Posted on March 6, 2022March 6, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 9 – “A Lot Happened After I Saw That Photo”

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

Woof. Look at that title. I’m not on the writing team for My Dress-Up Darling–or indeed, the translation team–so I can’t be totally sure, but I’m pretty certain that that’s a somewhat crass joke.

Which is weird, because while the show’s general aura of “idk, horny” returns this week, this is actually a pretty solid episode. The main goal here seems to be fleshing out the character of Shinju, Juju’s younger sister. That does unfortunately mean we get more than a little of the same “isn’t it funny that she’s a middle schooler but has HUGE bazongas?” energy that marred her introduction. But at the very least, she’s humanized here to a degree that raises her well above the status of a one-note joke character. It’s enough to make me at least consider overlooking how weird the series sometimes is about her.

Before that, though, we open with more cosplay nerdery. We don’t get a whole episode about Gojo making the outfits this time. As such, while there’s still a fair bit of Dress-Up Darling‘s usual camera leeriness, it’s at least over fairly quickly. And the rest of this sequence is actually pretty good. There’s the odd Lucky Star-esque sitcom conversation that slips in.

And I’m particularly fond of the details of Marin putting on her Black Lobelia outfit for the first time. The way she gets so happy over having a perfect black soul gem to stick above her chest, or how she delivers this absolute 24-karat one-liner after applying some cosplay tape.

In general, Marin actually gets a lot of great dialogue here. Something I have to equally applaud both the original writers and the translators for. Who hasn’t felt like this at least once?

But as mentioned, the real heart of this episode is Shinju’s story. If you’ll recall, last week, after Juju fainted, we cut abruptly forward in time to spend the last ten minutes of the episode on that dreamy endless summer sequence. If you were wondering what exactly happened in between those events, wonder no more, as this episode establishes that Juju was fine. More importantly, Shinju and Gojo had a long talk about the former’s desire to start cosplaying, but reluctance to do so for pretty understandable reasons.

I have to admit that I was a little surprised to see this brought back up as any kind of actual character flaw. While last week did explain Juju’s extreme passion for cosplaying and general derision borne of jealousy, it doesn’t really excuse it, and seeing that her rather gatekeepy attitude has actually hurt her younger sister’s feelings is an unexpected bit of realism. I appreciate it.

Gojo is able to assure her that she should try anyway, and naturally, Shinju is quite moved. (Will this develop into a third character in the show having a crush on Gojo? It’s hard to say. I rather hope not. Anything beyond the core Gojo / Marin relationship is cruft.)

But there is an issue. The entire reason Shinju is worried about “looking weird” is that the character she wants to cosplay doesn’t match her body type at all. (A real issue that many cosplayers face! To say nothing of broader clothing availability problems.) That character? Why, a cool older brother of course.

One can see how this might be a challenge.

Nonetheless, Gojo is nothing if not a cosplay wizard. He’s able to whip together a pretty convincing outfit in a matter of what seems like mere days, using one of his own old school uniforms as a base. Now, does this sequence also contain unfunny jokes about Shinju’s boobs and weird, leering shots of the same? Unfortunately, yes. Does it completely cancel out the actual good that Gojo is attempting to do? I wouldn’t say so, since he, at least in Watsonian terms, seems to have the decency to not be attracted to a middle schooler.

Clearing that so-low-it’s-underground bar aside, this sequence shows the two building a nice friendship. It’s worth remembering that Gojo doesn’t just do all this outfit-making work on a whim, he does it because he finds it meaningful. Shinju, similarly, doesn’t want to cosplay just for fun. She wants to do it because this character means a lot to her. As Marin said several episodes back, it is a way of expressing love. It requires a fine touch.

And, hey, there’s also some genuinely funny bits in here, like the pair being shocked at the affordability of certain kinds of chest binders.

