Month: September 2022

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Clock Strikes Twelve for CALL OF THE NIGHT

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Remember 2022 as a banner year for the anime vampire. Between the second part of The Case Study of Vanitas, 5-episode wonder (and future Magic Planet Anime review subject) Vampire in The Garden, and of course, this very anime, Call of The Night, it’s been a solid year for the fanged and fearsome among us. Of course, vampires—more specifically vampires and romance—are not new additions to anime as a medium. Not by a longshot, as I discussed when I first blogged about this series back in July, they’ve been common bedfellows for a long time.

Since then, in my intermittent coverage of the series, I’ve made mention more than once that vampires, traditionally, are symbols of the other. Of outsiders. The thing about symbols of course is that they eventually acquire a life all their own, separate from any single author’s intent. They become entities of their own; concepts that lurk in the collective human subconscious, to be interpreted a myriad of different ways as any individual artist sees fit, certainly, but always retaining a core identity that, if it changes, only does so slowly, over time, and through repeated effort by many individual interpreters.

So, when we look at Call of The Night, a series primarily centered on the 14-year-old Ko Yamori (Gen Satou) and his quest to fall in love with, and thus be turned by, decades-old vampire Nazuna Nanakusa (Sora Amamiya), we must ask ourselves what it is using that symbol to say, and how these things align with its broader storytelling goals.

In a general sense, there’s not really anything complicated about Call of the Night at all; it’s a story about Ko, an antisocial shut-in who starts taking long, lonesome night walks because he’s stopped going to school, coming of age and becoming his own person. Thought about this way, it could be lumped in with any number of other anime.

What lessens those commonalities that Ko and Nazuna’s relationship is somewhat fuzzy for much of the series; are they actually in love? Just friends? Something else entirely? It takes almost the entire 13-episode run for a definitive answer to that question to actually emerge, and that very uncertainty is largely what “vampirism” means within the context of Call of The Night. If we take “vampires” to be anyone who lives outside of normal society, the show’s theming clicks into place perfectly.

Indeed, it is very easy to read Ko, Nazuna, and their relationship in any number of ways. I’ve previously mostly looked at it through the lens of Ko, a fairly strongly neurodivergent-coded character, and quite possibly an aromantic, trying to figure out the foreign field of romance. Far on the other end of the field, I’ve also seen Nazuna called a sexual predator preying on Ko’s insecurities (I think you have to get pretty far into a countertextual reading to argue that, but I definitely get why people might get that vibe at first glance). In hindsight, I’d say neither of these, really, fit the show particularly well, which is a little unfortunate in the former case and a massive relief in the latter.

Instead, Call of the Night effectively presents a world much like our own, where human relationships are complicated, thorny things, full of accidents and insecurity, and in which you can never truly entirely know where you stand. This becomes clearer during the show’s last arc, with its introduction of the detective / vampire hunter Anko Uguisu (Miyuki Sawashiro), who makes it very clear that she does not see human and vampire lives as equally worthwhile. (It’s also worth noting that she guns for Ko more directly than Nazuna ever does.) Her killing a blood-starved vampire kicks off the final quarter of the series, which casts much of what comes before in a different light.

But, crucially, not all of it. At series’ end, Nazuna and Ko redouble their commitment to each other. Call of the Night ends on the line “we’re in this together.” Perhaps, then, what is crucial is not so much what Nazuna and Ko are to each other, but simply that they are something to each other. The very last scene is a kiss; so clearly this is a romantic relationship, but what is almost more important than the establishment of a definitive romance is that this clears out any uncertainty. “You and me against the world” is pretty easy to get your head around, even for the most romantically disinterested among us.

In that final arc, Call of The Night seems to pose Ko a choice; to become human and return to the world of ‘living’ (read: ordinary) people, or to take a gamble on the unknowable dangers of the vampire world. But interestingly, it does not present either humanity or vampirism as “the right choice.” Vampirism is neither a curse nor an automatic liberation. What is more important than making the choice at all is making it honestly, definitively, and with purpose. By the series’ end, Ko makes his.

None of this is to say that the show is flawless. For instance, its only real depiction of a genuinely GNC character, the otokonoko vampire Hatsuka Suzushiro (Azumi Waki) leaves quite a lot to be desired, and, for better or worse, there are many open questions by the time it ends. (Less a flaw, admittedly, and more just a consequence of adapting a still-ongoing manga.) It also probably spends a little too much time leering at various characters’ bodies; some of it makes sense, some of it just feels a little much.

