Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.
Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
Of all the anime from this season I thought I would still be writing about several months deep, this was maybe the last on the list. I didn’t even do a first impressions piece on Level 1 Demon Lord & One-Room Hero back when it premiered! To be honest, I simply wasn’t that taken with its first episode. There, the series sets up its central conceit; typical JRPG-style fantasy hero experiences gifted-kid burnout and grows up into a total slacker (same, dude), and is harassed into shaping up by the reincarnated form of his former nemesis. Together, they are the titular One-Room Hero, Max [Yuuichi Nakamura], and Level 1 Demon Lord, usually just referred to as that, but who we’ll call Maou, going by some info from AniList [Naomi Oozora]. (I think “Maou” might literally just mean “Lord” or something, but whatever.) That first episode was decently funny, but it wasn’t anything revolutionary. And its second followed suit; it was notably horny, for sure. And in terms of technical presentation, it was well-done (worth noting in the depths of production delays and jank that have defined much of the season), but it seemed like that was about all it was.
But, I kept watching, on and off, and the show started to take a very odd turn. The third episode introduced the show’s first proper arc, and it was here that, while retaining its signature zany comedy, the series started to take on a different tone as well. Beginning with the introduction of Fred [Yoshitsugu Matsuoka], one of Max’s former companions and, presently, a stooge for the government of the kingdom that they once all fought for, the series begins to question what would actually happen to the heroes of a traditional fantasy story if, indeed, they defeated the big bad guy and saved the day.
One-Room Hero postulates that they’d be rewarded with positions of influence, and it’s what they do with those positions that gives the series its unique identity; one-half a sharp, witty look at contemporary geopolitics as filtered through a typical fantasy world (albeit one with cars, cellphones, and the internet), and one-half a screwball comedy about a burned-out slacker. Max squanders his position. Fred becomes a behind-the-scenes power player interested in the kingdom’s welfare before anything else, including any kind of morality. Another former companion, Leo [Hiro Shimono], leads the breakaway Republic of Gamma, situated in heavily-terraformed former wasteland. The fate of the fourth, Yuria [Ami Koshimizu], has yet to be elaborated upon.
Thus, One-Room Hero becomes the vanishingly rare contemporary fantasy anime to actually try to address the sorts of things that monarchies—the most common form of government in fantasy anime—actually do. Specifically; the show’s wit for satirizing imperialism is shockingly pointed. This is most obvious with the ongoing Kingdom / Gamma conflict. You had better believe that, while nothing here is clean black and white, the show largely takes the Gammaites’ side. Leo is repeatedly shown to be pushing for a peaceful end to Gamma’s ongoing conflict with the Kingdom, whose forces are generally portrayed as unreasonable and only interested in Gamma at all because what they once dismissed as a wasteland happens to actually be chockablock with useful natural resources. (“Magic ore” here. I guess making it oil would’ve been a little too on the nose.) In episode 7, a government minister—unsubtly named Grimm—on the side of the kingdom approaches Fred and mentions that he’s working out a peace deal with the Gammaite government. He’s not, of course; in actuality, the visit sets up a false-flag terrorist attack that drives Fred to become an even more brutal and sinister agent of his nation. This as a capstone to an episode that is mostly about side character Zenia [Youko Hikasa] comedically failing to be a spy.
That attack, of course, is perfect pretense for war, which every important character on both sides of the conflict is well aware of. The buildup to the inevitable comprises most of episode 8, and that, as of the time of this writing, is where things stand. The show has never lost its comedic edge (and it remains egregiously horny), but it’s also genuinely pretty tense at the moment, as it heads into what is presumably its final arc. (The manga is still being released, of course, so there is presumably more after that. Still, we’re obviously hitting a big breaking point in the story.)
All told, between its genuine comedic chops and its cynical, satirical look at the modern political landscape, there’s an awful lot to like about One-Room Hero. Admittedly, the aforementioned horniness is going to put some people off, which I do understand—there really are a lot of pervy camera angles—but I don’t personally think it’s a huge dent in the show.
I won’t blow smoke and say that One-Room Hero is necessarily essential viewing. But I do think it’s quite good, and between this and Helck, it’s been a solid season for amusingly offbeat fantasy anime with a more serious undertone than you might expect. That’s a pretty specific thing for a season to be good for, but it’s worth a lot in what has, overall, been a rather weak year for the medium. There have been obvious standouts of course, but if One-Room Hero proves anything, it’s that even in apparent dry spells, there are often anime that remain under-sung and overlooked.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Header image from Lupin III: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. I haven’t finished it, so please no spoilers!
This is not a goodbye. At least not permanently, but things are going to be slowing down significantly here on Magic Planet Anime, and that very well might be permanent.
There are a lot of reasons for this, which we can broadly sort into the emotional and material. The former are more relevant to why any of you actually read this stuff, so let’s start there.
I have been, as I alluded to in last year’s Year-End Ranking article, very depressed for quite a long while now (we’ll get to why in a bit), and it’s seriously impacted my ability to keep up with seasonals on a simple schedule basis, and it’s also really dented my ability to follow even very simple plotlines of what I am watching. I get very bad “brain fog,” and it sucks. I frequently miss entire lines of dialogue and find myself having to rewind what I’m watching, etc. This has also dinged how much I actually enjoy these anime, because if I’m not keeping the plot straight I am having a much harder time parsing anything deeper than the literal goings-on. The haze is real, and it sucks.
By and large, I still like most anime I actually finish, but the amount of anime I do finish per season has been dropping for a while now, and even if I like a show, keeping up with it can feel like a chore because of all this. At this point, I’m a fair bit behind on even some shows I’ve really enjoyed this season, like Yohane the Parhelion. Instead, I’ve increasingly turned into one of those people who watches random old anime I hadn’t previously seen. (Not for nothing is my Devil Lady article one of the better things I’ve written recently.)
None of this is to say that I’m about to turn into one of those people who only watches Patlabor and berates others for watching anything made after the switch to digipaint, but it’s hard not to notice the change. And I guess, really, that is what this article is about. Because while this is not a goodbye, it is definitely the start of a different, slower phase of Magic Planet Anime’s existence. I do still want to write, but I want to feel like I don’t have to write quiteas much. Possibly not nearly as much. Accordingly; another part of what I’m doing here is just giving myself permission to write a less if it will (hopefully) make what I actually do write a little better. I have no delusions about turning into the greatest anime critic who ever lived overnight, but maybe I can finally dream up some things to say about anime that are not “this sucks”, “this is pretty good”, or “this is weird;” a pattern that I feel I’ve been stuck in for the past good while. There is more to this medium than those three points on the chart.
All this to say; I need to do some soul searching. I don’t really have a strong idea of what I want this site to be or accomplish anymore, and that really sucks. I feel like “I just want to write about anime” is not quite enough anymore. So I’m putting a lot of it on hold. I’m definitely not going to be doing any weekly watches this season—although you’ve probably guessed that by now—and my other columns are going to be very sporadic things. Probably coming out in occasional fits and spurts when I manage to get my head sorted for a week or two. I want to get a Year-End List out again this year, but beyond that, I really don’t want to promise anything at all.
