Month: April 2023

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Springtime Comes Again in SKIP AND LOAFER

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 are the first nine words of Skip and Loafer‘s official English synopsis; This country girl is ready for the big city!

Obviously, that is not the whole story (would we be talking about this show if it was?), but it’s a good jumping off point. Mitsumi [Tomoyo Kurosawa], our lead, really is a country girl. “Ready for the big city,” though, that’s debatable.

Before we get into why, though, let’s talk about the kind of story this is. This is a very old thing, a fish-out-of-water narrative where a small-town girl finds herself in a proper metropolis for the first time and has to navigate the different social norms etc. etc. that come from the different living situations. Usually there’s some quaint moral chestnut in there about how rural folks are Wise or something. (As somebody from the sticks myself, I am disinclined to agree with that, but that’s a subject for another time.) It’s an enduringly popular genre on both sides of the Pacific and, if I had to hazard a guess, it’s probably common in any part of the world that’s ever had an urban / rural social divide of any kind.

But that’s not really Skip and Loafer’s thing, at least not yet. Mitsumi experiencing culture shock is only part of the whole teenage relatability play here. Above anything else, Mitsumi is an intelligent but socially awkward young woman with huge ambitions. We literally see her spell them out in detail. To hear her tell it, she has her whole life planned out ahead of her.

This, of course, does not go as planned. On her first day in Tokyo, she accidentally boards the wrong train on her way to school and gets lost, making her Very Late for her high school entrance ceremony. This starts a domino chain of mishaps big and small that frustrate her attempts to stick to a rigid plan for the day, and she almost immediately starts raking herself over the coals because of it. (Failing at some ultimately-minor task and feeling like the world is going to end is a pretty universal feeling, but you could certainly read the magnitude of her reaction as some kind of neurodivergent, were you so inclined.) She’s only able to find her way to school at all because of the intervention of our other lead character, Sousuke [Akinori Egoshi], a laid-back (some might say lazy) guy who himself overslept and will also miss the entrance ceremony if the two of them don’t figure something out. There’s a pretty good moment here that establishes Mitsumi and Sousuke’s very different personalities; on their way on the (this time correct) train, Sousuke mentions that the thing they’re missing is just the entrance ceremony, at which Mitsumi actually snaps at him. He doesn’t seem to really mind, but she spends the rest of the train ride beating herself up for it. Unmotivated vs. Neurotic; who will win?

Luckily, they do get there before missing anything important, as the principal’s speech runs incredibly long. There, we see a demonstration of Mitsumi’s smarts as she gives a (memorized!) speech to the class, since she was, I suppose, the top scorer on the entrance exams? (This isn’t elaborated upon here and I don’t know how Japanese high schools pick who gives these speeches, if indeed this is even a thing that’s still done outside of fiction.) Her speech is lovely, honestly, but having to recite it from memory wracks her nerves something awful.

So awful in fact, that she promptly runs to the bathroom to puke. But she doesn’t actually make it there. Instead, she ruins her homeroom teacher’s blouse and suit.

Whoops!

At this point, I should take a moment to clarify something. I worry I’m making Skip and Loafer sound like a cringe comedy, but that’s not really what it is. There’s an element of that, but it’s used in service of a more general depiction of the awkwardness of the teenage experience. Mitsumi isn’t a supernaturally-inept trainwreck like, say, Kobeni from Chainsaw Man or something. She’s just an ordinary girl. I’m nearly 30, and somehow, this is still at least a little relatable to me. In our lowest moments, perhaps we are all little more than a teenager puking on someone’s blouse because we’re just really, really stressed out.

To be fair—and I realize I’m not helping Skip and Loafer beat the cringe comedy allegations here—the situation does give us perhaps the single best line of the season so far, after Mitsumi learns about the epithet she’s picked up because of the morning’s events.

