In our inaugural episode “planet” Jane-Michelle Auman and Julian Malerman discuss SHAFT’s 2010 maid cafe` slice of life comedy And Yet The Town Moves (aka Soremachi).
KeyFrames Forgotten is an anime podcast where two nerds talk about shows you haven’t thought about in a while, if ever. Where they came from, what we like (or don’t like) about them, and why it’s been so long since you last heard about them.
This article contains spoilers.
“It has to be you, Ruka-chan!”
Every few years there seems to come along an anime season that is ridiculously packed with well-liked shows. Spring of 2021 is shaping up to be one such example; long-awaited sequels, spinoffs, and reboots like Zombie Land Saga Revenge, SSSS.DYNAZENON, and Shaman King are competing for cultural real estate with fan-anticipated adaptions like Super Cub, Shadows House, Combatants Will Be Dispatched, Eighty-Six, and I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, and even the odd compelling original like Vivy – Flourite’s Eye Song. There’s something for almost every kind of anime fan airing, and each series in turn seems to have found its audience with a consistency that is rare in the current anime production bubble, which often has more shows broadcasting per season than anyone really knows what to do with.
Among all of this is one notable semi-exception; Blue Reflection Ray.
BRR’s very existence is somewhat puzzling. It’s a spinoff of magical girl RPG BLUE REFLECTION, but BLUE REFLECTION did not exactly set the world on fire commercially when it was released in 2017. It’d be an odd choice for an anime adaption to begin with, but that it’s a spinoff and not a sequel (and thus features none of the game’s characters), and has been greenlit for two consecutive cours, is even odder. This is all evidently part of an effort to continue to expand the franchise; which now includes a mobile game and is getting two more console games. So it’s clear somebody really believes in this thing, but if you were to only glance at Blue Reflection Ray, that confidence might not make a whole lot of sense.
What does make sense is its place within the modern anime zeitgeist. Blue Reflection Ray will immediately make most viewers think of a few touchstones from the past decade of TV anime; namely Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Flip Flappers. Blue Reflection Ray is more traditional than either of those, but it explores some similar territory. It deals, at least so far, primarily in thematics of empathy and human connection coupled with a heavy dose of lesbian subtext. (Enough so that I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns into plaintext before too long.) That, and a particular pastel-y visual style that harkens back to classic shoujo.
Blue Reflection Ray‘s four main characters are simple, but well-used. Hiori is cheerful and outgoing, but tends to neglect her own needs. Ruka is thoughtful and contemplative, but reclusive and has trouble understanding other people. Momo is a half-reformed delinquent perpetually on the run from her past. And Miyako, rounding out the current four, is a neglected rich girl. Hiori and Ruka, especially, form the show’s main pair, and the bubbling lesbian subtext present here defines quite a bit of the series’ tone. Everything, as it often is, is about connection.
Its storytelling, meanwhile, is a curious mix of fairly simple and oddly cryptic. The high concept isn’t too hard to understand; there are (at least) two groups of magical girls called Reflectors, one of which can somehow transform negative emotions into phantasmal lilies called “Fragments” and steal them away for some purpose or another.
Opposing those Reflectors are our protagonists, who, well I’ll let lead character Hiori explain.
The themes of this part of the series are pretty apparent; the Red Reflectors (The Bad Guys) want to simply lock peoples’ emotions away, whereas the Blue Reflectors (The Good Guys) defend the former’s victims. In turn defending their right to process their own feelings and deal with them. Unhealthy vs. healthy coping mechanisms, the importance of compassion (underscored by the rings the Reflectors use also being literal empathy machines); all stuff this genre has done before, but it’s rarely unwelcome. That’s the “simple” side of things.
The “cryptic” side is that, not unlike those touchstones I mentioned earlier, there is clearly more going on here than we can yet see. Some kind of system is in place that’s pitting the Reflector teams, who both think they’re in the right, against each other. And Momo in particular is in contact with a mysterious person via phone and clearly knows more than she’s letting on. I suspect, but can’t prove, that this will come to a head at some point around the episode 12 mark.
So that’s the what of it all, but we’ve yet to answer the why. I’m just not sure how much appetite the broader anime fan community, at least in North America, has for anime like this. Blue Reflection Ray currently seems too “traditional” to appeal to fans of things like Madoka Magica and it is too adult-oriented to appeal to the hardcore Pretty Cure crowd. If someone is a general genre fan they might like it, but only if they can appreciate its slow pace. It struggles to secure a niche, which explains why it is being (or at least is perceived as being) overlooked. Why whoever evidently exists behind the scene has so much faith in it is another question, but one that it’s hard to answer only 4 of a planned 24 episodes into the series.
All works of art reflect, and are in turn, reflected by, their audience. Blue Reflection Ray‘s soft nighttime scenes, gaudy Windows 95 wallpaper otherworld, charmingly simple transformation sequences, and blushing gay subtext all, in the end, simply beg your patience. It is, quite obviously, a very slow series.
I think in the hustle and bustle of the seasonal grind, it may not stand out against more bombastic titles. (Or even those that are simply doing “slow burn” from a more approachable angle, like Super Cub.) But I have a sneaking suspicion that in the long run, it will finally find that audience it’s searching for. The rings may, so to speak, resonate with more of us yet.
If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
“We are merely Caliban.”
Full disclosure, we’ve got a bit of a frustrating one today.
I have rarely ever in my limited time as a commentator on anime as a medium written two full-length “reviews” for a single series. I’ve certainly never done it for a show I don’t much care for. Yet, here we are, and here is Blast of Tempest, staring me down like an evil twin in the mirror. Let’s get started.
Very loosely inspired by William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, Blast of Tempest falls within the zeitgeist that was the late ’00s / early ’10s urban fantasy anime tradition, a world quite far from its inspiration. Like many such anime, it is a stew of proper nouns and half-sensical plot developments. Also like a lot of them, it is very silly.
Our premise is founded upon the murder of a girl, one Fuwa Aika, and her brother Mahiro’s quest to avenge her death. From this humble beginning sprawls out what quickly becomes a rather convoluted story. Which eventually comes to involve Yoshino, Mahiro’s friend and (unbenknownst to him) Aika’s boyfriend, a sorceress named Hakaze stranded on an island hundreds of miles away, the acting head of Hakaze’s family, a pair of god-like trees that embody creation and destruction called the trees of Genesis and Exodus respectively, and quite a few more things. Furthermore, Blast of Tempest loves its flashbacks, used to establish characterization post-hoc, especially in Aika’s case.
At its best, Blast of Tempest is content to show you dangerous, motivated people quoting Shakespeare at each other while they run rhetorical circles around, physically fight, or blast magic at each other. This mode, where Blast of Tempest manages to present a flashy, devil-may-care attitude about itself, is where we find the few places where it truly shines. The specific mixture of the flowery Shakespeare quotations, the magic technobabble involved in many of the show’s plot points, the wide swings and consequent misses at commentary on the nature of free will, and the wowee-zowee magic fights combine to make the best parts of the series a kind of low-stakes fun, even if one gets the sense even early on that it’s trying to be more than that.
Near the end of the first cour there is a stunning run of episodes (from about episode 9 to the middle of episode 12), where Blast of Tempest is reduced to three characters smugly proposing thought experiments to each other while the Japanese armed forces assault a mansion protected by a magic barrier. That this run then caps with Hakaze teleporting two years into the future while leaving her skeleton behind in order to avoid creating a time paradox, an action a friend of mine called “reverse-telefragging”, is the icing on the cake. It’s ridiculous on its face, but it’s entertaining, a maxim that describes most of Blast of Tempest‘s high points.
