Your Anime Orbit: OSHI NO KO – Season 2, Episode 9

Yeah, I think this show has just fully lost me.

The problem with finally formally introducing our main villain last week is that it makes all the showbiz stuff feel deeply trivial. If that was on purpose, I’d respect it. Unfortunately, it is still portrayed with the same monumental importance it’s always had in this show. Now more than ever, even, now that the movie about Ai is getting off the ground.

Speaking of which, hoo boy.

At what point does something cross the line from tragedy into comedy? How ridiculous does it have to get? How contrived must the situation be? Aqua has some kind of Epic Revenge Plan we are not presently privy to the details of that relies on this movie being a big success. Hence his acting in it as one of the leads—this is probably also a weird pyschosexual thing but the show is weirdly shy about actually saying that—and hence caring so much about how well it does. This much makes sense, but the arc it is trying to set up is short on anything actually worth watching so far.

What this setup means instead is that we get to do the stage play arc from season two warmed over, but with a movie this time and with less visual panache despite the higher stakes. (This might be the first episode of Oshi no Ko that I would say kind of looks so-so overall, in fact. It’s not horrible or anything, but there’s a noticeable lack of dazzle compared to most of its episodes.) You’d be forgiven for forgetting this, but there was a time not that long ago when Hoshino Aqua did in fact care about acting as something other than a means to an end. The fact that he doesn’t anymore isn’t inherently a problem, but as with everything else in this season the real issue is in the execution. There’s something to be said for the pure, granite cynicism of essentially having your lead seem like he’s going to walk into an open grave, but it’s absolutely no fun to watch at all, and it isn’t really that compelling as drama, either. The Aqua I cared about is already dead, so I don’t much care if this guy lives or dies. He says it himself in this episode, he’s given up on living a happy life. Why should I care if he lives one or not?

^{God bless MEM-cho. She is one of}^{Oshi no Ko}^{‘s vanishingly few characters who might be called “a normal person,” and as such she is totally unequipped to handle Aqua’s whole mess, but at least she’s trying.}

Then there’s the whole blind acting contest thing that closes out the episode. Essentially, Frill—yes, more on that in a second—challenging Ruby and Akane to a pseudo-audition where they will vote among themselves for the best actress between them. In principle this is actually interesting, but in practice, it’s the same thing I’ve been saying about every problem I have with this season. It’s not that it’s bad on paper, it just isn’t handled well. Also, I don’t care how true to life it is, contriving the situation such that neither Akane nor Ruby have any idea what they’re actually auditioning for just makes the entire thing less interesting. I want to see Ruby torn the fuck apart by grappling with what she’s going to have to portray if she lands this role, and I want her to do it anyway. I’m sure we’ll get to that eventually but what point does holding off on it serve? Other than being yet another example of the show handling Ruby with kid gloves? (Because god forbid a girl be a tragic heroine while her brother is doing exactly the same thing.)

Right, it serves to reintroduce everyone’s favorite character, Shiranui Frill.

Yeah, you know, Frill. The living piece of trivia who was initially created solely to bridge this series and Love is War!, since she’s related to a character from that manga. That Frill. Are there a lot of Frill stans in the audience? Are the Frillnatics (presently my headcanon for what Frill’s stan army is called in-universe) popping for this? If you are out there and you are reading this, please reply to this post telling me why you like Frill. I’m genuinely curious. Before this episode she was barely a character at all, and hey, to her credit, she makes a solid showing here (it is never a bad idea to add more weirdos to the cast). But it all just seems like such cruft. The anime is apparently cutting quite a lot, and it still feels like it’s paced glacially and is just generally way too decompressed. I want some fucking urgency, man! There’s a killer on the loose! And frankly the contrivance just makes her look like a terrible person! Frill knows that Ruby is Ai’s daughter, surely? The idea that she’d not tip her off just for the sake of being professional strains credulity. Actors break the industry’s unspoken rules for much less in both real life and fiction all the fucking time. (It would be an entirely other matter if she was doing this on purpose in order to give herself an edge in the contest or to mess with Ruby for some other reason, but there’s no real indication that that’s the case.) All told it’s a surprisingly sloggish episode, despite there being, theoretically, quite a few things that happen here.