Despite this, the homeroom scene that follows is the one where Skip and Loafer, presented with the opportunity to either double down on the cringe comedy or to pare back a bit, makes the wise decision to mellow out a little. Sousuke, who’s taken something of a shine to Mitsumi because of all these shenanigans, asks for her contact info, and this brightens up the whole class toward her. It doesn’t seem like Mitsumi’s going to overcome her habit of overthinking everything anytime soon, but Sousuke’s given her something to latch on to. (In fact, she has some delightfully shoujo manga-esque flights of fancy where she imagines herself as a little duck and Sousuke as a beautiful swan.) This very quickly develops into a crush, and she ends the day thinking pretty highly of the guy. Sousuke himself is a bit of an enigma to us so far, and we only get one short scene from his “point of view” near the end of the episode, but he seems like a good kid. He leaves a hangout with some middle school friends early so he can get to sleep on time, aiming to actually make it to school on-schedule so he can see Mitsumi again and perhaps actually “enjoy high school,” whatever that may look like for him.

I think that the specific word “enjoy” might end up being what Skip and Loafer fixes on. Mitsumi is clearly someone with a lot of ambition, but it is important to know how to have fun, and how to live with yourself when you’re not either Doing Important Things or Making Plans To Do Important Things. Not figuring that stuff out can turn you into a workaholic (I’m speaking from experience), and that’s no good for anyone.

The episode ends with a cute little scene where Mitsumi calls her hometown friend Fumi, and despite lying to her and telling her that everything went just fine, it’s clear that Fumi knows Mitsumi well enough to discern the truth, even if she doesn’t actually say so. I feel like these phone call scenes will probably be fairly important going forward.

All over, there are lots of additional little touches, too. I’ve barely touched on the visuals, which is a sin, because the anime looks gorgeous, with believable but still cute-as-a-button character designs and a ton of great character animation. It’s enough to remind one that the “PA” in PA Works is supposed to stand for “Progressive Animation” at the end of the day. There is also, in a fact that may surprise some, a supporting transgender character, Nao [Mitsuki Saiga], Mitsumi’s dad’s ‘sibling’ (we’re not told anything more specific about their gender identity in this first episode, but I looked it up and the fact that she’s a trans woman is both canon and doesn’t seem to be any kind of twist. If it actually is supposed to be a twist, I apologize. Google was not helpful on this front). I will confess that I’m always a little worried when I see a character who’s visibly not-cis in just about any kind of fiction, but Nao’s minor role in the story is handled very well so far, and Mitsumi certainly seems to think well of her.

Less a facet of the show itself and more its localization is the subtitles, which are lightly dialectical to further convey Mitsumi’s whole ‘country girl’ vibe. At one point she also says something that the subs translate as calling the sides in her dinner “stylin'”, to which Nao wonders if anyone says that anymore. There are a lot of ways to use slang in subtitles, and this is a particularly fun flip-around.

All told, Skip and Loafer is a lot of fun, a classic take on a very old central premise that still feels grounded in the present. I’m sure it’s rearranging some teenage anime fans’ brains as we speak, but you don’t have to still be in high school to find this stuff super charming.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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: Gay Girl Gaffes in ALICE GEAR AEGIS EXPANSION

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.

Pervy lesbian girlfailure seeks to join the power armor-clad alien defense force / idol agency for the space colony she lives in, despite her vast, galloping incompetence in every relevant field. Need I say more?

I mean, I literally do, but if you wanted a concise pitch for alice gear aegis Expansion you could do way worse. I jokingly called this show “Bocchi the Mech” to some of my friends as I was watching the first episode, and that’s not entirely accurate—Nodoka (Miyari Nemoto), our lead, is way more together than Bocchi ever was. Also, this show isn’t quite as good as BTR yet—but it does a good enough job of summing the whole thing up. Nodoka is a fangirl of Actresses, idols / mecha musume-style battle girls who defend her planet from alien invaders. She desperately wants to be an Actress, so she can fight alongside her favorite of them all, Yotsuyu (Manami Numakura), who she is ludicrously, obviously gay for. Unfortunately, she’s been ruled unfit to pilot a Gear—the Actresses’ equipment—via a computerized test. Initially it seems like there’s not much to be done about that, but we’ll circle back around to that point.

First, let’s hone in on the name of these battle armor units. Yeah, they just straight up are called Gears. I’m not going to sit here and say that Alice Gear is a front-to-back rip of Symphogear, because it isn’t, but the influence is obvious. Symphogear is one of my favorite anime of all time, despite some flaws, so one might expect that I’d be very harsh on Alice Gear because of this. To be honest, though, there are much worse things to try to be than Symphogear. Assault Lily Bouquet managed to make it work, so there’s no reason this couldn’t, too, but the actual fighting part of the genre seems fairly incidental to Alice Gear, (despite a very strong opening action sequence, only killed a little bit by some harsh screen-dimming) which instead traffics mainly in zany character comedy, at least so far. One might be more inclined to think of it as something of a parody of this kind of show. Again, a solid idea.