But indeed, even in terms of positive qualities there’s a fair bit I haven’t talked about, such as the show’s absolutely phenomenal directing courtesy of Tomoyuki Itamura, whose pedigree includes not only fellow 2022 vampire series The Case Study of Vanitas, but also work on most of the Monogatari series, and, remarkably, episode 7 of ever-underrated SHAFT comedy And Yet The Town Moves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that episode’s second half is entirely about the wonders of liminality, centering on a story about a young boy who watches midnight tick over into a new day for the first time. Call of The Night, despite many other differences from that series, inherits some of that spirit, a certain sense of midnight-black magic that no amount of cynicism and adult world-weariness can truly erase.

Back when Call of The Night first began, I made the remark that if it could keep up that feeling of nocturnal wonder from its first episode’s closing moments, it had nothing to worry about. Thirteen weeks later, that thought remains unchanged. Nazuna and Ko definitely have, but not the night itself. It’s as young as it’s ever been.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: REINCARNATED AS A SWORD is Dull and Rusty

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Here is, without embellishment, the first five minutes of Reincarnated as a Sword, the latest entry in the novelty isekai canon; a guy (Shinichirou Miki) dies (of course), and is—you’ll never believe this—reincarnated in a stock fantasy world as a magic sword.

He fucks around in some JRPG-esque menus, and when a group of goblins tries to pull him out of the stone he’s stuck in, he attacks them because he “doesn’t want to be used by goblins,” and kills them all. This gives him experience points which he spends yet more time plugging into the aforementioned menus, and he comments that he feels nice, assuming it’s because he’s fulfilled “the purpose of a sword.”

I am hardly the first person to have noticed that the average isekai protagonist is a gleeful cartoon sociopath who seems weirdly eager to cut down every being in their way—whether or not they’re sapient—in the pursuit of naked personal power, usually as imagined by some borrowed grab-bag of video game tropes. But Reincarnated as a Sword is a pretty damn stark depiction of such a thing. Our Hero also spends a good chunk of this episode hacking a goblin tribe who live in a cave to pieces for no reason other than acquiring more magic skills. This in spite of the fact that, as demonstrated by their having a hierarchy at all (there’s a goblin king and a goblin wizard, naturally), these are clearly intelligent beings of some kind. Shouldn’t he hesitate at least a little bit, sword or no?

(If I scrunch my eyebrows together quite hard, I can pretend this is commentary of some sort. “Clearly,” I can imagine “this is the series lampooning the power fantasy nature not just of the isekai genre but of kill-all-the-monsters sorts of RPGs in general.” It’s not really that, of course, but it’s a fun thought experiment.)

Even if we really work to suspend our disbelief and acknowledge that this is just how this world works for whatever reason, say maybe the monsters respawn or something, it doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling television. The production has a decent amount of polish, and I must commend the staff on managing to squeeze a few visually dynamic action sequences in fights centered on a flying sword, because that can’t be easy. But that polish alone does not elevate Reincarnated as a Sword beyond the bare minimum of “watchable.”

Eventually, he gets stuck in a field that drains all of his magic, and can’t go anywhere. Thus we are treated to the truly absurd sight of a fucking sword lamenting its fate as it’s stuck in mana-sucking ground, and despairs that no one might ever wield it. It is a bizarre spectacle, and is a scene that, I must imagine wholly unintentionally, captures a certain zeitgeist. This, truly, is what the dregs of TV anime have come to. (Aren’t we all suddenly very glad that Chainsaw Man starts in two weeks? I know I am.)

We should, at least, give some cursory acknowledgement to Sword‘s other protagonist, who the titular sword eventually meets while stuck.

This is Fran (Ai Kakuma). She is a catgirl, and because the isekai genre has over the past decade developed a bizarre fixation on the awful practice, she is also a slave. Fran doesn’t get nearly as much screentime as the sword himself, so we only see little bits and pieces of her story over the series’ introductory 30 minutes. But what we do see is pretty awful; she’s routinely kicked around and beaten, is shackled with a magic collar that forces her to obey her masters’ commands, and in general is just treated like dirt. Now, the bare minimum of credit is due here; Reincarnated as a Sword does in fact seem to understand that slavery is bad. That is unfortunately more than can be said of some isekai, so it is worth acknowledging.

