Month: June 2024

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Rock Will Never Die, But You Will – Youth, Guitars, Emptiness, and Catharsis in GIRLS BAND CRY

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

“We believe there’s a place where we belong. That’s why we sing.”

There is something fitting about the fact that, as of the time I’m writing this after the anime’s just ended, there is no way to legally watch Girls Band Cry in the west. It’s completely meaningless to call anything, much less an anime—the end result of many, many corporate machinations at the end of the day—“punk” in 2024, but there is something at least a little rock ‘n roll about how if you wanted to watch Girls Band Cry as it aired and you lived in North America, the UK, or many other parts of the world, you had to pirate it. Steal This Anime, they’ll call the documentary.

It’s appropriate because Girls Band Cry is a thirteen episode ode to the power of rock music, of youthful indiscretion, of the power of spite—of doing something just because everyone tells you you can’t—of love, of rebellion. I’m 30 years old, now, so I can’t speak to how Girls Band Cry may or may not be resonating with the actual teenagers of today, but I can say that for myself, for a generation that grew up on the pop-punk explosion, perhaps rock n’ roll’s last gasp of any real cultural relevance in the United States, it hits like revelation. The very short version is that this is an absolutely kickass tour de force, a complete triumph for Toei’s burgeoning 3D department, proof that Sakai Kazuo (also of Love Live! Sunshine!! fame, among other things) still has it and that his best work is ahead of him. This is a show that cements itself as an instant, iconic classic, and a series that other anime will build on in the future. If you haven’t watched this, you need to. Go look around, or ask a friend in the know if you don’t know where to search. You’ll find it, and it’ll find you. It’s a story about teenage rebellion. It’s a straightforward underdog rock band story, the best we’ve gotten in years, and a rare recent example to feel truly connected to the real world. It’s also, if you’re paying attention, a love story. Suffice to say, as is obvious from my effusive praise, I think Girls Band Cry is great. I could nitpick various things, and I don’t think it’s literally flawless, but it’s about as perfect as anime gets for me, at least. It’s an admirably dense text for its genre, too; thirteen episodes of the most emotionally resonant shit you’ve ever felt in your life. It’s an electric, nervy thing with a ton of heart. I love it.

Would you believe it all starts with a middle finger?

There’s an entire sub-article to be written about how Girls Band Cry makes use of the middle finger gesture. It starts as a running joke in the first episode, before being traded off for its more polite counterpart, giving someone the pinky finger. But then that becomes an in-group thing, something Togenashi Togeari, the band in Girls Band Cry (the name means something like ‘spineless spiny ant,’ I’m told), use to identify themselves, each other, their fans, their supporters. It becomes a fandom thing, a scene thing. A sign of belonging.

But before even that much, there’s Nina [Rina, in her first-ever anime role. All of Girls Band Cry‘s voice actresses go by mononyms and are new to the industry], a lonely girl keenly aware of her place in a world that is much, much bigger than she is. As our story begins, she’s just arrived in Tokyo, leaving behind a complicated home situation that we won’t learn more about until near the end of the series. The more specific reasons aside, the main sense we get early on is that the real reason Nina struck out on her own in the big city is just a sense that she felt like she didn’t belong in her hometown. Given some stuff later in the show, it is really easy to read Nina as a closeted (maybe even to herself) lesbian, but more generally, she definitely at least feels like a stranger in her own home. Getting away from it all makes an amount of sense. Much, much later in the series, we’ll learn that this all stems from trying to stick up for a girl in her class who was being bullied and being smacked down hard by the school system (and more literally, the actual bullies) for doing so. It quickly becomes clear that Nina is a pretty angry little thing, and that most of this anger is a justified expression of disgust with a deeply unfair world. That kind of anger can ignite a fire in a person, and I’ve always found these stick-to-your-guns-at-all-costs types admirable. I have a few friends like that, and they’re some of my favorite people.

Something that gives Nina relief from the general, well, pain of being herself, is the music of rock band Diamond Dust. Or at least, Diamond Dust as they used to be, before they replaced their lead vocalist Momoka [Yuuri] over what we later learn was a falling out about a shift in style at the behest of their label.

Nina, a real head, is a fan of their older stuff with Momoka, particularly the original version of their song “Void”, which makes things pretty astounding for her when she meets Momoka on a street corner, putting on a street performance. Nina introduces herself, starstruck, extremely awkward, and maybe a little smitten. The two hit it off pretty well, but Momoka plans to leave town the next day and quit the music business entirely.

Suffice to say, that doesn’t happen. Over the course of the remaining 12 episodes, Togenashi Togeari (who only actually get that name a fair ways into the series), gain three additional members; drummer Subaru [Mirei], keyboardist Tomo [Natsu], and bassist Rupa [Shuri]. All are fantastic characters, although they don’t get an even split of focus, as this is mostly Nina’s story, at the end of the day. Before we get more into that, though, we should actually talk about how this story is told, since the presentation is so important here.

Any anime is to some extent defined by its visual identity, and the sound work is always important as well, but both of these are particularly crucial to Girls Band Cry, which is genuinely attempting something new on the visual front, and sonically requires its viewers to buy into the idea of Togenashi Togeari as a credible rock band. The look of the show is the most notable thing about it, I’d argue (aside from that other elephant in the room we already addressed, anyhow). If you are one of the people who has held off on GBC because “it’s CGI” or “it just doesn’t look good,” this is me telling you, as politely as possible, that you are having an Goofball Moment and need to gently shake yourself out of it. I’ve long been a defender of 3D CGI in anime, but this is not a case like say, Estab Life, where the series is using CG to emulate the traditional “anime” look. Instead, Girls Band Cry focuses on capturing the feeling of being an anime, as opposed to clinging to techniques that don’t necessarily work in its particular format. This is obvious in details as basic as its apparent framerate. The common 3D CG shortcut of halving the final product’s framerate to make it look more like a series of traditional anime cuts is not present here, as Girls Band Cry‘s visuals are able to capture that look without relying on doing that. In general, the CG is fluid, cartoony, and wonderfully expressive. Not every trick it tries works perfectly, but it has an astoundingly high hit-rate for something that’s basically extending anime’s visual language on its own as it goes.

In more general terms of style, the show manages to pull off keeping things relatively grounded on a presentational level while still feeling cartoony. Some of the usual anime hallmarks are absent here—no one but post-Momoka-split Diamond Dust have any of the usual anime hair colors, for instance, and in their case there’s decent reason to think it’s dyed—and the backgrounds in particular lean toward the realistic. Despite this though, GBC is perfectly willing to break that illusion of restraint whenever it has a reason to. This can be as simple as a character making a goofy pull-face (something the show is shockingly good at considering how hard that is to do in 3D), or giving a character a literal aura that radiates off of them and impresses the other characters or telegraphs an emotional state to us, the audience. In one scene, for example, Momoka is given a gentle, cool lavender aura. We don’t need Nina to directly tell us that she thinks Momoka is beautiful and admirable. The entire series is loosely from her perspective, and devices like this let us directly see how she feels. This is even more obvious in the “rage spikes” the show draws around Nina when she’s angry; she literally brims with red and black needles, representing the barely-contained boil of her temper flares.

Girls Band Cry can and does use traditional 2D animation as well, but only in very specific contexts; the idealized, crystallized memories that we all have as part of our core personalities, very occasional flights of fancy when the show dreams up what “real rock stuff” looks like, including the opening theme, and for minor characters. If we interpret the show as being from Nina’s perspective, we can think of the 2D segments as her romantic notions filling in the gaps as she’s telling us her story, even in remembering minor characters she has no real extended contact with. It is certainly not a compromise or a concession, which is what a lot of people—myself included—might’ve initially thought, as it’s important that these are the only times when Girls Band Cry uses these techniques.

In terms of sound, Togenashi Togeari are surprisingly believable as a rock band. Obviously, despite the show’s gestures toward an independent rocker spirit—gestures that become more and more important as the show goes on—this is an anime series, and those need to be backed by corporate money, so they’re not, like, The Clash or anything. They’re pretty fucking good, though! It takes several episodes for their sound to really come together, as it doesn’t entirely click until they pick up Tomo for keyboards and Rupa for a real bass about a third of the way through the series. In the great Girls Band Anime Power Rankings I’d put them somewhere above (don’t kill me here) honestly most of the BanG Dream groups, and Kessoku Band, but below Ave Mujica, Raise a Suilen, and Sick Hack, bands whose very existence kind of feels like the series they’re from is getting away with something. (Even accounting for the last of these having only one song.) TogeToge aren’t that, but they’re great as the protagonists of this kind of thing, since they make straight-down-the-middle, fist-pumping, angst-shedding alt-rock of a kind that’s basically extinct as anything with any real cultural currency in the United States but remains a viable commercial and artistic force in other parts of the world, obviously including East Asia. Their biggest asset is Nina’s vocals; clear, piercing, incisive, bright as a shooting star. She sings like her vocal chords are trying to climb out of her throat to strangle everyone else in the room, and while she lacks the complete knockout punch holler of someone like, say, real-world rock star LiSA, she more than makes up for that in knowing her instrument and in her sheer on-mic charisma. This all rounds together as TogeToge being a pretty damn good band, I’ve found myself spinning their songs both from the show and from their album Togeari a fair bit, which is more than I can say of a great number of in-fiction acts from anime in this genre.

The important thing to note here is that TogeToge don’t have to be better than every other rock band from every other series, though. The main thing they have to do is be better than Diamond Dust, as over the course of its central narrative, Diamond Dust become TogeToge’s main rivals despite appearing only very rarely; TogeToge’s opposites in approach and philosophy, and also subject to a personal grudge from both Nina and to a lesser extent Momoka. This, TogeToge easily pull off. To the point where I feel a little bad for the actual people behind Diamond Dust, as DD’s music is just not nearly as good or interesting. (It’s polished and professional, certainly, but it lacks the magnetism that TogeToge eventually develop, and their own lead is a much less compelling vocalist.) The deck is clearly stacked in TogeToge’s favor in this way, but that’s not a bad thing. I think stoking a bit of fannish partisanship within its viewers is likely intentional, in fact. As though you’re supposed to hear Diamond Dust and think “what, people would rather listen to this than our girls?!” Given that Girls Band Cry clearly takes place in some version of ‘the real world,’ it’s distressingly plausible! It’s a fun little story-hack, and it makes GBC a nice exception to the trend of band anime main character bands being the least interesting groups in their own shows.

There’s a level of cognitive dissonance here that merits a quick aside. TogeToge, despite the show’s own themes, are, in fact, exactly as much a commercial product as Diamond Dust. The main reason this doesn’t really matter is that getting you to buy into the illusion that they aren’t is something the show goes through great lengths to accomplish, and I’d actually argue this is the main reason the show works at all. (It’s also why it took a few episodes to click for me! Nina is such an incredibly polished and talented vocalist right off the bat that I found it a little unbelievable. Imagine my shock upon learning that her voice actress is actually a year younger than she is.) I will confess that I think I’d like TogeToge even more if they had a little more grit in their sound, but that’s a personal preference.

In any case, the story of Togenashi Togeari has elements of a traditional up-from-the-bottom rock underdog story, but more important is the band’s members using music to process their personal traumas. Nina has the whole bullying situation, as well as an overbearing family and an equally-stubborn father who are not supportive of her sudden decision to drop out of school and pursue rock music when they learn about it. Momoka has the lingering pain of leaving the original Diamond Dust, and ends up projecting her own experiences onto Nina who she clearly sees as a slightly younger version of herself. Subaru is the granddaughter of a famous actress, and is expected to follow in her grandma’s footsteps despite her own disinterest in the profession. (She calls it “embarrassing”, even!) Tomo is living separated from her family for reasons we only get a very broad picture of, and has previously dealt with people cutting her off when they can’t handle her frank personality. Rupa, Tomo’s roommate and easily the most mysterious character of the main five, is originally from Nepal, and lost her mother in an unspecified tragedy before moving to Japan with her father. A common thread here is that of seizing your life, every minute of it, to do what matters to you, not bowing to anyone else’s whims. In one of the most casually-devastating lines in a series full of those, Rupa lays things out in one sentence.

In other words; Girls Band Cry will be romantic, because it clearly cares about that starry-eyed rocker girl shit a lot, but it’s not going to bullshit you. The window for anyone to make an actual rock band and have it work out in any way is very short, and Girls Band Cry is keenly aware of that. This frank attitude extends to the characters’ personal problems as well, and each has an issue they struggle with over the course of the show. Nina is a cute anime girl and she’s ridiculously fun to watch, but her prickly personality makes it hard for other people to get along with her and she tends to retreat into her anger when in difficult situations. Momoka is genuinely a beautiful and cool rocker lesbian1, but she also actively uses that persona to deflect tough conversations that she doesn’t want to have, and as mentioned she tends to project her own hangups onto Nina. Subaru is easily the funniest character in the series, a lovable goofball who gets most of the show’s most comedic moments, but her screwy attitude seems to stem from feeling repressed in her home life, and it’s downright uncanny how she acts around her grandmother. Tomo is similar to Nina in a lot of ways, as her blunt, often critical way of talking about things with people can make her seem rude or thoughtless to those not attuned to how she thinks. Rupa, lastly, actually seems to be the most well-adjusted member of the group, but there are a few moments when the façade cracks and it’s clear that something, perhaps the loss of her mother, is still weighing on her. It’s also worth noting that she drinks a lot, and while the show mostly plays this for laughs, it’s hard not to read a certain level of coping mechanism into it. The show’s command of characterization is just excellent overall, and it reminds me a lot of another anime original with a script by screenwriter Hanada Jukki, A Place Further Than The Universe, which also had a cast of strong characters and a deft hand with staging conversations.

Our central story is actually fairly straightforward, compared to all of this complex characterization. For the most part, we’re tracking TogeToge’s formation, relative rise, and as it turns out, very brief time on a major label here. I don’t want to bleed the anime of its specifics, but the short version is that the first 2/3rds of the show focus largely on Nina and Momoka’s relationship, which goes from that initial meeting to a sort of strained friendship before the two come to accept each other in episodes seven through nine.

We need to talk about one other character here, Mine [Sawashiro Miyuki], a singer-songwriter whose time in the show is brief but makes a huge impact, especially on Nina. In episode seven, Mine, who is an indie musician getting by even if she’s not famous, explains to Nina, after a joint show, that the reason she still does music for a living even if it’s very hard is that it feels like she has to. She goes into some detail about how she tried to compromise with herself, to take up a teaching position or something else more “stable”, but she couldn’t do it. Making songs, performing those songs, connecting with people via her art. It was too important. Nina seems to really internalize this. I’d argue it’s also basically the thesis of Girls Band Cry itself. Everything else is extraneous, what matters about making music—or any kind of art—is that you’re getting something of yourself, your soul, across to your audience. That’s what Nina got from the original version of “Void,” and that’s what she hopes to do with TogeToge.

Momoka can’t quite see that. She spends most of the early series convinced that Togenashi Togeari are destined to fail. Not just fail, crash and burn. Because she failed with Diamond Dust, and can’t seem to consider that the only data point she’s working off of is her own. Given what little we see of Diamond Dust, who mostly seem to be happy with their new direction, it’s entirely possible that Momoka splitting off was actually the best thing for both her and the band, but Momoka just can’t see it and continues to insist that she’s going to quit TogeToge in the near future. At one point, Nina is so fed up with all this that she just slaps Momoka across the face.

Would you believe that doing so actually makes their relationship much stronger? In fact, you can pretty easily argue that shortly after this, they become more than just friends. Nina, in episode eight, straightforwardly confesses to Momoka in the middle of a very hectic scene that I can’t bring myself to spoil the minutiae of. If you see people call Girls Band Cry a yuri series, that’s why. Does Momoka reciprocate? Well, she never actually says so, and I know that the lack of verbal confirmation will disqualify it in the minds of some, but based on what we actually see throughout the rest of the show; the two affectionately leaning on each other at various points, the fact that Nina has Momoka’s name circled on a calendar and a note reading “spend time with Momoka after practice” jotted down at one point, etc., I think the situation is fairly obvious. Maybe more than any of that is Momoka’s constant reassurance that she loves Nina’s voice. It’s clear that she’s not just talking about her literal vocals—although probably those, too—but Nina’s point of view, her passion, and her inner fire.

