shots that convey an impressive sense of scale, albeit usually to comedic ends. There are a fair amount of impressive splash panels, often parodying famous movie scenes or posters, so, appropriately, cinephiles will have a lot to latch on to here.
It can even occasionally pull off some more serious composition. These moments are rare, but they prevent Kine-san from falling into a fairly common trap of comedy manga; making it seem like the cast don’t actually like each other at all.
On the less positive side, there’s a weird habit throughout of centering panels on the cast’s collective rear ends. Of course, Kine herself would probably argue that complaining about such a thing is simply nitpicking a genre cliché. (This thing runs in Young Animal, alongside a number of other seinen manga, yes, but also photos of scantily-clad gravure models, so perhaps it’s to be expected.) On its own it’s a minor complaint, but here it is unfortunately indicative of an undertone of sexism that at its worst takes some of the fun out of Kine-san. And it dampens some otherwise strong characterization. Take for instance, Kine’s mother, who is depicted, usually via flashback, as fairly strict about not wanting her daughter to become an otaku “because she’s a girl”. Later, we learn in chapter 19 that she’s a former sukeban, and much of her harsh demeanor stems from wanting her daughter to be a proper lady, and her own complex about her self-perceived lack of femininity. Does this add dimension to an otherwise fairly minor character, or is it that old otaku misogyny creeping in?
Well, let’s say this. As I finished reading all of Kine-san that’s currently available in English, I found myself realizing that despite finding it pretty funny in its best moments, I certainly don’t love it. I don’t like to get into the ten-point rating scale game on this blog (I think it’s kind of superfluous) but 21 chapters in, I was struck by the realization that the way that the title character and I are most similar is in our lackadaisical attitude toward actual quality. Now, at one point Kine disses Citizen Kane by implication (one of the very few live action western films I’ve both seen in my adult life and actually quite like), and I can’t stand for that. But, do I relate to the broader feeling of, say, watching a classic and finding that even if you respect its craft you don’t really, you know, like it? Well, all due apologies to Cowboy Bebop, but, yeah.
So I leave you with the quote sitting at the top of this article as a final thought. I find it hard to pass judgment on Kine-san, given how much of myself I (unfortunately?) see in it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an episode of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid to watch.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture.
It probably says a lot about me that for this week’s Frontline Report the show I wrote the most about is the one I think is the least good. Oh well, you know what they say about tigers and changing stripes. As always, let me know what you think in the comments!
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The aquatope on white sand – This week’s episode deals with Fuuka being recognized, first by a coworker who happens to be deep into idol culture and later by a trio of curious teens. The bizarre public afterlife of people who aren’t famous but used to be is a fascinating and very complicated topic, and I’m glad that aquatope is not just conveniently forgetting Fuuka’s recent past. Something that’s interesting to me is that it’s not totally clear whether Fuuka actually regrets leaving the industry or if she thinks putting it behind her was the right choice. At different points in this episode you can make the case for either stance.
Blue Reflection Ray – This show is draining, man. For as good as BRR is, the fact that its episodes contain so much exposition combined with how heavy the show gets can definitely lead to episodes like this one where watching them just kinda feels exhausting. That may sound negative but I actually think that’s a positive trait. Is that weird? It’s probably weird.
The Detective is Already Dead – With the constant torrent of new anime, there’s a pressure to only let yourself watch the best of the best. Things that are masterpieces or at least seem like they’ll get into that conversation. If you subscribe to that philosophy, you can go ahead and move Detective to your Dropped list now. Detective is not the best, it’s honestly not even very good. But, when I find myself auditing my own time once a week (as I always do, it’s a bad habit arguably), I ask myself, “am I still getting anything out of this show?” Inevitably, I walk away answering “yes.”
Detective is…just kind of flummoxing. It has middling production values, and consists almost entirely of dialogue. (A trait I imagine works a little better in the original light novels.) Nonetheless, once or twice per episode it will do something that reels me back in, and temporarily banishes my skepticism. This week it was Nagisa talking down badly-traumatized cyborg idol Yui as she threatened both her and her co-lead with a pistol. Yet, while I maintain that Detective‘s problems have never been rooted in its premise (which I believe absolutely can be put to compelling ends), the fact remains that when Siesta reappears in a flashback in the post-credits, she is a dynamic, charismatic, theatrical presence that the show has no access to without her. Thus, the question of what happened to Siesta and how it will be resolved, and consequently whether Detective will ever actually earn its premise, is still an open one. She remains a compelling character, even in absence. A true “subtracted woman” who exists outside of the very narrative she controls. What can you do? The detective is dead already.
Magia Record Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Season 2 -The Eve of Awakening- – I made most of my thoughts on MagiReco’s second season premiere pretty clear in my writeup for GGA. But it bears repeating; this is probably the best premiere of the year. It is pure “fanservice” in the older sense of the word; it’s a love letter to Madoka Magica as a franchise, the fans who are still ride-or-die for it ten years later, and the magical girl genre itself. It’s an open question as to whether the rest of the season will live up to the admittedly very high standard set by this premiere, but even if it doesn’t, I remain confident the show’s going to continue to be worth watching.
Sonny Boy – Barely to its quarter mark, Sonny Boy is the season’s easy standout, the only thing in the same conversation as Sonny Boy is the aforementioned MagiReco, from which it is otherwise very distinct. If you’re only going to watch one show this season, make it this one.
A friend ventured that Sonny Boy, at present, is depicting its characters reinventing the worst facets of society from scratch, since it’s all they know. This week’s episode with its magic blackout curtains and supernatural NEET-ism solved only by empathy seems like it may gesture to a way out somewhere many weeks down the road. Honestly though, you don’t need me to say this, but as hard as it is to say where Sonny Boy is headed, the ride alone is worth the price of admission.
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