Also, the heavy-handed Ruby/Ai parallels are a bit much. But honestly if that was my only problem with this season we’d be doing alright. One thing they do genuinely have in common—a much bigger similarity than the contrived “they’re both liars” thing that the show keeps trying to set up—is that they’re dumbass goofballs. For example, we learn about a pair of video letters Ai had Gotanda hold on to (another contrived element), and when he asks her why have him do this, her response is this.

And back in the present, Ruby’s best guess as to what the audition will entail is…this whiteboard doodle.

(This is also something both of them have in common with Frill, who goes on a bizarre rant about her taxes and submits a comedy skit about the actual like from-the-fairytale Boy Who Cried Wolf as her audition, which includes her howling like a wolf. It’s one of the episode’s highlights.)

I’ve said this many times, but it’s so ridiculous to me that Akasaka Aka clearly wants to write Dark And Serious material, because he is so much better at simple comedy and relationship stuff. Kana is a bright spot in this episode when she shows up in its first third. She has a nice little exchange with Aqua and another with Ruby, and exits the episode early on with this line. I would not be surprised if she is the only major character who makes it out of Oshi no Ko with something resembling a happy ending. (Not inherently a better thing, but something Akasaka is far better at writing than whatever the fuck else he’s trying to do here.)

And honestly, that’s the main thing right? I didn’t hate this episode. It has its bright spots! But overall? In aggregate? It’s just a mess and a bore. I don’t respect what Oshi no Ko is doing anymore. Not because it shouldn’t try to have tragic elements or be serious, but because it is simply bad at both of those things.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.

Posted on March 9, 2026 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Brief Thoughts on: IKOKU NIKKI – Episode 10

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.

Posted on March 7, 2026March 7, 2026 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Your Anime Orbit: OSHI NO KO – Season 3, Episode 8

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 and really 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.

Posted on February 19, 2026February 19, 2026 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Your Anime Orbit: OSHI NO KO – Season 3, Episode 6

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.

Posted on February 7, 2026 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Brief Thoughts on: FATE/STRANGE FAKE – Episode 6

“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.

Posted on January 30, 2026January 30, 2026 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Brief Thoughts on: SHIBOYUGI: PLAYING DEATH GAMES TO PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE – Episode 4

“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.

Posted on January 22, 2026 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Brief Thoughts on: IKOKU NIKKI – Episode 3

“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.

Posted on March 29, 2025March 29, 2025 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Reviews

AVE MUJICA at the Edge of the World

This article contains spoilers for the reviewed material, and assumes familiarity with it.

Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.

This is going to be a mess, so let’s start it with a question, so we at least have something to work off of.

Is a tragedy deferred a happy ending? Ave Mujica is at least willing to entertain the idea, but it’s never a clear-cut thing. Nothing about Ave Mujica is clear-cut, and the thinkpieces that will roll out over the coming weeks and months about this series might obscure how much of a rollercoaster ride it was, week to week, start to finish, in the moment. They might also obscure how wild it will keep being, as we now know—we’ll get back to this—that this isn’t the end.

To trot out the neatest and tidiest labels possible for a show that is the neither of those things, Ave Mujica is a series that deals with, among other topics; familial violence, how generational wealth drains the humanity from those that hold it, a number of different expressions of trauma and self-loathing, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and incest. All of this from a series that—despite some misguided English marketing trying to downplay this fact—is part of the BanG Dream! franchise. It, thus, is also still an anime about guitar music, at heart, a cousin of other recent genre entries like Girls Band Cry and Bocchi the Rock! (not to mention the other entries in its own series), in that it does still very much deal with a group of young girls using that music to process their traumas. The methodology is very different, and if Ave Mujica is the best of these (and I’d be willing to say that it is, even if the competition is very close), it’s not because its approach is inherently “just better”, or because more serious subject matter automatically leads to better content, but rather because it’s a logical outgrowth of what this genre was already doing. People will make their little jokes, of course: you can call it the dollposting anime, Perfect Blue for zoomers, etc. But none of these really capture Ave Mujica‘s fundamental observations and themes, and none of them can dent a show that’s this bulletproof.

