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.
“maid is a state of mind and it’s about being a woman and shooting people.”
-memetic tumblr post by user lezzyharpy
Friends, rejoice. It’s finally happened, after who knows how many decades, the pop culture icon of the anime maid has finally completed her transformation, from her origins as a specific kind of live-in cleaning staff to a roving band of hyper-violent killers in funny outfits. The metamorphosis is complete; the postmodern otaku eschaton is upon us.
Akiba Maid War, a show that promises a whole hell of a lot by having that title, makes me regret I already pulled out the “Birdie Wing and Estab-Life” comparison earlier this week with Shinobi no Ittoki. Akiba Maid War isn’t the same kind of ridiculous as those two anime, but it’s definitely part of a minor ongoing trend of anime whose main defining feature is just being sublimely inscrutable. Like Ittoki, though, it’s also a self-conscious throwback. Once upon a time, this sort of deadpan surreal comedy where extreme violence is half the joke was pretty common, but demonstrative examples like Excel Saga, Puni Puni Poemi, or Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan are no longer widely recognized, at least not in the Anglosphere. This just isn’t a genre that has many modern descendants, with perhaps the only other recent example I can think of being Dropkick on My Devil.
But enough of comparisons to other anime. Even if you’d never seen a single other, you’d immediately clock Maid War as something supremely strange just by its opening minutes, where a rain-drenched Akihabara c. 1985 erupts in a, to us, currently unexplained shooting. A cafe maid is shot dead in the downpour, and her companion silently swears vengeance upon her assassins. Cut to opening credits.
When we return, it’s nearly 15 years later. 1999, the final year of the 20th century. Our protagonist is the chipper Nagomi Wahira (Reina Kondou), who is looking forward to her new job at a pig-themed(…??) maid cafe. A job that even provides free room and board.
Her enthusiasm remains through her extremely rough first shift, in which Nagomi firmly slots herself into the classic dojikko archetype, but quickly withers when a guy shows up trying to demand what sure sounds an awful lot like protection money from Nagomi’s boss (Ayahi Takagaki. The character herself has no name, she’s just “Tenchou.”).
From here, things rapidly escalate. Nagomi is sent on a nondescript “errand” that consists of handing a letter to the manager of a rival maid cafe. Ranko (Rina Satou), another one of the maids, who is a 35 year old woman and, I’m pretty sure, the same woman from the opening scene, insists on accompanying her. We then find out that Maid War is, essentially, what would happen if someone watched Black Lagoon and got angry that Roberta wasn’t every character.
The letter contains a bunch of yakuza-esque insults, including calling the other cafe’s girls (who wear rabbit ears) “cockroaches with antennae.” This goes over aabout as well as you’d expect, and Ranko ends up taking over as the main force for the episode’s final few minutes, where it turns out she can do some serious gun-fu shit.
But honestly even without the bloodshed, the show’s entire vibe is “off” in a way that’s clearly deliberate but also surprisingly subtle. The color palette and lighting are the biggest tells; far more than the popping pinks and blues that populate the whole “otaku action anime” micro-genre like Akiba’s Trip and Rumble Garanndoll, Maid War‘s visuals are dingy, washed-out, and deliberately rather grimy-looking. Even the scenes that actually take place outside, under the neon lights of Akihabara itself, having a slightly sickly look to them. Fitting for Maid War‘s grotesque take on the whole “moe moe kyun” thing; the central setpiece is Ranko mowing down hordes of angry battle maids, soundtracked to her coworker Yumechi (Minami Tanaka) singing a cutesy song back at the cafe.
We end on Nagomi, traumatized from her exposure to frankly unthinkable amounts of death in a single day, trying to brainstorm a way out, only to discover that Ranko is in fact her roommate, and the very notion of escape is, consequently, totally impossible.
Obviously, all this is a joke, but it is a little hard to know if Maid War will be able to keep up the silliness. A lot of the most memorable shows in this genre are on the short side, and that’s because it’s difficult to keep topping yourself in terms of absurdity. Then again, this is a series where a gratuitous Kurosawa movie-style blood gusher can turn off and on again like a leaky faucet if it needs to for the sake of a gag. Maybe Maid War will be just fine.
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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.
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.
Yua Serufu (Konomi Inagaki, in her first lead role) has a problem, and no, it’s not that the official translation of her show ignores the truly stunning pun baked into her name. It’s that she and her very best friend, the uptight but diligent tsundere Miku “Purin” Suride (Kana Ichinose), have ended up going to different high schools. Serufu is a disheveled space case of a girl, so that fact in of itself doesn’t bother her. But the fact that she can’t hang out with her bestie anymore definitely does. How does she plan to solve this? By building a bench. Obviously.
Let’s back up a moment; Do It Yourself! is the latest from Pine Jam, a fairly low-key studio that usually only puts out one or two projects a year. But they’re consistently visually great projects; most recently the trashy but excellently directed action seinen Gleipnir, and then, last year, the stage girl drama Kageki Shoujo!! Those last two are also by this series’ director, Kazuhiro Yoneda, and it’s his first original project with the studio. (And Pine Jam’s first original period since 2017’s Just Because!)
