Month: May 2023

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch OSHI NO KO Episode 7 – “Buzz”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Last week, Oshi no Ko dealt with some extremely heavy subject matter; how reality shows manipulate the images of those starring in them, online harassment, attempted suicide. All very stark and very real problems, depicted in a harrowing light that cuts close to the bone.

This week, the series continues addressing some of these issues, but takes a different, more pragmatic approach, one informed by the character of Aqua himself. If you have to play this awful game—and if you’re in the industry and want to stay in the industry, you really do—how can you win? Akane wants to keep acting in spite of everything, and won’t quit Love Now despite her own mental health being in the gutter. In that situation, what can be done to shift the public opinion? How do you take control of a narrative that’s spun out that far?

Well, if there’s one thing Oshi no Ko is good at, it’s getting us to understand (if not necessarily sympathize with, that’s going to be a person to person thing) Aqua’s big plans. He takes this entire thing exactly as seriously as it deserves to be taken, and considers Akane’s actions a cry for help. So, he’s going to help her, even if that means he and his Love Now co-stars have to get their hands dirty to basically rewrite their own show. His plan is simple; they’re going to use a combination of filming and editing to present a version of Love Now from their own point of view; the “real reality show,” as Aqua puts it, in the form of an online video. While the ethical mores of this particular plan might be questionable, its ability to get the public at large back on Akane’s side is less so. Even more because Aqua has Love Now’s whole cast on his side; the guy knows what he’s doing. When time comes to acquire a key piece of raw footage, he even guilt-trips the show’s director in expert fashion. It’s captivating stuff, a performance of a different kind. (It’s also honestly a little scary, but hey, he’s an antihero.)

Sleepless nights of editing follow, ended by a Monster energy-riddled Aqua needing MEM’s help to finally upload the video. But the ploy works, and things end in more or less a settled fashion, as the internet firestorm finally subsides. Even if, as Aqua himself points out, the incident will probably still trail Akane from time to time for the rest of her career.

Love Now’s cast openly suggest that Akane might feel a little safer if she puts on more of a performance during the show’s tapings. Somebody offhandedly asks Aqua what kind of girls he likes, to take a suggestion, and the predictable happens.

(Interestingly, he doesn’t actually name Ai directly. Instead, he describes someone in generalities, and MEM, in a true brain-to-brain moment, tosses her out as an example of the kind of person Aqua’s thinking of.)

Akane, thinking that this Aqua guy is really nice, and maybe playing the part of his ideal girl might get him to notice her, does some character study.

By which, it must be clarified, I mean she does a lot of character study. We learn something pretty interesting about Akane here; she is the sort who needs to really get into the head of any role she’s going to play. Since Ai is now just another one of those roles, she spends some amount of time (it’s not entirely clear how long, but it seems like at least a few days) learning literally everything about her that she possibly can. Not just her public persona, but pulling tiny social tells out of random photographs and videos, making notes and taping them to her wall. It’s genuinely a little freaky, and of Akane herself, it speaks to the kind of person who feels a deep need to get lost in a performance and to fully inhabit it. And, if I can turn her lens back on her a bit, seems to suggest that she’s not really happy with who she is.

Nonetheless, in an aside, we learn that Akane is famous in the theatrical world as a true force to be reckoned with, and in the episode’s closing scene, we see why. By the time Akane returns to the Love Now cast, she’s dived so deep into Ai as a character that, when the camera starts rolling and she has to start acting, a pair of hauntingly familiar star designs appear in her eyes. Her voice actress imitates Ai’s manner of speech, the animators draw her with Ai’s rhythm of motion. She basically becomes Hoshino Ai. Aqua definitely notices; his shocked reaction is the last thing we see in the episode. (Complete with a killer cut to the ED, which unlike last week’s, absolutely fits here.)

Despite everything she’s been through, Akane is an absolute monster talent, and it’s heartening to see her given a chance to shine here after the awful mess she went through last week.

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 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

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: When Did MAGICAL DESTROYERS Stop Being Fun?

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.

It’s always a danger with this kind of show; anything that’s more than 30% or so pastiche by volume will get lost in the weeds if it spends too much time reminding you of other stuff instead of being good on its own merits, but that isn’t really the specific problem that Magical Destroyers has run into as it closes out its first half. Instead, the issues are more basic. It just isn’t much fun anymore; the show’s always-questionable taste, initially a forgivable quirk, has collided headlong with its lacking character writing, incoherent plotting, spotty pacing, and, as of the most recent episode, the visual side of things is also starting to fall apart. None of this is good, and even if the series recovers it will be, if remembered at all, rightly dinged for having a weak middle third.

