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

Let’s Watch CALL OF THE NIGHT Episode 2 – Do You Do LINE?

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

Last week, while covering Call of the Night‘s debut episode, I made mention that Nazuna is, in a way dangerous. Or at least, representative of dangerous things, in a way that’s fairly inherent to her being a vampire. I stand by that, because last episode still, you know, happened. But what was also evident even then, and is far moreso this week, is that she’s also a bit of a doofus.

What this episode really cements is that Nazuna and Ko have a great dynamic. They’re a pair of verbal pinball flippers. It’s always hard to convey banter as a positive quality in writing, but the fact that the back-and-forth of sex jokes and general endearing dumbassery doesn’t get old mostly speaks for itself. For instance, there is Ko’s attempt to get Nazuna to give him her phone number, which runs into some of the usual problems one might expect when trying to hook up with a vampire.

^{Using this specific term places Nazuna in the same realm of dorkdom as Pearl from}^{Steven Universe}^{. Truly, no mean feat.}

Perhaps more relevant to the show’s actual plot, Ko here reaffirms that, yes, he is actively trying to fall in love with Nazuna so that when she bites him he will become a vampire. Given that he’s a teenager one would think this would be easy, but hey, some hearts are pickier than others. On the third hand, though, it’s not like Call of the Night is shy about pairing these two up pretty hard already. They spend the first third or so of the episode looking for each other (which eventually leads to the phone exchange above, since neither of them have any easy way to contact the other).

When they do eventually meet up, Nazuna again invites Ko over, and the framing is still less than subtle.

The episode’s second plot revolves around the two trying to find some way to keep in touch, given Nazuna’s lack of anything that can use a modern cellular network. Ko eventually hits on the idea of using….toy “transceiver” watches with walky-talkies in them.

This odd little detour has more underlying implication than one might expect. Sure, they spend a while fiddling with them—playing hide and seek, basically, an apt display that they’re both immature in their own ways—but then Ko reveals that when he bought them as a kid he hid one away as part of a longwinded ploy to be able to talk to someone new, only for one of them to simply go missing. That’s honestly kinda depressing! Which Nazuna actually points out (with a signature lack of tact).

Perhaps the most revealing moment though comes when the two take a short flight to Ko’s school, where Ko manages to do some pretty amazing deduction about his new friend. Noticing that she makes a ton of sex jokes but gets flustered at discussion of actual romance, he has this thought.

It’s a little too early to say if he’s right (although, I think so), but if he is; that’s a pretty impressive target to hit considering his own lack of experience. It’s also maybe a smidgen unrealistic, although, then again, teenagers can be awfully perceptive in their own way.

As the episode ends, Ko heads home, and shockingly, his toy watch goes off. Before he can fully process the question of who could possibly have the missing watch and why, someone who seems to know him spooks him from behind. (Not unlike what Nazuna did last week.)

The introduction of another person into the show’s core dynamic this early is an interesting thing. But, really, you could see it coming even if there weren’t other people asides from Ko and Nazuna in the OP animation. The Sun always comes up eventually.

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Posted on July 9, 2022July 9, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch LYCORIS RECOIL Episode 2 – The More The Merrier

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

I know on some level that I can’t just spend every one of these columns gushing about how goddamn entertaining Lycoris Recoil is, but I really, really want to. If anyone had any lingering doubts, “The More The Merrier” proves that Lycoris Recoil’s spy movie chops are no fluke. It’s stylish and intriguing with a fun little left turn at the end. Basically, the perfect second episode for something like this.

We open on a delightfully Lain-y scene of two hackers meeting in the confines of cyberspace. One is Walnut, who we met last week, and the other is a new face (or mask, anyway), Roboto.

The two’s relationship can perhaps best be described as tense, and we learn early on here that it was Roboto who told the mysterious billionaire Allen Adams where Walnut’s apartment was. You may remember said apartment getting blown up via car touchpad toward the end of the premiere. Walnut, perhaps out of options, hires the LycoReco cafe girls to get him out of the country. This seems like a fairly straightforward premise, and it mostly is, but many small details shade the entire journey.

To start with, before the mission even begins, we learn Takina and Chisato have been paired up for about a month now. And we learn that Adams, under the alias “Mr. Yoshi,” has become an occasional customer of the cafe. (He tries very hard to play the role of the nice, well-intentioned wealthy customer. Maybe a little too hard, even bringing Chisato a souvenir from a trip abroad to Russia in the form of a small toy.)

The mission itself is a study in contrasts. Chisato and Takina have very different personalities that happen to work pretty excellently together, and almost every single facet of the job they pull off here sees the two’s approaches deliberately juxtaposed. Chisato evidently spaces out during much of the briefing and doesn’t note down most of the minute transit details about where she’s going or how to get there, Takina has them memorized. Takina drinks a “jelly drink”—Soylent or something?—to quickly and utilitarianly get a boost of energy before anything actually dangerous happens, Chisato on the other hand chows down on a bento box.

The actual spy work part of the mission consists of escorting Walnut while a group of mercenaries in the employ of Roboto—who we eventually learn is himself working for Allen—pursue him. There’s some fun stuff in here, too. When the two meet up with Walnut (who spends the entire episode dressed in a squirrel suit, in a truly inspired bit of costume design), for example, Chisato is disappointed that the flashy Lambo-like supercar she’d spotted in the parking lot isn’t their ride for the mission.

When things inevitably get hairy, culminating in an office building shootout with Robot’s mercs, Chisato’s still using her rubber bullets while Takina has made only the minor compromise of aiming for shoulders instead of heads. Even here, the two are very different. Chisato’s approach, tellingly, seems to be the more effective of the two. In an impossibly cool moment that I really hope has some eventual sci-fi hokum explanation, Chisato is able to calmly sidestep her way out of point-blank rifle fire, literally waltzing between shots like it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

Minutes later, in what’s becoming a recurring pattern, she tend the wounds of one of their enemies so he doesn’t bleed out.

This seems like a mistake; as she’s doing that, Takina and Walnut leave the building, only for the squirrel-suited hacker to be riddled with bullets from across the rooftop. The ensuing bloody mess is the first time we’ve seen Chisato even remotely rattled at all in the entire first two episodes, and she and Takina grimly escort his dead body in the back of an ambulance.

But then, just as the episode seems like it’s going to end on a down note, Walnut rises from the ambulance bed, and takes off his helmet, revealing himself to be….

Mizuki??

