Something I greatly appreciate about Ikoku Nikki is its intentionally screwy chronology. Asa walks home disappointed when one of her friends suggests they all try out for a lead vocalist position. We then get to see why she’s upset. All of those friends pledged at some point to write a song together, a promise treated as sacred in some genres here dissolves into nothing in the span of just a few months. As she walks, melancholy, a piano melody drifts her way, and it’s suddenly years and years ago, when she was much younger and singing in a choir competition, something her biological parents seem to have encouraged. Later, when she loses, her father stutteringly tells her that her singing “stood out.” In this way, there is a through-line. The immense weight of that reaction, likely not even intentional, is something that can utterly sledgehammer a child’s sense of self. This isn’t the thing that sets Asa a-wandering, but it is one such thing.
This methodology pairs well with the collage-like approach that Asa takes to her notebook itself, the central object of Ikoku Nikki on the whole. Her writing in it is, like her memories, patchwork, a scrawled quilt of quotations from the adults in her life, doodles of UFOs, short exclamations of feeling and so on. In this way, Ikoku Nikki is very good at marrying form to function; we are living inside of a notebook not unlike Asa’s as we watch it, because everyone’s life is like this.
And indeed, Asa’s not actually the only character to have this privilege. We follow Emiri for some time here, time spent waiting for her friends, fixed on a length of telescoping pencil lead, washes away into a daydream of the seaside.
When one of those friends arrives, she vents about feeling like she could never stop being friends with Asa even if she wanted to ever since the accident. That feeling, tense and heavy, melts away. The person Emiri is venting to is a gentle newcomer to the narrative, one Shouko [Hanazawa Kana], who wraps her pinky finger around hers, the implicitly romantic nature of the gesture made explicit when Emiri blushingly says that she likes this girl. Without this insight into Emiri’s own point of view, it would be easy for the viewer to condemn her at arm’s length. Walking alongside her, we can see that her feeling of burden isn’t borne of cruelty. It’s the shifting unease of someone who feels she is rapidly growing apart from her childhood friend, in ways she’s not sure how to confront. This sort of tempering is what drives Ikoku Nikki’s emotional logic, it’s what makes it feel “real.” The emotional verisimilitude holds up a mirror to every similar selfish decision we’ve ever made for ourselves. It doesn’t judge, but it does reflect.
These aren’t the only lives this show has explored, but all those it has are considered similarly. (Makio, most notably. Both here and elsewhere.) Notebooks, connected by only the whims of their writers, emotions and events blending together with no regard for time or space, are the perfect metaphor. We are, perpetually, searching for the unifying thread at the center of it all, the reason we write in the first place, no matter what form our stories take.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
In this week’s Oshi no Ko, it feels like the house of cards is fully falling apart. Aqua revealed his and Ruby’s parentage at the end of the last episode. In doing so, he’s completed the alienation of everyone he cares for at all; Akane rightly told him off for putting trackers on her last week, here, Ruby chews him out for posthumously ruining their mother’s reputation, and even his surrogate second mom, the agency head Miyako, is clearly quite upset about the entire thing. Kana is really the only person here who still gives him the time of day, and it’s partly out of feeling she owes him for burying the scandal about her and that director, whether he meant to or not. Aqua spends this episode looking for all the world like a man already dead, and to the show’s credit, that much is definitely intentional, and it’s largely well-executed. There is also this line from Kana, who reveals that she plans on quitting the idol business in the near future. That much is not a surprise—we’ve always known that acting is her real passion—but combined with the rest of the episode it ends up feeling prescient, and not in a good way.
More than ever, Oshi no Ko is two different anime fighting each other for dominance. On the one hand, the showbiz stuff that took up most of the story when I last wrote about the series a couple weeks back. On the other, the psychological thriller aspects that have defined Aqua as a protagonist this entire time. I’ve thought about what the anime be like if it just picked one or the other, but ultimately it’s impossible to know. (And there’s no guarantee that such changes would make Oshi no Ko a better story. Or even a more coherent one.)
I’m sure to longtime readers it must seem like I keep going back and forth on this show. That is because I do keep going back and forth on this show. It’s trying to walk a very delicate tightrope, and because of that, how much this show succeeds at what it’s trying to do is going to come down to its final moments, be those moments counted in episodes or mere minutes I am not yet sure. For most of this season, and even most of this episode, I was willing to entertain the idea that it could still pull it off. Now, I’m not really so sure. I would like to be wrong, but we’ll get to why my opinion’s changed yet again.
First, let’s talk about a favorite storytelling technique of the series. One of Oshi no Ko‘s recurring tricks has been to have a character explain how to extract a certain feeling from the audience in some in-universe context while, at the same time, the series is doing that metatextually to its audience. Often with that same character. It’s been consistently fantastic at this, most notably so during the second season but as recently as just a few weeks back. Here, it makes its biggest play yet. This part of the story will be divisive, and perhaps sensing that, Oshi no Ko seeks to quell some of that division by returning to the one character that every fan of the series almost universally still has positive feelings for.