The point is this; the first thing one will notice about Do It Yourself! is that it just looks gorgeous. The art styles are dissimilar, but the free-flowing animation and school life-but-slightly askew setting remind me just a bit of Windy Tales. And the series makes heavy use of a soft but very warm and inviting color palette. I dislike describing things as “cozy” because the term often gets used to paper over the flaws of anime where not much is going on. (Such as, say, DIY’s contemporary Management of a Novice Alchemist.) But it definitely applies here in a real and positive way. There are, crucially, also a few places where it does feel a bit colder. Mostly, these are the areas that lean into its very near-future setting. Purin, for example, has an eye-scanner on her front door, the swarms of drones that ambiently fly overhead certainly offer a very literal overcast to the otherwise warm setting, and Purin’s high school itself—an upscale vocational/technical school where, Purin brags, that she’s learning how to 3D print body parts for surgery—quite literally overshadows Serufu’s. It’s larger and physically surrounds it, being constructed in a U-shape around the smaller building. Regardless, all of this makes the series’ world feel truly lived-in in a way that’s rare enough to be worth pointing out.
These tinges of darker and more mature concerns—the implied class conflict, the proliferation of intrusive technology—are not at the forefront of DIY’s modus operandi, though, and it’s hard to say whether or not the show will ever address them more directly. Serufu is a traditionally spacey (read, neurodivergent) lead for this sort of thing, and if she harbors any resentment toward the obviously-wealthier Purin, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she largely plays the part of the goofball school life lead. It’s an old character archetype, but done very well here, and Serufu has an unconventional but very much still adorable character design that really makes her stand out; covered as she is in bumps and bruises plastered over with Band-Aids. Not to mention smaller details, like the fact that her color palette leaves the inside of her mouth an un-shaded white when she speaks; minute touches, to be certain, but things that a lesser slice of life show would ignore.
As for the actual plot? There isn’t too much of one, yet. A kindly upperclassman (Rei Yasaku, VA Ayane Sakura) helps Serufu out after the younger girl’s bike chain slips and she smashes into a streetlight. Serufu, on the advice of shy and nerdy secondary character Takumi Hikage (Azumi Waki) goes to find her, to offer her a proper thank-you, and instead stumbles on a small wooden shack behind her school, where Yasaku whittles her after-school hours away as the only member of the DIY Club. As we meet her here, she’s making a bookshelf, which Serufu tries to help out with before promptly pulling the trigger too hard on a power drill and careening into a pile of planks.
(I feel the need to throw in somewhere here the fact that Yasaku is introduced by literally Heelys-ing to the site of Serufu’s bike crash, fixing her bike with barely a full sentence swapped between the two of them, and then Heelys-ing away without a further word. That’s the kind of A+ character introduction you don’t get every day.)
What happens next will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen even a single other series in the school club comedy format. You know the drill, they need X more members or the club will get shut down for lack of activity. Etc. Etc.
But sticking to a tried and true plot formula—at least this early on—shouldn’t be taken as some kind of glaring flaw. Instead, what’s obvious even from this first episode is that Do It Yourself! has an extremely strong aesthetic and storytelling sense. Look at, for another example, the wonderful way the show’s “imagination bubbles” are illustrated. Serufu’s daydreams actively shift the art style depending on their contents, going for a dreamy sort of comfort when she fantasizes about sitting on a cloud, a comedic chibi format when she reminisces about the time her mom banned her from doing arts and crafts because she injured herself so much. (And how this led to her taking up drawing as a hobby. And how she used to literally eat crayons. Serufu is a wonderful protagonist.) Occasionally it will pull an even wilder, bolder shift.
This truly is one to keep your eye on. In a way, Do It Yourself‘s relaxed vibe is deceptive; make no mistake, this is one of the year’s strongest premieres. Consider this article a wholehearted endorsement.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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.
In a way, it makes perfect sense that Shinobi no Ittoki exists and is airing right now. This has been a year full of absolutely bizarre shocks-from-nowhere. Birdie Wing, Estab Life, etc. Shinobi no Ittoki (something like “Ittoki the Ninja”, although in a rarity for a modern TV anime, it has no official English title) isn’t that crazy, at least not yet, and it’s as much a part with a certain strain of harem-but-also-something-else anime that has been largely supplanted by isekai shows in the modern day, but there’s a reason the first episode is called “Bolt From the Blue.”
There used to be a lot of vitriol in the air for this kind of thing, and I can certainly see why. The modern narou-kei problem of the hyper-generic “potato-kun” protagonist definitely has roots in this genre somewhere. That, combined with the mostly rather staid character designs and the good but fairly restrained visual work, really makes me feel like I shouldn’t be as taken with this as I am. But there’s just something about it that charms me. It’s endearingly dorky. Stupid in a fun way. A guilty pleasure, as some people say.
Perhaps it’s because the somewhat subdued visual presentation makes Shinobi no Ittoki feel retro rather than just dated. These kinds of anime were everywhere when I first started getting back into the medium in high school, and the only things that really mark Ittoki out as being made in 2022 instead of 2007 or so is the CGI truck in one early scene and the female lead having two-tone hair.
This throwback nature applies equally well to its actual plot, such as it is. Ordinary diligent high school boy—and aren’t they all?—Ittoki Sakuraba (Ryouta Oosaka) does all the ordinary high school boy things. He goes to school, sleeps in class, is roasted by his friends, and is shadowed oddly closely by his childhood friend Kousetsu (Haruka Shiraishi), the aforementioned two-tone hair girl, who, in a bit of what I might very charitably call foreshadowing, pretty much always walks around wearing a black facemask.
