Category: anime

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Radiant Magic of YOHANE THE PARHELION -SUNSHINE IN THE MIRROR-

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.

As I type this, a thunderstorm is passing over Chicago, where I live. I can hear the wind battering at my window and the rain tap tap tapping against it. In this way, there could perhaps be no environment less suited for Yohane the Parhelion -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR-, an interesting project that, as its title implies, is nothing but a warm column of sunrays on a breezy summer day.

I have to confess, I wasn’t going to originally cover Sunshine in the Mirror. It’s a decidedly peculiar spinoff of Love Live!! Sunshine, perhaps the franchise’s most well-regarded entry, which reimagines its characters by placing them in a fantasy setting wholly divorced from our own world. I have, plainly put, never seen Sunshine, so I was worried I’d be missing some context here. But, a few words of encouragement from a friend1 that it’s amenable to franchise neophytes (which, having seen only the two seasons of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club and Love Live!! Superstar! I would say I might still count as one) and, moreover, actually watching the episode itself, convinced me otherwise. This is just a mercilessly pleasant anime, going by its first episode. It also interacts with its immediate predecessors—mostly Nijigasaki—in some interesting ways that we’ll get to. But really, the main thing here is just that it is such a ray of sunshine. I haven’t felt this relaxed and refreshed while watching an anime since Healer Girl premiered over a year ago.

There’s something else, too, which I’m not sure will be obvious to non-genre fans. This is the third out-and-out fantasy idol anime2 in just four years. (We’re here counting this, Healer Girl, and 2020’s Lapis Re:Lights, which might just end up going down in history as being ahead of a trend.) A certain strain of idol anime, of which the Love Live franchise is a huge part, basically already is fantasy. “School idols” and whatnot are not real things. They have about as much to do with the actual idol industry as Fist of the North Star does with actual martial arts. If they are already presenting a notion of idol music that is so unconnected to reality, why not embrace that? This is the question these shows are, intentionally or not, asking. They have other themes too of course (I could go on about Healer Girl‘s various layers for hours), but by inheriting a textually fantastic bent from the idol anime genre’s contemporaries (say, Symphogear) and its ancestors (most famously Macross), it frees itself from the leftover trappings of the idol genre proper. Frankly, I think this is wonderful. Leave that to anime that are actually interested in dealing with the ins and outs of the industry. If you want to be fantastical, be fantastical. And that, in a nutshell, is what Sunlight in the Mirror is aiming for. It’s easily the most high-profile of these, and it’s definitely at least trying to be one of the best.

Even so! In the beginning you could be forgiven for thinking the whole fantasy world conceit is a little odd. The core story here, where our protagonist Yohane [Aika Kobayashi] reluctantly returns home after an unsuccessful two-year journey in the big city to get signed as a singer, could easily fit in a more conventional idol anime. If you’re not paying attention to the sumptuous backgrounds, you could conceivably even miss that this is an original setting at all. I have to admit that in the episode’s first third or so, I had some difficulty connecting with it. “Love for your hometown” is not exactly a theme that deeply resonates with me, personally, as someone who also left a podunk town to live in the big city, albeit not for entertainment career-related reasons. Still, Yohane herself, as an incredibly overconfident failgirl in a ridiculously flashy outfit, is an immensely likable protagonist. Even moreso when she’s teamed up with her talking dog(!!!!!!!!) / surrogate sibling Laelaps [Yoko Hikasa], who tolerates absolutely none of her bad attitude and forms a very fun dynamic with her.

Really, as far as actual plot, not a ton happens in this first episode. Yohane returns to her hometown, mopes around a bit while Laelaps needles her about it, tries (unsuccessfully) to avoid reconnecting with her childhood friend Hanamaru [Kanako Tanatsuki], who works at a local bakery. But there are two big things that point the way forward for Sunshine in the Mirror. One is a total question mark, and the other, where the show really leans into its strengths, is absolutely beautiful.

Firstly, while Yohane is making awkward small talk with Hanamaru, a bizarre psychic shockwave of some sort resonates across the entire town, and we’re shown the puzzling image of some kind of shadowy portal opening between the branches of a tree in a nearby forest. It’s hard to say what’s going on there, exactly, but I will just put forward now that if the climax of this anime involves our girls defeating some kind of demonic invasion by singing at them, I will be entirely here for that.

Secondly, late in the episode Yohane revisits a childhood landmark; a massive tree stump that, as a kid, she used as a personal stage. She would sing and wave around a stick like a conductor’s baton, it’s all very cute. What’s much better though is that, when a concerned Hanamaru joins her near the stump, she convinces Yohane to sing for her, and it’s here where Sunshine in the Mirror cashes in its most brilliant, yet, in hindsight, totally obvious idea.

She sings; the song is great, the visuals are great, a triumphantly lonely number set to rolling shots of a brilliant blue sea and vibrant green grass, where Yohane faces herself in the mirror, awakes from a long sleep on a giant black flower, and bursts away cottony shadows with a bright flash of lilies. In fact, Sunshine in the Mirror here uses the same “image stage” technique that fellow Love Live entry Nijigasaki High School Idol Club created and perfected. But the biggest moment here is actually when this little mini music video ends, and reveals that, actually, no it doesn’t.

We see Yohane’s costume glitter and glow as it changes from what she wore in the image stage back to its usual, very extra self. The strongly implied is made textual mere moments later; this is real, actual magic. Everything we just saw is what Yohane’s audience of two saw as well. Perhaps the most dramatic change is what happens to the little stick she’s again using as a conductor’s baton. It transmogrifies, evidently from the pure, literally spellbinding force of Yohane’s song, into a fox-headed magic wand. It’s an absolutely wonderful touch, and it makes complete sense as a further evolution of Love Live‘s visual splendor.

The only bad thing is that you only get a chance to do this particular reveal once. It’s a hell of a flourish, but it’s a one-off by its very nature. It can’t carry the whole show. The good news is that, of course, it won’t have to. If its first episode is any indication, Sunshine in the Mirror can get by just fine on emotional honesty, gorgeous production values, and simply by being an irrepressible blast of sunny magic. What a lovely way to start the summer season. What else could you ask for?

1: hi Josh

2: While this is the obvious name for this particular genre fusion, I’ve never heard anyone else call them this. Did I just coin a term? I’ll happily take credit for doing so, if I did.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) MAGICAL DESTROYERS Flames Out Forever

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

“If I round up, I’m basically 30.”

Well folks, I’ll admit it. I’ve basically been had.

That’s dramatic, but it was legitimately my first thought upon sitting down to write this piece. Where to begin? I’ve gone to bat for Magical Destroyers, even as I’ve gone back and forth over whether or not I thought the show was actually, you know, any good. Now that it’s over, we can settle the question with a definitive “no.” It’s not even the high-speed trainwreck some might’ve been hoping for. Taken on the whole, it is simply bad in a broadly disappointing way that feels all too familiar in the present anime landscape. Embarrassingly, this series—not the rightly polarizing but unquestionably effective Heavenly Delusion, not the relentlessly dramatic second season of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, not even the low-stakes fun of Dead Mount Death Play, but this series—is what I’ve written about most of the Spring 2023 anime crop. (Other than Oshi no Ko, at least.) This is embarrassing not because the show is bad, but because I let myself be taken in enough by its occasional moments of brilliance—moments that are real, and genuine, but do not do enough to justify the mediocrity around them—that I was convinced it would pull everything together in the finale somehow. That didn’t happen. Spoiler alert.