Yes. Via flashback, this is the first episode since the premiere of the series where Hoshino Ai [Takahashi Rie, if you’ve forgotten] herself is a major character.
At this point, I was already getting a bit worried. That is a big play, and it’s not one you want to make carelessly.
On the set of a film, she bothers Gotanda Taishi (the director who served as Aqua’s mentor) into filming a documentary about B*Komachi—the originals, recall—that her agency has wanted to do for some time. This is to be a grandiose thing, with shooting wrapping up on the day of the Tokyo Dome concert for B*Komachi that never actually came to be. Gotanda is serious about making this a truthful, genuine documentary of the B*Komachi girls, including Ai herself, and he doesn’t want her putting up her usual front. Despite warning Gotanda that the footage might be unusable if she isn’t “lying all the time”, Ai acquiesces to his request.
And then, somewhere between that conversation and the day when the concert was supposed to happen, Ai died. Gotanda has been sitting on this script, which he’s rewritten into a lightly fictionalized account of Ai’s story, for some time. Actual parallels in the real world to this are in very short supply. In theory, it’s an interesting idea. And depending on how much you pop for minor characters returning, you’ll be interested to know that in addition to the usual suspects, New B*Komachi, Aqua himself, and Akane, the film’s producer, Kaburagi, also wants to cast Melt and Shiranui Frill, as well as a completely new character in the role of Ai herself. For a minute, it might seem like the final arc of Oshi no Ko will be about immortalizing Ai’s story on the big screen, essentially an in-universe version of Oshi no Ko itself.
And, unfortunately, for the first time, I think Oshi no Ko‘s usual bag of tricks fails it here. Pretty much completely, in fact. It is wonderful to see Ai again, no matter what side of her we’re seeing, don’t get me wrong, but pushing Ai back to the center of the story as an actual character as opposed to just an idealized ghost haunting the narrative and everyone’s minds shines a very harsh light on OnK’s own complicity in the exact pop media machine it’s trying to critique. This has ramifications mere minutes later in the episode, but let’s talk about that in of itself first.
Do you know how many commercials Ai, the character, is in? Not fictional commercials within the world of Oshi no Ko, real ones.
Hint: More than you’d assume.
There’s a couple of these, although sadly not that many seem to have made it on to Youtube. Even if it were just this one, the point would remain; it’s weird that you’d use a dead person for this, right?
She’s not really dead of course. Fictional characters exist outside linear time, they are alive when they’re alive in the story and dead when they’re dead in the story. Vague, wobbly, out-of-universe stuff like a commercial is even less committal. Someone decided it would be funny to have a dead girl hawk this stuff, or even maybe just that she was so charming that it didn’t matter that she was dead, so there she is. I’m not stupid, and I’m well aware that this is far less of a problem than it would be if Ai had been a flesh and blood human being. But it’s still a little weird, right? There’s something a bit off about that?
The same is true of Oshi no Ko‘s endless barrage of merch. Look in any of these merch sets and there she is, frozen in eternal youth right alongside her children, who are of course represented as also being their teenage selves and thus roughly Ai’s own age. There is no explanation for this, because why would there be? It’s character merch, essentially just an art board put on some kind of collectible good. And in any other series I’d completely agree with that assessment, but the problem is that Oshi no Ko is in part a critique of fame. Ai isn’t real, but the systems she was written in part to criticize certainly are, even if they’re intangible, and this cuts against those ideas in an offputting way. I don’t know how much control original author Akasaka Aka has over the series’ merchandizing, but I’m criticizing a work of art, here, not one guy in particular. (And even if I was, I think the bit about figure rights in the cosplay episode several weeks back would put me entirely within my rights to do so.)
This has always been a problem with the series, a kind of deep-baked hypocrisy that’s never truly been absent. Until now, it’s been easy to ignore it if you were so inclined, the storytelling was good enough to warrant that. The Drama was worth it, if you ignored that it would have to build up to something at some point. Unfortunately, we’re now at “some point”, and it’s consequently become much harder to avoid the elephant in the room. The hypocrisy really hits a fever pitch toward the end of this episode, where we’re finally properly introduced to our main villain.
I strongly suspect that in the future, if I am asked to point to a single moment where Oshi no Ko just falls off for good and never recovers, it will be this sequence.
In the closing minutes of the episode, we are introduced to two characters. One is Katayose Yura [Hasegawa Ikumi], a red-hot superstar actress. She’s Kaburagi’s choice to play Ai.
Introduced alongside her is some mysterious and obviously-sinister blonde guy. They talk a bit as she drinks her stress away and she mentions her love of hiking. The blonde guy makes the deeply weird comment that she should be careful on her hiking trips, since if anything happens to her it’ll look like an accident. Hilariously, she doesn’t think twice about this, and either he or some accomplice of his promptly murders her the next time she’s on a hike, shoving her off a cliff, into a ditch where she dies painfully.