Yes, it turns out that the entire time, it was Mizuki in the suit, and this entire episode’s plot was a blind op. The Lycorii handled the hard part while, simultaneously, Mizuki and Mika handled the fakeout, which included the stupid squirrel costume; itself both bulletproof and stuffed with exploding blood packs.

This kind of borderline-corny twist is the sort of thing you can only get away with if you’re completely un-selfconscious about your genre. And thankfully, Lycoris Recoil seems to be. The episode ends with the real Walnut, a young girl who promptly switches to the also-fake name Kurumi (Misaki Kuno, thankfully operating in her lower, more naturalistic register rather than what she used for Chisato recently over in Prima Doll), moving into the cafe as payment for helping them out with future missions.

^{Spot the squirrel.}

And we close on Mr. Adams once again patronizing the cafe, before asking Mika point-blank what sort of work he and Chisato actually do. Perhaps a lead-in for next week’s episode?

I realize I’ve leaned really heavily on the “recap” aspect of this column for this one. To be honest, so far almost all of Lycoris Recoil‘s strengths are in intangibles like style, tight pacing, and just generally being fun as hell to watch. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing thematic here; it really is worth noting how hard that contrast button between Takina and Chisato is being slammed, and who knows what the addition of Kurumi to the cast is going to do to that. This is to say nothing with the further hints at some larger overarching web of conspiracy, here, including the DA still hunting for the man in the blurry background of that photo from last episode and, of course, Allan Adams’ recurring appearances.

Until the answers make themselves known, see you next week anime fans.

Posted on July 7, 2022July 7, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CALL OF THE NIGHT Episode 1 – Night Flight

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Ko Yamori (Gen Satou) is having girl problems. Quite the opposite of the many heartbroken protagonists who litter his genre, Ko has recently turned someone else down, on the grounds that he doesn’t really understand what “love” or wanting to date someone actually are yet. Through a combination of resultant bullying and just plain ol’ feeling bad, this has made him want to stop going to school. So, he does. He skips class by day and walks about town late at night. The city is neon-on-black and blown out around him as he absorbs the relative tranquility of a small playground and rambles to himself.

Scrolling post-sundown social media (never a great idea), he gets it in his head to try drinking, despite being only 14. He finds an alcohol vending machine—did you know those were a thing? I certainly didn’t—and, more than a little paranoid as he does so, slips a few coins in. The machine emits a yellow-amber glow all the while, almost sickly in its illumination of the scenery.

He is then promptly jumpscared.

That is Nazuna Nanakusa (Sora Amamiya), nighttime socialite, owner of a pretty cool cloak, and vampire. The specifics are less important than the broadstroke; Nazuna turns Ko’s life on its head over the course of their single night together, which takes up the entire first episode, with not a single second of concession to the morning after. She chats up drunk salarymen, she teases and prods Ko, she says she likes to help people who can’t sleep at night solve their problems.

She takes him to her apartment.

^{Sadly, she does not climb up the side of her apartment in lizard fashion.}

An aside; Call of the Night is somewhat new territory for this site. Despite being the holder of the seasonal romcom slot like previous Let’s Watch subjects My Dress-Up Darling and Kaguya-sama: Love is War!, Call of the Night is not particularly similar to either, and it would be a mistake to lump them together simply because they’re part of the same genre. Call of the Night‘s pedigree is older, and puts the series itself in a more sensible context. After all, people being attracted to vampires instead of (or in addition to) being afraid of them stretches back to the very dawn of popular vampire fiction. They’re nothing new in anime, either, with more or less popular titles that are about or prominently feature a vampire love interest including, just off the top of my own head, Rosario+Vampire, Vampire Knight, Actually, I Am…. / My Monster Secret, Seifuku no Vampiress Lord, Vampeerz, etc.

These span several different genres, but what all have in common is that the vampire is portrayed, at least initially, and in line with their origins as a creature of the horror genre, as something dangerous. Something that warrants caution. This is true of Call of the Night as well, even as Ko himself throws that caution to the wind not long after discovering Nazuna’s true nature and he decides he wants in on the whole “vampire” thing, the framing never lets her seem too innocent for too long. For every cut that depicts Nazuna like this, where she says something goofy or outright dumb.

There’s another that portrays her like this; a predatorial-in-the-animal-sense midnight stalker. She’s a vampire. Let her bite you.

Now, while danger can certainly be scary, it can also be salacious, and unsurprisingly that’s the angle that most of Call of the Night‘s more intense scenes take. Even less surprisingly, the attempts to play up Nazuna’s conventional sex appeal don’t work nearly as well as those that focus her vampiric features. The former are simply too clean. There’s a shot in here where the camera rotates around her body in an attempt to show off her midriff and it just looks absurd. (What is she, a sports car?) This is without mentioning what looks a lot like airbrushing on parts of her body, it just all looks too silly to take seriously.

The latter though? Well, there’s an old joke in some circles about how you can tell when they get someone who’s “into feet” (or into whatever) to animate a given scene. I think Call of the Night‘s team has someone who’s into teeth.

If they could only nail one, though, it’s actually better for it to be the latter. Ko, after all, is not so much attracted to Nazuna yet as he’s attracted to the idea of becoming a vampire, as is established not long after Nazuna reveals that she is one. We need to see this stuff through his eyes for that desire to make sense on a literal level (and on a less literal one, depicting some kind of temptation only works in any context if you can successfully convey said tempting). Fill in your own vice or vices here; is “vampirism” code for sex? Drugs? Booze? Just the general nightlife experience? There’s no reason it can’t be all of the above, and by keeping the metaphor fairly broad and open to finer interpretation, Call of the Night‘s first episode mostly succeeds in its aims of making Ko’s attraction to Nazuna—or perhaps more, what Nazuna offers—understandable, in spite of some minor flaws.

Call of the Night does also zero in on one particular thing. Nazuna, at one point, asks Ko why he thinks people stay up late in the first place. It’s a rhetorical question, and she provides her own answer.

This is an interesting notion, and certainly one that maps to why a lot of say, millennials like myself stay up too late, but the way Nazuna plays it is even more interesting. Later in the episode, Ko expresses that he knows he shouldn’t be doing “something like this”—that is to say, this whole skipping school and staying out at night bit—in the first place. Nazuna, who seems to have taken an interest in him despite herself, responds to that thought by hovering above the ground, and asking him this.

The question pierces the thematic heart of Call of the Night in general. How does Ko feel about all this? He says to himself, remembering back to the incident at school, that he tried to do the right thing. Nazuna cuts in—literally invading the flashback—to ask why he even cares.