I won’t flagellate myself over this mistake, if it can be called one. Sometimes anime just aren’t any good, and if you go into every anime expecting it to eventually become the best version of itself—and I generally do—you’re going to sometimes be disappointed. That’s just how the game goes. I might feel worse if I had a larger audience and had inspired legions of people to watch this, but I didn’t. To be honest, I don’t think much of anybody, inside Japan or out, watched Magical Destroyers. Nonetheless, because I was so convinced I’d eventually be vindicated, I feel something of an obligation to try and take the show apart and see why, specifically, it doesn’t work. Because I do think that much of what little criticism of Magical Destroyers there has been has been misaimed, in that it assumes that this is an idea that could never create a good or even great TV show. I don’t agree with that, I think Magical Destroyers had many opportunities to be brilliant, and more than one chance to salvage things once they started going off the rails. It blew almost all of those opportunities, which is, in my mind, worse.

But we’re starting with the conclusion, here. It’s probably best to lay out what Magical Destroyers actually is, for those of you just joining us. Here’s the very short version; Magical Destroyers is an admittedly novel fusion of magical girl trappings and some stylish red-and-black anarchist chic paint with what I’ve taken over the past few years to calling the otaku action anime subgenre. It ends up doing rather little with this fusion, but that’s the general idea.

About the otaku action anime microgenre. These shows, of which there are only a small handful, are all broadly similar; they combine the general highs and the structure of action anime with a premise that asks what would happen if society’s general dislike of the weird and socially awkward—specifically in the form of otaku themselves—were actively persecuted, like a dissident political movement. It’s an indulgent thought experiment, to be sure, but as I said back when this show premiered, it’s not a wholly irrelevant question. In the US alone, bans on artistic expression designed to catch minorities in their net are a real thing, and have been an ongoing issue especially this year specifically. Extrapolating from stuff like that into a full-on nerdocide is still pretty out-there, but it’s not entirely crazy. Especially if the show in question actually does something with that connection. Magical Destroyers really doesn’t, but other anime in this subgenre occasionally have, most notably 2021’s Rumble Garanndoll and its direct line-drawing between hatred of “undesirable” subcultures and out-and-out fascism, an observation that is actually pretty on point. (The other entry in the genre that sticks closest to this model is Akiba’s Trip. Not as good as Rumble Garanndoll but still decent, certainly. Slightly farther out, dealing in different specifics, are the second half of Anime-Gataris, undersung metafiction clusterfuck Re:Creators, and emotional fireworks display The Rolling Girls. All of these are better than Magical Destroyers, some significantly so.)

Magical Destroyers’ twist on the formula is that the otaku are being persecuted by a dictatorial being named Shobon, a man with a TV displaying a (•ω•) face for a head, and his army of similarly-decorated troops. They round up otaku and put them in reeducation camps and confiscate their stuff. It’s all a big to-do. But of course, there is a rebel army, led by our protagonist Otaku Hero [Makoto Furukawa], and aided by his three weed-smoking girlfriends1, the magical girls Anarchy Red, Blue, and Pink [Fairouz Ai, Aimi, and Tomoyo Kurosawa]. I’m being glib because the specifics really aren’t important here. The first half of the series follows a broad threat-of-the-week format that it mostly (but not entirely) manages to make work. The first three episodes are legitimately pretty great, especially the second with its Pepto Bismol-pink psychedelia, and if that were all there was of the show I would think fairly highly of it.

Unfortunately we hit our first major obstacle soon after, with a truly tasteless fanservice-focused episode. Things pick up somewhat again after that, but the show becomes markedly spotty from there on out.2 Throughout, it often threatens to make a greater point beyond its core slogan—and slogan really is the only appropriate term for the constant repetition and variations on the phrase “people should be able to like what they like”—but always backs away when that would jostle the show’s status quo. This is an absolutely bizarre approach for an anime about a group of rebels fighting against an oppressive government to take. Forget any specifics here, this is just bad writing in the broadest sense possible.

Sometimes, it gets by on audacity, style, or weirdness. The show’s visual quality is inconsistent, but the episodes that look good can stand up to anything else from this season. The aforementioned episode 2, along with a few other highlights, namely episodes 9 and 11, are full-on standouts. In addition, the show’s stylish, post-modern take on the whole “bank system” idea, where certain elaborate sequences are made to be reused many times throughout the course of a show’s run, is pretty great. All three magical girls have really great henshin sequences that we get to see a few times, and they have similarly fun attacks that really pop, despite the fact that we only get to see a majority of them once or twice each.

The character writing is similarly of variable quality, but Anarchy, who serves as a secondary protagonist, is great when given proper opportunity to shine. She’s a loud-mouthed hothead with a showoffy streak and a sensitive side that she reserves for (of course) Otaku Hero himself. It’s nothing revolutionary, despite the show’s posturing, but it’s decently compelling stuff. (Blue is also fairly entertaining, if one-note. I could imagine being offput by her, but to me the idea of gender-flipping the “moron pervert who is unfortunately a protagonist” character archetype is actually pretty funny. Pink, a druggie who can only speak in the phrase “gobo gobo”, is much less compelling.) Even Otaku Hero himself isn’t a bad character per se. Despite the vibes that the show’s 1 guy 3 girls setup might give off, he doesn’t really feel like a harem series protagonist, and doesn’t much feel like a self-insert or otherwise generic either. He can even almost spit some decent rhetoric in the show’s better episodes. But again, any time the show has to get more specific than “people should be able to do what they want,” it backs off, and this kneecaps everything about the series, top to bottom. For much the same reason, the crowd of nerds who make up the Otaku Revolutionary Army is pretty narrow, too. They’re uniformly—and specifically—Somewhat Unattractive™ Dudes From Japan, with the only exceptions being Pink’s band of nightclub warriors and literally two (count ’em, 2) indie idols we see join the ORA’s ranks later on. Even the show’s visual style isn’t all-upsides. There are episodes that look outright bad, and even the good ones are often extremely homage-heavy, which can be a good or at least fun thing, but we aren’t talking about Kill la Kill here. Magical Destroyers does have style, but it doesn’t have enough to make that approach work.

Really, the fact that I’m having to get so specific and caveat-heavy with the show’s positives says a lot on its own, doesn’t it? You could say things like this for any anime that’s not truly terrible. And that’s really the issue, Magical Destroyers isn’t truly terrible, and I’ll probably never actually dislike it. I like too much about what it could’ve been for that, and what the show actually is feels too slight to warrant hatred. But that doesn’t put it above the level of, say, The Detective is Already Dead, another anime I’ve fostered a somewhat inexplicable even to myself attachment to despite it being fairly mediocre.