Ittoki is confessed to by a classmate, Satomi Tsubaki (Miyu Tomita), in a scene straight out of every heart-on-sleeve romance film of the last 20 years. The relationship moves very fast, to the disapproval of Ittoki’s mother, and before too long Ittoki ends up flustered and confused in Satomi’s house while his kouhai is removing her clothes.
Then things take a turn, and Ittoki discovers he has things much more important than the ups and downs of puberty to worry about.
Long story short; his “new girlfriend” is actually an assassin from a rival ninja clan sent to kill him. Which is a big shock to Ittoki, given that he did not know he was the heir to a ninja clan before this. Or, indeed, that ninjas still existed at all.
That is his mom, by the way. Just to keep everything straight for you here.
Silly fight scenes ensue, including one starring Ittoki’s cool-loser uncle.
All of these feature snazzy hologram technology and some hilariously doofy-looking ninja-tech suits, and our opening episode ends on the setup that our protagonists here, the Iga Clan, have a rival in the powerful and wicked Koga Clan. Where is all this going? Who knows, but if it manages to keep up this brand of throwback goofball entertainment, it will remain worth watching.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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.
Every so often, an anime comes along where simply by virtue of what it is, writing about it feels more than a little surreal. Such is the case with Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury. You can probably guess why; the series bears a supertitle with some very long and very heavy history in this medium. It is the first mainline Gundam anime in nearly a decade, and while I’m sure lifelong Gundam aficionados will have plenty to say about the series, I am coming at things from a different angle as a relative neophyte. I’ve only ever seen one other Gundam anime; 2007’s Mobile Suit Gundam 00, and when I saw it, it was only a few years old.
The legwork of worldbuilding and basic plot setup already done in an “episode 0” prologue that aired a few months back, The Witch From Mercury instead opts to open with our protagonist, Suletta Mercury (Kana Ichinose), rescuing an apparently-adrift astronaut from the inky depths of space as they float away from the space station / military academy that will presumably serve as the series’ primary setting. But less important than what happens in these opening minutes is how it happens; she’s a panicked bundle of nerves the entire time, with her demeanor contrasting sharply against the soundtrack; a bundle of whirling synthesizer swells.
Things establish themselves in stages. Our setting is a military academy where absolutely anything can be settled via duel (the “space Utena” comparisons write themselves) under the watchful, sinister eyes of a shadowy council of CEOs. “Anything” happens to include marriage, which means that when Suletta runs into Witch From Mercury‘s other protagonist, Miorine Rembran (Lynn), it’s mid-escape attempt, since Miorine is attempting to flee from the academy and her duel-decided future husband, Guel Jeturk (Youhei Azakami). Or, as you will come to think of him, This Fucking Guy.
Jeturk is, to put it politely, not a nice man. To put it less politely; he’s a conniving, self-centered dillweed who’s an abusive ass to his to-be wife, going on a performative “man rampage” at one point while smashing up a garden she keeps because it reminds her of Earth. His only real redeeming quality is an admittedly impressive head of two-tone hair. (Sidenote; a couple other characters with wonderful hair show up, including an evil CEO whose beard and hair combine to give him the same silhouette as Mac Tonight, and a girl with astronomically huge puffball hair.)
The good thing about Jeturk being such an ass is that he makes an ideal episode one villain. He spends most of his screentime either being terrible to Miorine or peacocking his status as the “Holder”; that is to say, the school’s ace pilot. Naturally, when Suletta, despite being all nerves, challenges him to a duel, he accepts and thinks he’ll win easily. Some complications (like Miorine hijacking Suletta’s mobile suit, the Gundam Aerial) aside, this setup of dominos naturally comes crashing down.
It’s worth noting just how badly Jeturk gets his shit utterly rocked. His purple mecha is pretty impressive in its own way, but it’s not a Gundam (contextualized here as being a portmanteau of “GUND-ARM”). The Aerial is a truly sublime piece of deadly artwork in Suletta’s hands, and her capability with it comes across as a mecha pilot analogue to performance composure. Some people come alive on the stage; Suletta, on the battlefield, for better or worse. The thing’s weapons spin and reconfigure themselves in a floating ring that is an absolute visual delight. The rest of the episode looks, variably, solid to pretty good, but the entire fight scene here is just astonishing. In particular, a shot where the Aerial’s shield deflects a laser strike, only to make it scatter and scintillate into the air behind it, is just beautiful.
Suletta and Miorine also bicker while inside the Gundam, of course, and Suletta’s philosophy that pushing forward at all times, because even if you don’t win you’ll have “experience and pride”, is certainly something that the series seems like it will loop back around to before too long. But here, and for now, it carries her to an inarguable victory, as Jeturk’s purple mobile suit ends up in a tattered pile of laser-cut scrap on the ground.
The Witch From Mercury‘s premiere then concludes with what is perhaps one of the all-time great end-of-first-episode revelations, which I cannot comment on except to reproduce it here in its entirety, in screencap form.