It’s clear that Nazuna, for whatever reason or reasons, wants to bring him over to the very literal dark side. He can be a creature of the night too, if he wants to be. And that is, abstractly, what the show says for anyone; the only requirement for being an outcast, after all, is that you are cast out. Ko, at least in his own mind, already has been. The freaks come out at night, the question for Ko—and more broadly for anyone—is simply whether they feel they fit in more with them, or with the normal folks who thrive while the Sun’s up.

On another level; the extent to which Nazuna is a shamelessly bad influence adds further knots to the already twisty question of how “okay” any of this is. But personally, I’m less interested in the question of if Nazuna’s actions are in some way moral and more in the question of if this resonates both with its intended audience and more generally.

That’s a question that it will take the rest of Call of the Night’s thirteen episodes to answer, so for now, it’s an open one. But! I think this first showing is promising. Toward the end of “Night Flight”, the episode earns its title, as Nazuna gives Ko the thrill of his life whether he wants it or not.

She kicks him off of a roof, and lets him panic mid-freefall for a moment. Of course, she swoops down to save him, picking him up and carrying him away as ED theme kicks in.¹ In that moment, Call of the Night is pure black magic. If it keeps figuring out how to do that, it has nothing to worry about; the night is still young.

^{1: Also called “Call of the Night”, and after which the manga was originally named. I did not know this when I wrote the article and have updated the phrasing here and added this footnote to reflect the reality of the situation.}

Posted on July 2, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch LYCORIS RECOIL Episode 1 – Easy Does It

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

Erase, delete, eradicate, and beautify.

It opens like this; sunrise over a peaceful Tokyo, a gleaming monument to some sin or glory enshrined in the skyline. Our lead, Chisato Nishikigi (Chika Anzai), does stretches in front of her apartment window. A call comes in, and she’s out the door like a bolt of lightning. She monologues, extolling the virtues of Japanese politeness and the serenity of her hometown at dawn while the visuals supercut through scenes of high school girls packing pistols as they apprehend criminals. One appears to execute somebody. These are the Lycoris—named for the spider lily—agents who manufacture the peace that this Tokyo’s citizens enjoy.

Halfway across town, she arrives in time to see another such high school supercop toting a chain gun—that’s Takina Inoue (Shion Wakayama), our other lead—gun down a room full of arms dealers, and nearly hit one of her teammates in the process. Chisato, watching from a building over, whoops and cheers.

Takina’s stunt, meanwhile, gets her expelled from her department—the “DA”—and transferred to Chisato’s, LycoReco, which is rather inexplicably based out of a cafe. (This was the source of much of the show’s early promotional material.) There, she meets Chisato herself, the enigmatic owner Mika (Kousuke Sakaki), and alternately tries to adjust to her new role and openly wonders how she might find her way back to the force.

This, all of it, is Lycoris Recoil. This missile barrage of violence, cute girls, cafes, and tension-ratcheting authoritarian imagery is how it chooses to open. There have been anime somewhat like this before—Princess Principal, RELEASE THE SPYCE, to a lesser extent Assault Lily Bouquet—but of them, this might have the most openly bonkers, beat-your-fucking-head-in introduction of all. There is a sublime unease to the juxtaposition of Chisato’s cheery, upbeat narration and the blunt violence of what we see, even as all of the visuals have a sleek, modern edge that distantly recalls but does not actually look like its ancestors in the “girls with guns” boom of the 2000s. (Rest in peace, Bee Train.)

The episode’s second half sees some additional context. The Chisato and Takina’s unit handles what one might charitably call odd jobs. Chisato’s description is….vague.

They help out at a daycare, then a Japanese-as-second language school, and deliver rare coffee grounds to a mob boss. In the second half of the episode, they help a woman deal with a stalker. The woman’s stalkers turn out to be connected to the same arms deal that got Takina shunted over to Chisato’s unit, and Lycoris Recoil quickly establishes that in its world, everything is a connected, dizzying clockwork of interlocking plots and motivations. Coincidence is for suckers. That’s how we go from “three girls talking out a problem in a restaurant” to “hostage situation” in perhaps ten real-time minutes.

^{Takina actually intentionally lets the woman get kidnapped, to lure them out. Real piece of work, this girl.}

This is all also connected to a mysterious hacker named Walnut—think The Laughing Man from Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex if he had a fursona¹—and an eccentric, sinister billionaire named Allen Adams, who at one point we see cause an explosion in a building by remotely tapping a few commands into his Tesla’s touchscreen.

The inevitable and valid question is what all this adds up to, but the fact of the matter is that we simply don’t know yet. It’s clear that Chisato, despite her sunny front, has seen some things. The “symbol of peace” in Tokyo is evidently the result of some situation that she was involved with, and in deed, if not by name, she’s famous throughout the country. She lets a few remarkably cynical comments slip a couple times, and, frankly, given that supporting character Mizuki Nakahara (Ami Koshimizu) notes that Lycorises (Lycori?) are often recruited from orphanages, it’s not hard to imagine why. She and Takina’s original department also seem to have very different ideas of how to keep a place safe and worth living in; her narration—and her habit of helping out just about anyone—point to a belief in focusing on the community itself. And the DA, well, we see them shoot people. It’s not hard to draw a contrast, there.

That may well be the source of Takina’s already-established tendency to use violence as her first and only solution to any obstacle in her way. And this is to say nothing of the Lycoris Cafe’s owner, Mika, who himself seems to be an old hand in the field, the aforementioned villains, the DA’s director, who seems to have her own agenda, and on and on. There are a lot of interesting characters in Lycoris Recoil, and an absolute ton happens, even in its first 24 minutes.

No matter what happens from here on out; Lycoris Recoil should be remembered for a premiere that hits like information overload. Between the silenced pistols and shining city streets, conspiracies form in the broken glass on the floor. I won’t pretend to have all—or even any—answers, as this is clearly a series with a lot going on. But to me, that is part of the adventure. What’s next is unknown and unknowable, and for us to discover together.

^{1: I did not know this myself, but the text circling his avatar is a reference to a James Joyce story. God knows how that factors in to all this.}

Posted on June 25, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 12 – Penguin Park

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

Today, in its cour finale, Spy x Family circles back on its core strengths, those things that make it good in the first place. To wit; the series is an action comedy. There’s a lot of both in ” “. What more do you need?

Well, I don’t know about any of us, but Loid “Twilight” Forger really seems like he could use a few vacation days.

The opening minutes of this episode establish that, on top of the ongoing Operation Strix, Twilight has been picking up extra missions by the armful. (He blames a staff squeeze, and I see no reason to question his expertise.) He’s been getting home late often enough that the apartment complex’s local hens have started to notice, and some of the women in question even wonder aloud if he’s cheating on Yor. (He would never, and I’m vaguely offended at the notion.)

