I have lost any semblance of consistency when it comes to labelling these columns. I promise I’ll go back and fix them all eventually. Eventually.
This past Tuesday, Chainsaw Man ended. The wildly popular shonen manga had been going on in its second part for quite a long time, and I think to some extent no ending could’ve really satisfied the fanbase at large. Nonetheless, the ending we actually got seems to have really pissed a lot of people off. You can find reams of posts complaining about it of all shapes and sizes, and your standard suite of video essays and the like as well.
Someone who did not hate the Chainsaw Man ending was yours truly. I want to re-read the whole series before making any big proclamations, but I think it wrapped up the emotional arc of the story in a way that felt both hard-fought and worthwhile. It stung, but it meant something.
Now, will I still think that after having re-read the series? I don’t know. But! It did get me thinking about the array of popular anime and manga widely considered to have “a bad ending” and the various things they may have in common.
Oshi no Ko, anyone who is even tangentially aware of manga discourse at large already knows, is widely put in that category. (I myself have been exposed, just yesterday, to a Youtube thumbnail that loudly proclaims CSM’s finale “worse than Oshi no Ko, THE END!” Such dramatic proclamations not even a week out from the last chapter, my goodness!) And the reception to CSM honestly made me want to reevaluate my own opinion on this series, despite their otherwise lacking really anything in common, because I never want to be the sort of person who just declares that something is ruined forever because it didn’t head in the exact direction I wanted it to.
This in mind, and being honest with myself, I actually think the final episode of Oshi no Ko‘s third season is mostly pretty good.
A lot of the episode’s forehalf is devoted to Ruby trying to come to terms with the absence of both her former mother from her previous life, Tendouji Marina [the legendary Inoue Kikuko], who made a somewhat unexpected return to the narrative last week, as well as that of her current later mother, Ai. And honestly? It mostly works. We get to see Ruby repeatedly stumble over a bit in the 15 Year Lie script where it dictates that her character let her mother, who, in the fiction of the film never loved her, go. Predictably this absolutely tears Ruby apart, and she can’t get through the read, despite Kana’s attempts to coach her.
Name a time a friend gave you advice that made you look at them like this.
In a general sense, we probably should’ve gotten to this earlier—maybe toward the start of this season, rather than the cosplay episodes? Just a thought—but it does matter that it’s here at all. I was beginning to worry we’d never get to see Ruby’s side of things at all. By consequence, if there’s a standout star of the third season it is unquestionably Igoma Yurie, Ruby’s voice actress, who delivers some of the best work of her entire career here. Most of her dialogue, especially the strained rants about how her former mother must have loved her (until of course she finds out that that wasn’t really the case), is delivered in a pained, strangled yelp that really sells the character’s sheer despair at her situation. And once the episode hits its first big bombshell, where Aqua reveals himself as the former Dr. Amemiya Gorou, she starts full-on blubbering/ugly-crying in the best way possible. (You can literally hear her sniffling through the line-reads. That’s called commitment where I’m from.) Igoma doesn’t have a ton of other credits to her name, so if nothing else, I hope her performance here opens some doors for her even more than being Ruby in the first place likely already has. I would love to hear her in things more often.
As for Aqua finally revealing himself as the former Dr. What’s-his-name? I think around now makes sense, if he was going to hold onto it this long in the first place. (Narratively, that is. From a What Would You Do? sort of viewpoint he should’ve done this ages ago, but that’s not a terribly insightful statement.) So does the way their relationship entirely turns on a dime when he drops that piece of info, as she immediately lets go of her hatred of the brother that she thought had selfishly sold their mother out. Arguably, this stuff is way more manipulative of him than any of the more overt cases with Kana or Akane. (And the series knows this, too, because it makes sure to have the death goddess crow girl character who’s been present up and down this season wink and nudge at us about it. Keep her in mind, in fact, we’ll be coming back to her.) Still, it’s a solid beat, and while the flashback montage about time that Aqua and Ruby spent together as Gorou and Sarina is definitely pretty cloying, it’s still sweet enough to mostly work.
(There’s also this brilliant piece of comedy buried in the montage. I’m not a medical professional, so maybe I’m missing something here but you’re not supposed to do that, right? You’re definitely not.)
Now does all of this make this whole bit, this whole sequence, automatically a good piece of storytelling? No, an emotional beat working on a craftsmanship level is different from it being the right choice for the story. And honestly, I think the episode’s structure works against it here. A cut after the scene where Aqua reveals his past identity, and us being left to sit with Ruby’s bounceback for a week, would’ve done wonders. Especially when she drops this little line after reminiscing about Gorou’s “promise” to marry her when she came of age:
A black screen blinking the words “THEY FUCKED” in all capital letters would be more subtle.