Really, what could I possibly add to that? Are you, dear reader, surprised that I’m going to tell you that I think you should watch the sapphic giant robot show that seems to be taking at least a few cues from Revolutionary Girl Utena? You shouldn’t be. The Witch From Mercury delivers what is thus an early high-water mark for premieres in an already absurdly stacked season; competing with this one will be hard.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
If it seems like Spy x Family never really left, that’s because for all intents and purposes, it basically didn’t. In practice, this episode marks the start of a second season, but on paper, what the series is doing here is a once-rare but increasingly-common split cour. Two batches of episodes considered to be part of the same “season” even though they air months apart. Confusing! But if it lets the animators rest their weary bones even a little, we should probably be accommodating.
In any case, from a plot and style point of view it definitely doesn’t feel like things have changed. Spy x Family’s second cour opens with dual plots about adopting a cute dog for Anya and preventing not-Willy Brandt from being assassinated by bomb dogs. Naturally, these two things collide into each other when Anya gets lost at a pet adoption event.
Yes.
It’s easy to forget, since the series leans pretty heavily on the “comedy” end of the “action comedy” spectrum, but there is some genuinely harrowing stuff that happens in Spy x Family. The terrorist plot is played pretty straight throughout this episode. Keith, the terrorists’ leader, is a no-nonsense right-wing extremist, and when Anya stumbles into his group’s hideout, he’s the only one who’s completely unhesitant in trying to kill her.
But Anya is nothing if not lucky (and, you know, telepathic). One of the other assets being kept by the terrorists is a living mountain of fur in dog form.
He doesn’t have a name yet, but he doesn’t need one to make a strong first impression here. He has precognitive abilities, and makes his debut in this episode by yanking a child away from a sign that was about to fall, immediately establishing him as a “good guy” dog. (Although, really, with how Spy x Family generally is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the other dogs introduced in this episode eventually turn face also. We shall see.)
Here, our canine friend heroically slinkies Anya down some stairs.
We also learn of the sinister Project Apple, from whence all these telepathic dogs (and apparently a fair amount of other weird science-enhanced animals) come from. It’s not a stretch to assume that this might have some link to Anya’s own powers.
Regardless, the episode ends mid-showdown, with Yor rescuing her daughter from the terrorists, and things setting up excitingly for next week. It’s good to have the series back, foot foot planted firmly on the gas, dead-set on sparking a sense of adventure in your heart once again. And really, for now, that’s all it needs to do.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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.
To hear some tell it, there’s a lack of wonder in the world these days. Yes, if you put your ear to the ground or gaze out your nighttime window you might understand; once again, the world is changing.
Of course, we’re hardly the first generation to deal with this sort of thing. And My Master Has No Tail, an ostensibly straightforward gimmick comedy based on a 4koma that’s been running since 2019, might seem like an odd vessel to even briefly touch on that idea. But it belongs to a growing body of available-in-English Japanese pop media set in the Taisho Era, so it has more reason to think about the subject than one might assume.
But we’re starting in the deep end of the pool here; let’s back up a moment. On a premise level, My Master Has No Tail is pretty straightforward. Enough so, in fact, that instead of wasting time and effort, why don’t I just drop the relatively succinct official English summary right here, verbatim? (With VA credits added by yours truly, of course.)
Throughout time, supernatural, shapeshifting tanuki loved playing tricks on humankind. One plucky tanuki, Mameda (Mao Ichimichi), is no different. But there’s one big problem. She wasn’t born in the days of yore — she was born in modern, more cynical times! How can she fulfill her mischievous tanuki destiny when supernatural hijinks are a thing of the past? She finds an angle when she meets Bunko (Hibiku Yamamura), a master of the Japanese art of rakugo, which uses storytelling to beguile its audience. Mameda is determined to use rakugo to cast a spell on humanity, but first this tanuki trickster must convince the no-nonsense Bunko to take her on as an apprentice.
My Master Has No Tail – HIDIVE Official Summary
So yes, it’s about a tanuki—the supernatural kind—getting interested in the art of rakugo and trying to get a successful rakugoka to take her on as an apprentice. This simple premise belies two things; one, a genuine appreciation for the artform the series is centered around, and two, some interesting musings on the Taisho Era itself, and its nature as a transitionary period in human history. Of course, that must coexist with the fact that it is, at the end of the day, a comedy. The primary goal here is to charm you and make you laugh. If it can get you to think, that’s more of a nice bonus. (But an important one!)
Indeed, the first half of the opening episode is about Mameda’s attempts to trick people in the city of Osaka. But her pranks—trying to pass off leaves as money, attempting to spook policeman by appearing to have no face, etc.—go awry, and end up making the townsfolk cross with her instead. Disheartened, she eventually finds her way into an entertainment hall, where Bunko, her to-be mentor, is performing. She finds herself unexpectedly enraptured by the story that Bunko tells, and she likens it to her own quest to deceive humans. (By the end of the performance, she’s had such a good time being “tricked” that she actually looks rather drunk, which is pretty funny.)
Bunko’s story is done well, too. It is (apparently) a well-known stock rakugo routine, but she tells it well, and the world of the show is supplanted by sketched, pastel drawings to enhance her tale.
The rakugo bit itself elicits more sensible chuckles than full-on belly laughs, probably owing to both the age of the bit and the simple fact that an Anglophone audience isn’t necessarily going to pick up on all the subtler details. (Certainly, I’m including myself there.)
