Posted on in anime

Seasonal First Impressions: Does REIGN OF THE SEVEN SPELLBLADES Pass the Entrance Exam?

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

What do you think of the “magic school” genre?

In the Anglosphere, it will probably unfortunately be associated for quite a while longer with the Harry Potter novels. Mostly unfortunate because of their author’s utterly appalling views on trans people. Elsewhere in the world however, there is no such association, and indeed there is an absolute ton of light novel material in this genre, most of which never leaves that format but some of which does, including, just from a quick glance around Anilist, The Irregular at Magic High School, The Misfit of Demon King Academy, Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor, etc. You get the picture.

All this to say; Spellblades is very much a product of its own immediate environment more than anything else. Which is itself to say; Spellblades strikes me as incredibly basic from this first episode. But, given some developments in its final few minutes, there is a non-zero chance that it’s Doing Something by actually just pretending to be incredibly basic. Such is the inherent frustration of “non-indicative” first episodes. Which this might not even be, because other than spoiling myself by looking up the source material1, there’s really no way to tell beyond trying to play detective.

So, why not? Let’s review the evidence. First, we’ll start with the “it’s actually just that basic” argument.

Point 1, the characters; we have an incredibly simple clutch of archetypes here. They are all given just enough to say over the course of this episode that they don’t feel like complete cardboard cutouts, but we’re still working in very well established territory here. We have Oliver Horn [Atsushi Tamaru], our lead, who is a Very Nice Boy, compassionate to the point that he’s honestly kind of hard to like. Oliver spends most of the episode bouncing off of other characters and is by far the one we learn the least about, but he’s such a swell bro that he actually tucks his roommate into bed. (You’re not his mom, man, that’s just weird!) Next, we have Katie Aalto [Hitomi Oowada], who loves animals and has crazy ideas like “the school probably shouldn’t enslave sentient beings.” (We’ll come back to that bit.) There is of course also Guy Greenwood [Shinsuke Sugawara], who is the “hot-blooded” son of a farmer and gets very very upset at Katie’s aforementioned ideas. There’s Pete Reston [Riho Sugiyama], son of a pair of non-wizards and the archetypal studious guy with white hair. There is also Michela McFarlane2, a drill-haired off-the-shelf ojou who ends most of her sentences with desu wa. Lastly, there’s Nanao Hibiya [Yuka Nukui], who you can probably discern just from her name is the token student from fantasy-Japan. We’ll circle back around to her in a bit, but for now, just now that she has a sword, and is very dumb and absolutely loves to eat. She’s basically a stock shonen protagonist but a girl.

Point 2, the setting. Other than the sickly-sweet amount of colorful saturation, there is not a ton that distinguishes Spellblades‘ world from any other light novel series with a broadly western fantasy-derived setting. Honestly, even a few little personal touches would’ve been nice, but with two exceptions (talking, rude trees, and clock-nocks, little fairies that live in clocks), every single creature here is something I’ve seen in dozens of anime—and well beyond that—over the years.

Not to mention, Kimberly Academy, as the show’s wizard school is called, is itself set in yet another god damn city surrounded by a circular wall. Just in case you didn’t get your fill of those from the 3,000 other fantasy light novel adaptations that have aired since the decade began.

Point 3, the Troll Scene. Ugh. So, when our lovely little potato patch of protagonists pops over to their entrance ceremony, they’re treated to a parade of magical creatures. Perfectly fine—some of them, like the dragon, even look pretty cool—but, ah, one of the “creatures” in said parade is a troll. In this context, a giant guy who just happens to be green and angry. Hermione Katie sees this and takes immediate, justified offense, loudly arguing to anyone in earshot that trolls should not be paraded through the street like common animals, because they are thinking beings, just like humans. Guy angrily replies that this is fine because trolls are dangerous, don’t “speak our language”, and their being bent to the will of humanity is “only natural.” In the midst of that, a mysterious hooded figure curses Katie’s feet(!) sending her uncontrollably running straight toward the troll, which freaks out at being so provoked, and is promptly knocked unconscious by a group effort from Nanao and the other students. (Nanao, it must be mentioned, uses some kind of sword magic that changes the color of her hair. Neat.) The troll is not directly mentioned again after this.

Now, in theory, I think people should be able to write whatever they want. But, that also means all things are open to fair criticism. So; I have said this before on this blog, I will probably say it again, you cannot use fantasy species as a racism metaphor. That is a thing that we, collectively, human civilization, have to discard from our art. It just doesn’t work. It is perhaps the most overused and ill-considered analogy in fantasy fiction, and as an actual plot it is, on top of all that, just not any interesting. Especially if the side being discriminated against has no chance to ever get a word in, which seems like it will be the case here.

Unless, of course, Spellblades is Doing Something. Let’s now consider the points for that argument.

Directly relevant to the Troll Scene is A; Kimberly Magic Academy is fucked up and evil. This is not really hidden information to us in any way, a declaration that many of its students die, are permanently disabled, or are disappeared by their magical experiments opens the episode. The school’s headmaster, Esmerelda, reiterates that point directly upon greeting the student body, emphasizing that KMA prioritizes “freedom” and “results” and that all else, including the students’ own safety—and thus presumably any sense of morality—is decidedly a secondary concern. This could mean that the whole thing with the troll is just intended as another flag that these are Bad People. Of course, this would require Spellblades to not both-sides the issue, which is a problem that a truly astounding amount of bad anime run into. We’ll see where that goes.

Just as a side note; I’m not going to pretend to be scandalized by a powerful female character wearing what’s basically a bikini top, but it’s maybe not entirely the vibe you want to go for if you’re the headmistress of an evil magic school. On the other hand, in her position, and looking like she does, I’d wear the same thing. Truly, female character design is a land of contrasts.

Consider also Point B; the specific character of Nanao. It is easy enough to write Nanao off as an excuse to wedge a samurai into a setting that wouldn’t otherwise accommodate one, if you’re so inclined. But, Nanao is an oddly-presented character. In addition to all of her typical quirks, she is, as we see in a (sigh) bathing scene near the end of the episode, scarred almost from head to toe from real-deal war wounds. In fact, we learn that rather than entering Kimberly through any normal fashion, she was hand-picked by Michela’s father, who saved her from the midst of a raging battle. The visual we see could be dismissed as taking place in this setting’s equivalent of Asia—called, I am dead serious, Azia—but the framing almost seems to imply that she was isekai’d or something of the sort. The isekai device is much more interesting as something of consequence later in a series, rather than as the basic premise, so this would legitimately be a pretty neat twist. This is reinforced by her apparent ignorance of many customs in the setting, but again, she’s basically Schrodinger’s Samurai at this point. It’s hard to call one way or the other.

And lastly, C, there’s Oliver Horn himself. In the episode’s final act, he scouts out the school grounds at dawn, which seems to imply that he was aware of the general Fucked Up & Evil-ness of Kimberly Academy beforehand. Furthermore, the cloaked figure who cursed Katie is revealed to be an attendant sent by Oliver’s older brother Gwyn, also an academy student, who is shadowing him. This all implies some level of forethought on Oliver’s part, and that of his family. I will admit to being a sucker for “nice protagonist turns out to not be so nice after all” as a reveal, and it would do something to redeem Oliver’s blandness as a lead.