It’s probably obvious, but this blonde guy is in fact Kamiki Hikaru [Miyano Mamoru]. The twins’ father, the man who orchestrated Ai’s murder, and so on and so forth. This is our main bad guy, and while we’ve seen him from the shadows and briefly in passing a few times, this is our first opportunity to spend any real time with him. While he’s definitely intended to be unpleasant, the unfortunate reality is that this guy sucks in precisely the wrong way. In his brief few lines here, he comes off as the kind of supernaturally-competent murderous dickhead who riddles essentially the entire output of seinen manga magazines. Accordingly, his first impression is that of a character who is not only unpleasant, but corny andreally boring. God bless the team at Doga Kobo, because they really try their hardest to make this guy look properly sinister, and Miyano Mamoru delivers his lines with as much malice as he can muster, but there’s a deeper problem here, and it’s on the writing level.
Look, I’m not saying every character necessarily needs the most realistic motivation in the world. Hell, even if they did, serial thrill-killers are a real thing. My problem is not that this is unrealistic, or “too dark”, or anything like that. My problem, to put it in the only way I can really think of, is that it’s stupid. And it is stupid! It’s corny! It’s cheesy, and not even in a fun way! Worse is that her death is framed in basically the same way that Ai’s was. What’s the term? Once as tragedy, twice as farce?
Honestly this might’ve worked more if it was darker. Part of the reason this is so out-of-nowhere and scans as so ridiculous is that we have no idea who this girl is! She’s alive for all of five minutes of screentime, and it’s clear that the reason she exists is that the show wanted to kill a character similar enough to Kana to make the similarities obvious but was either too chickenshit to actually kill Kana herself or was prevented from doing so—editorial intervening in the manga writing process? Who knows. Either way: eat me, this blows.
If you want to defend the show, it’s easy to try to offload responsibility onto the viewer: “Well, you’re still watching, aren’t you? Clearly the fact that you are means this kind of lurid shlock works on you!” The problem of course is that I didn’t write this. In defaulting to not just this kind of plot but this execution of this kind of plot, the show’s undercurrent of hypocrisy boils over into something rank, ugly, and nasty. Earlier in the episode, on the set of the movie he’s filming with Ai, Goshanta says you can’t half-ass emotion, not even for the sake of plot. This is one of many bits of pithy wisdom about the arts that Oshi no Ko has put into the air over the years, some of them more meaningful than others. Yet, here we have the show doing exactly that, killing a random one-off character for no reason other than to establish a villain’s bad guy cred. We are given nothing to latch onto, and the entire sequence inspires no emotion but annoyance. Commit to the dark shit or don’t do it in the first place, you cowards. There is nothing worse than a half-assed tragedy.
Is it possible for the show to recover from this? Possible, yes. If you want to, you can read all of those comments people make to Aqua in this episode, that he’s ruining his mother’s reputation and basically digging up her grave, as comments the series is making about itself. I acknowledge that, and if it somehow pulls this off in a way that feels worthwhile then I’ll look like a naysayer. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take, because if I’m being asked if a righting of the ship is likely? Not at all. A fuckup this dramatic is usually the sign of an incoming plane crash of an ending. I am of course aware that Oshi no Ko‘s manga already has a reputation as a story that fucks it up in the final stretch, so I am not optimistic. We’ll see what the remaining three weeks bring.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
There are a variety of ways to interpret any story. This is something that’s obviously true, but I think is more often deployed as a cliché than really understood. For example, I have spoken a few different ways about Oshi no Ko over the past few years, I’ve praised it for its strong cast and bold storytelling, and I’ve criticized it for its relatively shallow understanding of the systems it seeks to critique and its reliance on elbow-jabbing shock value. Those aren’t contradictory opinions, my frustrations with the story stem from thinking it’s otherwise very good.
Out of habit, I’ve kept a lot of my more negative opinions on the series off-site to my tumblr or the like (with a few exceptions), while posting the more positive ones here. This has served to perhaps obscure that I think so far that season three is a pretty noticeable downgrade from season two. Not in terms of visuals—Hiramaki Daisuke’s team at Doga Kobo know what the fuck they’re doing if nothing else—but in terms of its actual story. I like this show best when it succeeds, but just as often, it lapses into Akasaka Aka bothsidesing some issue he clearly doesn’t understand very well, or gets caught in the muck of his addiction to wallowing in drama. (Often both at once.) Not to say “called it”, but I essentially knew this would happen, purely from Oshi no Ko‘s reputation as a manga that has a strong beginning and middle but a weak ending. Nothing gets a reputation that specific and that widespread without there being some kernel of truth to it. “No higher to climb” is specifically how I put it.
But, if I’m honest with myself, there are two things that make me want to be wrong about that assessment. One is simple contrarianism—you did remember that I’m the Wonder Egg Priority Defender, right? I love liking things that other people don’t. I never assume the role without a reason, but it’s one I like playing. Two is that when Oshi no Ko is good, it’s still very good. I think this episode is probably Oshi no Ko at its very best. It’s mostly about its best character, and it allows the show to actually explore its central ideas in an interesting way.