It is absolutely hysterical, and probably inevitable, that we’ve ended up at incest. If the show simply ended here, the movie in production and Aqua and Ruby abandoning their revenge quest to be left to their presumably torrid reincarnation incestuous love affair, I would have nothing but respect for it. Sadly, we don’t live in a world where anime are allowed to end—or even end episodes—on heavy implications of incest. It does also very much feel rather rushed, like we’re getting this all out of the way so we can say that Ruby had a full character arc—something perhaps true but only on a technicality—so we can rush headlong to the show’s conclusion. Oshi no Ko has of course been announced for a fourth season, probably its last, so I will need to wait until then to evaluate how right I am about this. (I could of course also read the manga, but if I’ve held off for this long, what’s the sense in doing that now?) But I suspect I am. Akasaka has just never seemed terribly interested in Ruby as compared to Aqua, and while this episode has some of the best material the character’s ever been given, it really does seem like it’s supposed to put the bow on her development. Granted! There is still the unresolved business with her former mother, so maybe that will complicate things in some worthwhile way. I’d love to see more unhinged Ruby, it feels like we barely got to know her. I nonetheless remain skeptical.
That said, I can complain all day, but for what it sets out to do, I think the first half of the episode more works than doesn’t. The only real contention is how worthwhile what it’s trying to do actually is, and I remain undecided on that front. (As I’ve said, I really do just keep going back and forth on this show.) The second half of the episode is also good, and unlike the first, is so in pretty straightforward ways. In large part, it’s a character study of Miyako, the boss of Strawberry Productions, a constant background presence throughout most of the series but who never really got an episode of her own up to this point.
It is probably the only focus she’ll ever get, but the series makes the most of it, walking us through Miyako’s arrival in Tokyo, and her early career as a model. It’s very broad-stroke, but it’s solid stuff. Made all the stranger by how she chooses to express some of this.
Miyako latches onto an extended video game metaphor while explaining her life. Bluntly, in-context, this is one of the weirdest rambles of its kind I’ve ever heard a character go on. Aside from the central simile of “fame is like a video game” seeming like something a Republican-era Nicki Minaj would come up with, it’s kind of a stretch in the first place? For whatever reason, this whole rant gets the full visual metaphor treatment and we get to see Miyako fight the men she seduced in her youth as an RPG encounters and the like. This makes it no less bizarre, but it’s an admirable amount of committing to the bit.
This all concludes with her reuniting with Saitou Ichigo, Strawberry Productions’ former owner and her own ex, when “randomly” running into him at a bar. (This was, of course, orchestrated by Aqua, actually.) And leads to Miyako herself recommitting to her obligations to Aqua and Ruby. There’s a broad motherhood theme that runs through all this, an idea that Miyako is more of a mother to the twins, perhaps especially to Ruby, than either of her own mothers ever were. (And she outright calls herself their mom more than once.) There’s something there, but for a show whose premise is so entwined with family, Oshi no Ko‘s ideas about it have always been its weakest thematic expressions. Still, it’s a worthwhile thought and I hope the show does something with it in the long term. That Kana line from the rehearsal scene does feel an awful lot like foreshadowing.
Beyond these two main plots, this episode just also has a genuine sense of fun that’s been missing (or at least not as present as I’d like) in the show for a good while, now. The show’s main issues have always been its hypocrisy and the inescapable sense that it’s kind of didactic, the comedic leanings help take the edge off of both of those things. Aside from the usual bevy of Good Kana Faces, we also have, for example, Pirate Yuri??? Why not, right? That’s a good thing, even if it does still make me wish the show just leaned into its strengths more.
In-universe, this is a commercial for body wipes. Yes, really.
Aside from a brief post-credits scene, the very last thing to happen in this episode is actually, deliberately, quite funny! Gotanda, the film’s director, laments that the casting has been squared away with the exception of the child actors, to play a young Ruby and Aqua. This is where the character officially known as just Crow Girl [Kino Hina], who I’ve been calling the death goddess in my columns—since, you know, that’s what I thought she was—re-enters the picture. Crow Girl shows up in the closing minutes of this episode to do what she does best, be vague and portentous and deliberately needle Aqua. Aqua, in the rare bit of scheming from him this season to actually have an impact beyond being eyeroll-inducing, gets an idea. He asks her if she’s, you know, physically at least, a normal human with parents and a government ID and all that good stuff. She smugly responds yes, that her “vessel,” just like his, is on the surface a normal human. Aqua then drops his funniest line of the entire season by asking her a simple question.
The anime adaptation of hit narou-kei series Reborn As a Portentous Death God in Another World That’s Actually Just Modern Japan Again, I’m Forced to Become A Child Actress by The Teenage Boy I’ve Been Tormenting?! is coming to a TV station near you sooner than you think!
And from there we cut to credits! That’s literally how the season end! This is a good thing, of course. It’s entirely the kind of bold audacity that made me interested in this series in the first place. Does this episode alone being pretty good mean that all is forgiven and we are guaranteed a satisfying conclusion? Of course not, but it’s a good sign from a show that’s been short on those for a while.
In any case, any final judgment of Oshi no Ko as an anime will have to wait until after it’s complete. So I leave you with this: I’ll see you when I see you, B*Komachi fans. Because I’m me, it’ll probably be back under the Let’s Watch banner, too.
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