All this to say, the walk from the earliest days of the BanG Dream! project to here is less extreme than it might appear at first glance. Poppin’ Party never went through most of this stuff, that’s true, but they’d absolutely be willing to throw horns at one of Ave Mujica’s concerts. The music, even when it’s not actively being heard—and it’s not heard for long stretches of this series—is both a connective tissue and a useful metaphor. If you can’t say something, maybe you can sing it.

That was the main thesis, too, of Ave Mujica‘s immediate predecessor and sister series, It’s MyGO!!!!!, effectively the first season of what becomes a two-parter here. AveMuji puts that theory to the toughest stress tests it can think of, and for a while, it seems like it might break under them. Consider that this is a band anime, and then recall that there is a gap from episode 2 to episode 7—almost half the season!—where there are absolutely zero in-show performances. Consider that this seemed at the time, given everything else going on in the narrative, more like a disband anime, an argument that Ave Mujica the group were not a good thing for anyone involved and maybe they’d all be better off apart.

It’s tempting to run through the absolute basics one more time. High school girl and neurodivergent icon Takamatsu Tomori [Youmiya Hina], and her first real friend Togawa Sakiko [Takao Kanon] form a band. This band, CRYCHIC, collapses not long after their first concert for a plethora of interpersonal reasons that are not really anyone’s fault in particular. It’s MyGO!!!!!, the first season of this show, focused on Tomori healing from this fallout with the help of both some of her old CRYCHIC bandmates and new friends alike. That group formed MyGO, title band of that season, pledging to build the rest of their lives, moment by moment, together as a band and as friends. So far, so girl band.

Ave Mujica—both the band and the show—run in the opposite direction, Sakiko attempts to put on a cold, merciless persona, and gathers a band based not on shared experiences or even particularly liking each other, but by a cynical rundown of what each member can add to the group. Sakiko’s childhood friend Mutsumi [Watase Yuzuki], another former CRYCHIC member, is added because of her guitar skills and her famous parents. Nyamu [Yonezawa Akane], the band’s drummer, is recruited as much for her looks and the flashiness of her ambidexterity as her actual chops, etc. If you’re reading this, you know all this already, so I won’t get too much farther into the nitty-gritty.

The result of all this? Probably the most seismic anime event of the 2020s thusfar. If not that, at least one that has exerted a deep and powerful pull on a certain kind of person. If you’re active on certain corners of tumblr or BlueSky you already know who I’m talking about. If not, we’ll just say: queer, gender-nonconformant, neurodivergent sorts. Which is a more formal and less fun way to say: the girlies. Ave Mujica takes the already intense emotional palette of MyGO and freezes it solid, erecting gothic cathedrals around the sharp, jagged pieces of pain and trauma that inform who we are, with a particular focus on the inherent violence of the family unit. Do you have bad parents? Mutsumi has the worst parent, a controlling, cruel stage mom who sees her daughter as competition instead of family. Furthermore, she’s plural, hosting, among others, a rambunctious protector alter who adopts the name Mortis from her stage name. From what we see, her mother treats this as a frightening burden, a sadly true-to-life read on how many singlet parents treat their plural children.