When all is said and done, the show cuts back to its present–the day of the cosplay photoshoot alluded to last week–and Marin, Juju, and us, the audience, see Shinju’s complete cosplay for the first time. It is a genuinely remarkable transformation.

The two, being cosplay otaku first and foremost, naturally freak out.

And Marin bestows upon Shinju the greatest honor any gyaru can grant to anyone.

Now, arguably, the episode could be said to undercut its own message by showing that Shinju basically does pull off a perfect cosplay of this character. But I think the intended takeaway of “trying your hardest to capture the spirit of your character is the most important thing” shines through well enough. Despite any of my qualms with it, the main shade present in this episode is one of sweetness. I think My Dress-Up Darling shines best when it’s showing its characters the love and humanity they deserve, and that is definitely true here.

Egregious Horny Score: We’re at a firm 3/5 this week. The show’s definitely been more egregious than this, but the pervy camera is back in full force. It’s unfortunate, but I’ve run out of meaningful commentary on the subject (at least for now), and it didn’t kill my positive feelings toward this episode.

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Posted on February 28, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

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.}

Posted on February 27, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 8 – “Backlighting is the Best”

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 plethora of reasons I can imagine someone wanting to drop, or simply never pick up in the first place, My Dress-Up Darling. It’s a romcom, and those are not for everyone to begin with. It’s a straight romcom, so the rabidly queer segment of my readerbase (hi friends) may be inclined to dismiss it out of hand. More specifically, the show’s tonal coherence has been a victim of poorly-worked fanservice–enough so that I’ve made a running gag out of it in these columns–and occasional tasteless humor. Any and all of this, take your pick, I absolutely get why MDUD does not have universal appeal.

But in spite of everything I’ve said about it over the past few weeks, I continue to watch it. Partly out of obligation, yes, but also partly because I do genuinely believe it has some good ideas. When the show gets out of its own way enough for everything to truly click into place, it can pull off some spectacular stuff. Episode 8 is that spectacular stuff. It is the best-yet episode of the series by a country mile, and while it doesn’t wave away my previous criticisms of the series (it may make them all the more frustrating, really), it does point toward a path forward for this show. Romcom Hell is escapable, and My Dress-Up Darling might just find an exit yet.

Up to this point, the show’s highlights have revolved around our leads, Gojo and Marin, and they get a good turn here, too. But a good chunk of this week’s episode, “Backlighting is the Best”, is instead about Juju, a character I’d previously basically written off as a one-note joke.

Let it never be said that I am right about everything I assume about a series.

Allow me to go on a tangent for a moment, it’s the proud tradition of the editor-less internet critic.

When I was very young, there were a few shows on Cartoon Network’s nascent Toonami block I really loved. Most of them were standard fare for a young boy growing up in that period of time, and as a small AMAB child, I believed I was a young boy. So naturally, most of the cartoons I gravitated toward were “for boys.” In as much as any cartoon truly is for only one gender.

There was one exception. You’ve probably heard of it, if I had to guess.

Sailor Moon was far and away Toonami’s most successful “girl show.” They only tried their hands at a few others (one was Hamtaro, which I was also fond of), and this aspect of the block has largely been scrubbed from the current incarnation’s image. (Retroactively, its inclusion has been recontextualized as fitting the block’s “action cartoons” mission statement. Which, to be fair, it certainly did.) I haven’t seen much Sailor Moon properly–I was quite young during all this, and my memories of the show are largely a hazy jumble of disconnected images–but something about seeing this pretty soldier stomp monster ass every week while also finding the time to deal with normal teenage girl issues struck a chord with me. I liked a lot of anime characters at the time. But I never wanted to be most of them. I did want to be one of the Sailor Scouts. That’s an important distinction.