All of this needs context of course. For one thing, it’s not a guarantee that Spellblades will actually be made any better by having some kind of twist, even assuming it does have one. Trying to “Do Something” and actually doing it are, after all, different things. And, really, a show should ideally be interesting both before and after any kind of twist, additional perspective, recontextualization, etc. So far, Spellblades just hasn’t given us a ton to work with.

I’d argue, in fact, that me having to do this much legwork just to ask myself (and you all) if I should be invested in this is kind of a problem in the first place. A certain amount of grace is due to any new piece of art, for sure, but having to hem and haw this much is not a great sign. At least, you wouldn’t assume so, right? Conversely, maybe the fact that I’m willing to do so much indicates that I want it to be good. Of course, that’s true, I want every anime to be good, ideally, but I will admit to having a soft spot for a kind of low-rent fantasy fun. And there are definite upsides here; the actual magic system seems decently interesting, and the production is solid and will hopefully remain so. They’re just not huge upsides, which is maybe why I so badly want Spellblades to actually have good writing, too.

So who knows! If Spellblades appears on this blog again, you can assume it pulled off making the waiting game worth it. If not, you can safely assume I lost interest. What better test is there?

1: Honestly, that wouldn’t be the worst thing, but this is a column about seasonal anime, so it’s rather outside my scope here.

2: Yes that is actually her last name, I’m not having a laugh here.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Tumblr, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime

Seasonal First Impressions: THE GENE OF AI

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

From a long, long tradition of manga and anime about humanoid androids, artificial intelligence, and more generally, machines and their minds, comes The Gene of AI. (Probably one of many, many AI / ai puns that have been made in Japanese media over the years, but who knows maybe it is just supposed to stand for “Artificial Intelligence” and nothing else, here.) Part medical procedural, part one man’s quest to clear his mother’s name, it’s a show walking on well-trod, but always fertile, ground.

In a word, this is not a show you watch for breezy fun. It’s a cerebral and fairly stark cross-examination of big ideas like the duality of mind and body, how technology influences our lives and how we interface with it, and so on. Again, this stuff has been done before and stretches back to the dawn of the medium. So the question by the time Gene of AI ends will be whether it has brought anything new to the table. We’ll hold off on that for now, as will we any question about how this particular genre intersects with the ongoing machine art boom. Instead, let’s look at the basics.

Dr. Hikaru Sudou [Taeko Ootsuka] is a medical professional who specializes in treating android patients. “Humanoids,” as the show calls them, are virtually indistinguishable from real people. They live, laugh, love, and so forth. (The only real tell that a person is a humanoid and not an actual flesh-and-blood human is in their eyes; humanoids have sideways-turned oblong pupils.) Sometimes, Dr. Sudou works under the table, under the name “Moggadeet”, to take care of patients with problems that they can’t go to a regular medical practice about. And it’s these underground visits that form the backbone of the show’s premise.

You see, in Gene of AI‘s world, copying a humanoid’s “neural net”—what has in fiction been variously called a brain pattern, neural scan, brain blueprint, etc.—is very illegal. “30 years minimum in prison” illegal. This is for two main reasons. Firstly, to “protect the sanctity of personality;” which is to say that if you restore a humanoid’s personality from a backup of their neural net, the question of whether or not they are in any meaningful sense “the same person” is an unanswered one. Secondly, and on a much more immediately practical note, the creation of backup neural nets allows for ersatz human trafficking, where one “person” can be duplicated many times over the course of many years. Doc Sudou himself gives the example of a figure called “The Crying Man,” a series of several humanoids copied from the same backup, who is repeatedly found involved with crime rings in the Middle East.1 I imagine both the practical and moral concerns of this whole practice are going to be a big theme going forward.

Sudou’s not helping the people who get involved with illegal neural net copying anyway out of the goodness of his heart, it must also be said. He’s using the hefty sums he collects to try to track down a pair of men who, we see in an opening scene set 25 years prior to the main story, tricked his mother—also a humanoid—into allowing them to make an illegal backup of her. Thus, we have our general premise and our main man, plus his motivation. And so, the stage is set for a fairly episodic(?) series where Sudou helps various patients in these complex, difficult situations, while also searching for those responsible for his mother’s imprisonment. It’s a pretty good setup, all told. Even if Sudou himself is kind of a dick, and notably rude toward humanoids. (Don’t make your protagonists machine-racist!)

His first case here is, one must imagine, pretty typical. An android husband and wife are in a crisis, because the wife has contracted a terminal virus. Initially, they’re both pretty willing to go forward with having her restored from an illegal backup that they’d had made a week prior.

But, it’s here that the series raises the existential questions for the first time, and the wife starts having second thoughts. And this is to say nothing of how her daughter, an adopted human child, takes all this, as Sudou is totally unwilling to back away from the tough questions; is the person who emerges from the backup the same person who is being restored from? It’s an open question with no easy answer, and the series, to its immense credit, feels non-judgmental even as both husband and wife go through several different stances on the subject over the course of the episode. (As an aside, said daughter is a fairly interesting character all around, and is a skilled hacker despite her young age. I wouldn’t be shocked if we see her again.)

In the end, they take the “obvious” compromise route. They let the virus advance to where the wife would die anyway, and then restore her mind from the illegal backup. But the show doesn’t cast even this in an entirely positive light. The memories of those weeks she spent on her temporary deathbed are never coming back, and there is a fundamental disconnect between her and her daughter over those missing memories, elegantly expressed in the form of narrative metaphor via a change in her scrambled egg recipe that does not carry over to her new mind.

There’s a lot to like about Gene of AI as it stands, and it passes the basic makes-you-think test of any show aiming to be cerebral. The preview for the next episode teases a story about a man competing against android runners. The whole “man vs. machine in a sports contest” premise is a tough one to pull off, and that might end up being the real test for Gene of AI. Still, I’m optimistic.

1: In most other anime, I’d find the rather random flagging of this as happening in the Middle East to be kind of suspect. Here, I think they’re actually planning to come back to it. A distinctly Middle Eastern town square is scene for a few seconds in a brief, cryptic closing scene.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Tumblr, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Searching for the Real Monsters in UNDEAD MURDER FARCE

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Somewhere in Tokyo, in a version of the 1800s that is not our own, a man in a circus, nicknamed the Oni Slayer, fights one of the last youkai for the entertainment of a screaming crowd. He’s not thrilled about this; all the people in the crowd, and the oppressive ringmaster organizing the show, are, in his view, more monstrous than he or the demons he kills could ever be.

So opens Undead Murder Farce, the first post-Kaguya-sama anime from director Shinichi Omata, and the first full TV series from studio Lapin Track that doesn’t involve their original creative brain, the legendary Kunihiko Ikuhara. To float a truly imperfect comparison; the first episode sets it up as something broadly akin to a gothic, Meiji-era Bakemonogatari. It’s hard to imagine that staying true for long—if nothing else, we have reason to believe that our leads will be departing for Europe eventually—but for now it provides a nice, if rough, baseline. Our lead, Tsugaru Shinuchi [Taku Yashiro], that “Oni Slayer” previously mentioned, is a charming asshole with a surprising amount of wit about him. His incredible strength is due to a transfusion of literal oni blood, given to him unwillingly by a foreigner only distinguished by the mysterious cane he carries, marked with the initial “M.”