Unfortunate, then, that those high points are as scattershot as they are, and that the show’s first half has the lion’s share of them.
A theory I have about anime like this is that the twelve-episode format actually works wonders for them. It condenses all the stuff of the series–the proper noun soup, silly plot twists, oddball worldbuilding, in-over-its-head themes, etc.–down into a single cour, which is easily kept up with over the course of a season or binge-watched afterward in a few nights. At absolute worst, it’s at least digestible. Here is the problem with Blast of Tempest in this regard; it’s twice that length, at 24 episodes long.
On paper, that doesn’t sound like a huge difference, but Blast of Tempest is an unintentional study on the practical difference between about five hours of footage and about ten. After the end of episode 12, Blast of Tempest effectively runs short on plot, and its previously tight pacing starts to crumble. Half of its main conflict (that between Hakaze and her brother who is controlling her family in her stead) is resolved. Because there are still twelve more episodes to fill, the show must then stretch out the remaining mystery (who exactly killed Aika) for longer than it can reasonably sustain. One plot point must now do the work previously done by two.
Under this duress, its flaws transform from things that can be written off as inconsequential into damaging weaknesses that are fairly serious. The slow, ponderous pace the series adopts from roughly episode 13 to episode 18 is nearly unforgivable. Nothing working in the tonal space Blast of Tempest does survives at such a slow speed. Less because the question of who killed Aika isn’t interesting (it is!), but more because it takes quite a while to actually get to that. A good third of the show’s episodes are filled with narrative pillow stuffing like romance subplots and the non-arcs of characters like Megumu, whose defining trait is that a girl he likes dumped him.
It does eventually recover, regaining a decent bit of its flashy spirit in its final five or so episodes (things get even messier than before when time travel goes from a one-off and one-way plot device to a recurring element). And it’s not like this kind of middle-third slump is rare in anime like this, but this an uncommonly rough example.
There is another problem as well. Aika herself, as discussed at length elsewhere, stands head and shoulders above the rest of the cast in terms of character complexity, despite being dead for the whole series. Aika is established as a sharp thinker with a nonetheless carefree spirit, who subscribes to a peculiar sort of fatalism that doesn’t quite match her actual actions.
Her own musings are the only time Blast of Tempest‘s commentary on the nature of free will even approaches being thought-provoking, and in a better series Aika would be the main character. Ironically, pining for Aika’s full, developed character over the much simpler ones who make up the rest of the cast is, in a way, a reflection of Blast of Tempest‘s own plot. But even if this were intentional, it wouldn’t be to the show’s benefit. Writing an excellent character and then throwing them away isn’t impressive or deep, it’s just frustrating.
“Frustrating”, to go back to that opening sentence, is the operative word here in general. The closest Blast of Tempest gets to having any kind of real point is Mahiro’s declaration in the final episode that “in this crazy-ass world, there’s no point in playing the blame game.” A pithy chestnut that ducks the question of who is really ‘responsible’ for Aika’s death and is generally unsatisfying. It’s a decent enough idea when applied to the real world, but good advice does not necessarily make for good television.
In the final episode, in her second-to-last appearance in the series, Aika dismisses an unnamed book as “dull” and lacking in “inner light”. It’s cheap and honestly a little mean to say that the same could be said to apply to Blast of Tempest itself, but that doesn’t make it wrong. The series’ Shakespeare fixation is, in a meta sort of way, its own undoing. Anime can absolutely achieve the transcendence Aika alludes to in that conversation and that the series clearly strives for. It did so before Blast of Tempest, and would do so again after it. But Blast of Tempest itself just isn’t in that conversation.
I must, of course, turn the lens back on myself here. I have, even very recently, given anime much less ambitious than Blast of Tempest a pass for succeeding at the far more modest aim of simply being entertaining. Worse still, Blast of Tempest even is entertaining at times! But shooting for the moon is a double-edged sword. Blast of Tempest feels like it is trying so, so hard to shoulder an amount of thematic heft that it just cannot lift. I have a begrudging respect for its sheer effort, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that enough of it is just straight-up dull that, a few specific aspects aside, I can’t muster up anything more than that. A flaw that is, admittedly, perhaps as much with myself as the show. But let no one ever accuse me of not giving it every chance I could think to.
And so Blast of Tempest remains. Unsatisfying, inconclusive, and trying way too hard. It reaches, but it knows not for what. In this way, perhaps Blast of Tempest, like the Caliban of Aika’s metaphor, is all of us.
If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This article contains spoilers.
Let’s start with some basic facts.
Blast of Tempest is a 2013 Studio Bones anime. It’s named after and very loosely inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. My own knowledge of Shakespeare is limited to what I was taught in my literature classes in high school. We never got around to The Tempest, though I am fond of the other play Blast of Tempest likes to toss out quotes from; Hamlet.
As I often do for an anime I have no particular expectations for, I queued Blast of Tempest up in my video player some two weeks ago, and watched it late at night over the course of several evenings. My intent, as it generally is, was to review it if I had anything of substance to say about it.
But, as you have likely already guessed by this post’s odd title, that did not exactly happen. The fact of the matter is that I don’t really like Blast of Tempest. If you’re looking for your pure-utility “good/bad” recommendation, I’d steer most people away from it. My entire reason for throwing out the first, more traditional proper review I wrote of the series, is that reading it back over to edit it, I just felt like I was being….well, mean, I suppose? I began to really question if this was the right approach, and I’ve placed the review back in my drafts folder. It will see the light of day before too long, after I cut the worst of the bile and re-structure it a bit. Until then, let’s engage in something both a bit more positive and a bit more specific.
Let’s talk about Fuwa Aika.
Aika is murdered before the series even begins. For the vast majority of it, who killed her is the driving question that motivates both of the actual protagonists; her step-brother Mahiro and his only friend (and, secretly, her boyfriend) Takigawa Yoshino. Very briefly; they enlist the help of Kusaribe Hakaze, a sorceress stranded on an island hundreds of miles away, to help find Aika’s killer and avenge her death against a backdrop of wider magical intrigue. Chiefly this involves two giant trees; Genesis and Exodus, one of which has the power to protect the world, and the other, to destroy it.
None of this is unusual, or at least not unusual for the late aughts / early ’10s urban fantasy zeitgeist that Blast of Tempest is part of. What is slightly unusual is how much more fully-realized Aika is as a character than the rest of the cast. It’s not that Blast of Tempest‘s other characters are flat, exactly, but Aika is markedly more complex than any of them, and this is true despite the fact that for the vast majority of the series, we only see her in flashbacks.
The other characters are fairly easy to figure out, even Hakaze, eventually, despite the fact that she’s away from the action for most of the show’s first half. Aika, meanwhile, is a riddle. We initially only see her interact with Mahiro and Yoshino. These interactions paint a picture of a difficult, strong-willed, and thoughtful young woman with a kind center that she only shows to some. But, the negative space created by the scenes she’s absent from–which is a majority of them, in spite of the frequent flashbacks–create a vastly more complex character by implication.
The latter half Blast of Tempest, textually, paints Aika as a fatalist obsessed with theatrical metaphor. She is the character who throws down the largest number of the show’s Shakespeare quotes. Late in the series she compares herself to an actress who can, at best, hope for “a beautiful exit” and who has no real control over her life. On its own, this is fairly interesting. I could devote this entire column to interpreting Aika as a “chained woman”, someone who is bound by the men in her life in a very real and immediate way, even if they don’t bind her deliberately. What’s even more interesting is that, in spite of everything, by the end of the series it seems as though Aika is the one who’s been pulling the strings the entire time.