Determined to keep up the appearance of the Forgers being a normal family, Loid insists on taking them out for a weekend trip, suggesting the local aquarium. This proves to be a problem for two reasons. One; some of those local gossipy housewives are also at the aquarium. Two; Twilight’s agency happens to foist another mission on him as he enters the building, to retrieve a film roll smuggled into the country via penguin.

Things unfold as you might expect; Loid has to go undercover as a penguin handler in order to get close to That Specific Penguin, and in the process completely shows up the lead aquarist. He fights an enemy agent, who also wants to get his hands on that bird’s precious info. Said agent “kidnaps” Anya—by which I here mean that Anya clings to his shirt and shouts “I’m being kidnapped!”—and the predictable result is him getting his shit kicked in by Yor. Loid wins a giant penguin plushie for Anya.

It’s a good, solid, fun end to the series’ first half. A rounding-out as it closes the first cour. There’s also a pretty excellent post-script where Anya inducts her new “secret agent”—that is, the penguin plushie—to her spy agency. AKA, her apartment.

Spy x Family will apparently return with a 13-episode second cour in the fall season. Until we rendezvous once again; be seeing you, anime fans.

^{You are #006!}

Posted on June 24, 2022June 24, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 12

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

Heart to Heart! — Let your burning love reach everyone!

– Hoshin Culture Festival Motto

How do you open the two-part finale to your long-running love story? How about your heroine turning to stone and shattering? That’s the visual that Kaguya-sama: Love is War! opens on as its third season draws to a close; girl to granite to rubble. Why? Because Miyuki Shirogane is going to Stanford, and Kaguya Shinomiya knows she can’t stop him. And moreover, knows she shouldn’t.

It’s a visual metaphor, obviously; Kaguya-sama has loved those since it started and it certainly isn’t going to stop using them now. But, the literalization of the sentence “she was shattered by the revelation” gives you a pretty good notion of what we’re all in for here. If Love is War, this is the conflict’s turning point, where the generals and foot soldiers alike earn their medals.

Spare a thought for Hayasaka, who has been mostly-unwillingly playing both roles for ages now, and is who Kaguya goes to for comfort and advice as her carefully-laid plans for a full year of dating fall to pieces. Shirogane isn’t just going to Stanford, he’s graduating a year early to account for cross-Pacific grade differences. For us, it’s an elaboration as to why he’s been acting like time is running out, if it weren’t already obvious. For Kaguya, it’s a sledgehammer to the face. Love is a battlefield, and she’s been ambushed.

Hayasaka, again in her role as a beleaguered advisor, needles her mistress. If the day has to be today, then the confession of feelings—that old Japanese pop media trope so ingrained into the anime landscape that it’s practically part of the scenery—has to be perfect. Kaguya tries different phrasings, Hayasaka shoots almost all of them down. It’s amusing, yes. Kaguya-sama fully empties its bag of visual tricks here; starting with cheerleader-based how-to-confess diagrams and references to the ancient “yukkuri shitte ne” meme.

But the real emotional heft obviously comes when Kaguya-sama reigns it back in. As Hayasaka and Kaguya talk, the room is bathed in a scarlet sunset, and the core point the maid makes is simple; there aren’t any easy outs. Kaguya just has to tell the president how she feels about him somehow. There can be nothing else.

There is just one problem; in order to confess to the president, Kaguya has to find him, first.

In the meantime, theirs is not the only story freefalling through youthful confusion. As she searches high and low for Shirogane, Kaguya catches sight of Ishigami and Tsubame, which serves as a crossfade over to their side of the cultural festival.

Ishigami remains as oblivious-self-conscious as ever, paranoid about coming across as a “creep” for having a command of flower symbology while at the same time being still wholly unaware that what he intended as a simple kind gesture has been taken by Tsubame—and indeed the whole student body—as a declaration of romantic love. Here, Tsubame begs his patience, but because he doesn’t really know what she’s talking about, things get muddled; intentions swept off the ground in the December breeze, and the half-punchline that is Ishigami’s continued unawareness can only do so much to pop the winter evening ambiance. Unintentionally, Ishigami gives Tsubame until March, when the cherry tree they’re standing under blooms, to truly answer his feelings. The gymnast is surprised by his mental fortitude, and the whole sequence is funny, but also very sweet in its own way.

It’s only after the two part that Ishigami gets some sense of what he may have actually done. A festival play recounts the legend that gives the culture festival its heart motif, and our boy comes within striking distance of figuring out that giving hearts out is an implied romantic gesture. Still, the second Tsubame herself takes stage in the play, all rational thought goes out the window for Ishigami, and he promptly stops thinking about it.

But, even if things between them don’t work out, one gets the sense they’ll both be fine in their own way.

Back at our main story, though, Kaguya is lost in her own little world as she prepares to light the culture festival bonfire via flaming arrow. She manages an impressively skippy internal monologue the entire time, as We Want to Talk About Kaguya! leads Karen and Erika cameo off to the side of the scene.

^{I wonder if Aoi Koga gets paid by the word.}

^{Karen will write a doujin about this later.}

But the bonfire-lighting itself is swept aside as the mysterious “phantom thief Arsene” makes his presence known; the papier-mâché dragon jewel is gone, and the thief’s calling cards float in the air en-masse as a shadowy silhouette cuts a looming figure against the night sky.

Of course, no one but us knows that Shirogane is behind all this just yet. Notably, Fujiwara tasks herself with solving the mystery, only for her grandiloquent proclamations of her own genius to dissolve into a puddle as it becomes obvious that most of the ‘clues’ she’s found are either her own inventions or deliberately planted to throw her off. This is Kaguya’s puzzle to solve, and there’s only one actual hint.

Karen, in what is to my recollection her single most substantial contribution to Kaguya-sama‘s story, points out that the small calling cards are made of flame-resistant paper. This sets Kaguya’s own mental wheels a-turning, because that kind of care and preparedness reminds her of a certain someone, and it does not take long for the rest of the game to click into place.

And to give us all just the slightest airbrake of comedy before rocketing into its last half hour, Kaguya-sama then pulls out the one-two punch of “Kaguya dropped the plastic heart she was going to give Shirogane” and “Kaguya does not know how coffee machines work.”

^{Very good, Miss Shinomiya.}

Shirogane, meanwhile, is starting to get flustered. The usual pattern of his where he does something extremely teenager only to cringe himself half to death the following day beginning to kick in as the second day of the culture festival ends. The narrator puts it best; the final battle of this war of love is to be a fistfight.