With a few half-exceptions; I have a few commissions that I still need to finish, and my ongoing podcast projects with Sredni are going to continue (however slowly or quickly that may be), but otherwise, I am releasing myself from all of my imagined writing “commitments.” All I have done is stress myself out for no good reason, at the end of the day. I want to care more about whether what I’m writing is any good than I do if I’m putting out 2 articles a month or 20. My hope is that, however many or few pieces I write over the remainder of 2023, those that do go up will at least give you something to appreciate or think about. There will be more articles this year, and I’m hoping that maybe putting the brakes on my attempts to be ‘relevant’ will make those articles that do come out more interesting, whether they’re involved analyses or off-the-cuff ramblings.
So, those are the personal reasons. What about the material ones?
Agh.
Dear reader, have you ever been considered a legal non-entity by your state government? No? I recommend avoiding it, if at all possible.
I don’t want to go into too many details here, but suffice it to say, the ten-car pileup of health problems, legal issues, and the intertangling thereof that plagued me last year has only gotten worse this year. This is definitely a massive contributing factor to my stress, and I have spent a decent chunk of this year so depressed that I have genuinely wondered if I’m ever going to sort this out, and I’ll cop to having contemplated suicide more than once.
For complex reasons, a lot of the basic necessities of being an adult in the US (health insurance, a driver’s license or equivalent, and a steady income, just to name a few) are denied to me. That’s all been true for pretty much the entire time I’ve been working on this site, and maybe that, more than the fiddlier and more emotional stuff, is the real reason I should be setting much of what I do on this site aside for a while. Not that the two aren’t intertwined; I’m starting to hit my limit with how much more of this crap I can take, and it’s definitely been affecting me mentally, as outlined above.
So, all of that is the very long version. I hope you’ll forgive me for being reluctant to offer a shorter one this time around, I think conveying the context for why I’m doing this is important, since I didn’t want to feel like I was just abandoning all of my regular readers to the wind. And as a result, I really struggled with putting this article together. (I had to cut a bunch of stuff that I imagine would’ve come off as just overly self-deprecatory, among other things. I’m not trying to commit emotional self-harm, here.) But in spite of everything, I’m pretty optimistic. I think—much like last year—I really just need some time away, and to do some reflecting on what I really want to do with my life, and how Magic Planet Anime fits into those plans.
I think I’ve gotten my point across by now, more or less. To a future filled with fewer, but hopefully better articles. To my own mental health. And to a brighter tomorrow. If I round up, I’m nearly 30. But life doesn’t end there, and otakudom doesn’t have to either.
See you when I see you, anime fans.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Shambolic Anime Podcast is a super-casual occasional format where myself and Julian M. of THEM Anime chat about whatever’s on our mind in the world of anime.
Today, on our inagural episode of this decidedly off-the-cuff, super-casual anime podcast, myself and Julian M. (of THEM Anime Reviews, previously also co-host of KeyFrames Forgotten and Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later. Both of which we intend to return to, I assure you!) shoot the breeze about one of the few things from this anime season that is neither particularly good nor entirely awful, the game battle light novel adaptation Liar, Liar. You can listen below.
You can follow Jane on Twitterhereand Julian on Twitter here.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
Sometimes, random chance just brings something to your doorstep.
I didn’t intend The Devil Lady to be my introduction to the Devilman series (or Go Nagai‘s work in general, for that matter). I simply happened to stumble upon a few episodes airing on one of PlutoTV‘s live channels, thought it looked interesting, and dived into it without much further thought. In all honesty, this is less of a review in the usual sense and more an attempt to just straighten out my own thoughts. (Although, re-reading this again a day after I first wrote it, aren’t they all?) I don’t regret watching the series, that much is certain, but it definitely steps on some pretty hot issues, likely without entirely intending to, and during the course of writing this I’ve learned some things that have recontextualized my already pretty-jumbled thoughts on even those elements. This is a complicated one, for better and worse in equal measure.
Part of all that is simply a consequence of its tone; Devil Lady is a bleak anime, presenting a kind of largely lightless action-horror that doesn’t really exist in this medium anymore. Moments of peace are a rarity, any kind of levity even more so, and while it has the general shape and structure of a transforming hero series, our heroine is a flawed one, indeed, a person thrust into an inescapable position of responsibility she never wanted and trapped under the glass to be prodded at by various sinister agents.
The plot itself goes something like this; Jun [Junko Iwao], a fashion model, has her life turned upside-down after she encounters a raving mad half-man half-monster, known as a Devil Beast. She herself carries a latent “Devil Gene”, the biological marker that turns ordinary humans into these dangerous mutants, but instead of becoming a full-on Beast herself, she becomes a hybrid, a Devil-man if you will, still in control of her senses and strong enough to give the full Beasts a run for their money. Consequently, she is drafted by a secretive government agency to fight against the Beasts and keep the streets of Tokyo safe, at the beck and call of her handler Asuka [Kaoru Shimamura], who is clearly not on the level.
This starts as rather typical—if notably dark—superhero fare. Jun’s identity as the Devil Lady is a secret, and her life starts falling apart as she tries to juggle her modeling work with her nighttime battles with Beasts, and she finds it incredibly hard to accept her very literal inner demon for what it is. She also takes in Kazumi [Kazusa Murai], a teen model who, early on, loses her parents to a Beast attack and moves in with Jun, becoming her half-problematic love interest/half-surrogate little sister—a combination of dynamics exactly as complicated and fraught as it sounds—who serves as Jun’s main lifeline to her own humanity as the war against the Beasts continues to escalate. Before long, it becomes obvious that different parts of the government, a sinister faction of other Devilmen, and Asuka’s own interests, are all working against each other for the fate of Tokyo, and it increasingly becomes obvious, mankind itself.
As things progress, it becomes impossible to hide the existence of the Devil Gene and first Tokyo and then Japan in general fall under martial law (complete with a mandatory vaccination against the Devil Gene which, boy, that is a scene that would hit very differently and much worse if it were written today). By its narrative endgame, Devil Lady has progressed into full-on biblical fare with God’s plans for the future of the human race and the physical location of Hell itself serving important roles. In terms of simple narrative progression, this is all pretty campy, but it works well enough.
Really, the upsides here are obvious in general. If all you’re really looking for is to see a hot lady clock some truly grotesque-looking monsters, you’re in the right place. Jun in her Devil Lady form is drop-dead gorgeous, and I doubt I’ll be the last lesbian to swoon over her toned physique and the half-feral demeanor she carries with her into battle. (Also; she fights in the nude and her clothes rip to shreds in lovingly-animated detail every time she transforms. So yes, this is very much an intentional draw of the series.)
Jun here seen crushing the head of an insect monster that I wish was me.