Uika [Sasaki Rico], the band’s singer, might be even worse off, the daughter of an illicit relationship between Sakiko’s grandfather and a house servant who has lived much of her life isolated from society. If this all seems rather melodramatic, I can only reiterate that that’s exactly the point, and anyone who writes the show—and honestly, much of this genre—off on those grounds is missing the most interesting artistic movement in the medium to happen this decade. More specifically, that heightened, arch theatricality has been present in the Ave Mujica project since we first knew it existed. This is a group of girls who were introduced to us as masked dolls, and who here leave us again as knights of a forgotten god. It feels a little ridiculous to criticize the series for a lack of “realism,” whether we’re referring to its literal events or its emotional palette. (And anyone who calls Nyamu and Umiri’s problems minor, even by comparison, is missing the very fact that by show’s end they’ve still willingly thrown their lot in with everyone else in the band.)

That tense, coiled sense of façade is also why it hits so hard when, in its very last episode, Ave Mujica finally lets all of that tension out. No one would walk away from this series thinking everything is neatly solved, but the finale is more concert than anime episode: 5 songs, two from MyGO, three from AveMuji themselves, all fantastic, and importantly, both bands are clearly having a blast. MyGO have the simpler story, but their sound has genuinely developed in some interesting directions, and centering a new song around Tomori’s jumbled, Jenga Tower-block poetry is never going to be a bad call.

Ave Mujica, meanwhile, have somehow gone stadium-level yet again (the episode’s lack of a traditional narrative leaves us in the dark about how that happened. Season three material, most likely). Their doll motifs replaced with a warped Round Table-style knightly mythos, Uika-Doloris as an amnesiac who finds herself returning to the embrace of Oblivionis, god of forgetfulness, over and over. Sakiko literally portraying herself as a deity within the world of the scripts is sure to have ramifications going forward as a plot point, but, consider that outside of the series itself, it also easily cements her as one of the most interesting and iconic characters of her generation. It has been way, way too long since we had someone to add to the Anime Girl Pantheon, and if Sakiko needs to actively force herself up alongside older legends like Lain, Haruhi, and Madoka, that’s all the better. It fits.

(Also, let’s just be honest here. Sakiko’s god complex is probably not great for her, mental health-wise, but if it’s making her write stuff like this, well, at some point you can’t argue with the music.)

As for the literalities of the last story arc, episodes eleven, twelve, and so on, it seems impossible that this won’t all fall down around them someday, possibly even someday soon.

So again, to ask the question, can tragedy deferred really be considered a happy ending? Even a bittersweet one?

Maybe we should reframe that, and turn it back on ourselves; can you be happy, knowing you will one day die? If Ave Mujica are a fleeting dream, that’s at least partly because everything is a fleeting dream. Any comparison between MyGO‘s “a series of moments adds up to a lifetime” and Ave Mujica‘s embrace of an illusory eternity needs to understand that, despite the obvious differences between these groups of people, these are fundamentally two ways to say the same thing. Something lasts forever until it doesn’t. You take things day by day, and one day is eventually the last one. (I don’t have much to say about this series, as I’ve made clear from how I’m framing this article, but I am a little surprised how rarely I’ve seen discussion of death in relation with Ave Mujica; Sakiko’s late mother is a shadow who looms over much of the series, and there is a broad implication that Uika’s sister, the actual Uika, is no longer with us either.)

I have spoken before in my work about hating the term “messy” and how it’s often used to paper over the flaws in works that a certain stripe of critic, myself very much included, like. Something is messy if it induces strong emotion but has some kind of missed shot or some kind of frustrating loose end. To that, I refuse to apply the term to Ave Mujica, even though I’m sure many other people will. Every time I had a doubt about this show, it proved me wrong. Mortis disappearing for much of the show’s final act? She shows up in the finale to wink at the mirror and reassure us she’s fine. Umiri “not getting” a proper character arc? Her tragic backstory is presented in a funny way, sure, but it’s as legitimate a reason for trauma as anything else, this stuff isn’t a competition. Not enough songs? The last episode has fucking five of them. The fact that Hatsune is down awful for her niece? That makes their relationship more interesting, and sure, more troubling. I won’t entertain any suggestion otherwise. You can’t catch Ave Mujica off guard.