So to round us out, the question must be asked; what was Magical Destroyers actually trying to do, if anything? Be a real rallying point for otaku counterculture? Establish a lasting multimedia series that would persist well after the anime itself is over? Just simply be a good action anime with more highs than lows? It accomplishes none of this. Which is a shame, because there’s some real love in this thing if you know where to look. Certain individual animators and episode directors clearly cared a lot about the show’s visual angle, and most of the voice talent turn in good to great performances, especially Ai Fairouz, who, when she gets the chance to truly chew scenery as Anarchy, is just as unstoppable here as she was as Power in Chainsaw Man last year. Unsurprisingly, this combined with the fact that Anarchy is actually decently-written makes her the show’s best character by far. Looking back on the first two episodes I’m left to wonder if the show wouldn’t be more coherent if they focused on her a little more. It’s hard to go wrong with such a delightful little firecracker.

But again, none of this ever comes together to present any kind of coherent theme. The fact that I’ve seen all twelve episodes and couldn’t really tell you what the show is about on any level except the most literal is kind of a problem! “People should be able to like what they like” is a reddit comment, not a core thesis you can hitch your whole show on! This is to say nothing of the whole kerfuffle involving Origin in the show’s final arc, the goddess who it seems to present as sort of an ur-anime viewer. This idea is simply not around long enough to ever be developed in a really coherent way, and it ends up being just another extraneous idea that the show briefly plays with but doesn’t actually engage with in any meaningful way.

But perhaps the most telling problem with Magical Destroyers is not anything obvious. It’s how the show treats youth as a concept. One of the very, very few coherent thematic lines through the series comes from Otaku Hero getting older. This article’s lead-in quote is from him, reflecting on his life in his last moments as he’s killed by the now-evil magical girls in the final episode, the climax of a conclusion so pointless as to feel deliberately insulting. On the one hand; same, buddy, I’m 29 myself. But there is something genuinely dark and offputting about this alluded-to notion that it’s better to die as a young otaku than to live to be an old one. It’s also complete bullshit! I personally know more than one person still active in the fandom who is over 60, and those people have stories! Stories that matter and are interesting! The only positive gesture in this direction are the characters of the Kanda River Squad. Their big character moment is to engage in a pissing contest with the young’ns about whether or not they’re “real” otaku all the way back in the loathsome fourth episode of this show. It’s pretty dire that all this is the only coherent theme to be pulled out of this series, other than it’s incredibly weak sloganeering.

In another lifetime, Magical Destroyers could have been something truly special. Maybe there, its talk of revolution isn’t all only just that and it actually has some bite to it. Maybe there it’s more even, maybe it has stronger writing, maybe it has the self-awareness to call out problems within the otaku subculture too, and not just pretend everything is a black-and-white us vs. them scenario. But of course, this thing we’re constructing, an anime about four real revolutionaries whose adoption of anarchist rhetoric is more than costume-deep, is not actually Magical Destroyers; it’s a dream on a cloud. It’s easy to say how things might have been different. And as I always say, you review the anime you watch, not the one you wish existed.

Magical Destroyers, as it exists, is a sign of an anime industry in a fairly dire place. Sure, it’s still better than the lukewarm backwash of the isekai boom, and it’s too ridiculous to be in any real way morally repugnant, but, really don’t you want more out of your anime?

Maybe I’m just getting old—as I said, Otaku Hero and I seem to be about the same age—but at some point, watching things like this just becomes depressing. It’s not the worst anime of all time or anything, and it’s not even the worst I’ve seen this year, but it is one of the most pointless. There’s something to be said for being memorably weird, and Destroyers definitely at least clears that bar, but maybe that’s not always enough to make a show worth watching on its own. In the end, there’s not really anything for anybody here. Other than the lingering suspicion that these girls deserved better.

1: This is a joke, of course. There is no actual weed usage in the show, since that would require actually pushing the envelope. God forbid an anime with a loose “anarchy” theme be on the same level of transgression as A Woman Called Fujiko Mine, an anime from 11 years ago.

2: I feel the need to point out that I briefly consulted Wikipedia to check my episode order was correct here. In doing so, I noticed that no one has uploaded titles or descriptions for the last two episodes, proving that even the diligent Anime Wikipedia community is having trouble staying invested with this one.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

Anime Orbit: The Immaculate Vibes of PlutoTV’s 24/7 SAILOR MOON Channel

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

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

At the risk of sounding like the caveman a decade late to the discovery of fire; hey, have you guys heard about this crazy thing called streaming?

No, but seriously. On-demand streaming has been a huge gamechanger for anime and its visibility in the west, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that we’re in the midst of a second anime boom following the original wave in the 90s and early 00s. However, that’s fundamentally changed how people actually engage with anime.

Allow me to put on my old woman voice for a minute. Once upon a time, it was not necessarily expected that you see literally every single episode of every single anime you were interested in. Following things on TV—usually on anime-focused linear TV blocks like Toonami—was an accepted thing, and only the truly grognardy would give you any shit about it. This isn’t really how things work anymore, with the rise of services like MyAnimeList and its primary competitor Anilist turning anime-watching, at least for some, into a number-checking competition. I’m hardly the first person to make this observation and it’s not unique to anime (Letterboxd has done a similar thing to film in general, for example), but it’s definitely shifted the cultural norm.

Which is mostly fine, but it’s left some folks my age and older a little cold, mostly because some of our strongest early anime memories aren’t things that we’ve technically seen every single episode of. Case in point; Sailor Moon, one of Toonami’s lineup regulars, the only magical girl anime to ever make a major cultural splash in the US, and probably the first thing that ever gave me an inkling that I’d rather be a girl. Not being able to “count” these shows isn’t the hugest deal in the world, all things considered, but it’s a little aggravating. It’s something that’s stuck in my craw—however minorly—for years at this point, and I did at one point plan on watching the entirety of Sailor Moon front to back to “fix” this “problem.” I still might, but honestly, isn’t that kind of a silly motivation to do something? Just so you can check a few boxes on a website?

Maybe so, and if something’s helped me feel a little less like this is some holy task I have to undertake, it’s been PlutoTV’s free 24/7 Sailor Moon channel. Why does this exist? I could not honestly tell you. PlutoTV in general is something of a mystery to me, as are its contemporary free streaming services like Tubi. It’s a mishmash of well-regarded and totally obscure TV shows and films (and a few stranger things, including live gameplay footage. Isn’t that what Twitch is for?). Most of that is on-demand, but some of it is exclusive to their live TV channels which, just like any old linear TV station, run on their own schedule and are periodically broken up by commercial breaks The only real difference is that this one exclusively shows Sailor Moon. On a loop. Forever. It is perhaps the perfect TV channel.

Strangely, at no point while watching this channel—which I’ve done a lot over the past few weeks, mostly as a time kill between other activities or while trying to fall asleep—have I felt the need to actually start Sailor Moon over from the beginning. I’ve definitely never seen the whole thing end to end, but I remember enough of the setup that I’m never lost, despite Sailor Moon having a fair bit more of a proper mythos than some of its later successors in the magical girl genre, and the series’ still-killer aesthetic ensures I’m never bored with what’s on-screen. Sometimes it’s nice to just have something like this that makes your brain happy, and that really is what I primarily turn to the station for.

