Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Miracle of Being: EARTH MAIDEN ARJUNA, Saving The Planet, and You

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

We aren’t meant to live like this.

At least, that is part of the driving thesis of Earth Maiden Arjuna. The mood is spiritual, and the tools used to explore that spirituality are myriad. It is here where we find maybe the fullest-ever realization of the magical girl as shaman; moonless, stormy nights in the wilderness, a return to the Earth that shakes you to your bones and shocks every single neuron in your brain, a bolt of lightning illuminating what every single aspect of the phrase “save the world” truly means. Pure hippie shit, in a good way. Gaia Theory‘s strongest soldier in this medium; the big wheel keeps on turning, and Arjuna‘s greatest strength is its ability to illuminate the spokes thereof; the fight for our planet rendered as a profound spiritual struggle. It’s brilliant, absurd, and more than a little frustrating.

Because at its worst, Arjuna instead gives off the familiar, stale whiff of thumbing through the more dubious sections of a New Age book store; screeds against genetic engineering, half-true claims about the value of growing your own food, needling jabs about everything from selectively-bred microbes to video games to aspirin, and, perhaps most damningly, the stink of the anti-abortion movement. Pure hippie shit, in a bad way. The kind of “ecological consciousness” that can be co-opted by the self-impressed, the hucksters, and much worse alarmingly easily. The kind you have to be pretty careful with.

Arjuna is largely not careful. And for that reason, it’s a tangled thing; as twisting, knotty, and gnarled as the roots and tree branches it so dearly loves. A lot of it will feel familiar, for good and bad, to anyone who’s ever had an older relative that went through a spiritual phase. This is essential oils and nights on a magic mountain, the dim glow of fireflies and the stale paper of inflammatory pamphlets. This is Earth Maiden Arjuna; for better or worse, it’s a lot. But while I’m going to say a lot about Arjuna and its various strengths and weaknesses here, two things are absolutely true; Arjuna knows something is wrong, and it has at least one pretty solid idea of how to fix that wrongness. In evaluating it as a piece of art, rather than as some kind of instructional text, those points count for a lot.

Arjuna is the story of Juna [Mami Higashiyama ,in what is, incredibly, apparently her only major anime role], an ordinary high school girl whose life is thrown into disarray in the aftermath of a motorcycle crash along with her boyfriend Tokio [Tomokazu Seki], who enters the series as the driver of said motorcycle. Juna, in a coma, is saved from the brink of death by the mysterious Chris [Yuuji Ueda]. The price for her resurrection? She must fulfill her role as the chosen defender of Earth itself, primarily in the form of dealing with ethereal, worm-like monsters called the Raaja.

In a sense, none of this would be that out of place in any other magical girl series. The term is an uneasy fit for Earth Maiden Arjuna for reasons we’ll get into shortly, but it does apply. If you take an extremely reductive approach, you can boil most of the rest of the series down to the essentials as mapped out by, say, Sailor Moon. A magical warrior is granted incredible powers that rely on her sense of empathy and compassion does battle against monsters that manifest from humanity’s evils, along the way her own sense of responsibility develops with the help of both her own experiences and a mysterious mentor. The thing is, while it’d be a mistake to try to force too much distance between Arjuna and its genre-fellows, the presentation of all of this makes it feel very different from most of its peers. Juna’s role is intricately connected to her understanding of the Earth as a singular, living organism. It takes her most of the series to truly understand the full implications of that, and she really only has her final revelation in the very last episode.

Thus, most of the show is about how she deepens that understanding. Early on, she’s abandoned on a mountain with no equipment or supplies of any kind, and must learn how to survive on her own. And if you’re expecting the series to hammer this into some kind of tourist ad for the beauty of nature, you’re not watching the right series. Juna very nearly dies, and the only way she’s able to survive is by a quite literal miracle. Stripped of the trappings of modern life, Juna is forced to treat the Earth itself as her only means of survival, and through this lesson—and many others like it over the course of the series—she deepens her bond with the planet, little by little. Surviving the mountain gives her the ability to see the auras of living things. Which, sure, it’s the instrument that propels several of the series’ subsequent plotlines, but more important to what Arjuna is trying to actually do is that it lets her literally see how much of the planet is alive. Everything from the swarm of ants that picks her over in an early, frightening portent of what the series later has in store, to the glimmer of a nutritious leaf, to the very blood flowing through her own veins is laid bare to her.

In a lesser series, Juna’s character development would stop here. Possessed of the sacred knowledge of how life and planet are intertwined, she would spend the remaining 10 episodes of the show being insufferable about everything and the remainder of the series would be about other characters—and consequently, we the audience—learning from Juna in a direct and very talking-down kind of way. There is, admittedly, some of this, and one particularly bad example, as we’ll get to, but for the most part Juna comes out of this ordeal and many others like it with only incremental experience. Life is hard, giving up the life you’ve lived up until this point is significantly harder, and Juna subsequently spends most of the series as the student, not the master, and there are a number of times throughout where she fails to learn an important lesson, all the way up through to the end of the series.

The whole mountain storyline is one of the show’s most successful. Conversely, it feels pertinent to here mention that not every one of these necessarily lands, and some of the show’s weaker material does, as mentioned, drift into pure New Age book shop hokum. On the other hand, it’d be a mistake to say that Arjuna, if it has a problem, suffers from the fact that it’s about the environment in the first place. The show would not work on a very fundamental level if it wasn’t about these things, and if it misses about as often as it hits, maybe that’s just the inevitable consequence of being such a pure emotional trip of thoughts and feelings. Art of a certain caliber is due a certain amount of grace, and if one takes Arjuna as the scrambled thoughts of someone trying to work out their place in the world rather than as someone necessarily telling you how to live your life, it makes significantly more sense.

….But admittedly, the series itself sometimes makes that hard. It’s true that art should not be judged solely through the lens of how applicable it is as advice to one’s own life, and Arjuna is mostly good enough that I’d be inclined to dismiss such readings out of hand. But it’s not entirely good enough, and it’s probably here that we should talk about the show’s flaws, which are few in number but significant in impact.