Even if you could, the curious thing about something as arresting as Ave Mujica is that after a while one’s emotional attachment stops being to the work itself so much and more the general orbit of it. The characters make such an impression on screen that they will live in our hearts forever. There is also the actual band, of course, who are fantastic, and a small spiderweb of ancillary media that enhances and sharpens the show in a number of interesting ways. None of this softens the point that the show itself is excellent, of course, one of the best I’ve ever seen, but it is worth keeping in mind.

And if you don’t agree….well honestly that’s fine? Why is talking about anime expected to be didactic like this anyway?

Isn’t all of this sort of silly? Another thing Ave Mujica has made me realize is that, despite the fact that I enjoy writing about anime, I also kind of hate doing it. (A love-hate relationship that I am all too aware is ironically somewhat reflective of what I’m reviewing.) Not because I’ve lost any love of prose or any love of analyzing fiction, but because there is this constant unending pressure to be correct about everything. (Or at least, I feel that there is. Maybe this feeling says more about me than it does anything else.) I had an inkling of this back when I reviewed Wonder Egg Priority years ago, which is why the two are somewhat connected in my mind even though the reception to AveMuji has been much more positive overall. Most of my really fulfilling engagement with Ave Mujica has not stemmed from my collective efforts of reviewing it. (Longtime readers will probably remember that we are a system ourselves, and if you didn’t know, well, surprise.) I—Ediva—have gotten much more out of talking about it with others, making of it a living discourse as opposed to a series of endlessly prolix pages where I try to prove that my opinion is the right one, man!, than almost anything else I’ve ever seen. I, Opal, have written fucking fanfiction for this series, weird and outlandish fanfiction—fanfiction I would never in a million years link here, mind you!—that has made me feel so much more connected to its world and its characters than laying them down on a table to cut them open ever could. And I, Ollie, have simply reveled in the fact that I got to feel seen. It’s very rare for popular fiction to touch on systems. I am not going to quit writing about anime—this is not my version of Brent DiCrescenzo’s To the 5 Boroughs review—but Ave Mujica has once again made me reevaluate how I really think about this stuff. How I feel about this stuff. In a way, that’s a higher compliment than anything I could actually say about it could ever be. Here’s something that sounds like a joke but isn’t: in the previews for one of the later episodes, 10 I want to say, Sakiko was shown reading Hermann Hesse’s Demian. We decided to read it too—why not, right?—and loved it. Some shows are bigger than just what’s on the screen.

None of me are saying that any of this makes analysis of the series wrong. But it does, increasingly, feel wrong for us. This is a world to be lived in, an atmosphere to be breathed, and a dream to set drift upon. I can’t pin the butterfly to the board like that. If you can, I’m not going to tell you you’re doing something wrong, but it’s not the right fit for how we feel about this show. Hence this instead of a “proper” review. Hence leaving it all up in the air.

That’s a temporary solution, but this, too, is the beautiful paradox of Ave Mujica: we can stay asleep in this dream forever—Until we wake up.

Posted on May 13, 2024May 13, 2024 in Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [5/13/24]

Hello anime fans, it’s another light week here on Magic Planet Anime as I fight against the raging tide of getting sucked into playing Hades II all day every day. Anyhow, here’s what I do have to report on this week. Enjoy!

Anime

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 19

We’ve got a split episode this time. Firstly dealing with Izutsumi joining the party.

I have to say, I think somebody on the staff is a bit thirsty for her. I can’t precisely explain why I think that but it has something to do with how her face is drawn compared to how it’s drawn in the manga, or even in scenes after this opening one.

The directing in the first half of this episode is otherwise actually a bit dry, but the second more than makes up for it.

The decision to render Marcille’s nightmare in black and white is bold. I don’t think many other studios would’ve even tried it, but it pays dividends here. Not just because it enhances the alternating terror and, yes, comedy of the nightmare. (Do keep in mind that against the backdrop of Marcille running from a monster symbolic of her fear of death we also have Laios Being Laios. Poor guy.) The moment where she retrieves the book from the monster, and it’s a golden yellow in contrast to the black and white dream is just absolutely brilliant. I love it.