Excellent fight choreography throughout makes sure that watching her slug it out with wolfmen, two-headed dinosaur monsters, busty harpy-dragons, and all manner of other Devil Beasts never gets old, and she even sometimes assumes a skyscraper-sized kaiju form known as the “Giga Effect”, where she gains a blue-and-black color scheme and some cool lightning powers. There’s some stuff in here that really tries to earn the “horror” part of its “action-horror” genre tag, too. One particular moment early on where Kazumi’s mother is killed by having her eyes and mouth filled with writhing centipedes is going to weed out anyone with a weak stomach pretty quick. All of this is drawn up with a dark, moody color palette that sets the show’s timbre perfectly, and it usually looks pretty good, too. (A few iffier-looking episodes are clearly outsourced to another studio. Some things never change.) If you’re just wondering if Devil Lady is entertaining and don’t particularly care if it’s schlocky or not, there’s really nothing else to be said; with a literally hot-as-hell protagonist and a sharp visual style, it passes that particular test with flying colors.
The writing however, is a lot more spotty. Jun herself is a very solid protagonist; widely admired but unable to accept either the circumstances under which she comes into her powers nor the responsibilities placed on her by them, she is a deeply conflicted, moody woman. (Which of course, sometimes turns into white-hot rage as Devil Lady.) Her real main flaws are a lack of willpower and an inability to come to terms with her situation, a somewhat unusual basis for the lead in something like this, but not an unwelcome one, as it gives her an immediately legible emotional depth that’s easy for even those in very different situations to relate to. She suffers a lot over the course of Devil Lady, and the show gets much of its emotional strength from the sheer depth of the loss she endures.
Which is great in terms of writing Jun herself, and indeed, every other character in the show is defined by their relationship to her, and for some of these characters those connections are perfectly believable, but for others they are very much not. We’ve already mentioned Kazumi, who probably comes out the strongest-written member of the cast overall. But other characters, like Jun’s modeling manager Tatsuya [Naoya Uchida], who eventually falls for her in a pretty hard-to-buy love subplot, just don’t add much at all, and mostly just serve to clutter things up or to tick expected boxes. Probably the worst of the small group of important male characters is Jason Bates [Ryuusei Nakao] another Devilman who repeatedly tries to get with Jun in a just generally unpleasant manner. He’s just flatly unlikable and doesn’t really add anything to the show.
Important side note: His Devil form is ugly as hell. Look at that hair. Eugh.
And then there’s Asuka, initially Jun’s handler in the early part of the series when she’s a Beast hunter, and eventually the main antagonist. Asuka is….a lot. You can think of her, in very broad terms, as a cold, calculating strategist who sets the show’s overarching plot in motion from the word “go” and remains in command of it until the closing minutes of the last episode. If you think of her as sort of an ancestor of, say, Makima from Chainsaw Man, you’re in at least the right ballpark. Asuka’s motives remain elusive throughout much of the story, and by the time we finally learn what they are, the series has taken a hard left turn into some Angels & Demons nonsense. More relevant to discussing the issues with her as-written though is one little detail; she’s not cis.
The story is a bit unclear on specifics, but it appears that Asuka is an intersex person who was raised as a man and then transitioned to identifying as a woman. Lumping different sorts of non-cis people together was common in Devil Lady‘s day, so perhaps we cannot fault the show for a lack of specificity, but we absolutely can fault it for falling back on the old, repulsive “transgender rapist” cliché. As in the series’ penultimate episode, Asuka forces herself on Jun, given a very loose plot “justification” with hokey “an angel and a devil fucking ends the world” crap. This is the series’ one big misstep, and god, how I wish it were not in here.
Look; I love a toxic female villain, you can make a woman do the most horrible shit imaginable and I will squeal and clap and post on tumblr about how I support women’s wrongs. But that is the one line that you really cannot cross without it causing some serious issues for your story. It’s also just totally unnecessary! Asuka already had a personal interest in Jun that clearly ran deeper than just her plans for her. There was actual tension there, and in the ambiguous space of tension you leave a lot of fertile room for interpretation; a sort of Schrodinger’s Yuri where two characters might be genuinely mutually attracted to each other or it might just all be illusory, manipulation on the part of one character or the other. Making her cross that line shatters all of that in the worst possible way, making the dynamic itself much weaker as a result and retroactively collapsing any interpretive space into “well, she was just a creep all along,” making Asuka herself a weaker character with a worse motive. Some will of course argue that Asuka, as a villain, should be expected to act villainously, but narratively, the problem is not that this act makes her evil, it’s that it makes her less interesting. All told, there are different kinds of transgression, and this is one of the worse and more exploitative ones. (That is without even getting into how these stereotypes harm actual trans and intersex people, an entire other topic I could fill whole other articles with.)
Am I a fool for expecting more from something like this, which is clearly trying to aim for a primarily male audience with anyone else as an afterthought? Maybe, but it did genuinely sour me on the series, particularly its last few episodes, pretty notably. I don’t think it ruins the show, but it definitely makes it worse.
Which sucks! Because, as mentioned, there’s a lot to like here on a pure entertainment level and, again as said, some of the writing is actually pretty strong. It’s just that this takes the show firmly into “it’s complicated” territory, which is not somewhere it really needs to have been confined to.
On the other hand, does that make the show worthless? Well, no. I can say all I’ve said, and I can even point to additional, pretty obvious, problems with writing women—not one but two villains of the week are lesbians who are “obsessed” with Jun, which I guess really should’ve clued me in as to where they were going with Asuka, and a third is a serial killer who feeds her victims to her Devil Beast brother as part of a Weird Sex Thing™—but even all of these issues in mind, the show does also write Jun and Kazumi’s relationship pretty warmly. That relationship has its own problems, Jun is a fair bit older than Kazumi, and Kazumi spends much of the show emotionally traumatized, but there is a sincerity and grace that the two are depicted with that wouldn’t be there if this was a show that was actively, intentionally hateful. I am inclined, in spite of everything, to chalk the bad ideas up to being just that. Hurtful bad ideas, don’t get me wrong, but ‘just’ bad ideas nonetheless.
So, are Devil Lady‘s fairly serious flaws forgivable in light of what it does right? Well, that’s going to depend on the person. For me, I’d say the series is absolutely still a worthy entry in the dark end of the urban fantasy space in anime, but it is unfortunately the sort of thing I’m reluctant to recommend to others. Still, that kind of judgment isn’t everything, and at the end of the long night, this whole “gun to your head, is the show Good or Bad?” criticism has never been my preferred mode of things anyway, and I’m always a little disappointed in myself whenever I lapse into it. What you have here is a show that promises a lot, delivers on much but not all of it, hurts you in ways both good and bad, and leaves you with a lot to think about. There are much, much worse things for a show to be than that.
Devil Lady doesn’t seem to have ever garnered even a notable fraction of the fandom of its parent series has, and various incarnations of Jun have been limited to very minor roles in other Devilman fiction (she was the co-lead of a crossover oneshot in 2013; Devil Lady vs. Cutie Honey, and a character based on her appeared in Devilman Grimoire. Of course, these both seem to derive from the manga version of Jun, who is a very different character starring in a very different story).