In fact, after this point the entire band seem to form a really coherent unit not just musically but as friends. I saw another fan of the series mention that the way you can really tell that TogeToge get along is that they’re comfortable being jerks around each other. And that’s honestly, completely true! TogeToge love to mess with each other, but it’s also obvious that they really do care. This is most obvious, at least it was to me, in episode ten, where Momoka has to be stopped from driving all the way back to Nina’s hometown by herself to pick her up. You don’t do long highway trips for people you only kind of care about.

About that; episode ten sees Nina return home to try to explain her situation to her parents, mostly her dad. Nina’s father is another great character who really shines despite a limited lack of screentime, and I’m absolutely in love with how the show stages the first conversation between the two where they’re not really listening to each other. How does Girls Band Cry communicate that? By sticking them on opposite sides of a sliding door. Subtlety is for losers.

The entire episode is fantastic, but the key points touched upon here, particularly where Nina says that the original Diamond Dust’s music saved her when she was feeling—she says this explicitly—suicidal in the aftermath of the bullying situation at school. That is the real power of art. That’s what TogeToge are seeking to channel, and episode ten is where Nina really starts understanding that. The self-acceptance she shows here is hard-won, and this is the sort of thing I refer to when I say that Girls Band Cry is really Nina’s show at the end of the day. I have rarely felt proud of an anime character, an emotion-object combination that just objectively doesn’t make any sense, but Girls Band Cry got it out of me.

As for the band themselves, they eventually sign with a real publishing company. (Or are they a label? To be honest, I am a little unclear on this point, but it doesn’t really matter.) The episode after this is where all of this buildup—the character arcs themselves, the emotional peaks, the sound, the love, the lightning—hit their climactic note. This is the best episode of the series, the best anime episode of the year so far, and one of the best of the ’20s in general. They play a festival, with TogeToge on a B-stage, in what is nonetheless the biggest moment of their careers. Diamond Dust are at the festival, too, but we only get to see a very brief glimpse of them playing, because this is not their story, and they’re not our real stars.

Togenashi Togeari aren’t up on the main stage, they aren’t playing to the biggest crowd, and they aren’t the main attraction, but for the three minutes and ten seconds of “Void & Catharsis”, their big roaring emotional fireworks display that is, in its own way, a response to Diamond Dust’s own “Void”, they feel like the best and most important band in the world. The entire series hinges on this concert scene, which is good, because it’s one of the best of its kind, and “Void & Catharsis” is TogeToge’s best song. It’s been weeks since I first saw it and it still blows me away. I might go as far as saying that it’s the best in-show rock band concert since the iconic performance of “God Knows” in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a full eighteen years ago. If it’s not, it’s definitely at bare minimum the best of this decade so far, and it’s hard to imagine it being topped by anyone any time soon.

It’s not just the visual tricks the show pulls out here; wild, zooming camera angles, cuts to 2D-animated segments that dramatize the girls’ own backstories and traumas in the way that so much great art does, some of the most raw rock poster animation I’ve ever seen in any television series, etc. It’s the song itself, a screaming and, yes, cathartic anthem about rebellion as personal salvation. Nina has no time for anyone’s bullshit. She’s busy screaming about insubordination as admiration, how telling someone they’re aiming too high is a rotten thing to do. She won’t be obedient but she’s scared to even try to resist. She doesn’t want to die. She wants to live so bad it hurts. She inhabits not just her own trauma but her bandmates’ as well, singing brief sections of the second verse from the perspective of Momoka, then Subaru, then Tomo, then Rupa. She channels the painful split Momoka endured from the original Diamond Dust, the towering expectations placed on Subaru, the forced clamping up that Tomo put herself through, and the unimaginable tragedy of Rupa’s loss of her mother. She’s not just a singer, she’s a medium. She takes on their pain as her own and lets every razor sharp line bleed her voice until there’s more blood on the stage than sweat. In a particularly astounding lyrical turn that I’m not entirely sure of the intentionality of, there’s a line in the chorus that is a completely coherent sentence in Japanese, translating very roughly to something like “because my anger can’t be stopped”, but sounds phonetically like the English phrase “so I can die young.” That kind of intentional bending of language, to facilitate a bilingual pun that calls back to and reinforces an earlier line, no less, is normally the domain of rappers. Particularly heady, lyrical ones (the likes of Kendrick Lamar or Lupe Fiasco or such), so part of me wonders if it’s not just an astounding coincidence. But if it’s not, that’s some 5D chess shit, and I feel wrong not pointing it out even if it is an accident because, holy fuck, what an accident.

It must also be said, she looks amazing throughout the entire concert scene; an honest-to-god icon of rock n’ roll rebellion in an age where the very idea should be a laughable archaism. She pumps her fist both toward the crowd and back at her own band to egg them on. She stomps around on the stage like she can barely control her anger. She glares at her audience, maybe Diamond Dust specifically, since they’re also watching, like she’s trying to kill them with her mind. All this while rocking a billowing yakuza shirt and with quick-apply teal dye that I must imagine smells like an unfathomable mix of chemicals slapped on the underside of her hair. In one particularly great moment, she makes an open-palmed gesture toward the crowd and then clenches her fist tight. It’s clear that not only is she insanely good at this, she really loves doing it. For all of her fury and thunder it’s also obvious that she’s having the time of her life on that stage, and who could possibly blame her? She gets to be in a rock band. Who wouldn’t love that? That feeling itself is embedded in “Void & Catharsis” as much as the righteous anger stuff. It’s subtextual, but it’s definitely there.

All this about Nina and barely a word about the other girls. The truth is that despite being a hobbyist musician myself I’m not much of a music theory gal, so I can comment only in generalities. Still, Rupa’s pounding, oscillating, heavy bassline grounds the song, as do Subaru’s nimble drums. Tomo’s key work—some of her best—provides some much needed texture to contrast the main sonic palette of the song, Momoka’s guitar, and have a sparkling, star-like quality that really reinforces the piece’s sky-looking aspirations. On the note of Momoka’s guitar, holy shit Momoka’s guitar. For the most part her riffs here are the song’s muscles, they give it strength and fullness and make it more than just a bed for Nina’s vocals, but there’s a really great moment where Momoka gets a full-on solo, a sparking piece of pyrotechnics that really sends “Void & Catharsis” over the top. I have it on authority from a guitarist acquaintance that it’s also fairly technically tricky, and I have no reason to doubt them.

All this to serve a song and a scene that streaks across the show like a comet. 3 minutes isn’t that long for a rock tune! I listened to the song a number of times while writing this piece and I was always astounded by how brief it is. Because in the moment, in the context of the show, it feels monumental and eternal. It’s not, though. When Nina hits that last note, the song ends, and in fact episode 11 on the whole ends. We are left with the feeling that we’ve just witnessed something rare and special. I wonder if the crowd that TogeToge attract during the show feel the same.

The rest of the show, really, is denouement. Falling action, of a sort, something that single cour anime have largely forgotten how to do. Episode 11 is the show’s peak both emotionally and qualitatively, but the miniature drama that follows, where TogeToge are briefly part of a real label, have their first single flop hard, and then quit to return to the indie grind, is compelling on its own. It’s a full extension of the show’s passion-driven spirit, and it also allows Nina to reconnect with an old friend.

Hina [Kondou Reina], the vocalist for the incarnation of Diamond Dust that TogeToge spend the entire show in the shadow of, was a classmate of Nina’s. She was there during the whole bullying thing, and she told Nina not to get involved. Nina, as we know, did get involved, and this led to a rift between the two that still doesn’t fully heal even by the end of the series. Honestly, in her sole on-screen appearance of any length, Hina comes across as a pretty nasty piece of work! Some of this is clearly affect, and the show’s final minutes state outright that she was deliberately pushing Nina’s buttons during their one meetup, but still! I would say that Hina would be the main character if this were an idol anime, but frankly I don’t think most idol anime have it in them to portray their characters with this much honesty. (Shinepost did, which is why Shinepost rules.)

The charitable read is that she’s a realist. Someone who knows how to play the game, someone who is actually interested in the monetary side of the whole industry, someone who wants to be famous. In pretty much every sense, she’s Nina’s complete opposite. Their meeting is enough to convince Nina that she was in the right back then, and she’s in the right now. This also concludes an entire plot about a dual Diamond Dust / Togenashi Togeari concert, that ends with TogeToge amicably leaving their label. Momoka, in one of her last lines in the entire series, gently teases Nina by suggesting that this whole thing was Hina trying to extend the Diamond Dust / TogeToge rivalry, partly because she enjoys playing the part, but also partly because Hina really loved Diamond Dust’s music too! Maybe not in the same way, maybe not to the same extent, but she did, and this is a commonality that connects the two similarly-named vocalists permanently, whether they like it or not.

This, then, is how the series ends, with Togenashi Togeari back on the indie circuit, a cult phenomenon at most. We will never know if they achieve success beyond this, although we do know they’ll keep trying. Either way, at the end of the day, part of the very point of this show is that success is secondary to being able to look yourself in the mirror. Nina is ridiculously, astoundingly, monstrously stubborn, but she sticks to her principles. In one of the flashbacks that dots the finale, Hina tells her that Nina’s intense “spikes” of justice make her feel like the bad guy. The thing is, in those flashbacks, Hina is the bad guy. She seems to even know this, on some level, given how she does everything she does in the last episode specifically to prod Nina into sticking to her guns. Arguably, that’s a pretty cold mercenary move too—after all, TogeToge and Diamond Dust are direct competition—but I choose to take it both ways. Yes, Hina is conveniently knocking a rival band down a peg, but she really does seem to care about Nina, too, in her own way. (Implicitly, there’s also some reason to wonder how happy Hina really is about having basically sold out, despite her own claims in the finale about how important success is. We may never know for sure.)

By design, we don’t see the rest of Togenashi Togeari’s story. We could write it ourselves, we could choose to extend the show’s text into the real world and keep an eye on how the inevitable actual touring version of the band do. You could argue, well, hey, Diamond Dust aren’t the ones with a Spotify ad or the goddamn branded earbuds. You could even argue there’s room for a hypothetical second season (there is, but I think people get way too caught up in that particular discussion). Ultimately all of that, all of the money and fame and success and legacy and popularity and on and on, is less important than the show’s overall dedication to sticking to the spirit of rock n’ roll in a time when that is a fast-fading phenomenon in even the most vestigial sense. These girls appreciate music as art, as life. They’d die without it. Even if TogeToge are never bigger than they are in episode 11, I have no trouble at all believing they will play together for the rest of their lives. In their very last concert of the series, in the middle of a charmingly awkward monologue, Nina declares her audience rebels and misfits, and while that’s true of TogeToge in a very different way than it was for rock and roll’s originators many years ago, it is still true, and it’s true of Girls Band Cry itself, too. In one very specific sense, TogeToge have a luxury that real bands don’t have. They get to ride off into the sunset and into our memories forever. The ED is something of a very short postscript, and it seems to suggest that TogeToge will soldier on together, living that indie rocker life, into eternity. That’s a bit ironic for a series that’s also in decent part about seizing life while you still can, but hey, it’s one of the perks of being an anime character instead of a flesh and blood human being.

All this said and there is so, so much I haven’t touched on. I think time might risk forgetting how funny Girls Band Cry is (seriously, it’s borderline a slapstick series in some spots). The girls have incredible costuming both in their day to day life and especially on stage. I didn’t talk at all about Subaru’s character arc, nearly as important to the show as Nina and Momoka’s. I didn’t talk about Tomo or Rupa that much even though they’re probably my favorite characters (one of the very few criticisms I could make of the show is that I wish it were just a bit longer so Rupa could’ve gotten an episode). I didn’t talk about Tomo’s pet snake or the fact that her outfit for the festival concert is an extended reference to Undertale. I didn’t talk about Rupa’s legion of gay fangirls, a real, canonical thing that we are shown in the series. Even in the parts of the plot I did go over, I skipped a lot of details. Hell, if I’m honest, I could write a whole other article about the sleazy indie rocker sex appeal of Momoka’s stupid fucking trucker hat that she wears while piss-drunk and acting like a jackass in one of the episodes. Like any good rock band, TogeToge have way more to them than any single writeup, video, whatever, could reasonably cover. The list is endless! But this review is not, and I need to stop somewhere, even if any point is ultimately going to feel arbitrary.

If this is the end of the series the fact remains that we were all here to see this, together. The moments themselves are more important than any lofty discussions of success or legacy, and if the show does find a long tail, which I really hope it will, it will be because it feels so huge and fiery in the moment. If you’re going to make an impact, make it electric. Connect with people, find your voice, live your life. Everything else is fluff.

1: Source: I’m Gay And I Can Fucking Tell, OK?

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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) Pop Music is an Ocean: JELLYFISH CAN’T SWIM IN THE NIGHT and the Rough Waters of The Girl Band Genre

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

We aren’t there yet, so it’s an educated guess at most, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spring 2024 season is remembered in hindsight as that of the yuri-inflected girl band series. You had the return of Hibike Euphonium, you had Girls Band Cry, you had Whisper Me A Love Song, for what little it contributed, but Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night was, we’ll remember, there as well. For its first half dozen or so episodes, you could easily have argued that it was in fact the most beloved of all of the new entries here, as Girls Band Cry‘s anglosphere cult following had not yet reached fever pitch. In an even broader view, I wouldn’t be surprised if the long view of history lumps Jellyfish together with an even wider circle of anime; Bocchi the Rock!, It’s MyGO, whatever becomes of the Ave Mujica anime slated for next year, etc. Grouping all of these anime together is, of course, ultimately reductive, but something I’ve learned over the several years that I’ve been writing about anime is this; nothing escapes the context in which it is created.

This is particularly unfair to Jellyfish for a number of reasons, but one of them is that on a basic premise level, Jellyfish differs a bit from its contemporaries. JELEE, the “band” in Jellyfish, is really more of an arts collective centered around a pseudonymous vocalist. My immediate point of comparison was ZUTOMAYO, but really, any of the night scene bands that followed in their wake are a decent point of reference. Like some of those (but unlike ZTMY itself), JELEE’s membership is fairly small, consisting of vocalist Yamanouchi Kano [Takahashi Rie], composer and keyboardist Takanashi Kim Anouk Mei [Shimabukuro Miyuri], visual artist Kouzuki Mahiru, who also goes by Yoru [Itou Miku], and social media wizard Watase Kiui, who is also a VTuber under the name Nox Ryugasaki [Tomita Miyu].

The show is divided roughly into two parts, with the former half focused on JELEE coming together and then attempting to make a name for themselves, and the latter with the emotional fallout of Kano’s former career as an idol under the emotionally abusive management of her mother. Bluntly, the former works a lot better, and while there are a number of threads and subplots here, the ones that are successful share a certain verisimilitude. They focus more on things that seem like actual issues a contemporary pop group would encounter while trying to find a foothold in the uncaring ocean of the modern internet. These are generally simple. Some are pragmatic questions of how to get your music out there, others are more abstract and deal with things like finding artistic drive within yourself, being unashamed to express yourself for who you truly are, etc. The common element is pursuing your passions in a world that may be apathetic or even actively hostile to your doing so.

This takes different forms depending on the character. For Mahiru, who is perhaps the show’s “main protagonist” in as much as it really has one, it’s as simple as a lack of self-esteem and a tall order of impostor syndrome. For Kano, it’s significantly more complicated; she struggles to be noticed as an utaite1, making cover songs in the aftermath of her failed idol career, there with a group called the Sunflower Dolls that she left under decidedly acrimonious terms after slugging one of the other members in the face. Mei and Kiui2 have it hard, too. We meet the former after years of burying herself in fandom for “Nonoka,” Kano’s old idol persona, as a coping method for dealing with the bullying she endured in school for being “weird” (read: neurodivergent) and for being biracial. We meet the latter, Mahiru’s childhood friend, constantly lying their ass off through the other side of a computer screen. Kiui spends most of the early show immersed in their VTuber persona and telling tall tales about how popular they are at school and such. (They aren’t.)

