The Weekly Orbit is a (sometimes) weekly 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 at least some familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

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Hi folks, bit of a light week here, and also one with not very many pictures. Hopefully that’s fine, I’ve been going through it a little bit.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of The Night – Season 2, Episode 8

Call of The Night does not go full horror anime very often, but when it does….brr.

So, yeah, Kyouko Mejiro is Anko. We could probably have seen this coming, but this episode confirms it in a tragic, delirious fever dream of blood and violence. I honestly have very little to say here, other than to remark that this episode absolutely excelled at imparting just how tragic Kyouko and Nazuna’s falling out was. I also suspect that there’s more to Kyouko’s father suddenly becoming a blood-starved vampire than we were shown here. After all, how exactly he was turned is a bit up in the air.

Dandadan – Season 2, Episode 8

I don’t think I remember the fight featured throughout the bulk of episode eight here being as memorable as this in the manga.

Which is strange, because when considered on its own terms, it’s pretty unique even for Dandadan. What we have here is a strength-building throwdown against a cadre of ghosts, taking the form of classical musicians. Primarily, this fight serves to do two things; give Aira something to do in this storyline, since she’s been absent for much of season two so far, and, more importantly, build and her and Okarun’s sense of “rhythm” to make them better fighters.

The show accomplishes this in a delightfully literal way with the ghost musicians, and I have to say that the chalk-white look really works well for the surreality of this episode. At about the halfway mark, the ghost of Beethoven summons a quartet of singing giants, who break into “Ode to Joy”, one of the ancestral bangers of western music, and it was around then that I realized I was watching another casual triumph in an anime absolutely stuffed with them.

If you want pure hype, though, next week is looking to top even this, as Okarun finishes this episode by promising to use his newfound strength to throw down with Evil Eye. Predictably—though not in an unwelcome way—we end things on a cliffhanger.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 8

If we want to say that Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show has a main flaw, and I think we probably do, I would say it’s that it has a poor command of its own strengths.

What the show is good at: putting its characters into wacky (and life-threatening) situations, basic and broad character writing, effectively tying the death games’ stakes to the lives of its characters.

What Necronomico is not good at: social commentary, more complex character writing, anything with immediate (that is to say, visible to us) stakes outside the lives of its own characters.

This is a problem, because episode eight is mostly about the latter group of things. We zoom out here, taking a broad view of the world as seen in Necronomico. Our main heroines go on a TV show and the series attempts to recontextualize its own past writing, shaming its audience by having a sleazeball TV exec character refer to Kanna as a marketable tragic heroine. The problem there is that “marketable tragic heroine” is pretty much exactly what Kanna is. Her more complex traits—relatively speaking—mostly consist of being a bit rude sometimes. She’s not a perfect angel, but that’s hardly an actual character flaw. Puzzlingly, Necronomico seems to think it is.

Similarly, the attempt to drag and drop Eita into the role of a cult leader is just baffling. I’m not going to say it’s unrealistic—the rise of Elon Musk has proven that people will bleed and die even for the dorkiest and least charismatic leaders possible as long as they give them suitable permission to enact violence—but it’s not necessarily super compelling. He remains a dead spot in the series’ cast.

And there’s not really a lot that happens in this episode other than these two things? Sure, getting a proper introduction to our Vatican witch hunter type character, Joe, is nice, but beyond that it’s all setup. Thankfully, the final game seems suitably deranged, as our cast have been dropped in a freezing wasteland—Kadath, in fact—and have to somehow take down the four main Old God antagonists on their own. So I am hoping this episode is more of a speedbump than a sign that the show’s final third is going to suck. At bare minimum, I hope we at least get to see Cthulu show off at some point during this game, as she was mostly absent from this episode.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 8

We continue the theme of artificial minerals in this week’s Ruri Rocks. To be honest, most of this episode didn’t capture my imagination terribly much despite being perfectly fine, but I liked the scenes in the factory at the end. Ruri’s concern over whether she’s “allowed” to like Zincite reminds me, funnily enough, of some similar thoughts I’ve had about, say, Detroit agate.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episode 7

