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.

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There have been anime about the Internet before, from Serial Experiments Lain all the way up to VTuber Legend also airing this very season. Mayonaka Punch is distinct from all of these in a single, very specific way; it feels terminally online. I have never seen anything so expertly convey the feeling of just being way, way, way too plugged in to social media and its various microdramas. Every Youtuber scandal, every shitposting Twitter account, every celebrity faux pas, feels equally important, even though it really isn’t. MayoPunch has the good sense to center this feeling, because it puts us in the head of our main character, Masaki [Hasegawa Ikumi].

Masaki is the rare anime girl who just completely sucks as a human being. To a degree that it’s actually a little surprising. Sure, she has a cute design, but short of actual villains it’s rare for a girl in the medium to be so toxic. It’s not that she has no redeeming qualities, but over the course of the first episode a portrait is painted where she comes off as self-absorbed and angry to a ridiculous degree. That anger might have a real motive, but if it does, we aren’t really privy to it here, and regardless of whether or not MayoPunch might decide to hedge its bets later on, it’s legitimately pretty bold to lead with such a thoroughly unlikeable main character. She’s a Youtuber, the recently-fired third member of a trio (now a duo) called the Hyped-Up Sisters, let go after complaining about the other two members endlessly on social media, bitching about the actual content of their videos, and finally, slugging one of the other girls live on-camera¹. Not helping her case is that during the livestream where she’s fired, she actually goes to their house and tries to attack them again. That’s wild! That’s an insane thing to lead your show with!

And yet, her sheer toxicity makes her strangely compelling. Partly because there’s something clearly very wrong with her. This isn’t (or at least, isn’t yet) an Iseri Nina situation where her stubbornness seems to stem from some kind of earnest moral code. We don’t really have a good grip on what Masaki’s motivations actually are—she claims late in the episode that she started making Youtube videos because she just wanted to make things that are fun to watch, but this is a bit dubious given everything else here—so she comes off as more of a chronic self-sabotager than anything. She tries to kickstart a new Youtube channel but can’t pry herself away from a flood of negative comments long enough to really make anything good. Later in the episode, she ends up absolutely blitzed off her ass at some random hole-in-the-wall restaurant, drunkenly rambling about how she was the heart of Hype-Sis, damn it. When she’s kicked out (by an employee who knows who she is no less, how mortifying) she wanders into an abandoned hospital where Hype-Sis shot their first major video some years prior.

She wanders around, wallows in self-pity, and smacks her face into a rebar. It’s all compellingly pathetic, and the sight of her wandering in a daze, lazily recording everything with her cellphone in a desperate bid to recapture past glories, does an amazing job of capturing total emotional burnout. There’s a scene later on where she falls off a roof, and her initial reaction is relief. She’s tired; of this, of everything.

The event with the most immediate tangible consequence, though, turns out to be hitting her face on that support beam. This gives her a nosebleed. Why does that matter?

Because there’s a vampire in the hospital, too, of course.

Live [Fairouz Ai, absolutely fucking killing it as usual], is our other protagonist. She’s a counterpart to Masaki in some ways, and in some other ways, they’re oddly similar people. For instance, they’re both very selfish. Live, when she runs into Masaki, could not care less about her emotional state. She just wants to suck Masaki’s blood. Why? Because she saw her on the Internet for the first time earlier in the day, and Masaki happens to resemble a girl from the 20-year-long slumber that Live has just woken up from. Masaki is, literally, Live’s dream girl.

Yes, the show is gay, too. Albeit only in a way that’s equally as unhinged as everything else. Live wants Masaki’s blood. Live needs Masaki’s blood; those are her words, not mine. It’s fairly horny, and honestly the show is a fair bit more hot-blooded than some of the actual ecchi airing right now.

We don’t learn many specifics of Live’s situation before she goes girl-hunting in a local abandoned hospital. What we do learn is that her two-decade slumber was apparently unusually long even for a vampire, and in the meantime her henchwoman (who has a crush on her, no less) has been playing the stock market. Ichiko [Itou Yuina], the character in question, is a tiny little thing with huge pigtails, meaning that she’s another entry in the proud anime tradition of “childlike character does something mundane and adult, because that’s funny.” To be fair to the show; it is pretty funny. After being brought up to speed on new innovations like “the Internet” and “smartphones,” Live spots Masaki in a news story and, noting the resemblance to the girl from her dream, sets out to find her, thus uniting the two halves of this story. (They’re actually inter-cut in the show itself, you’ll have to forgive me for not reproducing that effect here.)

Live and Masaki’s relationship has a rocky start, to say the least. Masaki has no idea who Live is, so when she spots the vampire casually hanging out on the hospital’s ceiling, she’s understandably freaked out. She’s even more understandably freaked out when Live knows who she is. And even more freaked out when she expresses a desire to suck her blood.² You can understand where Masaki’s coming from, here! (She’s a coward for that, though. I would’ve turned over my neck without a second thought.) There’s what one might describe as a chase scene, and the last major locale of the episode is the hospital rooftop, where Masaki accidentally falls, and almost bites it. Naturally, Live can sprout pink energy wings from her back, and is thus able to save Masaki without much trouble.

There’s the obvious comparison to be made to Call of the Night, and there’s some of the nocturnal romance that that series conjures here in the flight scene, even if it’s interrupted for a gag at the end when Masaki gets airsick. (MayoPunch seems to like cutting itself off to say “sike!”) The shared joy of the air seems to be what brings Masaki back to her senses, and by the time she’s on the ground she’s regained enough composure to make a proposal to Live. Help her new channel get a million subscribers³, and she’ll let Live have all the blood she wants. The vampire, of course, is all too happy to accept, and this first episode closes on the beautiful beginnings of what I imagine is going to be a weird relationship. It’s a lot! The show is a whirlwind of emotions and gags, and to capture some of that feeling I challenged myself to finish a first impressions article about it as quickly as possible.⁴ I don’t know if I succeeded, but I do know that I’m all too happy to like and subscribe for more of whatever’s going to happen here. I heartily recommend giving the show a try for yourself, to see if you’d like to do the same.

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^{1: Making this the second season in a row to feature an anime where a main character was let go from a group after punching one of its other members on camera. Is this a reference to something that actually happened? If not, what a weird coincidence.}

^{2: At one point she yells at Live for “phrasing it like she’s bumming a cig.” Not for nothing is Mayonaka Punch a good argument for having real translators in the season of My Deer Friend Nokotan‘s utter scuttling via machine translation. Misaki comes off as having an incredibly foul mouth despite not actually swearing that much, and it adds a lot to her characterization.}

^{3: Normally I roll my eyes at things like this in anime, but the number-based goal actually makes sense here, given that we’re literally talking about a group of Youtubers who make variety content. The king of this approach is Mr. Beast, but there are tons of these guys all over the Internet, making content in dozens of languages that defies any simpler categorization.}

^{4: It took about 40 minutes from having seen the show to final tagging and posting, if you’re wondering. This footnote was one of the last things I did.}

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