Category: Let’s Watch

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Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 9 – “I Love You”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Milo isn’t actually dead. Are you surprised?

I, for one, wasn’t. Not that much, at least. As much as I mentioned last week that Sabikui Bisco actually killing off its lead would be a disaster, it bringing him back from the brink also feels more than a little hollow. Not the least of which is–you do heed the spoiler warnings at the tops of these articles, right?–that our other lead dies here, seemingly in a fashion that is a lot harder to write your way out of.

But we’ll get to all that. “I Love You” is actually, for the most part, a pretty good episode. Mostly because it plays to Sabikui Bisco‘s strengths–action sequences, weird worldbuilding, snappy dialogue, and colorful characters clashing with each other–but that central, ephemeral lack of a certain “something” is a problem. It’s been a minor one throughout the series, and although this is the best episode in a while, it’s also an episode that demonstrates why that’s so.

We open with Bisco nursing Milo back to health, in a scene that should be genuinely touching but mostly comes across as just sort of stupid. Here the two of you are, bonding over your blood brotherhood or your mutual homosexual tension or whatever this all is, and Milo says this.

It’s not an entirely serious offer and neither is the banter that follows, but the fact remains that this is a hilariously dumb thing to say in this situation. And look, I love Pawoo–I wouldn’t say she’s well-written, but that’s another matter–but why is the show pushing this as a thing? Even as an outside option? Pawoo and Bisco have negative chemistry. Unless I’m just forgetting something, they’ve interacted three times in the entire show. It’s only barely believable if it were simply that Bisco has a one-sided crush on Pawoo. It being mutual is just nuts.

And maybe it comes off like I’m nitpicking a minor exchange of dialogue that isn’t really supposed to be all that serious. Indeed, the show follows all that up with this exchange, which is genuinely very funny.

Ladies love a femboy with advanced medical knowledge.

But this problem of a tone that is simply fundamentally “off” remains an issue throughout the episode, even in its strongest moments.

It is worth giving those moments their due, though. Most of the episode revolves around Kurokawa revealing his insidious evil plan and being duly punished for it. Spoiler alert: he meets his end here, but not before getting in some very over-the-top villainous gloating. This is a space that Sabikui Bisco can work in.

His plan, as he explains to a captive Jabi, is both simple in concept and hilariously stupid in execution. The natural Rust Wind doesn’t make quite enough people sick to keep his profits up, you see. His solution? Harvest the reactor unit inside one of the giant superweapons that blew Japan up in the first place–a Tetsujin, they’re called–and stick it in a bioengineered pink elephant. Have the elephant–sorry, the Ganesha Cannon–fire it wherever he wants, and let nature take its course by blowing the Rust Wind fallout all over the Japanese countryside.

Jabi also gets some incredibly raw dialogue in this scene, most notably when Kurokawa orders one of his henchmen to cut off his fingers so he can’t draw a bow anymore.

He doesn’t get the chance to show any of this off in-episode, because Bisco–who has been masquerading as one of said bodyguards throughout this entire sequence–sets to take him down once and for all.

This, too, is a space Sabikui Bisco can comfortably work in. The fights here are pretty great; we’ve got Kurokawa and Bisco themselves, fighting with both their lives on the line as the former has a total mental breakdown at his plans coming undone. Outside the facility they’re all in, we also get a quick cameo from Pawoo as she helps Jabi pummel a giant cyborg gorilla (?!) into submission, in what is somewhat-inexplicably probably the best-animated scene in the entire series thusfar.

It’s dope as hell so I’m not really complaining, just, what?

And when Bisco finally does take down Kurokawa, it’s incredibly satisfying. He even throws Kurokawa’s whole “evil badass who loves vintage pop culture” shtick back in his face as he dies. Which, by the way, happens when Bisco tackles him into an open pit of lava.

The whole thing is viscerally satisfying…except for the fact that Bisco dies, too. Shot dead by Milo, at his own request, since he’d rather have had his closest friend take his life than drown in the sea of molten Rust.

This, really, feels like it should be very affecting, but it’s here that we run headlong into the series’ shortcomings again. No matter how hard it tries, Sabikui Bisco just can’t pull off these huge emotional beats. When Milo takes Bisco out by sniping him, and declares that he loves him1, this should be a massive, intense moment. For me at least, it felt completely flat. Maybe even a bit unintentionally comedic. The longwinded speeches Bisco and Milo trade about how Bisco will always be with Milo and so on just land with a thud. It doesn’t work.