Also, the Falin doll is really, really cute.

GO! GO! Loser Ranger! – Episode 4

God Suzukiri is so good here. Anyway!

The transition to Red just laying into the guy mouthing off to him is very sudden and I think it’s effective in how out of nowhere it is. This is the first time we really see unambiguously that the Rangers are deeply corrupt.

Thus begins Loser Ranger‘s flirtation with political metaphor. It’s, uh, a lot. The Invaders are genuinely a threat here; we see so in Hibiki’s flashback as their general murders his whole family. Yet, he clearly bears individual invaders like Footsoldier D no ill will.

What is the show trying to say by this being the case? Hard to say. This is very slight manga spoilers, but the series’ worldview eventually develops into what I’d call nuanced (although not without problems), but it takes a while to get there.

In any case, the fights remain tricky and full of surprising little twists and turns, and by episode’s end we’ve got D and Hibiki set up as our Lelouch and Suzaku (so to speak) respectively. Fun times all around.

Girls Band Cry – Episode 4

The fact that Momoka’s high school band photo is 2D and is thus literally a window into a prior era of the girls band genre is pretty great. I wonder how intentional that is.

We here meet the stern aristocratic grandma. Who is also a minor himejoshi, if her choice for the improv scene that she makes the girls act out is any indication.

Said scene is genuinely so intense with the secondhand embarrassment that I had to mute the audio on the first bit. The second half where it turns into Nina just putting Subaru on blast is brilliant though. (Also, hm, comparing being in a band to dating. Interesting angle for a show airing in The Yuri Season to take.)

There’s something about the visual of an anime girl saying she doesn’t like acting “because it’s embarrassing” and calmly turning off the TV behind her. Interesting stuff.

I was repeatedly warned by people that this episode has a “weird resolution.” I don’t really agree, Subaru clearly is more conflicted on her split loyalties than she’s actually letting on, and the final scene is Nina realizing that. I will grant that it’s an unusual emotional expression to hitch an entire episode on, but it’s far from the strangest I’ve ever seen.

Also, Nina being a serial meddler is going to come back to bite her at some point. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like SobsPlease have gotten to episode 5 yet. If they still haven’t fairly soon I might try out the other group fansubbing this. It would be a shame though, I really like SobsPlease’s work thus far.

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 5

This adaptation reminds absolutely confounding.

In what I assume is some attempt to get around broadcast standards, the bath scene that should chronologically have been in the last episode has been split up in two, and the longer half has been wedged in here. It takes up a good half of the episode, isn’t titillating, and is only “comedic” in a very technical sense.

What survives the transition are little character moments; Oto’s friend getting annoyed that she can’t peep on the girls undressing, Oto herself being wooed by snacks into visiting the teacher’s apartment and later leaving some of those snacks at the altar of her late grandmother, etc.

In the episode’s last third, Oto is scared awake by haunting knocking and disembodied footsteps in the rain, creating a tension that is completely shattered the second that a new character is introduced by rushing at Oto, sans context.

There’s some other stuff in here. But for the most part, Mysterious Disappearances is so far mostly an example of the truism that horror anime are never anywhere near as good as horror manga. The original manga is trashy but fun. The anime has been mostly a series of puzzling decisions that dull the manga’s strong points and create new weaknesses. There’s still time for it to recover, of course, but this weak opening half is going to make it a hard sell to anyone who’s not already a pretty big fan.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 6

Is your favorite girl band anime this season Girls Band Cry or Jellyfish? If you’re undecided, can I interest you in a dark horse candidate?

