I think I speak for a lot of my readerbase when I say that 2020 has been the most taxing, challenging, and just flat-out exhausting year of our lives. Finding the time and energy to devote to experiencing, thinking about, and talking about art this year was not always easy. But by the same token, I’d say that a lot of the reason I’m handling it as decently as I am is because of said art. This is hardly unique to me; many critics, commentators, bloggers, and journalists have spoken about the importance of their medium(s) of choice this year.
To that end, rather than simply doing a Top 5, or a “Best and Worst”. I decided I would rank the anime I’ve seen in 2020, from worst to best. I’ve only seen twenty shows this year, which is not that many, in the grand scheme of things. But it’s enough that writing just one article was…not feasible, and as such, this post here will link to the four articles constituting the four parts of the list. Why worst to best? Well, I think it makes for a better dramatic arc, mostly. But also because even the shows I liked the least this year played a part in helping me keep myself together. It’s not an exaggeration to say that anime has helped my emotional state this year more than it ever has in my life.
I tried not to sweat the minutiae of placement too much; while last and first place are definitely where they belong, some stretches in the middle are occupied by shows that I’d say I liked about equally. So it goes!
Not present are non-serial anime (with apologies to music videos like “Ruru’s Suicide Show“ and “Study Me“ and shorts like Puparia) and, obviously, things I didn’t see or didn’t finish. (Which, those range from Akudama Drive to Healin’ Good Precure and everything in-between.) What it does include are 21 20* shows that, despite everything, I believe all have some merit, and are all worth talking about. Some of these writeups are short, a few are very long, some are more informal, and for others I endeavored to look at them through a more focused lens. Some lean heavily on personal experience, others, uh, don’t. Variety is the spice of life.
And of course, we’re required to use terms like “worst” and “best” because for a critic it is generally expected that one use the language of objectivity. I don’t really believe in that in the arts, and I don’t think most of my readerbase does either, but I feel the need to clear up any possible misconception nonetheless. This whole list is, obviously, of course, only my own opinions, thoughts, and observations. As says the disclaimer at the bottom of every Magic Planet Anime article.
But enough beating around the bush. Here is the list, divided into four parts for your reading pleasure. In order to stagger things out (and because I’m not done with some of the writeups on some of the better anime here), I’ll be rolling out one part per day over the next several days, starting with Part 1 today (December 27th, if you’re reading this in the future). Hopefully I will be able to finish by the new year! I hope, also, that you find some tiny crumb of insight, interest, or just plain enjoyment from these walls of words.
*I made an embarassing fencepost error when writing up the list, which is why not all four parts of the list have five entries each. I think it’s been fixed now. Whoops.
If you like my work, consider following me here on WordPress or on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilistor for The Geek Girl Authority.
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 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.
What is a “bad anime”, exactly? If it’s an anime that fails at being something it’s trying to be, I find it difficult to stick the label on Big Order. Because on the one hand, the 2016 manga adaption seems to know exactly what it wants to be. On the other hand, maybe a “bad anime” is an anime whose very aims are somehow defective. Being a case where “what it wants to be” is arguably somewhere between “bad for the medium” and “reprehensible”, Big Order‘s a bit of a hard one to evaluate. Too beholden to a wide slate of action-anime cliches to be truly unique. Too weird to be rightly called generic. Big Order largely succeeds in its aims, but that very same success makes the series impossible to defend. Speaking less roundaboutly; this show sucks and you probably shouldn’t watch it unless you have a fascination with shows that suck.
Very broadly, Big Order is about people who have superpowers based on “wishes” they had at the time a disaster called The Great Destruction (yes, really) hit, circa ten in-show years ago. This ostensibly-kinda-interesting premise means very little, because in practice these powers–called Orders–can just kind of Do Whatever in all but a few cases. Our protagonist is Eiji Hoshimiya, a chuuni’s dream. In a more self-aware show, the similarity of his first name to the word “edgy” might be deliberate. Eiji accidentally killed billions-with-a-B people when he got his Order, causing the Great Destruction in the first place.
