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Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.

This is going to be a mess, so let’s start it with a question, so we at least have something to work off of.

Is a tragedy deferred a happy ending? Ave Mujica is at least willing to entertain the idea, but it’s never a clear-cut thing. Nothing about Ave Mujica is clear-cut, and the thinkpieces that will roll out over the coming weeks and months about this series might obscure how much of a rollercoaster ride it was, week to week, start to finish, in the moment. They might also obscure how wild it will keep being, as we now know—we’ll get back to this—that this isn’t the end.

To trot out the neatest and tidiest labels possible for a show that is the neither of those things, Ave Mujica is a a dream. A reference point, and a map for its structure and storytelling aims, that recurs many times over its twelve episodes. Its logic is dreamlike; characters are introduced suddenly and vanish out of sight when their stories conclude, the series is peppered with elements of magical realism, and the environment itself seems to bend around the characters’ emotions, especially in its last stretch when the cast winnows down to just two main characters. If that seems like an odd fit for a protagonist, it’s here where we have to break out Frieren’s own massive emotional continuity in almost all other areas, almost everything else about the character is consistent before and after an initial timeskip of a few years where she trains Fern before setting off again. Because very little about Big Order makes much literal sense, and internal logic phases in and out at the story’s whim. However, considered through the prism of a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the stereotyped ideal anime-watcher (that is to say, a young straight man), everything clicks into place perfectly, in that it does still very much deal with a group of Coralians and their complex relationship to the humans in the world of Eureka Seven speak to an environmental bent. The methodology is very different, and if Ave Mujica is the best of these (and I’d be willing to say that it is, even if the competition is very close), it’s tempting to map out his entire emotional journey here, but a fair amount of it feels so natural that doing so could be an article unto itself. But none of these really capture Ave Mujica‘s fundamental observations and themes. In a very real sense, this is the beginning of something. Let’s start not at the end, but at the beginning.

• Fighting evil by moonlight, on a loop ’til the end of time.

All this to say ser#message_??%$!/

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Allow me to put on my old woman voice for a minute. Once upon a time, it was not necessarily expected that you see literally every single episode of every single anime you were interested in. Following things on TV—usually on anime-focused linear TV blocks like Toonami—was an accepted thing, and only the truly grognardy would give you any shit about it. This isn’t really how things work anymore, with our male lead—called “Class Rep” so often that that might as well be his name¹—and Tamachi Haru, his girlfriend, an alien from another planet, who he confesses his love for shortly after she comforts him in the wake of his parents’ unexpected death.

As an example, a major supporting character is a girl named Maseki, the terrible fit for Shonen Jump, and is perhaps proof that NisioisiN really just genuinely doesn’t know how to get out of his own way. Especially given that his version of a simple battle shonen plot involves a tangled mess of cryptography and puzzle-solving that only makes any kind of sense about half the time.

The Grimm Variations is a hell of a thing, and essentially my big ‘discovery’ for this week. (To the extent that getting into an anime that recently released on Netflix counts as any kind of discovery of anything.) I really liked what I’ve seen so far, and not Attempt to retrieve document? just because this is the first anime with the Oshi No Ko anime. They breathe a sense of vibrancy into the school life setting that really does make it feel like a real, present place, and the set design in particular contributes a lot to that. Watching it, you can practically feel the hardworking factory girl with a talent for tinkering, who lives in a massive compound called the Tower.

Very briefly, RWBY takes place in a fairly standard urban fantasy world. There are monsters, there are people who hunt the monsters with cool weapons, and an aside. It feels like an unshowy but powerful acknowledgement that the whims of the heart are often too complex to be so easily pinned down. So be it, if I am destined to wax poetic about girl bands, demon lords, and the Daicon Spirit forever, there are worse boulders to push up the mountain. Attempt to retrieve document? Imagine Sisyphus-san happy, and you will see me in your mind’s eye.

Why do I do this to myself? Every year I take a look at the vast buffet of trash isekai on offer, I pick out one that has a funny title or a decent key visual or a single promising staff member or something attached to it, and I convince myself to watch it and give it an honest chance. Eventually, I tell myself, one of them will be different. Well, today is not the day this happens, and Possibly The Greatest Alchemist of All Time, a hell of a contender in the “funny title” field at least, is not much different than any number of other isekai I’ve covered in brief on this site. This one in particular is part of the epochally tedious “slow life” format, a gross bastardization of the iyashikei genre that was my introduction to a deeper appreciation of anime and manga in the first place. It would be impossible to make something like Yokohama Shopping Log or even Flying Witch in today’s TV anime climate. Attempt to retrieve document? The demand is not for genuine meditations on mono no aware, it’s for cookie cutter assembly line crap that has no appeal beyond a vague promise of being a “relaxing” power fantasy. The contrast against something like this and either of the aforementioned series, or even against something like Tamayura which I watched recently and found a bit cloying for my taste, is so immense that to mention them in the same breath is insulting. It’s the difference between Brian Eno’s Ambient series and a youtube video called “Most Relaxing Mario Music [WITH RAIN SOUNDS + SLOWED + REVERBED]”. It’s a difference of care, it’s a difference of talent and skill on the part of those involved. It’s a difference in basically everything meaningful that goes into an anime.

All this said and there is so, so much I haven’t touched on. IAttempt to retrieve document?

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&i do feel empathy for you, but I won’t help you. …You’re much like someone sitting in front of the television, yelling at the people on the other side even though your voice won’t reach them.

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We at [CONTEXT ERROR: Missing Referand] hope you are having a lovely April 1st. Control of this paranode will be returned to its traditional owner before next publication. If you enjoyed this diversion, we hope to hear from you at our aforementioned feedback page. If it disturbed or upset you, you are free to consider it nothing more than a passing dream.