So, what do 20-year-old Gender Feelings have to do with a random mid-season episode of a romcom anime about cosplay? Well, I can’t claim the feelings are exactly the same, but Juju certainly seems to be able to relate. About halfway through the episode, Juju–nervous because they’re doing a photo shoot in an abandoned building(!)–confides in Gojo why it is that she got into cosplay in the first place. He wants to know why Juju wanted him to make her outfit, instead of any of the number of other people she could’ve contacted, and this dovetails into Juju explaining why she cares about the craft in general. I’ll just say, I found the sentiment familiar.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Juju doesn’t specifically say she had an at least somewhat unhappy home life, but the very fact that she felt compelled to seek refuge in these stories does sort of imply it. She also distills the appeal of the entire magical warrior-style mahou shoujo down to a couple sentences. It’s clear that she (and by extension, the author) have a sincere and deep love for the genre. But of course, things aren’t as simple in real life as in fiction.

Magical girls (tragically) do not exist, and Juju’s realization of that fact at a young age is what drove her to become a cosplayer in the first place. Not “the next best thing,” but the sort of sublime momentary transcendence of our everyday reality that all great art–of which cosplay, and indeed fashion in general, is certainly a part–is capable of inspiring.

Even Juju’s previous nasty attitude toward Marin is explained here. She was jealous. A jealousy that can only come from caring about something very deeply. She saw an absolutely perfect outfit and had to get in on whoever was making it. It makes total sense.

Gojo is of course deeply touched by this. Why wouldn’t he be? Someone basically just poured her heart out for him to compliment his design skills. He’s so grateful that he unthinkingly seizes her hand while muttering a thank you.

^{Well, a “fank you.”}

My Dress-Up Darling then almost immediately resumes being My Dress-Up Darling. (Read: Juju, who goes to an all-girls school, faints from surprise, because she’s never held a guy’s hand before. Sure.) The moment is over as quickly as it began, though the somewhat doofy gag is not nearly enough to actually undercut it. The rest of the episode is actually also pretty excellent, but completely unrelated to any of this.

Instead, the rest of the photoshoot left implied, we cut to the last day of exams in Gojo and Marin’s classroom. On the spur of the moment, Marin invites Gojo to the beach, and it’s there that we spend “Backlighting is the Best”‘s final ten or so minutes.

The impromptu beach date here is just adorable. It’s naturalistic in a sincere, warm way that the show’s best moments have previously touched on but only delivered intermittently. I’ve never had trouble “buying” Marin and Gojo as a couple; they’re clearly into each other in a way that most stock romcom leads could only dream of, but if anyone has, this sequence should put all of that to rest. Gojo stoically takes in the beauty of the seaside. And the visuals do a lot to sell that nautical beauty; this entire segment has a wonderful in-direct-sunlight look. A sort of deliberate overexposure applied to the drawings themselves.

Marin, emboldened by their comparative isolation at the relatively deserted beach, asks Gojo if he’d like to spend the summer together after learning that he didn’t get out much as a kid. Gojo enthusiastically agrees, and in what is easily her cutest moment in the show so far, Marin has to quickly scuttle back to their beach blanket to hide her blushing. (She’s also developed a pretty fantastic character tic of cupping her face in a W-shape when embarrassed. It’s immensely endearing.)

There’s also a pretty incredible sequence where Marin buys a hamburger and has it stolen by a bird, proving that My Dress-Up Darling can, in fact, be genuinely really funny when it wants to be.

I would honestly not be surprised if this ends up being the show’s overall best episode. Its two halves are great in totally different ways, the directing is on-point throughout (there is a lot of creative storyboarding here, and in a general sense the episode is visually fantastic), and most importantly, it has heart. There’s actually enough good here that I didn’t even find proper space to mention some of it, such as Marin’s truly powerful Girl Dad Fashion, or the episode’s entire first third, which is mostly enjoyably nerdy talk about cameras.

This is the sort of episode that sticks with you, and I sincerely hope it points toward the direction the series intends to take as it enters its final stretch. But even if MDUD never returns to these heights again, watching the whole thing will have been made worth it by these twenty-three minutes alone. That’s worth something, and everyone who worked on this episode should be very proud.