If that seems like an odd fit for a protagonist, it’s here where we have to break out our critical lens. Because very little about Big Order makes much literal sense, and internal logic phases in and out at the story’s whim. However, considered through the prism of a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the stereotyped ideal anime-watcher (that is to say, a young straight man), everything clicks into place perfectly. In this way, Big Order is a bad anime, but an excellent peek into the mind of the kind of person who thinks good anime begins with Code Geass and ends with Darling in The FranXX. Which is to say it is also a ten-car-pileup of barely-disguised fetish plots, some more objectionable than others. A large chunk of Big Order revolves around Eiji’s desire to save his sister from her Incurable Anime Disease. If you guessed that they’re also hot for each other, put your chip on your bad anime bingo card.
Along its ten episodes, Big Order manages to hit stops that include Eiji accidentally (but only temporarily!) impregnating a girl by touching her fake bunny ears.
This is a real screencap.
There’s also a man with a sword that can cut through time and space. A final episode plastered with an awful-looking monochrome filter in what I dearly hope is not a misguided attempt to homage Gunbuster. And the entire character arc of Rin; who enters the series in episode one trying to murder Eiji for killing her parents, and by the tenth minute of episode two has been mind controlled by Eiji’s ill-defined powers and wants to hatefuck him. I’m not normally this crass when writing on this blog, but no other language exists for Big Order. It is a crass anime.
This is to say nothing of the anime’s ugly thematic heart. Much ink has been spilled over the otaku persecution complex, a phenomenon that has given us many of the worst light novels, manga, and anime of recent years. It feels fair to say that it’d be hard to top Big Order, though. Eiji’s responsibility for the Great Destruction becomes public knowledge early on, and by consequence, the entire world hates him. Combined with his near-omnipotent powers and you have a character who has both the ability and moral license to do whatever he wants. He uses it, too. The above example with Rin is just one of several. The show’s entire premise reeks of repressed straightboy nerd “I’ll show them for making fun of me!” rage. This kind of dynamic has sexist echoes throughout the entirety of art, and it’s certainly no knock on anyone if they’re plainly sick of it.
You are at this point probably not surprised by there being a harem in this show.
Yet, I remained strangely fascinated with the show as I watched. All of this would ruin Big Order if there were anything to ruin. What prevents Big Order from falling into the lowest rung of mainstream TV anime is that it is a bizarre combination of astoundingly incompetent, yet tightly-edited. Things just kind of happen, but often in very entertaining ways. Episode four remains the show’s most infamous, featuring the aforementioned plot point of ear-pregnancy combined with Eiji and co. running to and ‘fro throughout a war-torn city and trying to come up with a way to stop it from being nuked. The entire series is this level of unintentionally hilarious. In a more self-aware show, it would seem deliberate, but Big Order‘s full-tilt commitment to its own inane thematic core makes it impossible to believe it’s anything but accidental. In this way, the show is enjoyable if you like seeing an anime fall apart at the seams when its premise and plot are put under the slightest bit of scrutiny. For whatever reason, I kind of do.
On the whole, Big Order is the rare series I’d say has fully earned the term “guilty pleasure”. It’s a kind of bitterly ironic that despite Big Order being a financial flop, the only project animating studio Asread has worked on recently is the similarly-reviled Arifutera. I’d say “you reap what you sow”, but the complex dynamics of how a studio picks up a show to work on render that moot. Besides, no one deserves to work on Big Order-quality projects forever, it’s simply too cruel.
If you like my work, consider following me here on WordPress or on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilistor for The Geek Girl Authority.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
How the hell do you review a music video? Even as someone who really loves animated music videos, it seems impossible, and before I saw the MV accompanying Shinsei Kamattechan’s “Ruru’s Suicide Show On a Livestream” I’d have had no motivation to try. Yet, like many commentators on the arts, I have a weakness for taking wild swings at the zeitgeist. Sometimes, even if only for yourself, you come across a singular piece of art that seems to just click things into place. Seems to “get it” in a way that most do not. The “Ruru’s Suicide Show” MV premiered all the way back in early January, just eight days into what would become what is unquestionably the darkest year for the world-at-large that I have ever lived through. 2020 finally winds down in just over a month as I’m penning this, and I think I can safely say that somehow, no other anime anything this year captured the unique mixture of toxic, spiraling misery, delirious, denialistic euphoria, and the tragic endpoint of both quite like this song and this video.