Jellyfish splits its time unevenly between these characters—not inherently an issue—with most of the early show focusing on Mahiru and most of the latter half of the series focusing on Kano. It’s not a clean split, as episodes primarily about Kiui are sprinkled throughout. Mei gets the short end of the stick, with only her introductory episode and a handful of stray scenes later on really focusing on her as a person.

For the first part of the show, the main thrust of the plot is the formation of JELEE itself, the arts collective that the girls create as a vehicle for Kano’s singing, Mei’s composition, and Mahiru’s visual art. JELEE finds a fair amount of early success, and this early phase of the show hits its peak during one of Mahiru’s bouts of self-doubt. Admitting that she resents that other artists can draw JELEE-chan—the jellyfish-themed mascot she created for the group—better than she can, she and Kano have a heart to heart in the snow, and Kano kisses Mahiru on the cheek. (Followups to that particular development are indirect, manifesting in such forms as Mahiru gently teasing her about it an episode or two later.)

Throughout all of this, the traumatic fallout from Kano’s previous career as an idol remains a lurking background element, but it’s only when her mother, Yukine [Kaida Yuuko], is properly introduced as a character, a fair ways into the anime, that it really becomes a central focus, and the anime shifts gears to reorient around this. It’s hard to call this change in direction a mistake, exactly, since it leads to some of the anime’s best scenes, and probably its overall best episode in its ninth, but it’s definitely a stark change, and the show handles it unevenly.

Throughout the ninth episode, we get flashbacks of how Kano came to be the original center for the Sunflower Dolls and how she was eventually kicked out of the group. Here, Kano becomes “Nonoka.” Her mother controls her style and manipulates her talents for her own ends in a plainly vile way that paints a very clear picture of her as an old-school slimeball record exec. Really, the moment that seals the deal in hindsight is when she lays out her goals to Kano. “I want to one day nurture an artist who sings to 50,000 people.” (Jellyfish floats a lot of numbers around over the course of its runtime, but that one, the 50,000 associated with the maximum seating capacity of the Tokyo Dome, is the one it runs back most frequently.) Unfortunately, Kano’s time with the Sunflower Dolls comes to an unceremonious end when she discovers that Mero, one of the other girls in the group, has been running a Youtube page that spreads gossip and inflames scandals about rival acts. Enraged, Kano punches her—the incident we’ve known about for the whole show, but only then get the full context for—and her career in the traditional idol industry ends in an instant. She’s so overcome with shame and emotion that the show actually switches art styles. In a compelling, lightly experimental touch, the visuals seem to turn into something like a burning oil painting, as though Kano is physically igniting under the harsh, dispassionate glare of her mother.

All of this portrays Kano as a victim in an industry that is certainly no stranger to victimizing even its youngest performers, and paints Yukine as, at best, deeply callous about her daughter’s suffering, and at worst, an outright abusive figure, a gender-flipped version of the archetypal sinister record executive-patriarch. It’ll make you want to scream “leave Kano alone!” at your TV, if you’re anything like me.

It’s worth noting that all of these flashbacks are broadly from Kano’s own point of view, but there’s relatively little evidence of some kind of unreliable narrator thing going on, and the trauma Kano endures from all of these events is obviously very real. This is unfortunate in its own way, because it feeling so raw and so emotionally resonant means that when the show tries to tie Kano and Yukine’s relationship up with minimal fuss in the last episode it really doesn’t work, as we’ll come back to. And as a further side note; we have no reason to directly suspect that Yukine was encouraging Mero’s little side activity in running the Youtube channel, but it so clearly seems like the kind of thing she’d do, given what little we have to go on, that I have a hard time imagining at least some of the story here isn’t trying to imply that.

Back in the show’s present, Yukine approaches Mahiru with an offer to do some visual work for the current incarnation of the Sunflower Dolls. (One with Mero as the center, mind you.) Yukine certainly seems to have ulterior motives for doing this, and when Mahiru tells Kano about her plans to take the job offer—pushing back a release of one of JELEE’s own songs in the process—Kano absolutely blows up at her, calling Mahiru a liar and ranting about how she’s the only reason anyone knows Mahiru’s art in the first place. It is legitimately hard to watch, and in the moment, it made quite the strong impression on me. (Especially when coupled with the absolutely diabolical editing decision to have that episode’s outro mostly be a montage of the two calling each other’s names.) With hindsight though, I actually think this is where Jellyfish starts to fall apart. Kano and Mahiru don’t really get many scenes together in the episodes after this, and those that do are brief and feel unsatisfying. Is that realistic? Sure, maybe, and if the series wanted to lean in to the emotional hurt there, and make it seem like these two would never be close again, that would also be a valid artistic decision. The problem is that it doesn’t really do either of these things, as we’ll circle back to.

Not every plot the show tries is derailed in this manner, of course. Kiui gets a great arc wherein they manage to overcome some of their severe social anxiety. The work with JELEE brings them out of their shell somewhat, but they really begin to undergo some proper character development during a small arc where they’re attempting to get a motorcycle license, staying at a driving school for a time, with Kano, in pursuit of that goal. There, they meet an older woman named Koharu [Seto Asami]. Koharu is an interesting, if minor figure in Jellyfish, an all-but-outright-stated-to-be-trans woman who’s an implied former yakuza and who hits on Kiui basically as soon as they show up. The two hit it off, and their budding romance is a very small but legitimately sweet part of the show, and the few conversations they have over the course of the series feel very lived-in, especially when they get into nerdy areas of discussion like denpa visual novels and the like. (Even this isn’t perfect and I might rewrite some of Koharu’s dialogue, to put it mildly, but you take what you can get with these things.)

Kiui even gets what is probably the last great moment in the series. In episode 11, they and Mahiru are at an arcade and run into some former classmates of theirs. Jellyfish takes a moment to get extremely real here, as the kids hate Kiui not just for how they’re generally “weird” but also for their apparent lack of conforming to the gender binary.

Kiui, in a minor moment of triumph, gathers the inner conviction to tell them off by tapping into her own VTuber persona, which, they seem to realize in doing so, is in some ways more “real” than their outward physical self. That kind of thing, with a constructed persona that feels more in tune with “who you really are” than your actual body does, is extremely common among a certain kind of internet-native queer person. I’m speaking from experience here, and I think this plot is probably the best single thing that Jellyfish pulls off. Making people feel seen is valuable.

Mahiru and Kano’s ongoing tension, meanwhile, goes largely unaddressed during all of this, and they appear to forgive each other in the final episode—after the big, emotional finale, which, with a few days of hindsight behind me, feels quite flat—based on….vibes, I suppose? They don’t really talk anything out! And I’m not the sort of person to demand lengthy on-screen Healthy Emotional Communication, but something a bit more substantial than the little we get here would be nice, and that really is my central problem with Jellyfish. It has all of these moments that are good to great, but they don’t cohere, because the show either can’t make them fit together in a way that feels holistic or it simply drops them entirely.

If I had to guess, what Jellyfish wants to do is use this act of simply stopping at a certain point as a statement unto itself. In the last moments of the show there are clearly still some unaddressed problems. Kano, for instance, obsesses over her performance in the finale being seen by over 50,000 people—that magic number her mom planted in her head as a kid—and the rest of JELEE are rightly weirded out by the whole thing. But we’re clearly also supposed to feel that this is essentially a happy ending for them, as the show’s last real scene is JELEE banding together to paint over the jellyfish mural—an old piece of Mahiru’s art—that inspired their endeavor to begin with. It’s beautifully drawn and composed, and it tries so hard to sell these big emotions, but it feels almost perfunctory, regardless. As though Jellyfish is doing this because it can’t stomach showing us an actual unhappy ending, or because it thinks we’d be angry if it did so.

Whether one wants to see Jellyfish as an anime that is sabotaged by this flaw or one that manages to work in spite of it is largely a matter of perspective. Can you ignore Yukine’s abuse going unaddressed? Can you ignore that the show never circles back around to Mero torpedo’ing the careers of the Rainbow Girls? Can you ignore the unshakeable feeling that this whole thing really needed another six episodes or so to really breathe? That it really clearly does not have the space to do everything it wants to do? All of that is going to depend on the person. For some, this is going to come off as extreme nitpicking and I will seem very shrill. I must again stress however that I’m fine with these things not being solved on-screen, I just want the show to follow up on them, any of them, in some form.

For me, the clearly stitched-together nature of the writing in the show’s latter half kills much of the emotional resonance I felt in its best moments. Some anime are camp enough, strange enough, or challenging enough to get away with ending on what’s essentially a shrug. If it clicked enough with you, you can say “well, the show is messy” and declare its flaws ignorable. Unfortunately, the emotional math involved here just doesn’t work for me. The fact that the Rainbow Girls are not characters in this narrative because we’re just supposed to write them off after their single appearance does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mero never even really directly talk, but that we’re clearly supposed to assume they’ve somehow reconciled does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mahiru are, in fact, entirely kept apart for most of the show’s final third does not work for me. The fact that Kano’s lack of forgiveness to her mother is signified by nothing more than playfully brushing her off in the show’s closing minutes after she sends a goddamn limo to Kano’s school does not work for me. None of this works for me! That’s really frustrating!

Let’s circle back to the term “messy”, in fact. “Messy” is often used, as a descriptor, to smooth over the rough edges of art we love. A way to excuse conflict and problematica because the art resonates hard enough with us that we have cause to explain its uncomfortable aspects away. You could call Jellyfish “messy,” for certain, and there are parts of it I’d apply that label to (Koharu and Kiui’s relationship, perhaps), but for the most part there’s not a lot of what I’d call messiness in Jellyfish. All of these aspects that don’t work are not messy, they’re just some shit that happens that the show gets in over its head in trying to address. This is why it feels unsatisfying on the whole despite a number of strong moments. The actual tone the show is going for gets lost somewhere in the shuffle.

The show attempts to do right by its queer audience in spite of all this; mostly in terms of Kiui’s subplot, but I think people have been a little unfair in labeling the show ‘queerbaity’ in the fairly subtle way it handles Mahiru and Kano’s relationship, as well. This, and the other more general ways the series fails to come together, creates a situation that practically begs for baseless, conspiratorial thinking. Did some suit decide the show was Too Gay, prompting a last-minute rewrite? Was there some kind of cut in episode number that impacted the narrative? Did network censors object? There’s no actual reason to believe these things, but they are the sort of theorizing that tends to pop up in the wake of an anime ending like this, because it’s an explanation. An explanation, no matter how convoluted, seems to make more sense than what appears to be the actual case; the show just faceplanted in its final stretch without a single specific cause. It happens. My personal theory is that primary scriptwriter Yaku Yuki, best known as the novelist behind Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki, had trouble adapting to the switch in format. There’s not really any more evidence for this than any of these other theories, but it would make sense, and would account for the show’s sometimes cramped and overstuffed writing. (In fact, I have somehow gone this entire review without mentioning the weird little side plot of Miiko [Uesaka Sumire], the 30-something idol that JELEE butt heads with a few times and eventually become friends with. The whole plot is actually pretty much fine, if not necessarily a highlight of the show. But a longer anime could have things like that without it feeling so incongruous with the rest of the series.)

I’ve spent a lot of time wracking my brain about what exactly my takeaway from Jellyfish has been without simply turning in basic qualitative assessments. It’s true that it’s probably always going to be considered in the broader “girl band anime” context, and that it isn’t the best series in that subgenre by any means. (I will also quickly make the point that, on the other hand, this is not a Metallic Rouge situation where hindsight makes it clear that the show never had any idea of what it was doing.) But putting it in those terms feels incredibly reductive! I’ve said a lot that’s negative about the show, but there is a lot to like as well! Visually, it’s pretty damn incredible! I’ve already mentioned its shift into a moving oil painting during one of Kano’s flashbacks, but it uses quite a few interesting tricks throughout, from video effects like a simulated VHS tape in the first episode, being drawn as though shot on a smartphone in the last, to rapid animation cuts to signify time passing quickly (often because Mei is enthusing over something), there’s a good amount to enjoy here in the visual dimension. The soundtrack is great, too! While I wasn’t enthused about JELEE’s music for the most part, the actual BGM is a weird, synth-heavy, analog-sounding thing that burbles and strains and hums expressively throughout essentially the whole show.

Generally speaking, the show is very stylish! The first episode in particular is a masterclass in visual storytelling! And even back on the writing end, the series’ portrayal of the suffocating smoke of having a controlling parent be absolutely furious with you is spot on! Kano pecking Mahiru on the cheek seriously does matter even if the followup isn’t as strong as we may have wanted it to be! Kiui’s complex gender identity is some of the best representation of its type I’ve ever seen in an anime! All of this is just as true as the show’s more frustrating aspects, and I think if the series develops a cult following in the years to come (and I would be unsurprised to see that happen) it will be off of these strengths. Those people will watch Jellyfish in a different way than I did. It’s true that nothing really escapes the context it’s created in, but we often only have a clear picture of that context in hindsight. Maybe, somewhere between all the aspects that frustrated me so much, is a better show that is only visible with some remove.

So that’s where we’re at. I wanted to like Jellyfish more than I did, and that’s admittedly an annoying position to be in. Because I simultaneously feel like I’m giving the show more of a pass than I should be and also being way too hard on it. But that’s the way things go sometimes! If any part of Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is truly encapsulated by the term ‘messy,’ it might be that very relationship that I, and many other viewers, have to the series in of itself. It’s obvious, but, sometimes art is not strictly good or bad! Sometimes it gets in your head in a way that causes you to spout a gushing torrent of thoughts that only barely cohere and sometimes outright contradict each other. I have said things of this nature many times on this blog, and I’ll probably say them many times more. Maybe, if all Jellyfish wanted to do was leave an impression—to shine a little, to borrow Mahiru’s own words—then my big judgy opinion about whether it’s peak or mid, man, matters less than the fact that it made me think this much about it at all. Jellyfish can’t swim, night or day. But sometimes it’s nice to just drift in the currents of the ocean and let them take you where they will; you can’t complain too much about choppy waters.

1: A kind of internet-based singer, originally associated with NicoNicoDouga, now common on Youtube as well. Perhaps the most famous utaite-turned-professional in contemporary J-pop is Ado, apparently a deliberate influence, in the case of this anime.

2: I’ve mostly spelled it “Kiwi” up until this point on this site, but “Kiui” with a U is apparently the official romanization. As for my use of they/them pronouns for the character throughout this piece, it’s clear to me that Kiui is some sort of genderqueer or nonconforming. Since it is impossible to ask a fictional character their preferred pronouns, and we’re unlikely to get official word on the subject for a variety of reasons, I am being as general as possible.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.

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“Goodbye, sekai!“

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Revolution Never Ended for CODE GEASS: ROZÉ OF THE RECAPTURE

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.

They fucking got me again.

Let me explain. Nearly 20 years ago, a little anime called Code Geass (subtitled Lelouch of The Rebellion) premiered, and it barged into the hearts and minds of myself and so many other impressionable young teens with reckless abandon. Short of perhaps Death Note, no anime was more synonymous with a certain kind of mid-aughts I’m 14 And This Is Deep chuuni shit. Quite unlike its former chief contender, Code Geass has remained an active franchise in the years since.1 I haven’t seen them myself, but the Akito the Exiled spinoff films have their following, and the series has kept chugging along with various ancillary media too, some available in English and some not. In 2019, the Lelouch of the Re;surrection film staked out an alternate continuity where Lelouch comes back to life. That movie was a bit of an up-and-down experience, and mostly succeeded off the strength of being a movie full of Lelouch doing Lelouch Shit, but its best moments were classic Code Geass camp and proved that the franchise still had some life left in it. Code Geass has been around, so the existence of Rozé of the Recapture, a new series of theatrical OVAs that are also being streamed week to week as a regular TV series (don’t ask me how this works, I don’t know), is not too surprising.