Last week’s episode saw Kana trying to schmooze with a director, Masanori Shima [Seiichiro Yamashita], to potentially be cast in one of his films. Shima, a young upstart who’s apparently responsible for some really good flicks, seemed nice enough at first, but once arriving at Shima’s home office, Kana found all of his staff gone for the evening. What followed was an awkward and uncomfortable scene of her being pretty ruthlessly hit on. Nothing Shima did crossed a clear line into violating consent, but this was one of those sickly situations where it’s clear that the power dynamics at play were influencing things in a way they really shouldn’t be. In finding a way out of this, Kana thought of Aqua, and tearfully explained that she has someone she already has feelings for.
This whole scene was, in of itself, a display of one of the obvious downsides of being an actress. The whole “casting couch” thing is a supremely gross mindset. Seeing someone in a position of power over an actress actually act on it is even more so. To his very limited credit, Shima backs off after Kana explicitly rejects his advances. But it’s still just all-around slimy, and despite the two parting on relatively okay terms, given everything, one can’t help but feel that Kana dodged a bullet. And however Kana herself may feel about it doesn’t end up mattering, because she happens to be spotted by a tabloid photographer while leaving Shima’s house. He snaps a few burst-shots of the two of them together and knows he has a scandal story in the making.
To be a little critical here, it feels like the show goes out of its way to exonerate Shima himself from any direct blame. A worse show would do this explicitly. Instead, he simply largely goes unmentioned while the episode places the blame on Mako Azami [Haruka Shiraishi], the girl who introduced Kana and Shima in the first place.
Now, it is true to life that scandals are often leaked from within a celebrity’s inner circle—this is even explicitly mentioned in this episode itself, albeit in a different context, because Oshi no Ko cares not for your subtlety—but a better show would just cut this entirely. It feels like a symptom of Akasaka Aka’s general tendency to try to complicate things for the sake of it, even when doing so doesn’t actually serve the narrative. It hardens into an overly-eager “no, you guys aren’t getting it, it’s not just the systems that are the problem! It’s the people in them!” that feels at times downright defensive. This trait is probably Oshi no Ko‘s biggest flaw in general, the kink in the armor that keeps holding it back. In its first season, Oshi no Ko really seemed like it wanted to turn the entertainment industry over and examine it rather than simply condemning it. That this tendency is present here—albeit only just so—in the show’s best episode in a season is thus a bit worrying. (And of course, if we circle back around to examining Shima’s role in all this at a later date, I’ll happily eat my words here, but I don’t think I’ll have to.)
Nonetheless, while this is all worth talking about, what I loved about this episode, and what makes it so great in spite of this flaw, was its study of Kana herself. Kana’s reaction to the specter of a probable scandal is one of profound panic. Confronted by the tabloid reporter, she freezes up in the face of his questions and eventually dashes off into the night in a fearful blur. Because episode director Uchinomiya Koki is a fucking pro, the show’s entire color palette changes moods along with her, trading in its usual bright and bold colors for a frozen world of grays, dark reds, and coffee-stain sepia browns.
When Kana’s panic is at its worst, she imagines the people she passes in the city crowd saying terrible things about her, the imagined slander clawing its way into her field of vision, like a blown-up, massive version of the tweet that ruined one of Ai’s days back in the very first episode of this series. It’s one of the best visual moments in a season that has hardly been short on those, and for that alone, this would be a great episode.
What’s really interesting, though, is how she eventually breaks herself out of this panic. Huddling by herself in the dark, Kana thinks that she should just quit. She thinks she wasn’t built to handle all this pressure. She cries about the mask she’s had to put on for the public her entire life, and somewhere in here she says something pretty heartbreaking: “Nobody wants the real Arima Kana.” Alone and frustrated, she cries for Aqua, who just so happens to be searching for her nearby. As a soft insert song kicks in, it briefly looks like Aqua might go to comfort her, which, just to lay it on the table, would’ve been super lame. The tension between Kana’s ambitions as an artist and her feelings for Aqua has been a central part of the character since the beginning, but it only works as a tension because Kana is so strong-willed. Having Aqua swoop in like an angel here would’ve robbed her of some of her agency and made her look weak.
Thankfully, this does not happen.
Crying out for Aqua causes her to pause, she’s shocked at her own neediness for someone who, at least from her point of view, isn’t actually interested in her like that. (Remember, Kana is not privy to Aqua’s inner thoughts like we are.) She chastises herself for playing the damsel in distress, and abruptly screams to the fucking sky that she’s not going to back down. She’s going to take the scandal, no matter how it breaks, on the chin, and she’s going to survive in the industry as she is. She—rightly!—reassures herself that she’s put up with this kind of thing since she was a preschooler. Something like this is not enough to stop her.
It’s absolutely fascinating that Kana seems to realize in real time that these things she’s always thought of as flaws about herself, her bitchy personality, her competitive streak, her lack of tolerance for the facades and handshaking of showbiz, her distance from the classical “pure and sweet-hearted” idol archetype, are actually why people like her. That’s definitely true out of universe, and in spite of her being a total professional, it’s hard to imagine that all this isn’t at least a little visible to her in-universe fans as well. You can’t really completely hide who you are, not wholly and not forever. It’s that old self-explaining magic trick maneuver Oshi no Ko really perfected last season, telling you exactly why you like this character right as it’s using that fondness to tug at your heartstrings. It’s brilliant stuff.