In fact, if you squint, you can imagine how a compelling story might develop here. Fran finds and acquires the sword somehow—and that part does, in fact, happen, she runs into it while being chased by a monstrous, two-headed bear—and becomes a swashbuckling liberator of her people, the Black Cat beastfolk, and all the other sorts of animal people enslaved here by humans. Now let’s be clear here, the main character becoming a sort of catgirl John Brown would still be incredibly strange, and it would probably be heavier subject matter than something like this is equipped to handle, but it would certainly be something. And it would, again, at least be an acknowledgement that the world this takes place in is fucked up and needs some fixing.

There isn’t anything in this first episode that prevents Reincarnated as a Sword from eventually becoming that kind of story, but it still seems unlikely, if only because the show seems far more interested in hurling menus, stat screens, and meaningless terminology at us instead. Fran gives her motive for linking up with the sword, which she calls Shishou (“Teacher” or “Master”), as a desire to be “the first Black Cat to evolve.” There is some indication of what that actually means, in-universe, but does it really matter? It’s just another narrative shortcut taken among an entire forest of them.

Ultimately what you have here is yet another isekai with a marginally interesting premise that completely squanders it by taking the dullest route possible through almost every single plotting decision it could make. The idea that it might eventually become something more interesting isn’t really enough, I imagine, to make most people want to tune in. Maybe, in six weeks, we’ll be here talking about how utterly incredible it is that Reincarnated as a Sword started out so anonymously and eventually got so good. But I very much doubt it. I intend to spend my viewing hours elsewhere this season, and I recommend you do the same.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime

Let’s Watch Announcements For the Fall 2022 Anime Season

No bombastic format this time, friends. Just a pair of very simple announcements.

I’ll be covering two anime weekly (or at least, most-weeks-ly) this coming season. One, which I picked myself, will be Chainsaw Man. The other, picked by you all, will be Spy x Family again. I will probably also occasionally write at least a little bit about the other shows that landed in the top 5; it was very close this season, with only a few votes gap between Spy x Family (the overall winner) and Raven of the Inner Palace (the fifth-most voted for show).

I’ll be seeing you then, friends.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Giving the Cold Shoulder to RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.

For a while, it looked like things might improve.

I’ve covered RWBY: Ice Queendom on and off here on Magic Planet Anime since it premiered, and I was not shy about the fact that I did not really care for its opening arc. Then, unexpectedly, episode four happened and for a while, it seemed like things were picking up. I had hoped it would stay that way, but suffice it to say, this didn’t happen. I just haven’t felt very motivated to cover Ice Queendom here on MPA in a long while. And because of that, this is, in a sense, less of a proper review and more of a conclusion of my coverage of the series. It’s been a long and rough road, and I am mostly unhappy with how the show has turned out, but I do feel obligated to write something.

But to back up a bit, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with what Ice Queendom is trying to do. As a reboot / side story / whatever of the larger RWBY series, it succeeds in that it doesn’t actually require you to have seen any prior material to get an idea of what the series’ whole deal is. (A good thing, too, since, as I mention in the First Impressions writeup linked up there, I am a neophyte to the franchise.) As a Studio SHAFT anime made during what is at this point undeniably their twilight years, it succeeds in looking intermittently cool when it’s not busy being extremely janky. In that sense, it’s not terribly different from, say, Assault Lily Bouquet, another “girls with cool weapons” anime from SHAFT from just a few years back. And indeed, Ice Queendom‘s greatest strength is the visual oomph brought by that SHAFT pedigree. The Studio SHAFT of 2022 are not the Studio SHAFT of 2011, but they can still deliver some real knockouts when things come together. For the most part, even from this angle, Ice Queendom really does feel like there’s no one “at the wheel” so to speak. These flashes of excellence; mostly in the form of fight scenes or other visual setpieces, seem to be largely the work of individual animators or occasionally episode directors, rather than there being any sort of unifying hand throughout the production. Still, it’s something.

In practice, you’re more likely to notice the show’s flaws, which stem from its one major difference from the bulk of mainstream TV anime. Any number of other battle girl anime are, generally, either original IPs or they’re based on existing Japanese series. Ice Queendom is, of course, based on the extremely weeb-y, but very much American, original RWBY. This matters, because, I am told, the original series is the original sin for what ends up being this show’s most glaring, central writing problem. The root of all evil; The Over-wrought Furry Racism Allegory.