So, the food thing. Arjuna really, really loves the idea of all-natural, organic food. “Organic” here meaning “devoid of those nasty chemicals and GMOs.” This is one of a couple places where the show’s point of view becomes all too easy to wave off. Because the sorts of people who complain about GMOs and non-specific “chemicals” in things are, rightly, often thought of as kooks. For the most part, Arjuna‘s treatment of this subject matter skews too goofy to really be read as harmful. The recurring problem of Juna being unable to eat processed food once she returns to civilization, for example, is definitely framed as though it’s a serious thing, but it’s hard to imagine anyone taking it on those terms. Especially when the show’s alternative is portrayed in such a trippy, Healthy Eating PSA-on-acid manner.

Juna decides to take “you are what you eat” more literally than most.

And, frankly, for all its haranguing on about chemicals in foods (seriously, some of the episodes of the show that are worse about this made me feel like I was in the car with my health nut aunt), Arjuna does at least know that spiffy capitalistic solutions won’t actually work. At one point, Tokio tries to compromise with Juna by offering her a ‘vitamin drink’ (think V8 or some such), and Juna has to explain to him that it’s not really much better than the cola that he’s drinking. Also, in a rare show of self-deprecation, Arjuna stages a fake commercial for this drink in episode 7’s halfway break that really must be seen to be believed. (It’s the first of several of these, in fact, including an extra-long one that was apparently a DVD bonus. Arjuna‘s skewering of commercials is probably its easiest point to relate to.)

This is the case for most of the show’s flaws, at any rate. These are sticking points that can be either laughed off as absurd or safely chalked up to the passage of time between the series’ original release and now. It’s not the case for all of them, though. We do have to talk about the show’s one big sticking point, the anti-abortion episode. Folks, it’s a rough one.

Juna spends most of this episode, the show’s ninth, learning to hear the voices of the unborn with the help of Cindy [Mayumi Shintani], Chris’s sort-of assistant. Cindy is a great character, possibly my second favorite after Juna herself, she’s funny, has a deep affection for Chris since he saved her as a child, and is responsible for both some of the show’s best one-liners and some of its most emotional moments. This episode, though, largely doesn’t do her justice. For the most part, the episode is a parade of nonsense to a much greater extent than even the others that present dubious ideas. It reads like a checklist of weird anti-abortion stuff; the notion that babies can “choose” when they’re born, the stereotype of all women who get (or even consider) abortions as abnormally sexually promiscuous, etc. The target for the latter in this case being Juna’s otherwise-unseen sister Kaine.

The whole thing climaxes with this, the dumbest single line in the whole show.

Married with that visual—of Juna just standing there all po-faced and pissed off—it basically becomes the world’s worst reaction image, something that is both riotously funny and deeply uncomfortable. A T-shirt reading “magical girls don’t do drugs” would be less on the nose.

That the series has to tie itself into knots to get there just makes it worse. With most of the other points Arjuna makes you can at least understand where it’s coming from, but most of what’s brought up here is just flat-out wrong, and worse still is that in doing this it squanders a powerful symbol it could’ve used to explore the issue with much more sympathy.

That’d be the fact that Cindy can physically feel everything that will ever happen to her—including, as she makes very clear in a very uncomfortable scene, sex—a disturbing and deft metaphor for the way that society hammers women into shape from the literal moment they are born; how it is demanded that a girl be aware of and take steps to address how she might appear to men, and how if anything happens to her because she fails to consider this, that she will be blamed. That this metaphor is then squandered on making her a mouthpiece for some really ugly bio-essentialism and the most tone-deaf anti-abortion plot this side of a Christian direct-to-streaming movie just sucks. Easily the worst part coming when we’re informed that Chris was water birthed from two loving parents, and that this is the reason he’s so gentle, because he “knows what real love is.” The unspoken other side of that claim, presented as fact, is pretty fucked up, and you would have to be a real piece of work to seriously think that the circumstances of a baby’s birth are solely dictated by how much their parents love them. The whole thing is just bad. Easily the worst idea the series has, and just wildly unpleasant to boot.

Ultimately, pockmarks like this are why I can’t give Arjuna the outright glowing review I’d love to. And we get into a fiddly and subjective realm, here, of just how much this is going to bother an individual viewer. Admittedly, while I am a woman, I am a trans woman, and thus am somewhat distanced from the issue of childbirth in particular. That might be why I find this episode, easily the show’s nadir, to mostly just be deeply unfortunate rather than an out-and-out show-wrecker. Nonetheless, if someone, especially someone who has more closely been impacted by this subject said that this just fully ruined the show for them, I don’t think I could really blame them.

Ultimately, Arjuna is holistic enough that not taking to it to ask for this would actually be the bigger insult than doing so is. It is better to acknowledge what the show is doing than try to pretend it isn’t doing it. (This is to say nothing of the viewer who would actually agree with the points being made here. But many are objectively untrue, and several are based on old debunked myths about childbirth. So I would advise anyone in that position to reconsider.)

A more briefly touched-on idea regarding an intersex character also hits a strange note. I will cop to not knowing if what she offers as an explanation for her condition (something about side effects from medicine her mother was taking) is true, but even if it is, the way it’s brought up doesn’t gel with the rest of the scene very well. It’s a strange mark on an otherwise pretty good bit of character writing, where we learn that she had a loving boyfriend and was part of the climate activism movement when she was younger, and it’s worth noting that the character is very well-handled otherwise, especially given that this show came out in 2001.

What makes flaws like this all the more noticeable is how well it gets it at other times. Arjuna excels at both very small-scale person to person drama and extreme big-picture thinking, and it’s pretty good at tying the two together, too. (This technique, which is not at all unique to this show, was the basis for the “world story” term back in the early days of Anglophone anime blogging, and if the term’s ever applied to anything, Arjuna must surely be it.) It only really hits a sour spot in discussing certain kinds of systemic problems, which it inevitably simplifies and tries to suggest easy fixes for. This makes it frustrating that the show spends as much time talking about all that as it does, but it makes the areas it excels at stand out all the more.

Take episode 8, for example. Juna, having just come off of a period of being depressed and doubting if Tokio truly loves her, finds she can literally astral project to spend some time with him, flitting around his room as an intangible half-ghost while Tokio, put-upon everyman that he is, remains unaware of her semi-physical presence, but loves talking to her nonetheless. Elsewhere, parental bonds are reforged after enduring immense stress with the help of Juna’s ability to literally see emotions, and a down on his luck math teacher expounds about the beauty of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

There’s even a pretty great moment in what is otherwise the show’s worst episode. Juna re-commits to her relationship with Tokio after the whole abortion plotline mercifully ends, and while they spend time together under the stars on a beach, they realize that their feelings for each other are more important than anything physical. The love is what counts.