I’d be unwilling to say that Devil Lady has left no legacy, though. I’d be very surprised if the creators of the Witchblade anime—another dark urban fantasy action anime with an attractive female lead that was a spinoff of a better-known parent franchise—weren’t at least aware of it. And I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if some tiny sliver of Asuka’s cold, manipulative characterization, especially from the forehalf of the show, has wound up in a few characters from the darker end of modern battle shonen. (Such as, as previously alluded to, Makima.) This is guesswork, but the timetables line up and given how widely influential Devilman on the whole is in anime and manga, it doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to me.
A postscript; with one last thing about Asuka. While writing this piece, I discovered that the character was one of just a handful of major roles that her voice actress, Kaoru Shimamura, ever had. Before Devil Lady, she seems to have been limited to supporting roles. And after Devil Lady, she doesn’t seem to have been in much else before sadly passing away in 2013 due to breast cancer.
Despite any problems I may have with how the character is written, Shimamura plays Asuka excellently, giving the character a cold, matter-of-fact menace and charisma that perfectly suits her. It’s easy to lament what could’ve been, but it should be remembered that the entertainment industry is fickle, and even very marginal fame is often fleeting. If all Devil Lady did for me personally was to highlight this woman’s career, no matter how short it may have been, then maybe that’s all it really needed to do.
“Random chance” is a hell of a thing.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Oh thank god, an unequivocal winner.
Listen; there have been a few things this season that I thought were decent, or have potential. Some have even been prettygood. But most of what’s premiered so far this season has been bad. Very bad. Evidence of the production bubble at its absolute bubbliest, some of which barely even functions as coherent television.
But we’re not here to talk about those anime, which I’m not going to even bother to name. It is really nice, and much more important, to have a premiere that is just no-frills awesome. There are a few complaints one could make, and I’ll get to those, but for the most part Zom 100, the debut series from brand-new studio BUG FILMS (but directed by the formerly OLM-affiliated Kazuki Kawagoe, of Komi Can’t Communicate fame), is just a kickass premiere with a ton of style and energy that sets up a lot of interesting possibilities for its world and its main character, the now-ex-salaryman Akira Tendou [Shuichirou Umeda]. It’s easily the strongest premiere of the season, and you could argue it’s the strongest of the entire year without much trouble.
The premise here is very simple. Akira joins a commercial production company after graduating college. This is his dream job, he wants to write commercial scenarios and make big bucks off of it. (I’m not gonna pretend I intuitively understand that, but hey, live and let live.) At first blush, the company he joins seems pretty good. He’s got motivated coworkers, a pretty company senior, one Saori Ootori [Sora Amamiya], in another department that he harbors a huge crush on from the moment their eyes meet, and, as mentioned, this is the career he’s always wanted to have. Things seem to be going okay.
Of course, they’re not, actually. He discovers quite quickly that the corporation he works for is a “black company,” although he’s strongly in denial about it. He and his coworkers pull lengthy all-nighters, sometimes for several days in a row, without overtime pay. Many of them are addled with addictions to energy boosters, and they openly brag to each other about their poor health. His boss is a truly, profoundly arrogant Middle Manager type who screams his head off at the slightest excuse. Oh, and his boss is having an affair with Saori. Sometimes they even go at it in the office itself. Gross.
So, all told, Akira is decidedly not having a good time, and the show, rather than just having him monologue, shows us this directly. As he keeps losing more and more sleep, he gets bags under his eyes, his movements become sluggish, and his gaze bugs out. The rare spare hours he has are spent binging movies on his laptop, as he’s too tired to do much of anything else. Days pile into weeks, which pile into months, and then years. Three years into his job, Akira’s days pass in a wholly undifferentiated depressive blur. Long work hours slaving over constantly-rewritten commercial scripts crash into shouting superiors, grainy late-night commercials, mental health PSAs, and zombie movies.
Eventually, they bleed into each other; the world fades to monochrome and the television won’t display anything but a mass of writhing scribbles, and the sound of Akira’s boss screaming at him. As he goes to sleep every night he sincerely prays that he just won’t wake up. Our man is out-and-out suicidal, no subtext here, that’s just true. Through all of this, the world remains in a fuzzed out black and white.
And then, one day, prompted by his bike being confiscated because he forgot to pay for his parking space, he wanders into his landlord’s apartment.
And promptly sees her corpse being gnawed on by the living dead. No time is devoted to how’s or why’s—the zombie apocalypse is upon us.
Akira is thrilled.
Color returns to his world as insane hyper-violence unfolds all around him. He dashes through his apartment complex, dodging the living dead as he climbs up to the roof top just in time to see a huge passenger plane go down. The whole time, he effortlessly fights off the zombies that actually try to attack him, and he’s absolutely ecstatic, practically walking on air and claiming that he sees the world in color for the first time in forever, adding “red blood” to the traditional “blue sky, green trees” chestnut. The world has ended, and Akira is free. (If that seems like a little much in terms of physical feats for an office worker, please know that Akira biked to work every day and played rugby in college. After whole generations of otaku-caricature protagonists filling the everyman role, it’s nice to have a self-described jock playing the lead instead.)
He has one lingering tie he wants to sever to the old world before deciding what to do next, and that’s with his crush, a flame he’s kept alive for these three years, Saori. Combing through the records at his old office, he finds her address and bikes over to check on her. He is, plainly put, too late, both Saori and Akira’s old boss alike have been zombified before he gets there. Even this, though, is bizarrely heartening. There’s an absolutely amazing laugh-out-loud moment here, where Akira encounters the bloated zombie of his boss. And he dramatically—even gracefully!—announces his “resignation” from his office job, and then promptly gives him a fucking incredible rugby tackle, pushing him out a window, and flashing back to his college days as the dead bastard goes flying onto the streets below.
His reunion with Saori’s zombie is more bittersweet, confessing to the now-dead OL that he’s kept her in his heart all these years. With that, and a theatrical—weirdly emotional?—cry of “goodbye, my first love!” he flees from her zombie, as he can’t bring himself to hurt her, even in her current state.
Settling down at an abandoned convenience store, he loots some food and, more importantly, a notebook and a marker. Akira is not one to stay in one place, now that the red tape of society has broken down. He’s got things he wants to do.
100 of them, in fact.
Throughout, the premiere never lets up for even a single second. We are practically hard-wired into Akira’s own brain through the entire sequence of events here, from optimistic entrance to the workforce, total burnout, and gleeful liberation as the zombie apocalypse breaks out. He might be totally delusional about how much fun he’s going to have, but honestly, I kind of feel him!
I don’t have an office job, but I’ve been struggling against a different kind of bureaucracy for years at this point. (If you’ve never tried to live anywhere in the US without a driver’s license or equivalent thereof, and cannot get one for complicated reasons, I do not recommend the experience. It sucks, and is the root cause of almost all of my personal problems.) Maybe I’d jump for joy if the world ended, too! Maybe I’d be right there with him.