The other half of this equation is Aya, our other lead who’s been tracking Shinuchi down, since she’s in a predicament of her own. You see, Aya is immortal, but, because of an incident with another oni-blooded hybrid just like Shinuchi, she is without most of her body. Yes, one of this show’s leading characters is a severed head in a bird cage. Amazing.

Most of the episode revolves around these two “getting to know each other”, which entails immediately falling into a wildly entertaining haughty girl / dryly witty guy dynamic. That’s pretty good on its own; when paired with the dynamic directing, it’s an absolute treat to watch, and has a real theatrical edge to it.

The conversations themselves are interesting too, as they paint a portrait of Shinuchi as someone who is clearly very much angry at the world but is past the point of actively despairing or raging about it, instead, the farce of the title seems to refer to how he presently views his situation. Using a kind of humorous, performative mask to cope with his own feelings of powerlessness. Aya is much more of a question mark, which seems deliberate at this early point in time.

In general, this is a very subtly strong first episode. Most of the show’s more bombastic points—the demons, the gothic overcast to the setting, Maya’s attendant Shizuku being a delightful murder maid—are leveled out by much more low-key strengths in directing, composition, and even-handed pacing. Keep an eye on this one. It’s definitely playing its cards close to its chest, and much about the general direction of the story is still a mystery, but I feel like good things are on the horizon, here.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Tumblr, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit: The Empathy of Invitation in Episode 3 of BANG DREAM! IT’S MYGO!!!!!

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

Well, I did not expect to be covering this.

BanG Dream is foreign territory to me. I’m vaguely aware of the general contours of the series, both in terms of its anime adaptations and the mobile game that I believe (I’m not double-checking, so if I’m wrong you’ll have to forgive me) is the original spawning point for all this. Before two days ago, I’d never seen a single second of any of the BanG Dream anime. A friend* convinced me to give the most recent season a whirl, and I was assured it’s legible to newcomers. To be honest, I was a little resistant, mostly because It’s MyGO!!!!!, as it’s called, made the decision to drop its first three episodes as a single bundle, an increasingly-common practice that I remain undecided on where I stand in relation to.

The show, on the whole, is perfectly fine. Episodes 1 and 2 did not exactly knock my socks off, hence this being an Anime Orbit article and not a First Impressions article (although I might file it under both archives anyhow) but I thought they were pleasant enough, if maybe populated with a little too much melodrama that’s not quite to my taste. Anon [Rin Tateishi, in what appears to be her debut role], who serves as the lead for those episodes, is a fun character, being weirdly pushy and inconsiderate in a way that the show neither condemns nor glosses over but which propels the story forward in a nicely economical fashion.

More interesting than her though—at least to me—is another of the characters, who episode 3 focuses on, and in fact, takes place entirely from the perspective of. Yes, for 22 unbroken minutes, we inhabit the POV of Tomori [Hina Youmiya]. Some people will, I suspect, learn some things from this episode. Others, like myself, will already know deeply and intuitively the emotional territory explored here. The series doesn’t use the term, but Tomori is very obviously neurodivergent, and I feel comfortable going the extra step and calling her autistic. The episode inhabiting her viewpoint is, then, an exercise in empathy-as-invitation. It explains to us, without her ever saying all that much, what the show’s world and characters mean to her. She doesn’t need to say anything, we get to see it directly.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call the episode “important,” but it is a remarkably successful exercise. We start with her as a small child, where we see that she is more concerned with collecting rocks and “things that roll” than she is in directly socializing with other kids. (There’s a bit where she tries to give a would-be friend a bunch of pill bugs as a gift because she thinks they’re cute. This doesn’t work out as planned.)

As we see her go through life, she feels a distinct disjunct from other people. Sometimes we have to intuit that disconnection from the episode’s visual language—where Tomori often feels “crowded out” by other characters—and other times we see her diary, where she writes about this feeling in those words exactly. She’s on a different wavelength from most other people, and is keenly aware of it.

I should here pause the recap to disclose something. I myself am neurodivergent, but I will admit that I have ADHD rather than autism itself (the two are presently considered to be part of the same spectrum of alternate neurologies, and are often found together. As far as I know, I am not also autistic, although given my current material situation I’ll never be able to get tested, in any case), which might change how I read some of this.

Nonetheless, to me, this sequence of events comes across not as pitying Tomori, which would be condescending, but as simply trying to get as inside her head as possible. Even neurotypical teenagers often deal with feelings of loneliness and isolation, so when Tomori can’t connect to her peers, her loneliness feels immediate and real.

The good news is that she’s not alone for the whole episode. Tomori’s first real friend is Sakiko [Takao Kanon], who she develops a connection with after the latter sees her reaching out for a flower over a bridge and gets the mistaken notion that she’s trying to jump off. Sakiko is taken with Tomori, and her habit of collecting things (which as she grows expands to include a color-sorted crate of notebooks she uses as diaries, among other things), and after rather rudely riffling through one of her journals, finds what she assumes to be song lyrics. Tomori doesn’t correct her, and this misunderstanding is the predication on which the two eventually form a band, CRYCHIC. Tomori, naturally, as the “songwriter”, is also drafted as the vocalist.

Despite the obvious problems with this idea (and the notion that she’s kind of being yanked around, which, as a point of criticism, the episode never entirely gets past), she rolls with it, and eventually does start writing actual song lyrics. In a school performance that we see only glimpses of, Tomori floors her school’s student body.

This kind of thing, where a shy wallflower “comes out of her shell”, is a pretty typical story template for this genre of course, but MyGo!!!!! deserves full marks for making this all feel believable in such a short span of time. Indeed, the episode could itself be considered the same kind of plea for empathy that Tomori writes in her lyrics. It’s an interesting way of making you actually feel the journey of these five people, who initially have basically nothing in common aside from a vague desire to form a band, to a believably warm friend group.

But if it ended there, that would probably be too tidy. The other side to all this is that, in the aftermath of the concert, Sakiko suddenly loses interest in the band and stops coming to practice (possibly because of rude internet comments or something, it’s not entirely clear at this point). When she finally shows up again, Tomori makes an accidentally insensitive comment, and that’s that; CRYCHIC are no more. What the show really succeeds at getting across here is that sickly lightning bolt of shell-shock, where Tomori (who, again, is our POV character) can definitely tell that she said something that she shouldn’t have but can’t really think of any way to rectify the situation. And, well, ask anyone who’s been there; people are not nice to non-neurotypical people when they make fuck ups like that. Sakiko is angry, the band’s drummer, Taki [Coco Hayashi] eventually becomes very protective of Tomori. The rest of CRYCHIC mostly just seem hurt and confused.