Sequences like these contrast the depressing mundanity of modern life with the inner strength and character of the people who endure it, and it is this compassionate interpretation of a majority of its characters that inclines me to read Arjuna favorably. In a lesser series, characters like Tokio’s father, a biochemist whose work ends up indirectly causing the apocalypse (more on that in a second) or the aforementioned math teacher would be written as flat caricatures. That they have such interiority makes the show breathe and feel alive, which is really important in a series whose core thesis is that we’re all part of a greater being.

And, indeed, that’s how it ties that small-scale drama to the big-picture stuff. More or less the entirety of the show’s finale, which fields an impressive amount of spectacle to truly take the kids’ gloves off, sees Arjuna kick into overdrive as petroleum-eating bacteria merge with the Raaja to create a new type of Raaja that destroys plastic and, it seems, most artificial products in general, on a massive scale, leaving Japan completely devastated and the entire world threatened. An American official with ties to an oil company advocates for just letting the whole country die, probably the closest Arjuna ever gets to an out-and-out evil villain.

Arjuna has some pretty harsh things to say about civilization in general, and for a while, it does genuinely look like the series might torch the whole planet and walk away, which would be a disappointing ending that lets all involved off the hook and burns the series to the ground for a false sense of catharsis. Pointedly, it is only Juna’s near last-minute realization that the world is intricately interconnected that saves Earth, and everyone she cares about, from destruction at the hands of the Raaja. The final scene, where she fully comprehends the realization that she’s been given, and loses her voice in the process, is absolutely stunning.

It all clicks into place; when you harm the planet you harm yourself. When you harm yourself, you harm your neighbor. When you harm your neighbor, the whole world suffers. You get it. In the show’s opening shots, we learn that Juna is an archer, and recites a mantra to herself to help her shoot straight. Most of that mantra, in this final episode, turns out to be literally true; “the body permeates throughout the universe.” “It’s not to shoot the target, but to become one with the target.” Juna realizes that the Raaja and her mentor Chris—and thus, all beings everywhere—are one in the same. It is a humble, joyous, and life-affirming ending to an astounding series. This is why I like Arjuna, and why I can forgive it for most of its missteps. For the faults it does definitely have, it understands its own core extremely well, and its ability to articulate those central ideas is admirable.

Earth Maiden Arjuna‘s legacy is….difficult to pin down. In contemporary English-language anime discourse, it might actually be most famous as Kevin Penkin’s favorite anime. Which is fair enough; the series’ music, by the legendary and inimitable Youko Kanno, plays a huge role in establishing Arjuna‘s atmosphere of mysticism. The show’s production is absolutely wonderful in general, actually. It looks positively great; decidedly of its era in the best way possible. And well, doesn’t this tell you something about the state of anime discourse in English? All that time spent talking about what the show means and one whole paragraph about its sound and visuals. I haven’t even mentioned that this thing was the brainchild of Shouji Kawamori! (Probably best known as “the Macross guy” but honestly of such prolific work that pinning any particular thing to him and having it be definitive is impossible.) I also haven’t mentioned how absolutely cool Juna’s “Arjuna” form is. Dig the glowy hair!

There are, I’ll concede, also elements I’m not qualified to comment on. The fact that Juna can summon a massive mecha-like creature that’s called Ashura and seems to symbolize the more wrathful and headstrong aspect of her personality certainly means something, but beyond basics like this I’m over my head in discussing the series’ use of Hindu symbolism, and a few other things besides.

But I don’t think Arjuna, of all anime, would be mad to have itself reduced to its themes. The series’ ending demonstrates a deep appreciation of the fact that the universe is a web of connected nodes. The show’s display of this fact is on the simple side, but it is true that there are no discrete actors. In a very real way, we are each other, and we are the world itself. Left implicit by Arjuna is the fact that this is also true of ideas, thoughts, feelings, and yes, stories. So, if Arjuna fails the spot test on any particular issue, at the end of the day it understands compassion. It’s a lot like Juna itself, in fact; ever the student, forever learning, right up until the very end.

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Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Toxic Yuri, Tragedy, and Catharsis in DESTROY IT ALL AND LOVE ME IN HELL!

CONTENT WARNING: This article contains mention of physical and emotional abuse, and other sensitive subject matter. Please read with discretion.

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

If this one seems a little less coherent than usual, and more like I’m jumping from idea to idea, give me a bit of a break, I tapped this out in about a third of my usual write-time because I really, really just wanted to talk about this manga.

Let’s start with this, though. What a fucking title, fan-translated or not.

Destroy It All And Love Me in Hell! You don’t get enough like that anymore. Just chunky enough to telegraph that it’s the English name for a manga, vague enough that it could be about just about anything, but promising a unique tonal space, and that space is much of what we’re going to talk about today. But before we get to that, as is always the case, it helps to know what this thing is actually about.

In a sense, this is a dark twist on the classic “status gap” setup common to many yuri stories and, really, much romance in general. Except, instead of, say, a noble and a commoner in some fantasy setting or anything like that, we have a high school populated by an outwardly-perfect student council president overachiever who’s secretly so high-strung that you could play her like a violin (Kurumi Yoshizawa) and, in the opposite corner, an absolute scuzz-fuck dirtbag of a delinquent whose idea of a crush involves blackmail and punches to the solar plexus (Naoi). No reduction to common character tropes here, while both of our leads are loosely rooted in archetypes common to the genre, neither is what she seems, and even those foundations that exist start to crumble as the pair get into each others’ heads. A third girl, Kokoro, plays a decidedly tertiary role as Kurumi’s relatively innocent childhood friend who is also (uh-oh!) harboring a massive crush on her.

We open on Kurumi giving a perfectly fine but decidedly canned speech as the student council president. It is immediately obvious from the manga’s opening pages that, other than Kokoro, nobody really likes her. They either envy her for her achievements or resent her because they think she’s looking down her nose at them. (That latter point of view is what leads to her and Naoi’s already-uneasy first interaction.) Managing this largely-friendless existence is made even tougher by her incredibly overbearing—and we later find out, outright abusive—mother, who micromanages her schedule and insists that she excel in all things. The kind of anxiety that this sort of thing kicks up can easily lead to bad habits, and Kurumi’s, evidently, is abortive attempts at shoplifting. We see her palm an eraser from a corner shop, stick it in her bag, and then, overcome with guilt, pay for it anyway.