Much of this first episode is basically a single long training montage. Yotsuyu (and some of the other girls) get the notion that if they can build Nodoka’s stamina, she might be able to pass the test. Thus, a parade of ridiculous things like having her balance books on her head while walking on a narrow bridge over a river filled with alligators, practice asking people to please buy idol tickets while wearing heavy cartoony balls-and-chains, etc.

Not all of these jokes work; there is a particularly unfunny bit where one of the characters dons A Certain Kind of Military Uniform to show that she’s going hardass mode. (Maybe rethink that one, guys.) But a lot of them do, and Nodoka’s sheer shameless infatuation with Yotsuyu is fairly endearing. Not even the presence of old-school romcom cliches like high-pressure nosebleeds can kill it.

There’s an interesting little twist at the end, indicating that there might be a little more to this show than just jokes. Time will tell, but I do hope we get to see Nodoka fight at least a few times.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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: KIZUNA NO ALLELE Asks, Can 3 Million Kizuna AI Fans Be Wrong?

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.

If you’re out of the Virtual Youtuber loop, it is probably difficult to comprehend what went on with Kizuna AI. I am, myself, only marginally invested in the medium these days, so I will disclose right off the top that I’m no expert. But I am something of a fiend for entertainment industry stories, and AI has a pretty great one. By most counts, she was the person who actually coined the term “Virtual Youtuber,” and later its abbreviation VTuber.

So you can thank / blame her, in at least some sense, for all those 3D-rigged anime girls taking over your Twitter timeline over the past half-decade. She is, in a way, her medium’s Elvis Presley. She didn’t invent the whole thing by any means, but she was among the first to take it mainstream, and that popularity has endured globally even as she’s gained real competition in the form of later arrivals, like the vast rosters of the Hololive or Nijisanji agencies. (She was, to provide some sense of numerical scale, the second VTuber to reach the 3,000,000 subscribers milestone. The only VTuber who beat her to that mark was Hololive EN’s sharkgirl star Gawr Gura. Gura has quite the story in her own right, but that’s a shark tale for another time.)

The history of her actual presence on Youtube (and the internet more generally) is odd and full of twists; from her channel relaunching with multiple Kizuna AIs all voiced by different people, her rig-actress Kasuga Nozomi becoming one of the few people of her stature to ever publicly admit to voicing their associated VTuber and gaining some creative control over the character, and so on, she’s had quite the ride, culminating in a semi-retirement—an “indefinite hiatus”—early last year.

All of that context is important because without knowing who Kizuna AI is and what she did, you can’t really know what Kizuna no Allele is trying to do. She’s the first character we see on-screen, not traditionally animated but in a reality show-esque confession cam segment where she enthuses about the fictional Lapin d’Or award, which she’s just won, and the series opens with a full-on music video by her. She is not the main character of this story, but she is an important, looming background presence. She is also, we find out from another confession cam segment from a different character, missing. Virtual Youtubing’s first great star has vanished.

At first, all of this seems like it might be only marginally relevant. The real star of our story here is Miracle (Ayumi Hinohara), herself an aspiring Virtual Youtuber, attending an academy(!) for the same, and with big dreams of one day measuring up to her idol—I’m sure you can guess who that is—despite being, at present, a total unknown. It is, basically, a pretty standard idol anime plot with the word “idol” swapped out for “VTuber.” Some of the specifics are a little unusual, but for a minute, this seems to be walking a tried-and-true route. Hell, the protagonists even do a variant on the Liella “throwing a star shape with their hands” thing in the OP.