So, for the first time in a long time, Kana chooses herself. She’s will not bend or break, not for this. If I can be real here, I think this was also something I needed to hear as someone who’s long connected with the character. It’s really easy at times to dissociate from your own role in your life, to turn yourself into a damsel in distress or a completely helpless victim of circumstance. Sometimes people are victims, of course, but just as often, you really do have to rely on your own grit to get back out there, no matter what stands in your way. This is the kind of situation where Akasaka’s penchant for old school “just build up your confidence and do the damn thing”-type writing really shines. It helps that she handles things with a sense of humor, dryly realizing that this is going to lead to throngs of angry Twitter comments accusing her of being a slut who sleeps her way to the top and maybe worse. That’d be a hard thing for anyone to deal with, but Kana? Well, she puts it best.
The Doja Cat approach.
Taking the broader view, it’s interesting to contrast this development, how Kana frames it as something she’s doing to be true to herself, with the fate of Suzuhiro Mana. We briefly met her for the first and only time way, way back when Oshi no Ko was still a relatively new phenomenon, before it even had an anime. Back then, it seemed like Oshi no Ko would treat leaving the business, one way or another, as the only real possible “happy ending” for a life in the entertainment industry. That’s what Mana did, and that is what that little aside, buried next to the debut of the new B*Komachi, seemed to imply. This episode raises the possibility that just maybe, that isn’t the case. Maybe for a lucky and strong-willed few, the white hot light of fame doesn’t have to actually burn you to cinders. Of course, fire still hurts whether it kills you or not, but that’s just the cost of playing with it.
Then again, maybe even that much is just wishful thinking. Oshi no Ko is hardly the sort of story that would shy away from setting all this up only to pull it out from under the audience. It is totally possible that despite her confidence here, this scandal will destroy Kana’s career. I certainly hope it doesn’t, but it’s not off the table! If that happens, we’ll talk about it when the time comes. No matter how her story ends, I will be watching—and probably writing about—the saga of Arima Kana until it reaches its conclusion. She’s simply the best.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
“Brief” articles are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
I must apologize to anyone who clicked on this article in hopes of deciphering more of Fate/strange Fake‘s rather knotty plot. I am here to wax poetic about one thing and one thing only; I love how Enkidu moves in this episode. Depicting a character who is not quite human but who nonetheless has a human form is a challenge. The long, graceful movements Enki’s given here are one way of overcoming that obstacle. Convey their strength not through what they do, but what they don’t do, make everything look easy and you imply nothing is difficult. I also love Enkidu’s little dig at Gilgamesh here: they correctly note that, while Gilgamesh and Richard are both kings, and they even look similar, they couldn’t be more different. Most notably because Richard clearly has friends. Ouch!
And indeed, Richard the Lionheart is not just Gilgamesh’s opposite but Enkidu’s as well. An incorrigible King Arthur fanboy in life, his is the decidedly chuunibyou power to find his sacred sword absolutely anywhere. In imitation of another of the Knights of the Round—Lancelot, ironically enough for those of us who’ve seen Fate/Zero—a twig he plucks from the ground is more than enough. Swinging this stick, it becomes Excalibur. And of course, Excalibur—even in imitation—should burn everything with a blinding fire, even the very film itself, giving actual cause to the battle shonen visual trope of a purifying visual white-out that burns the lines of the animation to cinders.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, with only minor changes, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
Another strange and unsettling episode from an anime that is consistently very, very good at making those. Although, if you’re reading this here, this is actually the first time I’ve spoken about Shiboyugi on this site. (Damning of me, to be honest!) There’s a lot one could unpack here, but I really want to talk about the episode’s second half and its last few scenes.
The first time we hear a male voice in this entire show is when the game administrator pops up, grainy and hard to make out at first, on that pile of old TVs. This is another way in which I think Shiboyugi is excellent at taking what would be cliche in most other stories’ hands—the animal-headed admin is a tried and true trope of this genre—and turning it into something strange and capable of inducing genuine unease, a charge that this concept has otherwise lost due to simple overuse. He’s not a man wearing a wolf mask, nor even some kind of Live2D or CGI rig as I initially thought. No, he’s a puppet. Clearly filmed in live action, at that. It’s hard to explain precisely why this is so much weirder than any other option they could’ve gone with, but it makes the administrator seem otherworldly and cruelly remote. His voice actor matches that tone, going for a remote diction that nonetheless crackles with a barely-concealed sadistic malice. Malice we are forced to identify with, as fellow spectators of the game.
The final trial in this particular game is a simple vote. The girls are locked in little waiting rooms, told to vote for which one of them was the least useful along their journey, and that girl will be killed by releasing a chemical into her room. There’s a ton of tension that comes from simply how this sequence is framed; we mostly just see the girls in their little shacks, writing on paper as industrial fans spin behind them. There’s not really much sound here either, just the noise from the fans and some flecks of piano, but it’s legitimately stomach-turning despite that.