Why doesn’t it work? Maybe it’s because of all the show’s undercutting of its own central relationship. I’ve never really been clear on what Bisco and Milo actually mean to each other. They’re clearly close, but there are many, many different kinds of “close.” Are they close friends? Blood brothers? Gay for each other? Does Bisco consider Milo a sort of surrogate son, as one line in this episode suggests? Maybe all of these things, to some degree? It’s never really clear. I think part of this may be an issue of the compression of pacing inherent to anime adaptions, but there must have been a way to handle this in a fashion that made more sense.

I did see a few people around various social media haunts suggest that perhaps Milo loves Bisco in a romantic way but thinks Bisco is straight. Thus, half-jokingly trying to set Bisco up with his sister is a coping mechanism / something of an attempt to keep Bisco in his life. If this is true, I would say that Sabikui Bisco is simply not the sort of series that can sustain a relationship dynamic that complex. None of the fine shades of character detailing that would require are apparent in the text of the series. As such, Milo and Bisco’s relationship is pleasant, and they’re fun together, but defining it in any more certain terms is difficult because none of these pieces really fit together.

As for the actual final plot beat here, are Kurokawa and Bisco themselves actually dead? Probably, but it’s hard to put a definitive “yes” there, given that the series has proven willing to pull characters back to life. Still, it’d be one hell of a writing challenge to come up with a way for one or both of those characters to escape burning alive in a lava pit. That’s pretty definitively fatal.

There is of course, only one way to find out. Until next week, anime fans.

1: It’s worth noting that I believe the specific word here (aishiteru) usually has romantic connotations, but I may be mistaken.

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

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

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Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 8 – “Fiendish Trap”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

There is a tendency in the action shonen genre, which I will charitably call “unfortunate,” where a female character who’s been previously shown to be a competent, strong combatant will be reduced to a damsel in distress role when the story’s stakes need to be raised. “Fiendish Trap”, the eighth episode of Sabikui Bisco, spends most of its opening few minutes showing Pawoo–a woman that other characters in-show have previously compared to an oni in terms of raw strength, and who was shown to be a more or less even match for our redheaded lead back in episode two–being tortured by Governor Kurokawa, the series’ Big Bad Evil Villain with No Morals. He has her chained up to a wall in some dank, gross-looking cell, and prods her in the gut with a hot iron. The show mercifully cuts back to Milo’s own reactions to all of this (this is apparently what we weren’t directly shown in the TV broadcast last week) before showing us much else, but the audio isn’t really any better.

This is all, suffice it to say, pretty stupid and gross. But if it were just stupid and gross, we could chalk it up as a flaw the series has. A pretty major one, to be certain, but a flaw nonetheless. Unfortunately, what the rest of the episode makes clear is that this is not something that Sabikui Bisco is pulling out in an attempt to shock viewers. It’s doing this because it has no better ideas, which may or may not be “worse,” but certainly bodes very badly for the remainder of the show.

The episode’s actual events are garden variety shonen hostage situation nonsense and are frankly not worth recapping in detail. Milo crashes Kurokawa’s HQ to rescue Pawoo and Jabi. There is a tense standoff; bows, arrows, and muscle-controlling mushrooms(!) are involved. None of it is terribly interesting despite the competent direction. When it looks like Milo’s going to bite it, surprise, Bisco bursts in to rescue him. And when Kurokawa eventually puts Bisco on the ropes, Jabi, who gets the episode’s best scene as we’re shown him breaking out of prison, bursts in to rescue him.

The net result of all this is that Kurokawa manages to get the secret to making the Rust-Eater work out of Milo, revealing that he used to be a Mushroom Keeper himself (how shocking), and that his motivation is to monopolize the production of the Rust-Eater drug so he can leverage it to squeeze ever more profit out of the sick, Rust-infested masses.

There is a tiny grain of actual real-world commentary in there, but when your villain takes eight episodes to explain something that Bun B once nailed in a single couplet1, it is maybe time to reconsider what you’re writing and why. (To say nothing of if we’re meant to take this in a “pharmacies are complicit in the opioid crisis” sort of way or a “Covid vaccines have microchips in them” sort of way. It’s vague enough that you can easily read it however you want.) If we had known this from the start of the series, it would’ve been an additional shade of detail that made Kurokawa all the more despicable. It being treated as some huge twist–a politician? Valuing profit over the lives of his constituents? Perish the thought–is just insulting. Even the shonen genre’s target audience of teenage boys are more than smart enough to deserve better than this.