Let’s get some major spoilers out of the way; Blast of Tempest involves time travel. Hakaze can leap through time and does so twice over the course of the series. The first instance isn’t relevant here, but the second, where she goes back to the night of Aika’s death to find out who killed her, very much is. Aika, as it turns out, is her own murderer. Not just that; she’s a powerful sorceress. Strong enough to defeat Hakaze, otherwise the most capable in the series, without much of a fight.
The specifics here aren’t super important. The fact that Aika willingly kills herself in order to facilitate a plan of her brother’s and her lover’s in the future directly contradicts her own statements about her life philosophy. She says one thing–that this is all inevitable, and comparing herself (and indeed the whole cast) to Caliban–and does another, seizing her fate with her own hands. She could, as is pointed out, easily avoid this outcome. If she were the blithe fatalist she paints herself as, the lack of an external murderer would make not killing herself the correct option. But she does anyway. Despite her insistence otherwise; she isn’t an actress playing a role. She’s a playwright all her own.
Which makes her absence from the rest of the anime all the more peculiar, doesn’t it? Why would you make a character like this and then kill her before the start of the story? I have to confess that I was hung up on this. You could argue that my own fixation on Aika as Blast of Tempest‘s most complex character mirrors the show’s actual narrative. I think, somewhat ironically, in trying to place Aika at the center of that narrative, Blast of Tempest frees her from it. Aika is the only one of the show’s characters who does not abide by the narrative logic it operates on–a principle that is called out nearly by name several times. She pretends to, but her compliance is false on its face.
What to make of all this? On some level, I’m aware that my reading of Aika specifically is likely the result of bias. I do just plain like the character a lot. On another, most of Blast of Tempest‘s other important characters either are male or are beholden to a male love interest. While it’s true that Aika and Yoshino dated while she was alive, she seems to revolve around him much less than, say, Hakaze, who eventually also develops feelings for Yoshino, does. And Yoshino and Mahiro’s actions for most of the series are almost entirely driven by their respective feelings for Aika. Later in the series, when the character of Megumu is introduced, he too is largely driven at first by unrequited love, in this case for a girl who dumped him. Of the main characters, Aika stands alone as a person who truly doesn’t seem to need anyone else, even if she does appreciate them. As someone who very much does feel reliant on other people, I can’t help but respect that, even if the endpoint she takes it to is pretty tragic.
Conversely, I’m not trying to make the argument that Blast of Tempest is some sort of feminist manifesto. (It would be fair to call such an idea a stretch.) Indeed, one might equally argue that the entire reason Aika is dead is because when writing within a certain framework, it is the only way she can exist in the story at all. A woman as smart and capable as Aika inherently disrupts the structure of a male-lead revenge story just by being there. The very nature of the genre requires her to only exist in the past tense.
But on the third hand, I would not simply condemn the series as sexist, either. Aika, as already mentioned, exits her “role”, and Blast of Tempest‘s backstory, of her own accord, through no one’s actions but her own. Violently, true, and one could write entire other articles about the lingering image of her, bled out, draped over a chair, that the series frequently returns to. However, I think it is helpful to consider all possible readings here. “Aika is a victim” is not an idea that, in my mind, holds up to the facts I’ve gone over here. I risk repeating myself, but perhaps it bears repeating; Aika is quite possibly the only character in Blast of Tempest who is truly the master of her own destiny.
And, despite the flaws and frustrations of her parent series, I think that all of this is why I find Aika so fascinating. Blast of Tempest ends like many anime of its ilk do; the dust settles and the cast go on with their lives. Only in this case, somewhere far beyond them, already long gone, is Aika. Never caught, she escapes like a thief in the night.
If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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.
What does it mean to be famous?
Like, what does it really mean?
To some extent, that is the driving question behind Oshi no Ko. Billed as an exploration of the dark side of the entertainment industry, it chronicles the brief life and consequent death of one Ai Hoshino, an idol, the center position of a decently-popular group called B-Komachi!
Technically, that she dies is a spoiler. But is it so surprising? The entertainment industry is littered with corpses, both figurative and literal. Burned-out rockstars, child actor has-beens, disbanded indie idol groups, rappers who never made it, abandoned Youtube channels and shuttered TV studios, and on and on. Ai Hoshino is just one of those skeletons. Oshi no Ko centers the curious circumstances around her rise and fall, and how it inspires those who she leaves behind. The series is built around a rather harsh truth; the white hot light of fame burns bright and short. Some people get a second act, most do not.
The entertainment industry is a pretty fucked up one. Oshi no Ko‘s initial thesis is that to participate in it, one must be an adept liar. A seller of fantasies , yes, but what’s not explicitly spelled out but is equally important is that one has to lie to themselves, too. The industry is an ouroboros that devours dreams, and it is only a very rare and lucky few who escape it both alive and with those dreams intact. It is against this rather dire backdrop that Oshi no Ko eventually settles, but how it begins is actually quite far from all this; from the point of view of two idol fans, a chronically ill girl named Serina and the doctor who took care of her.
Ai Hoshino, face of the idol group B-Komachi, is pregnant with twins. Goro, the doctor, who lives in a small town in the Japanese countryside, is in charge of her care, as she’s chosen to keep the children despite the difficulties she’ll inevitably face. He vows to help her as best he can, because one of his patients–the aforementioned chronically ill girl–was a dedicated fan of the idol. Circumstances twist, and he is run down by a stalker and murdered, mere minutes before Ai gives birth. He and his former patient are thus reborn as Ai’s twins; Goro as Aquamarine, a boy, and Serina as Ruby, a girl.
It’s a very strange conceit to use as a launchpad for this sort of thing. It raises a lot of questions and only half-handwaves the twins’ borderline-supernatural talents as entertainers. Things only get more complicated when the very same stalker eventually kills Ai, on her 20th birthday. The young reincarnates’ lives are rocked by the tragedy, and they develop into very different people as a result. Aqua seeks to find his biological father–and possibly kill him, given that he has reason to believe Ai’s death was indirectly his fault–while Ruby seeks to become an idol just like her mother. Yin and Yang, blue and red.
This whole premise is only intermittently relevant. Oshi no Ko really shines when it’s exploring the many, many pitfalls of showbiz. Mangaka Aka Akasaka has said that he prefers to character-write by starting with a broad template and “filling” the characters in over time, but here the characters are so complex that it’s hard to assign any template to them at all. Witness, for example, Akane, a prodigal theatre actress with a fragile personality, a strong perfectionist streak, and an intense affinity for deep method acting. That’s a lot to even pay lip service to with a character, that she–and indeed, basically every major character–can balance all this or something like it in a way that feels natural is pretty amazing.
But that’s a strength, and a strength is meaningless if it’s not in service of something. Oshi no Ko, thankfully, knows what it’s doing. Far more than simply a condemnation of the entertainment industry (with a focus, though not an exclusive one, on acting and idol work), it is an examination of it. As keen as the series is to portray the truly loathsome–such as a recurring producer character–for what they are, it goes through even greater pains to examine the inner lives of each and every one of its entertainers. That is what transmutes the strong character writing from simply a strength into what is almost inarguably the manga’s core. Through its writing, Oshi no Ko is able to explain why these characters want to be famous, and how that desire is exploited by the industry around them. It’s at times a rough and upsetting read.
And I do worry that I’m making this manga sound like a drag through and through. The truth of the matter is that for as much complex character exploration and heavy subject matter it gets into, one trait that Oshi no Ko does share with Akasaka’s more well known manga–Kaguya-sama: Love is War!–is that it knows when to cut the more serious plot developments with some humor. Oshi no Ko is incredibly funny when it wants to be.