Until next time, anime fans.

Egregious Horny Score: I’m pleased to report that we’re at a tasteful 1/5 this week. There’s a panty shot (which Gojo gets comically flustered by) as Marin frolics in the water, but aside from that single instance there isn’t anything in the episode that’s so much as mildly suggestive.

Posted on February 21, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

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.

Posted on February 19, 2022February 20, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 7 – “A Home Date with the Guy I Wuv is The Best”

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

Hello, anime fans. I’ve had a bit of a week, as I’m sure you noticed if you’re one of my readers who happens to also follow me on Twitter. If not, no need to worry, as everything turned out just fine. But in recognition of my own good fortune, I endeavored to go into this week’s episode of My Dress-Up Darling as charitable as I could possibly muster. I do feel like I perhaps complained a little too much last week, even if I do stand by what I said.

So, maybe it’s just that spirit of charity that compels me to say that this is one of Dress-Up Darling‘s better episodes. But I think even if I’d had a more ‘normal’ week I think I’d be giving this one due praise. You see, I think I’ve basically got MDUD here figured out. There are episodes more about the geeky cosplay minutiae that distinguishes the show from any other ecchi comedy, and there are those that focus more on that very ecchi comedy. Bluntly, these are the good episodes and the mediocre to outright bad episodes, respectively. This week’s is mostly a good one, may it not be the last.

If I wanted to be rude, I could argue that I’m not even really reviewing or recapping an episode of Dress-Up Darling here. Even moreso than last week’s, a good chunk of this episode is dominated by footage of show-within-a-show Flower Princess Blaze. This is a double-edged sword of course; the very fact that we’re seeing so much of Flower Princess makes it pretty easy to call that it’d be a vastly more interesting series than Dress-Up Darling itself.

^{I’m just saying, it’s even got a lead magical girl whose theme color is pink. It’s hard to argue with that.}

But of course, the series presents the framing device that lets us see any of that in the first place. The very short version is that Gojo commits to making outfits for both Marin and Juju of characters from the series. He decides that to properly get as many references as possible, he should actually watch the series, which a quick peek at an in-universe Wikipedia article(!) helpfully tells us a bit more about.

This is all narrative pretext to have Gojo head over to Marin’s apartment. The initial plan is for Gojo to borrow her box set of the show (of course she has a box set), but things quickly change once he actually gets there, and Marin ends up convincing him to watch much of the show at her place. Once again, we get some actual access to Marin’s perspective here, and it is a nice change of pace from the focus on Gojo’s point of view the anime has had until recently.

Marin, of course, is Dress-Up Darling‘s best character, and it’s genuinely a lot of fun to see her try to “subtly” win Gojo over by cooking for him and watching Flower Princess by his side.

You could conversely pretty easily frame this badly; it does not exactly require a degree in feminist literary analysis to point out that much of this episode consists of a male lead being handed cartoons and food on a silver platter, and it’s pretty inarguable that Marin and her pristinely kept but very nerdy bedroom are embodying a kind of otaku domesticity here. (I am sure many, many snarky people on Twitter have made “this will not improve the declining birthrate” memes about this episode.)

^{As Gojo discovers the merits of the entire magical warrior subgenre, of course.}

Still, I have no conceptual problems with this kind of escapist fantasy, and if the show operated at about this level all the time, I’d probably like it a lot more. Flower Princess Blaze remains compelling, too. Although again, basically any time it was on-screen I couldn’t help but think that I’d rather be watching it.

This is another episode with a lot of cosplay talk. So, if you’re like me, and you find learning about the ins and outs of other peoples’ hobbies always at least mildly interesting, you’ll be satisfied here. There’s a fairly long digression in the episode’s second half about eye taping, a practice I’d not previously heard of, and which sounds vaguely unhinged to me. But hey, that’s subcultures for you.