At the very least, it’d be more forgivable if the rest of the writing here were more interesting. Little about “Fiendish Trap” is even remotely compelling, a fundamental problem that dwarfs all the other sins here.

So, what does work in this episode? Well, there are some fun pop culture references. Kurokawa opens the episode by playing a Yu-Gi-Oh! pastiche with one of his henchmen, an amusing nod to voice actor Kenjirou Tsuda‘s most famous role, Seto Kaiba.

When Bisco busts in to rescue Milo from his own recklessness, Kadokawa cracks that he’s basically Tuxedo Mask, which, what, would make Milo Sailor Moon? That’s a fun thought.

There’s also a hilariously awesome sequence where Bisco catches a crossbow bolt in his teeth and flings it back at Kurokawa at full speed somehow.

The chain of rescues that comprise most of the episode’s actual events is also pretty funny when you think about it. With Milo initially setting out to rescue Pawoo, only to be rescued by Bisco, only for the both of them to be eventually rescued by an escaped Jabi, who also himself ends up freeing Pawoo. Pawoo, of course, does not get to save anyone. That would be letting a woman do something, and we obviously can’t have that.

The episode closes with Milo apparently dying in the snow–yes, really–as he and Bisco try to flee from Kurokawa’s facility. His last words to Bisco are a plea to stay alive.

I will give Sabikui Bisco some credit here. Usually, this sort of maudlin attempt at tear-jerking involves a straight couple, and the very fact that the title of the next episode is “I Love You” makes me comfortable calling Bisco and Milo one too. On the other hand, the more interesting of our two leads is dead with four episodes left to go. And if we do consider Bisco and Milo partners in more than just an “adventuring buddies” sense, this whole thing is a pretty rote and lame example of the whole “Bury Your Gays” routine.

Look, it’s not impossible that the show will come back from this somehow, but more than anything else the most damning thing I can say about “Fiendish Trap” is that despite everything that happens in it, it’s mostly pretty boring. I mention minutiae like pop culture references because the show’s actual story is just not holding my interest anymore, and I doubt I’m the only one. It feels like digging for scraps.

1: “They don’t care about the cure, they just wanna sell a treatment // Keep you alive by keepin’ you high, now that’s some street shit.” – Bun B – “U A Bitch”, Return of The Trill. Did I reference this mostly just because I like UGK? Don’t worry about 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 Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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

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Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 7 – “The Stolen Rust Eater”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

“The Stolen Rust Eater”, Sabikui Bisco‘s seventh episode, is predicated on a fakeout.

At the end of last week’s episode, we were teased a confrontation between Pawoo and Bisco. We were also assured that the giant flying snake creature that Bisco and Milo had been pursuing was the thing they were hunting; the source of the Rust-Eater mushroom and the entire impetus for the quest they’ve been on for the first half of the series. In the opening five or so minutes of “The Stolen Rust Eater,” almost all of this is thrown out the window. Pawoo and Bisco fight only very briefly before uneasily teaming up to rescue Milo from the snake creature. When they take it down, they find that the mushrooms it’s infected with are nothing more than a matsutake. Tasty, maybe, but not at all what they’re looking for.

…Or is it?

You see, it turns out that one needs a mushroom keeper’s blood to “activate” a Rust-Eater mushroom. The Pipe Snake was infected with the right mushrooms. All Milo needs to do to make a cure is carefully harvest some of them and extract some of Bisco’s blood to feed them with. Simple, right? Well, our favorite sinister fedora-wearing governor drops in on a blimp to steal the Pipe Snake’s corpse and shoot Bisco in the stomach with a “rust bullet.” So no, not really.

Things twist and they turn. By episode’s end, Pawoo and Jabi are both hostage to Governor Kurokawa, who informs Milo of this fact via TV broadcast (really). Milo and Bisco have a big scuff-up about which of the two should go it alone to rescue them (obviously they can’t both go. That would just be silly.) While this does adequately convey how much they’ve come to care for each other, it is all rather sudden.