All of this, I must imagine, is very much accidental. Perhaps it’s unique to me, even, and given that the video with its scant runtime of just four minutes sits atop this article, perhaps you’ve watched the whole thing and are feeling very confused as to what I’m on about. But, as I write this the video sits at over fourteen million views, far more than any other music video ever associated with a Shinsei Kamattechan song. It makes sense; the band are immensely talented and wildly creative, but they’re definitely niche despite being signed to a major label (Warner Japan, via their Unbonde sublabel). Lead vocalist Noko is an acquired taste, (I’m not even sure if that’s them on “Ruru’s Suicide Show”. It doesn’t entirely sound like them, but their voice is very flexible, so who knows.) and the band in general are no one’s idea of a shiny-polished pop group.
“Ruru’s Suicide Show” itself is the kind of song whose utility is difficult to put into words. It is based, albeit only loosely, on a very real tragedy involving a young girl named Roro that occurred some seven years ago*, which can make it seem odd, possibly even exploitative, to the uninitiated. More broadly, it taps into a long lineage of Japanese rock that I’m frankly a little unqualified to explore in-depth. (And it’s beyond the scope of this article anyway.) On a surface level, it isn’t hard to understand why a song about suicide would resonate in a particularly bleak year for the world, but I think dissecting our opening question of why specifically this requires digging a bit deeper than that.
Songs that are simply sad are one thing, “Ruru’s Suicide Show”‘s “trick”, such as it is, is relatively simple. Despite its bleak subject matter it is sonically upbeat. However, most songs like this rely on simple lyrical dissonance, the classic example over here in the US being OutKast’s “Hey Ya” (which itself is merely about heartbreak). “Ruru’s Suicide Show” goes well beyond that. Its relentlessly upbeat sound is pushed into the proverbial red, becoming first disquieting, then almost a kind of confrontational, and finally cathartic. “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is not a song for people who need a pick-me-up, it is a song one listens to so that they know that they aren’t the only person in the world who’s ever suffered like this. And whether or not “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is the sort of music that resonates with you can be correlated pretty well to whether you know what I mean when I say “like this.” It is a song for a very specific sort of person. That a major label–even an ‘indie’-focused subsidiary of one–would bankroll a video for this thing is nothing short of astounding.
And yet, there it sits. Fourteen million views and counting throughout the course of just one calendar year. Some of that popularity (like with many things nowadays) can be thanked to / blamed on TikTok, where the song caught on as something of a minor meme of all things. But while that might account for an initial spike in popularity it does not account for its continued success. And indeed if one visits the video’s comments section it is mostly people (fairly young ones, is my impression) defending the song, the video, the late Roro herself, and so on from being appropriated as a fad / fandom / meme / whatever term you care to use. These users, to whom the song clearly means as much as it does to me, demand that it, and its subject, be treated with respect.
I think some of this broad resonance may have to do with the elephant in the room. The music video itself, and how it welds to the song. Enhancing, as it does, every line with surreal, dire imagery that expertly conveys internal crisis through symbolic destruction of the outside world. And, sadly, the very literal destruction of the self.
Music videos, like other short-form projects, can be some of the “purest” animation imaginable, unbound by conventional narrative. Some months ago I compared Eureka Seven to a collage of images, but that’s often literally all music videos can afford to be, given their limited run-time. It’s no surprise then that “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is on the more surreal end as far as such things go. One can map out the broad story of the main character, but the real resonance lies in the details.
To state the obvious; the “Ruru’s Suicide Show” music video is gorgeous. Director Rabbit MACHINE has built up a body of music video and commercial work over the past decade or so, but it’s hard to imagine any of it could top this. There’s a particularly unnerving edge to the editing in this video. I imagine it’s an attempt to underscore the sharp distinction between the main character’s flights of fancy–often rendered in an even more cartoonish art style and depicting such feats as her miraculously ducking under and dodging a train–and the darker side of her psyche, including the suicidal ideation itself. To me, the grimmest shot in the entire short is a first-person aside where the “camera” is tossed into the path of a speeding train, presumably the Chuō Line mentioned in the lyrics.
Elsewhere; our protagonist laughs, lugs her stuffed rabbit around an unfriendly city, stands alone in a classroom, at one point in front of chalk drawings of butterfly wings and at another as the world outside explodes, is lost among a forest of nooses, envisions a rose blooming from her corpse, poses atop an ocean of (what else?) power lines, and pictures herself crawling into a coffin. She speaks of being bullied, of “building a gravestone” for herself on-camera. Finally, she laughs again, as she jumps.