The episode ends with Gojo and Marin meeting up with Juju and her younger sister, Shinju, who does her photography. (Hina Youmiya, whose career seems to just be getting started. She was in Selection Project last year.) Here, My Dress-Up Darling pivots from a genuinely funny joke–about the fact that Shinju is noticeably taller than her older sister–into a deeply tasteless one. And that is how what is otherwise one of My Dress-Up Darling‘s better episodes ends on a noxious crack about a middle schooler’s boobs being “hilariously” big, something that causes actual stress to no small number of young girls who are actually in middle school.

I could feign being angrier about this than I am, but at this point I have come to expect as much from Dress-Up Darling. It has its charms, and it definitely has its flaws. A general lack of taste is very much one of the latter. (And to give it more credit than it probably deserves, the original manga was written by a woman. Maybe this is meant to be Relatable rather than just meanspirited and gross, who knows.)

There are a few other things about the episode worth discussing. The translators continue to ride a fine line between clever and just slightly obnoxious. The use of the term “wuv” both in the episode title and in at least one line of dialogue might push it a bit over the edge, but I found Marin’s giggly, wordless “I have a crush” noises being subtitled as keysmashes legitimately hysterical. I suspect opinions will differ.

^{Yet more evidence for my “Marin is bi” theory.}

And finally, after an absence that felt like a century, we can mark the return of the Bonus Nowa Screencap. She appears briefly toward the very end of this episode.

As for the Egregious Horny Score, which I feel an obligation to continue doing for some reason, I’ll slap this one with a solid 3/5. There isn’t actually much horny here, but what we do get feels more out of place than ever. The gag about Shinju’s chest being the most obnoxious example of the lot. Some of the posters in Marin’s room are contributing to that score as well.

And that’s about the size of it, anime fans. I hope you’re continuing to enjoy My Dress-Up Darling. If not, I hope you’re at least enjoying these columns. There won’t be a Frontline Report tomorrow, since I’ve been sick, but I’ll see you all again on Monday for Sabikui Bisco.

Posted on February 14, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

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.

Posted on February 13, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 6 – “For Real?!”

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

I honestly just never know what to make of My Dress-Up Darling. Last week’s episode was, to put it mildly, not a personal favorite. This week’s episode, “For Real?!”, isn’t either, but it starts off with one of the simplest and best story segments in the show so far.

For one thing, the first part of this episode is actually from Marin’s perspective, something we’ve largely been denied explicit access to up until now. We hear her internal monologue and see shots from her point of view. In one of those monologues, Marin reveals herself to have more emotional intelligence than the vast majority of anime romcom protagonists.

Indeed, this whole section is a pretty cute and emotionally striking piece of work. Marin rides the night train home alone, wondering if maybe she should’ve more seriously put the moves on Gojo while the two had some alone time. But it comes across as the sincere thoughts of a teenage girl, rather than something gratuitous or showy.

We get more of a sense than ever as to why Marin might like Gojo in the first place, and in the process, the season’s premiere malewife / cosplay gf couple become that much more believable.

Were that the whole episode, this would be a glowing review. Unfortunately, all of what I just described happens before the opening title and is not really what the episode focuses on.

The first thing of note that happens after the opening title is that Gojo accidentally walks in on a little girl taking a bath.

^{I’m not posting any of that actual scene, because ew, and because I don’t want to get my WordPress account suspended. So here she is having been caught in the rain. I like the composition of this shot.}

Look, I will level with you. I feel like a fucking dweeb complaining about nudity in an anime. If I could show this article to my teenaged self, I’m sure she’d cringe out of her skin, but come the fuck on. We do not need a convoluted string of Anime Happenings to put a little girl in Gojo’s house off a case of mistaken identity on the part of his grandfather. We do not need the ancient-ass “accidentally walking in on someone bathing” trope. We certainly don’t need lovingly boarded, queasily fetishistic shots of her legs, the only barely-censored space between her legs, and prepubescent chest. God knows we don’t need the show’s shitty attempt at a joke by inserting a wildly inappropriate flashback to when Gojo and his grandfather talked about how “smooth” Hina dolls are. What does this add? Who is this for? Rejoinder: who is the fact that she turns out to actually be older than Gojo for? What am I watching here? Other than something that makes me feel like I’m going to be put on a list?