If you’re counting; there are three major twists in this episode’s 23 minutes. Add to that its honestly pretty laughable attempt to pivot Bisco and Pawoo’s adversarial relationship into the latter romantically teasing the former and, well, much as I have enjoyed the series so far, the cracks are starting to show. Some of this is a limitation of format; if you want to adapt X number of manga chapters into Y number of anime episodes, you’re going to have to make some things feel more clipped than others. But it does make me wonder if we really needed a whole episode of Milo learning how to ride Bisco’s giant crab companion, even as fun as that episode was. Everything here feels a bit perfunctory. Even Pawoo and Milo’s big reunion.

Speaking of Pawoo, this episode also pretty handily demonstrates the show’s problems with handling her. Much as I love the character, I wouldn’t actually argue she’s terribly well-written. “Stoic badass” is a pretty simple character archetype. “Doting older sister” is another. “Repeat damsel in distress” is yet a third, and by piling all three on top of each other she is consistently the character that Sabikui Bisco writes the worst. She doesn’t really get to do anything here, and her actions within the episode all feel oddly disconnected from one another. It’s unfortunate. We haven’t even really gotten to properly see her kick ass in a while.

These are all unenviable weaknesses. Sabikui Bisco is consistently at its best the lower the stakes are, but being an adventure anime, we’re now hitting the point of the season where its stakes are getting higher and higher by necessity. I would like to say that I have faith that the show will eventually hit its stride again, but it really just feels too fuzzy to call at the moment. I feel bad saying that, given that I praised the show for its consistency just last week. But things change, and I recap the anime I’m watching in the present, not the anime as it was a week ago. I didn’t dislike the episode, but it feels bizarrely inconsequential for the major role it plays in the story. Looking back, that final line from last week’s column feels like tempting fate.

There is, of course, only one way to really find out for certain if this marks an actual downturn in quality or just a rough patch of road. And to that end, I’ll see you next week, anime fans.

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

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

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Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 6 – Companions and Prey

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

It’s such an understated strength that pointing it out can feel like a backhanded compliment, but I really do think that one of the sneakily great things about Sabikui Bisco is that it’s consistent. You know, roughly, what you’re getting each week. 22 minutes of adventure through spore-infested, Rust-stricken, post-apocalyptic Japan as our leads, Bisco and Milo, seek the legendary Rust-eater mushroom to cure Bisco’s mentor Jabi and Milo’s sister Pawoo. It’s simple stuff, but it’s effective, and if the stars aligned, it’s easy to imagine that Bisco could pull this off satisfyingly week after week for literal years on end.

But we do not live in the world where Bisco is a show with eight seasons at two cours apiece. It gets twelve episodes flat. No more, no less. And God only knows if it’ll ever get even one more season. So, for as much as that consistency is a strength, it means that even minor twists in the formula count a lot. This week, we get a quieter, more character-driven episode. It’s a notable swerve toward the more serious for an anime that, even in its comparatively darkest moments, has so far remained fairly light.

That character is Tirol (previously transliterated as Chiroru in this column. I’m not sure if I got that wrong or if the official subs actually changed.) Tirol, you’ll recall, is the traveling merchant / swindler / mercenary / also a mechanic as we learn in this episode that we met for the first time all the way back in episode one, but who we were more formally introduced to in episode four. Milo and Bisco, traveling through an Arctic-cold tundra, discover her once again on the brink of death. This time in a decidedly less gnarly fashion than when they found her infected with a deadly parasite two episodes back.

After being de-thawed, she banters with our heroes for quite a while. Conversation between Tirol and Milo (or Tirol and Bisco) forms the bulk of this episode. The result is, I’d say, more positive than not. Some of her more angsty explication of her own motives comes across as a pretty blatant example of just stating the subtext out loud–always a bad look–but at the same time, there’s marginally more subtle stuff weaved in here, too. For instance, she puts her charm to good use by talking a different merchant into giving Milo and Bisco way more supplies than they can reasonably afford, off of the logic that the merchant will be able to “swindle them again later.” It’s pretty funny.

If that grin doesn’t just scream “integrity,” what does?