Kaguya-sama: Love is War!‘s season finale is a fucking hurricane of romantic imagery.

Shirogane’s plan is grandiose, ridiculous, ostentatious, and the sort of thing that only a heartsick teenage boy could dream up. It leans hard on narrative convenience—the strings he’d have to pull make no real sense, and the post-hoc explanations given here don’t really either—and hard on pre-built character sympathy. If someone did this kind of thing in real life and you read about it in the news, they’d be a horrible creep and you’d hate them. This is a “proposing on the Jumbotron” gesture blown up to ridiculous fantasy proportions.

But that of course is part of the beauty of fiction. Kaguya and Shirogane love each other very much; we know this, and have known this. It’s been obvious to everyone, including much of the show’s own cast, for, at this point, real-world years. Anything that moves the needle at all is good. But this? This is insanity. Beautiful, wonderful, romantic insanity. If love is a sickness, Shirogane’s case is terminal.

He uses some mechanical doohickey to pop a massive balloon, sending scores of heart balloons out into the air above the festival, held aloft by the heat from the bonfire, the December night breeze, and the fact that anime is the highest form of art. Shirogane’s winding internal monologue about how he really wants Kaguya to confess first because he needs to feel equal to her only half makes sense, but that doesn’t really matter. None of the obvious little holes in Shirogane’s plan really matter. Do you see how hard Kaguya’s blushing? I got contact flutters from watching this. Frankly, I’m a little envious.

It would be one thing if it stopped there, but it does not.

This isn’t usually what one means when they say “popping the question,” but it certainly feels comparable.

Really stop for a second and think about what he’s asking there. Think about these two characters and their respective situations, think about the enormity of what he’s asking her to do. Even on its own, studying abroad is a huge undertaking. Studying abroad at Stanford University is quite another level beyond that. Doing so in Kaguya’s specific situation is yet another step beyond that. This is an absurd ask. Kaguya says as much.

She says yes anyway. An implicit fuck-it-all to her own upbringing and, really, her entire life up to this point. She doesn’t even really hesitate. She’s giddy, if anything.

They kiss. Obviously, they kiss. On top of a clocktower, hearts surrounding them in the air.

Elsewhere on the festival grounds, Hayasaka blushes like crazy once she realizes what’s going on, and Miko Iino, alone on patrol, is the only one not present at the bonfire. Ishigami brings her a recording—and a plastic heart trinket, for the lost and found—a much more subtly sweet moment that contrasts nicely with the star-scraping, wild gesture that Shirogane’s just pulled off. Could there be something between those two someday? I don’t think it’s impossible. (It will certainly be funny if Ishigami, the character that Kaguya-sama‘s least pleasant fans attach themselves to out of a misunderstanding of his character, ends up having to choose between two women who are into him, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)

And just like that, the festival switches off like a lightswitch, and we cut to the morning after. There is a postscript of sorts here; it’s very funny, and sweet in its own way, featuring a rare appearance from Kaguya’s childish “Kaguya-chan” personality. But with all I’ve said here, recapping that bit as well would feel a little pointless. It made me cackle out loud at one point, so you can consider that an endorsement.

It’s a valid question to ask; where, if anywhere, does Kaguya-sama: Love is War! go from here?

Well, not long after the episode aired in Japan, we got an answer of sorts. Whether that’s another season being announced, an OVA, a film, no one really knows yet. But Kaguya and Shirogane’s story doesn’t end here, and that’s the important part. I will spoil nothing, but there is much of the manga left to cover, so I am very curious as to what’s being planned. Kaguya-sama will appear here on Magic Planet Anime again, that much is almost a certainty.

But for now, the romantic rollercoaster ride has come to an end. Until next time, Kaguya fans.

^{Results for Today’s Battle: Mutual Victory}

Posted on June 20, 2022June 20, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episodes 11 – 12

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

The time has come for measure-taking. Healer Girl ended today. I will not make a secret my feelings; I absolutely love this show. It’s a soft, glowing rainbow light that revitalizes the soul. If you don’t have the patience for unchecked fangirling, I suggest you turn back now.

A certain kind of studio hound will want to know where I rank Healer Girl among Studio 3Hz‘ other two well-known originals—Flip Flappers and Princess Principal—but in truth I find them so different that any comparison would be irrelevant. So instead, I will say this; Healer Girl, regardless of whether it’s the best or anyone’s personal favorite, is certainly the most healing and soul-soothing of the three. How appropriate, given its name.

We’ll spend much of this article talking about today’s episode, the finale, but it’s important to discuss last week’s as well (which I wasn’t able to cover on time). The gist is simple; our girls have found themselves in a rut with their C-Rank exams dangerously near on the horizon. When they try to sing, their image song breaks, and each of them is yanked out of it by a trio of biting orca-like creatures. Ria has the idea to send them to a training camp of sorts, spearheaded by Reimi’s former maid.

Over the course of the camp, they visit museums, take a pottery class, go bunging jumping, and hike in the mountains. None of it helps, because even as the diverse experiences temper and strengthen their songs, an underlying issue isn’t addressed: jealousy.

There were a few broad hints before, but episode 11 foregrounds the fact that all three of our leads are, in one way or another, jealous of each other. Once again, Ria actually notices this long beforehand. At the end of the episode, we’re given a quick peek at her notes, and they’re pretty revealing.

In a way this represents the first major interpersonal conflict these characters have ever had, but it’s entirely believable that a trio of teenagers, no matter how naturally talented, might develop inferiority complexes over that very same talent. All this leads to perhaps Healer Girl‘s single most unexpected scene; a full-on shouting match between the leads, each of them venting their jealousy. Even this, it’s to be expected, is sweet in its own way, given that the three are mostly yelling about how talented each of them thinks the other two are. (If you’re a certain sort of person, I could imagine finding this saccharine. But if you are that sort of person, I doubt you made it this far into Healer Girl unless you’re also a masochist.)

It will not surprise you to know that getting all of this out is exactly what they needed, and indeed if you read Ria’s notes up there, you’ll see that having the three of them grow closer together on their own, without her interference, was the plan all along. The camp completed; they return for exam day.

The image song, as sung during their exams, is a thing of beauty. They are more in harmony after their little fight, despite being physically apart and taking their exams in different rooms, than they were together, and the results are spectacular. Kana in particular, perhaps the one among them with the most raw talent, metamorphoses into a butterfly-winged fairy as she sings, the orca rendered nothing more than a blooming flower itself.