You can map Magical Destroyers‘ episode quality over time pretty easily. After a strong premiere, an even better second episode that seems likely at this point to be the show’s overall highlight, and a solid third episode, cracks started to show around episode 4, where the entire thing is basically an excuse for some tasteless fanservice. Episode 5 is fine, and even seems to set up some ongoing plot threads for the episodes to follow, but the two that come immediately after it are easily the show’s low points. Episode 6 is a dull and pointless elaboration on the titular magical girls’ barely-there backstory, and episode 7 is just a top to bottom problem.

In episode 7, the girls face the second of the Four Heavenly Kings—gotta have those in an anime, of course—but in contrast to the brainwashed car otaku in episode 3, this guy is….an angry gamer named Adam who cheat at video games a lot until he was eventually banned from every online game. It really must be said, Adam has an unforgivably bland design for a show like this, and his AI girlfriend Eve (of course her name is Eve) doesn’t fare much better.

Adam of course traps our heroes in a virtual world where he has unlimited haxx0rz to torment them as he pleases. Except, he’s not very creative with any of this—which is maybe supposed to be a vaguely meta point about the sorts of people who are inclined to cheat at video games, but it doesn’t really come off that way—and his attacks are mostly limited to generic stuff like rocket launchers and pistols. The SNES-style JRPG mockup segments are a bit more interesting, but given how off-model the rest of the episode looks, they almost feel like an excuse to simply have the characters on screen less often.

While all this is going on, there is a massive battle happening back at the home base of Otaku Hero’s rebels. We’re shown approximately none of this, and despite the threat of Otaku Hero and the magical girls possibly not making it back home in time to save the day, the plot is simply resolved off-screen. This is indicative of the show’s poor writing at this point in general, plot points will be seemingly forgotten about or just dissolve mid-episode, proving to be of no real consequence. Anime in this “otaku action anime” genre do not have to be exquisitely-written, but they do need to have impact, and virtually nothing that’s happened in the past two episodes has had any.

On top of that, it must be said. No one comes to an anime like this for its themes, but watching it—again, especially this weak run of episodes 6 and 7—has made me realize just how well written some of them, in particular Rumble Garandoll, actually are by comparison. That series never lost sight of the fact that people who loudly express disdain for art and those who love it tend to have ulterior motives for doing so. There is a reason its villains were from an alternate timeline where Japan won WWII; they were literal fascists, whose hatred of otaku culture stemmed from it being indicative, in their view, of a weak mindset that did not sufficiently put the nation first. By contrast, Magical Destroyers‘ main villain seems to just hate otaku because they’re otaku. He gives a rather over-wrought speech in episode 6 that makes him come across like the sort of person who spends a lot of time on tumblr ranting about how fanfiction is destroying young writers’ minds. He’s still ultimately wrong, but the ideological scope is not there, and as such his plans—and the show’s entire plot as a consequence—come off as trivial.

Otaku Hero’s ideal of a world where you can “like whatever you want however much you want to like it” is a nice enough idea, sure, but it’s not very specific. Contrast Garandoll‘s broad messages of unity and inclusiveness—even accounting for that show’s own flaws—and you start to see how poorly Magical Destroyers‘ writing holds up even against other anime in its own very narrow genre. When Magical Destroyers began, I saw a few people express disdain at the fact that it took its own conceit seriously. That isn’t the problem; the problem is that it’s not taking it seriously enough to actually articulate any further ideas it might have. And if it doesn’t have any, if the only thought it has truly is “doesn’t it suck when nerds get bullied?” then that’s all the worse.

Finally, the show’s production has begun falling off as of episode 7, and as a result some shots and sequences look astoundingly poor, with low drawing quality and bad composition. One hopes it’s just a hiccup, but it’s genuinely hard to believe that shots like these come from the same anime as episode 2, which still stands as one of the single most visually inventive of the season. And for that matter, the show’s own stock henshin sequences, which stack up to any from any more conventional magical girl anime of the past decade.

Will Magical Destroyers recover? It’s not impossible. There are a few high points of episode 7; a bit where Otaku Hero and Anarchy rescue Pink and Blue sees them walking in on the two mid-Uno game, where Pink is “torturing” Blue by hitting her with a pair of Draw 4s. And there are a handful of good to great shots and cuts, although honestly that’s true of almost any anime (very few anime look uniformly terrible throughout).