Dress-Up Darling continues to feel like two shows with wildly different tones and, frankly, levels of decency, that constantly interrupt each other. I’d say it brings down both sides of the series, but the anime’s ecchi half is so noxious to me at this point that I can’t properly gauge that. More to the point; I wish the ecchi anime would stop interrupting my romcom.

This character, for the record, is Sajuna “Juju” Inui. (Atsumi Tanezaki, who you may remember as the title role from last year’s Vivy – Flourite Eye’s Song.) Juju sorta sucks. She manipulates Gojo into making an outfit for her and is a judgmental little shit toward Marin when the latter shows up.

^{And what exactly is wrong with that, you snide little weirdo?}

The real tragedy here is that the last third of the episode is pretty good! Juju wants to cosplay one of the leads, Shion, from in-universe magical girl anime Flower Princess Blaze, a broad homage to the last 30 years of the magical warrior subgenre. We see enough of the show-within-the-show that by the end of the scene I rather wished I was watching that instead. The scene is a full-on loving pastiche, it’s even letterboxed. It looks melodramatic, fun, and very, very extra as it briefly chronicles Shion’s totally-not-a-Madoka-soul gem becoming corrupted and her falling to the dark side. We get a full-on henshin sequence near the start of the scene! This stuff is great, and I really wish more of the episode were like this!

As always, Dress-Up Darling is the best version of itself when it’s about Geek Shit, so this part of the episode is pretty fun in general. Juju also mistakenly assumes that Marin and Gojo are dating, which floors Gojo and puts Marin in a tizzy.

The episode ends with Gojo promising to make Juju her outfit and with Marin chiming in that she’d like to cosplay one of the show’s villains, Neon. (Neon is also Shion’s older sister and apparently people in-universe ship them. Because Dress-Up Darling seriously cannot stop itself from being weird for more than five minutes at a time.)

I wish I could praise the episode with fewer caveats. I feel like a whiner whenever I complain about the fanservice in this series, but I feel entitled to mention it because it frankly really does ding my enjoyment of the show pretty hard. I certainly can’t recommend it to most of my friends who aren’t waist-deep in the anime rabbit hole, which is doubly a shame because romcoms are otherwise a pretty accessible genre. (I’ve had some success along these lines with Kaguya-sama: Love is War! That series isn’t perfect, but it has way fewer problems than this does.)

And not everything needs to be recommendable to necessarily be good. There are plenty of anime I like–from Kill la Kill to Bakemonogatari–that I would not casually recommend to someone without knowing beforehand their feelings on such things. The difference between those anime and Dress-Up Darling is that they are honest about what they are. Dress-Up Darling really feels like it’s trying to have it both ways, and it mostly just keeps tripping over its own feet. This wasn’t even always the case! The second episode was loaded with over-the-top cheesecake, but it fit within the context of what was going on, so it was easy for me to chalk it up to stupid but harmless fun that I was simply no longer in the target demographic for. Four episodes later, I am not sure I can do that anymore.

I will continue watching the anime, both because I am obligated to by it winning the community choice pick for this season and because I do believe there is no small amount of good in it, but I am not enthusiastic about it anymore because of how many things it gets wrong, and that sucks, because I really want to be. Maybe the show will improve in its second half as we move into an arc that’s again more focused on the actual cosplay side of things. But that increasingly feels like wishful thinking. I am not optimistic.

Until next week, I suppose.

Egregious Horny Score: This segment isn’t fun anymore/5.

Posted on February 8, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

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.