They all pass, because of course they do.

As the episode’s obligate heartwarming post-credits scene ends, Ria cheerily announces that all three of them are expelled. It’s a slammed door played like a punchline, but the underlying idea—that she’s taught them all she can, and they now have to stand on their own two feet—is sound. Ultimately though, any expectation that they move on permanently is to be ignored. Spoiler alert; at the end of the show they rejoin Ria’s clinic. Again as understudies, but also as proper healers in their own right. Still learning, but able to stand by themselves.

Still, episode 12 does deal with the girls out and about on their own for the first time. It splits into three parts for its first half, showing us the month-long internships that the girls enter. Reimi cuts her long blonde hair short and takes up residence at Sonia’s clinic. Hibiki interns at the newly founded audio medicine department at the hospital from episodes 4 and 9. Kana, who the episode returns the central spotlight to, interns abroad, at a hospital in what appears to be California.

This part of the episode is charming, especially in its depiction of how the girls remain in touch even when physically apart. Although Hibiki and Reimi in particular aren’t actually far from each other, and it seems like they occasionally hang out at the clinic. (Where Hibiki might still live? I’m not totally clear on this.) In what is easily the episode’s silliest scene, they embody every meaning of the term “moé blob.”

In general, episode 12 is concerned with legacy and the meaningful passage of knowledge and love from one generation to the next. Ria spends much of it with her own mentor, Sonia’s grandmother, but the real clincher takes the form of multiple callbacks to episode 1. Kana, in a land where she does not speak a lick of the local tongue, nonetheless soothes a crying, lost girl in the hospital’s lobby. Unlike her technically unauthorized use of healing from that first episode, this is exactly what she’s supposed to be doing, and it’s only through her study under Ria that she can accomplish it. Thus, here on her own, she draws on both her own life and the legacy of those who came before her. This is a difficult thematic balance to strike, but Healer Girl pulls it off.

^{There is an extremely funny comment made by Abigail, the woman with brown hair on the left, where she’s startled by “what Japan’s C-Ranks can do.” This would maybe come across as a little self-aggrandizing if this scene took place anywhere but the United States. As someone who lives here; yeah, that’s fair.}

Later, when the threes’ internships end, Hibiki and Reimi get a cryptic email from Kana on the eve of her anticipated return to Japan. True friends and, apparently living in a world where commercial flight does not cost a small fortune, the two actually take a flight to California, where they find Kana helping out with the aftermath of a wildfire.

In any case, it’s on their return flight that Healer Girl makes this parallel between its first and final episodes most explicit. One of the passengers, a young girl, has an asthma attack. Our girls, of course, volunteer to help, directly referring back to the very incident that made Kana want to become a healer in the first place. I honestly cannot do this scene justice with words alone; the soothing song itself is one thing, but the imagery of Kana spiritually duetting with the younger incarnation of her master got to me in a way that I struggle to properly describe. The parallel invites you to imagine that the young girl they sing to might one day become a healer herself; wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing?

Amazingly, Healer Girl has another trick up its sleeve, its last, as the finale comes to a close. When the girls return home to Japan, they’re formally “given investiture” as healers (another of the series’ many strange and mystical religious parallels). And as they depart the graduating ceremony, they sing the song from the OP. The long version, with more verses.

Healer Girl—the very show itself—dissolves into magical dream sequence; their song fills the air like the light of drifting stars. Their friends and teachers come to join them. Is this all literally happening? Is it artistic license? A better question for you; who cares? In an interview, Director Yasuhiro Irie cited the Symphogear series as an influence on Healer Girl. These anime are, on many fundamental levels, very different. But they are alike in that both have a deep, intuitive understanding of the fact that with enough raw emotion, you can transmute literal events into symbols and back again.¹ So the question of whether this is “really happening” is irrelevant, what it is, is Healer Girl‘s case for itself. A definitive answer to the question of whether these twelve weeks have been worth it.

During this fantastical, mesmerizing ending sequence, any lingering doubt vanishes like shadows against the morning Sun. Healer Girl takes its final showman’s bow, and it exits, as suddenly as it arrived.

If you feel it, it’ll heal you. That’s all there is to it.

Song Count: In episode 11, just one, but they sing it four times, only completing it on the fourth. In episode 12, three in total, all of which are wonderful in their own way. If you’ve liked the show’s songs and have more money than I do, consider buying the soundtrack or official vocal album.

^{1: Incidentally, Hibiki Tachibana would make a great healer. And the girls from this show would probably be pretty good Gear-wielders as well. There’s a free idea for the four of you who read this site but also write fanfiction.}

Posted on June 18, 2022June 18, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 11 – Stella

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

Last week’s dodgeball plan out the window, Anya Forger needs to find a new way to earn Stella stars if Operation Strix has any chance of succeeding in the long term. In this week’s episode of Spy x Family, she finds a way, although not intentionally, and not without a fair bit of harrowing suspense beforehand.

The episode opens simply, with Loid again struggling with Anya as the latter’s grades continue to sink, although with a more understanding approach than we’ve previously seen. (Also, at one point Loid mentally refers to Anya as his daughter with no further clarifiers, which I think is sweet.) Even from the point of view of a mundane parent, Anya’s scores would be a problem; we see at least three F’s, and there may be several more, so clearly, he’s got to do something. Anya’s academic woes aren’t solved in this episode. Even as she has a fun internal monologue about how she can totally just read other peoples’ minds to cheat, and makes an attempt to sound like Loid while she does so, it’s clear that things need to change for Anya to have any hope of getting a Stella.

All of this vexes Twilight. And indeed, Anya’s ESP means that since she can read his mind, his worries become hers in a very real and immediate sense; a literalization of the idea that children tend to inherit their parents’ anxieties.

He does hit upon one possible solution though, a father-daughter “ooting” to a local hospital. There, he hopes that perhaps Anya acquiring a taste for volunteer work might eventually lead to her getting a Stella for being an exceptional community member. If not any time soon, at least eventually.

Loid gets far more than he bargained for. Initially, this is played for comedy. Anya, being a girl of recall, only five or so, is terrible at helping out around the hospital, first breaking a vase and then shirking her task to reorganize the hospital library by reading their comics section. (Presumably, something they keep around to entertain young patients, which Anya definitely falls in that bracket.)

Just when this gets bad enough that the Forgers are practically kicked out, though, something much more serious occurs. A young boy named Ken, attending a physical therapy session in the hospital’s pool room, idles around near the adults’ pool. Not paying much attention (do kids ever?) he falls in, and almost immediately “Stella” takes a turn for the significantly darker.