Very briefly, RWBY takes place in a fairly standard urban fantasy world. There are monsters, there are people who hunt the monsters with cool weapons, and an academy where they learn how to properly engage in monster hunting. Very well-trod stuff, but not necessarily bad. Here is the problem; in addition to the humans and the monsters (called Grimms), we also have kemonomimi called the Faunus. For reasons I can only guess at, Ice Queendom is very fixated on the Faunus, specifically as a vehicle for the aforementioned Over-wrought Furry Racism Allegory. This is a somewhat infamous stock plot, and it’s pretty much impossible to do well unless you’re the guy who wrote Maus. Personally, I’ve been over it since about when the first surly Skyrim guard threatened to turn my Khajit into a rug. And I cannot even imagine how utterly sick actual POC must be of the continued prevalence of this particular trope.

Ice Queendom‘s take, unfortunately, is particularly bad. A majority of the show takes place not in the series’ own real world, but inside the mind of one of its main characters, the snooty heiress Weiss Schnee (Youko Hikasa), who, along with her friends Ruby (the cheerful red one, Saori Hayami), Yang (the big sister-ish yellow one, Ami Koshimizu), and Blake (the cool and aloof Faunus, Yuu Shimamura), is one of the four members of the titular Team RWBY. Early in the series, she’s possessed by something called a Nightmare Grimm which locks her in a dream world inside of her own head. With the help of extremely cool original-to-Ice Queendom character Shion Zaiden (Hiroki Nanami), the remaining Team RWBY girls dive into this nightmare prison and attempt to rescue Weiss. This takes up the remainder of the show, and along the way they fight a fairly wide variety of dream baddies and, at least ostensibly, help Weiss grapple with the trauma that comes from being raised by a bunch of rich assholes who probably don’t care very much about her.

You may ask, what does all of this have to do with kemonomimi? Well, you see, one of the things that the show repeatedly hammers home over the course of its run is that Weiss does not like or trust Blake. Specifically, she doesn’t like or trust Blake because she’s a Faunus. Because, you see, some Faunus are part of a, ahem, “terrorist organization” called the White Fang, which attacks trains and such owned by Weiss’ family’s company. Blake actually was part of the White Fang at one point, having left some time ago for only vaguely specified reasons. Thus begins Ice Queendom‘s utter fixation on both this dumb-as-bricks plot and, on top of that, trying to falsely equate Weiss and Blake’s struggles.

Let us be very clear here, based on the information that Ice Queendom itself gives us, Weiss is a troubled but still very privileged heiress from a wealthy background. Blake is from a, by all appearances, widely discriminated-against ethnic minority, enough so that she feels the need to wear a ribbon to hide her wolf ears, and may have done some arguably-bad things in the past. I am not embellishing here; those are the facts laid out by the series itself. Somehow, Ice Queendom insists that both of these characters are equally sympathetic, utterly emptying the pantry of basic dream symbolism in service to the idea that somehow, Weiss Schnee, deeply unlikable rich girl who spends much of the series as her subconscious “nightmare self” trotting around in a militaristic overcoat, and Blake Belladonna, a girl who has by all accounts had a very rough life, are equally at fault for the rift that emerges between them.

If I ended up inside someone’s mind, and I found out that they thought things like this, I would probably have a hard time trusting them, too. Just saying.

Make no mistake; what actually happens, repeatedly, throughout Ice Queendom, is that Blake will say something that the show frames as her being hurt, but which is actually, obviously, completely correct. Weiss will then say something racist. We are supposed to believe that both of these people are doing something wrong here, despite the fact that it its trumpetingly obvious that only one is.

I’ve said this before, but I feel like a total idiot for complaining about this kind of thing. Not because I’m wrong—I know I’m not—but because it just seems obvious. I have said a fair few positive things about Ice Queendom in my earlier columns on the show, and I stand by most of those. I do genuinely think it’s pretty visually interesting, and, even if the dream symbolism leans toward the obvious, it is the closest we ever get to actually seeing a full inner picture of Weiss that doesn’t just make her seem like an entitled snot. But none of that really fixes the fact that overall Ice Queendom fails at some very basic things.

The whole Blake / Weiss feud plotline would, itself, be just the source of a complaint—a major one, but not necessarily one that would wreck the whole series—were Ice Queendom not so obsessed with circling back to it. The show’s entire final stretch, from episode 8 to episode 12, is almost entirely about it. Other narrative threads like Ruby’s personal development as a leader of her team are reduced to perfunctory side stories; this is clearly what Ice Queendom wants to be about, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why, because it is both its worst and its least interesting plot by an order of magnitude, and it rots the show at the root right up until the very end.