Posted on February 5, 2022February 5, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

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.

Posted on January 31, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 4 – “Ride the Crab”

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

Folks, I’m gonna level with you. It’s 10am local, and I, your illustrious blog-owner / writer, have not slept. This happens to me sometimes. I have insomnia. Pretty bad insomnia! I could just have slept in today and decided to cover Sabikui Bisco later tonight or possibly tomorrow. But let me ask you this; do people who work real jobs get to decide to just not go in for their morning shift because they’re tired? No, they do not. They probably should! But they don’t. So why should I get that luxury? I say fuck it. I’m here to deliver to you, loyal readers, however many paragraphs of grade-A Insightful Anime Criticism (TM, TM, TM), and by god, I am going to get it to you even if I have to shotgun six Red Bulls to get there.

So here’s where I’m at, alright? I have the episode queued up on my laptop (not CUE!’d up, I dropped coverage of that show). I have my breakfast; a delicious slice of Edwards’ Chocolate Creme pie ($2.50 for 2 pieces at the local dollar store) and what I will refer to only as a Caffeine Drink. As I type this, I have not yet started watching the episode. Why draw it out any further? I’m Jack Kerouackin’ it. You do not get the polished Jane The Anime Critic today, you get the rambly one. Let’s rock ‘n roll.

An observation right off the bat; I have not appreciated this OP enough. The song kicks ass. It makes me want to traverse the Rust-infested desert searching for a wanted man. Or maybe lost love. Or maybe I just really wish I was Pawoo. God, Pawoo is great.

You may recall last week’s post-credits scene ended on a cliffhanger. Our episode does not open addressing this–which is a thing I kinda hate?–but we get Milo and Bisco bickering like a married couple to make up for it, so it’s fine.

Some important business is established here. Point 1. Pawoo has only three months to live. Given that she’s the most attractive, coolest, most dashing, and just generally best character in the show, and is in fact absent from this episode, this is tragic. Point 2. Bisco’s mentor, Jabi, has only about one month to live. This is also pretty awful. Point 3. There is no way to get to where Milo and Bisco need to be in time without attracting a huge amount of attention the twosome can’t afford to attract.

Except of course, because this is an adventure anime. There is a plan. (There’s always a plan.) Bisco knows of an underground mine complex whose railcarts run the length of the area they need to traverse. This complex is part of the kickassedly-named Bonecoal Mountains. Which of course, because this is an adventure anime, is an absurdly dangerous route that will present them with all kinds of challenges and tests of both physical and intellectual might. (One of the dangers namechecked here? “Iron mice” which can skeletonize a man in seconds. Piranhas, watch your backs!) After overcoming them, of course, they will grow both individually as people and closer together as friends. All of this is fine, though. Bisco has an ace up his sleeve.

The ace is a giant crab.

Yes, the pair link back up with Actagawa here. Actagawa, a giant “steelcrab,” has a shell tough as iron and can amble over any terrain with ease. He is, as Bisco explains, the ideal mount for their journey. (He may be a bit biased, given that he calls the giant friendly crab his “brother.”) Giant crabs objectively improve any work of art in which they appear, so I have to say I am quite satisfied with the ratio of giant crabs to things that aren’t giant crabs in Sabikui Bisco so far.

But much like a horse or, really, any tamable animal, Actagawa has to be eased into putting up with Milo. Progress is…slow, over the course of this episode. And eventually one of Milo’s attempts to ride the crab (a phrase that really sounds like a euphemism but somehow isn’t), literally tosses him headlong into meeting up with another character we’ve seen before.

Yes, Chiroru unexpectedly returns here. She’s chased off after trying to steal Actagawa, but it’s not long before our heroes meet her again at a small rural rest station. There, things promptly get weird.

The two approach her from behind as she appears to be sitting idly by a fire. Initially it seems like she’s simply giving them the cold shoulder, but a well-executed sudden jumpscare proves that, no, she’s got some kind of horrible infection in her mouth. It’s pretty goddamn nasty!