And while it probably hasn’t sounded like it from most of this article’s tone; I am rooting for Magical Destroyers, here. I like stuff like this! There’s a real point to be made about how the persecution of art can abet the persecution of people, and while no show in this small genre has ever made it perfectly, they usually at least try. What’s really burning me about Magical Destroyers at this stage is that it feels like it’s not trying anymore. Not to beat a dead horse, but you’re going to go on and on about the glory of anime and manga, and then this My Hero Academia reject is the heat you’re going to bring?

I initially thought there was a method to this anime’s madness, but it really seems like it might just be making it up as it goes after all. For a show where the premise involves a rebelling army of nerd guerillas and a magical girl named Anarchy, it hasn’t really lit the fires of revolution under me.

Nonetheless, because I’m a mark, and because I tend to get attached to shows where my feelings on them change several times over the course of me watching them, if it ever does get its act back together, I’ll be the first person singing its praises. Come on, Magical Destroyers! Give me something to believe in!

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 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

Let’s Watch OSHI NO KO Episode 6 – “Egosurfing”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Content Warning: The below article discusses self-harm and attempted suicide.

We didn’t cover last week’s episode of Oshi no Ko here on the site. (I’d like to pretend that’s for some grand reason, but to be honest it’s just a combination of the fact that I’ve been sick and also reading way, way, way too much Umineko: When They Cry.) So to give a quick recap; last week, Aqua was able to convince Kana to join Ruby’s fledgling idol group, the rebooted B Komachi. It was a fun, straightforward episode that has something in common with, say, last year’s Shine Post, even if Oshi no Ko on the whole is very different from that. Tragically skipping last week also means we won’t get to discuss Kana and Ruby’s “mentor” in the realm of online marketing, masked fitness Youtuber Pieyon, in detail. He’s a pretty great minor character, all told, even if Kana certainly doesn’t see it that way.

On the other side of the coin, we got Aqua finally joining the reality show, a dating / daily life program called Love Now, he promised to take part in a few weeks back. Love Now’s cast show is of decent size, but we’re mostly going to be focusing on three characters; the fashion model Sumi Yuki [Saori Oonishi], the livestreamer MEM-cho [Rumi Ookubo], and the actress Kurokawa Akane [Manaka Iwami]. Other than Yuki coyly flirting with Aqua, this part of the episode was mostly scene-setting. (It’s to OnK’s credit that it’s willing to walk around in the less obviously-glamorous parts of the entertainment industry. Few people dream of getting famous off of gimmick fitness videos or reality TV. It’s a stepping stone thing.)

The focus is again on Yuki as this week’s episode opens up; a theatrical outburst where she cries and talks about quitting the show is, of course, just her playing up her actual feelings for the camera. Aqua observes this—and seems to have observed a lot about his castmates—and places them into three distinct categories; Yuki and MEM-cho both get “skillful”, whereas Akane is relegated, in his view, to someone who doesn’t come across well and so gets little screentime. Indeed, Yuki remains the center of attention for the first part of this episode. Within Love Now itself, she sits at the center of a love triangle, and thus most of the show’s audience interest is funneled toward her. It’s easy to get the sense that while Yuki may or may not be manipulative, exactly, she definitely at least knows how to play to her own strengths. Through all this, Aqua and MEM mostly stay out of the way, and at one point MEM actually accuses Aqua of being rather unambitious.

One person that definitely isn’t true of, though, is Akane. Throughout the episode we see her taking notes on her fellow cast members, from the camera crew, and practicing various things; stretching, fencing, line-reading. Akane is a capital-A Actor, not unlike Kana. But that’s ill-suited to a reality TV series where the main draw is everyone acting more or less how they actually do, any playing up for the camera aside, and she happens to nearly walk in on her own manager being yelled at by one of the show’s producers. She needs to leave some kind of mark on the show, or she’ll be left behind.

Oshi no Ko does something interesting here; there’s a cut-aside to Ruby and Kana, where the former has to stop the latter from tweeting negatively about a lousy soft drink she bought. Kana’s point is solid, and she says it verbatim; in the social media era, the entertainers themselves are the product. This borderline-paranoiac attitude is normal in the industry, and it makes sense, in a way, too. The Internet is a big place, and the digital abyss loves nothing more than to gaze back.

For a while, it seems like Akane’s story might be one about what happens when you don’t keep that in mind. Determined to make some kind of strong impression on Love Now’s viewers after god knows how many sleepless nights of searching her own name on Twitter and finding very little at all, she tries playing the part of the bad girl, and makes a go at snatching Yuki’s not-quite-bfs away from her. This, to put it mildly, goes badly. In the middle of a (mostly-staged) argument, she makes a dramatic hand gesture and accidentally smacks Yuki across the face, scratching her cheek. What Akane and Yuki themselves think of this whole incident doesn’t really matter; the fact that it was caught on camera means that the audience is judge, jury, and executioner here. And if you’ve ever followed reality TV even a little bit, you know how nasty this kind of thing can get.