Naturally, the series ends with wishy-washy handwaving bullshit about how the power of friendship has helped Team RWBY overcome their differences. Except, of course, that a huge chunk of the very last episode—what is supposed to be the triumphant postscript, mind you—is spent by people still casting aspersions on Blake for her being a Faunus. One of those people is still Weiss, who really does not seem to have grown as a person at all over the course of the story. Another one is the school’s headmaster, who both assures her that the academy is totally egalitarian and then also grills her about her possible connections to the White Fang within the space of a single conversation. It is a truly breathtaking display of double standard, and if it were at all intentional it’d be almost brilliant, but I’m not convinced it is. Instead, it’s just the last of a very long series of nails in Ice Queendom‘s coffin. And then the proverbial spit on the grave is Weiss using the threat of calling the police as a bit of bargaining leverage against a different Faunus character not ten minutes later.

There is one further bright spot, and it also comes in at the show’s end. And I do mean the very end; as in, the last scene of the whole series. Inexplicably, we end on a scene of Ice Queendom‘s cast getting into a massive foodfight. It’s lavishly animated and a pretty slick little tune pumps in the background as it happens. It’s also completely baffling. I’m told it’s an homage to the opening of the second season of the original RWBY.

On its own, this is great. In a meta sort of way, it even loops back around to what RWBY as a series was originally about; flashy fight scenes, with any greater narrative context a secondary concern at most. (Even I know about the famous color trailers. I’m not totally out of the loop.) But taken in the greater context of Ice Queendom on the whole, it really raises the question; why could they have not just done this the entire time? There is no real reason that all of the writing problems that so badly hamstring the show should be present, and I really doubt anyone would’ve blamed the scriptwriters for sidelining or even outright ignoring some of the original’s more questionable plot lines. No one likes RWBY for its writing. Again, even I know that much.

At the end of the day, what we have with Ice Queendom is a deeply frustrating piece of media. Intermittently good, occasionally brilliant, but willing and ready to repeat the mistakes of not just its source material but an entire generation of pop media, usually in the most basic fashion imaginable. Often enough that doing so completely ruins it. This is a case where a show’s positive aspects don’t balance out the negative ones so much as they make them seem even worse by comparison.

If we are to remember Ice Queendom in any kind of positive light, it should be for those rare few moments of visual brilliance. But, of course, when it’s possible to experience all of a show’s highlights just by scrolling through sakugabooru, there’s already been a greater failure of imagination.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime

Vote on the Next Let’s Watch for the Fall 2022 Season

I think y’all know the drill by now, but just in case you don’t, here’s the very short version. Every season (mostly), I cover one or two anime week-by-week that I think people will be interested in seeing me write about. Each season, I like to leave the choice of what at least one of those shows will be to you, my dear audience. You can vote on whatever shows (with a few exceptions left off the list) you like, here, and vote for as many as you want.

I’ve been having a time of it lately, so the site has been rather quiet for a while. I would like to get things back on track at least a little bit.

I don’t want to promise anything, hence the somewhat low-effort nature of this particular post (I didn’t even do one of my token funny photoshops this season. For shame), but I want to at least make an honest effort.

Your opinions, as always, are very much appreciated.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(Review) .hack//ROOTS Needs to Touch Grass

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rakhshi. Thank you for your support.

Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.

Maybe I just don’t quite get it.

.hack//Roots, the second entry of the storied .hack franchise, is a kind of anime that doesn’t really get made anymore, on several fronts. It’s an adaption of (and sort of a prequel to) the video game .hack//G.U. It’s also a fairly low-key and unflashy speculative fiction series. There used to be a lot of these; stuffed to the brim with a lot of place-names, people-names, and thing-names, where the central plot is the main fixture but is, at least in theory, supported by a whole lot of worldbuilding and Lore™. The slow pace is a key part of it too, enough so that my pet neologism “Proper Noun Machine Gun” doesn’t quite feel appropriate. (Proper Noun Composite Bow, maybe?) Usually, the plot is about finding a McGuffin of some kind. Or several McGuffins. Often, there are competing factions who want the McGuffin(s). At a glance, you’d usually guess they were mid-budget productions. You were usually correct. All of this is true in Roots, to at least some extent, and I have to admit that it made getting invested in the series hard for me. That in mind, I did not really care for it at all, we’ll circle back around to why.

In the past decade, anime like this have had their niche crowded out by light novel adaptions and the like, which have a more uptempo pace and are generally a lot campier. So, I must admit that for the second .hack franchise entry in a row, I went into Roots with the mentality of a pop cultural archeologist. .hack//SIGN was so of-its-era that the very net culture it was loosely based on is basically a foreign country nowadays. Roots is much the same, despite being a bit more recent (it hails from 2006) as signposted by its tangle of now-ancient MMO slang, some of which was never common in the anglosphere to begin with.