Despite many of the details matching to the real tragedy alluded to in the song’s title, I don’t believe most of this is intended to be literal. Even the bleakest moments of the video are defined by a bright art style that does not lend itself to such interpretations. Our protagonist seems cast less as specifically Roro and more as an amalgamation of all who’ve taken their own life because they could see no other way out and were spurned there by the uncaring masses of the world. She wants to stop hurting, she wants to stop being lonely, she wants people to look at her. All of this is driven to its horrible endpoint.
Her look–downright stylish, if we’re being honest–might seem at odds with the core theme of the song and the video, but the same dynamic present between the music and the lyrics is repeated here. Her blonde hair, the pink smartphone taped to her face, the black lightning bolt hairclip providing a visual metaphor for the term denpa, all of it is intended to push past merely cute into a funhouse mirror reflection of getting lost in your own head. If you’re the sort who demands evidence of a mask slip, there is a literal one in the video, though only for the briefest moment.
We are clearly intended to both sympathize and empathize with the protagonist, but what happens to her is tragic, and here we have to return to the song itself again and more generally to Shinsei Kamattechan as musicians. I am admittedly a neophyte when it comes to the band’s discography, but I can tell (and have been told as much secondhand) that much of their work deals with alienation and a feeling of not belonging. Be that to some specific part of society or simply the world in general. It is an uncomfortable feeling, and one far more people have than I think many others may realize. It is no wonder so many of us want to be witches that talk to kittens, or aliens riding in a UFO. It is no wonder then again that so many of us come to eventually half-believe we really are. Checking each other, keeping each other in good spirits but away from the brink, is arguably the duty of those of us afflicted by mental illness. Because the consequences of dealing with this alienation alone, or with the toxic fake-help of bad actors, can be, as “Ruru’s Suicide Show” illustrates, tragic.
So the real power of “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is in melancholic solidarity. You are not alone, but giving in to this feeling will not end well. It’s also a plea for understanding; some of the lines spoken by the protagonist in the chorus could just as easily be said from a child to their parent, the so-simple-its-devastating “Mama please listen this isn’t a phase” foremost among them.
In this strength we find that “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is, in a peculiar way, a sort of two-way elegy. On the one hand it is a memorial to the titular Roro and many others like her. On the other; it is a prayer from those who did not make it for those who are still alive.
In my heart I am a worrywort. Any time I listen to this song I think about those people in the video’s comments, many of them obviously kids, and I hope that they’re okay. It’s naïve, but my hope is that by writing this, I am somehow doing some small portion of my part in the “duty” outlined above. To you, my limited audience, I simply want to reassure you, if you are reading this, you are still alive. For those who aren’t, the most we can do is to remember, and to eulogize.
Take care of yourself.
*The “Roro-chan Incident” as it’s come to be called is the sort of case where rumor and reality have bled together so much that it’s hard to know the truth of things. I will not deny that several times while writing this I did wonder if this song could be construed as exploitative. I have no real answer, the question of how much leeway a musician (or anyone) gets via artistic license is, as far as I am concerned, an unsettled one. Regardless, I find the song and video’s power impossible to deny.
If you like my work, consider following me here on WordPress or on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilistor for The Geek Girl Authority.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column series where I take a look at single specific anime that shaped my experience with the medium, were important to me in some other way, or that I just really, really like.
Disclaimer & Thanks: I am new to Love Live as a property and enlisted my good friend Heinzes to help me Love Live Fact Check this column. Thank you very much!
“There are school idols and they have their fans. Isn’t that more than enough?“
Let me let you in on a small secret. As a medium commentator of any sort: critic, blogger, video essayist, whatever. You tend to set little arbitrary rules for yourself. “I won’t review this until a week after I’ve watched it.” “I won’t score anything 10/10 unless I’ve seen it more than once.” Things like that. But sometimes you come across something that just hits you in such a way that’s so specifically your thing that these rules suddenly seem like they don’t matter, and that’s about when it’s time to break them. When I started Twenty Perfect Minutes my intent was to do it fairly infrequently and to showcase episodes of older anime. A few years old, at minimum.