I think the specific choice of who they kill might strike some people as a bit of a cop-out, but it’s worth keeping Mishiro around now that she and Yuki have this incredible yuri murder rivalry going on.
Speaking of! The last scene of this episode is bizarre in a completely different way than the rest of the show, which is fascinating in its own right. For the first time, we see people who aren’t players of the games themselves—agents of whatever group is setting these up—and they look so…normal? A lot of them have the standard funky anime hair, of course. But other than that they just look like regular people. It’s disarming, to say the least. As is the J-Pop track that plays on Mishiro’s ride back home as she freaks the fuck out in the car, swearing revenge. It’s a very abrupt and drastic tonal shift from what we’ve seen so far, and I’m very interested to know how it’s going to feed back into the games going forward other than the obvious Mishiro v. Yuki rivalry itself. One possible way lies in the shot where we finally see what’s become of Chie. It’s just awful, she’s literally been reduced to nothing but fluff, like a plushie shredded to smithereens, and despite the frame-blending effect—often regarded as cheesy or distracting—seeing the sheer desperation with which her agent tries to put her back together is really effective. Terror like that is pretty universal.
I admit, though, part of me is the slightest bit nervous, because, to float just a small amount of criticism, in something like this that asks a lot of questions, giving too many answers too early often deflates the story’s promise. Still, I think we’re headed in a good direction here and I cannot wait to see whatever the hell will happen next week.
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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 manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, with only minor changes, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
One of my favorite things about this anime, which is used in a couple of different ways over the course of this episode, is Makio’s very authorial and writerly narration. She describes Asa’s empty apartment, which they visit in this episode, this way, and it really adds an ineffable something to the characterization as opposed to if we heard fewer of her thoughts. It gives the work a very “literary” quality, which makes sense both on an obvious level because Makio is an author, but also on a less obvious once, in that she seems to use this formal discursive register to separate herself a little bit from the events she and Asa are going through. It’s an interesting tension, and one I hope the series continues to explore as it goes on.
One way this forms a tension is in her statements to Asa, that Asa’s feelings about her parents’ passing are her own business alone. She’s said this a lot over the course of these three episodes, and while she clearly does believe it to some degree, she also doesn’t believe it so much that she doesn’t ask questions when Asa comes home from her first day back at school—the graduation ceremony, ironically—in tears, having even gotten lost on her way back. Asa presses her for asking about it, and—again, I think this is an interesting bit of tension—Makio says she shouldn’t put so much stock in what other people say
The entire episode of Asa going to school, only to learn that her friend Emiri has inadvertently let the entire class and faculty know about the tragedy she went through, and acting out at both Emiri and that faculty is an interesting one. We don’t really see Asa acting this emotive very often and she’s clearly very angry that everyone will only think of her as “that girl with the dead parents”, she says as much. (All the while the visuals transpose the characters into a surreal Maypole Dance setting.) Emiri and Asa were friends before this, but she spends most of the rest of the episode ignoring her and, on her way out the door, says she hates her.
We return to Makio attempting to figure out what exactly happened here, and when Asa throws the whole “no one’s business but your own” thing back in her face, that is when she tells Asa that she shouldn’t put so much stock in what other people say. Even more interestingly, this is immediately before talking about her own schoolday friend (Daigo Nana, who we met last week), and how Nana wrote her a letter on their last day of school together that meant the world to her. These pieces of subtle hypocrisy aren’t drawn a ton of attention to, other than Asa calling them out the one time, but they’re very interesting and paint Makio as a very complex character.
Again, I’m just really interested to know where else we’re going here. You could easily make the case that this is an outside candidate for the best thing airing right now, and given how stacked this season is, that’s really saying something.
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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 manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, with only minor changes, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
I’m glad we’re going all-in on the “conniving Ruby” plot here because I think at this point it’s surpassed the whole Aqua <–> Akane <–> Kana love triangle for me in terms of the various things this show can do that I’m personally interested in. She spends a lot of this episode trying to get close to Yoshizumi Shun [Takenaka Yuuto, in what appears to be his first role of any real note], an assistant director on the show she and Aqua both work on. Shun is the sort of industry everyman that Oshi no Ko really likes to spotlight so it can make you feel super, super bad for them. And the show does a great job of that here! Portraying Shun as someone really suffering under the thumb of his boss (a former bigshot who was hired here after some scandal or another) and having to constantly scramble to get the show airing on time.
The whole cosplayer interview bit he gets stuck with here seems truly humiliating for everyone involved, including the cosplayers themselves who include his own younger sister (who he has to pressure into participating). The reveal at the end of the episode that they don’t actually have permission to interview cosplayers who are identifiably dressed up as characters from super popular shonen-thing and frequent in-universe presence Tokyo Blade is very funny. Just have everyone change their costumes at the last minute! It’ll definitely be fine! This isn’t going to have hilarious knock-on consequences that will be surprisingly important down the line, I’m sure.