Salad Bowl is thankfully back on track this week, and quite honestly this episode is a complete odyssey, more than making up for last week. I’m never going to claim that an obsessive lesbian cult leader like Noa is good rep, exactly, but in The Yuri Season it’s as on-tone as anything else. The sugar mama arrangement that Livia stumbles into with Noa is pretty fantastic, whether it’s in the realm of taking her clothes off so Noa can 3D scan her and make dolls of her or convincing Noa, who is also a bedroom musician, to join Puriketsu’s faltering band.

This episode is the best of Salad Bowl as a series and as a concept. Pure uncut zaniness, no chaser.

As a side note, this is really the first time I’ve bought into Livia being hot. Maybe it’s the sharper visuals here than in prior episodes, maybe she just looks good with a guitar. You decide!

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 49

Dot episodes are always fun, and I’m a sucker for anything that even remotely touches on the performer / performance dichotomy, as this episode does with the dichotomy between Dot and Nidothing. So this episode was just an all-around hit with me. Also it’s a 2-parter! Cool!

That’s it for this week. Please bask in the glory of this week’s bonus thought before you go.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on February 15, 2024 in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: No, Seriously, What The Hell is Going on in ISHURA?

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

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

Bad anime are fascinating things.

I would argue that there are two pretty distinct types of bad anime. There are anime that are trashy—which have an open disregard for artistic aims beyond “be cool”, a mentality that can lead to shows that are the anime equivalent of empty calories—and there are anime that are boring, which may aim to be Serious Art but profoundly fail at it. ISHURA, an isekai battle royale political intrigue fantasy thing that aired its seventh episode this week, asks; need this be a dichotomy at all? What if, for example, it was possible to be both trashy and sometimes fun, but also tedious and dull? Not at the same time, obviously, but in alteration?

We’ll get into the specifics of that, but in a lot of ways, my main thought about ISHURA, a show I would say I have decidedly mixed feelings on, is just that it is an extremely ’20s anime. Ten years ago, it was not entirely clear how vast the endless appetite for isekai light novel adaptations truly was, so I can’t see it getting made then. Ten years from now, I imagine this market—maybe the entire industry—will have collapsed. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s just my call on things. ISHURA‘s defenders, however, of which there are a surprising amount, will point to a few merits that make them hold the show in more regard than your run-of-the-mill narou-kei adaptation, and argue these are reasons that ISHURA not only got an adaptation, but deserved to get one. Let’s run those down.

1: the action scenes – ISHURA has, in the rare occasion it’s actually gone full-tilt with them, admittedly had some cool fights. These are, though, uniformly sloppy despite the surface-level wow factor. The direction is there, but it struggles against wonky CGI and inconsistent animation quality. In the most recent episode there was a moment where there was very visibly and obviously a cut missing. If I, a random viewer with no formal animation training whatsoever, can notice that kind of thing, there are issues with your pipeline. In spite of these imperfections, I’ll concede that these are easily the show’s best moments, because they’re fun in spite of all that.

2: the worldbuilding – Frankly, I understand this argument the least. ISHURA‘s plot is a confusing, dull tangle of lore dumps, proper nouns, fantasy geopolitics (complete with our old friend, Ye Olde Fantasy Racisme, although it’s not as major a factor here as it is in many competing isekai), and silly character names that I am not going to do the show the favor of trying to summarize here. The world they take place in is an obvious step up from the infinitely-xeroxed settings of many fantasy isekai, but there is a difference between worldbuilding being interesting and there simply being a lot of it, and I place ISHURA firmly in the latter category, despite a few cool details like the presence of a faction of talking wyverns. I will admit the magic system seems neat, but it’s not interesting enough to devote most of an episode to explaining it at length, which ISHURA of course, does. That particular expository scene takes place in a hot spring, which takes us to our third point.

3: the babes – Many people probably think of themselves as being above watching something because it has attractive women in it. I am not “many people,” and, from what I gather, neither are most ISHURA fans. That said, with one exception, I don’t find ISHURA‘s cast to be a standout in this regard. (Which is kind of weird, because the studio behind this series are longtime ecchi peddlers Studio Passione.) None of the men really do it for me either, sadly.