But enough about that, what’s it actually about?

Hint: not this.

For the first half of its show, there’s a straightforward answer to that question. Our main character is Haseo (Takahiro Sakurai), a surly noob who finds himself getting ganked on his very first day playing hit MMO The World. As the series’ plot revs up, he gets caught between the machinations of two guilds; the Twilight Brigade, led by the mysterious Ovan (Hiroki Touchi) searching for the Key of the Twilight—you may remember it from SIGN—and the enigmatic TaN Guild, who oppose the former for initially nebulous reasons. Haseo joins the Brigade at about the show’s quarter mark, and consequently they form the bulk of our remaining main cast. The main other members of note are Shino (Kaori Nazuka), who Haseo quickly forms a close bond with, and Tabby (Megumi Toyoguchi), who is another new player in search of friends in the digital fields and cities of The World.

Our McGuffins this time around are glowing crystals called Virus Cores, things of obscure provenance found in glitched-out locations within The World called Lost Grounds. The show opens before these things start to actually turn up, but they’re the main plot-drivers for the earlier parts of the series.

But detailing the plot from this point on becomes, or at least I feel it becomes, rote. Eventually the Brigade dissolves and things crumble into a syrupy morass, and the show never really recovers.

Before we discuss why, though, let’s consider the overall positives.

What I will give the series is that its soundtrack and background visuals are consistently excellent. As a production, and keeping in mind its origins, it is generally just a solid affair all-around. (There are some rough spots toward the end, but they’re relatively few in number.) The fight choreography is engaging on the occasion that fights actually pop up. In general, the show looks and sounds good. Unfortunately, that is about the sum of my unambiguously positive thoughts on .hack//ROOTS.

After the opening third or so of the series, these strengths clash with an increasingly sluggish central plot, and the series slows to a crawl. There is a lot of utterly leaden exposition—some of it handed out by decent characters, in spite of that, like the wise cat-man sage Phyllo (Junpei Takiguchi)—that is probably interesting if you have much more prior investment in this franchise than I do, but without that existing experience it mostly just comes across as boring.

There are, though, writing-side positives, too. Haseo’s character arc is terrible, as we’ll get to, but some of the other character writing is fairly strong.

For instance, a bit under halfway through, there’s an excellent bit of character work where Shino professes that she likes being in the Brigade because she feels that she can truly be herself there. There is something to this idea of Ovan (or really, Shino herself, given that she does just as much to make the Twilight Brigade what it is, while it exists) as a great creator-of-spaces. Areas where people can just be without having to worry about the pressures of the outside world. In the modern, mundane internet, there are plenty of such spaces, although not as many as there used to be, many of them on services like Discord. And there is also something to Roots’ depiction of one of these spaces falling apart; about halfway through the series, most especially in episodes 12 and 13, where the Twilight Brigade all quit after Ovan’s sudden disappearance, and Shino dies outright at the hands of the mysterious digital executioner Tri-Edge (Sayaka Aida). The collapse of a place like this is genuinely a sad thing and trying to convey that through the story is one of .hack//Roots‘ better ideas. Unfortunately, having good ideas and telling good stories are different things, and just because Roots can do the former does not imply it can necessarily do the latter.

From here, the plot again greatly slows down, and most of the remainder of the show is spent on Haseo’s deeply tedious quest for vengeance against Tri-Edge. On paper, you can see how this would work. Sacrificing almost every positive attribute you have in order to “get stronger” so you can avenge the death of a loved one is a tried-and-true narrative, one that’s been done many times in anime, and sometimes to great effect. But two things sink Roots’ attempt to tap into this bit of the collective human psyche. For one, the very fact that the series takes place within an MMO makes the whole thing feel slightly ridiculous, even with Shino being literally dead. For two, and much more importantly, Haseo is just not an interesting character. He begins the series as a whiny dweeb, and the series’ attempts to sell him as a genuine menace when he decides to go full raging avenger just don’t work.

Shino is gone, Haseo has given up a lot, so all of this, again, should work, but none of this changes the fact that what he’s mostly doing is mopily level grinding in an MMO. It’s silly, which would itself be excusable if there was any sense of drama to any of this, but there isn’t. Instead, Haseo mostly looks like a scrawny teenager cosplaying Cu Chulainn Alter for the back half of the show, something that really does not help its stabs at gravitas land.