After the performance, Mameda finds herself surrounded by angry townspeople, who recognize her from her earlier pranks and attempt to chase her out of the city. She’s cornered on a rooftop and nearly falls to her death because she forgot that, as a female tanuki, she lacks the comically large balloon-scrotums that are traditionally ascribed to the creatures. (Yes, that’s a real thing. Folklore is wonderful.) Luckily, she’s rescued.
By Bunko.
Who is piloting a flying boat.
Bunko’s musings; on the nature of human development, on the fact that both she and Mameda, as creatures of myth (Bunko herself is a kitsune) will soon no longer have a place in their world, and on the nature of storytelling, put an intriguing spin on the series’ solid but otherwise fairly simple first episode. This sequence exposes My Master Has No Tail as having a thoughtful emotional core in addition to its simpler concerns of comedy and charm. Bunko herself serving as the wise—if reluctant—mentor figure rounds this out nicely.
The episode concludes with Mameda deciding to stay and committing to studying under Bunko. Whether or not the fox spirit is interested is an entirely different question, and I suspect that much of the comedy of the weeks to come will involve the inherent push-and-pull baked into their dynamic. But capping things with a nice bout of quiet introspection is a nice trick, and while something like this is never going to find a massive Anglosphere audience, I do hope it finds one that appreciates it for what it is. It’s a subtle sort of magical; like all good stories are.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
Remember 2022 as a banner year for the anime vampire. Between the second part of The Case Study of Vanitas, 5-episode wonder (and future Magic Planet Anime review subject) Vampire in The Garden, and of course, this very anime, Call of The Night, it’s been a solid year for the fanged and fearsome among us. Of course, vampires—more specifically vampires and romance—are not new additions to anime as a medium. Not by a longshot, as I discussed when I first blogged about this series back in July, they’ve been common bedfellows for a long time.
Since then, in my intermittent coverage of the series, I’ve made mention more than once that vampires, traditionally, are symbols of the other. Of outsiders. The thing about symbols of course is that they eventually acquire a life all their own, separate from any single author’s intent. They become entities of their own; concepts that lurk in the collective human subconscious, to be interpreted a myriad of different ways as any individual artist sees fit, certainly, but always retaining a core identity that, if it changes, only does so slowly, over time, and through repeated effort by many individual interpreters.
So, when we look at Call of The Night, a series primarily centered on the 14-year-old Ko Yamori (Gen Satou) and his quest to fall in love with, and thus be turned by, decades-old vampire Nazuna Nanakusa (Sora Amamiya), we must ask ourselves what it is using that symbol to say, and how these things align with its broader storytelling goals.
In a general sense, there’s not really anything complicated about Call of the Night at all; it’s a story about Ko, an antisocial shut-in who starts taking long, lonesome night walks because he’s stopped going to school, coming of age and becoming his own person. Thought about this way, it could be lumped in with any number of other anime.
What lessens those commonalities that Ko and Nazuna’s relationship is somewhat fuzzy for much of the series; are they actually in love? Just friends? Something else entirely? It takes almost the entire 13-episode run for a definitive answer to that question to actually emerge, and that very uncertainty is largely what “vampirism” means within the context of Call of The Night. If we take “vampires” to be anyone who lives outside of normal society, the show’s theming clicks into place perfectly.
Indeed, it is very easy to read Ko, Nazuna, and their relationship in any number of ways. I’ve previously mostly looked at it through the lens of Ko, a fairly strongly neurodivergent-coded character, and quite possibly an aromantic, trying to figure out the foreign field of romance. Far on the other end of the field, I’ve also seen Nazuna called a sexual predator preying on Ko’s insecurities (I think you have to get pretty far into a countertextual reading to argue that, but I definitely get why people might get that vibe at first glance). In hindsight, I’d say neither of these, really, fit the show particularly well, which is a little unfortunate in the former case and a massive relief in the latter.
Instead, Call of the Night effectively presents a world much like our own, where human relationships are complicated, thorny things, full of accidents and insecurity, and in which you can never trulyentirely know where you stand. This becomes clearer during the show’s last arc, with its introduction of the detective / vampire hunter Anko Uguisu (Miyuki Sawashiro), who makes it very clear that she does not see human and vampire lives as equally worthwhile. (It’s also worth noting that she guns for Ko more directly than Nazuna ever does.) Her killing a blood-starved vampire kicks off the final quarter of the series, which casts much of what comes before in a different light.
But, crucially, not all of it. At series’ end, Nazuna and Ko redouble their commitment to each other. Call of the Night ends on the line “we’re in this together.” Perhaps, then, what is crucial is not so much what Nazuna and Ko are to each other, but simply that they are something to each other. The very last scene is a kiss; so clearly this is a romantic relationship, but what is almost more important than the establishment of a definitive romance is that this clears out any uncertainty. “You and me against the world” is pretty easy to get your head around, even for the most romantically disinterested among us.
In that final arc, Call of The Night seems to pose Ko a choice; to become human and return to the world of ‘living’ (read: ordinary) people, or to take a gamble on the unknowable dangers of the vampire world. But interestingly, it does not present either humanity or vampirism as “the right choice.” Vampirism is neither a curse nor an automatic liberation. What is more important than making the choice at all is making it honestly, definitively, and with purpose. By the series’ end, Ko makes his.