I don’t like to screenshot fake tweets, but it’s pretty necessary to discuss what happens here. There are a lot of them.

As we see this, the show dissolves into a swarm of voices; buzzing like flies around Akane’s head as she slowly withdraws from her own life, and encounters scathing rebukes of not just the inciting incident but everything she’s ever done and even her personality itself everywhere she goes, online and off. It’s pretty goddamn depressing, and it’s impressive that Oshi no Ko can manage to convey just how hard this stuff, which can seem trivial to an outsider, hammers on you.

It’s bad enough that in the episode’s final scene, Akane leaves her apartment in a half-awake daze. She tells herself (and the group chat that seemingly all the Love Now actors are in) that she’s just going to the store to pick up some food, this in spite of the fact that a typhoon is blowing through and wind and rain are pounding down outside. It eventually becomes heartbreakingly clear that no matter what she might’ve said, Akane left the house to die. It takes the absolutely miraculous intervention of Aqua—just passing through by chance, or did he have some idea of what was about to happen?—to literally pull her back from the ledge mid-jump. (The harrowing moment is spoiled only very slightly by the rather inappropriate choice to fade the show’s ED song in. I think total silence might’ve been a better call this time around.) The real visual jewel here is a match cut between how Akane feels—tragically free—and how she actually looks standing in the pouring rain.

There’s no such thing as a pretty suicide. Thankfully, good fortune saw Akane saved in the nick of time, but it’s worth thinking about the context that Oshi no Ko was originally written in. The entertainment industry is no stranger to performers being pushed to the brink by an uncaring public, and the arc happened to originally serialize not long after the tragic Terrace House incident. [Just as an additional content warning, that article discusses a real-world suicide in detail, please exercise caution before deciding to read it.] The parallels are not subtle.

To some, there will never be a sufficiently tactful way to depict this kind of thing, but the horrors gestured to here are very real, and turning away when a light is shined on them doesn’t make them vanish. Not for nothing, “Egosurfing” is the only anime episode I can recall ever seeing that ends with a card showing the National Suicide Hotline’s information. Oshi no Ko is a work of fiction, so Akane was always going to be okay here. Real people, obviously, do not have that luxury, so the hotline card seems like a good inclusion.

There is no real suitable way to transition from discussing that kind of subject to my usual outros for these articles. Nonetheless, I will see you all again next week.

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 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 Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: You Are Not Immune to MAID TO SKATE

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a new manga.

If you’re a digital artist working through the online content grind, having some kind of identifiable thing that’s distinctly your own is a huge help. For a lot of artists, it ends up being fanart; people become known for doing art of one particular character or many characters from one particular property, and gain a fanbase from there. But there are other paths, and one of the less-traveled is to simply make gorgeous art with some kind of gimmick that serves as a draw. Enter suzushiro333, a Twitter illustrator better known as “that person who draws all those maids skateboarding.” They have been at this for years, and they have gotten very good at it. Good enough to make Maid to Skate, a manga that is undeniably one of a kind.

There is an admirable, almost battle shonen-esque laser focus on the titular subject here. We don’t really learn much about our protagonist, Benihana—whose name, by the way, is a skateboard trick—over the course of these short few pages. We don’t learn a ton about her situation either, such as why she seems to live in some kind of group home with a bunch of other maids. We do learn one very important thing though; in this world, maids skate. Maids skate a lot. Maids take skating very seriously. Maids skating is the entire point of this manga, to an even greater degree than most actual hobbyist manga I’ve seen. And if you don’t like maids that skate? Get out. There is nothing for you here.

It’s honestly not surprising that Maid to Skate is so focused on the actual action of maids skating. Most of this first chapter is a single long action sequence wherein Benihana tries to skate through town to get to a market quickly, and it is absolutely gorgeous; sleek, refined, and with a command of lines-of-movement that even the best working mangaka would have to respect. The entire debut chapter is basically a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 level, and reading it is as fun as playing through one yourself. It knows better than to stick too strictly to plausibility, too. There’s an absolutely great bit in here where Beni retrieves a crying little girl’s balloon by ramping off of a building to snatch it out of the sky.

And to provide a counterpoint to that, she also absolutely eats it while trying to jump the gap over a river (!!). This level of completely bailing is apparently unacceptable for a maid, since she ends the chapter being scolded by the presumable head of her group home.