The usage of something as utterly minor as an eraser for this bit of tension-building feels deliberate. As it turns out, we’re not the only one who saw this little stunt. Naoi, whether coincidentally nearby or outright stalking Kurumi, films her doing it. From there, editing the video to only show the theft itself would be trivial, and it is that threat that first intertwines Kurumi and Naoi, and it doesn’t take long for their encounters to get violent. Things are fraught for a little bit, but then, in a scene where Naoi explains to Kurumi precisely why she doesn’t like her, three consecutive pages, and six words on the last of those, change the timbre of the manga forever.

“What are you laughing for? Freak.”

Like a magic spell, that single question—and Kurumi’s grin in that last panel—shifts the manga from a tragic story about one girl bullying another to something very different. I shouldn’t have to say this, but let me do so anyway just to be cautious; obviously, in reality, this is not how any part of this works. But, within the wonderful world of fiction, we can explore such problematic but compelling concepts as “what if a really hot girl at your school systematically ruined your life and you realized you kind of liked it?” Further, “what if you eventually got enough into it that it kind of became a mutual life-ruining?” Thus is perhaps the driving question of Love Me in Hell.

And on that note, I do feel the need to here go to bat for this entire subgenre. Occasionally I will see people express disbelief that anyone likes this kind of manga at all, or else they’ll assume they’re made for a gawking male audience, the alleged “male majority” that supposedly make up most yuri readers. Aside from the deep irony of how a certain kind of low-rent media criticism will claim to be feminist but center the male experience anyway, this is easily rebutted here from personal lived experience. I’m a woman, and I like this stuff. I’d describe myself as something of a novice in the ways of Toxic Yuri, but the appeal is immediate and obvious. This isn’t my first foray into the genre, but it’s a dive back in with an intentionality I didn’t have when I first discovered it.

We’re going to largely skimp on linear recapping here. The manga as it stands is just seven chapters long, and you can easily knock it out in an afternoon if you’re so inclined. The important thing to note is that as Naoi and Kurumi’s strange relationship continues, with Naoi continually threatening to expose her fake-shoplifting habit and demanding Kurumi do increasingly risky things (stealing from a teacher’s desk, carving another student’s desk up with threats and insults, etc.), they do grow closer in a twisted way. Based on that alone, you probably already know whether or not this is “for you,” I think it’s worth asking why this subgenre and particularly Love Me in Hell specifically, resonates with people.

I have one pet theory, myself. In the background of the manga, lurking but never directly mentioned, is of course the specter of homophobia. The idea of a “good girl” snapping under the weight of a deep-seated desire to do “bad things” doesn’t actually need all the character justification it gets in this series—although it does add a lot of depth to Kurumi’s self-destructive behavior—because it makes perfect sense. What is homosexuality in a straight society always painted as if not the ultimate transgression? What is anything that happens in this manga but the viscera of sexual exploration splayed out for us to see? Three chapters in, Kurumi is actively getting herself off1 while fantasizing about Naoi pinning her down and calling her a “bad girl”. She of course tries to claim to herself (and implicitly, though obviously disingenuously, to the audience) that she’s not really thinking of Naoi that way, but the panels show what they show, and it’s genuinely fascinating how Naoi seems to literally take up more and more of Kurumi’s mental real estate as the manga goes on. Love Me in Hell sometimes depicts her—or rather, Kurumi’s thoughts of her—as literal shadowy interlopers into the pages themselves, carrying clouds of inky black fog with them.2

Because we are to understand Kurumi and Naoi’s relationship as two-way if not healthy (it’s definitely not healthy, hopefully you don’t need me to tell you that), it’s important to point out that Naoi isn’t really the villain of this piece beyond maybe the first chapter or two, and by the more recent chapters it’s clear that they’re actively harming each other rather than it being as simple as X hurting Y. If there’s a real root of all evil here, it’s society itself; specifically the school system, and homophobia at large for allowing things to get this bad in the first place.

And on that note, if you’re straight and this kind of thing makes you uncomfortable, it is worth asking precisely why. Is it just that you don’t like to see cute anime girls getting hurt, or is there the lingering guilt of complicity somewhere in your noggin? I won’t judge, it’s in mine, too, despite my being queer, I let a lot of shit fly that I shouldn’t have when I was younger out of a desire to remain closeted, and I’m still not really a “visible” queer in a way that anyone would pick up on without asking. This stuff hurts, and pretending it’s not there doesn’t solve anything.

Of course, that’s not to say that Love Me in Hell is some kind of high-minded liberationist treatise, because that isn’t right either. There is a sense of reveling in the pain, here. Not as simple rubbernecking (do not let that imaginary male audience back into your head! Not for a second!) but as a fully intentional exploration of these emotions. A wading into, for lack of a better term, this uniquely fucked-up vibe. It may be offputting to put it this way so bluntly, but there is really nothing quite like watching two people collide in a way that could not possibly end well for either of them.

Kurumi, repressed to the point of her personality buckling under the pressure, finds an absolutely perfect foil in Naoi. It’s all but directly pointed out that it would have been “better” for Kurumi, if she wanted to break off contact with Naoi entirely, to just come clean about the shoplifting video and cut the problem off at the root. There are two reasons she does not do that. One; Kurumi’s very real anxiety from her mother’s outsized expectations of her, and as is later revealed, her outright abusive behavior wherein she threatens self-harm if not constantly kept up to date on Kurumi’s whereabouts, have made actual, honest communication between the two impossible. But equally important to the story itself is Two; being blackmailed by Naoi gives Kurumi permission to do bad things. Being “bad” with Naoi gives Kurumi a way of stepping outside of herself, an escape that no traditional outlet offers. It is a profoundly bad coping mechanism, but it is one nonetheless. Thus, the tragedy and the romance of Love Me in Hell stems not from the idea that there was no other way this could’ve gone, but because on some level Kurumi wants it to have gone this way. It is an absolutely sublime example of rotten romance, and a bit later in when Naoi starts to more obviously return these twisted feelings, the catharsis is very real.