Maybe more important than the actual plot beats is the direction for Ruby’s character that Oshi no Ko really commits to here. She’s infamously been a bit of a secondary presence in a show where she’s nominally one of the protagonists, and at least so far, the third season seems to be really trying to change that. Admittedly, this involves making her more like Aqua in several ways—cunning, always trying to get her name out there, searching for the truth of her mother’s death—but honestly, while that may be true, “Aqua but a girl” is plenty interesting as a character concept on its own. (And it’s not like they’re strict clones of each other even now.) She’s also surprisingly funny, securing a role as the idiot of the cast in that variety show she’s on. As the show’s gotten darker these little sprinklings of humor have gotten a bit rarer, so it was nice to see some here.
I’m not entirely sure how much of the manga the series has left to cover. My impression is that most people dislike the ending, which has led to Akasaka Aka having something of a reputation as a guy who can start interesting stories but not finish them. (Although, honestly, I’ve always thought the Kaguya-sama ending was pretty good.) I am interested to find out whether that’s more warranted here or not, but in either case, I am at least still quite enjoying the ride.
I should also give a shout out to the absolutely devastating OP sequence that debuts with this episode. Not only is the song fantastic, maybe the best Oshi no Ko has ever had, but the visuals really just have to be seen to be believed.
Me when I have to get a broken heart painted on my back for the music video to symbolize the weight of the heartbreak I’m carrying because I’m a dramatic bitch and don’t do things normally.
I’m particularly fond of B*Komachi’s whole dance routine, the sequence that turns the late Ai into a very literal icon, and of course, all the shots of the huge black stars in Ruby’s eyes. Scary stuff!
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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 manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, with only minor changes, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
There’s a lot of stuff crammed in here. Overall, this is a great second episode for what is quietly shaping up to be one of the best anime in a very strong season.
I love Makio’s blonde friend Daigo Nana [Matsui Eriko], who we meet for the first time here. Asa seeing her and Makio interact gets us a lot of interesting thoughts from Asa herself, who finds the two’s interaction decidedly un-adult-like. There’s a particularly funny moment where, via smash cut, Asa compares Nana’s cackling laugh to the trumpeting of an elephant, just one of a number of really good scenes from Asa’s imagination throughout the episode. Nana’s whole bit of sharing a gyoza recipe with Asa is great too, and in general I hope to see a lot more of the character. Asa’s reaction to the meal itself is interesting as well, and points to the continued major role of food as an element of the series. She tries to remember her mom’s home cooking, but while she recalls liking it at the time, she can’t remember what she was actually served in them anymore. Pointing at, perhaps, more distance between Asa and her late mother than might have previously been safe to assume.
Then there’s Makio’s meetup with her ex, a man named Kasamachi Shingo [Suwabe Junichi doing his “hi, I’m Suwabe Junichi” voice]. I am trying quite hard to fight off my ambient misandry and not just assume the worst of Kasamachi right off the bat, but his conversation with Makio here doesn’t especially endear me to him. He feels the need to tell Makio that he was “hurt” by her decision to adopt Asa, which sure seems like making it about himself. (Him being a dedicated reader of Makio’s books also feels a little…I don’t know, off somehow. Not that I have a right to criticize as a 30-some woman who still watches shonen anime.)
Still, there’s a difference between a bad person and someone who’s just a bit thoughtless, and he strikes me more as the latter. He offers advice for getting Asa set up with insurance and such. I admit I was still a touch on-edge throughout that entire scene, though. Probably more to do with my own biases than anything else.
The best bit in the episode, however, comes in between these two major segments, and is actually probably this, a conversation between Asa and Makio where they try to be a bit more open with each other, right until the subject of Asa’s mom comes up. It’s a very impressive trick to get your audience this mad at a woman who’s literally dead with only a couple of lines, but Ikoku Nikki pulled it off.
When I was young, the stock line I always got hit with when I failed to do something my mother just assumed I’d be able to do easily was “I know you’re smart” said in a vaguely disapproving tone. I guess for Asa and, hell, Makio as well, it was that instead. Maybe that’s oversharing, but I find fiction like this to be good for helping to process complicated emotions that are difficult to speak about directly. For that, it’s one of my favorites so far of the young year.
Programming Note: I think posting episode writeups individually is the way I’ll be handling this going forward, even for shows like this one where I don’t actively plan to write about every single episode. These will be filed under the same archive as the “Let’s Watch” columns even though they’re a slightly different thing. I can’t imagine the subtle distinction matters to anyone but myself 😛
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
In keeping with the spirit of the show I’m covering, and in my ongoing quest to make my first impressions writeups less identical, here, presented in no particular order, is simply a list of things I liked about the premiere episode of Ikoku Nikki. (English-market title Journal with Witch, but, seemingly, almost no one calls it that.)
1: Its non-linear storytelling. We start with a flash-forward, only establishing the actual premise after the OP sequence plays. This allows us to meet our main characters, the recently-orphaned Takumi Asa [Mori Fuuko, in her first starring role], and her aunt, the eccentric Koudai Makio [Sawashiro Miyuki], on their own terms, before learning of the accident that deprived Asa of her parents and Makio taking her in.