So, what is the purpose of this article, then? I’ve struggled with that a little bit, to be honest. But sometimes I really do just want to tell you guys about something nice that I found and want to share with the world. I have no idea how well-known PlutoTV is, but I’ve personally never seen anyone else talk about it. Maybe I’m going to usher in the world’s biggest collective ‘no duh’ with all this, but that’s fine. Perhaps all I really wanted was to remind everyone that Sailor Moon is pretty great no matter how much or little of it you’re watching.

And hey, if Sailor Moon isn’t your speed, they also have 24/7 channels for One Piece, Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Lupin the 3rd. Pick your poison.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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

Posted on in anime

Cessation of Coverage for OSHI NO KO, Effective Immediately

Hello, friends. Sorry for the lack of communication recently.

I want to keep this very short and to the point, since my intention is not to moralize at anyone or to get anyone to drop the series itself. Put very briefly, I will not be covering Oshi no Ko going forward in any capacity on this site, with the possible exception of it appearing on my year-end list, if indeed I make one this year.

I don’t really want to get into the details, but if you’ve been following the series, and particularly the fandom’s activity for the past few weeks, you can probably imagine why. Suffice to say, it’s not the fault of anyone reading this. I just don’t really want to be associated with certain kinds of anime fandom, and to me personally, the association has become unavoidable. If I continue watching the series I will do so in relative silence.

I don’t currently plan to replace OnK’s slot with anything else for this season. I’ll see you when I announce the polls for the 2023 Summer Let’s Watch.

Sorry it had to end like this! I’m not happy about it either.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: MAGICAL DESTROYERS is So Fucking Back

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

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

Look, if I’m going to rant about a show for falling off I have to give it due credit if it gets back in the saddle, too. That’s just fair play.

On the other hand, I really do feel like I’m tsundere for this goddamn show.

It’s not like Magical Destroyers has really gotten any easier to understand since I last wrote about it just two short weeks ago. If anything, it’s retreated even further into its own little world. Subtext and any real stab at a larger theme have been set aside for the moment in order to riff on disparate tropes and styles from all over the last 20 years of anime history. I really wouldn’t say, even as it closes in on its final third, that Magical Destroyers seems particularly in a hurry to get anywhere. (Apparently, there’s a tie-in mobile game, which might have something to do with that.) But even as it’s seemed less and less concerned with making any kind of point, Magical Destroyers has rediscovered its love of style. That counts for something. At the end of the day anime is both an artform and a medium of entertainment; if you can’t swing a compelling take on the former, the latter is a pretty good consolation prize.

Case in point; the last two episodes. Last week, the series dove into an almost Sonny Boy-esque hallucinatory flicker, constantly going back and forth on whether what we were seeing was real or not. (It eventually gave us a definitive “yes,” which takes away only a little bit of the magic.) This week’s episode, despite being much less conceptual, is almost even weirder, though certainly not in better taste. How do you put a compelling spin on the yucky “brother and sister who are like, Too Close” trope? Well, I’m not sure it’s possible. But making them respectively a mutant severed head and a creepy The Shining kid respectively is certainly one way to at least try.

“She will never be ballin.”
*Spits out cereal.*

This is to say nothing of the series’ ongoing habit of warping its own aesthetic around the characters of the week. This can, as we’ve established, backfire. But put to the right ends, it can really liven up an otherwise fairly straightforward episode. The series really does get into some proper horror aesthetics here. It’s mostly loving pastiche rather than doing anything “truly original,” but that’s in-line with the series’ general aesthetic aims, so it’s hardly a bad thing.

It’s worth shouting out the series’ commitment to one-off magical attacks that seem like they should be coming out of a bank system, but aren’t. Blue whips out two new ones here, and Pink gets one as well (in both cases, after the girls in question have taken a shady empowering drug. If the show’s edgy sense of humor wasn’t your speed toward the start of its run, it won’t be any moreso now), and they’re a lot of fun.

As for the running B-plot of secondary villain Slayer, that finally comes back around here, too. Although mostly as a tease for next week’s episode. It’s pretty fun when she manages to out-aggro girl Anarchy herself.

All told, the series seems to be back on track. Or at least, as on-track as something this proudly idiosyncratic can ever be. For my money, that’s a good thing. I’m slef-conscious of the fact that this article, where I praise Destroyers, is shorter than the one where I yelled at it for getting lazy. But that is just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. (Ask anyone, it’s easy to write about things that are done poorly, it can be much harder to articulate why something works. Sometimes something is just cool because it’s cool.) And honestly, if all I truly have to say is “it’s back, baby!” why beat around the bush?

I’ve followed a lot of anime this season, and I’d while be hard pressed to say that Magical Destroyers is the best of the lot, but it’s damn memorable. In the seasonal churn, that counts for a lot.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch OSHI NO KO Episode 7 – “Buzz”

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

Last week, Oshi no Ko dealt with some extremely heavy subject matter; how reality shows manipulate the images of those starring in them, online harassment, attempted suicide. All very stark and very real problems, depicted in a harrowing light that cuts close to the bone.

This week, the series continues addressing some of these issues, but takes a different, more pragmatic approach, one informed by the character of Aqua himself. If you have to play this awful game—and if you’re in the industry and want to stay in the industry, you really do—how can you win? Akane wants to keep acting in spite of everything, and won’t quit Love Now despite her own mental health being in the gutter. In that situation, what can be done to shift the public opinion? How do you take control of a narrative that’s spun out that far?

Well, if there’s one thing Oshi no Ko is good at, it’s getting us to understand (if not necessarily sympathize with, that’s going to be a person to person thing) Aqua’s big plans. He takes this entire thing exactly as seriously as it deserves to be taken, and considers Akane’s actions a cry for help. So, he’s going to help her, even if that means he and his Love Now co-stars have to get their hands dirty to basically rewrite their own show. His plan is simple; they’re going to use a combination of filming and editing to present a version of Love Now from their own point of view; the “real reality show,” as Aqua puts it, in the form of an online video. While the ethical mores of this particular plan might be questionable, its ability to get the public at large back on Akane’s side is less so. Even more because Aqua has Love Now’s whole cast on his side; the guy knows what he’s doing. When time comes to acquire a key piece of raw footage, he even guilt-trips the show’s director in expert fashion. It’s captivating stuff, a performance of a different kind. (It’s also honestly a little scary, but hey, he’s an antihero.)

Sleepless nights of editing follow, ended by a Monster energy-riddled Aqua needing MEM’s help to finally upload the video. But the ploy works, and things end in more or less a settled fashion, as the internet firestorm finally subsides. Even if, as Aqua himself points out, the incident will probably still trail Akane from time to time for the rest of her career.

Love Now’s cast openly suggest that Akane might feel a little safer if she puts on more of a performance during the show’s tapings. Somebody offhandedly asks Aqua what kind of girls he likes, to take a suggestion, and the predictable happens.