It’s also probably not too surprising to any longtime readers of this blog that I, the Magia Record defender, think that the first episode of what some would deride as a pointless spinoff project is actually really fucking good. In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever doubted the project. I am still the same person I was in 8th grade in one very important way; I love campy goofball shit, and Code Geass is and always has been some Grade-A campy goofball shit.

Rozé of The Recapture takes place many years after some version of the original series’ events—I’m not totally clear on how many, but it’s been long enough to let some additional light sci-fi elements seep into the setting—but rehashes the same fundamental premise. A resurgent “Neo-Britannian”2 empire has once again conquered and subjugated Japan (or at least Hokkaido), once again rebranding the region itself as Area 11 and its citizens as second-class Elevens. Once again, an underground cadre of resistance fighters struggle against their imperial overlords. There are some extra elements this time around (such as a gigantic energy barrier called the Situmpe Wall that surrounds Area 11), but the fundamental premise is the same. And once again, it’s up to a Britannian outsider to help the resistance win the day. More or less. We’ll come back to that part.

The main difference is the most obvious one. There’s no Lelouch, here. He’s gone. The emperor is dead.

In his place we have a mysterious pair of Britannian siblings named Rozé [Amasaki Kouhei] and Ash [Furukawa Makoto]. Ash has yet to make much of an impression on me, but his brother is a different story. Rozé is not Lelouch—nobody could be Lelouch, that’s an impossible pair of shoes to fill—but he’s a pretty fun protagonist so far, with a whimsical and playful personality that belies the brain of a serious tactician. Rozé, however, commands a battlefield that is significantly weathered from his predecessor’s day. In general, Rozé of the Recapture has a marginally more grim aesthetic sensibility than the original series. It’s as though the order was to make it just as camp but twice as dark. Everyone still dresses like a lunatic, and the show has that same love of cutting from battlefield to command room shenanigans to domestic scene and back at a wild pace that the original did, and it even also has its love of bold—perhaps reckless—incorporation of very bleak imagery into something that’s otherwise so fun, but it does feel a bit less bright, even literally, than the original Code Geass did. It’s as though Code Geass knows it is returning to a world that is, if you can believe it, even bleaker than the one it left in 2008. Having not seen them, I can’t comment on how directly this follows from the sensibilities of the Akito the Exiled side series, but I wouldn’t be shocked if those have been quietly building a bridge from the original series’ point of view to that of this anime.

As for the actual events of this episode, despite the slightly updated setting they’ll be very familiar to any returning Code Geass heads. We open with some exposition, and after the OP, a pretty grim scene of Britannian noble siblings—both of a class of knight called Einbergs, something that seems like it will be a recurring thing over the course of this show—Greede and Gran Kirkwayne [Nojima Hirofumi and Ono Yuuki, respectively] being absolutely horrible to a group of random Japanese citizens. This culminates with Gran, the more hotheaded of the two, shooting a man he’s holding hostage in the head. When his wife cries out in grief, Greede makes a token effort to perfunctorily apologize, only to then shoot her when she understandably spits on him. The scene ends with Greede ordering his men to unceremoniously massacre the rest of the gathered group. The message is pretty clear; the Kirkwaynes are bad people, power-drunk authoritarians and bigots with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Fair enough.

So of course, our protagonists are tasked by the fabulously-named Seven Shining Stars resistance group with taking them out. Their infiltration into the Britannian base, to the extent that it even counts as infiltration, is classic Code Geass. Ash’s knightmare frame emerges from a wrapped-up present box and Rozé spends much of the scene dressed like a clown; you can’t ask for much better than that. Rozé does eventually actually properly infiltrate the base, confronting Greede, the brains of the operation, directly.

The two have a very classically Geassian back and forth. The series’ famous chess motifs return here, as absolutely ridiculously goofball as they were in 2006. Rozé and Greede strategize while poking at some kind of holographic tabletop chess display. When the moment is right, Rozé orders his brother to go all out, and back in the actual battlefield we get some genuinely riveting mecha action, complete with Ash skewering Gran and his knightmare frame with a pair of its own swords after laying down some pretty fantastic shit-talk about how Gran’s a worthless coward.

The robot is pretty cool too. We don’t get a name for it here, but look at it!

Back in the base, we get a fantastic twist here as Rozé, with Greede at gunpoint, offers the Britannian noble a choice. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that he doesn’t give him a choice per se. Because Rozé doesn’t do anything per se. There is no Rozé.

Meet Sumeragi Sakuya [Ueda Reina], the actual protagonist of Rozé of the Recapture.

I am almost never at a loss for words when writing these columns. There’s a lot to say about even fairly uninteresting anime, and Rozé of the Recapture is anything but that so far. But seriously, what the hell does anyone want me to say? They made a character who looks like Lelouch a woman and had her crossdress for most of the first episode. I’m in love, sue me. I’ve seen the phrase “Lelouch of the Transition” drift around the Internet in regards to this twist and, I mean, what can I possibly say that’s better than that? (It does say a lot that this random tweet showcasing the scene immediately following this has done more marketing for Rozé of The Recapture than Disney+, who are distributing it in North America, have, but that is perhaps unsurprising, given their track record.) This scene is what made it truly obvious to me that the show is dedicated to recapturing that spirit of the original as much as possible, hopefully without too-directly rehashing many of its plot points. Rozé of The Recapture does basically nothing at all here to endear itself to any new audiences, and it definitely isn’t going to change the opinion of anyone in the “Code Geass sucks, actually” crowd, but I honestly think that is fine. Code Geass is so entirely itself that trying to “adapt to the times” would’ve been doomed to fail. Call this the rare Millennial nostalgia play that I’m fully onboard for.

In any case, Sakuya shows off her Geass. We don’t know how she got it or precisely how it works—my reverse-engineering attempt here is that it somehow forces the target to choose between two options if they hear her give a command—but she offers Greede the choice of saving a hundred times more Japanese people than he’s ordered dead or killing himself. Suffice to say, Mr. Kirkwayne does not survive to the end of the episode.

We close on Sakuya—back in-character as Rozé—talking to the Stars. She says that she and Ash knew from the jump that this entire mission was more of a test than anything else, and asks what the real objective they’re being hired for is. The answer? To liberate an Alcatraz-like offshore prison to free some of the Stars’ comrades. It just so happens that someone that Sakuya euphemistically calls a ‘friend’—someone named Sakura, who looks so similar to Sakuya that they could be mistaken for each other—is also being held there, under the pretense that she’s Sakuya. The amount of hilarious shenanigans this is setting up is truly dizzying to consider, but the main takeaway is one very important thing; if Code Geass isn’t back per se, that’s only because it never really left.

1: Technically, there actually have been a few short story collections and one-shots and things. But I think there’s a reason that there’s no Death Note spinoff airing right now. Lelouch would whip Light’s ass in any serious battle of wits, by the way. Just saying.

2: I will be using the series’ ridiculous alternate history terminology religiously while discussing it as it airs, thank 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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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 The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [6/24/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

The season is winding down, and the winds of the upcoming Summer season are already on the horizon (we’ll hopefully get to that tomorrow, if my writing schedule holds up). We’ll be kicking off with the three finales that aired over the last week, one of which only came out today. I realized after compiling this that in all three finale writeups, I quoted a character from the show in summarizing how I felt about the show itself. That was not intentional! But it’s kind of funny. I’ll also be blunt in saying I liked some of these more than others. Read on to learn why.

Anime

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night – Episode 12 (Finale)

I’ve compared Jellyfish to other anime a lot while writing these off-the-cuff posts, but to pull from an otherwise very different series, the ending here almost reminds me of that of Witch From Mercury? Decidedly pretty good, and definitely fine-tuned to make you feel happy that our main pair are back together, but with just enough that doesn’t quite add up that I feel remiss not to mention it. It’s now been a few days since I wrote the original version of this entry over on Tumblr, and it’s clear to me that most people did not like this ending. I mostly did! But I don’t think it redeems the series largely faceplanting in its second half, so I’m not sure how willing I am to contest the consensus. Personally I think this is a case where I like the characters more than the show they’re from.

To be clear, if the series’ representational efforts—more in the realm of Kiwi than the Mahiru / Yoru thing, which the show largely drops for its final stretch—outlive the actual text of the show itself, as may well happen, that’s not actually a bad thing. Most anime would be lucky to have that legacy.

I want to zero in on one moment during the episode, though. Kano during the concert, where we’re early in the episode and she’s clearly nervous. Flashbacks, intrusive-thoughts-as-voiceover. The literally-faceless masses. This is imagery we’ve seen associated with her before, as she’s clearly reliving her trauma from her days with the Sunflower Dolls.

We see her basically bomb; the backing track kicks in but she can’t sing, and suddenly the sound cuts out entirely, putting her in the bottom of the ocean. Mero, surprisingly, is the one who calls out to her to egg her on, although it’s Mahiru’s jellyfish that she looks at as Mahiru calls out to her as well. We get our big, swelling concert song, and then the moment is over. Jellyfish‘s actual narrative ends the second the music dies, for better and worse.

We get a mirror of the first episode as the two meet again for the first time in a while after Kano’s performance. Ultimately, the conclusion they come to is that they kept their promises to each other, so everything’s basically fine. This is clearly to some extent what the show wants us collectively to think, as well. Kano as the aimless singer who’s finally found something to sing for, Mahiru as the ever down-on-herself visual artist who’s found someone inspired by her paintings. Kano says she wants to be a reason for people to keep looking forward, an interesting thought. But I’m not sure how much I agree with the show’s assertion here. The two definitely seem like they’ll be fine in the long-term, but given that we aren’t going to get to see the long-term, that’s a bit of a bittersweet pill.

In the Sunflower Dolls / JELEE show’s credit roll, Kano is credited under her preferred name. Yukine, the closest thing Jellyfish has had to an antagonist, seems to mean this as—and certainly the show wants us to take it as—a gesture that despite her past treatment of her daughter, she respects her now. (An analogy is also drawn between the virtual audience the show draws and the 50,000 person capacity of the Tokyo Dome. Originally referred to several episodes ago, having one of her artists sing there was a long-term goal of Yukine’s. The rest of JELEE is a little weirded out by Kano bringing this up, and that much is obviously intentional.) Clearly, not all is forgiven, as Kano playfully spurns her mother in the finale’s closing minutes. Still, something about this feels…a little wishy-washy in a way I can’t entirely put my finger on. It’s a good ending, maybe the best ending this iteration of the series could’ve had, but not a great one. There’s a distinction there, and this is the sort of show that practically begs rumination on distinctions of that nature. Yukine herself says, and I quote directly, “The difference between buzz and backlash ultimately hinges on an idea being meaningful.” Are Jellyfish‘s ideas meaningful? I think that’s an open question. Despite everything—Kano’s trauma, the falling out with Mahiru and Mahiru’s own impostor syndrome, the show’s own strange pacing, Kiwi being bullied for their gender expression and for being “weird”, the discrimination Mei faced as a child, Mero detonating the careers of the Sunflower Dolls’ onetime rivals The Rainbow Girls—this ends as a feelgood story, despite its gestures otherwise. That may be a bit too neat for me, I’m not sure.

I hate to bring up That Other Music Anime Airing Right Now while writing about this one yet again, but the main distinction between the two, I’ve finally realized, is that Girls Band Cry‘s emotional material feels much more consistently raw. Jellyfish’s best episodes hit those nerves as well, but the show on the whole feels like it can’t quite thread the needle in the same way. The comparison is perhaps unflattering to both anime, but I can’t help myself here. Jellyfish clearly wants to have a complex, somewhat open-ended ending, but it also wants to leave us on a positive note, not unlike fellow polarizing aftermath anime Wonder Egg Priority. In that show’s case, I felt that it was doing enough both overall and with its ending in particular that I felt compelled to defend it. I can’t really do that, here. I’m not as disappointed as some have been, for sure, but if someone feels significantly more let down than I do, I can’t really blame them.

The series ends on a short run-through of denouement scenes, for the individual members of JELEE both apart and together as a group. Tellingly, it might be Kiwi’s that works the best. The relatively straightforward nature of their arc makes their development feel the most earned and the most logical. The whole thing with Koharu is, to say the least, odd, but even that fits in pretty well with their arc in coming to accept themself as a queer person in a world of queer people. At the same time—and I couldn’t quite pin this down the other day when I was first writing this—that same coherence just isn’t there for the other characters. Perhaps because Mei was never particularly well-developed to begin with, and Kano and Mahiru’s reunion feels contrived. I can forgive letting a kiss on the cheek hang for six episodes. Letting that falling-out hang for, what, 3? Is a bit harder to stomach though. The entire plot there takes away a bit from what the show is trying to do, and when what you’re trying to do is this delicate, “a bit” can feel like a lot.

The over-painting scenes in the last few minutes of the episode being drawn as though they’re shot through the phone is a cool touch, I like it. On the note of that scene, something that Jellyfish does manage to capture is the warm mundanities of friendship and life in the digital age, and I like Kano’s little speech to the others at the end here. That’s worth something, I think. Not many anime end with their casts literally waving goodbye to the camera.

Time, as my memories of the show crystalize and harden, will tell whether I end up truly feeling that those warm feelings are “enough” to rate Jellyfish particularly highly, both on its own terms and as compared to other anime that have come and gone (and will come and go) this year. But that’s also sort of a way of looking at art that is ruthless enough to not always be appropriate. So I’ll say it here if I never remember to again, the people who made this clearly cared about it a lot. There’s love in it, and love does matter. I can’t speak for anyone else, though. Some songs just don’t reach everybody.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 12 (Finale)

So ends one of the season’s true hidden gems. A series that combines a freewheeling and loosey-goosey sensibility to both its worldbuilding and characters with just enough emotional warmth to make it worth connecting to. Good chance this ends up being my favorite of the two finales I’m watching tonight!

An aside: the live action screen camera-point screen recording of some random-ass actual pachinko machine is really funny.

It’s either astounding luck or meticulous planning that a pretty funny parody of a band performance episode dropped here, in the gay girl band season. It’s obviously nowhere near the bowl-you-over powerchord of say Girls Band Cry‘s eleventh episode, but Grasshopper the Savior put in an okay (and more importantly, amusing) showing here. How does that whole plot conclude? With Noa getting arrested for insider trading. Roll credits!

Sara, meanwhile, exits her ongoing plot by graduating the school she was enrolled in just three months prior, universally acclaimed and beloved by her fellow students and their parents alike. She sings an idol song. It’s all pretty great.

All told the main takeaway here is that Salad Bowl is, true to its title, a gathering of truly eccentric souls and bizarre situations. Sousuke’s reaction to Olivia’s band getting broken up because of Noa’s antics? “I see this is all insane as usual.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. The series ends on what passes for a cliffhanger in a show that has never really been focused on its plot. I can’t imagine this getting a second season, but who knows? I’d be pleasantly surprised.

Train To The End of The World – Episode 12 (Finale)

Here, we have easily the best of this past week’s finales. A pitch-perfect ending to a show that was not always so effortless. An ending I appreciate a lot, the sort of thing that makes me view the whole series in a better light.

A brief summary of the literal events here; We get a final battle while the two trains drive through what I’m going to call Windows 95 screensavers. We get Shizuru and Youka making up for lost time. We get the world returning to something that’s not normalcy but at least approximates it. (Another theme running through this show is acceptance of inevitable change, naturally.) We get to see scumbag techbro villain Pontarou get his comeuppance. It’s all very nice.