….

Elsewhere, things are better. More grounded characters like Tabby, whose struggles still consist mostly of her wanting friends and not knowing how to deal with her first friend group breaking up, is the one who’s best and easiest to relate to, among the main cast. She carries that torch through the whole show, and she might be my favorite character over all. At show’s end, she quits The World, and plans to become a nurse, so she can help people in the real world.

Other minor characters like Pi (Sanae Kobayashi), who is effectively a combination minion of the obligate mysterious conspiracy / put-upon secretary, and Saburou (Shizuka Itou), a hacker with a talent for longwinded, clunky metaphors, brighten things up when they’re onscreen. But we here again return to the central problem of these characters just not being on-screen all that often.

And even when they are, they’re usually talking about Haseo. I’m reminded of that Simpsons episode about Poochie the Dog, except in this case Poochie is the show’s main character. We’re supposed to buy him as an avenging badass, but on a simple vibe level, it just doesn’t work.

This disconnect renders most of the show’s entire second cour tedious, but there are bright spots even here.

Episode 19, for example, treats the annoying but relatively mundane practice of Real Money Trading (RMT’ing, as the show frequently abbreviates it) with all the deadly seriousness of an episode of The Wire. Here, former TaN member Tawaraya reappears under a new account, using the name Tohta (Kenta Miyake), and busts up a ring of RMT’ers exploiting the playerbase for money. It’s a surprisingly interesting plot, with a fair amount of intrigue and actual mystery that is sorely lacking from much of the preceding material. It’s the one time the show’s self-seriousness actually works in its favor. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last, as the series returns to its ongoing main plot in the following episode and almost immediately loses that edge.

Finally, in the last few episodes, we learn that Phyllo has passed away, and has spent the last eight months of his life with a terminal cancer diagnosis, logging in to The World every day, just to chat up players. It’s a sincere, resonant ode to the quiet life, and the idea that some people find a deep joy in just communicating with others at all. It is maybe the single most affecting moment in the entire series….and then the entire rest of the last episode is just about Haseo again. Even when .hack//Roots has a good idea—and it has a fair few of them!—it can’t stay focused for long enough.

The problem with these sorts of anime is that they live and die by their central plot, which is usually driven by some kind of mystery. Here, at least in Roots‘ second half, the mystery is what precisely happened to Shino, why Tri-Edge attacked her in the first place, and where he is now. But there’s no compelling sense of discovery to it, everything just feels far too slow for something like this, and many of the plot points raised here do not actually get resolved by show’s end. (For actual conclusions you’d have to play G.U. itself, or perhaps watch one of its film adaptions.) So, the show drags and drags, all buildup and no payoff. Despite having only 26 episodes, it is mostly a series of intermittent highlights surrounded by doldrum. The bright spots make the experience more tolerable, but they don’t make it good. The disparate strengths never form a whole.

I don’t want to make it seem like I hate .hack//Roots. I certainly don’t. But I do find it frustrating, there are few things moreso than an anime with decent ideas that it just can’t figure out how to fit them together. Roots was actually fairly popular, once upon a time, but I think there’s a reason that the .hack series on the whole has largely faded from view. Its sprawling, inaccessible nature certainly has never helped, but if this is more indicative of the average tone and tempo of the franchise than Sign was, I can understand why people are not super interested anymore. Certainly, my personal journey with .hack ends here; I’m logging out.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Let's Watch

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: A Gunsmoke Twilight in the Last Days of LYCORIS RECOIL

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.

Since we last spoke about Lycoris Recoil, the series has undergone a radical shift in scale and focus. We saw the opening moves of this maneuver back in episode 7, but by now the show has mostly disregarded any direct “nitty gritty” political engagement. There are two things LycoReco cares about right now: mapping out the long arc of Chisato’s short life, and broad, philosophical questions of destiny and free will. Even though the show’s actual setting and characters have not changed much, we’re still a very long way from the montage of high schoolers capping people from the premiere.

We’ve known for a while that Chisato has an artificial heart, some future-tech thing that doesn’t actually beat, and which is essentially irreplaceable. So it wasn’t that surprising when, a few weeks ago, a minor villain posing as a nurse injected our protagonist with some knock-out serum or another and performed some impromptu surgery. The result was hardware lockout; no one can tinker with Chisato’s heart anymore, and that includes recharging it.

She has two months left to live.