At the same time, there is a festering, throbbing kind of pain to watching all this unfold, like an infected cut that got that way because you neglected to put a bandage on it. But in its own way, that kind of pain is itself fascinating and intoxicating. And this, really, is where we boil things down to “you either get it or you don’t.” Many people, I think perhaps most people, will never try to kiss this particular snake. Those that do will know better than to complain when they’re bitten. You need to know what you’re getting into if you’re going to read about a couple whose love language is beating each other up and whose grand romantic proclamations sound like this. It is fundamentally a very different thing from “vanilla” romance, and one cannot substitute the other.

I like things like this both for that reason, the emotional, elemental appreciation of watching two people make each other worse because there is no “better,” but also because unlike a good amount of “fluffier” yuri, this stuff feels immune to being stolen from us queers. Which is not to say that straight people are incapable of reading and appreciating art like this, but rather that in order to even understand what a manga like Love Me in Hell is trying to do, you have to already accept the premise that yuri actually is largely about queer romance and queer sexuality, instead of assuming it is being made for some other reason. I cannot conceive of the kind of bland, bad-faith readings that plague more mainstream yuri and yuri-undertoned works ever catching on with this kind of thing. Who could possibly actually get through it and not understand that sometimes, there is nothing more romantic than two girls just seeing how much worse they can make each other? It’s impossible to even entertain the idea.3

On a broader level, though, Love Me in Hell taps into the same rhythms of darkness that fuel all sorts of longstanding arts. Tragic theater, heavy metal, horror movies, hell, if you wanna go truly mainstream, there are tons of pop songs about specifically the idea of tainted love, bad romance, and so on. Hell, one of them is serving as the ED theme for an anime I covered on this very blog earlier this season.

Of course, hey, let’s check off the obligatory caveat. Love Me in Hell is a monthly, and as such even though it’s run for most of 2023 so far, it is still only those seven chapters in. The most recent of these is outright hopeful, in fact, ending with Kokoro admitting her crush on Kurumi. Things could, you know, theoretically, get “better” for Kurumi. But let’s just be honest with ourselves here, that’s not Love Me in Hell. I would be very, very surprised if Kokoro, the hopelessly in love, kind of bland sweetheart that she is, got the girl. I’m not even sure that either of the leads are going to get out of this thing alive! Both Kurumi and Naoi’s households are tinderboxes; emotionally unstable parents creating absolutely untenable situations for their children. The two’s only way out is through each other, and I don’t really see how Kokoro could feasibly fit in that equation.

The manga’s title, after all, is Love Me in Hell. It would hardly be the first romance manga to end in some kind of terrible tragedy, and that title sure does conjure images of going down into a burning ring of fire; a roaring inferno that takes everything, good and bad, with it.

1: If you are concerned about this kind of thing, the scene is drawn in such a way that you don’t really see anything.

2: I think I can get away with saying I find this entire habit of fantasizing and then feeling terrible about it deeply relatable as someone who was raised Catholic as long as it’s not in the main text of the article. Thank god for these footnotes that nobody reads.

3: This is yet another reason that the imaginary “male majority” isn’t worth considering when evaluating this stuff. I don’t know about y’all, but my experience with cis-hetero men in anime fandom, at least the kind who, say, insist Suletta and Miorine are just very good friends, has not painted a picture of people with the stomach for this kind of 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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Hell is Other People in KAMIERABI GOD.APP

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.

“Be forewarned that what’s to come isn’t a very pleasant story.”

-Opening line of the series.

You really need to know what you’re doing if you’re going to open a show with a deliberate, tone-setting monologue. That quote up there is just the tip of the iceberg, where Gorou Ono [Kazuki Ura], the protagonist of KamiErabi God.app, tells us that this show will not have heroes, will not have a love interest, won’t be about friendship, and won’t “tug at your heartstrings.” It’s a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing, in other words, and he encourages us to just “laugh it off” if nothing else. That kind of acidic cynicism is certainly more likely to elicit laughter than any actual bracing for serious, cerebral storytelling in this day and age, that’s true. So is there actually anything to this show, or are we in for a hopelessly edgy bleed-out of self-indulgent misanthropy?

Time will tell, but if KamiErabi‘s first episode proves anything, it’s that it has enough style to be worth giving a shot. Although I’ll freely admit I’m not sure how many will make that leap. The show is a highly-stylized all-CG affair, and while this is not the instant death sentence it used to be in terms of general reception, it’s still a hard sell for a lot of people. Which is a shame! The show’s modeling and animation are very good, and I’d only point to a tiny handful of quibbles with regards to things like eyebrow clipping as faults in this regard. The series’ environments look stylish, too, with a minimalist color palette that tends to focus on making single colors pop at a time. Each main character has a distinctive image color, as well, both in their eyes and in underdye form in their hair. All told, KamiErabi looks pretty sharp.

What will probably draw folks in is the nebulous involvement of Nier: Automata creator Yoko Taro. I’m only passingly familiar with the man’s work, but nothing here sticks out to me as an obvious thumbprint of his. In terms of plot, what we have here is actually a fairly direct riff on the whole Future Diary1 setup. The show’s opening minutes aren’t worth recapping in detail, but they establish a few fundamentals; Gorou is a typical teenage boy, but also kind of a misogynist, and is an idol otaku obsessed with the singer Iyo Futana [she doesn’t show up in this episode, but the credits list her as played by Tomori Kusunoki, whose prior role as Love Live‘s Setsuna Yuki seems worth mentioning here] and also interested in a classmate of his named Honoka Sawa [Sara Matsumoto]. Interested enough, in fact, to be jealous when his own friend, the shark-toothed Yutaka Akitsu [Shuuichi Uchida] points out that she’s dating a soccer player. And jealous enough that, when the convenient plot machination of a wish-granting phone app pops up, much to his own skepticism, he still idly asks it to let him “fool around with Sawa-san.” Not a terribly pleasant guy, all things considered, although how much we’re supposed to identify with vs. be disgusted with the kid isn’t entirely obvious at this point (and does matter, as far as establishing the themes of this kind of story go).

Initially unbeknownst to Gorou, his wish actually was granted, and fate just so happens to convolute itself such that he can invite Sawa to a secluded location. From here, things get….weird. Weirder than they already were.

Sawa starts coming on to Gorou pretty strong, apparently influenced by the wish-granting app. Gorou (seemingly involuntarily? The visuals get confusing here) exposes himself (thankfully we don’t actually see anything), and is promptly interrupted by a literal exposition fairy named Lall [Ayane Sakura], who takes a moment to explain the whole Mirai Nikki-esque state of things.