It quickly becomes clear though that if this is trying to be a “normal” idol anime with just some different seasoning than the norm, it’s only doing a so-so job of it. Throughout the first episode, the entire series demonstrates a spacey, loopy energy that doesn’t really mesh well with those sorts of narrative goals. Miracle is a decent protagonist in theory, but she seems to spend more time talking about Kizuna AI than she does about herself, and it makes her feel more like a fan of VTubers than an aspiring one. Speaking from personal experience; there is a huge difference, and because so much of an idol anime’s success hinges on we, the audience, being able to “buy in” to these characters and their ambitions, the fact that I found myself bouncing pretty hard off of Miracle this early on is a bad sign. There is also a particularly odd aside where she gets lost in a greenhouse on her way to class and has tea with a character we haven’t really been properly introduced to yet. What that is about is anyone’s guess.

And then there’s the class itself; a dry, all-talking affair where we’re yet again doled out exposition about Kizuna AI as she lived her life in this fictional setting. (She won the Lapin d’Or award five years in a row, which is certainly impressive in-context, but feels so much less interesting than the actual story of the real person. The series also goes with the conceit that Kizuna actually is an artificial intelligence, which has always been her character gimmick as a VTuber, but for some reason not even making a token acknowledgement that there was a real person involved irks me. But, to be fair, this might become a plot point later on.) We’re also told about (but not introduced to) her counterpart Ada, who has won several years since AI disappeared, and who several of the students in this VTubing class vocally express a preference for. Clearly, this is our heel, although the fact that it’s directly pointed out that she only appeared in the years following AI’s disappearance makes me wonder if she isn’t just Kizuna AI herself under a new name and rig. (Consequently, I wouldn’t be too shocked if the entire anime was a promotional vehicle for exactly that.)

The real disappointment here though is Miracle’s performance for the class. The notion of shooting these performances in a similar rigged 3D CGI fashion as the one in the opening is solid, but they do need to actually be good. Unfortunately, despite the show attempting to sell it as a big moment, Miracle’s performance in this episode is incredibly lackluster, with passable but dispassionate singing and weak choreography. The song itself is fine, but she has no real charisma with which to sell it, and compared to Kizuna AI’s performance at the top of the episode, it’s just a colossal letdown. Bizarrely, when Miracle reappears in a post-credits sequence to wave us off for the week, she seems much more chipper, and consequently, much more interesting to watch, if only for those 30 or so seconds. It’s strange that she has a kind of upbeat charm there that’s missing from the actual show. Perhaps it can be pinned on the fact that this is Ayumi Hinohara’s first anime role, but the writing doesn’t give her much to work with either. If she could somehow bridge the gap between who she is in the actual anime and who she is in that closing segment, the series might become properly worth watching.

Even then, there are a few more interesting moments before the first episode closes. After her performance, which most of the class hails as Super Impressive, Miracle gets overconfident and shoots a collab request to one of her classmates that she admires, only to get turned down near-instantly with a literal big fat “NO.” There isn’t a ton of humor in Kizuna no Allele, but what little there is is effectively deployed.

Then there’s the utterly confounding final scene, where Miracle comforts herself by watching the Kizuna AI video from the start of the episode, only to have a voice in her head—who might actually be AI? It’s not clear—speak to her and deploy a shining portal, which she then steps through to find….a mostly empty grassy field with a little virtual avatar of a green baby taking a nap. It’s very odd, the kind of oddness that it’s hard to do on purpose. That sense of lackadaisical WTF-ery might be what saves Kizuna no Allele, since the chops to be engaging as an idol series just aren’t there yet. Who can say? This is a strange one.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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: Climbing The Stairway to a HEAVENLY DELUSION

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.

Let me say it again, if you didn’t happen to check out the Spring Let’s Watch poll article. Heavenly Delusion (officially just Tengoku Daimakyo on Disney+, as the streaming service has chosen to forego the existing English title of the series for some reason)—both that it exists at all and that we’re able to sit here and talk about it—is pretty remarkable. The original manga is the still-ongoing project of Masakazu Ishiguro, of And Yet The Town Moves fame. These are very very different properties—And Yet The Town Moves was an often-surreal comedy series, something that does not describe Heavenly Delusion at all—but if you squint, you can spot a few similarities. Some are obvious, like Ishiguro’s general character design sensibilities—natural hair tones, round faces, a certain specific sort of facial proportioning—or the timbre of some of the moments of genuine comedy in this opening episode, of which there are a surprising amount. Less obvious is the sheer sense of tactility that Ishiguro, and the staff of the anime, bring to Heavenly Delusion‘s setting. For lack of a better term, this show’s world—a post-apocalyptic landscape overrun with vegetation and unease—feels real. There is a grounded feeling to even the more fantastical elements.