That’s not to say the premiere is completely flawless. There’s arguably some Stuff going on with the writing of women here. Akira himself doesn’t judge Saori for sleeping with her boss (those kind of abuses of power are uniformly the superior’s fault anyway), so he’s in the clear, but the show itself sure sees fit to kill her for that. I’d want more evidence before strongly claiming that Zom 100 has “an issue with writing women,” but you could build a case if you wanted to. I’m not yet inclined to, but it’s worth at least keeping in mind.
Honestly though, even that much feels like a quibble. There’s an interesting, instructive difference between Zom 100 and last season’s big post-apoc show, Heavenly Delusion. That series, which I did not write about extensively, seems to float the thesis that people are people even in desperate situations. That can be a good or a bad thing, depending on what that person and that situation are, (and that series puts its characters in some very dire situations indeed) but it seems to treat this as an immutable fact. Zom 100, which is after all, an action-comedy anime, takes a much more optimistic view of the dim future. Maybe, it says, things will be better. Maybe, in such a dire circumstance, we could finally find the time, the energy, and the courage, to do the things we really want to do. It’s not an intellectual argument, it’s one from the heart.
And honestly? Part of me finds that more convincing. Maybe, indeed.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter,Tumblr, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
What do you think of the “magic school” genre?
In the Anglosphere, it will probably unfortunately be associated for quite a while longer with the Harry Potter novels. Mostly unfortunate because of their author’s utterly appalling views on trans people. Elsewhere in the world however, there is no such association, and indeed there is an absolute ton of light novel material in this genre, most of which never leaves that format but some of which does, including, just from a quick glance around Anilist, The Irregular at Magic High School, The Misfit of Demon King Academy, Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor, etc. You get the picture.
All this to say; Spellblades is very much a product of its own immediate environment more than anything else. Which is itself to say; Spellblades strikes me as incredibly basic from this first episode. But, given some developments in its final few minutes, there is a non-zero chance that it’s Doing Something by actually just pretending to be incredibly basic. Such is the inherent frustration of “non-indicative” first episodes. Which this might not even be, because other than spoiling myself by looking up the source material1, there’s really no way to tell beyond trying to play detective.
So, why not? Let’s review the evidence. First, we’ll start with the “it’s actually just that basic” argument.
Point 1, the characters; we have an incredibly simple clutch of archetypes here. They are all given just enough to say over the course of this episode that they don’t feel like complete cardboard cutouts, but we’re still working in very well established territory here. We have Oliver Horn [Atsushi Tamaru], our lead, who is a Very Nice Boy, compassionate to the point that he’s honestly kind of hard to like. Oliver spends most of the episode bouncing off of other characters and is by far the one we learn the least about, but he’s such a swell bro that he actually tucks his roommate into bed. (You’re not his mom, man, that’s just weird!) Next, we have Katie Aalto [Hitomi Oowada], who loves animals and has crazy ideas like “the school probably shouldn’t enslave sentient beings.” (We’ll come back to that bit.) There is of course also Guy Greenwood [Shinsuke Sugawara], who is the “hot-blooded” son of a farmer and gets very very upset at Katie’s aforementioned ideas. There’s Pete Reston [Riho Sugiyama], son of a pair of non-wizards and the archetypal studious guy with white hair. There is also Michela McFarlane2, a drill-haired off-the-shelf ojou who ends most of her sentences with desu wa. Lastly, there’s Nanao Hibiya [Yuka Nukui], who you can probably discern just from her name is the token student from fantasy-Japan. We’ll circle back around to her in a bit, but for now, just now that she has a sword, and is very dumb and absolutely loves to eat. She’s basically a stock shonen protagonist but a girl.
Point 2, the setting. Other than the sickly-sweet amount of colorful saturation, there is not a ton that distinguishes Spellblades‘ world from any other light novel series with a broadly western fantasy-derived setting. Honestly, even a few little personal touches would’ve been nice, but with two exceptions (talking, rude trees, and clock-nocks, little fairies that live in clocks), every single creature here is something I’ve seen in dozens of anime—and well beyond that—over the years.
Not to mention, Kimberly Academy, as the show’s wizard school is called, is itself set in yet another god damn city surrounded by a circular wall. Just in case you didn’t get your fill of those from the 3,000 other fantasy light novel adaptations that have aired since the decade began.
Point 3, the Troll Scene. Ugh. So, when our lovely little potato patch of protagonists pops over to their entrance ceremony, they’re treated to a parade of magical creatures. Perfectly fine—some of them, like the dragon, even look pretty cool—but, ah, one of the “creatures” in said parade is a troll. In this context, a giant guy who just happens to be green and angry. Hermione Katie sees this and takes immediate, justified offense, loudly arguing to anyone in earshot that trolls should not be paraded through the street like common animals, because they are thinking beings, just like humans. Guy angrily replies that this is fine because trolls are dangerous, don’t “speak our language”, and their being bent to the will of humanity is “only natural.” In the midst of that, a mysterious hooded figure curses Katie’s feet(!) sending her uncontrollably running straight toward the troll, which freaks out at being so provoked, and is promptly knocked unconscious by a group effort from Nanao and the other students. (Nanao, it must be mentioned, uses some kind of sword magic that changes the color of her hair. Neat.) The troll is not directly mentioned again after this.
Now, in theory, I think people should be able to write whatever they want. But, that also means all things are open to fair criticism. So; I have said this before on this blog, I will probably say it again, you cannot use fantasy species as a racism metaphor. That is a thing that we, collectively, human civilization, have to discard from our art. It just doesn’t work. It is perhaps the most overused and ill-considered analogy in fantasy fiction, and as an actual plot it is, on top of all that, just not any interesting. Especially if the side being discriminated against has no chance to ever get a word in, which seems like it will be the case here.
Unless, of course, Spellblades is Doing Something. Let’s now consider the points for that argument.
Directly relevant to the Troll Scene is A; Kimberly Magic Academy is fucked up and evil. This is not really hidden information to us in any way, a declaration that many of its students die, are permanently disabled, or are disappeared by their magical experiments opens the episode. The school’s headmaster, Esmerelda, reiterates that point directly upon greeting the student body, emphasizing that KMA prioritizes “freedom” and “results” and that all else, including the students’ own safety—and thus presumably any sense of morality—is decidedly a secondary concern. This could mean that the whole thing with the troll is just intended as another flag that these are Bad People. Of course, this would require Spellblades to not both-sides the issue, which is a problem that a truly astounding amount of bad anime run into. We’ll see where that goes.
Just as a side note; I’m not going to pretend to be scandalized by a powerful female character wearing what’s basically a bikini top, but it’s maybe not entirely the vibe you want to go for if you’re the headmistress of an evil magic school. On the other hand, in her position, and looking like she does, I’d wear the same thing. Truly, female character design is a land of contrasts.