And Gorou promptly freaks the fuck out—understandably so!—and runs away, protesting that he wants no part of this. Sawa follows him, not actually because she’s under the influence of the wishing app, as it turns out, but because she’s also one of the candidates. To prove her starter bad guy bona fides, she promptly kills an innocent bystander and uses some kind of arcane ritual to turn his corpse into a huge cleaver-sword-thing.

The battle scene that immediately ensues here is, unquestionably, the easy highlight of the episode. We can sit here and talk about the show’s actual writing (spotty) and directing (interesting but a bit confusing), but the fight here looks absolutely great, as Gorou runs through a version of the stages of grief for his own ordinary life; first just straight-up running, then trying to persuade Sawa that this whole thing is stupid, then passively accepting his impending death, and finally steeling himself to fight back (which he does with some kind of magic book, because KamiErabi is not keen on explaining itself).

At the end of all this, Sawa dies, although Gorou and his impish partner resurrect her somehow, possibly sans-memories of the whole death game thing, and the episode ends on a very sudden, uncertain note.

The specifics of any of that are deliberately unclear, and a brief explanation is offered only in passing, but the case seems to be that in return for Sawa coming back to life, Gorou is now living an altered life where everyone believes he sexually harassed her. There are a couple ways to take this. On the one hand, yeah, he’s genuinely taking the fall for someone else in a very immediate and direct way; he did literally save her life when he had no real moral obligation to do so given that she was trying to kill him. On the other, the show sure does seem to want to twist itself into knots to justify or at least excuse Gorou’s earlier, apparently completely genuine, misogynistic behavior.

Ultimately though, it’s too early to tell for certain what KamiErabi is going to do here, but the fact that Sawa hasn’t been entirely written out of the story is, itself, a good sign. Especially given that she, not Gorou, is the one with the real killer scene this episode. (Now, if the series proceeds to do nothing else with her for weeks and weeks, that’ll be another story entirely.)

All told, the gist of it is simply that while KamiErabi isn’t anywhere near the strongest premiere of the season so far, it’s definitely one of the most out-there. And while strangeness shouldn’t be confused for quality (a mistake I myself have made a few times this year), there is some inherent value in just not being afraid to get weird with it. KamiErabi is bizarre, lurid, stylish, and disturbing. And those are good words in my book, as far as evaluating an anime’s future prospects goes.

1: Many other works of fiction have since used this general premise of course, to the point that I think you could easily argue that the whole “god candidate” thing is its own subgenre within the broader death game setup. I’m not even entirely sure if Future Diary originated this trend or just popularized it.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, Mastodon or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: A Lullaby For You To Come Back Home – Endings and Beginnings in FRIEREN: BEYOND JOURNEY’S END

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.

Wherefore the anime elf? This often-stylized archetype has been a standby of the medium, especially in the old-school fantasy genre, since the days of Record of Lodoss War. In Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, the archetype finds perhaps its best representative in many years. Which would mean nothing were the show itself not very, very good, but thankfully, Frieren‘s premiere is not just one of the year’s best, it’s an incredibly emotional treatment of the concept, and consequently, an examination of the brevity of life itself. Of how regrets can pile up over the decades, and of the incredible importance of connecting with those who are still here while we can.

If you wanted to be pedantic, you could argue that Frieren has something of an unfair advantage when it comes to the inevitable forthcoming comparisons to the other anime premieres of this season. Its first four episodes were melded into a single contiguous block for their Japanese premiere, and even as some streaming services (both in Japan and overseas) have sliced them back up into four parts, it’s obvious that this is intended to be taken as a single chunk of narrative. Back when Oshi no Ko made the over-length premiere play in Spring, it was an act of gutsy arrogance; an announcement that this was a massive pop blockbuster event that demanded full attention. With Frieren, the aim is much quieter but no less ambitious; it is to emphasize the sheer scale of time on which this story takes place. By my count, the combined premiere contains around 5 time skips varying in length from 1 to almost 50 years. Over this loping timescale, the hero’s journey is rendered merely a prologue. By taking this approach, Frieren reveals itself to be part of a long legacy of fiction that emphasizes the transient and fleeting nature of life itself, while at the same time demonstrating how important the people we meet, the things we do, and the memories we make truly are, even if they are little more than dust on the wind.

I have to confess to being a complete and utter sucker for this particular thematic line, and you should read everything else I’m about to say accordingly. I am a kind of romantic at heart, and stories that deal with this sort of material almost always get me. Last year I praised Vampire in the Garden for a broadly similar approach, there focusing on romantic connection. The year before that, it was Heike Monogatari with its emphasis on the crushing weight of history. Further examples predate anime as a medium. It is a tale quite literally as old as human memory. People are here and then, one day, they are not. Art is one of the few ways to truly reckon with this.

As far as the actual plot, we should rendezvous with Frieren herself [Atsumi Tanezaki]. She was the wizard of an adventuring party that, as the anime opens, has just returned triumphant from defeating (of course) the Demon Lord. A fireworks show cheekily labels this joyous occasion as “Part 6” of a story that we will never get to see in full. That night, a shower of bright blue comets blazes through the sky; the fleeting fire is a symbol for the short lives of mankind, and to hammer it home, Frieren’s companion, the swordsman Himmel [Nobuhiko Okamoto] remarks that he wishes he had a better spot to see it from. Frieren offers to see the next shower with him, which Himmel recognizes but Frieren does not is far enough in the future that he will be old by then. And indeed, when we actually see that next occasion, a full 50 years later, Himmel is a hunched-over old man with a beard almost as long as the party dwarf’s. Frieren herself, of course, looks exactly the same.

Not long after that, Himmel passes away. Frieren attends his funeral service and is forcibly confronted with her own nigh-immortality. She laments that despite travelling together for a decade (a length of time she previously dismissed as a “mere” ten years), she never really knew Himmel at all, despite him considering her a close friend.

Later pieces of the premiere imply that the two harbored even deeper feelings for each other, but, really, this scene is pivotal enough that for a time, the original manga was known by its fan-scan name Frieren at the Funeral. This marks a shift in her worldview, if one she seems to struggle to actually incorporate into how she acts.

Heiter [Hiroki Touchi], the party’s cheerful (at least on the surface) cleric, struggles with the limits of his own mortality as he takes in a war orphan named Fern [Kana Ichinose]. Frieren is eventually convinced to take Fern on as an apprentice as Heiter lay on his death bed, and she is the second main character of this story.