Let’s talk about that exception, though, because she’s indicative of both ISHURA‘s obvious weaknesses and, conversely, its strengths. I think by looking at her, we see the show itself in microcosm.

This is Nihilo [Rie Takahashi]. Full name Nihilo the Vertical Stampede (no relation to Vash). She has short purple hair, a smug streak a mile wide, and has wires that look like old iPod earbud cords coming out of her back. I think she’s basically the perfect woman and I love her more than every other character in this show put together.

_{I felt the need to include two screenshots because the first one is so dark that it’s honestly kind of hard to see her. I’m not sure why anime have started taking lighting cues from}_{Game of Thrones}_{, but I hate it.}

I will not sit here and pretend that Nihilo is a terribly well-written character. She has an easy to understand motivation (she wants to be treated like a person instead of a living weapon, to very much boil it down), which is nice, but we’re not exactly breaking new ground there, and this is the case for most of the show’s characters. What’s more important than all that is that in the most recent episode, she climbs, naked, into a giant spider mecha that somewhat inexplicably has its own name and title. As she did this, and as she sped off cackling about how she felt free and had her “body” back, it occurred to me that maybe I was just watching ISHURA in the wrong way.

This isn’t a get-out-of-jail free card, to be clear. Episodes 3, 4, 5, and 6—a good chunk of the show—are mostly just unforgivably dull. But, there is a certain “smacking action figures together” appeal to the show’s stronger moments, particularly when any of the shuras (as its various Powered Individuals are called) fight each other. Perhaps that’s all you’re really supposed to get out of ISHURA. Pick a favorite character—or a couple favorite characters, I’m also partial to the in-way-over-his-head, wyvern hating general Harghent [Akio Ootsuka] and the skeletal Shalk [Kouichi Yamadera], who also has a nice turn in this episode as he fights the show’s alleged protagonist—cheer when they’re onscreen, and sit through the rest of the show while just barely paying attention.

That’s not really an endorsement on its own, and I would still describe ISHURA as easily the least essential of the anime I’m watching this season. Plus, if it ever slows down so much that we get back to episodes 3-6 levels of tedium, I will be very sad. But episode 7 is at least, you know, fun? Fun is worth something. The show’s massive ensemble cast also makes it so that you never really know quite what you’re getting with each subsequent episode, and I do get why that appeals to people in a landscape where every isekai feels interchangeable.

ISHURA‘s appeal is, in many ways, the appeal of seasonal anime in general; you really never do know for sure what you’re going to get! Sometimes you get excellent adaptations of great source material (Delicious in Dungeon, Sengoku Youko), solid genre work (The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic), fun surprises (Brave Bang Bravern!, Bucchigiri?!), or things that are just totally inscrutable (Metallic Rouge). And, sometimes, you get one of these. If I had to compare ISHURA to anything, it would be Big Order, another light novel adaptation, and one that has found cult “so bad it’s good” status in the near decade since it aired. I’m not sure if ISHURA is committed to the bit enough that it could ever get there, but it seems to be making a run for it.

And yet, at the same time, I’m left wondering if that’s really enough to make up for its many obvious deficiencies.

From its instantly-polarizing opening episode, wherein ostensible female lead Yuno [Reina Ueda, in one of the weirdest miscasts in recent memory] sees her girlfriend brutally murdered in front of her by giant, hulking magitek robots, I knew I would have complicated feelings on ISHURA. I’ve wanted to like it in spite of that, because I think people are often too hard on stories that open on a down note. But it’s become clear that ISHURA is really just interested in shock value and spectacle. That first episode really is quite visually impressive, and the most recent follows suit.

Those are fine things to aim for, but is it really so much to ask that the series have decent pacing and just a little more thought put into it, in addition to that? I’m content to classify ISHURA as a guilty sometimes-pleasure, but it would really be nice if it could be more than that. That it’s not just makes me wonder about what could’ve been.

The Magic Planet

Category: Anime Orbit Weekly