Consider also Point B; the specific character of Nanao. It is easy enough to write Nanao off as an excuse to wedge a samurai into a setting that wouldn’t otherwise accommodate one, if you’re so inclined. But, Nanao is an oddly-presented character. In addition to all of her typical quirks, she is, as we see in a (sigh) bathing scene near the end of the episode, scarred almost from head to toe from real-deal war wounds. In fact, we learn that rather than entering Kimberly through any normal fashion, she was hand-picked by Michela’s father, who saved her from the midst of a raging battle. The visual we see could be dismissed as taking place in this setting’s equivalent of Asia—called, I am dead serious, Azia—but the framing almost seems to imply that she was isekai’d or something of the sort. The isekai device is much more interesting as something of consequence later in a series, rather than as the basic premise, so this would legitimately be a pretty neat twist. This is reinforced by her apparent ignorance of many customs in the setting, but again, she’s basically Schrodinger’s Samurai at this point. It’s hard to call one way or the other.
And lastly, C, there’s Oliver Horn himself. In the episode’s final act, he scouts out the school grounds at dawn, which seems to imply that he was aware of the general Fucked Up & Evil-ness of Kimberly Academy beforehand. Furthermore, the cloaked figure who cursed Katie is revealed to be an attendant sent by Oliver’s older brother Gwyn, also an academy student, who is shadowing him. This all implies some level of forethought on Oliver’s part, and that of his family. I will admit to being a sucker for “nice protagonist turns out to not be so nice after all” as a reveal, and it would do something to redeem Oliver’s blandness as a lead.
All of this needs context of course. For one thing, it’s not a guarantee that Spellblades will actually be made any better by having some kind of twist, even assuming it does have one. Trying to “Do Something” and actually doing it are, after all, different things. And, really, a show should ideally be interesting both before and after any kind of twist, additional perspective, recontextualization, etc. So far, Spellblades just hasn’t given us a ton to work with.
I’d argue, in fact, that me having to do this much legwork just to ask myself (and you all) if I should be invested in this is kind of a problem in the first place. A certain amount of grace is due to any new piece of art, for sure, but having to hem and haw this much is not a great sign. At least, you wouldn’t assume so, right? Conversely, maybe the fact that I’m willing to do so much indicates that I want it to be good. Of course, that’s true, I want every anime to be good, ideally, but I will admit to having a soft spot for a kind of low-rent fantasy fun. And there are definite upsides here; the actual magic system seems decently interesting, and the production is solid and will hopefully remain so. They’re just not huge upsides, which is maybe why I so badly want Spellblades to actually have good writing, too.
So who knows! If Spellblades appears on this blog again, you can assume it pulled off making the waiting game worth it. If not, you can safely assume I lost interest. What better test is there?
1: Honestly, that wouldn’t be the worst thing, but this is a column about seasonal anime, so it’s rather outside my scope here.
2: Yes that is actually her last name, I’m not having a laugh here.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter,Tumblr, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
From a long, long tradition of manga and anime about humanoid androids, artificial intelligence, and more generally, machines and their minds, comes The Gene of AI. (Probably one of many, many AI / ai puns that have been made in Japanese media over the years, but who knows maybe it is just supposed to stand for “Artificial Intelligence” and nothing else, here.) Part medical procedural, part one man’s quest to clear his mother’s name, it’s a show walking on well-trod, but always fertile, ground.
In a word, this is not a show you watch for breezy fun. It’s a cerebral and fairly stark cross-examination of big ideas like the duality of mind and body, how technology influences our lives and how we interface with it, and so on. Again, this stuff has been done before and stretches back to the dawn of the medium. So the question by the time Gene of AI ends will be whether it has brought anything new to the table. We’ll hold off on that for now, as will we any question about how this particular genre intersects with the ongoing machine art boom. Instead, let’s look at the basics.
Dr. Hikaru Sudou [Taeko Ootsuka] is a medical professional who specializes in treating android patients. “Humanoids,” as the show calls them, are virtually indistinguishable from real people. They live, laugh, love, and so forth. (The only real tell that a person is a humanoid and not an actual flesh-and-blood human is in their eyes; humanoids have sideways-turned oblong pupils.) Sometimes, Dr. Sudou works under the table, under the name “Moggadeet”, to take care of patients with problems that they can’t go to a regular medical practice about. And it’s these underground visits that form the backbone of the show’s premise.
You see, in Gene of AI‘s world, copying a humanoid’s “neural net”—what has in fiction been variously called a brain pattern, neural scan, brain blueprint, etc.—is very illegal. “30 years minimum in prison” illegal. This is for two main reasons. Firstly, to “protect the sanctity of personality;” which is to say that if you restore a humanoid’s personality from a backup of their neural net, the question of whether or not they are in any meaningful sense “the same person” is an unanswered one. Secondly, and on a much more immediately practical note, the creation of backup neural nets allows for ersatz human trafficking, where one “person” can be duplicated many times over the course of many years. Doc Sudou himself gives the example of a figure called “The Crying Man,” a series of several humanoids copied from the same backup, who is repeatedly found involved with crime rings in the Middle East.1 I imagine both the practical and moral concerns of this whole practice are going to be a big theme going forward.
Sudou’s not helping the people who get involved with illegal neural net copying anyway out of the goodness of his heart, it must also be said. He’s using the hefty sums he collects to try to track down a pair of men who, we see in an opening scene set 25 years prior to the main story, tricked his mother—also a humanoid—into allowing them to make an illegal backup of her. Thus, we have our general premise and our main man, plus his motivation. And so, the stage is set for a fairly episodic(?) series where Sudou helps various patients in these complex, difficult situations, while also searching for those responsible for his mother’s imprisonment. It’s a pretty good setup, all told. Even if Sudou himself is kind of a dick, and notably rude toward humanoids. (Don’t make your protagonists machine-racist!)
His first case here is, one must imagine, pretty typical. An android husband and wife are in a crisis, because the wife has contracted a terminal virus. Initially, they’re both pretty willing to go forward with having her restored from an illegal backup that they’d had made a week prior.
But, it’s here that the series raises the existential questions for the first time, and the wife starts having second thoughts. And this is to say nothing of how her daughter, an adopted human child, takes all this, as Sudou is totally unwilling to back away from the tough questions; is the person who emerges from the backup the same person who is being restored from? It’s an open question with no easy answer, and the series, to its immense credit, feels non-judgmental even as both husband and wife go through several different stances on the subject over the course of the episode. (As an aside, said daughter is a fairly interesting character all around, and is a skilled hacker despite her young age. I wouldn’t be shocked if we see her again.)
In the end, they take the “obvious” compromise route. They let the virus advance to where the wife would die anyway, and then restore her mind from the illegal backup. But the show doesn’t cast even this in an entirely positive light. The memories of those weeks she spent on her temporary deathbed are never coming back, and there is a fundamental disconnect between her and her daughter over those missing memories, elegantly expressed in the form of narrative metaphor via a change in her scrambled egg recipe that does not carry over to her new mind.
There’s a lot to like about Gene of AI as it stands, and it passes the basic makes-you-think test of any show aiming to be cerebral. The preview for the next episode teases a story about a man competing against android runners. The whole “man vs. machine in a sports contest” premise is a tough one to pull off, and that might end up being the real test for Gene of AI. Still, I’m optimistic.