Much of the premiere, in fact, consists of Frieren and Fern taking on various odd jobs. Frieren is rather fey in a way that elves in more poppy works tend not to be. She is an aimless loreminder, and travels throughout the land collecting spells. To her, something to heat up a cup of tea or turn sweet grapes sour is just as valuable as any great or destructive magic anyone could conjure. Similarly though, when either she or Fern are shown in deep concentration or meditation, they do so amongst nature.

That Frieren is so mindful of the natural side of spellcasting elevates it above most work that reduces magic to the merely flashy. This connection with nature becomes important when, at one point, the two search for a type of flower that Himmel was fond of to decorate a statue raised in his honor many years prior. The search takes months, and Fern, who has quickly grown into the more practical of the two, thinks it may be extinct. But sure enough, Frieren is able to find a hidden store of the pale blue beauties, and rescues the species from extinction. (The flowers are blue and seem to deliberately recall the comet earlier in the premiere; that’ll be another symbol for the tragic brevity of life, if you’re counting.)

The flowers are also important to Frieren’s actual goal throughout the premiere. As the story advances and Frieren repeatedly reflects on the departure of Himmel (and, indeed, Heiter), she resolves to retrace her adventure with Himmel nearly a century after the fact, before all sign of it fades away and is subsumed by time’s tides. This smoothing-out of all of history, good or bad, is another of the anime’s key ideas.

Another example; 80 years before the show’s present, Frieren and her companions sealed away a demon sage as part of their adventure, trapping him in stone. During the present day, when the seal begins to weaken, Frieren and her still-relatively-green apprentice are able to simply dispatch the demonic wizard with ease. The once-unthinkably destructive magic that the demon pioneered has since become a standard part of every magician’s arsenal. In some sense, his contribution to this branch of magical theory, stripped, perhaps deliberately, of any context by the march of time and tides of history, is the real “evil legacy” of the Demonic Kingdom. Of course, on the other hand, the magical analysis of this kind of spell has allowed it to be overcome in the form of the protective wards that Frieren and Fern cast to defend themselves, so it’s not all bad. Still, one must wonder if the demon sorcerer doesn’t in some sense get the last laugh here.

A similar flattening and smoothing is applied, very much in the other direction, to an utterly ancient genre-standard gag. A skirt-flipping brat 80 years in the past becomes the wizened old man leading the village where the demon is sealed in the present. Time, Frieren puts forward, takes the impact out of anything, be it atrocities or dumb pranks, for better or worse.

When the past becomes truly important, it argues, is when it is manifested in the present. A later tale sees Frieren making sure she can witness a New Year’s sunrise. Not because she has any desire to do so herself, but because she did not do this with her companions during her quest decades ago. In a sense, she’s righting a wrong; even if Fern has to almost literally drag her out of bed for this to happen.

Later on, the past meets the present in a more immediate and dramatic way when Frieren and Fern reconnect with the dwarf Eisen [Youji Ueda] (another member of Frieren’s old party, and the only one other than Frieren herself who is not deceased by the premiere’s end).

From that reunion, Frieren’s journey seems to go full circle. The late elf magician Flamme, Frieren’s own mentor, is a fascinating, looming presence over this story. She taught Frieren much of what she knows, and time and legend have ascribed to her the power to speak to the dead and physically visit heaven itself. In the end, a book she left behind sets Frieren on a new journey, once more, a “mere” ten years to the lands of the late Demon King, as she chases the trail of her dead mentor and, conveniently, still sticks to her goal of retracing her steps with Himmel’s group. Frieren’s journey begins again, a loop nearly a century in the making.

I would not be surprised if future episodes of Frieren are less direct with alluding to this particular circle. Then again, maybe they won’t be. Frieren is nothing if not holistic; no part of the premiere feels easy to divorce from any other part of it. It’s in a way criminal that I’ve held until now to speak about the show’s craftsmanship, which is absolutely superb. Keiichirou Saitou returns here, from his directorial debut with last year’s Bocchi the Rock! working in a very different mode, intent on capturing the beauty of a lived-in, weathered fantasy setting that feels utterly timeless. The series can be surprisingly funny, too, with a charming, character dynamic-based sense of humor that never overstays it’s welcome. These things add to the show’s immense capacity for resonance; be that in joy or sadness. At the end of the day, all of this is Frieren, and it all ties back to the series’ core themes. This is my life, this is your life. We are all on some journey to somewhere.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to 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.

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: Forging a Myth in KAGURABACHI

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a new manga.

The life cycle of a meme—in the casual, internet sense of that term—is weird. Things can randomly spark some kind of cultural flame and within mere months you go from joking about, how, say, Morbius is the greatest movie of all time to it getting a second theatrical release and managing to flop twice. Simply because Shonen Jump is not as much of a presence in Anglophone pop culture as the MCU, Kagurabachi, a new title that began serializing earlier this week, is not there yet. Nor, unlike the Morbius example, is its fandom entirely ironic. But the same snowballing effect is there, if in a different way; something has a solid first chapter, maybe an exceptional one depending on your feelings on the all-sword-slashes-and-shadows school of shonen manga storytelling, and suddenly, there are lengthy copypastas calling it the greatest manga of all time, tweets about non-existent anime, game, and live-action adaptations, budget cosplays, a Discord server with some 4,000 members, and about a million jokes that all manipulate the same promo image of the protagonist drawing his sword. As of Thursday (9/21/23, for those of you reading this in the future), Shonen Jump’s English Twitter account has acknowledged the bit, so god only knows where this will eventually end.

This doesn’t need to be said, but just to get it out there; this is all pretty firmly tongue-in-cheek. I think perhaps the most telling of any of these memes that I’ve seen is the Kagurabachi bingo card, which allows for a number of standard contemporary action shonen plot beats. Plus the possibility that the series will either A) get an anime, B) flop outright, or C) get axed before either of those can happen. It also has the concession that the plot might end up being “basic.”

Nonetheless, however much or little irony any individual person making these images might have regarding their feelings for the series’ first chapter, I find it hard to believe that there isn’t something there. In comparison to its Class of ’23 contemporaries, Kagurabachi does indeed have a more immediately thrilling opening chapter than many. Time will tell if that holds up, of course—and even if it does, ongoing quality is not a guarantee of continued success. Just ask any fan of Ruri Dragon, myself included—but it’s worth at least looking at that promise, and figuring out what’s underneath all these jokes.