None of this is to say that the show is flawless. For instance, its only real depiction of a genuinely GNC character, the otokonoko vampire Hatsuka Suzushiro (Azumi Waki) leaves quite a lot to be desired, and, for better or worse, there are many open questions by the time it ends. (Less a flaw, admittedly, and more just a consequence of adapting a still-ongoing manga.) It also probably spends a little too much time leering at various characters’ bodies; some of it makes sense, some of it just feels a little much.
But indeed, even in terms of positive qualities there’s a fair bit I haven’t talked about, such as the show’s absolutely phenomenal directing courtesy of Tomoyuki Itamura, whose pedigree includes not only fellow 2022 vampire series The Case Study of Vanitas, but also work on most of the Monogatari series, and, remarkably, episode 7 of ever-underrated SHAFT comedy And Yet The Town Moves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that episode’s second half is entirely about the wonders of liminality, centering on a story about a young boy who watches midnight tick over into a new day for the first time. Call of The Night, despite many other differences from that series, inherits some of that spirit, a certain sense of midnight-black magic that no amount of cynicism and adult world-weariness can truly erase.
Back when Call of The Night first began, I made the remark that if it could keep up that feeling of nocturnal wonder from its first episode’s closing moments, it had nothing to worry about. Thirteen weeks later, that thought remains unchanged. Nazuna and Ko definitely have, but not the night itself. It’s as young as it’s ever been.
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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.
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.
Here is, without embellishment, the first five minutes of Reincarnated as a Sword, the latest entry in the novelty isekai canon; a guy (Shinichirou Miki) dies (of course), and is—you’ll never believe this—reincarnated in a stock fantasy world as a magic sword.
He fucks around in some JRPG-esque menus, and when a group of goblins tries to pull him out of the stone he’s stuck in, he attacks them because he “doesn’t want to be used by goblins,” and kills them all. This gives him experience points which he spends yet more time plugging into the aforementioned menus, and he comments that he feels nice, assuming it’s because he’s fulfilled “the purpose of a sword.”
I am hardly the first person to have noticed that the average isekai protagonist is a gleeful cartoon sociopath who seems weirdly eager to cut down every being in their way—whether or not they’re sapient—in the pursuit of naked personal power, usually as imagined by some borrowed grab-bag of video game tropes. But Reincarnated as a Sword is a pretty damn stark depiction of such a thing. Our Hero also spends a good chunk of this episode hacking a goblin tribe who live in a cave to pieces for no reason other than acquiring more magic skills. This in spite of the fact that, as demonstrated by their having a hierarchy at all (there’s a goblin king and a goblin wizard, naturally), these are clearly intelligent beings of some kind. Shouldn’t he hesitate at least a little bit, sword or no?
(If I scrunch my eyebrows together quite hard, I can pretend this is commentary of some sort. “Clearly,” I can imagine “this is the series lampooning the power fantasy nature not just of the isekai genre but of kill-all-the-monsters sorts of RPGs in general.” It’s not really that, of course, but it’s a fun thought experiment.)
Even if we really work to suspend our disbelief and acknowledge that this is just how this world works for whatever reason, say maybe the monsters respawn or something, it doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling television. The production has a decent amount of polish, and I must commend the staff on managing to squeeze a few visually dynamic action sequences in fights centered on a flying sword, because that can’t be easy. But that polish alone does not elevate Reincarnated as a Sword beyond the bare minimum of “watchable.”
Eventually, he gets stuck in a field that drains all of his magic, and can’t go anywhere. Thus we are treated to the truly absurd sight of a fucking sword lamenting its fate as it’s stuck in mana-sucking ground, and despairs that no one might ever wield it. It is a bizarre spectacle, and is a scene that, I must imagine wholly unintentionally, captures a certain zeitgeist. This, truly, is what the dregs of TV anime have come to. (Aren’t we all suddenly very glad that Chainsaw Man starts in two weeks? I know I am.)
We should, at least, give some cursory acknowledgement to Sword‘s other protagonist, who the titular sword eventually meets while stuck.
This is Fran (Ai Kakuma). She is a catgirl, and because the isekai genre has over the past decade developed a bizarre fixation on the awful practice, she is also a slave. Fran doesn’t get nearly as much screentime as the sword himself, so we only see little bits and pieces of her story over the series’ introductory 30 minutes. But what we do see is pretty awful; she’s routinely kicked around and beaten, is shackled with a magic collar that forces her to obey her masters’ commands, and in general is just treated like dirt. Now, the bare minimum of credit is due here; Reincarnated as a Sword does in fact seem to understand that slavery is bad. That is unfortunately more than can be said of some isekai, so it is worth acknowledging.
In fact, if you squint, you can imagine how a compelling story might develop here. Fran finds and acquires the sword somehow—and that part does, in fact, happen, she runs into it while being chased by a monstrous, two-headed bear—and becomes a swashbuckling liberator of her people, the Black Cat beastfolk, and all the other sorts of animal people enslaved here by humans. Now let’s be clear here, the main character becoming a sort of catgirl John Brown would still be incredibly strange, and it would probably be heavier subject matter than something like this is equipped to handle, but it would certainly be something. And it would, again, at least be an acknowledgement that the world this takes place in is fucked up and needs some fixing.