1: In most other anime, I’d find the rather random flagging of this as happening in the Middle East to be kind of suspect. Here, I think they’re actually planning to come back to it. A distinctly Middle Eastern town square is scene for a few seconds in a brief, cryptic closing scene.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Somewhere in Tokyo, in a version of the 1800s that is not our own, a man in a circus, nicknamed the Oni Slayer, fights one of the last youkai for the entertainment of a screaming crowd. He’s not thrilled about this; all the people in the crowd, and the oppressive ringmaster organizing the show, are, in his view, more monstrous than he or the demons he kills could ever be.
So opens Undead Murder Farce, the first post-Kaguya-sama anime from director Shinichi Omata, and the first full TV series from studio Lapin Track that doesn’t involve their original creative brain, the legendary Kunihiko Ikuhara. To float a truly imperfect comparison; the first episode sets it up as something broadly akin to a gothic, Meiji-era Bakemonogatari. It’s hard to imagine that staying true for long—if nothing else, we have reason to believe that our leads will be departing for Europe eventually—but for now it provides a nice, if rough, baseline. Our lead, Tsugaru Shinuchi [Taku Yashiro], that “Oni Slayer” previously mentioned, is a charming asshole with a surprising amount of wit about him. His incredible strength is due to a transfusion of literal oni blood, given to him unwillingly by a foreigner only distinguished by the mysterious cane he carries, marked with the initial “M.”
The other half of this equation is Aya, our other lead who’s been tracking Shinuchi down, since she’s in a predicament of her own. You see, Aya is immortal, but, because of an incident with another oni-blooded hybrid just like Shinuchi, she is without most of her body. Yes, one of this show’s leading characters is a severed head in a bird cage. Amazing.
Most of the episode revolves around these two “getting to know each other”, which entails immediately falling into a wildly entertaining haughty girl / dryly witty guy dynamic. That’s pretty good on its own; when paired with the dynamic directing, it’s an absolute treat to watch, and has a real theatrical edge to it.
The conversations themselves are interesting too, as they paint a portrait of Shinuchi as someone who is clearly very much angry at the world but is past the point of actively despairing or raging about it, instead, the farce of the title seems to refer to how he presently views his situation. Using a kind of humorous, performative mask to cope with his own feelings of powerlessness. Aya is much more of a question mark, which seems deliberate at this early point in time.
In general, this is a very subtly strong first episode. Most of the show’s more bombastic points—the demons, the gothic overcast to the setting, Maya’s attendant Shizuku being a delightful murder maid—are leveled out by much more low-key strengths in directing, composition, and even-handed pacing. Keep an eye on this one. It’s definitely playing its cards close to its chest, and much about the general direction of the story is still a mystery, but I feel like good things are on the horizon, here.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter,Tumblr, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.
Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
Well, I did not expect to be covering this.
BanG Dream is foreign territory to me. I’m vaguely aware of the general contours of the series, both in terms of its anime adaptations and the mobile game that I believe (I’m not double-checking, so if I’m wrong you’ll have to forgive me) is the original spawning point for all this. Before two days ago, I’d never seen a single second of any of the BanG Dream anime. A friend* convinced me to give the most recent season a whirl, and I was assured it’s legible to newcomers. To be honest, I was a little resistant, mostly because It’s MyGO!!!!!, as it’s called, made the decision to drop its first three episodes as a single bundle, an increasingly-common practice that I remain undecided on where I stand in relation to.
The show, on the whole, is perfectly fine. Episodes 1 and 2 did not exactly knock my socks off, hence this being an Anime Orbit article and not a First Impressions article (although I might file it under both archives anyhow) but I thought they were pleasant enough, if maybe populated with a little too much melodrama that’s not quite to my taste. Anon [Rin Tateishi, in what appears to be her debut role], who serves as the lead for those episodes, is a fun character, being weirdly pushy and inconsiderate in a way that the show neither condemns nor glosses over but which propels the story forward in a nicely economical fashion.
More interesting than her though—at least to me—is another of the characters, who episode 3 focuses on, and in fact, takes place entirely from the perspective of. Yes, for 22 unbroken minutes, we inhabit the POV of Tomori [Hina Youmiya]. Some people will, I suspect, learn some things from this episode. Others, like myself, will already know deeply and intuitively the emotional territory explored here. The series doesn’t use the term, but Tomori is very obviously neurodivergent, and I feel comfortable going the extra step and calling her autistic. The episode inhabiting her viewpoint is, then, an exercise in empathy-as-invitation. It explains to us, without her ever saying all that much, what the show’s world and characters mean to her. She doesn’t need to say anything, we get to see it directly.
I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call the episode “important,” but it is a remarkably successful exercise. We start with her as a small child, where we see that she is more concerned with collecting rocks and “things that roll” than she is in directly socializing with other kids. (There’s a bit where she tries to give a would-be friend a bunch of pill bugs as a gift because she thinks they’re cute. This doesn’t work out as planned.)
As we see her go through life, she feels a distinct disjunct from other people. Sometimes we have to intuit that disconnection from the episode’s visual language—where Tomori often feels “crowded out” by other characters—and other times we see her diary, where she writes about this feeling in those words exactly. She’s on a different wavelength from most other people, and is keenly aware of it.
I should here pause the recap to disclose something. I myself am neurodivergent, but I will admit that I have ADHD rather than autism itself (the two are presently considered to be part of the same spectrum of alternate neurologies, and are often found together. As far as I know, I am not also autistic, although given my current material situation I’ll never be able to get tested, in any case), which might change how I read some of this.
Nonetheless, to me, this sequence of events comes across not as pitying Tomori, which would be condescending, but as simply trying to get as inside her head as possible. Even neurotypical teenagers often deal with feelings of loneliness and isolation, so when Tomori can’t connect to her peers, her loneliness feels immediate and real.
The good news is that she’s not alone for the whole episode. Tomori’s first real friend is Sakiko [Takao Kanon], who she develops a connection with after the latter sees her reaching out for a flower over a bridge and gets the mistaken notion that she’s trying to jump off. Sakiko is taken with Tomori, and her habit of collecting things (which as she grows expands to include a color-sorted crate of notebooks she uses as diaries, among other things), and after rather rudely riffling through one of her journals, finds what she assumes to be song lyrics. Tomori doesn’t correct her, and this misunderstanding is the predication on which the two eventually form a band, CRYCHIC. Tomori, naturally, as the “songwriter”, is also drafted as the vocalist.
Despite the obvious problems with this idea (and the notion that she’s kind of being yanked around, which, as a point of criticism, the episode never entirely gets past), she rolls with it, and eventually does start writing actual song lyrics. In a school performance that we see only glimpses of, Tomori floors her school’s student body.
This kind of thing, where a shy wallflower “comes out of her shell”, is a pretty typical story template for this genre of course, but MyGo!!!!! deserves full marks for making this all feel believable in such a short span of time. Indeed, the episode could itself be considered the same kind of plea for empathy that Tomori writes in her lyrics. It’s an interesting way of making you actually feel the journey of these five people, who initially have basically nothing in common aside from a vague desire to form a band, to a believably warm friend group.