I think with hindsight the show is perhaps best considered as a longform metaphor for anxiety, specifically that stemming from social conflict. You fuck up, and the fucking up is blown up so big in your mind that it becomes impossible to move past. As somebody who just spent a few hours agonizing over and then rescheduling a doctor’s appointment, and then agonizing over the fact that I did reschedule it, I get it. It happens. It usually doesn’t result in the world degrading into a surreal hell of the senses that threatens to drive all within it to death or madness, but it happens. If you want to stretch a little, you can rope in the show’s technological motifs—the externalization of the internal through the medium of the Internet, as turned outward by the 7G Phenomenon—into all this. You could argue that Shuumatsu Train advocates for resolving conflicts of the social media age by talking to each other and treating each other as humans. I’m not sure how intentional that read is, but if it is, it’s a fine thesis, and the series pulls it off pretty well.

Incidentally, anxiety like that, which can end up fracturing friend groups as it has in Shuumatsu Train, doesn’t usually involve one of the parties being a near-omnipotent goddess either. Nonetheless that is what Shizuru and co. have to deal with at this episode’s climax, and while the results are a little saccharine, I think this whole arrangement works better than not. The final argument (such that it is) between Shizuru and Yoka is just great all around, and ties up their interpersonal conflict perfectly.

Shuumatsu Train was hardly a perfect show (I ask readers to remember the run of relatively weak episodes at about the 2/3rds mark. We probably could’ve skipped the ecchi zombie plot) but it did what it wanted to do and it did it well. This is another one in the grand tradition of oddball fare like The Rolling Girls or even the Akiba’s Trip anime, and it’s a worthy addition to whatever you’d like to call that genre, regardless of any flaws. To quote Shizuru herself, it’s better to try and have regrets than to do nothing at all.

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 55

This episode is mostly just an excuse for a procession of several fun, short battles. I say “just”, but that’s hardly a bad thing, since at the end of the day that’s what this series is about.

The second is the best of these, with an impressive showing from Elite Four artiste Hassel and his Baxcalibur and Flapple. Roy and his partner, the Grass-type gym leader Brassius pull off a number of coordinated double moves. Our brief detour over into what Coral’s doing is also pretty fun, since “what she’s doing” is having her Glalie blow everybody up again.

The real treat seems like it will be next week, though, when Liko faces off against Rika. I will spare you all the gay rant, although I can’t promise I will do the same when next week rolls around.

Wonderful Precure – Episode 21

I must say, my main surprise in watching this episode was how much of it was an episode of a Class S yuri school comedy. Yuki transfers in to the gang’s school in this episode, and most of the episode, accordingly, focuses on that.

Her personality, or at least, the one she sort of grows out of here is—and I realize that what I’m about to say is very silly—almost a little Homura-esque? It’s something about her single-minded fixation on Mayu that makes me think that, I think. I assume she’ll continue to develop out of it as the show goes on. (Something Homura never had the chance to do given the way her show is structured but, well, they’re very different anime to say the very least. It’s a loose comparison at best, but let me have my fun here.)

We get a pretty melancholy little flashback here where we learn about Mayu drifting away from a friend at her previous school. The anecdote, I think more than anything before it, seems to position Mayu as neurodivergent, as what drives a wedge between Mayu and her former friend is simply Mayu’s tendency to become fixated on tasks, and, implicitly, her more general habit of keeping to herself. Yuki is the one who tells Komugi and Iroha (and, well, us) all this, and I don’t think it’s a reach to say she’s projecting her own hurt into the anecdote as well. Much of this episode’s focus is her learning to deal with her own reluctance to get close to people. That’s all a bit heavy for a kids’ show, but Precure being Precure, it handles it all with relative ease.

Of course, all that and the action part of the episode involves waking up a sleeping panda garugaru by using the fox fairy to transform Komugi into a giant tire. The animation goes all out for this, of course, and around here I started to wonder if this might honestly be the best Precure season, or at least a new personal favorite.

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 11

What would be a fairly nice transitory episode leading into the finale is once again held back by a lackluster visual presentation.

Honestly this one shoots past “workmanlike” into just generally pretty bad to look at all around, especially in its first half it’s just remarkably shoddy. (I can’t even meaningfully directly compare to the manga, as this is after the point where I stopped reading, but I almost guarantee you it looks better there, and anyone can read any of my Dungeon Meshi writeups to know I’m not normally a “haw haw manga better” person.)

If you can look past that—and the fairly gratuitous pool scene a bit after the halfway point—this is a decent bit of plotting. Rei and Oto possibly having a way back home is a decent final conflict. What I will say, the secret Rei is keeping where he plans to become the ticket is a compellingly dark twist. My main hope is just that things can get back in order visually by the time the anime ends next week. I’m also interested to see how the cat boss youkai factors in.

Girls Band Cry – Episode 12

A slower episode this week, but certainly an eventful one. TogeToge are officially signed! Rupa and Tomo are working their last day at their job! I am very happy for these people who don’t exist!

As one might predict, Nina seems almost as anxious about their current situation as she is happy. After all, Diamond Dust were still the main attraction at the concert TogeToge played at. And despite Nina claiming her band is better (she’s right) and that they completely rocked (she’s right about that, too), they aren’t the ones being talked about on socials. Rarely do the best artists get the most coverage, as Nina is learning.

The callbacks to the first episode are absolutely adorable, as is Tomo’s cute but muted reaction to the card and flowers Subaru buys her. The hotpot party scene is nice; a restrained sort of comfort and a chance to recuperate after the big, billowing emotions of last episode.

Their songwriting sessions are motivated by a desire not just to one-up Diamond Dust, but also, as you might recall, to get to the Budokan, a feat that would put them on par with many famous bands up to and including The Beatles, but most amusingly, Cheap Trick. These are subject to montage, the first in the series I think. We cap with a little scene of Momoka asleep on Nina’s shoulder, on the train home. It’s so cute, I wanted to cry.

The show’s final twist seems to be to make the whole Diamond Dust / TogeToge fight very literal. TogeToge are offered a co-bill, with composing the theme for a TV series on the line for the band that draws a bigger crowd. This is a stacked fight at best, and TogeToge have a lot to lose. Ultimately, the band put it to a vote, and, despite Nina’s misgivings (and being collectively unsure of what DiaDust’s actual goal was, here), they opt to decline. This leaves Nina in something of an emotional rut. Being a rockstar, she has learned, is not all about huge bursts of emotional catharsis. There’s a lot of boring bookkeeping and shady politicking, too. (I would refer her to the wisdom of KRS-One on this topic, myself.)

Momoka, however, knows that. There’s a running B-plot through this episode about a song she’s working on, first mentioned during the hotpot party. Throughout, she’s stuck on a specific part of it (we’re not shown what, specifically). Why exactly is left unstated, but it seems to be at least in part because, in her own way, Momoka wants to beat Diamond Dust, too. She’s just being more subtle about it.

Or at least, she thinks she is. Nina seems to pick up on this, and the rest of the band are convinced to accept DiaDust’s challenge after all. There’s fear in Momoka’s shadowed mood throughout the episode too. That much she says herself. She lost everything once before, and she’s afraid to lose it again.

The episode ends with an upturn of mood; Momoka admitting that she wants to win against Diamond Dust too, TogeToge’s sound engineer and manager telling them they really like the new song (which Momoka finally finishes, naturally), and all seems to be going well in the leadup to the finale.

And then, at the last possible second, we get this; the new song releases, Nina goes to check the metrics. 103 views. Ouch.

It is hard to tie genuine emotion to numbers floating up and down. This is a big mistake that frankly a lot of music anime make these days, but here, that 103 feels like a legit punch to the gut. We only have one episode left! What the hell is going to happen?! It’s hard to know, and there’s of course the knot of anxiety that GBC won’t “stick the landing” so to speak, but I have a lot of faith in the series. TogeToge will figure it out.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Ruin Explorers Fam & Ihrie

A fun, if not particularly challenging, fantasy action-comedy romp from the heyday of the 90s OVA boom.

On the one hand, there’s not a ton to say about this one; we’ve got a very basic fantasy premise here with our two lead protagonists—a pair of treasure hunters named Ihrie [Neya Michiko] and Fam [Shiina Hekiru]—who seek an ancient wish-granting treasure. (That’s “Fam” pronounced to rhyme with “fawn” by the way. Don’t ask her if she’s cheesin’, though.) This eventually spirals out into a quest to help the last prince of a destroyed kingdom reclaim his throne from a very classic wizardly overlord bad guy. It’s all solid stuff and the main strengths here are visual; the show’s choices of color and shadow are consistently fantastic and the animation is similarly excellent with a lot of standout moments both in more action-oriented scenes and in the more comedic ones that make use of a lot of good character acting. (This is most obvious with Fam, whose kitty tail gets to telegraph her mood sometimes. It’s a cute touch.)

On the writing side, while the plot is truly nothing special, the characters, broadly-written as they are, are solid and likeable. Aside from the two leads, my favorites ended up being Rasha [Matsumoto Rika], a snarky and full-of herself wizardess who starts out as an antagonist before she and her partner Migel [Yamadera Kouichi] join the main party to help them take down the bad guy, and surprisingly, the cowardly merchant Galuff [Ootsuka Chikao]. Usually such characters come off as vaguely uncomfortable, and he’s not entirely free of that, but he’s such a petty and ineffective scoundrel that it becomes kind of endearing.

All told, this is a pretty fun and accessible watch. I dock a few points for some of the thematic material in the fourth and final episode (I’ve never been a big fan of the whole ‘divine right of kings’ thing, even in inherited form as a stock genre plot in fantasy stuff like this.) But all around, it’s a good time, and there are way worse ways to burn two hours. This is a strain of fantasy anime that still exists albeit in somewhat reduced form, so it’s not like this stuff has really gone away, but obviously something like eg. Dungeon Meshi (or even like, I dunno, Helck) is a fair bit more sophisticated on the writing and thematic level, so the comparison isn’t direct. Either way, yeah, fun time. Enjoyed myself here.

That’s all for this week, anime fans. Consider tipping your girl if you liked any of the entries this week, every penny helps me cover basic life necessities like food and medicine. As for this week’s Bonus Thought, I wanted to give it to Train, since we won’t be seeing it in this column again. Take it away, Akira!

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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 The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [6/17/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello, anime fans!

I have a confession, there were supposed to be two articles today. This, and a longform comparison of Girls Band Cry and Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night called “The Girl Band Wars Are Almost Over – But Who’s Winning?” I couldn’t bring myself to do it! At this point, I like the former show more, and it just kind of felt rude beating on Jellyfish for “only” being very good as opposed to fantastic. (And I’m sure plenty of people would disagree with me there anyway.) Because of all that, you can guess what we’re starting with today.

Anime

Girls Band Cry – Episodes 10 & 11

Oh boy we have a lot to cover here. Suffice to say, I think Girls Band Cry has easily notched itself as my favorite anime of this season. Depending on how things go, it could take the annual crown, too.

First point of note; there’s a good old fashioned WcDonald’s in this episode, I was worried they’d gone extinct.

Second point of note; I like that the Rupa groupie scene is in 2D. Once again, flat animation is reserved for romanticized, idealized moments. Someone on tumblr pointed out that this seems to vaguely imply that Girls Band Cry‘s vision of what being a rocker girl “should be” includes being surrounded by other women. Who could argue with that?

Anyway! There are two main beats to this episode. Following the introduction of a barely-hiding-her-fangirlishness manager figure, our girls are semi-officially working with talent agency Golden Archer. Not long after, however, the episode takes a left turn into Nina’s family problems, where it stays for the rest of its duration. This starts with her mother and father showing up unannounced in the area. Given that the show is nearing its end, it makes sense that we’re finally bringing this all back.

We also get the barest outline of Rupa’s own backstory from her own mouth, a phone call that went unmade on the day of what she tersely refers to as ‘the accident’ has made her cognizant of how little time anyone really has in the world. She uses this to encourage Nina to try to reconcile with her family, although Momoka’s much blunter ‘encouragement’ of just flat-out banning her from the apartment is part of the equation too. Reluctantly, Nina ends up on a train back home.

This confrontation, primarily between Nina and her father, is not easy. An obvious reason for which is that both Nina and her father seem to be incredibly stubborn. Even when she’s literally back home, their conversation is had from opposite sides of a shoji door, with Nina herself radiating the same red rage particles that we’ve seen the show draw on her before as she struggles to hold back her anger (complete with a very loud heartbeat sound in the OST), and her father chain smoking the entire time.

Later, her father walks her to her old school, and Nina is clearly uncomfortable the entire time. (It may just be on my mind, since I’ve seen it recently, but the small city summer portrayed in the scenes where Nina’s father is taking her around remind me of AIR. There’s a similar tactility to the humid, baking concrete of the city.)

Perhaps surprisingly, Nina’s father seems to have gone through the effort of getting the school to issue an apology of some kind. This doesn’t sit right with Nina either, though, and the emphasis placed on her father labeling her a “victim” implies to me that the real issue here is that Nina’s father is unable to see her as a complete person. She can slot into one of several roles, perhaps; student, daughter, bullying victim, but he can’t handle it when she wants something he doesn’t have a good grasp on. This is in fact a recurring thing with Nina; Momoka gives her the same treatment in prior episodes with projecting her own past experiences onto Nina, and another character does the same in a flashback in episode 11. Nina seems to really not like being put in a box! Which is, honestly, completely fair!

Ironically, the inverse might be somewhat true as well, since Nina seems eager to put her father in a specific, adversarial role. Of course, Nina, being only a teenager, does not have nearly as much responsibility for her parent’s mental health as they do for hers.

Speaking of which, the climactic scene here where Nina is talking about how That One Song gave her the courage she needed to soldier on after dropping out of school is just genuinely really beautiful. Aside from its excellent visual presentation—how often do you get the “falling into the open blue sky” thing in the show itself?—the fact that she openly admits to have been contemplating suicide at one point, and how she contrasts with that how she feels now, as someone who loves herself and is ok with who she is…. It’s odd to put it this way, but I honestly feel, I suppose, proud of her?

If you’re cynical, you can object that Nina’s reconciliation with her father is too clean and too soon. I would counter that the two of them still obviously have a fairly complicated relationship by the end of this episode, and that it is rare for anyone to truly ever square everything away with their parents. I don’t think the show portrays Nina as having done that, and I think that remaining emotional debris will continue to be important as the series enters its final stretch.

Which brings us to episode 11. Easily the highlight of the show, and maybe the best single episode of any anime this year so far.

The scheduling of the concert is switched around, which gives TogeToge a leg up to hopefully make an even bigger first impression at their first festival. Things are going well for them for once! It’s really nice to see!

In the leadup to the festival, with Nina and Momoka actually doing pretty much fine for once, the show refocuses on its other three characters for a little while, spotlighting Subaru and how she’s still hiding her involvement with the band from her overbearing grandmother, and then moving over to Tomo and Rupa, whose relationship—played to a tasteful tee, neither over- or under-explained—provides a source of strength for the both of them in the face of the loss of their respective families. Physically in Rupa’s case, emotionally in Tomo’s. Subaru seemingly resolves things with her grandma later in the episode, but Tomo and Rupa’s issues aren’t so easily packed away. I wouldn’t be surprised if the show touches on them one more time before it ends.

Also, hey, Mine’s back! That’s cool as well. In general the atmosphere of the pre-show buildup reminds me a bit of the pre-concert scenes from Oshi no Ko, although in that show there’s a different and more cynical context at play to the upbeat, nervy anticipation on display here.

Also returning here? The punk girl from episode one. (Kyouko, apparently.) It feels telling that even she’s a fan of TogeToge now.

Momoka taking them all to the big main stage to see Diamond Dust play before their own show is gutsy. And at that, we get our rewind all the way back to Nina’s confrontation with DD’s current lead singer when they were both students. And, as has been previously implied a few times, friends! We still don’t precisely know what their falling out was about, as Pink’s remark to Nina where she tells her to stop “playing the tragic heroine” are awfully vague. Regardless, DD’s performance itself is pretty good, although one gets the sense they’re sort of being set up to fail here from a meta perspective. Their little show of rivalry here is admirable, but they aren’t the band we’ve been following this entire time. (And while they sound fine, if we’re being honest, they’d be rinsed not just by TogeToge but by most protagonist girl bands from these sorts of anime. Then again, maybe me thinking all this is the intended reaction, and we’re supposed to be feeling some amount of fannish partisanship.)