Kagurabachi‘s actual premise is so simple that the official summary is only a few lines long. Here it is, in its entirety:

Young Chihiro spends his days training under his famous swordsmith father. One day he hopes to become a great sword-maker himself. The goofy father and the serious son–they thought these days would last forever. But suddenly, tragedy strikes. A dark day soaked in blood. Chihiro and his blade now live only for revenge.

Kagurabachi, Manga PLUS Official Summary

True to that curt summary, what little we have of Kagurabachi so far paints it as a fairly straightforward tale of bloody revenge. There isn’t anything even remotely wrong with that of course; manga as a medium is rife with those, and some of them are very good.

We open on a bit of scene-setting, with Chihiro, as a young boy, living with his father while the latter runs a sword smithy. Chihiro’s father is eccentric, despite what one might assume from the gritty nature of his profession, and he’s introduced to us as talking with his pet goldfish. To hear him tell it, they have a lot to say.

Throughout this scene, we get little dollops of information about the world. The setting feels broadly contemporary, but Chihiro’s father’s friend, a fellow named Mr. Chiba, alludes to something called the “Seitei War” that Chihiro’s father’s swords somehow helped end. How mysterious.

For his part, Chihiro seems rather unimpressed by his old man’s reputation. In fact, as it’s nearing his fifteenth birthday it really seems like what Chihiro wants most is to follow his pa into the family business. He directly says as much, in fact, but his father is hesitant.

His father explains; swords are exemplary pieces of craftsmanship, sure. But at the end of the day, they’re weapons. Chihiro’s father believes that, whatever role they may have in ending conflict, they are also the tools used to start one, and the swordsmiths themselves are complicit in the lives lost by them. It’s a thoughtful approach. On a meta level, it’s also indicative of the many cultural differences between swords and, say, firearms, as storytelling tools. If one were to turn this guy into a dealer of almost any other kind of weapon, he’d be markedly less sympathetic than the already gray moral tone he has here.

Chihiro reassures his father that he’s willing to shoulder the burden of selling these things responsibly. Satisfied by that answer, his father brings their conversation—and this first, fairly light half of the manga—to a close by reaffirming that he believes in Chihiro.

Cue a timeskip; 38 months pass between two pages.

When we return, whatever city we’re in is not the peaceful one of the opening pages of the chapter. Wherever it may be, sword-toting yakuza rule the streets, and quash any resistance to their regime. That’s grim, if still in line with the fairly mundane world of swords and grit that the opening seemed to promise. But then, we learn that the yakuza are being bankrolled by this guy, a “sorcerer” of some description, who certainly seems to have enough magic to back that label up. In his few, gleefully villainous, pages of appearance here, he grows a black, spiky bush around a rebel’s head, leaving him to suffer until it decays on its own.

This, I think, is where Kagurabachi starts really staking out an identity. This guy’s character design alone is enough to hang a decent starter villain on, and depending on if we ever learn anything of substance about his motives, he could easily become an interesting recurring antagonist, too.

Naturally, when we next meet Chihiro he’s 3 years and change older, a fair bit taller, and a hell of a lot edgier. His face has been marked by a star-shaped scar, he’s clad in black, and toting a katana of his own. It’s honestly a little much! If you put him in tan instead of black he’d look like an Attack on Titan character. But my opinion on these things remains that it’s better to go hard on your character designs and risk overshooting than it is to play it so safe that you end up at “boring.” If there’s an artistic misstep here, it’s the former, not the latter.

Chihiro and Mr. Chiba (notably, Chihiro’s dad is nowhere to be seen) stride into the aforementioned yakuza city with, initially, plans to negotiate. Then they see a clutch of dead bodies hanging from a bridge, and at this point, the remainder of the chapter dissolves into pure action. Chihiro and Chiba can’t abide by what they’ve seen, so they bust up the yakuza controlling the city, and here, we learn just what it is that makes Chihiro’s father’s swords so special.

If you’re going to reveal that your protagonist has some kind of hidden power or technique, this is the way to do it. The sequence spans a few pages here, but it’s legitimately pretty damn cool, with Chihiro’s sword apparently possessed(?) by three inky goldfish specters which annihilate the rest of the yakuza in just a few swings.

This is not enough to pin a whole manga on, but it’s damn sure enough to pin an opening chapter on, and I think this particular trick is where Kagurabachi is getting most of its hype from right now, no matter how much ironic attachment there may or may not also be.

In general, this really is a strong first chapter, and it does a good job of providing emotional context for the burst of action that is going to be most of the reason Shonen Jump’s target audience pick this thing up. Clearly, something happened to Chihiro and his father. One does not go from a snarky but otherwise well-adjusted kid to an angel of death due to happy circumstances. Time will tell if the series can keep this momentum going, but I would say that the series’ surging popularity is, at least at this very early juncture, well-earned.

There are some weaknesses here, too, of course, very few manga absolutely nail everything right from chapter one. (The handful that do are exceptional for a reason.) The character art tends toward a bit stiff, and other than Chihiro himself and the villainous sorcerer I’d like to see the designs get a little more wild. The translation also tends toward the just slightly too-corny, with Chihiro calling the villains “slime” sticking out as a particularly bad offender. Of course, that part is not mangaka Takeru Hokazono‘s fault, and really, these are minor gripes more than serious complaints anyway. Overall, this is a very good first chapter, especially considering that it’s Hokazono’s first proper series.

At this early point, all that’s really left is to see what shape, if any, the series’ raw potential takes, not unlike the unforged swords in the chapter’s opening pages themselves. The manga’s early fan community will be a huge boon to it if it can manage to pull a good story from this setup (and if it can keep delivering on the action), and no amount of ironic distance will diminish that.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to 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.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: The Strange Transformation of LEVEL 1 DEMON LORD AND ONE-ROOM HERO

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to 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.

Posted on in anime, Manga, Other Posts

I’m Burned Out, and I Want to Talk About It

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 quite as 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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to 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.

Posted on in anime, Shambolic Anime Podcast, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Shambolic Anime Podcast [7/17/23] – “Liar, Liar”

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 Twitter here and Julian on Twitter here.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Exorcising THE DEVIL LADY

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Apocalypse as Liberation – ZOM 100: BUCKET LIST OF THE DEAD is the Season’s First Must-Watch

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 pretty good. 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.

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