The plot itself is actually rather simple, so far. Maru (Gen Satou) and Kiriko (Sayaka Senbongi) wander what was once Japan in the wake of some society-destroying disaster known only by the maddeningly vague name of “The Collapse.” Kiriko has been hired as a “bodyguard” of sorts, by somebody, in order to escort Maru to his destination, a place that both characters are short on details about, but they know is called “Heaven.” Along the way, Kiriko hopes to find two men who she keeps photos of sealed in a plastic baggy. Their relationship to each other—and to Kiriko—unknowable at this early point in time.

At the same time, somewhere else, a sealed-off facility hosts an entire generation of children who know nothing of the outside world but seem to be cared for in relative comfort. One of the children there, Mimihime (Misato Fukuen), wonders of the world outside the dome, telling her friend Tokio (Hibiku Yamamura) that she dreams of it, and that in her dreams, a person outside the dome looks just like Tokio. The latter mentions this notion to the facility’s mysterious administrator, who all-too-happily tells them that life outside the facility’s walls is a hellish, unforgiving struggle. Given some of the other things we see in this episode, and regardless of whatever else she’s up to, she might not be wrong.

Most of the opening episode focuses on Maru and Kiriko, who have a sibling-esque relationship complete with plenty of affectionate bickering despite not actually being related at all, as Kiriko points out. You’ll forgive me for talking around the episode’s events in general instead of addressing all of them individually—this is a busy first episode, albeit not in a bad way—but the two do go through some pretty intense stuff here, and how they handle it raises tons of questions. Kiriko has some kind of laser gun* and Maru seems to be capable of some truly bone-cracking martial arts that makes one wonder why he needs protection in the first place.

Even more bizarre are the man-eating monsters that seem to stalk the world’s nights. Something very bad clearly happened here, and this episode does a dizzyingly excellent job of hooking you in by making you wonder what that could’ve been.

On top of that, the production is just absolutely top-shelf stuff. If that seems like a rather unromantic statement given everything else I’ve said, know that this is only because I don’t really think I can compete with just posting screencaps for this particular part of the show. Look at this!

I’m very cynical about tierlist-bro descriptors like “movie quality visuals” but if people resort to terms like that to describe this show I don’t really blame them, Production I.G. have done an absolutely stunning job, and it’s good to see something carrying the torch for truly wonderful TV anime visuals after the finale of Trigun Stampede last week.

So what to make of this thing, all told? Well, it’s firing on basically every available cylinder. Sometimes there are no nits to pick or further points to raise. If anything, I’m even impressed with how Disney+ are handling the show, which is not something I expected to be saying even a week ago. (Last year they sidelined the intermittently-brilliant Summertime Render by simply not releasing it until months after it concluded. I’m still salty about that.) As far as opening episodes go, this is basically perfect, a gorgeous adaptation of already well-loved source material. You can’t go wrong here; 10/10, no notes.

*In part, I think this is actually a reference to And Yet The Town Moves, which to my recollection featured a similar weapon in a gag plot, but I assume there is some in-universe explanation for it as well.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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: On a Highway to HELL’S PARADISE

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.

If you’re the sort that craves a truly classic premise, try this one on for size; disgraced ninja threatened with execution is offered amnesty if he can find the Elixir of Life, hidden somewhere on a mysterious island that may or may not be one of the Buddhist Pure Lands. The specifics here are, of course, very culturally Japanese, but the core of that idea is universal. Death is the ultimate equalizer after all, and despite many attempts over the centuries, no one has truly figured out how to escape the Reaper’s long reach. Certainly, the topic preoccupied the minds of those in the late Edo period in which the show takes place as much as it does today. It’s a fairly universal point of fixation.

Some, of course, claim to not fear death at all. Such is the case with Gabimaru (Chiaki Kobayashi), protagonist of Hell’s Paradise and star of this season’s opening anime.* All told, it’s an extremely promising one. It’s also remarkably slow for such a thing, but that’s not a complaint. Despite being a MAPPA-produced shonen adaptation, Hell’s Paradise knows better than to overplay its hand at this early juncture, and there’s a deliberateness to this opening act. This is the sort of story that wants us to know the why before the what. Episode one is, thus, mostly an examination of Gabimaru’s motives and how he comes to reckon himself with them.