Rupa’s just here for the drama as usual, what a queen.

During the sound check Subaru plays a pretty nice little breakbeat, and Rupa gets to show off her bass licks.

TogeToge also unveil their new looks here and all of them look genuinely fucking fantastic. (I’d recommend this little Twitter thread on possible references and symbolism in the outfits.) Rupa’s weird military uniform thing with the goggles, Subaru’s pinstriped suit(!), Nina’s dyed hair and badass long shirt, Tomo’s almost pixelated-looking hair bow accessory, Momoka’s arm bands. Honestly just a killer visual presentation both in- and out-of-universe.

When the time comes to take the stage, they absolutely kill it. At the end of the day, this is an anime, so of course, Girls Band Cry deploys absolutely every single visual trick it can think of to really sell the performance that serves as the climax of this episode.

“Void & Catharsis”, the song they play, is a, if you’ll pardon the pun, rock solid alternative number with a surprisingly heavy low-end that serves as a bed for Nina’s incisive, comet-like vocals. (Also it has what I’m pretty sure is a breakdown? I’m not a heavy metal expert, but what the fuck.) The show spins out into full music video mode here, taking a page from the otherwise very different Love Live series, as the stage blends into a blurry stitching-together of crystalized memory and motive; defiance, lies, love, loss. It is perhaps the single most arresting moment in a music anime to air this year. I ended up replaying the entire thing from the start of the song onward, twice. I can’t help myself; TogeToge have serious charisma. Every single one of them sheds tears during their part of the music video, making this episode something of a sideways title-drop, as well.

The single most compelling visual element, though, has nothing to do with all the crazy camera tricks, overlays, flashbacks, or anything else like that. It’s Nina herself. In what I can only describe as an absolute triumph of CGI in anime as a form, this little seventeen year old pipsqueak comes off as a complete and total superstar, and, even more than that, an absolutely fatal frontman. She stomps angrily from one end of the stage to the other with her long shirt drooping and billowing dramatically, she grips her head in anger as she sings like the words are being physically ripped out of her throat, she headbangs, she pumps her fist and spins around to egg her own band on, she glares at the audience like she’s trying to kill them—maybe Diamond Dust specifically, who are also watching—with her mind, she does weird shit with her hands and gestures around like a rapper. It’s mesmerizing.

Clearly, all this is the result of a ton of love not just for animation as a form of art but for concerts as a form of performance. The entire thing is just end to end nuts, and this moment, regardless of what came before it or comes after it, completely validates Girls Band Cry as an artistic endeavor. If the entire rest of the show were to somehow go missing, removed from reality with a surgeon’s knife, this performance alone would make the undeniable case that it deserved to exist.

Nina isn’t even my favorite character in this show. But good god she’s great here. I’m just honestly stunned.

As for GBC itself, there is only one real problem; there are still two episodes of this anime left. It’s possible I’m just sitting in a sort of concertgoers’ afterglow at the moment, but I kind of can’t imagine what else the show could really do from here. How do you top that?

Nonetheless, Girls Band Cry wants to try, and that ambition is admirable.

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episode 10

Once again mostly rambling stream of consciousness, because talking about this show coherently is kind of hard. It seems like there’s maybe been another (brief) timeskip?

Kano’s put the group on ice after her fight with Mahiru, citing her reasons for singing as trivial and expressing a fear of singing in the meantime. The show here makes the odd decision to focus an episode primarily on Mei, although we’re drawing a link to the current Sunflower Dolls center, Mero, I think?

There is something to be said both about this show’s weird fixation on noses, and how Mei is somehow the gayest person in this show that includes a possible actual couple.

“The Influencer” is the idol from a few episodes back, now going by Nom-Nom Baba. Godspeed.

I must give the show credit for its horror-inflected visuals when Mei decides to activate her stalker powers. Also worth noting is how hard Mei seems to be infatuated with Mero despite her ulterior motives and despite claiming to not even be a fan of Mero’s in the first place.

The depiction of Mero has a fairly shallow person is interesting, someone who only sings because she wants to be famous and be adored. Mero makes the claim—probably not entirely wrong—that Kano herself mostly only sings nowadays to try and get her own mother to notice her. Of course, Mero herself doesn’t seem that happy with her own situation, so perhaps she’s not the best source.

Kano being once again subject to the gossip of classmates. Not great all around for her, I’d imagine. Although, the fans she overhears talking near the jellyfish mural does do something to improve her morale. (And honestly, the two who talk about wanting to respect JELEE’s privacy remind me of a hell of a lot of conversations I had on the ZUTOMAYO Discord back when they were first blowing up.)

Nonetheless, Kano draws a not entirely false but certainly not entirely true equivalence between her own behavior and her mother’s pattern of predatory behavior.

There is something genuinely, deeply sad about the scenario of exactly half of JELEE putting on a livestream to announce their hiatus. Mei’s absolutely heart-rent, ridiculously screechy and off-key singing is a very literal cry for help. It sounds TERRIBLE, and for a show centered on music to play something so deliberately unmusical as an important plot point is….bold, to say the least, to say nothing of her rambling rant immediately afterward.

By the end of the episode, it seems to tentatively be the case that JELEE will get back together. But is it really going to be that simple? Time will tell.

Also hey! This show deserves credit for managing to be visually inventive enough to meaningfully compete with Girls Band Cry, even at this relatively late point.

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episode 11

So we’re back in The Negging Office again as of the start of this episode. This happening while the rest of JELEE are having a big viral moment is an interesting juxtaposition. Of course, they’re not all doing great either given that Kiwi’s cover has been blown at the same time. So really it’s 50/50 on the main cast doing OK right now.

Once again a case of Yukine using her perceptiveness to just basically gut someone emotionally for her own ends. (Honestly, I think if I can pin a major difference between this show and Girls Band Cry it’s that this series has something akin to an actual villain.)

With Kano and Mei’s conversation we return to a theme of passion and intention over technical precision that I think this show is fairly good at elaborating upon. This takes the form of rewriting the lyrics for JELEE’s upcoming single here but the series has gone back to it several times.

Back on Mahiru’s end of the story, she’s handed an extensive correction sheet that essentially swaps all of the art she’s contributing to the Sundolls’ show out for different work entirely. Yukine frames this as a compromise but it seems fairly obvious to me that she never actually intended to use Mahiru’s art in the first place and this entire thing has just been a ploy to hurt Kano.

Kiwi is handling the public rejection that comes with knowing her superhero persona was fake very badly, we see her combing through her comment sections and deleting anything negative and the like. She doesn’t drop the bluster for Mahiru, either, and in fact compares herself to “some punk band” in how she intends to tell anyone who tries to bother her in person to go shove it. (Wrong show, darlin’.)

There’s a recurring thing here about the characters either not liking themselves or being so unsure of themselves that they don’t even know if they like themselves or not. This is mostly framed in reference to artistic pursuits, but it seems to be more general than that, which ties into the episode’s episode’s climactic scene.

Visiting an arcade that was an old haunt of theirs as kids, Mahiru and Kiwi run into some former friends, who proceed to badmouth Kiwi in front of Mahiru while Kiwi slumps toward them unsteadily. When they notice her, they rake her over the coals for lying about her past and for being immature. Some of their taunts are outright transphobic in a way that feels very real.

Kiwi, gathering an inner conviction that seems to surprise even themselves, rants at them, telling them off, screaming at the top of her lungs and making a huge scene. Kiwi seems to say outright that they’re some form of genderqueer if not precisely in those terms exactly. It’s a brave, raw moment from an anime that’s been full of those.

We don’t see their tormentors’ reaction, as the show just cuts to Mahiru and Kiwi riding a train back home.

Mahiru stands up to Yukine, too, when they have their next meeting. The episode again ends on a cliffhanger when Mahiru tries to negotiate JELEE performing at the concert as well.

It feels fair to say that Jellyfish is trying its absolute damnedest to sell all of this. I want it to work, especially in Kiwi’s case since I think the show is fairly unsubtle about portraying them as some sort of genderqueer. Unfortunately though, on a personal level, I still think that while Jellyfish has a lot of strong moments, and the show’s core thesis of being true to yourself is solid, I’ve found it kind of hard to reckon those moments together in my head. It’s still definitely quite a good show, but something is missing in a way it wouldn’t be in a story that had a slightly cleaner, more ironed-out plot.

Of course, a few weeks ago I said such a version of Jellyfish would arguably be less special, and part of me still thinks that, but I can’t help but shake the feeling that this is one of those anime that just doesn’t have enough time and space to do everything it wants to do, which is a shame. (I have seen speculation that the series was cut down from 20 to 12 episodes at some point during the writing process. If that’s actually true, it explains a lot.)

Still, we have the finale next week. Who knows, I want to be proven wrong.

The Grimm Variations – Episode 2

The second episode of CLAMP‘s loosely fairytale-inspired anthology is in fact a pretty straightforward karmic retribution story. Honestly, I’m a bit mixed on this one, although my opinion has improved a bit since I first watched it a few days ago. It’s pretty lurid and, even considering the end of the ‘tale’ told here, it’s not exactly a great feeling to be following a serial rapist and killer as our protagonist for most of the story. Still, his comeuppance is pretty satisfying even if his executor doesn’t necessarily seem like a much better person. (If she is, it’s only by degrees.) It also has astoundingly little to do with the story it’s ostensibly based on, which does not sway my opinion of it strongly one way or the other, but may put off some.

The visuals in this episode are pretty interesting too. This story takes place in a future that’s consistently half-submerged in a virtual reality, making determining what’s “real” or not something of a challenge, and giving the whole thing an airbrushed CGI finish. (And also some strong character designs, especially for Scarlet who looks a bit like if Lelouch Lamperouge had a twin sister who spent most of her time in a fire-red bunny ear hoodie.) This is in fact the ostensible motivator for our protagonist, as vile as he is. There may be some seed of commentary in here about the constant thirst for “grounded”, “realistic” stories is at times little more than an excuse to rubberneck at horrible tragedies, but even as I make this connection, I’m cognizant it’s a bit of a reach.

All told I think the main goal here was just to tell a straightforward tale of comeuppance, and it’s a decent one of those, if definitely not one for the squeamish.

Mysterious Disappearances – 10

Yorumun’s gone full Bonzi Boddy. What will our heroes do?

I love Nodoka’s voice actor just absolutely dying in the booth to portray the character having a breakdown. Pretty good!

Yorumun being a version of a garei rather than a tsukumogami is another example of the show switching from one apparent type of supernatural being to another.

I like Mysterious Disappearances‘ fascinating analogy between an idol and their audience and a divinity and their congregation. It’s hardly the first time anyone’s made the observation, but this is one of the more literal takes on it I’ve seen, and I think consequently this is one of the anime’s better episodes.

I like Yorumun’s departure, on the whole. It’s a pretty good sequence and gently nudges the episode into tragic yuri-esque territory. There is the obvious question of whether Yorumun’s death allowing her former host to walk again is ableist or not, I’m inclined to unfortunately kind of think so, but that’s a problem inherited from the manga. Then again, so are most of this episode’s strengths, so maybe it all comes out in the wash? I’m not sure.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 24

Fantastic end to a fantastic first season. I honestly don’t think you could ask for much more.

The first half of the episode sees us resolve the changeling plot from last week. More than anything, I want to highlight the really excellent animation here. They went all-out, knowing it would be the last episode for a while, and it really shows. Half-foot!Marcille in particular is given an absolutely cartoony treatment that is both adorable and very funny. Love it.

The more serious second half is what I think people will remember long-term, though, and I think that’s about right. What sticks out to me about the Dungeon Meshi anime as we await the gap between seasons is that it has a very good understanding of its source material, a very good command on what to emphasize, what it can and can’t do, and how to portray all of that in a way that feels complimentary to the manga as opposed to feeling as though it’s trying to replace it. All that to say; the trolley ride sequence is the exact right split of moody and comedic. The way the conversational ball drops when Laios reveals his biggest anxiety about Senshi’s plan is how just the five of them could possibly eat a whole dragon? Brilliant.

Also, Falin, despite only technically being in this episode for a small bit near the very end in person, is great throughout here. She remains my favorite character and I’m in absolute love with how much affection the animators and director clearly have for her.

All told, I cannot wait for season two.

And that’s all for this week! Normally I’d here include a fun little Bonus Thought, but I actually have something more serious to talk about, here. My housemates and I have been having some financial difficulties at home, and to make a long story short we need about $120 USD to fix things. If you enjoyed the previous article, or for that matter anything I’ve written that you’ve read recently, I would be deeply, earnestly thankful if you could consider contributing to my Ko-Fi. If you’ve been reading this site for a long time, you’re probably aware of how generally reluctant I am to ask for help in the main body of an article itself, so that should give you some idea of how serious things have gotten. Hopefully everything will be fine!

EDIT: We’ve actually already hit our goal! I’m so impressed that I’ve edited in a post-facto Bonus Tomo Screenshot below, because she’s my favorite and I think everyone should look at her. Look at how devilish she looks behind that keyboard! What a scamp.

And on that note, I’ll see you next week, anime fans. Please feel free to leave a comment to tell me what YOU thought of this week’s shows!

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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 Uncategorized

Weekly Orbit Archive

THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Here you’ll find an archive of every series I’ve written about in the Weekly Orbit. These are listed alphabetically—by the English title if available, by the most common Romanization if not—with each episode number linking to the appropriate Weekly Orbit column or other relevant article.

Anime

  • Air –
    • episodes 1-8 writeup
    • Review
  • Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian –
    • episode writeups: 1 First Impressions, 2
  • Asura Cryin’ –
  • Brave Bang Bravern
  • Bucchigiri?! –
  • Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture –
    • episode writeups: 1 First Impressions, 2, 3,
  • Delicious in Dungeon –
  • Gabriel DropOut
    • episode writeups: 1-7
  • Girls Band Cry
  • Grimm Variations, The
    • episode writeups: 1, 2
  • Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
    • episode writeups: 1, 2, 4, 5
  • Himitsu no AiPri
    • episode writeups: 1, 6,
  • Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night
  • Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! –
    • First Impressions 1, 2
  • Metallic Rouge
  • My Deer Friend Nokotan
    • episode writeups: First Impressions 1, 2
  • Mysterious Disappearances
    • episode writeups: First Impressions 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12
  • Oshi no Ko, Season 2
    • episode writeups: 1, 2,
  • Pokémon Horizons
  • Quality Assurance in Another World
    • episode writeups: First Impressions 1, 2
  • Salad Bowl of Eccentrics, A
  • Sengoku Youko
  • Train to The End of The World
  • The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic
    • Shambolic Anime Podcast
    • Episode 13 writeup
  • Unnamed Memories
    • episode writeup: 1 & 2,
  • Wistoria
    • episode writeup: 1, 2,
  • Wonderful Precure

Manga

  • Deep Raputa – 2, 3 & 4,
  • Dai Kyoujin – Oneshot
  • Flan Wants To Die (Touhou Doujin) – Oneshot
  • Magical Girl Tsubame: I Will (Not) Save The World! – 20-23
  • Psych House – 1
  • A Story About A Hallucinatory Girl – Oneshot
  • Witch Watch – 148-159
Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [6/10/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

The season is starting to wind down, and that shows in some of these episodes. Our first two anime this week are setting up for their big finales.

Anime – Seasonal

Train to The End of The World – Episode 11

As Shuumatsu Train enters its final stretch, we kick off one of the series’ denser episodes to date with our heroines arriving, at last, at their destination of Ikebukuro.

They find Youka in short order, but things aren’t simple enough that just reuniting the separated friends is enough. It’s clear that Youka doesn’t remember them—we don’t yet know why, but Reimi openly speculates that ‘wibble-wobble surgery’ of the same type Zenjirou was subjected to might be to blame—and their attempts to remind her who they are fail. Her reactions are confused and interlaced with her 7G powers, and any time the girls try to break through to her, it clearly destabilizes her already fragile mental state, causing the environment around her to temporarily devolve into an acid trip of digital video flickering and color-burst effects. The girls are chased away by Pontarou’s personal guards, the masked Ikebukuro police force.