There isn’t anything in this first episode that prevents Reincarnated as a Sword from eventually becoming that kind of story, but it still seems unlikely, if only because the show seems far more interested in hurling menus, stat screens, and meaningless terminology at us instead. Fran gives her motive for linking up with the sword, which she calls Shishou (“Teacher” or “Master”), as a desire to be “the first Black Cat to evolve.” There is some indication of what that actually means, in-universe, but does it really matter? It’s just another narrative shortcut taken among an entire forest of them.
Ultimately what you have here is yet another isekai with a marginally interesting premise that completely squanders it by taking the dullest route possible through almost every single plotting decision it could make. The idea that it might eventually become something more interesting isn’t really enough, I imagine, to make most people want to tune in. Maybe, in six weeks, we’ll be here talking about how utterly incredible it is that Reincarnated as a Sword started out so anonymously and eventually got so good. But I very much doubt it. I intend to spend my viewing hours elsewhere this season, and I recommend you do the same.
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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.
No bombastic format this time, friends. Just a pair of very simple announcements.
I’ll be covering two anime weekly (or at least, most-weeks-ly) this coming season. One, which I picked myself, will be Chainsaw Man. The other, picked by you all, will be Spy x Family again. I will probably also occasionally write at least a little bit about the other shows that landed in the top 5; it was very close this season, with only a few votes gap between Spy x Family (the overall winner) and Raven of the Inner Palace (the fifth-most voted for show).
I’ll be seeing you then, friends.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.
For a while, it looked like things might improve.
I’ve covered RWBY: Ice Queendom on and off here on Magic Planet Anime since it premiered, and I was not shy about the fact that I did not really care for its opening arc. Then, unexpectedly, episode four happened and for a while, it seemed like things were picking up. I had hoped it would stay that way, but suffice it to say, this didn’t happen. I just haven’t felt very motivated to cover Ice Queendom here on MPA in a long while. And because of that, this is, in a sense, less of a proper review and more of a conclusion of my coverage of the series. It’s been a long and rough road, and I am mostly unhappy with how the show has turned out, but I do feel obligated to write something.
But to back up a bit, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with what Ice Queendom is trying to do. As a reboot / side story / whatever of the larger RWBY series, it succeeds in that it doesn’t actually require you to have seen any prior material to get an idea of what the series’ whole deal is. (A good thing, too, since, as I mention in the First Impressions writeup linked up there, I am a neophyte to the franchise.) As a Studio SHAFT anime made during what is at this point undeniably their twilight years, it succeeds in looking intermittently cool when it’s not busy being extremely janky. In that sense, it’s not terribly different from, say, Assault Lily Bouquet, another “girls with cool weapons” anime from SHAFT from just a few years back. And indeed, Ice Queendom‘s greatest strength is the visual oomph brought by that SHAFT pedigree. The Studio SHAFT of 2022 are not the Studio SHAFT of 2011, but they can still deliver some real knockouts when things come together. For the most part, even from this angle, Ice Queendom really does feel like there’s no one “at the wheel” so to speak. These flashes of excellence; mostly in the form of fight scenes or other visual setpieces, seem to be largely the work of individual animators or occasionally episode directors, rather than there being any sort of unifying hand throughout the production. Still, it’s something.
In practice, you’re more likely to notice the show’s flaws, which stem from its one major difference from the bulk of mainstream TV anime. Any number of other battle girl anime are, generally, either original IPs or they’re based on existing Japanese series. Ice Queendom is, of course, based on the extremely weeb-y, but very much American, original RWBY. This matters, because, I am told, the original series is the original sin for what ends up being this show’s most glaring, central writing problem. The root of all evil; The Over-wrought Furry Racism Allegory.
Very briefly, RWBY takes place in a fairly standard urban fantasy world. There are monsters, there are people who hunt the monsters with cool weapons, and an academy where they learn how to properly engage in monster hunting. Very well-trod stuff, but not necessarily bad. Here is the problem; in addition to the humans and the monsters (called Grimms), we also have kemonomimi called the Faunus. For reasons I can only guess at, Ice Queendom is very fixated on the Faunus, specifically as a vehicle for the aforementioned Over-wrought Furry Racism Allegory. This is a somewhat infamous stock plot, and it’s pretty much impossible to do well unless you’re the guy who wrote Maus. Personally, I’ve been over it since about when the first surly Skyrim guard threatened to turn my Khajit into a rug. And I cannot even imagine how utterly sick actual POC must be of the continued prevalence of this particular trope.
Ice Queendom‘s take, unfortunately, is particularly bad. A majority of the show takes place not in the series’ own real world, but inside the mind of one of its main characters, the snooty heiress Weiss Schnee (Youko Hikasa), who, along with her friends Ruby (the cheerful red one, Saori Hayami), Yang (the big sister-ish yellow one, Ami Koshimizu), and Blake (the cool and aloof Faunus, Yuu Shimamura), is one of the four members of the titular Team RWBY. Early in the series, she’s possessed by something called a Nightmare Grimm which locks her in a dream world inside of her own head. With the help of extremely cool original-to-Ice Queendom character Shion Zaiden (Hiroki Nanami), the remaining Team RWBY girls dive into this nightmare prison and attempt to rescue Weiss. This takes up the remainder of the show, and along the way they fight a fairly wide variety of dream baddies and, at least ostensibly, help Weiss grapple with the trauma that comes from being raised by a bunch of rich assholes who probably don’t care very much about her.