And also to this point, in the rare event that someone leaves the entertainment industry alive on-screen in Oshi no Ko, it’s treated as a sad thing but not a bad one. The blow-you-down superstar debut of Ruby’s idol group is contrasted with a brief vignette where we see a former idol quit the business for good. The juxtaposition gives the latter a stunning sense of finality.
But while Mana’s story ends here, it really seems like it’s only the beginning for Ruby and Aqua. Given Love is War!‘s length, it seems a fair assumption to make that any ending to this manga is a long way off.
And look, all of this about the plot and themes and I’ve barely mentioned the art! Akasaka and Mengo Yokoyari–best known as the artist behind Scum’s Wish–make an incredible pair, and the emotional heavy lifting is carried as much by Yokoyari’s beautifully expressive art and the wonderful, clever panel composition as it is the writing. It’d be very hard to capture Oshi no Ko‘s look in an anime, though I’d be fascinated to see a properly-equipped team try anyway.
As for that far-off ending? Who knows, one of the exciting things about manga that are still being published is that they are, in a way, pure potential. Perhaps the next time you read about Oshi no Ko on this blog, it will be about an upcoming anime adaption. Or perhaps a truly shocking volume. Who can say?
Update, 4/12/23 – If you liked this article, be sure to check out my coverage of the anime’s premiere.
If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
“This realm is a facility to create God.”
High-Rise Invasion is a B Movie. Specifically, despite the Netflix logo that rings in each and every episode, I remain convinced that it was pulled off of a forgotten VHS tape somewhere. If that’s not the case, it should be. Like a lot of its action-seinen brethren, High-Rise Invasion is a jumble of proper nouns, invented terminology, gamey genre tropes, and capital P Problematic scenes leveraged for shock value. For a certain kind of viewer, it’s a particular kind of fun only half in spite of all this, the sort of thing the term “guilty pleasure” was made for.
Our story starts out simply enough. Highschooler Honjo Yuri ends up in a strange world composed wholly of high-rise buildings. She must evade masked people hellbent on killing her and find her brother Rika. From these humble beginnings things quickly get complicated, and it’s only a few episodes in before Yuri has a companion (Mayuko Nise), and the show dives headlong into its lore, something it assumes you care a great deal about, on its way to its actual themes, in as much as it has them.
This has its ups and downs. Invasion‘s real weak point is its wildly inconsistent writing. As often as it decently skewers petty authoritarians and absolutists like its main villain, it lapses into rote-ness in a lot of other areas. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to the characters developing new abilities, something that happens some half a dozen times across the series’ brief twelve episodes, and never manages to rise above feeling convenient. Yuri herself, while a fun character, is not a particularly deep one. A fact underscored by her tendency to yo-yo between action heroine hyper-competence and stereotypical schoolgirl ditziness at the drop of a hat.
On the other hand, it is capable of a decent amount of resonance when it actually has something to say. Aikawa, the aforementioned main villain, is an interesting example. A wannabe fascist power-tripping over being a big fish in a small pond is a surprisingly nuanced antagonist for this sort of thing. His grandiose speeches–generally given to tiny audiences–come across as bluster and empty thunder. And while he’s definitely a serious threat, the series itself never deigns to treat his ideas seriously. Even the camera itself seems to frame him as ridiculous; none of his powers are treated with the same visual flair and coolness that the other characters’ are. It renders him absurd and cartoonish on his face.
There are also a few genuinely interesting mysteries here. The nature of the “facility” that is the constructed world of the high-rises isn’t solved in the first season here, and the few encounters our characters get with the “maintenance masks” who seem to keep things running smoothly raise a lot of fun questions. These provide ample fodder for a second season, and indeed Invasion seems to have been produced with the assumption of one in mind, given that it ends on a cliffhanger.
The presentation is also solid, and there’s some cool, evocative imagery, especially toward the end of the season.
Less thoughtful is the show’s bounty of ridiculous nonsense. Whether these are a strength or a weakness will depend on the kind of viewer you are, but it’s hard to call, say, the Railgun that serves as a plot power, or Mayuko defragmenting her brain like a computer to make herself better at fighting, or the very use of the hilarious term “god candidate”, anything else. There is also the mountain of lesbian subtext between Yuri and Mayuko, which is frankly so blatant that even calling it “subtext” seems disingenuous. There’s a lot to like here, despite the often slapdash storytelling.
But, the line between the trashy but fun and the simply gross is razor thin. High-Rise Invasion spends enough time on the right side of that line that the times when it’s not stick out all the more; a scene of only-barely-thwarted sexual assault that occurs in the first episode and a truly nauseating pan over a beheaded corpse in the eleventh are easily the most egregious of these. The fanservice that kicks up and down the series is, as far as attempts to titillate go, far tamer, which makes the occasional bizarre bouts of sexual violence all the worse. It’s a shame, because with a little more care it would be pretty easy to drop a lot of the “guilty” from the “guilty pleasure” here. But, High-Rise Invasion is what it is, and it wouldn’t be right to simply wave its mistakes off.
Really, a lack of care comes to define the worse parts series in general. It approaches irony that the main villain’s philosophy is bargain-basement eugenics nonsense. High-Rise Invasion itself would be unlikely to last in any “survival of the fittest”-style trial against others in its genre for very long. Certainly the same is true for 2021 anime in general, given how strong a year for the medium it’s been and continues to be. If that second season does get made, there’s a fair amount of room for improvement, to say the least. It gives Yuri’s eventual quest to destroy the high-rise world and replace it with something kinder and better an amusing, if unintentional, meta edge.
In the end, what does one make of High-Rise Invasion? It’s hard to deny that there’s better stuff out there. (There is certainly also worse, but that’s no endorsement on its own). And I do not feel entirely comfortable writing its uglier aspects off as a consequence of its genre. Consequently, it’s certainly the sort of thing I could entirely understand someone absolutely hating. But, sometimes, a woman is really just in the mood to watch a pair of lesbians thrash through a hostile world, guns blazing and knives glinting. For those times, High-Rise Invasion hits the spot like little else, warts and all.
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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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Genre. “A kind of story.” Something that separates one group of narratives from another. Genres are tricky, malleable, slippery things. Outside the focus of this blog, there are terms like lit fic, slipstream, neo noir, dungeonpunk, and dozens and dozens of others, broader or narrower, over the entire range of fiction and analysis of that fiction. Sometimes a marketing tool, sometimes a fandom in-group identifier, sometimes an after-the-fact grouping to tie together similarities in disparate stories.
When I first became interested in anime as a medium I ran into the term “sekai-kei”, or “world story”. A style of anime in which the relationships between two people are tied directly to global or even universal-scale problems, and often directly equated. Nowadays, the term is widely decried as a nonsensical westernism (if you google it, the first two results are TVTropes, not exactly a reputable source, a clone site of the same, and an article decrying it as “horseshit”, in that order.) It’s yet another example of how hard defining genre in anime can be, especially from what is fundamentally an outsider’s point of view here in the Anglosphere.
Another genre that is often mixed up in heated debate is that of the Magical Girl, specifically because it is among the hardest to define concretely. Stories commonly accepted as being part of the Magical Girl genre; say foundational text Himitsu no Akko-chan, and something like Sailor Moon, are quite distinct from each other. Thematic ties are the main binder here, as are certain aesthetic choices. The trials that young girls face as they grow up are, broadly, the key element. There is also a degree of demographic assignment here. Most Magical Girl stories have historically been for young women.