2: Its use of limited, but bold visual techniques. In particular, with its frequent cuts to the desert Asa imagines as she attempts to write in her journal, it reminds me of the sometimes casually-hallucinatory bilocational direction of the recent mystery anime Shoshimin Series. Of course, the context is very different, but I grew very fond of the technique in that series, and I am happy to see a similar method used here to elicit different emotions. Asa calls this desert “loneliness”.
3: Makio herself, a decidedly disheveled woman of 35 (making her the increasingly-rare anime character older than me) who lives in an unkempt apartment with bits of paper scattered everywhere. She is characterized as shy and just generally a bit of a weirdo. To say I felt seen, as someone in my 30s who also makes a living (well, “a living”) off of writing as Makio appears to do, also fitting pretty much all of these descriptions, would be an understatement.
4: When Makio gives Asa the journal, we see its rows and rows of ruling lines slowly morph into the sand dunes of the desert. This sequence in of itself is incredible, especially for how little is actually involved in it, but it’s Makio’s advice to Asa on journal-writing that really sticks with me: you don’t have to write anything you don’t want to, write only what you want to in that moment, and what you write needn’t even necessarily be true.
5: In general, stemming from both of these prior points, both Makio and Asa have fairly understated characterization. I admit I often struggle with fiction like this, as someone with generally low emotional intelligence who is bad at observing people. (And of course, observation of real people generally informs the sort of gestural tics and other expressive signals that act as a tell in this sort of thing.) Even so, I welcome the challenge here. I think perhaps what’s objectively true of Makio is less important than what Asa thinks of Makio, as a life raft in a sea of indifference. I am interested in seeing the two of them grow together, and that, really, is the main reason I found this premiere so compelling.
6: Of course, the louder and more direct bits of characterization help. Makio’s loud declaration that despite hating her mother and not even being sure she’ll be able to properly love Asa, that she won’t let her just be passed around by her family, is the episode’s best scene.
7: The scene where Asa, in her lonely desert, discovers Makio walks it as well. Without directly saying anything, the series draws a line between these two people, their minds, and their lives. It is proven to Asa that she is not alone. This really ties the episode together for me, and I am absolutely fascinated to see where the series will go from here.
It is shaping up to be a very strong anime season. That’s a good thing, but a problem with that is that works that are somewhat less conventional, like Ikoku Nikki, risk being overrun by their flashier peers. I really hope that doesn’t happen, there’s a ton of potential here, and what is here already is very, very good.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
“Brief” articles are copied directly from my tumblr, and are shorter and more off-the-cuff than their full length counterparts.
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.
To be brief, my oft-mentioned-on-this-blog-friend Josh and I watched this premiere after having caught a few stray episodes of the original Samurai Troopers on PlutoTV several months ago. Essentially, we did this as a bit of a gag? We watch lots of premieres together every season and most of them aren’t fantastic. This though was a huge surprise, being one of the best premieres of anything I’ve seen in recent memory, full stop. It’s an absolutely cracking action anime with a simple but solid “sentai show but fucked up” premise with some really incredible animation to back up that action, in its best moments, it reminds me of, say, a prime-era Studio TRIGGER series, to make an admittedly pretty basic comparison. (Although the actual staff here are from Sunrise, and the project is being spearheaded by Fujita Yoruichi of “a bunch of Gintama stuff” fame. I’m not super familiar with Gintama, so I can’t speak on any possible resemblance there.) Visually, that is.
In terms of story I don’t entirely know what we’re doing yet. I mention the sentai thing, and that is about as far as I’ve gotten in terms of picking up what the show is putting down, narratively. It reminds me a bit of Go Go Loser Ranger in that least one of our protagonists is from the antagonistic faction, the so-called Ten Warriors. He spends this episode firmly in the bad guy corner, slaughtering civilians while humming 80s pop-rock, so god knows how we’re going to turn him into an antihero, but I’m very interested to see the show try.
Our hero, folks.
Our other protagonists mostly aren’t protagonists at all, as we’re introduced to a whole slew of rando, fake Samurai Troopers who actually all die toward the end of the episode except for the blue-haired, sweet but timid Musashi, who seems like he’ll be a bit of a Shinji-lite sort of figure.
And his, I dunno, future boyfriend?
More than anything, I’m just stunned that this is as good as it is. I’m also not entirely clear on its relation to the original Samurai Troopers, as it was apparently being billed as a reboot but it seems more like a distant sequel or something of that nature. The only real downside, I’d say, is that they throw a lot at you here to get you up to speed with the general premise, but even that is honestly pretty entertaining, and if (admittedly a big “if”) it keeps up this level of quality, I think it has a real shot at anime of the year status. I don’t like the term “hidden gem” but if you want to apply it to anything that’s airing this season, it’s probably this. I only sometimes actively recommend my readers check something out but I think if anything I’ve described sounds interesting to you, you should at least give it a shot to see if you click with it.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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