Chisato’s life has the ring of true tragedy. Raised as a child soldier but addled with an incurable heart disease, she was singled out by the mysterious Shinji Yoshimatsu as a “genius” of killing, the primary skill of all Lycorii, and given her artificial heart with the understanding that she would use this gift to become an even deadlier assassin. Even with this in mind, we learn, it was doubtful she’d live past 18. Of course, for the purposes of being a deadly teenage supercop, that’s perfectly fine; Lycorii are discharged at 18 anyway.

The entire universe of Lycoris Recoil is aligned against Chisato; the “nurse” who’s pulled the plug on her heart is one of Yoshimatsu’s people, an obvious attempt to gain leverage on her to get her to return to her alleged true calling as an assassin, her former superior at the DA is not much better, giving her back a camera she’d confiscated some time ago to try to nudge her back into DA service. And of course, there’s her heart problems themselves, a natural ailment that the artificial heart has provided only a temporary reprieve from.

Chisato rarely shows any direct concern over any of this, and frankly she’s remarkably unflappable in the face of her imminent demise, but that’s precisely part of what makes her character arc so effective. Fearing death, at least a little bit, is normal. Staring unblinking into its face as you know it’s creeping ever closer, that’s another thing entirely. The ability to do that only comes from having spent the better part of your life in a seriously bad place. Even with all she very obviously cares for—Takina, the cafe’, Mika, etc.—she seems to have accepted this as inevitable from day one. It’s heartbreaking.

Yet, when, in episode 10 (the most recent), she finds out who exactly is responsible for all of that hardship, she holds no ill will toward him at all. She’s not really even mad at Mika for keeping this secret from her this entire time! Instead, she reiterates that she sees the two of them as her fathers, and when, in the episode’s final minutes, we learn that Shinji’s being held hostage by Majima and Robota, she doesn’t hesitate to spend a day of her rapidly-shrinking lifespan trying to rescue him. (The actual hostage rescue itself being territory for next week, we must assume.)

Chisato is, at the end of the day, an incredibly strong character. Not just strong in the usual anime sense, and not just strong as in “well-written,” but possessing of a vast moral strength, too. It’s hard to know whether to take her insistence that she hear all of the terrible things Shinji’s said about her in person as an incredible capacity for forgiveness, a denial that she’s been lied to at all, or both. But all signs point to her being very much aware of her own mortality, her ability to do all of this in spite of that awareness is both admirable and more than a little terrifying. Hers is a blitheness that hides a deep pain, something we really don’t get to actually see for ourselves directly.

While this is very much Chisato’s show, it’d be a mistake to not mention that the rest of Lycoris Recoil‘s cast has continued to be great, too. Mika’s deep and very much justified regret over his role in concealing the truth from Chisato rounds out his character in an excellent way.

Takina, in the meantime, has had to deal with the impending loss of her best friend (or “best friend.” I leave that distinction up to you, shippers), perhaps the first person she’s ever truly connected to, while also, in a twist of dramatic irony, being given exactly what she initially wanted; a trip back to the DA. She and Chisato are apart for episode 10, which while sad, does give her a few moments to truly shine on her own, and her single-minded focus on trying to somehow help Chisato is very grounded and relatable, despite the fantastical stakes. (This could also be said of Mika, actually. I am sure there is at least one father watching this show who absolutely cried his eyes out this past episode.)

The only real weak spot is Majima, who’s taken the main villain role in this last arc of the show. As a cartoonish caricature of an anarchist in a world built on some already-iffy foundational principles, he is probably the only genuine weak link in Lycoris Recoil‘s character roster and embodies most of the show’s remaining shortcomings. Still, he’s at least entertaining at this point, with his utterly ludicrous plot of “hide a thousand guns all over Tokyo and let carnage ensue naturally from there” being, all at once, a decent piece of commentary, comically stupid on its face, and weirdly lazy, as far as big endgame villain schemes go. But at this point, that’s expected of LycoReco, a show that is built on contradictions top to bottom.

The plot itself has taken an all-action movie tropes twist—again—as we ride into the final few weeks. A dying Chisato prepares to rescue Shinji while Takina and the other DA Lycorii try to deal with Majima running circles around them. Much is up in the air, and it’s impossible to exactly call where it all will land.

For any flaws it could be said to have, there is absolutely no denying that, as Lycoris Recoil nears its end, it remains an absolutely fascinating show, forever pulling in all directions and only recently settling into a groove that seems to truly suit it. (No one would call the show’s early episodes bad, I don’t think, but things have definitely improved.) The last bullets are in the chamber; gun cocked, but not fired.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.