(Interestingly, he doesn’t actually name Ai directly. Instead, he describes someone in generalities, and MEM, in a true brain-to-brain moment, tosses her out as an example of the kind of person Aqua’s thinking of.)

Akane, thinking that this Aqua guy is really nice, and maybe playing the part of his ideal girl might get him to notice her, does some character study.

By which, it must be clarified, I mean she does a lot of character study. We learn something pretty interesting about Akane here; she is the sort who needs to really get into the head of any role she’s going to play. Since Ai is now just another one of those roles, she spends some amount of time (it’s not entirely clear how long, but it seems like at least a few days) learning literally everything about her that she possibly can. Not just her public persona, but pulling tiny social tells out of random photographs and videos, making notes and taping them to her wall. It’s genuinely a little freaky, and of Akane herself, it speaks to the kind of person who feels a deep need to get lost in a performance and to fully inhabit it. And, if I can turn her lens back on her a bit, seems to suggest that she’s not really happy with who she is.

Nonetheless, in an aside, we learn that Akane is famous in the theatrical world as a true force to be reckoned with, and in the episode’s closing scene, we see why. By the time Akane returns to the Love Now cast, she’s dived so deep into Ai as a character that, when the camera starts rolling and she has to start acting, a pair of hauntingly familiar star designs appear in her eyes. Her voice actress imitates Ai’s manner of speech, the animators draw her with Ai’s rhythm of motion. She basically becomes Hoshino Ai. Aqua definitely notices; his shocked reaction is the last thing we see in the episode. (Complete with a killer cut to the ED, which unlike last week’s, absolutely fits here.)

Despite everything she’s been through, Akane is an absolute monster talent, and it’s heartening to see her given a chance to shine here after the awful mess she went through last week.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: When Did MAGICAL DESTROYERS Stop Being Fun?

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

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

It’s always a danger with this kind of show; anything that’s more than 30% or so pastiche by volume will get lost in the weeds if it spends too much time reminding you of other stuff instead of being good on its own merits, but that isn’t really the specific problem that Magical Destroyers has run into as it closes out its first half. Instead, the issues are more basic. It just isn’t much fun anymore; the show’s always-questionable taste, initially a forgivable quirk, has collided headlong with its lacking character writing, incoherent plotting, spotty pacing, and, as of the most recent episode, the visual side of things is also starting to fall apart. None of this is good, and even if the series recovers it will be, if remembered at all, rightly dinged for having a weak middle third.

You can map Magical Destroyers‘ episode quality over time pretty easily. After a strong premiere, an even better second episode that seems likely at this point to be the show’s overall highlight, and a solid third episode, cracks started to show around episode 4, where the entire thing is basically an excuse for some tasteless fanservice. Episode 5 is fine, and even seems to set up some ongoing plot threads for the episodes to follow, but the two that come immediately after it are easily the show’s low points. Episode 6 is a dull and pointless elaboration on the titular magical girls’ barely-there backstory, and episode 7 is just a top to bottom problem.

In episode 7, the girls face the second of the Four Heavenly Kings—gotta have those in an anime, of course—but in contrast to the brainwashed car otaku in episode 3, this guy is….an angry gamer named Adam who cheat at video games a lot until he was eventually banned from every online game. It really must be said, Adam has an unforgivably bland design for a show like this, and his AI girlfriend Eve (of course her name is Eve) doesn’t fare much better.

Adam of course traps our heroes in a virtual world where he has unlimited haxx0rz to torment them as he pleases. Except, he’s not very creative with any of this—which is maybe supposed to be a vaguely meta point about the sorts of people who are inclined to cheat at video games, but it doesn’t really come off that way—and his attacks are mostly limited to generic stuff like rocket launchers and pistols. The SNES-style JRPG mockup segments are a bit more interesting, but given how off-model the rest of the episode looks, they almost feel like an excuse to simply have the characters on screen less often.

While all this is going on, there is a massive battle happening back at the home base of Otaku Hero’s rebels. We’re shown approximately none of this, and despite the threat of Otaku Hero and the magical girls possibly not making it back home in time to save the day, the plot is simply resolved off-screen. This is indicative of the show’s poor writing at this point in general, plot points will be seemingly forgotten about or just dissolve mid-episode, proving to be of no real consequence. Anime in this “otaku action anime” genre do not have to be exquisitely-written, but they do need to have impact, and virtually nothing that’s happened in the past two episodes has had any.

On top of that, it must be said. No one comes to an anime like this for its themes, but watching it—again, especially this weak run of episodes 6 and 7—has made me realize just how well written some of them, in particular Rumble Garandoll, actually are by comparison. That series never lost sight of the fact that people who loudly express disdain for art and those who love it tend to have ulterior motives for doing so. There is a reason its villains were from an alternate timeline where Japan won WWII; they were literal fascists, whose hatred of otaku culture stemmed from it being indicative, in their view, of a weak mindset that did not sufficiently put the nation first. By contrast, Magical Destroyers‘ main villain seems to just hate otaku because they’re otaku. He gives a rather over-wrought speech in episode 6 that makes him come across like the sort of person who spends a lot of time on tumblr ranting about how fanfiction is destroying young writers’ minds. He’s still ultimately wrong, but the ideological scope is not there, and as such his plans—and the show’s entire plot as a consequence—come off as trivial.

Otaku Hero’s ideal of a world where you can “like whatever you want however much you want to like it” is a nice enough idea, sure, but it’s not very specific. Contrast Garandoll‘s broad messages of unity and inclusiveness—even accounting for that show’s own flaws—and you start to see how poorly Magical Destroyers‘ writing holds up even against other anime in its own very narrow genre. When Magical Destroyers began, I saw a few people express disdain at the fact that it took its own conceit seriously. That isn’t the problem; the problem is that it’s not taking it seriously enough to actually articulate any further ideas it might have. And if it doesn’t have any, if the only thought it has truly is “doesn’t it suck when nerds get bullied?” then that’s all the worse.

Finally, the show’s production has begun falling off as of episode 7, and as a result some shots and sequences look astoundingly poor, with low drawing quality and bad composition. One hopes it’s just a hiccup, but it’s genuinely hard to believe that shots like these come from the same anime as episode 2, which still stands as one of the single most visually inventive of the season. And for that matter, the show’s own stock henshin sequences, which stack up to any from any more conventional magical girl anime of the past decade.

Will Magical Destroyers recover? It’s not impossible. There are a few high points of episode 7; a bit where Otaku Hero and Anarchy rescue Pink and Blue sees them walking in on the two mid-Uno game, where Pink is “torturing” Blue by hitting her with a pair of Draw 4s. And there are a handful of good to great shots and cuts, although honestly that’s true of almost any anime (very few anime look uniformly terrible throughout).

And while it probably hasn’t sounded like it from most of this article’s tone; I am rooting for Magical Destroyers, here. I like stuff like this! There’s a real point to be made about how the persecution of art can abet the persecution of people, and while no show in this small genre has ever made it perfectly, they usually at least try. What’s really burning me about Magical Destroyers at this stage is that it feels like it’s not trying anymore. Not to beat a dead horse, but you’re going to go on and on about the glory of anime and manga, and then this My Hero Academia reject is the heat you’re going to bring?