But if it ended there, that would probably be too tidy. The other side to all this is that, in the aftermath of the concert, Sakiko suddenly loses interest in the band and stops coming to practice (possibly because of rude internet comments or something, it’s not entirely clear at this point). When she finally shows up again, Tomori makes an accidentally insensitive comment, and that’s that; CRYCHIC are no more. What the show really succeeds at getting across here is that sickly lightning bolt of shell-shock, where Tomori (who, again, is our POV character) can definitely tell that she said something that she shouldn’t have but can’t really think of any way to rectify the situation. And, well, ask anyone who’s been there; people are not nice to non-neurotypical people when they make fuck ups like that. Sakiko is angry, the band’s drummer, Taki [Coco Hayashi] eventually becomes very protective of Tomori. The rest of CRYCHIC mostly just seem hurt and confused.
This is all a very complicated situation, and the episode ends on that unresolved note, as the rest of the series takes place some time later (this episode is, in addition to everything else, essentially backstory for Tomori and the other ex-CRYCHIC girls). Tomori openly says that she feels incomplete somehow, an emotional beat that just absolutely punched yours truly dead in the gut. Her new school in general doesn’t seem kind to Tomori, and the show’s actual description notes that in-universe she’s given the not-very-nice nickname of “Honoeka’s Weirdo.” So the episode just ends there! With Tomori alone again. It’s a rough scene, one I’ve literally lived through, and it’s only the implicit promise that things will get better that makes this come off as realistically sad rather than a complete downer. That’s a hard thing to pull off.
It’s hard to say how, precisely, things will improve for Tomori and the other former CRYCHIC girls. But I’m confident that they will, simply because this episode is so intent on wholly inhabiting her as a character. Compassion this immediate doesn’t happen by accident, it has to be actively worked for.
*hi Josh
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
I’ve had nightmares about having to cover these guys.
Far more important than the actual anime we’re covering today, The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, is the studio that’s making it. This is a production by the infamous GoHands. The things they make are identifiably still anime, but they sit far outside of established visual norms; in terms of shot composition, basic directing and storyboarding, etc., that to see them in motion is to see what an anime produced in a another universe might look like. I am not, as many people in my position have, going to sit here and tell you that their shows necessarily look outright bad. I think GoHands’ work really falls outside of the good/bad dichotomy. But what it certainly, undeniably is, is confusing. Theirs is a ludicrous, extravagantly gaudy approach to fairly humdrum material that I cannot readily compare to any single other anime studio, except to say that if you imagine what would happen if Kyoto Animation decided to collectively drop an absolute ton of acid, you might get close.
There is so much that is just absolutely insane about how they approach the entire visual angle of their work, and people who study animation as a medium much more deeply than I do have written extensively on their many baffling decisions. Camera angles for instance; it’s obvious, but it’s worth repeating; in anime, there is no physical “camera.” Every single frame is drawn from an imaginary point of view, and there is absolutely no reason you cannot put the “camera” anywhere you want. In spite of this, there is ample literature describing best practices for where to focus your audience’s attention. Anime does this in a variety of ways, some common to all popular cinema and some unique to the medium itself, and GoHands boldly defies almost all of them. In terms of angles, the opening few minutes of Glasses Girl alone see Us, The Viewer, dragged along behind the protagonist’s feet as he walks to school, looking up at him at such an extreme angle that it makes him appear to have downright CLAMP-ian leg proportions.
In addition, GoHands completely disregards the entire general principle of limited animation. Their work, and especially Glasses Girl here, is absolutely bursting at the seams with extraneous motion. When our lead imagines the titular Glasses Girl walking to school with him, it seems like every single hair on her head is individually animated blowing in an imaginary wind. Background characters, who contribute nothing to the story directly, are given the full attention of the animation team. This has the interesting effect of making the main character, our usual everyman protagonist, actually feel exactly as important as every other character on screen—that is to say, not very important at all—and it’s from this kind of thing that you can sort of understand why GoHands, in addition to being widely reviled, also have a cult following. And hey, their stuff does look pretty good. As stills.
If it seems like I’m spending a lot of time discussing the actual animation and not the story, that’s because there’s not a ton to say on that front. The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is another entry in the girl-with-a-gimmick romcom subgenre like, say, My Dress-Up Darling or any number of others. I tend to be pretty mixed on these anime at the best of times, and most of the good ones get by on visual chops. (Not to mention, “she wears glasses” is pretty damn weak as far as the central charm point for these things goes, especially since the show’s very premise requires her to not wear them most of the time. Not as weak as Shikimori from that show being nebulously ‘cool,’ but still.) So to that end, GoHands actually sort of has the right idea here. The notion is to make you feel the strength of the characters’ love via visual metaphor rather than necessarily needing to write them particularly strongly. After all, even a simple teenage crush can feel enormous when it’s your first one. And to their credit GoHands do pull off some appropriate tricks here; a huge swarm of blooming cherry blossom petals in the opening being the most obvious.
But fundamentally, the series has an unshakeable air of total derangement that feels comparable not to any other anime but, really, only to total amateur fiction. Glasses Girl‘s real compatriots are indie doujins and the like, not anything else airing this season. (Other than perhaps The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today, another GoHands show that premieres in a few days.) Any attempt at earnest depictions of romance falls apart under the fact that in addition to the series’ wobbly, loopy visuals, it’s also pretty badly-written. Main character Kaede Komura [Masahiro Itou] spends most of the episode monologuing about how down bad he is for the female lead, Ai Mie [Shion Wakayama]. Which would itself be forgivable if anything he had to say was remotely interesting instead of just vaguely creepy drivel, but it isn’t. The attempts at humor are mostly not worth mentioning, although the series does occasionally manage a passingly funny gag. If I could compare the combination of bizarre visual choices, faintly skeezy atmosphere, and downright upsetting attempts at selling the “chemistry” of the leads to any other anime, it might be Akebi’s Sailor Uniform, which long-time readers will know is not a compliment.
Through the bizarre monologuing, offputting atmosphere, and overuse of fisheye effects, it’s hard to imagine who the target audience for this thing actually is, other than GoHands’ own small cult of devotees. (Even then, the moments of true visual weirdness, such as when Kaede and Ai are chroma-keyed into a heavily filtered CGI forest, are few and far enough between that I’m not sure bad-anime rubberneckers will be interested either. Although there is an abundance of truly bizarre camera choices on otherwise mundane shots, for certain.)
Nonetheless, it’s hard to actively dislike Glasses Girl. There’s just too much that is too far removed from the norm to make it worth that, and it’s worth at least acknowledging that the bizarre disjunction every part of this show has from every other part can at least produce an interesting accidental-denpa effect. No, save your vitriol for shows that are actually offensive or are so badly kneecapped by the production bubble that they’re ruined. Real cases of potential squandered, not whatever’s going on here. At the same time, l can’t find it within me to become a true GoHands defender, either, and I did have some outside hope that maybe this show would accomplish that. But, it is what it is. Some things are simply not made for you and me.
And, well, it’s at least still more authentically weird than Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon, which I will not be covering here on Magic Planet Anime. So that’s something.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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