This is all a very complicated situation, and the episode ends on that unresolved note, as the rest of the series takes place some time later (this episode is, in addition to everything else, essentially backstory for Tomori and the other ex-CRYCHIC girls). Tomori openly says that she feels incomplete somehow, an emotional beat that just absolutely punched yours truly dead in the gut. Her new school in general doesn’t seem kind to Tomori, and the show’s actual description notes that in-universe she’s given the not-very-nice nickname of “Honoeka’s Weirdo.” So the episode just ends there! With Tomori alone again. It’s a rough scene, one I’ve literally lived through, and it’s only the implicit promise that things will get better that makes this come off as realistically sad rather than a complete downer. That’s a hard thing to pull off.

It’s hard to say how, precisely, things will improve for Tomori and the other former CRYCHIC girls. But I’m confident that they will, simply because this episode is so intent on wholly inhabiting her as a character. Compassion this immediate doesn’t happen by accident, it has to be actively worked for.

*hi Josh

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Tumblr, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: What The Hell is Going in With THE GIRL I LIKE FORGOT HER GLASSES?

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

I’ve had nightmares about having to cover these guys.

Far more important than the actual anime we’re covering today, The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, is the studio that’s making it. This is a production by the infamous GoHands. The things they make are identifiably still anime, but they sit far outside of established visual norms; in terms of shot composition, basic directing and storyboarding, etc., that to see them in motion is to see what an anime produced in a another universe might look like. I am not, as many people in my position have, going to sit here and tell you that their shows necessarily look outright bad. I think GoHands’ work really falls outside of the good/bad dichotomy. But what it certainly, undeniably is, is confusing. Theirs is a ludicrous, extravagantly gaudy approach to fairly humdrum material that I cannot readily compare to any single other anime studio, except to say that if you imagine what would happen if Kyoto Animation decided to collectively drop an absolute ton of acid, you might get close.

There is so much that is just absolutely insane about how they approach the entire visual angle of their work, and people who study animation as a medium much more deeply than I do have written extensively on their many baffling decisions. Camera angles for instance; it’s obvious, but it’s worth repeating; in anime, there is no physical “camera.” Every single frame is drawn from an imaginary point of view, and there is absolutely no reason you cannot put the “camera” anywhere you want. In spite of this, there is ample literature describing best practices for where to focus your audience’s attention. Anime does this in a variety of ways, some common to all popular cinema and some unique to the medium itself, and GoHands boldly defies almost all of them. In terms of angles, the opening few minutes of Glasses Girl alone see Us, The Viewer, dragged along behind the protagonist’s feet as he walks to school, looking up at him at such an extreme angle that it makes him appear to have downright CLAMP-ian leg proportions.

In addition, GoHands completely disregards the entire general principle of limited animation. Their work, and especially Glasses Girl here, is absolutely bursting at the seams with extraneous motion. When our lead imagines the titular Glasses Girl walking to school with him, it seems like every single hair on her head is individually animated blowing in an imaginary wind. Background characters, who contribute nothing to the story directly, are given the full attention of the animation team. This has the interesting effect of making the main character, our usual everyman protagonist, actually feel exactly as important as every other character on screen—that is to say, not very important at all—and it’s from this kind of thing that you can sort of understand why GoHands, in addition to being widely reviled, also have a cult following. And hey, their stuff does look pretty good. As stills.

If you’re the sort of person who, like me, is constantly depressed by the general state of anime production, and how in recent years it’s led to even the best anime generally having at least one or two episodes that just look visibly unfinished, you will not really know what to make, at first, of a show that seems to have the opposite problem. But the fact remains that there is so much goddamn visual spaghetti on-screen at any given time in Glasses Girl that it’s hard to actually focus on anything.

If it seems like I’m spending a lot of time discussing the actual animation and not the story, that’s because there’s not a ton to say on that front. The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses is another entry in the girl-with-a-gimmick romcom subgenre like, say, My Dress-Up Darling or any number of others. I tend to be pretty mixed on these anime at the best of times, and most of the good ones get by on visual chops. (Not to mention, “she wears glasses” is pretty damn weak as far as the central charm point for these things goes, especially since the show’s very premise requires her to not wear them most of the time. Not as weak as Shikimori from that show being nebulously ‘cool,’ but still.) So to that end, GoHands actually sort of has the right idea here. The notion is to make you feel the strength of the characters’ love via visual metaphor rather than necessarily needing to write them particularly strongly. After all, even a simple teenage crush can feel enormous when it’s your first one. And to their credit GoHands do pull off some appropriate tricks here; a huge swarm of blooming cherry blossom petals in the opening being the most obvious.

But fundamentally, the series has an unshakeable air of total derangement that feels comparable not to any other anime but, really, only to total amateur fiction. Glasses Girl‘s real compatriots are indie doujins and the like, not anything else airing this season. (Other than perhaps The Masterful Cat is Depressed Again Today, another GoHands show that premieres in a few days.) Any attempt at earnest depictions of romance falls apart under the fact that in addition to the series’ wobbly, loopy visuals, it’s also pretty badly-written. Main character Kaede Komura [Masahiro Itou] spends most of the episode monologuing about how down bad he is for the female lead, Ai Mie [Shion Wakayama]. Which would itself be forgivable if anything he had to say was remotely interesting instead of just vaguely creepy drivel, but it isn’t. The attempts at humor are mostly not worth mentioning, although the series does occasionally manage a passingly funny gag. If I could compare the combination of bizarre visual choices, faintly skeezy atmosphere, and downright upsetting attempts at selling the “chemistry” of the leads to any other anime, it might be Akebi’s Sailor Uniform, which long-time readers will know is not a compliment.

Through the bizarre monologuing, offputting atmosphere, and overuse of fisheye effects, it’s hard to imagine who the target audience for this thing actually is, other than GoHands’ own small cult of devotees. (Even then, the moments of true visual weirdness, such as when Kaede and Ai are chroma-keyed into a heavily filtered CGI forest, are few and far enough between that I’m not sure bad-anime rubberneckers will be interested either. Although there is an abundance of truly bizarre camera choices on otherwise mundane shots, for certain.)

Nonetheless, it’s hard to actively dislike Glasses Girl. There’s just too much that is too far removed from the norm to make it worth that, and it’s worth at least acknowledging that the bizarre disjunction every part of this show has from every other part can at least produce an interesting accidental-denpa effect. No, save your vitriol for shows that are actually offensive or are so badly kneecapped by the production bubble that they’re ruined. Real cases of potential squandered, not whatever’s going on here. At the same time, l can’t find it within me to become a true GoHands defender, either, and I did have some outside hope that maybe this show would accomplish that. But, it is what it is. Some things are simply not made for you and me.

And, well, it’s at least still more authentically weird than Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon, which I will not be covering here on Magic Planet Anime. So that’s something.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Radiant Magic of YOHANE THE PARHELION -SUNSHINE IN THE MIRROR-

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.

As I type this, a thunderstorm is passing over Chicago, where I live. I can hear the wind battering at my window and the rain tap tap tapping against it. In this way, there could perhaps be no environment less suited for Yohane the Parhelion -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR-, an interesting project that, as its title implies, is nothing but a warm column of sunrays on a breezy summer day.