Yet, here I am. Writing in late 2020 about an anime airing in late 2020. Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is the voluminously-titled most recent entry in the storied and frankly massive Love Live franchise. It is also not finished, and as such by writing this I very much risk making myself look like a fool come the end of the season. But if that is a risk, it’s one worth taking, because Nijigasaki‘s third episode is not just the best episode of the young season, it’s one of the strongest this year period.
It’s been a solid year for a lot of different kinds of anime, but very little has made me cry, and as someone who values high melodrama I do unashamedly check for that when mulling over how good I find a series overall. Nijigasaki arguably tossed its hat into the Anime of The Year conversation from the word “go”, but if there was any doubt, it should be cleared up by this episode; “Shouting Your Love”.
Before we can discuss “Shouting Your Love” though, we have to backtrack a bit, to that word “go”, and explain how we got here. First of all, let’s meet Yu.
Yu is interesting. She feels simultaneously pretty typical for the genre but just enough to the left that it’s fresh. Yu begins the series as someone with a lot of passion searching for an outlet. She does not start as an idol (or even an idol fan). We get to see her fall in love with idol music in real time, as the opening half of the first episode is devoted almost entirely to this. And it’s back in that first episode where Nijigasaki pulls out its artistic ace in the hole.
Yu (and her friend Ayumu) happen to catch a public performance by a local idol, Setsuna. The song itself (“Chase!”) is a great slice of upbeat J-Pop if you’re into that sort of thing, but what really sells the scene is twofold. One is a number of close shots of Yu’s face, letting us see her reaction change moment to moment. The other is that we see Setsuna’s performance gradually shift from a simple depiction of what she is actually physically doing, to–at the exact moment that her music hits Yu in the heart–a music video-within-a-show. The stage erupts into fire; figurative passion transformed into literal flame. My understanding is that these inset MVs are not entirely new to Love Live as a franchise, but Nijigasaki‘s use of them feels deeply woven into the narrative. The show wouldn’t entirely work without them.
Yu’s journey starts here, her passion is ignited and it’s her drive that leads the plot forward from this point on. What is left largely unsaid in that first episode–and what brings us back to the third–is Setsuna‘s journey. The very short version is that Nijigasaki pulls off an elegant piece of narrative symmetry here: in the first episode Setsuna lights a fire in Yu’s heart, and Yu, in the third episode, rekindles the dying embers in Setsuna’s.
As this early part of the series has gone on, it’s established that “Setsuna Yuki” isn’t a real person. She’s the alter ego of Nana Nagakawa, the student council president of the titular Nijigasaki High. The performance that Yu and Ayumu witnessed was, in fact, her last and only. Some attention is even paid to the fact that Yu can’t find any other songs by her. (And real life is rife with examples of low-output musicians, from The New Radicals to Mr. Fantastik, so it’s quite a relatable experience.)
What would otherwise be a very straightforward plot detour is spun into a miniature epic through “Shouting Your Love”‘s framing. Nana’s true identity was revealed an episode prior. Here, we get to see her most “normal” side first. Despite her own misgivings about her role in the former Idol Club, she has many traits of a good leader that shine through even here. She seems to know almost every student by both name and educational track, and isn’t above doing dirty work herself. After an introductory sequence where Nana mulls over her decision to quit before deciding it’s for the best, the first thing we see her do is chase down a stray cat. It’s charming and sets the rest of the episode up nicely.
But while this fleshes out her character a bit, the real revealing turn is her initial encounter with Yu, who is idly playing “Chase!” to herself on a piano. Yu initially mistakes Nana for a fellow Setsuna fan, but Nana quickly rebuffs her. But as she does so, it becomes clear before long that Nana is less talking to Yu and more trying to justify her decision post-hoc to herself.
In a vacuum this is a pretty simple development. In the context of the rest of “Shouting Your Love” it helps Nana feel like someone legitimately going through a serious crisis of the self. The actual argument that broke up the Idol Club–something about passion vs. cuteness–is perhaps a bit underexplored, but the conflict it represents feels real. It’s clear to us the audience that Nana doesn’t really want this to be where her time as an idol ends, and she’s trying to convince herself more than anyone else. At one point she even sits down to watch a Youtube upload of her own performance; only to scroll down and realize that all the comments are asking fundamentally the same question: why did Setsuna quit?