On a more serious level, comments she makes toward the end of the episode reveal that she was once a mechanic at a workshop that was tasked with restoring some part of the mysterious Tetsujin. It infected her coworkers with Rust, and she only lived to tell the tale by fleeing upon being promoted to foreman-by-default. This story in of itself is a fairly straightforward critique of worker exploitation. A later conversation in the episode, this time between Milo and Bisco, hammers the exploitation theme, too. Combined with some examples we’ve seen over the first half of the show of Imihama’s colonial-esque influence ruining the lives of those both in and outside the city, it marks the first time that Bisco has shown some real teeth. This is all pretty simple stuff, and no one is going to mistake it for The Communist Manifesto, but it’s good to see a show trying to have a point and mostly succeeding, given that we are still currently trudging through a season that also contains Tokyo 24th Ward and the rotting corpse of Attack on Titan.

The episode’s main act closes with Bisco, Milo, and Tirol locating the underground subway line they’ve been hunting for since episode four. Tirol fixes up one of the automatic train cars and departs the other two, but not before a fairly heartfelt goodbye. She even tells them her real name, something she claims to be embarrassed to do because of how weird it is. (To be fair. “Tirol” does strike me as an odd name for a Japanese woman. But hey, I’m not Japanese, so what do I know? Also, it’s however many centuries in the future. Who knows.) All told, this a nice spotlight for a character I’ve honestly wanted to know more about. Praising this as a sound and logical development may not come across as terribly exciting, but it is those things, and that’s what I like about Sabikui Bisco. It’s comfort food.

Two people who do not end the episode comfortably are Bisco and Milo themselves. After the pair fight off something called an Oilsquid on their train ride, they reach their destination; a vast canyon inhabited by a gargantuan apex predator of the skies. The mighty Pipe Snake; the very thing they need to take down to get the Rust-eater mushroom.

They begin fighting it here, only to be expectedly-unexpectedly interrupted by the one major character who hadn’t shown up in this episode so far. Pawoo.

That particular cliffhanger is where Sabikui Bisco chooses to leave us, this week. A true tease for Pawoo Enjoyers like myself. Still, I think I’ve made it clear that I like this episode a good deal. And let me tell you; one of the nice things about Bisco being so consistent is that, unless something goes truly awry, I’m pretty damn sure I’m gonna like next week’s too.

Until then, anime fans.

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

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

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Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 5 – Children’s Fortress

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Another day, another episode of Sabikui Bisco that is certainly not the best thing airing right now but is pretty damn entertaining. That’s about what I signed up for with Bisco, so I’m pretty satisfied with it.

“Children’s Fortress” splits its time between two stories. Which is an expedient way to keep track of multiple groups of characters at once and also keep the pacing up, but it does make it a tad annoying to summarize. Let’s start with the “B-plot” first, since it’s shorter and simpler.

Pawoo–Sabikui Bisco‘s coolest character and also my future wife–has been pursuing Bisco and Milo since they left Imihama. We don’t get a particularly precise idea of how far off their trail she is so far, but it’s evidently far enough that they don’t interact at all during the course of this episode. Instead, the B-Plot kicks off when Pawoo’s bike pops its tires in the midst of an abandoned town. Evidently from a trap left by some bandits who have themselves long since vacated the area. While trying to sort out what to do about all this, she sees a kindly old couple being menaced by an overgrown mutant spider. This being a shonen anime, she of course casually kills it with her giant iron pole thing and finishes it with a kick. (What is that thing, anyway? No one ever calls it anything but a “pole.”)

You really have no idea how hard it is for me to not just caption every single picture of Pawoo with “SHE’S SO COOL!!!!” written exactly like that.

Grateful, the couple allow her to stay with them while she fixes her bike. They also take the time to explain that an eeeeeeeeevil mushroom keeper is the cause of a Rust outbreak that whittled the town’s population down to just the two of them. Whether or not this is true, we don’t learn here and may never directly learn, but there is reason to doubt the couple’s story.

There are many great things about Pawoo, but I would not say that her calm demeanor and even temper are among them.

Pawoo isn’t with these people for terribly long before she discovers that something is off. By “discovers something is off,” I mean she comes across a bunch of rotting corpses propped up like they’re watching TV in one of the couple’s rooms.

They drop the act pretty much immediately and go all blatantly evil knife-sharpening on her, also threatening to “turn her into a statue of a female oni.”