I’m not entirely sure what to think of this plot development, but the scene with Mai and Satsuki fighting over Renako is pretty great. I have to give a special nod to the, I’m not even sure what to call it, evil Super Nintendo music? It plays when Satsuki shows Mai the photo of her and Renako kissing. A great scene in an episode I thought was merely pretty good, which when the last several have been great is a slight step down.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

Dominion Tank Police (OVA)

Well, this was just a bit puzzling. An interesting thing about these old OVAs is that they’re often baffling in ways that, on the surface, seem completely different from how a contemporary anime would be baffling, but taken in a broader view you end up with a lot of the same root causes.

For Dominion Tank Police, that’s basic incoherence. I can only guess here, but I think the two story arcs adapted for this four part OVA must be from quite far apart in the original manga, since that’s the only way I can think to account for this thing’s bizarre tone. We start with an extremely politically-charged argument between a mayor and a police chief about the role of police in society, wherein the chief advocates using nukes on criminals(!!), and from there it seems like the series is attempting to sort of hamfistedly parody buddy cop narratives. But this reading doesn’t really survive contact with episode two, which seems to take the cops’ side.

We ditch all this entirely for the second part of the series, consisting of episodes three and four, which exchange the over-the-top comedy action of the first half for something slower and more philosophical. I wouldn’t say the change in tone works to the show’s favor exactly, but it makes a kind of half-sense in the moment, even if it does leave almost the entire cast feeling like they’ve been replaced with different characters halfway through. I particularly like the weird explorations into conceptual sci fi toward the end; artificial humans, a winged environmental fairy named Greenpeace, blunt and unsubtle musings on the nature of man. Will any of this be elaborated upon to feel “satisfying” in the conventional sense? No, and given the, to put it lightly, troubling political sympathies of the series, I can’t cleanly recommend Dominion Tank Police. But I admit it’s entertaining on a moment to moment basis in a stoner-flick kind of way, and I appreciate that about it. Again, not something I’d show to just anyone, but it has its charms. Charms helped along, admittedly, by the across-the-board strong visual presentation. A sakuga-head watching this would find enough to enthuse over to keep their attention, and even if that’s not your specific focus, the show is sharply directed throughout and has a great use of strong color; lots of dark navy blues and purples, burnt oranges, and fluorescent blues and reds. (Like a police siren, you see.)

Even aside from everything else I’ve outlined here, the catgirl criminals are an excellent pair of characters (and so fashionable!) and the show’s music is unimpeachable.

Manga

Big Love From Ultra Deep Space – Chapters 1-5

This….is okay!

Only five chapters in, it’s hard to make many claims about Big Love From Ultra Deep Space. The manga is about an alien princesses being betrothed to an ordinary (if gloomy) high school girl. So far, my main takeaways are that the character designs are all lovely, and tonally it’s pretty cute, with a lot of nice domestic scenes between our leads as the princess settles into her life on Earth.

It does however try to tackle some more serious subject matter, too, with the pair’s classmates initially harboring some suspicion of the princess, the lead girl having a troubled past, and so on. Unfortunately the handling of these aspects has so far been a bit contrived. There’s definitely still time for the manga to improve in this regard, and the fifth and most recent chapter is definitely a bit better than the previous four, so it may be a case of the mangaka—Ashidaka Woz, no relation to Scott The, presumably—finding their narrative legs.

If the manga has a central theme, it’s this:

There’s something really beautiful in the sentiment expressed here, the idea that just inherently, we often need others to see the best parts of ourselves. That people mean different things to different other people. I think if it pursues this core theme, Deep Space could really put together something special.

As is, it’s mostly cute and not a lot else, but we’ll see how it develops as time goes on. If nothing else, the art is beautiful, so it’s not hard to recommend off the back of that alone.

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