Worse, Milo somehow deduces that it’s something in her stomach. That “something?” A parasitic creature called a balloonworm that inflates and kills from the inside out; used as a tool of control by particularly bad dudes who force those they make use of to eat the creatures’ eggs and then keep them in line by drip-feeding them a drug that prevents the eggs from hatching. It’s a favored tactic of Imihama’s governor, Chiroru’s former employer. Did I mention that Milo is able to get this thing out of her by locking lips with her and pulling it out with his mouth? I reiterate; goddamn nasty.

Chiroru is grateful to Milo in her own way. But, assuming ulterior motives, tries to, ahem, pay with her body.

^{I think her main mistake here is assuming Milo is straight.}

This starts off Bisco on another annoying, sexist spiel. The only thing that prevents that from being as much of a black mark on this episode as on last week’s is that Chiroru can hit back about as good as she gets. (Milo, bless him, prevents a fight from breaking out. And buried within that exchange, there’s actually a telling little character moment where Chiroru seems genuinely surprised Milo doesn’t expect to be able to sleep with her for doing her a favor.) Everyone hits the hay, and Chiroru–a travelling merchant when she’s not working as a bounty hunter, apparently–tosses out a few old wares she can’t reasonably sell, including a can of “liquid bonecoal.” (Gas by another name or some sort of futuristic fossil fuel? You decide!)

This turns out to be a mistake.

Recall that cliffhanger I mentioned earlier. The unnamed area our heroes stopped at here and the War Memorial from last week’s post-credits scene turn out to be the same place. And it’s here, at about the episode’s 2/3rd’s mark, that the story loops back around to where it left off last week. Not time wasted! I enjoyed the whole ride; but it’s good to know what the heck was going on.

So how does this all end? Well, the “living temple” decked out with cannons and whatnot is, as we learn, actually a colossal, fuel-eating shrimp. Milo is able to use his newfound bond with Actagawa to have the crab land a fatal blow on the shrimp’s noggin, which Bisco finalizes by splitting it open with an arrow. All’s well that ends well…

Except that a stray shot from one of the shrimp’s mounted cannons ignites the mine entrance they were hoping to use and just happened to be near. Bisco’s plan, it seems, did not account for that. The two, seeing no other immediate option, settle down for the night. They awake to find Chiroru’s run off again (and taken a good chunk of their money with her, although she’s left a bunch of food and such in return.)

Our postscript here sees Bisco and Milo wandering a salty-looking desert some days or weeks later, hard up on food. Bisco spots a watermelon–yes, a watermelon. Just lying on the ground–and things quickly escalate into a standoff.

But that’s something we’ll see play out next week, what about this episode?

Honestly, perhaps it’s just the lack of sleep, but I’m dry on sweeping, grandiose statements for this’n. It’s a good episode and I like that Milo can ride Actagawa now. It was cute to see them bond and the critter has a surprising amount of personality given that he’s a huge crustacean animated via a slightly stiff CGI rig. Milo and Bisco’s bickery bromance continues to be incredibly entertaining, and I was thrilled to see Chiroru again in a slightly more prominent role this episode. (Less thrilled to see her hock up a giant worm. Seriously, that shit was disgusting.)

So, anime fans, I leave you with those as my thoughts for this week. Those and one more; yes, if you’re wondering, the pie I mentioned in the opening paragraph was delicious. Thank you as always to my supporters, who allow me to indulge in such luxuries as occasional $2 pie.

Until next time.

The Magic Planet

Category: Let’s Watch

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 9 – “A Lot Happened After I Saw That Photo”

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

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 8 – “Backlighting is the Best”

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

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 7 – “A Home Date with the Guy I Wuv is The Best”

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

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 6 – “For Real?!”

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

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

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 4 – “Ride the Crab”