But defining the genre even in the very loose terms I just did is controversial. (Sometimes extremely so.) Less because of what it includes and more because of what it excludes. Puella Magi Madoka Magica hangs like a grim specter over the genre’s modern form, the oft-decried “dark Magical Girl” style is frequently accused of missing “the point” of the entire thing. (As if whole genres ever have single “points”.) But fair enough; some of Madoka‘s least imitators are widely considered to be….well, not very good. And as someone who is on record as thinking Magical Girl Spec. Ops. Asuka is the worst TV anime made in recent memory, I can at least understand the viewpoint.
Things become even more complex the farther from the latter-day “magical warrior” model we venture, as we’ll get to. The broader a view we take, the clearer it becomes that there is a space of overlap between “proper” / “pure” / whatever term you care to use Magical Girls and….something else, something slightly different. Something that has, to my knowledge, so far existed without a name. But if we gave it a name, what would be a good choice?
The panel above is from a fan translation of The Demon Girl Next Door. It’s not really an example of the genre as I’ll shortly attempt to define it, but the name is catchy and it’s indicative. They’re girls, they battle. “Just Battle Girl things” indeed.
Like all art, what I’ll be terming “battle girl anime” here comes from a fairly long tradition. In this case, I would say that it unites–not necessarily intentionally–two diffuse strains of anime that were originally only loosely related. With the important caveats that I am not a historian of the medium, and that I will only attempt to comment at length on anime I’ve actually seen at least some of, I think I can draw a line from the early 2000s, where I believe this genre’s origins lie, to the present day.
One half of the Battle Girl genre’s parentage is fairly clear. 2004 saw the premiere of Futari wa Precure, a Magical Girl series that synthesized thematic elements taken from more traditional stories in the genre with visual and aesthetic choices drawn from tokusatsu, including Toei’s own Super Sentai series. Precure has had a massively successful long run in its home country. New Precure series are still produced today, even into this very anime season, where they are often held up as the only “traditional” Magical Girl anime still airing. Precure has also been quite influential in a way that is frankly self-evident, almost any Japanese Magical Girl parody of the past 15 years goes to Pretty Cure before it touches on anything else. That alone speaks volumes. Precure is not the only series on this side of the battle girl genre’s heritage, but it’s by far the most important, and the most obvious.
On the other side, we have a tradition that is both more obscure and in the eyes of many, less respectable, that of the Battle Vixen genre. The slightly different name gives the key distinction away; while modern Battle Girl anime are certainly capable of having leery cameras or the like, a vast majority of Battle Vixen anime were ecchi series. Fanservice–“cheesecake” as it was often called back then–was a core part of the appeal. The anime Battle Vixens (or Ikki Tousen in its home country) that gives its name to the genre, aired just a year before Pretty Cure. It too has been fairly successful domestically, for an ecchi, at least, and got a fair amount of sequels. The most recent, the Western Wolves OVA, airing just two years ago in 2019.
Although the franchise lacks Precure‘s broad appeal for fairly obvious reasons, it is certainly something that left an impression on the otaku of the aughts, whether positive or negative.
This two-prong approach is a simplification; we are neglecting the fair amount of Magical Girl anime made for adults before this, including the seminal Cutie Honey. We’re neglecting the related “mecha musume” term, which refers to something more specific and not necessarily narrative (and also refers to a kind of model kit), and several other things. Nonetheless, the close chronological proximity of the two anime I mentioned above, and the general climate that surrounds them, makes me think that these are, if not “the catalysts”, at least some of the catalysts. The New ’10s saw several events that allowed these styles to mix together; it’s here where we bring up Puella Magi Madoka Magica again. While it was hardly the first magical girl series for adults (or indeed the first one to be “dark”), what it was was massively popular, carving out a new audience for people who wanted stories that featured girls in colorful costumes kicking ass but weren’t necessarily predisposed to seek out stories with the themes most Magical Girl anime traffic in. (Or even, indeed, necessarily Madoka‘s own themes.) Combined with anime’s resurgence in the Anglosphere in the age of streaming, and you have an audience that is eager for stories “like this”. Even if what “like this” is was not quite a definite thing yet.
That brings us to the third piece of the puzzle; Symphogear.
The timeline hyper-compresses here, and I suspect that if one were to look at the actual movement of staff and so on, one would find many people influencing each other, rather than a simple case of cause and effect. Still, I would fairly confidently point to Symphogear as the first “true and proper” modern Battle Girl anime. Its protagonists function like Precure-style Magical Girls, but its writing gestures to themes that are somewhat broader than the Magical Girl genre’s usual concerns, flattening out the more specific bent of its parent genre to examine more general oppressive systems. And in the case of Symphogear specifically; propose that only full-hearted love and honest communication can save us. Something still very much rooted in the Magical Girl style. (This is a very inconsequential sidenote, but I’d argue this puts Symphogear among the “closest” to a traditional Magical Girl series, out of those we’re discussing here.)
I cannot definitively prove that Symphogear‘s success inspired imitators–and indeed, there were other shows at the time working in broadly similar territory, such as the 2012 Black Rock Shooter anime–but the genre explodes from here. Not for nothing did the aforementioned Assault Lily Bouquet pick up the pre-air hype train nickname “SHAFTogear”. Anime fans can already recognize this genre, even if they don’t quite have a name for it yet.
So we can somewhat confidently identify where Battle Girl anime come from, but what are they? What separates a Battle Girl anime from a Magical Girl anime? What separates one from a show that simply has a female lead in an action-focused role? Knowing what we do about their lineage, we can make a few specific qualifying points. Things that separate a Battle Girl anime from its closest cousins.
Caveats abound, of course, and like any genre classification, much of this will come down to personal interpretation. (There is no objectivity in the arts, after all.) But I believe these four points are what separate Battle Girls from their closest relatives.
With all this in mind, it is perhaps best to define the Battle Girl genre as more of a super-genre–a broad storytelling space that more specific genres can exist within, or overlap with. It would be hard indeed to disqualify Precure itself, for example. And while the third point disqualifies some of the genre’s own ancestors, there are at least a few borderline cases. (I am thinking here of the uniquely frustrating VividRed Operation, mostly.) There is also room for a conversation about whether vehicles count as “special powers or exceptional weaponry”. If they do, we could possibly rope in series like The Magnificent Kotobuki and Warlords of Sigrdrifa as well.
There is also plenty of overlap with other genres; Symphogear itself has some DNA from idol anime, and fellow Satelight Inc. production AKB0048 merges the two even more closely. I would also argue that say, Kill la Kill is either just barely or just barely not a Battle Girl series. It would have to come down to how much weight one wishes to place on both the ecchi elements and the male characters.
So, if the genre is so broad, and is nebulous at the edges, why impose it at all? Well, in part, I do genuinely think that all of these anime existing within the same roughly ten year span cannot be entirely coincidental. But more importantly I think it’s genuinely really important to spotlight anime that have all- or mostly-female casts². There is still a widely-held assumption in Anglophone anime fan spaces that women only watch certain kinds of anime. Certainly they don’t care for action anime with lots of punching and shouting.
The truth of the matter is that women love fantasy and sci-fi action as much as anyone else. It is no coincidence that both Precure specifically and the Battle Girl genre in general have a sizable following among female otaku. The genre is also not a marker of quality of course; none is. I’d call myself an easy mark for it, but upon reviewing what series I considered to be or not be Battle Girl anime, I certainly came up with some that I do not like. And quite a few more that I’m more mixed on.