You may ask, what does all of this have to do with kemonomimi? Well, you see, one of the things that the show repeatedly hammers home over the course of its run is that Weiss does not like or trust Blake. Specifically, she doesn’t like or trust Blake because she’s a Faunus. Because, you see, some Faunus are part of a, ahem, “terrorist organization” called the White Fang, which attacks trains and such owned by Weiss’ family’s company. Blake actually was part of the White Fang at one point, having left some time ago for only vaguely specified reasons. Thus begins Ice Queendom‘s utter fixation on both this dumb-as-bricks plot and, on top of that, trying to falsely equate Weiss and Blake’s struggles.
Let us be very clear here, based on the information that Ice Queendom itself gives us, Weiss is a troubled but still very privileged heiress from a wealthy background. Blake is from a, by all appearances, widely discriminated-against ethnic minority, enough so that she feels the need to wear a ribbon to hide her wolf ears, and may have done some arguably-bad things in the past. I am not embellishing here; those are the facts laid out by the series itself. Somehow, Ice Queendom insists that both of these characters are equally sympathetic, utterly emptying the pantry of basic dream symbolism in service to the idea that somehow, Weiss Schnee, deeply unlikable rich girl who spends much of the series as her subconscious “nightmare self” trotting around in a militaristic overcoat, and Blake Belladonna, a girl who has by all accounts had a very rough life, are equally at fault for the rift that emerges between them.
If I ended up inside someone’s mind, and I found out that they thought things like this, I would probably have a hard time trusting them, too. Just saying.
Make no mistake; what actually happens, repeatedly, throughout Ice Queendom, is that Blake will say something that the show frames as her being hurt, but which is actually, obviously, completely correct. Weiss will then say something racist. We are supposed to believe that both of these people are doing something wrong here, despite the fact that it its trumpetingly obvious that only one is.
I’ve said this before, but I feel like a total idiot for complaining about this kind of thing. Not because I’m wrong—I know I’m not—but because it just seems obvious. I have said a fair few positive things about Ice Queendom in my earlier columns on the show, and I stand by most of those. I do genuinely think it’s pretty visually interesting, and, even if the dream symbolism leans toward the obvious, it is the closest we ever get to actually seeing a full inner picture of Weiss that doesn’t just make her seem like an entitled snot. But none of that really fixes the fact that overall Ice Queendom fails at some very basic things.
The whole Blake / Weiss feud plotline would, itself, be just the source of a complaint—a major one, but not necessarily one that would wreck the whole series—were Ice Queendom not so obsessed with circling back to it. The show’s entire final stretch, from episode 8 to episode 12, is almost entirely about it. Other narrative threads like Ruby’s personal development as a leader of her team are reduced to perfunctory side stories; this is clearly what Ice Queendomwants to be about, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why, because it is both its worst and its least interesting plot by an order of magnitude, and it rots the show at the root right up until the very end.
Naturally, the series ends with wishy-washy handwaving bullshit about how the power of friendship has helped Team RWBY overcome their differences. Except, of course, that a huge chunk of the very last episode—what is supposed to be the triumphant postscript, mind you—is spent by people still casting aspersions on Blake for her being a Faunus. One of those people is still Weiss, who really does not seem to have grown as a person at all over the course of the story. Another one is the school’s headmaster, who both assures her that the academy is totally egalitarian and then also grills her about her possible connections to the White Fang within the space of a single conversation. It is a truly breathtaking display of double standard, and if it were at all intentional it’d be almost brilliant, but I’m not convinced it is. Instead, it’s just the last of a very long series of nails in Ice Queendom‘s coffin. And then the proverbial spit on the grave is Weiss using the threat of calling the police as a bit of bargaining leverage against a different Faunus character not ten minutes later.
There is one further bright spot, and it also comes in at the show’s end. And I do mean the very end; as in, the last scene of the whole series. Inexplicably, we end on a scene of Ice Queendom‘s cast getting into a massive foodfight. It’s lavishly animated and a pretty slick little tune pumps in the background as it happens. It’s also completely baffling. I’m told it’s an homage to the opening of the second season of the original RWBY.
On its own, this is great. In a meta sort of way, it even loops back around to what RWBY as a series was originally about; flashy fight scenes, with any greater narrative context a secondary concern at most. (Even I know about the famous color trailers. I’m not totally out of the loop.) But taken in the greater context of Ice Queendom on the whole, it really raises the question; why could they have not just done this the entire time? There is no real reason that all of the writing problems that so badly hamstring the show should be present, and I really doubt anyone would’ve blamed the scriptwriters for sidelining or even outright ignoring some of the original’s more questionable plot lines. No one likes RWBY for its writing. Again, even I know that much.
At the end of the day, what we have with Ice Queendom is a deeply frustrating piece of media. Intermittently good, occasionally brilliant, but willing and ready to repeat the mistakes of not just its source material but an entire generation of pop media, usually in the most basic fashion imaginable. Often enough that doing so completely ruins it. This is a case where a show’s positive aspects don’t balance out the negative ones so much as they make them seem even worse by comparison.
If we are to remember Ice Queendom in any kind of positive light, it should be for those rare few moments of visual brilliance. But, of course, when it’s possible to experience all of a show’s highlights just by scrolling through sakugabooru, there’s already been a greater failure of imagination.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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