I have to confess, I wasn’t going to originally cover Sunshine in the Mirror. It’s a decidedly peculiar spinoff of Love Live!! Sunshine, perhaps the franchise’s most well-regarded entry, which reimagines its characters by placing them in a fantasy setting wholly divorced from our own world. I have, plainly put, never seen Sunshine, so I was worried I’d be missing some context here. But, a few words of encouragement from a friend1 that it’s amenable to franchise neophytes (which, having seen only the two seasons of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club and Love Live!! Superstar! I would say I might still count as one) and, moreover, actually watching the episode itself, convinced me otherwise. This is just a mercilessly pleasant anime, going by its first episode. It also interacts with its immediate predecessors—mostly Nijigasaki—in some interesting ways that we’ll get to. But really, the main thing here is just that it is such a ray of sunshine. I haven’t felt this relaxed and refreshed while watching an anime since Healer Girl premiered over a year ago.

There’s something else, too, which I’m not sure will be obvious to non-genre fans. This is the third out-and-out fantasy idol anime2 in just four years. (We’re here counting this, Healer Girl, and 2020’s Lapis Re:Lights, which might just end up going down in history as being ahead of a trend.) A certain strain of idol anime, of which the Love Live franchise is a huge part, basically already is fantasy. “School idols” and whatnot are not real things. They have about as much to do with the actual idol industry as Fist of the North Star does with actual martial arts. If they are already presenting a notion of idol music that is so unconnected to reality, why not embrace that? This is the question these shows are, intentionally or not, asking. They have other themes too of course (I could go on about Healer Girl‘s various layers for hours), but by inheriting a textually fantastic bent from the idol anime genre’s contemporaries (say, Symphogear) and its ancestors (most famously Macross), it frees itself from the leftover trappings of the idol genre proper. Frankly, I think this is wonderful. Leave that to anime that are actually interested in dealing with the ins and outs of the industry. If you want to be fantastical, be fantastical. And that, in a nutshell, is what Sunlight in the Mirror is aiming for. It’s easily the most high-profile of these, and it’s definitely at least trying to be one of the best.

Even so! In the beginning you could be forgiven for thinking the whole fantasy world conceit is a little odd. The core story here, where our protagonist Yohane [Aika Kobayashi] reluctantly returns home after an unsuccessful two-year journey in the big city to get signed as a singer, could easily fit in a more conventional idol anime. If you’re not paying attention to the sumptuous backgrounds, you could conceivably even miss that this is an original setting at all. I have to admit that in the episode’s first third or so, I had some difficulty connecting with it. “Love for your hometown” is not exactly a theme that deeply resonates with me, personally, as someone who also left a podunk town to live in the big city, albeit not for entertainment career-related reasons. Still, Yohane herself, as an incredibly overconfident failgirl in a ridiculously flashy outfit, is an immensely likable protagonist. Even moreso when she’s teamed up with her talking dog(!!!!!!!!) / surrogate sibling Laelaps [Yoko Hikasa], who tolerates absolutely none of her bad attitude and forms a very fun dynamic with her.

Really, as far as actual plot, not a ton happens in this first episode. Yohane returns to her hometown, mopes around a bit while Laelaps needles her about it, tries (unsuccessfully) to avoid reconnecting with her childhood friend Hanamaru [Kanako Tanatsuki], who works at a local bakery. But there are two big things that point the way forward for Sunshine in the Mirror. One is a total question mark, and the other, where the show really leans into its strengths, is absolutely beautiful.

Firstly, while Yohane is making awkward small talk with Hanamaru, a bizarre psychic shockwave of some sort resonates across the entire town, and we’re shown the puzzling image of some kind of shadowy portal opening between the branches of a tree in a nearby forest. It’s hard to say what’s going on there, exactly, but I will just put forward now that if the climax of this anime involves our girls defeating some kind of demonic invasion by singing at them, I will be entirely here for that.

Secondly, late in the episode Yohane revisits a childhood landmark; a massive tree stump that, as a kid, she used as a personal stage. She would sing and wave around a stick like a conductor’s baton, it’s all very cute. What’s much better though is that, when a concerned Hanamaru joins her near the stump, she convinces Yohane to sing for her, and it’s here where Sunshine in the Mirror cashes in its most brilliant, yet, in hindsight, totally obvious idea.

She sings; the song is great, the visuals are great, a triumphantly lonely number set to rolling shots of a brilliant blue sea and vibrant green grass, where Yohane faces herself in the mirror, awakes from a long sleep on a giant black flower, and bursts away cottony shadows with a bright flash of lilies. In fact, Sunshine in the Mirror here uses the same “image stage” technique that fellow Love Live entry Nijigasaki High School Idol Club created and perfected. But the biggest moment here is actually when this little mini music video ends, and reveals that, actually, no it doesn’t.

We see Yohane’s costume glitter and glow as it changes from what she wore in the image stage back to its usual, very extra self. The strongly implied is made textual mere moments later; this is real, actual magic. Everything we just saw is what Yohane’s audience of two saw as well. Perhaps the most dramatic change is what happens to the little stick she’s again using as a conductor’s baton. It transmogrifies, evidently from the pure, literally spellbinding force of Yohane’s song, into a fox-headed magic wand. It’s an absolutely wonderful touch, and it makes complete sense as a further evolution of Love Live‘s visual splendor.

The only bad thing is that you only get a chance to do this particular reveal once. It’s a hell of a flourish, but it’s a one-off by its very nature. It can’t carry the whole show. The good news is that, of course, it won’t have to. If its first episode is any indication, Sunshine in the Mirror can get by just fine on emotional honesty, gorgeous production values, and simply by being an irrepressible blast of sunny magic. What a lovely way to start the summer season. What else could you ask for?

1: hi Josh

2: While this is the obvious name for this particular genre fusion, I’ve never heard anyone else call them this. Did I just coin a term? I’ll happily take credit for doing so, if I did.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) MAGICAL DESTROYERS Flames Out Forever

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

“If I round up, I’m basically 30.”

Well folks, I’ll admit it. I’ve basically been had.

That’s dramatic, but it was legitimately my first thought upon sitting down to write this piece. Where to begin? I’ve gone to bat for Magical Destroyers, even as I’ve gone back and forth over whether or not I thought the show was actually, you know, any good. Now that it’s over, we can settle the question with a definitive “no.” It’s not even the high-speed trainwreck some might’ve been hoping for. Taken on the whole, it is simply bad in a broadly disappointing way that feels all too familiar in the present anime landscape. Embarrassingly, this series—not the rightly polarizing but unquestionably effective Heavenly Delusion, not the relentlessly dramatic second season of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, not even the low-stakes fun of Dead Mount Death Play, but this series—is what I’ve written about most of the Spring 2023 anime crop. (Other than Oshi no Ko, at least.) This is embarrassing not because the show is bad, but because I let myself be taken in enough by its occasional moments of brilliance—moments that are real, and genuine, but do not do enough to justify the mediocrity around them—that I was convinced it would pull everything together in the finale somehow. That didn’t happen. Spoiler alert.

