Month: October 2024

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Can DEMON LORD 2099 Bring Isekai into The Future?

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 three.

I talk enough about how I don’t really like contemporary isekai that I risk repeating myself. So instead of lamenting the state of the genre let’s just jump right into the important things about Demon Lord 2099 specifically.

So! This show! Our premise is that your archetypal demon lord—Veltol Velvet Velsvalt [Hino Satoshi], great name—has been defeated. Some centuries later, his world collides with and fuses with ours, plunging the globe into a magic-infested apocalypse that kills most of the planet and reduces what remains to a squabbling landscape of feuding city-states. In the ashes, magic and technology combine to forge a broadly cyberpunk-inflected setting. So far, so “reverse isekai with a twist.” There’s a bit more to things than that, though.

Veltol is of course resurrected in the present day (2099, natch), and as he gets his bearings in the first episode, with the assistance of his loyal servant Machina [Itou Miku], two things immediately stand out about both his character and the timbre of the show itself.

1: Veltol is portrayed, barring a big exception that we’ll get to, with a fair amount of genuine gravitas and dignity. That’s not to say the character is taken 100% seriously all the time, but rather that the series devotes a fair amount of space to his thoughts and feelings, and how they interact with the world he’s returned to. He feels like an actual person rather than a boxed archetype.

2: The series on the whole seems, at least going off of the three episodes that have currently aired, to be surprisingly faithful to the original ideas of the cyberpunk genre. While the tiresome stock fantasy racism metaphors that pockmark the narou-kei scene are present here, they are more of a background element than a defining feature (and at one point are blamed on a specific character, in a seemingly deliberate move on 2099‘s part). The real antagonistic force is unchecked technocapitalism and all that it enables; stressful, strained paycheck-to-paycheck living, the inequality it foments, etc. As a force, this is embodied by Marcus [Matsukaze Masaya], one of Veltol’s former lieutenants who has found a new position in the world, as the overtly ill-intentioned head of a massive tech company.

This is not to say that Veltol is a straightforward good guy. He’s still an aspiring world-conquering tyrant after all, but because the series is from his point of view, he’s humanized in a way that a lesser show just wouldn’t bother with. This is most obvious at the end of the first episode, where his most loyal devotee, the aforementioned fire immortal Machina, takes him to her new home, a tiny, ratty apartment on the outskirts of the city. Veltol initially assumes this place is some sort of storeroom, and when Machina gently corrects him and makes it clear she’s not joking, breaking down in tears at the “shameful” fact that she lives in such a small home, he pulls her close to comfort her.

A later episode shows us Machina’s backstory, which involves her being thrown into an active volcano. And remarkably, the show still portrays her current state, struggling to get by and making minimum wage, as being even less dignified than that. The message that this is an environment that makes monsters of all of us is clear. It’s also a nice bit of character building for Veltol, and a cheaty (but not invalid!) way to get us, the audience, on his side. Veltol as he’s portrayed here, even accounting for the evil required for his conceptualization as a demon lord, is a nearly admirable figure. I admit to having a personal weakness for a certain kind of principled villain in fiction, depending on what those principles are, so I may be in the minority in that I’d follow this guy into hell. Still, I imagine even if you’re less susceptible to such things, he comes off well here.

The second episode is a slightly different story. For one thing, it’s a fair bit more typical for this genre. Veltol attempts to find work, reasoning that having Machina take care of all of his expenses is unbecoming, and is rejected at every turn due to his lack of experience and inability to get a Familia implant, the magic-producing cyber-chip smartphone-things that that Marcus’ company produces. This doesn’t pan out, and per the suggestion of his and Machina’s mutual friend, the resident punk-hacker Takahashi [Hishikawa Hana, in one of her first major roles since her time as Cure Precious came to an end], he takes up a career in streaming, which surprisingly works out rather well for him.

This whole bit certainly seems like a stupid gag that’s going to derail the whole show, and it takes up most of the second episode, but things get back on track with the much more serious third. (Which has a fun double-meaning title, it’s called “Debut of a Demon Lord”, alluding to both the beginning of his streamer career sure, but more importantly his actual return as a force of real impact in the world.) There are great scenes throughout; Veltol meets his old enemy Gram [Namikawa Daisuke], now granted eternal youth by a goddess as a reward for his service and profoundly disillusioned with the 500 years of war, death, and betrayal he’s endured since the two last met. Veltol tries to make Gram see things his way, that the world needs a strong leader like him for true peace, but it doesn’t take. (Remember, Veltol is the protagonist, but he’s not actually a “good guy”. “Peace through tyranny” and all that.) And he finishes off the episode by reasserting his might against an oni who kicked his ass back in the first episode, which is a fun full-circle moment.

