The Weekly Orbit is a weekly(-ish) 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!
Another week, another batch of girlies being absolutely dramatic. I’ll be honest, between the seasonals and the manga I read for this column, this might have the highest “girlies being dramatic” ratio of anything I’ve written in a long long while. I’d say in this respect at least, I’m living my best life. I hope you are too.
Anime – Seasonal
Ave Mujica – Episode 6
Every week I walk in to the torment nexus and walk out with my heart broken in three places. What a show.
Some interesting play with structure and framing this episode. At last week’s conclusion Soyo was shown discovering Mortis, and the whole scene was framed in slasher movie tones. Here, now that she has a better idea of Mortis’ whole, you know, thing, Mortis is instead framed as the angry, lost girl that she really is. I really enjoyed (and did not at all expect) Soyo actually playing along with Mortis’ whole ‘calling the doctor’ bit, it shows a pretty deep empathy that I don’t really know if we’ve seen the character express before? (It’s been a while since I watched MyGO, so I may be forgetting something.) Also, she apparently spends 3 whole days sleeping over there trying to patch things up, which, while there’s definitely a selfish aspect to her motive (she misses CRYCHiC too, after all), I still think deserves serious real one points. I don’t think I’d have the emotional stamina to spend 3 whole days consoling anyone about anything.
Full credit to Rana also, who can just intuit what’s going on with Mortis and Mutsumi without even actually being told. (She doesn’t actually go out of her way to help, though, and spends a decent amount of time this episode playing with cats. Rana remains this subseries’ most mysterious character.) Mortis actually seems to develop a bit of a crush on her, and is that a twinge of jealousy I detect from Soyo about that fact? In the tumblr version of this post I made a joke about the relationship chart this series must have, and then they just actually published one. Way to undercut my quips, Bushiroad.
I like Umiri’s brief scene in this episode. Forever the eternal mercenary, she describes the breakup of Ave Mujica as though it happened around her and not to her. And yet when Ricky Taki calls her on this, she gets annoyed. Truly the “fake ass IDGF’er” meme in human form.
The first half of this episode, I must stress, is actually pretty light by this show’s standards. So of course, there needs to be a breaking point somewhere. Here, that breaking point is between Mortis and Mutsumi, who stirs for the first time in a solid month only to find how awry things have gone in her absence. This isn’t what she wanted, and Mortis is appalled to learn so. The two have an argument in headspace, which of course to anyone outside of the Mutsumi-Mortis system’s own head just looks like an argument with herself, and she actually carries on so bad that she ends up tripping and falling in front of Live House Ring and making a huge scene, which of course a throng of anonymous busybodies are nearby to witness. It’s SO much that it would come off as contrived if the show weren’t so set on showing us how badly this is fucking over Mutsumi and Mortis. It’s hard to watch.
There is something admirable about the show’s complete lack of handholding with this kind of thing. This episode alone depicts multiple conflicts within a fully-realized mental space, a tug-of-war between Mortis and Mutsumi for their collective fate that is just profoundly sad to witness. I do wonder how legible this is to audiences who aren’t plural. Part of me is worried this series might actually be too ahead of its time for most audiences to properly appreciate.
(I’ve barely talked about Sakiko here and she is absolutely going through it up and down this entire episode. From the horrible, obviously untrue claims she makes about not caring about either band or even about Mutsumi, to the folder of sticky notes she’s gotten from Tomori over the years, to the fact that she sadly looks for another one despite telling Tomori off for them last week. To. This fucking expression, just, god.)
There’s a mostly-lighthearted interlude with Nyamu (it remains really funny that her dark secret, compared to everyone else’s, seems to just be that she’s from the sticks), but even that is twinged with her finding out about Mortis and Mutsumi’s public breakdown. The episode then ends with MyGO finding out about Sakiko’s whole extremely fucking complicated family situation. Episode 7 is entitled “Post nubila Phoebus,” “after the clouds, the Sun.” In most other contexts that would be a shining beam of hope, and maybe it is here too, but I’m fairly sure things will get worse before they get better. (Recall, we still have no idea what’s going on with Uika, just as one example, and she’s the only character from either band who doesn’t put in even a cursory appearance in this episode. Where is she!)
Flower and Asura – Episodes 2-5
I don’t usually try to predict how an anime will end before it gets there. But, by the same token, I tend to usually have at least a broad idea of what something “is doing” for most of its run. A first episode or so might need some room to establish itself, but by the halfway point of a series, one can usually figure out its whole deal with relative ease, especially if you’ve been watching anime for a while. All this is the long way around to say; I don’t get caught out by an anime very often. When I’m surprised it’s usually the addition of some new element, as opposed to something I had just outright been misunderstanding. Flower and Asura thus gets to join a pretty exclusive club with its fifth episode, and I am left to consider if I’ve maybe been underrating the show a little. (And by the time you’re reading this another episode will have aired, sigh! The unrelenting march of time.)
The gist is this: so far, Flower and Asura has largely been presented through the eyes of its main character, Hana. Hana’s insecurities and need to find a way to express herself defined the first episode or two of the series, and—perhaps this is the show’s fault, but I’m more inclined to blame myself—because of that, I had not really given terribly much consideration to the interiority of the show’s other characters. Natsue An, the snippy girl with the twin-tails, is a direct challenge to this, in her interactions with Hana she essentially addresses the viewer directly. This is the case with the rest of the cast, but the other two members’ inner lives we’ve explored to any extent are those of Mizuki, the free-spirited upperclassman that recruited Hana in the first place, and Ryouko, who, while not exactly a one-note character, has a deep interest in classic literature that aligns her nicely with Hana and Mizuki’s philosophy that recitation is primarily an art. The NHK Cup, the tournament looming in the show’s background, is to them secondary to reading what they want to be reading, and Ryouko says as much directly. Winning is not hugely important to either of them. (Certainly not to Ryouko, whose gleeful joy at the ancient drama frozen in glass by the Japanese Classics is outright described in-show as fetishistic. I feel very strongly I would get along with this character.)