You can read a lot into her internal monologue in this episode. And there may be more than one answer. Personally, it seems to me that she’s someone with a tendency to put what others expect of her before what she wants herself. It would fit with her demanding position on the student council, an aside remark by her mother about “mock exams”, and her decision to disband the club once she felt like she was getting in everyone else’s way. She even seems to think that she was holding them back from competing in the Love Live, the school idol “tournament” after which the entire franchise is named. And indeed, her final comments in that very monologue seem to frame things that way, with her justifying her decision as a sacrifice for the benefit of her friends, the new members of the club, and so on.
In fact on my first viewing of this episode I actually thought it might end there, because I wasn’t paying particularly much attention to how far along the video was. In the best way possible; “Shouting Your Love” is the rare anime episode that feels twice its length. The second half of the episode sees the newly-reformed School Idol Club briefly hijack the school announcement system to call Nana and “Setsuna” to the roof. (After a heartfelt meeting where they decide they want to try to get Nana back in the club, of course.)
Here, she has another talk with Yu, who at this point in the series seems like someone whose wildfire passion may well be contagious. Yu asks Nana to rejoin the club. Nana replies that she’ll hold everyone back from being able to compete at the Love Live, to which Yu says this.
And the facade of Nana as the dutiful student council president who always puts others before herself promptly snaps like a twig.
It’s hard to not just post screencaps of the entire conversation, which is so heartfelt that in places it borders on a confession scene (not the first like this that Yu’s been responsible for in Nijigasaki and I doubt it’ll be the last).
Shippers eat your heart out.
The important thing is that Yu’s words reach Nana, much like Setsuna’s song first reached Yu. In a stylish hairflip, Nana’s braids come undone, and Setsuna is reborn in an instant. Because this is an idol series–because this is Love Live, perhaps–she of course bursts into song. “DIVE!”, the insert song here, is a fist-pumping rocker whose “music video” weds the earlier fire theme of “Chase!” to an underwater aesthetic, laying Nana/Setsuna’s personality out in symbolic language as she, in the MV, breaks through a reflective underwater wall of ice, perhaps a visual metaphor for this rediscovery of what is, in my estimation, her real self.
But we can talk about symbolism and other such concerns all we like. The biggest thing I can say in the favor of “Shouting Your Love!” is that I’ve now watched the ending scene three times. And while it’s true I cried the first time, I think it’s even more impressive that I couldn’t stop myself from grinning ear to ear every single time. “Yu” is kind of brilliant as a character name, because while she is a character in her own right, when you’re watching the idol performances, you’re seeing them, essentially, as Yu sees them. If you open yourself to it, the passion of the series–the same passion I’ve talked about at length, here–can easily light your heart on fire as well.
It’s impossible to know if we’ll still be talking about Nijigasaki in these same terms in a few weeks. A lot can change over the course of an anime’s run, after all. But it’s hard to imagine a world where this episode ever feels less wonderful. To tell the truth, as someone who recently set music as a creative outlet aside, I can’t help but relate to Nana. But even more, I can’t help but relate to Yu, who seems just as star-struck by the wonder of art that I am in moments like….well, like “Shouting Your Love”.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Or “weekly livewatch writeup” as it might be more accurately titled. They’ve been taking up much of my writing time lately. Not a bad thing! But it has made doing other stuff a bit hard especially as I’ve been rather under the weather both physically and mentally for the past while. (This is why there was no roundup post last week and why my seasonal first impressions column did not materialize, for the record.)
To also clarify something else just to lay any possible suspicions to rest, I am still writing for The Geek Girl Authority. I’m just on a short hiatus and will likely resume work for them sometime around the middle of next month if everything goes according to plan. At worst, I will be picking my recap columns back up over there next season. Ironically, this season’s main problem has been that there is too much good stuff airing. It’s made knowing what to cover kind of impossible and as a result I have been….largely not covering anything at all. Not really a great approach, to be perfectly frank, but, well, see prior notes about being under the weather.
But enough beating around the bush (and beating myself up, that helps nobody), let’s get to what I have been doing recently.
Twitter “Live Watches”
This is where most of the Good Content ™ is this week.