This does lead me to wonder, though; where does Maid to Skate go from here, if anywhere? Certainly, no one would complain if every chapter was basically just a spin on this. At the same time, I wonder about this delightful little world and the people that live in it, and would be over the moon to learn more about skater maid society. Wouldn’t you?

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 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

Let’s Watch OSHI NO KO Episode 4 – “Actors”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

In with an out with a bang. If you’ll remember the closing minutes of last week’s episode, Aqua promised to make his performance in the final episode of Sweet Today count. And, implicitly, that was the show also promising to dazzle us. So, the question of how exactly it goes is what’s on our minds as we enter this week’s episode, and rain drips in to the leaky, abandoned warehouse that serves as the site of the shoot.

As we open, we actually lead with Kana’s side of things. A quick recap of her whole situation; former child prodigy-actor, now the subject of waning public interest, is given the lead role in a crappy live action miniseries adaptation of a beloved shoujo manga. She’s desperately trying to make her co-stars look decent in spite of their own lack of acting chops and nearly everything else about the series. This is something she cares about, she wants to be back in the spotlight and she wants to make a good show from this manga that, we learn, she loves too. It is just not happening; in particular her co-lead, played by the character Melt [Seiji Maeda], is an absolute cardboard cutout. She is getting nothing off of him, so she can’t give anything back.

This is when Aqua steps in. Improvising basically anything in a scripted performance—be it film, TV, whatever—is usually quite a bad idea. But Aqua does it anyway, in an admirable show of sheer audacity. He really leans into his role as the villain within Sweet Today, here, playing his character with an appropriate amount of sleazy grime and even deliberately antagonizing Melt just out of earshot of the camera.

Right or wrong, Melt’s sudden burst of emotion in response gives Kana something to actually play off of, and suddenly the child prodigy who can cry on command is back. Some of the show’s staff are a little annoyed (honestly, they’re not wrong to be, this isn’t the sort of thing one should try at home), but the series’ director isn’t, so it stays in, despite the alterations to the program it ends up necessitating. The staff aren’t the only people who’re charmed; this is the last shot of Kana while she’s being filmed that we get. Look at that blush!

Another group of people are grateful for the step up in Sweet Today‘s finale; the actual manga staff themselves. Not the least of which is the series’ actual mangaka. There is some palpable irony in the discussion she has with her assistants—about how manga artists often tell each other to keep their expectations in check when it comes to adaptations—being had in an adaptation of a manga. And indeed, the necessities of the format curtail a bit of the emotional punch. Still, it’s an effective scene, and we learn that the Sweet Today miniseries develops a small cult following on the internet off the basis of its strong final episode. (Previously mediocre shows suddenly and inexplicably becoming a lot better happens in anime, too, although it’s rare.) The mangaka ends up actually thanking Kana specifically during the show’s wrap party.

That party is also where we get our next plot thread. Kaburagi, who you’ll remember is the show’s producer and one of the many people on Aqua’s suspect list, ends up talking to him about Ai after casually remarking that they look rather similar. Aqua, who’s already crossed Kaburagi off the suspects list, presses him about how he knew Ai in the first place. Assuming Aqua to be more of a simple stan than anything else, he offers to trade a piece of little-known gossip for something; an appearance on a reality TV show that he’s the producer on.

We don’t get to see that just yet. The episode’s final third actually revolves around Aqua and Ruby’s new high school, a performing arts academy where Kana is their senior. Here we split off and mostly follow Ruby for a while. This is good, because it lets us get, say, her impressively bisexual reaction to entering her class for the first time.

She also makes a friend in the form of effusively pink gravure model with a fake Kansai accent Kotobuki Minami [Hina Youmiya]. In general, Ruby’s side of Oshi no Ko will tend toward the light and comedic for a good bit yet. She is very much the secondary protagonist after her brother, although this does mean we get to see more of her silly wild takes when something funny happens.

We also meet Shiranui Frill [Asami Seto] here. Regarded in-universe as a top entertainer even in high school, Frill mostly serves as the indirect conduit for the other upcoming plot line. (And as fanservice for Kaguya-sama: Love is War! fans. She’s the younger sister of minor character Shiranui Koromo.)

Ruby, a huge fan of Frill’s, feels insecure about not having a job in the industry yet. This leads to her pressuring Miyako to get her idol group together more quickly, but just as Miyako retorts that unaffiliated showbiz-grade cute girls are in short supply in Japan—precisely because of things like idol auditions—Aqua pipes up that he might know somebody who’s looking for an opportunity.

Namely, Kana.

Once again, though, that’s a development for next week, as the episode cuts there.

Until then, anime fans!

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 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.