How does Hell’s Paradise get there? Well, we open on an executioner repeatedly trying and failing to behead our protagonist. His sword simply breaks against the young man’s neck. This is Gabimaru, disgraced shinobi, captured and hauled before a magistrate and condemned to death. As the magistrate’s executioners repeatedly try and fail to kill him—first by beheading, then by burning at the stake, then by tearing apart with bulls, and then finally by dousing him in burning oil—is someone who claims, again and again throughout this first episode, to not be attached to this thing we call life. Honestly, combined with the nearly documentarian narrator, it becomes pretty clear from the word ‘go’ that, in addition to anything else, there’s a surprising amount of grim humor in Hell’s Paradise.

That claim to have accepted his impending death is what’s most important here, though. Gabimaru is lying.

Serving as a counterweight to Gabimaru is Yamada Asaemon Sagiri (Yumiri Hanamori), an executioner and “sword-tester” who seems to directly serve the shogunate itself. Sagiri spends most of this first episode in a detached and observational mode. She grills Gabimaru about various things, scribbling notes down in a small book she keeps on hand. Two points stand out here. One; the village of Iwagakure, a shinobi enclave that Gabimaru was raised in from a very young age, and two, the daughter of said village’s chieftain, who is also Gabimaru’s wife. It is for the sake of his wife—who, despite their arranged marriage, he loves very much, as shown in some genuinely super endearing flashbacks—that Gabimaru clings to his own life. It is also for her sake that, when Sagiri offers a way out of being executed, Gabimaru accepts.

Gabimaru cuts an interesting figure across this first episode in general; he seems very fatalistic, but that’s clearly also at least in part a cover for how badly he misses his wife and, perhaps, some deeper traumas. When recounting how he was apprehended by the Iwagakure shinobi, Gabimaru leaves out the part where he resisted so stubbornly that he took out twenty men before eventually being captured. There is definitely some level of self-serving memory going on here; no one accidentally kills twenty people, but whether it’s to keep Sagiri in the dark, as part of an internal attempt to reconcile himself with his wife’s wishes for a peaceful and ordinary life, or some other option, isn’t yet entirely clear.

Nonetheless, Sagiri offers him a pardon from the shogunate itself, offered on just one condition; he must go to a recently-discovered mysterious island, which may itself be a Pure Land, far past Ryukyu, and recover the Elixir of Life. In doing so, he’s competing with a number of other condemned criminals, each of whom also seek the Elixir on behalf of the shogunate. Essentially, Hell’s Paradise seems to be setting up a death game scenario here, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more to it than that. (Sagiri also assures Gabimaru that his wife is allegedly still alive and patiently waiting for him back at Iwagakure village. This screams “bait” to me. I would not be shocked if there was a plot twist of some kind that hinges on that particular detail.)

There’s a little bit of Capital-A Action sprinkled in here too; a pretty great bit where Sagiri proves that she could kill Gabimaru, even if he resisted with his various ninja techniques, and makes the ludicrously badass claim that her sword’s reflection shows the true inner nature of the people she executes. She and Gabimaru have a nicely-choreographed fight before she eventually offers him the pardon, and when they both have to escape the angry troops of the magistrate, Gabimaru deploys a proper jutsu for the first time in the series, lighting himself on fire in the process. (Ninja Bullshit will always be cool to me. I had a brief Naruto phase in middle school and that was more than enough to rearrange my brain in that regard.)

And in the episode’s closing minutes we get some truly gnarly shots of what happened to the first expedition to this “Pure Land”; they came back to Japan’s shores in wooden boats, dead, bodies overgrown with flowers, and their faces contorted into a ghoulish smile. That’s one hell of a hook to get you to tune in next week

I can imagine, in theory, someone being perhaps disappointed that the first episode of Hell’s Paradise doesn’t lay all its bells and whistles on the table right away. But personally, I’m finding this slower approach pretty captivating. The show is not, at least not yet, a full-fire storm of blood and adrenaline. It’s a creeping, almost nocturnal dread, not unlike the fear of death itself.

*Heavenly Delusion, which I will also be covering for a first impressions article, technically premiered about an hour earlier.

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