Ken cannot swim, and being unable to even thrash or make noise, he simply sinks to the bottom of the pool like a rock. The direction of the episode takes a sharp detour into the visually harrowing here, with the underwater shots especially composed like something out of a tragic drama. The boy is saved only by his own thoughts; mental pleas for help that happen to be picked up by our resident psychic.

In a visible panic of her own, Anya rushes off to the pool with a flimsy excuse to help. Thankfully, Loid gives chase, because even though her bravery is admirable and her desire to help equally so, Anya can’t swim either, and it’s only the fact that Loid hurries after Anya into the pool room that saves both her and Ken. A mission well done, if ever there was one.

Her role in Ken’s rescue is enough to earn Anya the titular Stella, her very first. She gets something vaguely akin to a henshin or other kind of visual power-up sequence as it’s put on her uniform, and it puts a sweet cap on what is otherwise a rather harrowing story. Perhaps more important than the Stella is the other thing Anya has earned: some self-confidence. For the first time, she considers that her powers might be able to actually help people. (And, of course, that this might make people like her. Something she’s also still not entirely accustomed to.)

The remainder of the episode focuses on the aftereffects of all this. Anya briefly gets a bit of a big head, in fact.

But unfortunately her hopes that having earned a Stella in a genuinely heroic fashion might endear her to her classmates are quickly dashed. Some nameless girls in class are straight-up mean about it, and even suggest she might’ve faked it somehow. Only for Damian (!) to, roundaboutly at least, stick up for her by telling the gossips that if they think Eden is such a cut-rate school that they’d hand out a Stella by accident, they should transfer. (He leaves out the part where the main reason he cares about Anya’s Stella being authentic is that it hurts his pride that she got one before him. And it would hurt even more if it weren’t genuinely earned.)

Anya’s little friend Becky also suggests, running on pure spoiled-little-princess logic, that since Anya did something good she should ask for a reward. Eventually, she hits on the idea of a dog (because, you see, Damian has a dog. And if Damian has a dog and Anya also has a dog they’ll have something to talk about. And that will lead to world peace. The mind of a first-grader is incredible. The mind of a telepathic first-grader, all the more so). Anya’s able to talk Loid and Yor into it fairly easily—though not without them respectively wondering about a dog’s utility as a house guard and threat level respectively—and the episode ends there, with the promise of Dog Shenanigans next week for the last episode of the first cour.

Except, there’s a little bit more. Somewhere in a mad laboratory-turned-hellish dog pound, a group of canines who’ve had something done to them—it’s not clear what—waste away in tiny, dirty cages. A pair of villains, obvious by their poor treatment of the animals, talk about their client, who they speculate will use the animals as “bomb dogs.” What the broader implications of any of this may be are presently unclear, but the camera focuses on one dog in particular as the episode fades out, and I do suspect we’ll be seeing him again soon.

Posted on June 18, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 11

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

We knew this day would come. There’s been a fire burning in Miyuki Shirogane’s heart since we first learned that he’d be transferring abroad for college, probably since before then. Hourglasses wait for no one, and Miyuki and Kaguya’s dynamic has shifted fairly drastically since the first season, or really even, the earlier parts of this season.

Episode 11 is, top to bottom, filled with the actions of a man who knows he’s running out of time, and running out of time fast. We learn at the very end of this episode that the transfer to Stanford is not some far-off thing, he’s been accepted. And will be skipping his last year of high school. Shooting for the moon is no longer an option; it’s a necessity.

But as much as this episode does to pour the powder in and light the fuse, the long-awaited confessionary gun does not fire just yet. That’s for next week’s episode, a double-length finale. This week, there’s a lot of tension, a lot of buildup, and, thankfully, still quite a lot of jokes. A ton of great visual tricks here, too, most of which I don’t have the space to discuss individually.

We begin with what I’m fairly sure is a deliberate throwback to the back-and-forth antics of season one. Kaguya visits a balloon tying table, which ‘just so happens’ to be staffed by Shirogane. Obviously, she wants him to make her a balloon heart, but in her own mind she still can’t just say that, leading to her giving out an increasingly ridiculous list of things that the balloon can’t be, culminating with her arguing that flowers are animals. (It’s complicated.)

Notably, in this and a few other nods to the first season’s structure, Kaguya and Shirogane’s roles are reversed. It is now Kaguya who is at a distinct “disadvantage” when it comes to playing these little games. Notice, for instance, how things turn when she finally gets her heart balloon, and finds out that you don’t pay for them with money like you do any of the other designs.

Whoops!

Flustered, she slaps far too much money down and flees. It’s funny, but it does also show that Kaguya and Shirogane are really no longer even doing the same thing. When they both thought they had all the time in the world to work this out, the stakes were relatively low. Now that Shirogane, at least, knows that that’s not the case, he has much less to lose. (Arguably, he never had anything to lose in the first place other than perhaps a misplaced sense of pride, but you know how teenagers are.)

Eventually, Kaguya encounters Tsubame, who is having a tough time figuring out how to respond to Ishigami’s unintentional confession. Specifically, figuring out how to turn him down. She’s used to turning down playboy types who think they’re entitled to her, but Ishigami’s confession was (from her point of view, see last episode’s recap for how this whole mixup happened), sincere and straightforward, and that’s not something she knows how to deal with.

It’s not even, really, that she doesn’t like Ishigami. She just doesn’t know him very well, and is concerned that being in a serious relationship would damage other areas of her life.

Kaguya, always with a minor in villainy, initially assumes that the person she’s talking about must be someone else—and thus one of Ishigami’s rivals—and in the process she very nearly convinces Tsubame to shut him down in perhaps the worst way possible.

Thankfully things eventually clear themselves up. Kaguya and Tsubame eventually find themselves spying on Chika, who deals with the out-of-the-blue confession that she gets by challenging her would-be beaux to a quiz and then spouting koans at him.

There’s also a short scene where Iino very nearly gets sweet-talked by a pair of random incidental characters. Girl really needs to be more careful (thankfully Ishigami is there to bonk her on the head).

The remainder of the episode sees Kaguya run into Shirogane again. He promptly invites her to walk around the festival, and once again, Kaguya does not entirely know how to deal with Shirogane’s suddenly much more blunt personality. When she asks him if people won’t get the idea that they’re on a date, to which he promptly responds….

….again, he knows he’s running short on time. All of this is fairly interesting in that outside of the context of Kaguya-sama as a series itself, it wouldn’t be that notable. But within that context, knowing what we do about both of these people, Shirogane’s sudden comparative boldness is pretty striking.