I initially thought there was a method to this anime’s madness, but it really seems like it might just be making it up as it goes after all. For a show where the premise involves a rebelling army of nerd guerillas and a magical girl named Anarchy, it hasn’t really lit the fires of revolution under me.

Nonetheless, because I’m a mark, and because I tend to get attached to shows where my feelings on them change several times over the course of me watching them, if it ever does get its act back together, I’ll be the first person singing its praises. Come on, Magical Destroyers! Give me something to believe in!

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch OSHI NO KO Episode 6 – “Egosurfing”

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

Content Warning: The below article discusses self-harm and attempted suicide.

We didn’t cover last week’s episode of Oshi no Ko here on the site. (I’d like to pretend that’s for some grand reason, but to be honest it’s just a combination of the fact that I’ve been sick and also reading way, way, way too much Umineko: When They Cry.) So to give a quick recap; last week, Aqua was able to convince Kana to join Ruby’s fledgling idol group, the rebooted B Komachi. It was a fun, straightforward episode that has something in common with, say, last year’s Shine Post, even if Oshi no Ko on the whole is very different from that. Tragically skipping last week also means we won’t get to discuss Kana and Ruby’s “mentor” in the realm of online marketing, masked fitness Youtuber Pieyon, in detail. He’s a pretty great minor character, all told, even if Kana certainly doesn’t see it that way.

On the other side of the coin, we got Aqua finally joining the reality show, a dating / daily life program called Love Now, he promised to take part in a few weeks back. Love Now’s cast show is of decent size, but we’re mostly going to be focusing on three characters; the fashion model Sumi Yuki [Saori Oonishi], the livestreamer MEM-cho [Rumi Ookubo], and the actress Kurokawa Akane [Manaka Iwami]. Other than Yuki coyly flirting with Aqua, this part of the episode was mostly scene-setting. (It’s to OnK’s credit that it’s willing to walk around in the less obviously-glamorous parts of the entertainment industry. Few people dream of getting famous off of gimmick fitness videos or reality TV. It’s a stepping stone thing.)

The focus is again on Yuki as this week’s episode opens up; a theatrical outburst where she cries and talks about quitting the show is, of course, just her playing up her actual feelings for the camera. Aqua observes this—and seems to have observed a lot about his castmates—and places them into three distinct categories; Yuki and MEM-cho both get “skillful”, whereas Akane is relegated, in his view, to someone who doesn’t come across well and so gets little screentime. Indeed, Yuki remains the center of attention for the first part of this episode. Within Love Now itself, she sits at the center of a love triangle, and thus most of the show’s audience interest is funneled toward her. It’s easy to get the sense that while Yuki may or may not be manipulative, exactly, she definitely at least knows how to play to her own strengths. Through all this, Aqua and MEM mostly stay out of the way, and at one point MEM actually accuses Aqua of being rather unambitious.

One person that definitely isn’t true of, though, is Akane. Throughout the episode we see her taking notes on her fellow cast members, from the camera crew, and practicing various things; stretching, fencing, line-reading. Akane is a capital-A Actor, not unlike Kana. But that’s ill-suited to a reality TV series where the main draw is everyone acting more or less how they actually do, any playing up for the camera aside, and she happens to nearly walk in on her own manager being yelled at by one of the show’s producers. She needs to leave some kind of mark on the show, or she’ll be left behind.

Oshi no Ko does something interesting here; there’s a cut-aside to Ruby and Kana, where the former has to stop the latter from tweeting negatively about a lousy soft drink she bought. Kana’s point is solid, and she says it verbatim; in the social media era, the entertainers themselves are the product. This borderline-paranoiac attitude is normal in the industry, and it makes sense, in a way, too. The Internet is a big place, and the digital abyss loves nothing more than to gaze back.

For a while, it seems like Akane’s story might be one about what happens when you don’t keep that in mind. Determined to make some kind of strong impression on Love Now’s viewers after god knows how many sleepless nights of searching her own name on Twitter and finding very little at all, she tries playing the part of the bad girl, and makes a go at snatching Yuki’s not-quite-bfs away from her. This, to put it mildly, goes badly. In the middle of a (mostly-staged) argument, she makes a dramatic hand gesture and accidentally smacks Yuki across the face, scratching her cheek. What Akane and Yuki themselves think of this whole incident doesn’t really matter; the fact that it was caught on camera means that the audience is judge, jury, and executioner here. And if you’ve ever followed reality TV even a little bit, you know how nasty this kind of thing can get.

I don’t like to screenshot fake tweets, but it’s pretty necessary to discuss what happens here. There are a lot of them.

As we see this, the show dissolves into a swarm of voices; buzzing like flies around Akane’s head as she slowly withdraws from her own life, and encounters scathing rebukes of not just the inciting incident but everything she’s ever done and even her personality itself everywhere she goes, online and off. It’s pretty goddamn depressing, and it’s impressive that Oshi no Ko can manage to convey just how hard this stuff, which can seem trivial to an outsider, hammers on you.

It’s bad enough that in the episode’s final scene, Akane leaves her apartment in a half-awake daze. She tells herself (and the group chat that seemingly all the Love Now actors are in) that she’s just going to the store to pick up some food, this in spite of the fact that a typhoon is blowing through and wind and rain are pounding down outside. It eventually becomes heartbreakingly clear that no matter what she might’ve said, Akane left the house to die. It takes the absolutely miraculous intervention of Aqua—just passing through by chance, or did he have some idea of what was about to happen?—to literally pull her back from the ledge mid-jump. (The harrowing moment is spoiled only very slightly by the rather inappropriate choice to fade the show’s ED song in. I think total silence might’ve been a better call this time around.) The real visual jewel here is a match cut between how Akane feels—tragically free—and how she actually looks standing in the pouring rain.

There’s no such thing as a pretty suicide. Thankfully, good fortune saw Akane saved in the nick of time, but it’s worth thinking about the context that Oshi no Ko was originally written in. The entertainment industry is no stranger to performers being pushed to the brink by an uncaring public, and the arc happened to originally serialize not long after the tragic Terrace House incident. [Just as an additional content warning, that article discusses a real-world suicide in detail, please exercise caution before deciding to read it.] The parallels are not subtle.

To some, there will never be a sufficiently tactful way to depict this kind of thing, but the horrors gestured to here are very real, and turning away when a light is shined on them doesn’t make them vanish. Not for nothing, “Egosurfing” is the only anime episode I can recall ever seeing that ends with a card showing the National Suicide Hotline’s information. Oshi no Ko is a work of fiction, so Akane was always going to be okay here. Real people, obviously, do not have that luxury, so the hotline card seems like a good inclusion.

