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, I missed last week, and as I alluded to the week before that, I’m experiencing a bit of end-of-season burnout. Still, I wanted to try to get an at least mostly complete Weekly Orbit to you today. We have some season finales and a few less permanent things. I hope you enjoy.

Anime – Seasonal

Call of The Night – Season 2, Episode 12 (Finale)

A really sweet sendoff for Call of The Night, here.

I really like that we’re not just abandoning Anko as a character now that her arc is “over,” and I will be honest, while it’s not for nearly as grandiose reasons, her comments about feeling like you’ve gotten older but not really grown up, and about wasting the last decade of her life, really hit home very hard for me. Not to be dramatic, but as I’ve sometimes discussed elsewhere on this site I sometimes feel the same way due to my disabilities. Accordingly, I think this is maybe the most I’ve ever liked the character.

As for Nazuna and Ko, I am happy to see their relationship developing as it has. Ending the season by cutting to black on the chomp (because bites are their private thing, now, you see) followed by the “Call of The Night” needle drop was just brilliantly classy. Good episode, good season, good show.

Dandadan – Season 2, Episode 12 (Season Finale)

Another example of that with Dandadan here. A great finale from what’s just been a pretty consistently great season of a great show. A robot vs. kaiju showdown just makes sense as a way to end an arc for something as rambunctious as Dandadan. I particularly like how the robot goes from very toku-esque (and a bit goofy looking) to a very Daicon-y thing with a flaming head by the end of the battle. And of course we end on the introduction of another new character to the anime, who I am excited to get more spotlight next time around.

Admittedly! The upcoming arc is maybe my least favorite of the manga? It’s….an odd one, to say the least. But it has its high points, too, so I’m sure Dandadan will be reliable with delivering bangers for many seasons to come.

My Dress-Up Darling – Season 2, Episode 12 (Season Finale)

And bringing up the third spot on the tic tac toe board, Dress-Up Darling also delivers a lovely end to a lovely season. I don’t have a ton to say about the finale, I’m happy that the two character arcs here resolved the way they did though. I think Akira actually just being a huge lesbian is a pretty unsurprising plot twist, but I was still really delighted with how they handled it. The Coffin cosplay scenes were also really great, I think this is easily the most blood I’ve ever seen in a gentle romcom!

Overall just a fantastic season of television. I’m hoping the third season, should they make more, isn’t too far off. We’ll see!

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 12 (Series Finale)

This was the first full-length TV anime of the season to end, at least as far as stuff I was watching. My verdict? This was fine! Not great, not awful. It was fine.

When the show started I said something to the effect of, if you can’t pull off “good,” “weird” is a solid second thing to aim for. I think maybe more than I expected, Necronomico is a great example of that. This is a show that has much less to say than it thinks it does, has generally messy and unfocused characterization, and its core conceits are all just generally kind of stupid. But it was largely entertaining week to week just off of novelty and audacity, and I think that’s worth something. This is a truly textbook Seasonal Anime, capital S, capital A. I cannot imagine anyone remembering this aired by this time next year, except maybe because of the ChatGPT subs controversy when the first episode dropped.

About the final episode, I can’t say I have a ton to comment on. I will say that I think any finale in which the main character gets to pilot her girlfriend, grown to kaiju size for the sake of a fighting game match, is an at least solid finale. I also like that, perhaps intentionally but perhaps not, the game Nyarlathotep—sorry, Tick Tock Man—comes up with seems kind of shitty. Everyone loves fighting games where you have to button mash so hard your fingers bleed, right? I also really appreciated the gag where Miko somehow magics up a proper fight stick after being frustrated with the gamepad. Also the symbol sealing thing felt like a missed opportunity to incorporate the Yellow Sign into the show. That would’ve been a fun gag.

The epilogue was honestly a little much. I appreciated seeing Miko reunited with her girlfriend, and the hints that Cthulu might still be in there (and a similar hint with Gua’s host streamer) are fun and tantalizing if they ever decide they want to follow this show up. (Frankly, it seems very unlikely that this show did well enough to warrant that, but I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong. I think the actual IP is owned by Cygames, so maybe they don’t care about that.) But I really had no desire to see most of the other characters again; the mangaka, the actress, etc. are just not memorable and I think if we really felt the need to establish that they were still alive, a simple montage of a couple seconds, tops, would’ve sufficed just fine. I’m also a little mad they never killed Eita, he really seemed like he was asking for it and if they do make more of this, I simply refuse to buy into any attempted redemption arc. Try harder, man.

In any case, yeah, that’s Necronomico. A solidly decent show that I will probably think about only very occasionally for the remainder of my life. Hardly the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but definitely in the bottom third or so of anime I’ve seen this year. I really liked Cthulu, and that’s probably the most credit I can give it.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 12

I know I’m overusing the word here, but this is another lovely episode from Ruri. Here, Ruri comes across an old crystal radio owned by her grandfather while snooping around her attic. This is a bit of a shift for the show in that this episode is as much about radio as it is about mineralogy, but I think it ties the two fields together very nicely. In addition to exploring the overlap between these fields, this is also the first time Aoi (Ruri’s gyaru-looking friend from school) gets to be much of a character, which is also nice.

I also think that the scene at the end, where Ruri finally gets the radio working again out near a shrine, is a very nice summation of the “point” of Ruri Rocks as an overall work.

What we do today can connect us, however fleetingly, to the endless yesterdays before us, whether that time scale is across human lifetimes or across aeons.

On a more grounded level, it is also nice to see Ruri working through her insecurities: after saying in last week’s episode that what she doesn’t isn’t research because that’s something only “smart people” do, she here opts to take geology as an elective at school. I should also commend the use of the ending theme as diagetic music. That was brilliant.

Turkey! Time to Strike – Episode 11

Have you ever played bowling with your life on the line?

This is truly just a delightful show. I think something that’s largely gone unsaid about it is that despite the very different literal events than most other anime in this broad girls’ drama genre, it is fundamentally wired the same way. The characters have similar arcs and the bonds between them are not unlike what we would have in a much more traditional show in this genre. The main difference is in the stakes, which are outright fatal here as opposed to the much lower ones present in what would otherwise be Turkey‘s peers.

A decade ago—to the month, in fact—SCHOOL-LIVE!, Gakkou Gurashi as it’s also known, pulled off a similar trick. That anime similarly borrows language from outright horror material to obfuscate the fact that it is, fundamentally, still a story about friendship and caring for the people close to you. The difference, of course, is that in most anime where girls compete in sports tournaments, their lives are not literally at stake if they lose.

The latter is what leads to Turkey’s second biggest tonal pivot, coming in behind only the initial switchup in the first episode. Just when things seem like they might be resolved a bit too conveniently by all of our heroes getting strikes in this tournament that the enemy feudal lord has agreed to, he changes the rules and puts them at a marked disadvantage, betraying their trust and any notion that he’s someone that could be seen as respectable.

I am pretty damn sure this is all a fakeout, of course. The finale will end with our heroines battered but not beaten, and they will tearfully depart to their own time. (There is always a second throw, recall.) But if I’m wrong, that’s actually even more interesting, so barring some generational last-episode fumble, I am still deeply interested in what Turkey will do in its last moments.

I mentioned Gakkou Gurashi. That anime is a classic, and I don’t think Turkey! is quite that good, but it’s definitely one of the more interesting things to air this year. I don’t think it’s out of the question to say it’s one of the better ones, too.

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