Hello, anime fans! Premiere season is finally over here at Magic Planet Anime, which means I can finally get back into the regular groove of things after mostly covering premieres for the last two weeks. There’s still one more article in the pipe—you guys should be seeing it tomorrow, unless something’s gone wrong—but for the most part we’re back in our regular schedule.
Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture – Episode 3
This was a pretty good episode, although Rozé is visibly straining against the limits of the 12-episode format at this point, cramming in tons of major twists and more lighthearted subplots into the 24 minute space of a single episode that can make the series feel a little claustrophobic.
The end result is that this episode feels very diced-up and fragmented, like a dozen little shards of stories are being laid all in a row.
That said, the effect works surprisingly well! Not having the original Code Geass‘ space to laze about and really revel in its contradictions is definitely hurting the show a bit, but I don’t think it’s to the point where it’s a major problem, at least not yet. Also, there were rare amounts of Gender in this episode; Sakuya lounging about in bed, dressing up as a maid, using her real voice while boymoding, etc. All very good. I’m also interested about the new knights we’re very briefly introduced to in the episode’s start.
As for the main thing; the child-emperor of Britannia is dead, and it seems like Sakura is going to be placed on the throne as a puppet for our local Char knockoff, Lord Noland [Yasumoto Hiroki]. This implies to me that he probably knows she’s not the real Sakuya, which makes things interesting. It’s fun to see how Rozé tries to skirt around the limitations of its runtime with regard to this kind of thing specifically. Norland’s plan to kill Callis and replace him with Sakuya would’ve been given several episodes of buildup in the original Code Geass. Here it’s all left to implication, making the entire thing feel all the more sudden.
All of this pales to the real revelation in this episode: LELOUCH IS HERE AND THEY GAVE HIM LINES AND EVERYTHING AND IT WAS JUST A FLASHBACK BUT I DON’T CARE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA MY FUCKIN BOY!
That is the least formal writing you will ever read on this blog. Please revel in it.
Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 2
This episode clarifies for us that Suou, who we met last week, is actually Kuze’s sister, and is also significantly less prim and proper than we might’ve been initially led to believe.
She’s an incorrigible faux-(or is it even faux?)-brocon and arguably even more of an otaku than her brother. I am Not Really Into This, suffice to say, but on the flip side, any texture is good for a romcom that’s working this tightly within a formula. Suou does not seem to be a particularly complex character (maybe that will change as the show goes on) but her sheer meanness is funny enough. She really delights in teasing Alya over her closeness to Kuze. Alya has no idea of course, that the source of this closeness is that they’re siblings, and she in fact assumes that they’re dating. (This is less unbelievable than it might seem given that the two use different surnames and don’t seem to be living together. My guess is that their parents are separated.)
This flows nicely into the main setting of the episode, a mall, where Alya runs into the siblings while they’re out shopping and gets roped into visiting a novelty spicy ramen restaurant. An admirable amount of visual polish goes into conveying how unpalatably hot the ramen is, but I will admit that this whole scene was a bit of a shrug for me.
I can’t help but notice that Alya’s Russian has already been relegated to a plot device. Alya mutters in Russian about wanting him to be her running mate in the student council election, and it really seems like he eventually will. Other than this it’s mostly relegated to a couple basic jokes during the ramen scene.
Alya herself remains a delight, though. At one point she and Kuze spend time clothes shopping and she gets hooked on him praising her outfits, only to collapse into an anxious ball when Suou shows up again.
Her walleyed expressions throughout this episode are also pretty endearing, and she’s the main character whose interiority here doesn’t come off as slightly forced. Contrast the siblings, who are here given an out of place melancholic flashback that I don’t think this show really has the weight to handle.
Roshidere still isn’t amazing or anything (and I could really do without the Single Egregious Ecchi Scene in each episode, they throw the whole vibe off) but I’m having fun with it, mostly off the strength of its cast, and I’m interested to see where this all goes.
This week’s ED theme is a sugary sweet cover of “Kawaii-te Gomen” (something like “Sorry I’m So Cute~”, apparently) by The HoneyWorks. I actually quite like this song, and Uesaka Sumire‘s cover of it here is a nice if straightforward take on the original.
Quality Assurance in Another World – Episode 2
This was not nearly as interesting as the first episode, but it was alright! Once it became clear that this is just a variant on Sword Art Online‘s setup I will admit that I lost some interest, but I’m going to stick with it a bit longer to see if it can gain that interest back. I liked this episode’s villain being a guy dressed up like Black-Iron Tarkus from Dark Souls, and he and his skinny friend do a bit to establish that most of Haga’s fellow QA people are pretty twisted this far into their being abandoned / purposely left in the game / whatever is going on.