There is no real suitable way to transition from discussing that kind of subject to my usual outros for these articles. Nonetheless, I will see you all again next week.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch OSHI NO KO Episode 4 – “Actors”

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

In with an out with a bang. If you’ll remember the closing minutes of last week’s episode, Aqua promised to make his performance in the final episode of Sweet Today count. And, implicitly, that was the show also promising to dazzle us. So, the question of how exactly it goes is what’s on our minds as we enter this week’s episode, and rain drips in to the leaky, abandoned warehouse that serves as the site of the shoot.

As we open, we actually lead with Kana’s side of things. A quick recap of her whole situation; former child prodigy-actor, now the subject of waning public interest, is given the lead role in a crappy live action miniseries adaptation of a beloved shoujo manga. She’s desperately trying to make her co-stars look decent in spite of their own lack of acting chops and nearly everything else about the series. This is something she cares about, she wants to be back in the spotlight and she wants to make a good show from this manga that, we learn, she loves too. It is just not happening; in particular her co-lead, played by the character Melt [Seiji Maeda], is an absolute cardboard cutout. She is getting nothing off of him, so she can’t give anything back.

This is when Aqua steps in. Improvising basically anything in a scripted performance—be it film, TV, whatever—is usually quite a bad idea. But Aqua does it anyway, in an admirable show of sheer audacity. He really leans into his role as the villain within Sweet Today, here, playing his character with an appropriate amount of sleazy grime and even deliberately antagonizing Melt just out of earshot of the camera.

Right or wrong, Melt’s sudden burst of emotion in response gives Kana something to actually play off of, and suddenly the child prodigy who can cry on command is back. Some of the show’s staff are a little annoyed (honestly, they’re not wrong to be, this isn’t the sort of thing one should try at home), but the series’ director isn’t, so it stays in, despite the alterations to the program it ends up necessitating. The staff aren’t the only people who’re charmed; this is the last shot of Kana while she’s being filmed that we get. Look at that blush!

Another group of people are grateful for the step up in Sweet Today‘s finale; the actual manga staff themselves. Not the least of which is the series’ actual mangaka. There is some palpable irony in the discussion she has with her assistants—about how manga artists often tell each other to keep their expectations in check when it comes to adaptations—being had in an adaptation of a manga. And indeed, the necessities of the format curtail a bit of the emotional punch. Still, it’s an effective scene, and we learn that the Sweet Today miniseries develops a small cult following on the internet off the basis of its strong final episode. (Previously mediocre shows suddenly and inexplicably becoming a lot better happens in anime, too, although it’s rare.) The mangaka ends up actually thanking Kana specifically during the show’s wrap party.

That party is also where we get our next plot thread. Kaburagi, who you’ll remember is the show’s producer and one of the many people on Aqua’s suspect list, ends up talking to him about Ai after casually remarking that they look rather similar. Aqua, who’s already crossed Kaburagi off the suspects list, presses him about how he knew Ai in the first place. Assuming Aqua to be more of a simple stan than anything else, he offers to trade a piece of little-known gossip for something; an appearance on a reality TV show that he’s the producer on.

We don’t get to see that just yet. The episode’s final third actually revolves around Aqua and Ruby’s new high school, a performing arts academy where Kana is their senior. Here we split off and mostly follow Ruby for a while. This is good, because it lets us get, say, her impressively bisexual reaction to entering her class for the first time.

She also makes a friend in the form of effusively pink gravure model with a fake Kansai accent Kotobuki Minami [Hina Youmiya]. In general, Ruby’s side of Oshi no Ko will tend toward the light and comedic for a good bit yet. She is very much the secondary protagonist after her brother, although this does mean we get to see more of her silly wild takes when something funny happens.

We also meet Shiranui Frill [Asami Seto] here. Regarded in-universe as a top entertainer even in high school, Frill mostly serves as the indirect conduit for the other upcoming plot line. (And as fanservice for Kaguya-sama: Love is War! fans. She’s the younger sister of minor character Shiranui Koromo.)

Ruby, a huge fan of Frill’s, feels insecure about not having a job in the industry yet. This leads to her pressuring Miyako to get her idol group together more quickly, but just as Miyako retorts that unaffiliated showbiz-grade cute girls are in short supply in Japan—precisely because of things like idol auditions—Aqua pipes up that he might know somebody who’s looking for an opportunity.

Namely, Kana.

Once again, though, that’s a development for next week, as the episode cuts there.

Until then, anime fans!

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch OSHI NO KO: Episodes 2-3

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

We open last week’s episode of Oshi no Ko on a smiling face and some cold, hard numbers. Ruby is applying to join an existing idol group as an add-on member. Her chances are literally one in hundreds of thousands, but nonetheless she swings into the episode’s opening moments in a whirl of joy and determination. Ruby is easily the more upbeat of our two leads (which is probably why, sadly, she’s the one who tends to get less screentime), and these first couple minutes are a cheerful pastiche of the past decade and change of idol anime. Juxtaposed, of course, with a reminder of the grim fate of Ruby’s mother / oshi in a past life / it’s complicated, Ai. A few of her friends at school razz her over the fact that she can’t sing, as though that’s ever been an obstacle to being a star anywhere in the world.

More pertinent are her brother Aqua’s objections. Idols, he points out as though Ruby doesn’t already know, make relatively little money, live under constant scrutiny, and are mostly pushed out of their line of work by their early 30s. Ruby does know all this, of course. But in a little exchange that cuts to the heart of why people do this stuff in the first place, she asks Aqua what his point even is. People do not chase the kind of dream Ruby’s chasing because they want to be rich or because they want job security. The dream is, itself, the point, for better or worse. This is something Oshi no Ko comes back to, underscoring and undercutting it in equal measure, throughout its whole story as part of its larger themes.

Something else that recurs not just throughout Oshi no Ko but throughout Aka Akasaka’s work in general is that simply wanting something badly enough does not make it happen. Ruby eventually gets the phone call responding to her audition, and is flatly rejected. She’s comforted by Miyako [Lynn], who is now serving as the twins’ mother figure as she runs the revamped Strawberry Productions by herself (they manage net talent these days, we’re told), but the comfort is a cold one. And as it turns out, Ruby hasn’t really been rejected on the basis of her own abilities in the first place. The person on the other end of the phone was actually Aquamarine, who, we learn, has been going through incredible lengths to keep his sister out of the industry. Being so deceptive about it is pretty shitty (to the point where the phone call “from the idol agency” was actually Aquamarine himself, he’s got quite the vocal range), but one does, in an abstract sense, understand his trepidations. You’d be paranoid about the whole thing too if your mother was stabbed to death by a stalker. Still, he’s clearly going about this entirely the wrong way, and this is absolutely going to come back to bite him somehow.

None of it ends up mattering; Ruby is promptly scouted for a different group—this one an indie—just days later.

Miyako and Aqua are rightly concerned that this might be a sketchy situation (which would not be a first for an underground idol group), and Aqua handles it in a rather unscrupulous way yet again, pretending to scout one of their idols and, with a little effort and a false promise of possibly hiring her himself, manages to squeeze all kinds of reasons to not let Ruby join out of her. (Incidentally, this character, Lala, is pretty cute, but I don’t think we ever see her again, unless I’m forgetting something.)