It’s all rather silly, and of course Pawoo escapes the entire mess unscathed (although I wouldn’t be surprised if the fucking zombie she encounters in the couple’s hideout breathing some kind of toxic fumes on her comes back in some way or another). She doesn’t even actually kill the couple herself. They plea for mercy, but before she can make any meaningful response, retreat back into their hideout, which promptly explodes. Which they seem to have done intentionally? This whole half of the episode is, frankly, kind of absurd. But I do like the idea that whenever Pawoo isn’t directly on-screen she’s off having some kind of bizarre Samurai Jack-ian adventure.

Then there’s the A-plot, which is a tad more involved. In last week’s post-credits teaser, we saw Bisco and Milo come upon a building / small city inhabited solely by children, two of whom were sniping at them from the rooftops. Bisco and Milo end up willingly letting themselves be captured by these kids. Why? Well, mostly because they think they might have food. There’s also perhaps the unspoken implication that even the antiheroic Bisco would prefer to avoid hurting kids if he can.

Mostly this serves as a vehicle for us to learn this town’s woes. All the kids have Rust and all the adults have left town to try to raise money to buy treatments for it. We’re not directly told how long they’ve been gone, but it seems to be a few years minimum, based on the other major threat the town faces; annual giant flying blowfish attacks.

Yes, you read that correctly. Sabikui Bisco really loves its funky bio-engineered deadly wildlife. Here, they even have the audacity to appear out of season due to “unusual weather.” (We are helpfully told that this is normally a winter problem, and it’s currently summer in-show.) Unlike some of the other dangers our heroes have faced, which have been either cool or genuinely grotesque, the blowfish land more on the doofily cute side of the spectrum. But they are dangerous; one of them almost eats support character Kousuke, who spends most of the episode as Bisco’s “jailor.”

It also turns out that, surprise; the infection the kids have is not Rust, but some far more benign and easily treatable disease called shellskin. Milo treats them (and in the process, teaches one of the kids, Plum, enough about medicine that she can become a doctor herself.)

Plum also has a precocious crush, which adds her to the long list of women in this show that mistakenly think Milo is available.

But the facts are simple; their parents have been misled. And by who else but Imihama’s governor? I hadn’t considered this while actually watching the episode, but comparing the two, it makes me wonder if he–or someone working for him–wasn’t the mysterious “mushroom keeper” the couple from the B-Plot were referring to. The man seems to have a vested interest in making sure Imihama is the only habitable place around.

On the other hand; maybe not. Sabikui Bisco is good for what it is, but this is very much an episodic episode. The biggest change here being that Bisco exits town with a new weapon (a harpoon), and some directions pointing him toward an abandoned subway line. It does all feel a touch filler-y, which is a little strange given how short this series is planned to be. Perhaps they’re already banking on a second season, or maybe what’s gone on here will have more significance than I’ve given it credit for.

Still, it’s a minor complaint. Sabikui Bisco‘s goals seem to be fairly modest ones of entertainment and telling a story that’s base-level compelling. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and it’s succeeded at it admirably so far. Will next week bring us more of the same or are things going to start getting a little more ambitious? There’s only one way to find out.

Until then, anime fans.

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

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

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Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 5 – “It’s Probably Because…”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

You can’t be mad at something for being what it is, right? That’s been my philosophy since I started casually writing about anime on Anilist several years ago. I think it’s largely a good one, but it can be difficult to apply when something is working in a space that you’re only a bit familiar with. My Dress-Up Darling is a romantic comedy, and I’m versed enough in those to know what I like and don’t like about them. Less familiar to me is the ecchi side of the series. It’s not like the genre is alien to me–I was a hormonal teenager once, too–but it does put you in a truly weird headspace when you ask yourself what separates a good ecchi anime from a bad one. Is it a certain tone? A general sense of taste? A lack of taste? Maybe it’s better for these things to be totally shameless? I don’t know; I am many things, but I am not a connoisseur of Boob Anime. What I have discovered over the course of watching My Dress-Up Darling is that one thing I do require is for the show’s ecchi and non-ecchi parts to feel like they fit together, and if Dress-Up Darling has a single problem, it’s that they really don’t.