With all of the above in mind, I came up with a list of anime from the last ten or so years I’d consider to belong to the genre. It is not exhaustive, and this is not really a “recommended viewing” list, either, but I feel that simply lining the names up in a column speaks for itself.
I think this is sizable evidence that this is, indeed, “a thing” on at least some level. And this grouping leaves out some series I am personally on the fence on some of which I’ve already discussed, such as the aforementioned Kill la Kill, as well as things like Day Break Illusion and any number of other “dark Magical Girl anime” that could conceivably be counted in the genre but which, if so, form a distinct enough subgroup that they are a topic worthy of more specific discussion. I’ve also left out some anime that I’m reasonably sure likely qualify but that I have not seen myself, such as Yuuki Yuuna is A Hero and Battle Girl High School (no relation). There is also The Rolling Girls, a series that is definitely speaking some of the same language as these anime, but whose rejection of traditional heroism and odd structure prevent me from feeling comfortable listing it here.
And even within this group, there’s a noticeable sub-category consisting of Flip Flappers, Wonder Egg Priority, and arguably Revue Starlight. These three have a more surreal presentation and somewhat different themes than their compatriots. I am not sure I’d be comfortable calling this its own “lineage”, exactly, due to its small size, but it may be the budding seeds of one.
All these caveats to say; I am under no illusion that I have “solved” any kind of “problem” here. Artistic frameworks–very much including genre–are imposed, they do not naturally exist. This is as true for the Battle Girl genre as anything else. What I do think I’ve done, though, is hopefully given a new lens through which we can analyze and think about these stories. I think art should be understood based on what it is trying to do. And I do think, at least to some extent, that framing shows like Symphogear, or Wonder Egg Priority, or Granbelm or any number of others as “Magical Girl Anime” harms understanding them more than it helps. Not because the Magical Girl genre is some exclusive sacred club (or indeed something to be shunned or avoided), but because the aims of the works are different. Different things exist for different people. That is not just something to tolerate; it’s worth celebrating.
I acknowledge that this framework I’ve devised is an incomplete one; my own relative neophytism is surely depriving me of at least some knowledge that would further flesh it out. (I have not even mentioned Mai-HiME, because I’ve never seen it, but I am near-positive that it factors in here somehow.) But that, in of itself, is a beautiful thing. If I have done something even akin to laying a single brick in what will one day become a building, it’s been worth the time, the words, and the thought.
As for the future of this genre-space, who can say? Wonder Egg Priority remains excellent, but time alone will tell if these anime continue to be made or if they will end up as a hallmark of the still, in the grand scheme of things, only-just-over 2010s.
Personally? I know what I’m hoping for.
1: There is some flexibility here. Male characters are still allowed in the periphery; as antagonists or as supporting characters like love interests or mentors, but they cannot be the main focus, and they should not have strong relationships with other male characters. The clause that there must be at least two characters is to distinguish these series from a not-closely-related group that star a lone, often wandering heroine.
2: It’s inarguably even more important to spotlight those that have many female staff, but that is another conversation, and is outside the scope of this article.
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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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
What to make of Otherside Picnic? Named after a famous Russian novel to which it bears little resemblance, and drawing on a twenty year tradition of Japanese “net lore” for its inspiration, one might initially peg Otherside Picnic as a fairly heady, intellectual kind of horror story. But while it’s certainly creepy enough in its most unsettling moments to earn the genre tag, it’d be a mistake to box this one in as being solely for those with an SCP Foundation addiction.
A more proper indicator of where Otherside Picnic is coming from might actually be its opening theme. A rollicking, adventurous pop-rock tune with a romantic slant from accomplished anisongsters CHiCO with Honeyworks. Otherside isn’t not a horror series, but it’s important to consider what else it is; an adventure anime, and also a show with some pretty prolific lesbian subtext. It’s not at all dour, is what I’m getting at.
Instead, Otherside is a surprisingly breezy watch. It’s the story of Sorawo, a depressed college student who, through her vast knowledge of online urban legends, wanders through a gateway to another world; the titular otherside. When we meet her, she’s lying flat on her back in a puddle, pursued by a mind-invading monster known as a kunekune¹, and about to accept her imminent death. What, or rather who, saves her is a gun-toting Canadian-Japanese woman named Toriko, who she quite quickly develops a very obvious crush on.
Otherside Picnic follows the two, as they grow closer, make trips to and from the Otherside, and contend with the many strange creatures that live there. Sorawo often gives a brief rundown of what these things are, which is helpful if you, like me, only have a pretty limited knowledge of Japanese creepypastas. The “net legend” angle is a big part of the setting’s appeal, so if the idea of even something as out there as the bizarre and disturbingly violent “monkey train dream” getting a nod appeals to you, the series is a must-watch.
Really, I was surprised at how much I liked Otherside Picnic in general. Horror isn’t really my genre, but Sorawo is just the right kind of relatable reserved nerd. (Although I will admit, the one thing the series is missing from the light novels is her delightfully gay inner monologues about how attractive she finds Toriko.) Her character arc over the course of the series is fairly simple, as she starts out as said reserved nerd and by the final episode, having along the way developed what are essentially magic powers, and having been through so much with Toriko is, well, decidedly no longer that.
On a less literal level, the series also hums a simple theme of the importance of finding people who you just vibe with. In the finale, this is all but stated outright, as Sorawo and Toriko both recount how the other saved them. It gives Otherside Picnic a point, adding some substance to its afternoon anime binge-friendly nature.
Much of the rest of the fun of the series comes from setting details or technical aspects. The monster design is quite strong, and combined with the often surprisingly good animation², this carries the series’ weaker episodes. There’s also quite a few running sub-plots tucked in to the show’s single cour. These range from fairly serious (a lost group of US Marines who the pair eventually rescue), to clear set-up for seasons yet to come (Sorawo’s apparent and only briefly touched-on ability to not-quite mind control people, the late-game introduction of minor character Akari), to the just plain odd (there’s an episode about cats who are ninjas) or funny (the pair accidentally buy a multi-purpose miniature harvester on a drunken spending binge at one point).
It’s hard to imagine that Otherside Picnic will exactly change anyone’s life, but like last year’s Dorohedoro, it’s strong genre fare in a genre that is under-represented in mainstream TV anime. That it is perhaps only the second-best anime of the Spring 2021 season to revolve around a heterochromiac who travels to an otherworld that also has a lot of queer subtext speaks more to the strength of the competition than it does any problems with Otherside. This is a series I could see getting sequel seasons for years, frankly, as there is a lot of unadapted material and a lot of mysteries left unexplored. Perhaps if we’re lucky, that will be the anime’s eventual fate. Either way, there’s a lot to love about a brief trip to the Otherside.
1: The subtitles somewhat astoundingly refer to these things as “wiggle-waggles”, which is pretty damn funny.
2: Surprising because this is a LIDENFILMS production. I’m not an expert on the company by any means, but what I’ve seen from them has traditionally had outright bad animation. While the CGI used for some distance shots won’t impress anyone anytime soon, I was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked at other times.
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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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by S.F. Sorrow. Many thanks, as always.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
The gender binary works for almost no person on Earth. The national war machines of the world, even fewer. In the abstract sense; Simoun is about this simple pair of facts, and how they relate to the broader systems that define our lives. Moreover, it is about how those systems can be dealt with; through adaption, rejection, self-sacrifice, self-love, and self-knowledge.
It’s possible I’m betraying a small reference pool here, but I find Simoun a true original. I’m guilty of overusing terms like “unusual” and I call enough anime “a bit of a weird one” that you could conceivably make a drinking game out of it while reading my blog. But qualifiers like “a bit” are unnecessary here. I don’t think I’ve seen much else even remotely like Simoun. Frankly, I struggle for reference points. “A shoujo-inflected political war drama with gender identity issues” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. And indeed, Simoun is defined by some very unusual stylistic tentpoles.