I won’t flagellate myself over this mistake, if it can be called one. Sometimes anime just aren’t any good, and if you go into every anime expecting it to eventually become the best version of itself—and I generally do—you’re going to sometimes be disappointed. That’s just how the game goes. I might feel worse if I had a larger audience and had inspired legions of people to watch this, but I didn’t. To be honest, I don’t think much of anybody, inside Japan or out, watched Magical Destroyers. Nonetheless, because I was so convinced I’d eventually be vindicated, I feel something of an obligation to try and take the show apart and see why, specifically, it doesn’t work. Because I do think that much of what little criticism of Magical Destroyers there has been has been misaimed, in that it assumes that this is an idea that could never create a good or even great TV show. I don’t agree with that, I think Magical Destroyers had many opportunities to be brilliant, and more than one chance to salvage things once they started going off the rails. It blew almost all of those opportunities, which is, in my mind, worse.

But we’re starting with the conclusion, here. It’s probably best to lay out what Magical Destroyers actually is, for those of you just joining us. Here’s the very short version; Magical Destroyers is an admittedly novel fusion of magical girl trappings and some stylish red-and-black anarchist chic paint with what I’ve taken over the past few years to calling the otaku action anime subgenre. It ends up doing rather little with this fusion, but that’s the general idea.

About the otaku action anime microgenre. These shows, of which there are only a small handful, are all broadly similar; they combine the general highs and the structure of action anime with a premise that asks what would happen if society’s general dislike of the weird and socially awkward—specifically in the form of otaku themselves—were actively persecuted, like a dissident political movement. It’s an indulgent thought experiment, to be sure, but as I said back when this show premiered, it’s not a wholly irrelevant question. In the US alone, bans on artistic expression designed to catch minorities in their net are a real thing, and have been an ongoing issue especially this year specifically. Extrapolating from stuff like that into a full-on nerdocide is still pretty out-there, but it’s not entirely crazy. Especially if the show in question actually does something with that connection. Magical Destroyers really doesn’t, but other anime in this subgenre occasionally have, most notably 2021’s Rumble Garanndoll and its direct line-drawing between hatred of “undesirable” subcultures and out-and-out fascism, an observation that is actually pretty on point. (The other entry in the genre that sticks closest to this model is Akiba’s Trip. Not as good as Rumble Garanndoll but still decent, certainly. Slightly farther out, dealing in different specifics, are the second half of Anime-Gataris, undersung metafiction clusterfuck Re:Creators, and emotional fireworks display The Rolling Girls. All of these are better than Magical Destroyers, some significantly so.)

Magical Destroyers’ twist on the formula is that the otaku are being persecuted by a dictatorial being named Shobon, a man with a TV displaying a (•ω•) face for a head, and his army of similarly-decorated troops. They round up otaku and put them in reeducation camps and confiscate their stuff. It’s all a big to-do. But of course, there is a rebel army, led by our protagonist Otaku Hero [Makoto Furukawa], and aided by his three weed-smoking girlfriends1, the magical girls Anarchy Red, Blue, and Pink [Fairouz Ai, Aimi, and Tomoyo Kurosawa]. I’m being glib because the specifics really aren’t important here. The first half of the series follows a broad threat-of-the-week format that it mostly (but not entirely) manages to make work. The first three episodes are legitimately pretty great, especially the second with its Pepto Bismol-pink psychedelia, and if that were all there was of the show I would think fairly highly of it.

Unfortunately we hit our first major obstacle soon after, with a truly tasteless fanservice-focused episode. Things pick up somewhat again after that, but the show becomes markedly spotty from there on out.2 Throughout, it often threatens to make a greater point beyond its core slogan—and slogan really is the only appropriate term for the constant repetition and variations on the phrase “people should be able to like what they like”—but always backs away when that would jostle the show’s status quo. This is an absolutely bizarre approach for an anime about a group of rebels fighting against an oppressive government to take. Forget any specifics here, this is just bad writing in the broadest sense possible.

Sometimes, it gets by on audacity, style, or weirdness. The show’s visual quality is inconsistent, but the episodes that look good can stand up to anything else from this season. The aforementioned episode 2, along with a few other highlights, namely episodes 9 and 11, are full-on standouts. In addition, the show’s stylish, post-modern take on the whole “bank system” idea, where certain elaborate sequences are made to be reused many times throughout the course of a show’s run, is pretty great. All three magical girls have really great henshin sequences that we get to see a few times, and they have similarly fun attacks that really pop, despite the fact that we only get to see a majority of them once or twice each.

The character writing is similarly of variable quality, but Anarchy, who serves as a secondary protagonist, is great when given proper opportunity to shine. She’s a loud-mouthed hothead with a showoffy streak and a sensitive side that she reserves for (of course) Otaku Hero himself. It’s nothing revolutionary, despite the show’s posturing, but it’s decently compelling stuff. (Blue is also fairly entertaining, if one-note. I could imagine being offput by her, but to me the idea of gender-flipping the “moron pervert who is unfortunately a protagonist” character archetype is actually pretty funny. Pink, a druggie who can only speak in the phrase “gobo gobo”, is much less compelling.) Even Otaku Hero himself isn’t a bad character per se. Despite the vibes that the show’s 1 guy 3 girls setup might give off, he doesn’t really feel like a harem series protagonist, and doesn’t much feel like a self-insert or otherwise generic either. He can even almost spit some decent rhetoric in the show’s better episodes. But again, any time the show has to get more specific than “people should be able to do what they want,” it backs off, and this kneecaps everything about the series, top to bottom. For much the same reason, the crowd of nerds who make up the Otaku Revolutionary Army is pretty narrow, too. They’re uniformly—and specifically—Somewhat Unattractive™ Dudes From Japan, with the only exceptions being Pink’s band of nightclub warriors and literally two (count ’em, 2) indie idols we see join the ORA’s ranks later on. Even the show’s visual style isn’t all-upsides. There are episodes that look outright bad, and even the good ones are often extremely homage-heavy, which can be a good or at least fun thing, but we aren’t talking about Kill la Kill here. Magical Destroyers does have style, but it doesn’t have enough to make that approach work.

Really, the fact that I’m having to get so specific and caveat-heavy with the show’s positives says a lot on its own, doesn’t it? You could say things like this for any anime that’s not truly terrible. And that’s really the issue, Magical Destroyers isn’t truly terrible, and I’ll probably never actually dislike it. I like too much about what it could’ve been for that, and what the show actually is feels too slight to warrant hatred. But that doesn’t put it above the level of, say, The Detective is Already Dead, another anime I’ve fostered a somewhat inexplicable even to myself attachment to despite it being fairly mediocre.

So to round us out, the question must be asked; what was Magical Destroyers actually trying to do, if anything? Be a real rallying point for otaku counterculture? Establish a lasting multimedia series that would persist well after the anime itself is over? Just simply be a good action anime with more highs than lows? It accomplishes none of this. Which is a shame, because there’s some real love in this thing if you know where to look. Certain individual animators and episode directors clearly cared a lot about the show’s visual angle, and most of the voice talent turn in good to great performances, especially Ai Fairouz, who, when she gets the chance to truly chew scenery as Anarchy, is just as unstoppable here as she was as Power in Chainsaw Man last year. Unsurprisingly, this combined with the fact that Anarchy is actually decently-written makes her the show’s best character by far. Looking back on the first two episodes I’m left to wonder if the show wouldn’t be more coherent if they focused on her a little more. It’s hard to go wrong with such a delightful little firecracker.