Retreating to the train, they receive a phone call—via a phone fashioned from bitter melon, of course, because why not?—from Makoto and Zenjirou. Their conversation here basically confirms what we already knew; if they can nab the 7G button and just turn the network back off, the whole world will snap back to normalcy. (Allegedly, at least.) They’re not alone, though, as an unexpected ally turns up in the form of Mito and her zombie horde from a few episodes back. Her zombies, as it turns out, can sense the presence of the 7G button.

Call me stupid, but the show calls attention to a few parallels I hadn’t noticed up to this point. For one, Shizuru and Pontarou are, in a very broad sense, a bit similar, in that both are actively trying to avoid accountability for their actions. (They’re also very different in a number of ways, which I expect the show to draw attention to in its finale.) Also, the zombies, with their longing for the old world back when times were simpler—and indeed their distraction by simple pleasures like cheap ecchi—are supposed to be, you know, all of us, the people watching the show.

I honestly think that this sort of straightforward lock-and-key symbolism doesn’t really suit Shuumatsu Train particularly well. (And hey, what are you trying to say about your audience, here?) But then again, it took me 10 1/2 episodes to connect two dots with a line, so who am I to talk?

In any case, the episode ends with two things. One; a shockingly well animated and choreographed fight sequence between Pochi (as in, Youka’s odd butler / handler. We still don’t know what his deal is). And two; Akira and Mito slamming the 7G button to turn it off. Surprise! It doesn’t actually work, and in the episode’s closing moments, we get the latest in a long line of incredible what-the-fuck moments from Shuumatsu Train, when our heroines’ final obstacle comes rolling out of a high-rise on a track being constructed as it goes by long, gooey arms made of some kind of yellow substance; a second train, with Youka and Pontarou on it, headed off to parts unknown.

Shuumatsu Train has hardly been a perfect anime, but I’ve immensely enjoyed the ride just for how utterly bizarre it’s been. It’s hard to say what the finale will look like, but I’m interested to find out, and in the end, being compellingly weird from start to finish is all I really wanted out of this show to begin with.

Dungeon Meshi – Episode 23

Senshi’s backstory is another area where the addition of color, sound, and motion to the material gives it a slightly different texture than it had in manga form.

In the manga, this backstory felt like a fairly lengthy aside, steeped in deep shadows to a degree that was nearly gothic. Here, rendered in full color—earthy browns, iron greys, bloody reds—it feels a lot more like what it actually is, a traumatic memory. Bunched up in a relatively brief burst like this, but punctuated with a monstrous illustration of the griffin that hounded the dwarves who were taking care of Senshi, and the eventual screams of Null (the dwarf who Gilin, Senshi’s advocate throughout his backstory, butts heads with, and who Senshi believes Gilin may have in fact killed) renders the entire thing violent and scary. You can really feel how this would shape someone to their core.

The backflips the narrative goes through to eventually prove to Senshi that no, it was in fact not another dwarf that Gilin fed to him when he was young, have always been a bit convoluted for my taste, but they go down easier here. Especially when the payoff is Senshi having a big, tearful, emotional moment, always a nice thing to see.

The tail end of the episode is a bit less serious, mostly focusing on the ramifications of the circle of changeling mushrooms our heroes accidentally step into, swapping their species around at random. (Laios becomes a dwarf, Chilchuck a tall-man, Senshi an elf, Marcille a downright adorable half-foot, and Izutsumi a kobold.) It’s all a fairly good gag, although a bit light for Dungeon Meshi, until it ends up having very real consequences when the party run into a troop of gargoyles. I will say, there’s probably something not-entirely-flattering to be said about the show’s refusal to treat kobolds (dog-like, and thus the least human-looking humanoid species) with any dignity, even if the “go get it, boy” ball-toss gag that Izutsumi is subjected to here is admittedly a bit funny.

The episode ends in true Dungeon Meshi fashion; a brief meditation on the universality of dumplings. The series ends this week, and I’m going to miss it.

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 9

This episode didn’t leave a massive impression on me overall. The core conceit, that of a VTuber being a sort-of tsukumogami due to how rapidly digital data is deleted and discarded compared to physical objects, is pretty cool, as is the VTuber in question being a pastiche of a couple different popular, actual talents. For whatever reason though, the main thing that stuck with me in this episode was the goofy, animated dance number at its end, which is wholly disconnected from the rest of the episode’s story and is mainly about a catgirl who we won’t properly meet for a little bit, yet. Odd! Compelling, but odd!

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 53

Hatenna episode 😊

Our Heroes meeting a trio of people who look vaguely similar to themselves and even seem to be arranged in a similar trio is really funny, to start off with. The main meat of the episode, where they encounter the ghost alluded to last time and learn that it’s an Annihilape, is pretty great all throughout. The animation team really goes through some effort here to convey Annihilape as a menacing, almost otherworldly force of nature. Conversely, it’s pretty cool how our protagonists work together to stop it in their initial encounter, as it shows off a pronounced coordination, which we haven’t gotten from them super often before.

The horde of angry Mankey is honestly a pretty credible threat. Have you ever seen videos of angry monkeys? They’re terrifying. There are a lot of really impressive cuts here, the majority of which are apportioned to Annihiliape but the main trio’s Pokemon get some as well.

Given Hatenna’s prominence throughout the episode, the obvious tack to take is to have it evolve (especially given that Roy got his Kilowattrel last week, and that Hattrem learns the Dark-type Brutal Swing on evolution) but instead, at least initially, it uses its brains to figure out the source of the Mankey troop’s frustration and the remainder of the episode, complete with an insert song, is about helping the troop recover their food store, emphasizing once again Horizons‘ knack for centering episodes around unconventional problem-solving.

That said, the show isn’t enough of a tease to raise the possibility of a Pokémon evolving without actually following through with it. A stray rockslide causes the Mankey troop to start fighting amongst themselves, and some of the Primeape troop leaders even evolve into more Annihiliapes. Short of any other way to keep the peace, Hatenna promptly evolves into Hattrem, beats all of the squabbling monkeys up, and then heals them while they’re knocked out. It’s a genuinely delightful sequence and a lovely capper to a very good episode overall.

Wonderful Precure – Episode 19

We pick up from last week’s Hamster Garugaru two-parter for a just really, really good episode about Mayu, her fears, and her relationship with Yuki.

We kick off with a bunch of cutely-illustrated Japanese turns of phrase, most of which were new to me, and all of which are animal based. This has minimal relevance to the rest of the episode, but I mention it because it’s cute.

We also meet the evil general for only the second time, though once again he simply encourages the garugaru to Be Angry while giving it some new powers, advice it has no problem taking. The animators deserve some credit here for making a goddamn hamster seem like a credible threat (and for making Yuki seem genuinely threatening in turn when she trash talks it a bit later in the episode), what a feat.

Given that this episode is called “The Birth of Cure Lilian”, it’s no surprise that Mayu’s Cure alter ego debuts here, but we actually get an explanation of that name in the episode itself. Mayu’s mother mentions a lily-yarn that Mayu made for her when she was young as an example of Mayu imparting positive emotions and experiences to other people. Given some flashbacks early in the episode and, really, her entire previous existence in this series, it seems like this is a hard thing for Mayu to believe. She’s honestly so scared of everything that it makes her come off as having an actual anxiety disorder of some kind. Same, girl!

This all makes it that much worse when the garugaru, using its newly-granted ability to shrink Komugi, Iroha, and Yuki to the point that they’re too tiny to be a threat. This leaves Mayu alone against the garugaru when she comes across Yuki.

Standing her ground even in this frankly pretty scary situation—because she’s even more scared of losing Yuki than she is of the garugaru—allows Mayu, through the magic of the Mirror Stone, to become a Precure herself, and with that, our core team of four is complete.

I still like Yuki just a bit better as a character (I have a weakness for bitchy catgirls from this franchise, I suppose), but Mayu’s transformation into Cure Lilian might actually be even more drastic than Yuki’s into Cure Nyammy. It is relatively rare that a magical girl transformation feels so truly transformative. As much as I love them, one gets the sense that Komugi, Iroha, and Yuki are basically the same people as Cure Wonderful, Cure Friendy, and Cure Nyammy. This isn’t really the case with Mayu. With the Mirror Stone’s power, Lilian becomes everything she couldn’t be without it. Graceful, strong, courageous, a protector. It’s fantastic, and her voice actress Ueda Reina absolutely pours her whole heart into her performance in this episode to help sell it.

After the garugaru is defeated and turned back into a hamster fairy, Mayu and Yuki reconcile in a genuinely really sweet moment of teary-eyed reaffirmation. They want to stay together, so they will, no more to it than that.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Rozen Maiden – Episodes 5-12

Pretty good all around! I don’t have a ton to say about Rozen Maiden, but as an old-school action series with a somewhat shoujo-y bent I think it’s quite a nice ride overall, and I loved all of the characters, especially Suigintou whose death(?) in the final episode absolutely ripped my heart out. Poor girl thinks of herself as incomplete and takes it out on everyone else. Which of course, is a reflection of how Jun, the main protagonist, does the same in an admittedly much less violent way. (Side note here: Suigintou x Shinku is some deliciously classic toxic yuri. Waiter send me more, please and thank you.)

Manga

Witch Watch – Chapters 148-159

I’m not sure what it says about me that, while there are other manga in the publication that are more meaningful to me, Witch Watch is consistently the thing I have the most fun reading in Jump these days.

I think it’s the manga’s combination of a lean but engaging storyline with an absolute ton of off-the-wall goofball shit. I can sense that we’re getting close to the end of this “aged-down Nico” arc, and while it’s been a return to the manga’s earlier, decidedly comedic days, I am glad that a return back to the whole Witches vs. Warlocks plot that continues to tick along in the background is on the horizon. I like the new character introduced in yesterday’s chapter, too. The idea of an apparently ‘chuuni’ adult who just Actually Is involved with a bunch of supernatural stuff but is really bad at hiding it is pretty fun.

On a note less immediately related to the current chapter, Ban is such a fun addition to the cast, I absolutely love her. Rabuka seems like she’s going to be part of the school group in upcoming chapters too, which is also exciting since she’s one of my favorite supporting characters. All around, just a really fun and readable manga that I’d recommend to just about anyone.

And that’s all for this week. While I have your attention, I’m going to go ahead and recommend Yume Nikki fan game / MMO (!) Collective Unconscious, a free exploration game about wandering around and gawking at cool scenery. I may write about it at some point, but if not, consider this an endorsement.

As for this week’s Bonus Thought, you know I have to go with this.

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Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [6/3/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello, anime fans! Over the last week, things have really been heating up in certain corners. I won’t belabor the point, every episode covered below is, at bare minimum, compelling, and some are absolutely arresting. Let’s get into things!

Anime – Seasonal

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 8

The anime continues its relative strong streak here, with an episode that expands a part of the story that was only a chapter or two in the manga and gives it full focus.

Here, we focus on a young Sumireko’s adventure to a mysterious bookstore and how said encounter helped her overcome her anxiety. There’s a real nostalgic warmth to both the bookstore itself—I spent a lot of time in book shops as a kid, I get it—and its actual depiction, which thankfully ditches the dripping, cloying sepia of previous flashbacks for an extended full-color reminiscence, lightly brought down into the realm of earth tones, to quite literally paint a picture of what going to this place felt like. Gentle, comforting, mysterious, childhood-defining, it’s all things that this kind of flashback could be, and my only real point of contention here is that more of the show hasn’t tried this hard to look this good. I should also bring up the way they depict the books Sumireko is reading, which has a fun paper cut-esque quality to it. It’s visually inventive in a way the rest of the show hasn’t been even if the actual technicality of what’s being done isn’t particularly crazy.

Naturally, the book shop has mysterious origins of its own that aren’t revealed until the episode’s second half. Its mysterious proprietress, a dark-haired woman whose kindness is matched only by her love of literature, is revealed as an ancient spirit from the early Shogunate, immortalized in part via her love of literature, she is someone to whom heaven is literally a library.

The second half of the episode kicks off what is likely the second to last arc that the anime will cover. It remains to be seen how the show will handle that, but I’ve been enjoying the series’ late recovery and am pleasantly surprised by it. I don’t get to give out the “substantially improved” award distinction super often.

Girls Band Cry – Episode 9

After last week’s emotional bombshell, we have a slightly lighter episode this week, although still one with a lot of narrative momentum. (And, crucially, a focus on Tomo, one of the show’s less developed characters up to this point.)

Those who succeed in their chosen field have a tendency to romanticize hard work and effort. Presumably, those working on Girls Band Cry are no exception, most of this episode characterizes Tomo as a cornered tiger, someone who struggles to speak her mind but can be absolutely vicious when given permission (or reason) to do so. This collides with Nina’s ongoing quest to learn guitar on her own so she doesn’t have to keep relying on Momoka in an interesting way. Tomo’s feedback, when Nina presses her enough to actually get it, is withering, and a less determined person might give up. Nina doesn’t, and much of this episode revolves around getting the whole band on the same page so that Tomo can provide some direction. This is epitomized here by the ongoing process of hammering out the song they plan to play at the upcoming festival.

To provide some context for why Tomo is like this, we get flashbacks, one of the show’s favorite narrative devices. I like that, running with the show’s general use of flat animation as a depiction of the idealized past, Tomo’s memories are done in a mixed style. Her bandmates (rendered faceless) are drawn in 2D, but Rupa and Tomo herself—who seems to still be stuck in that moment—are 3D. It’s a nice way of conveying how out of step she feels with other people (and perhaps a way of quietly signaling that Rupa is one of the relative few who understands her).

To be honest, I find Tomo as depicted here kind of an admirable figure. As someone who’s had a lifetime of difficulty in committing to anything, much less improving on anything—I’m only a bit less bad at writing these kinds of things now as I was 7 or so years ago when I started, after all—I find her stubbornness endearing, her willingness to be direct and to the point compelling.

Much of the episode also employs the running motif of a snake (Tomo’s pet) who won’t eat. Why it isn’t doing so is never directly stated, but it eventually does in the episode’s closing minutes. Perhaps the reason is that, like the show’s human characters, it just needed some time and effort.

To be clear though, this is not solely a Deep And Serious Episode. There’s a fair bit of slapstick, especially in the opening bits with the busted air conditioners. I think it’s possible that how funny Girls Band Cry is might get lost in the shuffle when the show ends and the time comes to assess it in retrospect. I hope not, the show deserves full credit for everything it’s doing, not just the high-intensity emotional plays and excellent characterization.

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episode 9

Ouch.

This episode follows up on the commission work that Mahiru was offered last episode, to do art for the Sunflower Dolls, Kano’s old idol group, the problem being that this would pre-empt the project that JELEE want to do around the same time. The fallout from that offer, what Mahiru does with it, and how it permanently bends the Jellyfish‘s narrative, is immense, sprawling, and messy. It’s also the best episode of Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night, trumping its electric premiere episode by being an almost total inversion of it; emotionally, thematically, even visually. What I wrote below is an after-the-fact edit of what I wrote as I was watching the episode, because the thoughts came to me in such a torrent that I knew there was no way I’d remember everything I wanted to write about if I didn’t get it down in type first. This is the sort of episode people will bring up to prove that this show was worth it. It is a permanent part of the conversation, an immediate lightning bolt to the zeitgeist, and, to the extent that the “girls band war” between this series and Girls Band Cry is a real thing, is the first time in weeks it’s been able to comfortably claim the better episode between the two. That counts for something too, on a more cynical level.

One of the main threads of this episode is Kano’s consistent flashing back to her fallout with the Sunflower Dolls. Showing us how she initially joined the group and her eventual departure from it, and why and how that all happened. Several times, an overwhelming feeling of negativity is conveyed by the actual video blurring lightly in and out, a nice, lightly experimental touch from a show full of them.