I will say I think Haga’s insistence that if he just keeps doing his job he’ll eventually get home is the one thing that I’m hanging onto, here, because it’s a good metaphor for how being stuck in a dead-end job can feel and I think that’s on purpose. So hopefully the series has more tricks up its sleeve to come.
Oshi No Ko Season 2 – Episode 2
One of the central ideas of Oshi no Ko is that being in a creative field can absolutely suck. Perhaps that it even does usually suck, as a rule. So it is with “Game of Telephone”, the second episode of the show’s second season. As revealed at the end of the last episode, Abiko [Sakura Ayane], the mangaka for Demon’s Blade, hates the play’s script.
There’s a fun duality to the comedic and tragic sides of this episode. On the one hand, the fact that Abiko, a very weird little woman who brushes her teeth with double toothbrushes when she needs to do it quickly and dresses in decidedly dated attire, has everyone running scared is pretty funny. On the other hand, Abiko, as the original creator of a very successful work, wields a lot of power over the play, which she uses to eventually dislodge the pseudonymous scriptwriter GOA [Ono Daisuke] from his position, threatening to pull the right to make the play in the first place if she’s not allowed to simply do the script all over again herself.
GOA is, of course, devastated, and he can’t even get his name taken off the play so he’s not being falsely credited. One of Oshi no Ko‘s simplest shots to date is just him, sitting in his dimly lit apartment by himself, clearly doing fine financially but creatively deeply unfulfilled. It’s sad stuff.
And yet, Abiko isn’t entirely unsympathetic here either despite how she absolutely lays into GOA. Her passion that her work be translated accurately to other media is clearly genuine, and there is, of course, the little fact that Oshi no Ko itself was originally a manga. So there is some amount of sympathy for her point of view built into the series just inherently. (I’ve seen it suggested that Abiko is supposed to be a skewering of a certain kind of entitled mangaka or even some mangaka in particular, but I just don’t see it, especially considering that Akasaka Aka is pretty opinionated about his work in his own right.)
All told, this is a compelling episode in its own right and a solid twist to what was set up last episode. We end on Akane taking Aquamarine—who has professed to be disinterested in theater—out to see a 2.5D play of the type they’ll be putting on. I cannot wait to see what that looks like.
Anime – Non-Seasonal
This was fun! Despite the way Magic Knight Rayearth is often described as a mix of magical girl, mecha, and isekai genres, it most strongly comes off as a fairly straightforward heroic fantasy thing, at least so far. It’s such an old-school fantasy thing that Acquiring Legendary Weapons and Getting Out of The Monster Forest are whole-episode quests in of themselves.
The pacing of these early episodes is surprisingly hyperactive for the vintage of the show, which I find interesting. Also, the character animation is really bouncy and I like the amount of chibi cuts.
I also must confess to loving the evil sorceress Alcyone [Amano Yuri]. Her design is like 50% purple spheres by volume, it’s fantastic.
All three main girls are a lot of fun. So far Fuu [Kasahara Hiroko] has gotten the most focus and I like her fairly analytical personality, although it’s funny that even 30 years ago isekai protagonists were comparing the world they end up in against video games they’ve played. (There are a lot of differences obviously, but this similarity struck me and a friend1 who I was watching with as funny.) Episode 3 is a focus episode for her, wherein our main group meets the chronic liar / wandering swordsman Ferio [Yamazaki Takumi]. Despite initial skepticism she ends up falling for him, it’s cute, and believable! It also involves Fuu shooting one of her magic arrows into a big rock that turns things into monsters, so that’s pretty great too.
Going back a bit, episode 2 features a pretty involved scene where our girls take down a mud golem. I really liked it, as the way they lead it into a small pond where it dissolves. I think a lesser show would just take it for granted that our girls could defeat these things and not really bother showing us any details.
I was decidedly not a fan of the racial humor in the second episode, though, which caught me very off-guard. (It consists of the smith character fantasizing about capturing her enemies and doing so with some stereotypical Native American / boiling pot imagery, admittedly iconography nicked from old, racist American cartoons most likely, but still. Eugh.) and I’m hoping that’s the end of that.
Anyway, it’s a solid show overall! Excited to watch more whenever the aforementioned friend and I end up having the time.
That’s all for this week. I leave you with the following Bonus Thought. I’ve been forgetting to do these lately, shame on me!
1: Hi Josh
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