But again, none of this ever comes together to present any kind of coherent theme. The fact that I’ve seen all twelve episodes and couldn’t really tell you what the show is about on any level except the most literal is kind of a problem! “People should be able to like what they like” is a reddit comment, not a core thesis you can hitch your whole show on! This is to say nothing of the whole kerfuffle involving Origin in the show’s final arc, the goddess who it seems to present as sort of an ur-anime viewer. This idea is simply not around long enough to ever be developed in a really coherent way, and it ends up being just another extraneous idea that the show briefly plays with but doesn’t actually engage with in any meaningful way.

But perhaps the most telling problem with Magical Destroyers is not anything obvious. It’s how the show treats youth as a concept. One of the very, very few coherent thematic lines through the series comes from Otaku Hero getting older. This article’s lead-in quote is from him, reflecting on his life in his last moments as he’s killed by the now-evil magical girls in the final episode, the climax of a conclusion so pointless as to feel deliberately insulting. On the one hand; same, buddy, I’m 29 myself. But there is something genuinely dark and offputting about this alluded-to notion that it’s better to die as a young otaku than to live to be an old one. It’s also complete bullshit! I personally know more than one person still active in the fandom who is over 60, and those people have stories! Stories that matter and are interesting! The only positive gesture in this direction are the characters of the Kanda River Squad. Their big character moment is to engage in a pissing contest with the young’ns about whether or not they’re “real” otaku all the way back in the loathsome fourth episode of this show. It’s pretty dire that all this is the only coherent theme to be pulled out of this series, other than it’s incredibly weak sloganeering.

In another lifetime, Magical Destroyers could have been something truly special. Maybe there, its talk of revolution isn’t all only just that and it actually has some bite to it. Maybe there it’s more even, maybe it has stronger writing, maybe it has the self-awareness to call out problems within the otaku subculture too, and not just pretend everything is a black-and-white us vs. them scenario. But of course, this thing we’re constructing, an anime about four real revolutionaries whose adoption of anarchist rhetoric is more than costume-deep, is not actually Magical Destroyers; it’s a dream on a cloud. It’s easy to say how things might have been different. And as I always say, you review the anime you watch, not the one you wish existed.

Magical Destroyers, as it exists, is a sign of an anime industry in a fairly dire place. Sure, it’s still better than the lukewarm backwash of the isekai boom, and it’s too ridiculous to be in any real way morally repugnant, but, really don’t you want more out of your anime?

Maybe I’m just getting old—as I said, Otaku Hero and I seem to be about the same age—but at some point, watching things like this just becomes depressing. It’s not the worst anime of all time or anything, and it’s not even the worst I’ve seen this year, but it is one of the most pointless. There’s something to be said for being memorably weird, and Destroyers definitely at least clears that bar, but maybe that’s not always enough to make a show worth watching on its own. In the end, there’s not really anything for anybody here. Other than the lingering suspicion that these girls deserved better.

1: This is a joke, of course. There is no actual weed usage in the show, since that would require actually pushing the envelope. God forbid an anime with a loose “anarchy” theme be on the same level of transgression as A Woman Called Fujiko Mine, an anime from 11 years ago.

2: I feel the need to point out that I briefly consulted Wikipedia to check my episode order was correct here. In doing so, I noticed that no one has uploaded titles or descriptions for the last two episodes, proving that even the diligent Anime Wikipedia community is having trouble staying invested with this one.

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 Manga

The Manga Shelf: KINDERGARTEN WARS and The Struggle to be Loved

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.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. His codename is “Spade”, real name unknown and unknowable. He’s an assassin, a stalker in the shadows and a kiss of death to the unwary. He will kill anyone, anywhere, for the right price.

And unfortunately for him, this is not his story.

Kindergarten Wars doesn’t care much about Spade, who gets capped in the head not long after this and is not an important player in this story. The other person in that image, the woman who blocks his sniper bullet with a shovel, is our real protagonist. And I have to start this column with a confession; this was originally a completely different Manga Shelf article. I want to survey the recent rise in manga that take at least some degree of inspiration from Spy x Family and examine what they did with that influence. I still might write that column someday, but Kindergarten Wars deserves a spotlighting of its own. This is some good stuff. Of just 21 currently-available chapters, it does take a little while to find its footing, but once it does, it hits hard. This is a little surprising given its premise, which is goofy even by the standards of this emerging subgenre.

Speaking of, even though this column is no longer about the Spy x Family….Family, we should at least briefly define what “this subgenre” actually is, as there are a few common points. In particular, these manga usually juxtapose absurd, highly “genre” elements; mostly ridiculous hyperviolence, leagues of assassins, international conspiracies, a sprawling criminal underworld, etc. with down-to-earth concerns, and a particular focus on domesticity; romance, family, friendships, and finding one’s place in the world. The simple and slow things in life. Without fail, they come to the conclusion that the latter is better (and in this sense they find some common ground with the rather more out-there Chainsaw Man), and is the real thing worth fighting for. No one in any of these manga has ever truly been fulfilled by being a gun-toting killing machine. They’re fulfilled by little things; dates, shoujo manga, the laughter of children, and whatever found family they manage to rustle up along the way. Other than SpyFam itself, the most successful example is probably Sakamoto Days, which, if Kindergarten Wars isn’t also taking that series as an influence, its similarities are remarkable for being convergent evolution.

As for our actual premise? Nothing too weird for an action manga these days. Rita—that’s the lady blocking a bullet with a spade—works at the world’s safest kindergarten, Kindergarten Noir, where the children of the wealthy and influential are sent so they can receive a normal education away from the dangers of the world. The only problem is that the school is the frequent target of assassins and kidnappers, meaning that these teachers have to also be world-class bodyguards for their students. Rita is an ex-assassin herself, formerly a human swathe of destruction nicknamed the Witch. Not that you’d know it by looking at her, for most of the manga’s current run; despite her deadly skills, Rita is a gremlin obsessed with finding a hot boyfriend, and that contrast is where the manga gets most of its more comedic elements from.

To be honest, while this is hardly a bad gag, it is the primary reason that I way underestimated Kindergarten Wars when I first flipped it open. The series’ first several small mini-arcs are primarily comedic, and while they do still have the violence angle to supply some solid action, they’re more about humor and small-scale character developments. For example, Doug, Rita’s coworker and a secondary protagonist, develops a crush on her when she saves his life, despite a past as a swindler and a ladies’ man. This sort of setup is typical of this very early part of the manga, and is also the fuel for the manga’s “romantic” side, given that romcoms are a part of its DNA as well. You get a bit more of an idea as to where all of this is going when we’re introduced to Hana Bradley, the manga’s other main female character and who it hilariously tries to play as a comparative straight man despite the fact that her preferred method of attack is batting homeruns with live grenades. Still, where Kindergarten Wars goes from decent but unremarkable to actually feeling like it’s worth following is in its most recent half dozen or so chapters, where we get a peek at an inner darkness that may betray more ambition than might be expected.