As with many anime like this, it’s hard to make a called shot as to whether or not 2099 will really live up to its potential, but these first few episodes are promising, and in what’s been a pretty dry season, any show that’s good or at least interesting is worth keeping tabs on.

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, Tumblr, or Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.

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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Maid in Abyss – Is YOU ARE MS. SERVANT Strange Enough To Stand Out?

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.

I’ve been trying to be slightly less longwinded in my writing as of late, so let me just lay the cards on the table here. You Are Ms. Servant, an odd little sort-of romcom from Felix Film, is primarily concerned with two equally-important questions. Question 1: Isn’t the anime pop cultural archetype of the maid-as-assassin, who exists only to kill on behalf of her master, as typified by examples as diverse as Izayoi Sakuya from Touhou and Roberta Cisneros from Black Lagoon, kind of fucked up? Question 2: Do you want a soft dommy mommy gf? Because whoever wrote this certainly does.

It’s probably best to think of You Are Ms. Servant as a pretty typical anime of this present moment for the medium. Visually, it’s all over the place, some shots are absolutely gorgeous, others are just barely passable. Overall, one gets the sense that, even accounting for the fact that this first episode looks pretty good on the whole, the production could fall to pieces at any moment and one wouldn’t be that surprised. There’s also a mashup of visual signifiers here that feels less original than it would have even a few years ago. Frequent cuts in the chibi style emphasize comedic moments, as does the technique of simply rattling a character back and forth very rapidly when they express surprise. At the same time, there’s a pretty heavy use of what we might call denpa imagery throughout this debut episode; shots of railroad tracks as trains breeze by, static-tinged memories, etc. It’s a weird mix, one that leaves the show feeling fairly incoherent tonally. A fact that is, in of itself, hardly notable at this point in this genre’s history.

The setup here is, as it often is in these shows, very simple. Yokoya Hitoyoshi [Kumagai Toshiki] is an ordinary high school boy who struggles with keeping his home clean and whose parents are presently conveniently out of town. Yuki [Ueda Reina], whose name we don’t actually learn in this first episode but which I am plucking from Anilist’s character sheet for convenience, is a “maid” seeking work, who has for reasons only vaguely explained in passing, decided to come to Hitoyoshi for her prospective employment. Obviously, this makes no sense and is the realm of pure fantasy. This is fine on its own, of course, and I’d even argue that the fact that Yuki goes to Hitoyoshi shaves some of the inherent ickiness off of the basic concept here. More the problem is that Yuki is cast firmly in the Yor Forger mold, she’s preternaturally talented at murder, but absolutely hopeless at anything else, in a way that is clearly supposed to be humorous but mostly hits a somewhat sour note. It’s hard to get the thought “we’re doing this again?” out of one’s head throughout a lot of the comedic material. This is a trope that’s been quickly run into the ground over the past few years, and Ms. Servant is not going to be the one to make it funny again.

If You Are Ms. Servant can claim any great innovation, it’s in attempting to return the character archetype to its roots. Yuki is a goofball a lot of the time, baffled by the idea that anyone would enjoy food instead of just thinking of it as pure sustenance and flummoxed by even the simplest of household chores, but there are moments that reveal some real darkness within her. Memories of being raised as a child assassin, Noir-style, intrude on the otherwise simple world of the series. One gets the sense that Yuki’s past is something she’s actively running from, and that her turning up on Hitoyoshi’s doorstep is no coincidence.

Hitoyoshi has his own demons, too. His parents’ absence would be unremarkable in most anime with this setup, but we learn toward the conclusion of this episode that he’s prone to having nightmares wherein he cries out for his mother. The implication here seems to be that Hitoyoshi is a child of divorce. So, it is perhaps inevitable that the varying needs of this narrative, in this format, conspire to give the final moments of this episode a, we’ll say, very particular feeling. This is where Question 2 starts coming up.

Technically, at least in this first episode, it is never outright said that these two are attracted to each other, but come on.

So that, it seems, is You Are Ms. Servant, an age gap romance informed by its characters respective troubled upbringings, standing on an unsteady foundation of hacky comedy, reaching for denpa signifiers in search of meaning. Will the series ever actually do anything with the obvious wellspring of disquiet here? It’s hard to predict these things ahead of time, but the example of some past similar anime doesn’t incline me to get my hopes up. Still, its blend of disparate elements is at least distinct. I want the series to dig into the pasts of its main characters more, and I want that direct namedrop of the term “found family” in the closing narration to actually mean something. Time will tell if it does.

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, Tumblr, or Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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.