Natsue is an irregularity here. She actually wants to win the Cup. As such, she’s not performing literary recitations like the characters we’ve discussed so far but rather a technical program, an altogether different thing that relies on a different skillset. Despite their different paths, Natsue is clearly at least appreciative of Hana’s talent, and, in her particularly brusque way, urges her to choose Kafka’s The Metamorphosis from among the available works to read a selection from. This is in contrast to Hana’s own desire to read from a contemporary work. (A work which in fact appears to be about a romance between two girls. Subtle.) If we’re just judging on taste, Natsue is clearly completely right; Hana’s particular timbre, especially the lower and more menacing end of her arsenal, which we know of from episode one, would lend itself very well to something as dark as The Metamorphosis. But this just isn’t what Hana wants to do, and it’s easy to read Natsue’s insistence that she do it as jealousy. It makes almost too much sense, right? Natsue, clearly someone who has very strong opinions on literature from her insistence on Hana’s selection and her denigration of the book Hana actually wants to read as shallow, would rather be doing recitation, right? I certainly read things that way. But we should stop ourselves here, because what that assumption actually is, I am a little embarrassed to say, is probably just projection.
Natsue, after an entire episode of Hana bugging her about it (including a magnetic—and also kind of embarrassing!—scene where Hana actually recites from the book she is planning to read from. In public, where the whole student body can see it), eventually explains that no, the real reason she’s so set on winning the tournament is nothing this complicated. She relates an anecdote from middle school where, in that school’s broadcasting club, an enthusiastic friend was selected to go to the nationals over her. Despite that friend’s insistence that Natsue was actually better at recitation than she was, the condescension—intentional or not—stung more than the actual failure. It has nothing to do with her specific talents and everything to do with just wanting to win in the first place.
Hana is left with the figurative egg on her face, although it’s not so bad, given that this causes the two to actually roughly get along for the first time in the entire show. Still, there’s an important point in there about not just assuming motives for this sort of thing. A point well made to both high school girls and, it turns out, anime critics more than a decade removed from high school.
All this and I’ve barely mentioned how utterly gay Mizuki and Hana’s entire relationship is. How embarrassing!
You and Idol Precure – Episodes 1 & 2
Idol anime are dead, long live idol anime.
Really interesting stuff with this show these past two episodes. Very clearly this is trying to be an “old school” Precure season in that it’s very physical and has a certain kind of comedy that’s been absent for the past couple years. Some people have been a little down on this but to be honest I’m really enjoying it, especially the return of the fisticuffs after an absence in Wonderful. (Not that that show needed them, but it’s always good to have some punching.) Our lead, Uta, alias Cure Idol [Matsuoka Misato], is probably the goofiest main Cure we’ve had in a while. I’m here for it. (That said, it seems like the blue Cure is going to have A Somewhat Sad Backstory and if I know myself I’m going to probably like her most, but who knows.)
Manga
Black and White: Tough Love at the Office
In the best possible way: this is wretched.
What we have here is a yuri manga where the “girls love” is two women, Shirakawa Junko and Kuroda Kayo, attempting to just completely destroy each others’ professional and personal lives over the course of several months after they begin working together in the same department of a bank. There’s a lot of talk about “toxic yuri” in the air right now, moreso than ever before I think, but this is a pretty potent strain of the stuff. These two are bad for each other, they don’t like each other, they become psychologically obsessed with each other, and their “intimacy” consists of violent, questionably-consensual sexual encounters where they alternate between actually fucking and throwing punches and the like at each other. It’s violent! Very violent!
None of this is a complaint of course, the primal and twisted nature of these scenes—which there are really only a couple throughout the whole manga, and they’re all pretty brief—is a big part of the point. There’s an idea floated here that while these two women are both trapped within the financial system that employs them, they’re at each others’ throats. Junko is BY FAR the more vicious of the two, and once Kayo starts seeing another woman, she gets that woman, a fund manager, fired for financial fraud. And yet, when the manga ends, Junko finds herself a pawn of the shadiest parts of the company she works for, possibly for the rest of her life, despite being “successful” in the business sense (and having picked up a new partner along the way). It’s Kayo who gets off with the comparatively happy ending; she quits the company entirely, and leaves to pursue love and happiness, things more important than success and failure. It’s honestly a surprisingly romantic ending for something that’s otherwise so vicious. Of course, not for Junko, who in the final page of the manga literally vanishes into darkness to join the other behind-the-scenes power brokers who run the company and Japan’s finances in general. I guess who really “won” is a matter of perspective, but I know who I’d rather be. (And not just because I’d rather have Junko making all of those twisted, sadistic grimaces at me, but you didn’t hear me say that.)
And that’ll do us for the second week of February. As with last week, I’m going to directly request that you drop a donation if you like reading these columns. They’re my only source of income, and every penny really does help a lot.
See you next week, but before I go, allow me to leave you with this week’s Bonus Thought, a sacred legend from the old days.
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