We have here a deliberately slow and ponderous pace, sketchbook fantasy architecture, a decidedly odd setting with flying vehicles rendered in airbrushed mid-aughts CGI (the titular simouns themselves), and a surprisingly complex….well, complex of fantastic gender roles and associated dynamics. All this is soundtracked, naturally, with a combination of very of-its-time canned breaks and four-on-the-floor rhythms, and a shocking amount of violins. It’s a lot to take in.
At its heart, Simoun is both the story of its cast, all of whom are young girls in a military unit called the Chor Tempest, and how they are affected both by the social systems that they live in and each other. If that sounds a bit heady, that’s because Simoun itself often leans that way. This is a show with a lot on its mind, and it spends all twenty-six of its episodes pouring it out.
Getting into the nitty-gritty of what Simoun is about requires first explaining a facet of its worldbuilding. Though I called the show’s protagonists “young girls” in the previous paragraph, that’s not actually entirely correct. Simoun‘s cast consists mostly of young people belonging to a social caste of their country, The Theocracy of Simulacrum, called sibyllae (singular: sibylla) who are perhaps best thought of as being a kind of nonbinary, although even this is, admittedly, a simplification. Sibyllae pilot the titular simouns, both as ritual instruments in their role as priestesses and as weapons of war in an ongoing conflict with first one and then two other powers; the Archipelago of Argentum and The Plumbum Highlands. Two pilots occupy each simoun, in a bond called a “pair” that is both tactical and emotional. Sometimes merely friendly, other times romantic. On a few occasions it’s even adversarial.
Once they reach maturity, sibyllae (and indeed, all of Simulacrum’s citizens) are expected to retire from their role and visit a magic fountain, where they will choose to either become male or “remain” (the terminology is somewhat odd, but can probably be chalked up to the age of the series) female. Alternately, if they are uncommitted, they can have the fountain itself (via its representative, a priestess figure named Onashia) choose for them. Much ceremony surrounds this, and the reasons individual sibyllae give for their choice varies wildly; some want to remain with their simoun pair or some other romantic interest and thus choose to become male, others seek specific jobs more associated with one gender than another, and so on.
In the series’ second episode, a sibylla named Elly has the fountain choose her gender for her. We don’t see much, but we learn as she does that she is to become male. Almost immediately, she cries out in anguish and breaks down crying. A lack of commitment on the part of someone who is still essentially a child is punished by being forced into a role that does not fit her and that she is not happy with. To say it’s “hard to watch” is an understatement. It’s horrifying. And it’s one Simoun calls back to more than once over the course of its run. It is the first major indication that all of these invented systemics are buildup to a real core, not just aesthetics or aimless experimentation.
The sibyllae occupy a role that has no direct, obvious real-world counterpart, which has the benefit of halting any preconceived notions on the part of the viewer. Any notions that do form will be quickly picked apart by the characters themselves. Almost to a one, every character in the show has a distinct opinion of the syballae, none moreso than the pilots themselves. Some see the sibyllae primarily as priestesses and lament the combat role they’ve had to take up in wartime. For others, such as Mamina, it’s the entire point; a chance to prove oneself and rise above one’s station. Others still, such as Aeru, who is probably the closest thing Simoun has to a proper protagonist, primarily serve in order to avoid the inevitability of the fountain.
Some are just as lost as the audience; Neviril, around whom much of the series revolves, is engaged with a desperate search for purpose after the loss of her partner in the first episode. This is all without even mentioning the complex and thorny dynamic of having a bunch of children who are essentially miko pilot the simoun themselves. Given that the vehicles are, when deployed at their full strength, functionally magical nuclear bombers. These are just some of the many issues that Simoun picks at numerous times over the course of its run.
It’s unsurprising then that tonally, Simoun is iron and rain. The foggy atmosphere tints the deep regret, unrequited love, and crises of faith that permeate the series. As it progresses, conflicting ideals of religious and noble duty clash with those of militaristic nationalism, the individuals that espouse these ideas caught in between. Simoun is heavy as lead. This is not a show you watch for fun.
This means that the show does have a few, not weaknesses exactly, but quirks. The way it handles big emotional moments is almost more reminiscent of dramatic theater than anything else. But make no mistake, that stately sense of gravitas is absolutely capable of sending chills up the spines of the unprepared. It’s a trait the series shares with some other big-picture war dramas, your Gundams and such, making it the thing that most easily places Simoun within the obvious broader context of its medium.
As for actual weaknesses, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call Simoun something of a slog. It’s not pointless, which is what that term usually implies, but it is definitely not anyone’s idea of a breezy watch. There are very few moments of emotional catharsis or even many pleasant interludes during the entire run of the show, these only really coming to fruition in Simoun‘s final half dozen episodes. It works well with the series’ thematic core, but it doesn’t make it any easier to stomach on a moment to moment basis and I must confess my millennial ADHD brain found itself struggling to keep my attention focused on the screen at times. It’s almost impressive, given that Simoun is only a fairly short 26 episodes. Simoun also looks very much of its time. I grew to appreciate its mid-2000s charm over the course of watching it, but I would be unsurprised if others were less charitable.
So those are the ups and downs. It is fair then to ask where all of this goes, and the truth is that Simoun‘s greatest strength is that by spending all of that time on worldbuilding and similar details, it earns an incredible amount of leeway to take the entire thing wherever it pleases. Simoun‘s true core thesis then, is wonderful. The series broadly rejects all notion of heroic narrative; the ostensible main military conflict fizzles out with four episodes left to go. Its’ finale is not about any grand confrontation, but about how the sibyllae who remain deal with the end of the war, and consequently the end of their special relevance to the Theocracy.
All of this is broadly a metaphor for coming of age. A thematic line that many anime explore, but Simoun‘s closest compatriot, at least from my own pool of knowledge, is none other than Revolutionary Girl Utena. The two share something that looks like fatalism from a distance but is both more practical and more resonant up close. Unlike many other anime, Simoun offers no dramatic moment of breaking the system. The system, in a way, wins, in that it continues to exist even after the war. The sibyllae’s own choices are where the revolution lies; for many, to go to the fountain, for one, to replace Onashia as its keeper, and for two, something far stranger, and not unlike Utena and Anthy’s great escape at the end of their own series’ film. It is a revolution not of the world, but the self.
One could argue that this thesis is incomplete, maybe even irresponsible. I would counter that no single work of art is obligated to depict all aspects of the human condition on its own. We need lovers as much as fighters, and Simoun is decidedly for the former. This school of thematic material lives on in anime to this very day for that exact reason.
For the flaws it admittedly does have, Simoun‘s final catharsis is wonderfully well-earned. The hours of our lives tick on, and somewhere far beyond them spin two eternal maidens, in a land of hope and dance.
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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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
How do we keep ending up here?
This past week, the mass of loosely Japanese animation-related Twitter accounts broadly known as “AniTwitter” worked itself into a tizzy over an admittedly somewhat surface-level but harmless article on gaming website Polygon. That article’s author, Kambole Campbell, came under fire from anglosphere magical girl genre fans after the column (admittedly incorrectly) implied that Wonder Egg Priority was innovating in the genre space by dealing with the traumas of growing up.