The present day contains the main events that actually drive the episode, however. Mahiru’s meeting with Yukine, Kano’s manipulative mother and former manager, makes it clear that this is a very large-scale project that she’s being tapped for. Mahiru rightly wonders why, exactly, she’s being considered for this, although Yukine claims that the connection between Mahiru herself and Kano isn’t a factor when she’s pressed on it. This is an obvious lie—whatever Yukine’s opinion of Mahiru’s actual talents, it is very clear she’s asking this of Mahiru with an agenda in mind—but Mahiru buys it.

In general, Yukine is quite obviously a very manipulative person. A simple but very effective technique of oscillating between telling Mahiru what she wants to hear, lightly criticizing her, and then circling back around works wonders, which she finishes by, basically, promising her the world; at a Sunflower Dolls concert, Mahiru’s art will be projected onto the entire surrounding landscape. This plants an idea in Mahiru’s head, a very enticing one as a character who clearly deals with impostor syndrome and seeking external validation, “literally hundreds of thousands of people will see my drawings,” she must think to herself. “There’s no way I can say ‘no.'”

In any other show I’d question myself as to whether or not Yukine was really that bad, but Jellyfish has not historically been very subtle about signaling its characters motives. This is setting aside Kano’s flashback where Kano becomes “Nonoka.” Her mother controlling her style and manipulating her talents for her own ends is pretty vile, and paints a very clear picture of her as an old-school slimeball record exec. Really, the moment that seals the deal in hindsight is when she lays out her goals to Kano. “I want to one day nurture an artist who sings to 50,000 people.” The max capacity of the Tokyo Dome, as she points out. When I first heard this line, I rolled my eyes a little, thinking something like “It’s always numbers with this show.” Hold on to that thought, though. We’ll be coming back to it.

Especially when the show starts bringing up LookIdiot again. LookIdiot (a….whatever the opposite of catchy is, shortening of “Look at Reality, Idiot”), an in-universe gossip and scandal Youtube channel, is eventually revealed to be run by Mero, the former Sunflower Dolls center who Kano replaced. Mero certainly has the motive—she’s deeply resentful of this display of straight-up nepotism from her beloved ‘Yukine-P’—but it seems implausible, even in the world of Jellyfish, that a single teenage girl could be running a channel like that on their own, especially when one of the channel’s videos derails the careers of one-time Sunflower Dolls rivals the Rainbow Girls.

This is all contrasted with a brief visit that Kano takes during the flashback to visit her dad. We don’t see much of the man, but it’s clear that he and Yukine are not on remotely good terms anymore, and he and Kano meeting up at all seems to be a secret. (This is also where we see Kano seeing the jellyfish mural for the first time, inspiring some off-the-cuff lyrics which she takes the time to jot down.)

Inevitably, Kano finds out about Mero’s antics, thus finally contextualizing for us the punch to the face that got her booted from the Sunflower Dolls before the start of the show. Jellyfish again draws on its more experimental inclinations here; Yukine glares at Kano and Kano seems to almost go up in flames as the show’s visual style completely changes to a gauzy, faux-painted look, swamping Kano’s recollection of events in an oily blur, and smothering the dialogue in an equally thick layer of muffling.

Back in the present, a paranoid Kano finally snaps when Mahiru reveals that she’s going to take the commission from Yukine. I have previously criticized this show for feeling contrived, but someone splitting from the little indie group they came up with for a bigger opportunity is probably the single most realistic conflict Jellyfish has ever had. God bless Kiwi and Mei for trying to smooth things over, even if it obviously doesn’t work. Kano’s blow up at the end is absolutely vicious, she completely lays into Mahiru, saying a ton of things she can’t possibly mean because in that moment her only aim is to hurt the girl she’s close with as much as she possibly can. It is legitimately difficult to watch, not a term I use lightly, and even Kano herself seems shocked by what she says.

As she lays in her bed after the fight, the show’s obsession with numbers—followers, seating capacity, arbitrary dates, whatever—is revealed as a trait of Kano herself, a fraction of Yukine’s controlling personality inherited the worst possible way. Ouch. My fucking heart. And yet, in this absolute buckshot blast of emotional devastation, Jellyfish seems to find its footing all over again. The episode ends with a truly rude twist of the knife; a montage of Mahiru and Kano’s moments up to this point, concluding with a simple procession of Kano saying her name. Over and over again, as the credits play.

Things will not be the same ever again for this show, and how it handles the next three episodes is going to define its long-term legacy—people can forgive a lot for a strong closing arc—but for the first time in a while, it feels like it means something again. Kano has a long road ahead of her to picking up the pieces of her shattered relationship with Mahiru and the rest of JELEE, but I’m interested in seeing her—and seeing Jellyfish itself—make the attempt. Other people have said it better than I. Sometimes you discover yourself when you fall short.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 9

This show is so delightfully stupid.

Here we follow Sara and Yuna’s respective first days at school. Suffice to say, they go pretty differently. The first half of the episode follows Sara, and is generally gag-based, with the majority of these first twelve or so minutes being a nonstop cavalcade of the other students falling in either love or admiration for Sara and her charmingly over-the-top personality. She out-maths the class intellectual, impresses the local hot blooded boy with her skills at ruler fights, finds her way to the heart of the class’s soft boy with her deep appreciation and open-mindedness toward food, and makes the “English speaker” (most of what he’s saying is, in fact, nonsense) laugh with a goofy impromptu manzai skit. All of this is played purely for jokes, and much of the humor has a regional color to it owing to the heavy focus on the “Gifu-ness” of Gifu, where the series takes place. All the while, Sara also picks up a group of rivals, who promptly pledge their loyalty to her as “retainers” once they see her blow the lock off of a shed they try to lock her in.

The second half of the episode is substantially more serious and focuses on Yuna, taking the form of a simple story about bullying. It’s quite the swerve, and this is such a straightforward depiction of girls bullying girls—specifically, a group of second years picking on a freshman, Mizuki, who they’re jealous of for being picked up for the basketball team—that it’s more something I’d associate with old shoujo manga than anything contemporary. Yuna uses the burgeoning detective skills she’s picked up from her time with Sousuke to get audio and video footage of the girls bullying her. Yuna actually advocates taking the whole case to the police if Mizuki is so interested, and mirrors many of the same talking points that Sara and Sousuke gave her several episodes back. In general, the show seems to advocate a “do no harm but take no shit” attitude here, which is more applicable in general than anything more specific it might be pushing.

At episode’s end, Yuna admits to Sousuke while visiting Sara that she helped Mizuki more out of a desire to test herself and “solve a puzzle” so to speak than a pure desire to help a classmate. This is a fair point, and Sousuke doesn’t discourage her, but given what I know about police psychology it does damper the episode a little bit for me. Not much, but a smidgen.

It’s also worth mentioning the show’s visuals here which are….fine? It’s more worth mentioning that they’re not worth mentioning I suppose. This is a supremely workmanlike adaptation being carried hard by its writing, a trait, presumably, of the source material. I wonder if the manga or light novel are being translated.

Train To The End of The World – Episodes 9 & 10

Episode 9 of Train begins in somewhere we’ve heard a lot about but haven’t actually seen until now; Ikebukuro itself. Here, Youka is being kept in some kind of dreamlike haze by Pontaro, possibly by the “wibble wobble surgery” that affected Zenjiro. The first half of this episode is, therefore, our rendezvous with her, our first since the show began, and an assessment of her mental state. The verdict? Not great. At one point she gets into an argument with one of the survivors of Ikebukuro—“survivor” really is the right term, the city’s few remaining citizens seem to cling to life in a desperately hostile environment—who blames her for the city’s state for reasons she can’t really understand. When she gets angry enough, she zaps him with a beam of unknowable magic, and turns him into a bowl of egg custard. That’s 7G Powers at work, baby, and it’s nasty stuff. Further complicating things are her mysterious bodyguard / retainer “Pochi”, named after the dog of course, who keeps a watchful eye on her but doesn’t seem entirely aligned with Pontaro’s goals, either. The whole thing is rather mysterious.

Train returns to its theme of environment as a reflection of the inner self here, and more than ever, makes a clear connection to the tech bro-y nature of Pontaro, whose early days after the crisis were apparently defined by “claiming this was the plan all along” and admitting that he can’t exactly tell people just how badly this has all fucked up. The general picture is a bit akin to if what Elon Musk did to Twitter happened to all of physical reality, but also he had to convince a random teenage girl in order to let him actually do anything. Also worth a minor mention; Youka has had a light redesign in the intervening years, and her new look, despite having only relatively minor adjustments, makes her look pretty cool, and in some shots even properly regal, which is not an adjective I would’ve ever dreamt of associating with the character when this show was new. Did she make all of these changes herself, or is this Pontaro influencing how she presents herself? It’s hard to know for sure, but things seem to definitely be leaning in the latter direction, despite all her power.

In the episode’s latter half, the girls meet a figure who I was honestly pretty sure was never going to show up in this series again; the guy in the swan boat from way back in episode 2! The conversation our heroines have with him is important—as is the conversation Dr. Makoto has with Zenjiro around the same time, which is intercut with it—we learn that Ikebukuro is physically expanding, in what is described as a miniature approximation of entropy. That sounds pretty bad! Worse is Zenjiro’s theory that it will simulate the Big Rip if it goes on long enough, causing the whole world to simply vanish in a snap. Worse, he has no idea when that will happen. In his own words, it could be tomorrow, it could be in two billion years.

The episode ends with a cut back to Ikebukuro, where Pontaro informs “Pochi” about an approaching band of miscreants—our heroes, as you might guess—and tells him to remain on high alert. In the episode’s last scene, Youka seems to have a brief flash of lucidity wherein she questions where she is and what she’s doing. In a relative rarity for Train, it’s subtle, quiet, and very sad.

By contrast, these are adjectives that do not describe the following episode, the show’s tenth, in any way. Episode 10 is, in a very literal sense, a setup for the show’s finale. By the end of Episode 10, Shizuru and company know who the threat is, know what they’re trying to stop, and have an at least vague idea of how to do it. Getting there is another story, which requires going through heartwarming father-daughter reunions and art movement-invoking battle scenes alike.

For the former, Shizuru’s dear old dad makes his return to the series after a very brief appearance back near the start of the show. He and his two companions have been turned from animals into animal mascots. He and Shizuru talk some things out, and their reunion is both genuinely heartfelt and also very silly in a way that is pretty typical of this show.

Importantly, Akira also gets a beret from Shizuru’s dad, which he identifies as a ‘war trophy,’ which becomes important in the second half of the episode which I am frankly much more interested in talking about. Here, our heroines are forced to battle a trio of mangaka with art-related superpowers who are blocking their way forward. They get their powers from those very same berets, of course. (Which are based on a “subscription model” somehow. A shot at Adobe and other overpriced pay-per-month art programs? Probably not, but I’m choosing to interpret it that way anyway.)

As you might guess depending on how many weird anime you’ve seen over the years, this fight entails beams that turn our girls into versions of themselves rendered into genre cliché. Nadeshiko becomes an old-school shoujo character complete with Glass Mask-esque expressions, Reimi becomes a hot-blooded delinquent, and Shizuru, like her pa, becomes a cute little animal creature.

What the mangaka fail to consider is that Akira is very much capable of wielding the powers of the magic beret too, and Akira, being a lovably pretentious dork, fires back with expressionism lasers that summon copies of the screaming guy from “The Scream,” hordes of dosgs, and so on as she righteously tells the trope-loving mangaka that artistic expression has no bounds! There is an irony here, in how this kind of metafictional, art style-hopping, self-commentating episode has, itself, become something of a minor cliché. Off the top of my head, the eternally-underrated Anime-Gataris did it some seven years ago. Not that this inherently invalidates the points that Akira—or Shuumatsu Train itself—are trying to make, but it is notable and funny. The whole sequence is pretty great, all told, though, and it makes for a fun final action piece before we move into the show’s last stretch.

From 30 stops to Ikebukuro down to just one, only the surreal stronghold of the city itself remains. Can Youka, and the world, be saved?

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Asura Cryin’ – Seasons 1 & 2

Solid overall, and I don’t have a ton to say, given that this is just an all-around pretty good anime from an era where there were a lot of those, but there is something I like about this one that puts it a notch above bare “decent” to me.

It’s got a solid little theme of taking losses in your life as they come as opposed to clinging to the past, which I think is a good thesis for something like this.

Obviously, it’s not perfect. There’s a lot of the ambient misogyny prevalent in the writing that poisoned tons of anime from around this time—obviously that can still be a serious problem, but anecdotally I feel like it was way more of a thing in the 2000s—everything from stupid jokes about how an important plot coupon looks like a vibrator to the fact that most of the show’s characters are organized into 1-guy-2-girl groups, complete with a narrative justification for these off-the-shelf harem setups. So, if you want to take a dim view of the series, there’s more than enough here to justify that.

That said, I think it has a good heart, and its actual plot ambitions are mostly realized pretty well. Plus you can read the main 3 characters as a polytrio without much squinting, which is nice. Looking at this from the contemporary landscape of light novel anime, where most main characters are self-inserts to such an extent that they’re actively discouraged by their narratives from doing any introspection and the power fantasies themselves tend to be pretty boring, it’s actually refreshing seeing a series where the main character’s situation, itself a power fantasy, is used to facilitate character growth. The story itself is wild and weird, too, I mentioned in my last writeup about this series how crazy it can get and that carries through all the way to the end of the series. I miss this era when “light novel anime” meant more something along the lines of putting every genre ever in a blender than the narou-kei slop we tend to get now. Maybe I’m just looking at things with rose-tinted glasses, though.

Also, the final battle in the last episode is actually pretty cool, which given that the visuals are a bit of an up and down ride throughout the series wasn’t a given, and is something I appreciate.

I’m rambling. Show’s pretty good, check it out if you like this kind of thing.

Rozen Maiden – Episode 3 & 4

I haven’t talked about Rozen Maiden since starting it with some friends recently, but these two episodes—four in particular—have really elevated my opinion of this show. We don’t get enough anime that explore characters’ inner worlds as artistically-rendered symbolic landscapes anymore. (The most recent example I can think of is Magical Destroyers which, that was one of the best episodes of that show, but the series overall doesn’t really do enough to make watching it for that worthwhile.) Jun’s inner landscape is a place defined by a wasteland of broken televisions and homework slips glued to the floor contrasted with a lively forest full of insect-cars that he spends time trying to catch (beetle-Beetles, if you will). It’s interesting stuff.

I also like the characters a lot, particularly the dolls who all fall into easily-recognizable archetypes but in entertaining ways. I’m also very excited to see more of the I-assume-villain of the piece, gothy, crow-feather-laden doll Suigintou (Tanaka Rie).

Manga

Deep Raputa – Chapters 3 & 4

Over the course of these two chapters, Raputa’s ability to “hack” peoples’ brains comes into its own. This is, on a plot level, both alarming and astounding, but more interesting is what the manga is doing with that power. Chapter 3 is mostly a wash, being a somewhat corny story about Raputa meeting Kei’s father Fugaku Joe and playing Side War with him, but Chapter 4 more than makes up for it. Kei wants to be a good dad someday—understandable, it’s a pretty normal ambition for a boy in his young teens—and Raputa has a full-on crisis about how she can never give that to him for all the obvious reasons; she’s just a computer program at the end of the day, and Raputa gets hung up on the idea of the two of them ‘having a baby’ together. It’s weird! It’s uncomfortable! But given the timbre of the story, it seems to be intentionally so, we’re again getting into this division of experience between Raputa and a physical flesh-and-blood human.

Naturally, Raputa tries to solve this by controlling the dreams of everyone in town so that she can create a perfect dream world where she and Kei are together forever.

This doesn’t last, and Raputa realizing just how big the gap between herself and Kei is hits hard. The chapter’s last few pages tease the possibility that she’s going to target his father next, and so we move further into the whole “yandere AI” zone.

That’s all for this week. I leave you with this Monday Bonus Thought for you to contemplate.

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