Chapters 14-18 mark a turning point, and it’s here where we should consider two things. One, Rita’s old assassin nickname/persona of the Witch, a lingering phantom of her old self who threatens to come to the fore every now and again. Two, the character Natasha, a swordswoman just as deadly as Rita herself who is obsessed with The Witch, seeing her as a lone kindred soul in a world full of people who are otherwise nothing like herself.

Natasha, hired to attack the kindergarten just like any number of the scores of dead goons from earlier in the series, eventually confronts Rita directly, only to find herself absolutely perplexed that she doesn’t enjoy fighting this woman. If anything, she feels scared. All of this happens as we flash back through Natasha’s life as a prodigal killer. And all at once, like a bullet through the brain, a revelation hits Natasha; a blunt, heavy, deeply unsubtle and direct statement of what can only be the manga’s core theme.

This all manages to capture a very real desperation, from the mouth of someone who feels like she never had any other options in life. Trying to talk yourself into being satisfied with your place in the world is a rough thing even when that place is somewhere fairly innocuous. For Natasha, this revelation breaks her, and unfortunately, she doesn’t survive the arc. Chapter 18 is an entire postscript of her dying thoughts as Rita holds her in her arms. For just a little while, Kindergarten Wars transforms into something greater than the sum of its parts, and the spilled blood spells a plea for empathy.

It’s easy, and not at all wrong, to say that none of this is exactly revolutionary. God knows this isn’t the first manga to feed a character a line like “If I keep on killing, what will I find beyond it all?!”, but just dryly relaying the story in descriptive prose doesn’t capture its emotional impact and neither does chopping, cropping, and dropping select pages, even very good ones. There’s some real weight here, partly just from how much of a swerve this is from Kindergarten Wars‘ usual style, which is pretty lighthearted even as buildings and heads alike explode. Natasha seems like an early sign of things to come, and combined with more recent revelations about the actual nature of Kindergarten Noir it seems like the series is gearing up to tackle its first larger, more ambitious arc.

We should be taking all of this in context, of course. “Ambitious” is not a synonym for “good,” and there are plenty of ambitious manga and anime that have been done in by their own inability to stick to a single tone or topic. Most of what happens in Kindergarten Wars is still pretty cartoony, and its flashes of a more sincere and resonant emotional core are exactly that, flashes. We haven’t been handed a bombshell that turns this into a must-read just yet, even if some stories (like Natasha’s) are very good, they’re still playing with recognizable shapes. Time will tell what it eventually combines them into.

That’s what the cynical part of me says, anyway. The optimistic part says that the fact that something like this is being so well-received despite its obvious influences is evidence that there is an appetite for this kind of stuff, and that manga like Kindergarten Wars are rising to the occasion. Maybe it just wants to be loved, too.

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, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

Anime Orbit: The Immaculate Vibes of PlutoTV’s 24/7 SAILOR MOON Channel

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.

At the risk of sounding like the caveman a decade late to the discovery of fire; hey, have you guys heard about this crazy thing called streaming?

No, but seriously. On-demand streaming has been a huge gamechanger for anime and its visibility in the west, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that we’re in the midst of a second anime boom following the original wave in the 90s and early 00s. However, that’s fundamentally changed how people actually engage with anime.

Allow me to put on my old woman voice for a minute. Once upon a time, it was not necessarily expected that you see literally every single episode of every single anime you were interested in. Following things on TV—usually on anime-focused linear TV blocks like Toonami—was an accepted thing, and only the truly grognardy would give you any shit about it. This isn’t really how things work anymore, with the rise of services like MyAnimeList and its primary competitor Anilist turning anime-watching, at least for some, into a number-checking competition. I’m hardly the first person to make this observation and it’s not unique to anime (Letterboxd has done a similar thing to film in general, for example), but it’s definitely shifted the cultural norm.

Which is mostly fine, but it’s left some folks my age and older a little cold, mostly because some of our strongest early anime memories aren’t things that we’ve technically seen every single episode of. Case in point; Sailor Moon, one of Toonami’s lineup regulars, the only magical girl anime to ever make a major cultural splash in the US, and probably the first thing that ever gave me an inkling that I’d rather be a girl. Not being able to “count” these shows isn’t the hugest deal in the world, all things considered, but it’s a little aggravating. It’s something that’s stuck in my craw—however minorly—for years at this point, and I did at one point plan on watching the entirety of Sailor Moon front to back to “fix” this “problem.” I still might, but honestly, isn’t that kind of a silly motivation to do something? Just so you can check a few boxes on a website?

Maybe so, and if something’s helped me feel a little less like this is some holy task I have to undertake, it’s been PlutoTV’s free 24/7 Sailor Moon channel. Why does this exist? I could not honestly tell you. PlutoTV in general is something of a mystery to me, as are its contemporary free streaming services like Tubi. It’s a mishmash of well-regarded and totally obscure TV shows and films (and a few stranger things, including live gameplay footage. Isn’t that what Twitch is for?). Most of that is on-demand, but some of it is exclusive to their live TV channels which, just like any old linear TV station, run on their own schedule and are periodically broken up by commercial breaks The only real difference is that this one exclusively shows Sailor Moon. On a loop. Forever. It is perhaps the perfect TV channel.

Strangely, at no point while watching this channel—which I’ve done a lot over the past few weeks, mostly as a time kill between other activities or while trying to fall asleep—have I felt the need to actually start Sailor Moon over from the beginning. I’ve definitely never seen the whole thing end to end, but I remember enough of the setup that I’m never lost, despite Sailor Moon having a fair bit more of a proper mythos than some of its later successors in the magical girl genre, and the series’ still-killer aesthetic ensures I’m never bored with what’s on-screen. Sometimes it’s nice to just have something like this that makes your brain happy, and that really is what I primarily turn to the station for.

So, what is the purpose of this article, then? I’ve struggled with that a little bit, to be honest. But sometimes I really do just want to tell you guys about something nice that I found and want to share with the world. I have no idea how well-known PlutoTV is, but I’ve personally never seen anyone else talk about it. Maybe I’m going to usher in the world’s biggest collective ‘no duh’ with all this, but that’s fine. Perhaps all I really wanted was to remind everyone that Sailor Moon is pretty great no matter how much or little of it you’re watching.

And hey, if Sailor Moon isn’t your speed, they also have 24/7 channels for One Piece, Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Lupin the 3rd. Pick your poison.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime

Cessation of Coverage for OSHI NO KO, Effective Immediately

Hello, friends. Sorry for the lack of communication recently.

I want to keep this very short and to the point, since my intention is not to moralize at anyone or to get anyone to drop the series itself. Put very briefly, I will not be covering Oshi no Ko going forward in any capacity on this site, with the possible exception of it appearing on my year-end list, if indeed I make one this year.

I don’t really want to get into the details, but if you’ve been following the series, and particularly the fandom’s activity for the past few weeks, you can probably imagine why. Suffice to say, it’s not the fault of anyone reading this. I just don’t really want to be associated with certain kinds of anime fandom, and to me personally, the association has become unavoidable. If I continue watching the series I will do so in relative silence.

I don’t currently plan to replace OnK’s slot with anything else for this season. I’ll see you when I announce the polls for the 2023 Summer Let’s Watch.

Sorry it had to end like this! I’m not happy about it either.