To briefly satisfy the bloodhounds, yes, this is wrong. One need only to have seen the fairly recent-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things HeartCatch Precure to know that’s not true, and beyond that specific show or even the Pretty Cure franchise in general, the genre has been tackling this subject matter basically since its inception. I would argue that if Wonder Egg Priority makes a real innovation it’s merging that thematic core with an approach centered around surrealistic psychological imagery. Even there, it has forefathers. (That article also mentions Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It’s an obvious comparison, but not an incorrect one. And Madoka too has its own stylistic ancestors, of course, but this should go without saying, nothing exists in a vacuum.) Innovation is often only truly noticeable in hindsight anyway.
But Campbell’s minor error, mostly one of tone, doesn’t really matter here. And beyond the previous paragraph I don’t intend to much discuss the article itself at all, because I don’t think its content is terribly important to this issue. What’s been laid bare by this entire incident, which culminated in Campbell locking his twitter account and thus cutting off a vital source of networking for himself, is the truly dire state of anime fandom on social media.
This isn’t really surprising, if we stop to think about it. Broadly, the more niche a geeky interest is, the more intense its fans are. To abandon anime completely for a moment, look at the MCU. The cinematic universe’s most intense fans are not casual moviegoers, they’re the diehard core of Marvel comic fans for whom the films mark a public acceptance of what was for some time a rather obscure set of narratives. You go back fifteen years and much of the public at large doesn’t know who Marvel’s Thor is, much less the Guardians of The Galaxy.
So with this principal in mind, let’s apply it here. Anime as an entire medium is already a niche interest in the anglosphere, despite a resurgence in popular awareness over the last decade. Outside of mainstream TV shonen; the likes of say, My Hero Academia and a few other such properties whose merch you can find at your local Target, it is even moreso. It is not a surprise then that one of the most intense corners of online anime fan space is what might loosely be termed “magical girl twitter”. People whose passion for the genre runs wide and deep, not just Pretty Cure mega-fans (although those certainly exist), but folks whose knowledge extends back to the birth of the genre. Farther than mine, certainly.
In of itself, passion is a wonderful thing. I started this blog in part out of a desire to share my own. The issue arises when fans who share a niche interest go from appreciative to exclusionary and, in this case, to actively antagonistic. A freelance journalist’s Twitter account being locked is not a minor inconvenience, it is an active, tangible negative impact on their life. “Magical girl twitter”, as I’m calling it here, has harmed a person’s livelihood. Here in retaliation–deliberate or not–for a perceived lack of respect toward the genre and its traditions.
We have to be careful here, because wanting a journalist to be qualified is not inherently a bad thing. In an ideal world, anyone who wanted to pen an article about some anime they liked would have infinite time and resource to do so, and would always produce the absolute best material possible. We, of course, do not live in an ideal world. The pool of writers a website can draw on is limited. The combined frames of reference of those writers is limited. The amount of money a website is willing to pay those writers is limited. And so on, and so forth.
The reality thus is this. Most likely, Campbell’s article came into being because he saw the show, thought it ruled (which it does), and wanted to use the platform that Polygon gave him to hopefully spread the word. I have seen a lot of malice ascribed to his motives, and I find the conclusions many were willing to jump to somewhere between upsetting and just plain confusing. (I cannot count how many times I’ve seen the word “clickbait” over the last two days. Sidebar here: all journalism written on the internet is clickbait. Clicks are how we pay for, y’know, groceries and such.)
In some ways though, this is the logical endpoint of the mindset that any commentator on the medium must be This Qualified to write their work. As the traditional western otaku gatekeeping structures have broken down, anime has become more accessible to anglophone audiences than ever before. Thus, pure, experiential knowledge–How Much Anime You’ve Watched–has become the last refuge of those who think that the broadening scope of who is watching and enjoying anime is a bad thing.
Part of this is just a failure to understand a basic truth of art. No two people experience the same works in the same order or in the same way. One’s “experience of art” is wholly unique. Seeing, just as a vaguely-relevant example, Madoka Magica before Sailor Moon is different from seeing them in the reverse order. Seeing any entry in the storied Cutie Honey franchise before you saw either would influence your perception of both, and the same is true in whatever order you care to put these three examples in. This is part of why people simply disagree on interpretation and even just the quality of a given work in the first place.
Artistic canons, then, eventually arise from broadly agreed-upon interpretations or at least points from which interpretations may emerge. It’s important to acknowledge that they are not objective truths, but rather groups of shared experiences. Niche knowledge becomes codified by those who have the most of it, and a consequence of this is that some opinions become an easy way to identify someone as not being “in the know”. In the case of magical girl anime, almost anything that positions Madoka Magica and its imitators as diametrical opposites to older works in the genre is one of these. Sadly, it is then all too easy to think of the “not in the know” person as an outsider here to besmirch the good name of magical girl anime. (Or whatever else you care to name.)
I don’t think those making these assumptions have bad motives, to be clear. I have been on the receiving end of enough nightmarishly dull conversations about how Madoka Magica was the first thing to “deconstruct” magical girl anime that I can absolutely understand finding such talk infuriating. I too understand the impulse to correct someone when they seem to be buying into (or worse, spreading!) a badly-informed talking point. What I do think is bad is the actions that this attitude leads to if taken to an extreme. One Twitter account being locked is one thing, but the exclusionary attitude underlying much of the discourse here is the same mentality that, combined with a noxious cocktail of reactionary politics that is also very much present in some parts of the anime fandom, fueled the GamerGate fiasco a decade ago. No one should want more of that.
The people behind this specific incident likely had only the best of intentions; defending the reputation of the magical girl genre which is often unfairly maligned. But we must be mindful of how this interacts with the internet at large. It would not be difficult at all for a reactionary group to co-opt this sort of outrage flareup for their own ends. I think I speak for every rational anime fan when I say that that is firmly not what we want the future of our medium’s fan spaces to look like.
I look again to what the likely origins of Campbell’s article were; a simple attempt to put more people on to a series he thought was worth watching. Even if we take it as a given that he made mistakes in the process, did he actually do anything wrong? I would say not. Intent matters here. It is obvious from any even remotely considerate reading of the article that there was no active attempt to deceive, discredit, or defame anyone or anything. At its absolute worst, the article is maybe slightly shallow. Certainly, it’s nothing that warrants the hugely disproportionate negative response Campbell got on social media. Which, as we’ve gone over, is both personally damaging to the journalist and just unproductive in general.
So what is the best way to counteract potential bad information in a piece like this without causing its author harm? Speaking generally, I advocate response articles (something of a lost art, honestly) for this kind of thing. They are better for the productive purpose of educating and expanding the horizons of anime neophytes. Twitter threads if carefully maintained can also be a solid tool, but especially for owners of larger accounts, this risks accidentally painting a target on the author’s back. Care must be taken in general, as the goal of artistic commentary, and indeed, commentary on that commentary, should always be to foster greater understanding between people. Social media outrage, by contrast, has the exact opposite effect. It turns both fans and the journalists themselves away from the medium and from each other, something nobody should want.
I’ve confessed before that I loathe writing articles like this. They’re not any fun, I always feel like I’m scolding people, and they’re not even remotely indicative of my broader work. Yet, I sometimes feel obligated to. If I can leave even one person just slightly more considerate and constructive at the end of this article than they were at the beginning, it’s well worth it. And to head off at the pass any accusations of self-righteousness; it’s not like I’m immune to this either. I’m definitely as guilty of occasionally jumping down folks’ throats as anyone else. I think it’s important to recognize that it’s at best a bad habit and at worst an active detriment to the medium I love.
So please, let’s all try to be just a little nicer, more charitable, more compassionate to each other? The artists, fans, and writers of generations to come will thank us for it.
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