This includes, for example, taking her to a fortune telling booth manned by a girl known for asking questions that border on the lascivious. Meet Yume Atenbo (Ai Kakuma). She’s what some sorts of people, a long time ago, would’ve called a one-scene wonder. She gets in, does her thing, and gets out. She’s kind of amazing, an opinion I definitely don’t hold in part because she’s dressed up as a witch and my Twitter account is called “Jane the Anime Witch.”

She needles the two to the point of, frankly, harassment. (As always, romcoms are not a good place to get your notions of proper romance or just behavior in general from, kids.) But she does also drop this particularly interesting bombshell in between all the quips about how Kaguya will make a great wife.

Is she just messing with them? Is she playing cupid? Does she have actual supernatural insight somehow? Who knows, but no matter the method, she is actually right, as we’ll come to see. She also compares Kaguya to pure water; someone whose very nature changes depending on who she surrounds herself with. (I would argue this is true of all people to some extent, but that it’s truer of Kaguya than most would not necessarily be wrong.)

The both of them flustered (but definitely happy), Kaguya and Shirogane spend much of the remaining day together, after a hilarious sequence where the two narrowly avoid having their date ruined by random interference from their friends. (My favorite of these involves Iino, who is hungry, and gets abruptly drafted into a soba-eating contest out of nowhere before she can even talk to the two of them.)

Near the end of the episode, Kaguya has this absolutely adorable thought.

The only thing putting a damper on this happy ending is what I mentioned back up there in the very first paragraph. Shirogane needs to talk about something serious, and it’s not what Kaguya would’ve wanted to hear.

Can they make it work out somehow? Will Shirogane actually find the nerve to confess his love? Will the mysterious phantom thief stealing up all the heart balloons ever be caught? (Yeah, that whole plot runs throughout the background of this episode, too. It’s why Chika’s in her Love Detective uniform up in the banner.) All of these questions and more will be answered next week in the finale. See you then, Love is War fans!

Bonus Hayasaka Screencap, which I have been shamefully forgetting to do: Here’s Hayasaka giving a full-on idol performance during the school festival.

Posted on June 12, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 10

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

This week; festival stuff, beginning with the haunted house that was teased at the end of last week’s episode. Even in just this opening scene, we get a lot of interesting xx. Kaguya and her cousin Maki alike prove to be cowardly within the haunted house proper, and when we flash back to how all the spooky 3D sound (yes, 3D sound) was recorded in the first place—by subjecting Miko to it—and we get maybe the only Love is War! segment that might cause untoward awakenings in certain viewers. Seriously, if you showed some of these stills to someone out of context they would very much get the wrong idea.

^{Thankfully I’d never do that to my loyal readers.}

More to the point, back in the present, Miko catches a couple making out in the haunted house and as a result the attraction gets separated into two lines; one for boys, one for girls. By coincidence, this also ruins Ishigami’s initial plan for getting an ideal opening to confess his feelings to Tsubame, so he has to do something else instead.

On the spur of the moment, while visiting a class cafe, he wins a gigantic heart-shaped cookie for her, with the intent that doing so would just be a nice gesture. Dramatic irony ahoy, he is unaware of the whole “eternal love” urban legend, singled out by the narrator as one of about 10% of students who doesn’t know about it. This leaves Tsubame a blushing, mess, and, flustered, she runs off screaming that she needs time to think about his inadvertent confession.

And friends, let me tell you, I am someone who is pretty sensitive to second-hand embarrassment. Ishigami accidentally(!!) confessing to his massive crush on Tsubame in front of her own class, a good 20 or 30 people, did not just make my skin crawl, it made my spine shuffle around like a deck of cards. I could feel my teeth conspiratorially whispering “get a load of this guy” to each other. My hair stood on end and metamorphed, Bayonetta style, into that one meme of girls at a college party looking awkwardly at the camera. The cringe is real, and it is inside of Ishigami. I have not felt this bad for the guy in quite some time.

Later in the episode, Shirogane and Chika wonder aloud about Ishigami’s chances. Shirogane is hopeful, admittedly because if Ishigami isn’t successful, it might ruin his ability to pull off his own forthcoming confession. Chika, meanwhile, says Ishigami “doesn’t have a prayer.” Comedic rudeness aside, she does think pretty hard on Ishigami’s chances, despite her initial assessment, including grading him on “points” and trying to put herself in Tsubame’s shoes a bit. This facet of Chika has always been pretty interesting to me. What she’s doing here—treating romance between two people as an object of amusement or for study—is fairly representative of someone with a para-romantic personality. If she’s seriously interested in any crush or anything of the sort of her own, we don’t hear about it here, and I’m pretty confident we never will. (This does have the unfortunate effect of sidelining Chika any time the anime starts focusing more heavily on its dramatic side.)

My armchair psychoanalyzing of Chika aside, she indicates that thinking on it more, she actually does think Ishigami has a chance, and it is always nice to see her being genuine.

Elsewhere, we’re reintroduced to Moeha, who you may or may not remember as Chika’s younger sister. She’s also basically Chika But Sadistic, although that angle of her personality is toned back here, since this segment focuses on her newfound crush on Shirogane.

Yes, Shirogane now has another girl who thinks his dead-eyed sleep deprived stare is the sexiest thing in Japan. There’s even a great moment where Kaguya, who is initially very hostile upon finding out about this, has a “could this be one of my people?” sort of reaction as the two gush about that very feature of his.

Before that, it’s Chika who tries to sabotage the relationship, by demonstrating how terrible Shirogane is at various things. She picks a pretty random task—juggling—and sets him to do it, assuming he’ll be as awful at that as he was at singing, rapping, playing volleyball, and however many other things. Naturally, because of the laws of comedy, he’s actually pretty fantastic at juggling. And the three or four other things Chika tries to have him do.

That particular segment ends with this, a casual reminder that Moeha has a particularly warped personality. But hey, at least she’s funny about it.

Post-credits, we find out that someone’s stolen all the heart-shaped balloons at the festival! Truly, an unprecedented crime! The heist of the century! Who could our culprit be?

The Magic Planet

Category: Let’s Watch

Let’s Watch CALL OF THE NIGHT Episode 2 – Do You Do LINE?

Let’s Watch LYCORIS RECOIL Episode 2 – The More The Merrier

Let’s Watch CALL OF THE NIGHT Episode 1 – Night Flight

Let’s Watch LYCORIS RECOIL Episode 1 – Easy Does It

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 12 – Penguin Park

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 12

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episodes 11 – 12

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 11 – Stella

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 11

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 10