In the end, Ruby does sign with an agency; Strawberry themselves, who, under Miyako’s guidance, are putting together a new group for the first time in a decade. Both she and Aqua reason that if Ruby is really going to insist on this, it’s better for her to be managed close to home. In a different sort of show, this would be where things pivot back into a heart-pounding underdogs-race-to-the-top narrative, akin to something like The Idolmaster or last year’s surprisingly great Shine Post. But that is not what Oshi no Ko is, and that’s not where our story (or even the episode) ends.

Aqua has been helping the Director out as an editor and general assistant since his mother passed away, but when the Director approaches him (not for the first time) about becoming an actor as well, Aqua brushes him off, saying that he doesn’t have any true talent and doesn’t have what his mother did. This leads into the only real miss of episode 2, a gag where the Director keeps trying to give an inspirational monologue but is interrupted by his mom barging into his room. This is decently funny, almost Simpsons-y, the first time it happens, but it happens several times before the scene is over, and by the end it just feels vaguely meanspirited. (Which is also pretty Simpsons-y, now that I think of it.) It’s easy to miss that despite being interrupted, the Director’s speech is actually a pretty good one. He touches on how Aqua, who’s only a teenager, is way too young to be giving up on his dreams and clearly wants to be an actor. Aqua is so focused on finding his mother’s killer that he may be blind to his own love of the craft, which is pretty tragic in its own way and explains no small amount about his character.

Episode 2 ends with a fun little diversion. Aqua and Ruby enter the integrated middle / high school where Ruby will be getting her performing arts education. Here, we’re reintroduced to Kana, who Aqua doesn’t initially recognize. She gets the last line of the episode; initially relieved that Aqua’s returned to acting (crush much?), she flips out when Aqua tells her that he’s actually taking the general education track. Cut to credits!

All told, despite a few minor missteps, episode 2 is an essential bit of scaffolding, establishing both Ruby and Aqua’s respective personalities and motivations and their (rather lopsided) relationship with each other. I imagine Aqua’s serious, manipulative characterization might lose some people, and I’ll admit that the already-great series might be even better if we perhaps swapped the personalities around here, but really, these are petty complaints at best. And we’re not even done! Since my life has been in a bit of a shamble lately, I didn’t get to cover episode 2 last week, which means we’ve got two to talk about this week. Cut to (opening) credits!

We pick up right where we left off, with Aqua and Ruby meeting Kana again for the first time. Initially, they essentially lightly bully her, which gives us a feast of Good Kana Faces to kick off the episode with.

This quickly take a somewhat more serious turn, though, and it becomes clear that while the previous episode focused mostly on Ruby with an Aqua segment in its last third, this one is going to be Aqua’s show. (Ironic, given how much of the episode he spends still denying that he wants to act.)

We should talk about Kana first, though. This is our first real look at her post-her child actress era, and while her star has dimmed, it hasn’t gone out. She’s happy to leverage the fact that she’s the lead role in the fictional shoujo manga drama web-miniseries adaptation Sweet Today to attempt to get Aqua back in the game. (If Sweet Today sounds familiar, that’s because it also shows up in Kaguya-sama: Love is War. This and a few other connections make it clear that the two series take place in the same universe. Is this relevant to anything at all in either of them? Not to my knowledge, but it’s a fun fact.) Kana herself spends much of this early part of the episode bouncing around the screen and just generally being lively and engaging. I realize I’ve really hammered this point home over the last two columns, but this kind of charisma is deadly important if you’re trying to sell a character as a performer, and Kana is yet another Oshi no Ko cast member who has it in spades. (For that matter, Aqua does too, although his is more of a cold and dark kind of compelling. If he were a real person, I imagine he’d have quite the fandom over on tumblr.)

Aqua’s not interested until he hears the name of the drama’s producer, Masaya Kaburagi. As for why, we here swerve over to the show’s darker side once again. We learn that in his search for Ai’s killer, Aqua’s compiled a list of candidates. How? Well, he found his late mother’s secret personal phone, and spent four entire years trying to guess the correct passcode. (He’s lucky it only used numbers, frankly.) That gave him a list with a good dozen industry people on it. Masaya Kaburagi was one of them.

This in mind, he accepts Kana’s offer. Although because Kana happened to have just mentioned that the male lead in the production was attractive, she suddenly gets the wrong idea. (To be honest, the fact that she cares, even in a girlish “ohmigosh” sort of way, slightly bugs me. It’s not like Aqua would be the first gay actor in the world, and Kana’s been in the industry since she was a child.)

We actually get to see a minute or two of Sweet Today, and it is truly dire, with canned, wooden acting from not only Kana herself but also her co-lead. On Kana’s part, she’s deliberately acting well below her level, since most of her co-stars are male models, not actors, and without someone with equivalent chops to play off of, she risks barreling over the rest of the cast if they can’t keep up. Thus, she tries to act the same way they are, and hopes to at least present the series as “watchable”, if not great. She points out that acting well and making a good show are different things, and we get the point again here of acting being primarily about communication. This is a lesson she had to learn the hard way; the reason her roles dried up as she got older was that she was initially so difficult to work with. Things are different now, and she makes a point of being a good coworker.

All this said, Sweet Today‘s production is still a disaster. The main reason Kana wanted Aqua for the job, any personal feelings aside, is that Aqua genuinely is a great actor. All of the off-camera stuff—initial script run through, full rehearsal, etc.—is being blended into a single practice take, and that’s all the practice anyone gets. With Aqua onboard, Kana finally has someone at her level that she can play off of. If acting is communication, these are two people who speak the same language.

As for Aqua’s actual role, he is, irony of ironies, playing a stalker villain who appears in the show’s finale. (Aqua in fact mentions this directly, which I’d qualify as a minor weakness. Rarely do you need to actually point irony out!) During the rehearsal, he does fine, and Kana compliments him afterward. Her little speech here is actually quite nice overall, and conveys the strong sense of kinship that she feels with Aqua, someone else who was also a child actor, left the field for a while, and is now trying to come back (Aqua has his own reasons for doing so, but she doesn’t know that). The animation—in fact, the kind of animation often known as character acting—bumps up here, and Kana’s broad smile and her huge, wide hand gestures are really something lovely.

They are contrasted quite a bit by a something Aqua overhears. The producer, Mr. Kaburagi, says to the director that Kana is great to throw into “any random role” because she’s so easy to work with, and says it’s great how they can leverage her remaining name recognition for such little money. In fact, his only complaint is that she’s so focused on acting in the first place, dismissing the entire show—his own production!—as little more than pure promo material. This seems to get under Aqua’s skin in a major way, and as he collects one of Kaburagi’s discarded cigs (remember, he’s trying to catch his mom’s killer at the end of the day, and the cigarette serves as a possible source of material for a DNA test), he decides that even if he’s already done what he came here for, he might as well make a strong impression on the way out the door. “Out with a bang” as he puts it.

On that note, the episode closes, so we’ll have to wait until next week for Aqua’s actual performance. It’s great to be back, and since I haven’t gotten to say it in a while, I’ll relish saying it here; see you next week, anime fans.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, or Anilist, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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