Before I go into detail and risk seeming like a total shrew, let me be clear; I don’t have a conceptual problem with Dress-Up Darling‘s premise. “Guy who makes cosplay outfits and girl who is a cosplayer” is a perfectly fine and cute idea for a fictional couple. I even completely get why one would want to extend this premise into the ecchi genre; it’s a natural fit for it. But Dress-Up Darling is still also a romcom. Gojo is supposed to be our likable everyman lead, and Marin, by all accounts, is way too enthused with cosplay as a craft to really care about how other people might react to her outfits. These are pretty ordinary teenagers, not H-manga characters. What you end up with is a series that occasionally feels like it’s trying to shoehorn fanservice into a show where it doesn’t belong, or, conversely, an ecchi series that is misguidedly trying to be romantic. If it were that simple, it’d probably be easier to dismiss Dress-Up Darling out of hand. Instead, it is somewhat more complicated. I didn’t have a problem with episode 2, because it dedicates to the bit. That episode is almost entirely fanservice. Here, things are more complicated, because it’s trying to do two things at once.

This week’s episode–the ludicrously-titled “It’s Probably Because This Is the Best Boob Bag Here”–centers around the show’s core strength, the simple, infectious joy of two people who share a passion for something geeking out over it. In theory, this should be one of Dress-Up Darling‘s best episodes. And there is a lot to like here! Marin comes up with a hilariously uncreative cosplay alias (Marine. That extra E is really gonna throw ’em off, girl.), and she and Gojo attend their first cosplay event. There, she poses for pics and mingles with other attendees.

In one of the few moments where the episode’s generally horny atmosphere makes sense, Marin is the one who sizes up the other cosplayers while Gojo just stands there feeling generally out of place.

Again. Bi icon.

The “infectious joy” side of things is pretty simple here. And when Marin bounds toward Gojo and the background music swells and the whole thing is just so melodramatic, it makes sense. He’s done something genuinely nice for someone, and it happens to be the person he’s crushing on. You get why he’s happy, and if the episode were fixed more on that emotion, I’d probably like it more.

But Dress-Up Darling is what it is. So, throughout this entire part of the episode–which takes up a good 2/3rds of its runtime–there are constant horny gags, mostly revolving around Marin’s figure. She sweats a lot because the dress’s fabric is heavy. She’s wearing two bras to emphasize her bust because the character she’s cosplaying has bigger boobs than she does. She nearly passes out from the heat and Gojo ends up having to cool her down on a random indoor stairwell, and as he wipes down her back with a cold cloth, she starts moaning in a comedically suggestive fashion. Marin Sexy: Do You Get It?

At least we get some Good Faces out of it.

It’s all just a bit much, isn’t it? The sweat and the jiggling and the leering camera and all? Part of me feels bad for even criticizing this. Dress-Up Darling is lightyears away from the worst offender in this genre, and it does not even speak the same language as some of those manga and anime do. On top of that, Dress-Up Darling‘s original mangaka is a woman, so I should at least be cutting her a little slack, right? Well to tell you the truth I think I have been. Maybe a little too much.

I know how even saying this sounds, but I didn’t hate this episode, and I really liked some parts of it. Perhaps I only feel this way because I’ve been talking about the show a lot today, including with some friends who like it far less than I do, but this was the first time where My Dress-Up Darling‘s flaws prevented me from enjoying the show as much as I want to, and that just sucks. I really hope this is as far into the H Valley as the show ever goes. This doesn’t sink the show for me, and I doubt other people who were enjoying it will be dissuaded for much the same reason, but I definitely didn’t love the episode.

To not make this article an entirely bum note, there were, as mentioned, parts of the episode that I really enjoyed. Marin posing for pics is really cute in a genuine and enjoyable way, and on the topic of things that are horny but don’t bother me, there’s this lady, who seems even more into Marin than Gojo is in the minute or so of screentime she gets.

There’s also the very genuine moment of emotional connection that Marin and Gojo share on the train ride home. Sleep-deprived as hell, Gojo says she looked beautiful, and we get Marin blushing like a dummy. It feels sincerely romantic in a way that most of the rest of the episode is clearly reaching for but just doesn’t get ahold of. I can only speak for myself, but I’d love to see more of that going forward, and less of the egregious leering.

And speaking of egregious, I’m putting this episode’s Egregious Horny Score at a solid 4/5. There’s probably less of it overall than episode 2, but it’s more interwoven into the actual, you know, story, which really pushes up the “egregious” part. Egregious is a funny word, don’t you think? (There was no Nowa this week, sadly. So, no bonus Nowa screencap. Those are also egregious, but in a good way.)

Now, if you’ll all excuse me, anime fans, I have a big event to go prep for. See you next week.

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