ANOTHER (for #AniTwitWatches) [1, 2]: Something I am increasingly fond of is shows that I end up treating as kind of a puzzle while I watch them, trying to figure out what they’re going for, what they’re trying to say, and so on. ANOTHER (which may or may not actually be stylized that way, I’m not entirely clear) has been great in this regard. I’ve found myself turning over the series’ use of smalltown social dynamics to dive into the mechanics of “curses” really interesting. I’m still not entirely sure what point it’s trying to make with all this, but figuring that out is half the fun. Bonus: a genuinely freaky nightmare scene in episode 7.
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha [1, 2]: Here’s my latest “watch a classic anime I haven’t seen yet” boondoggle following the completion of the Utena livewatch (see below). My thoughts on this show are a little mixed at the moment. I am really not fond of the vestiges of its origin as a spinoff of an eroge, there’s some inappropriate perviness in the camera and a few other things. Which I would perhaps mind less if the characters were not mostly children. Yuck. If you can get past that (and as always I don’t hold anything against people who can’t) there’s a solid–god forgive me for using this term–hype-driven magical girl anime in here. Lots of flashy lasers, fun henshin sequences, magical doodads, and snappy directing (which comes from a pre-SHAFT Akiyuki Shinbo. Something I am rather embarrassed to admit I didn’t actually pick up on until it was pointed out to me!)
I’m pretty confident the show will get better as it goes on and relies less on The Aforementioned Fanservice Stuff, and even in the couple episodes I’ve watched it’s already started to drop off (or at least refocus to Arf, who is an adult) as the storyline gets a bit more serious and the show introduces main antagonist Fate Testarossa*. My final “verdict” on it is a long way off yet, so we’ll see.
Revolutionary Girl Utena [1, 2, 3, 4]: I think Revolutionary Girl Utena might be one of my favorite anime ever. It’s a hard call to make. I only finished it recently and there’s so much going on in the show that I’ll probably be turning the symbolism over in my head for years. But it feels telling that despite the fact that I basically just finished it I already want to watch it again. That I have not reviewed it is indicative not of any deficiency on its part or a lack of anything to say on mine, but of my skills as a reviewer. I simply don’t know if I’m there yet. Although honestly it’s been consuming so much of my mental real estate that I’m tempted to try anyway.
But let me offer you this evidence: after several months of drawing the series out as long as I could, I banged out the rest (and the alternate take / sequel film The Adolescence of Utena) in just three days. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a series that’s captivating in this specific way before, and I’m not sure I ever will again. I love this show to pieces.
Sailor Moon: And firmly on the other end of the quality spectrum, at least right now, are these two frankly pretty bad episodes of Sailor Moon. Isolated, they’re merely subpar. Together, they’re insufferable, especially the first, a bizarre bout of (internalized?) misogyny that feels wildly out of place in a children’s series, even one of this vintage. Certainly in a mahou shoujo series. Easily bottom 5’ers, the both of them. Thankfully I believe the show returns to more well-regarded ground this coming week, and you take the good with the bad, so I think I will have kinder things to say in this space next week.
Other Thoughts N Such
As I briefly mentioned up top, there is too much good stuff airing this season. Do you like battle girl shows? Check out Assault Lily Bouquet and Warlords of Sigrdrifa. Idols? Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is incredible and maybe the single best thing airing in an insanely strong season. Even Jun Maeda of all people is here, responsible for the script on The Day I Became A God, a show whose first episode showed off an incredible amount of promise.
In the realm of things I’m not watching (but have heard a lot of good about), there’s solid action shonen (Jujutsu Kaisen), iyashikei (Sleepy Princess In The Demon Castle), an isekai where the main character wears a Lain-style bear suit (Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear), a traveler story (Elaina The Witch), and even an anime about rap battling boy band idols (the ambiently baffling HYPNOSISMIC -Division Rap Battle- Rhyme Anima). I feel like I’m basically advertising the season, but when there’s just this much stuff dropping it’s hard not to. Unless these somehow all manage to strongly disappoint I imagine people will be talking about this season for a long time.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
It’s been a busy week here at MPA. I haven’t had GGA work to worry about because the new season’s only just started, so I haven’t settled on my pickups yet. As such, I’ve been doing a lot of work for the blog, I hope some of it is of interest to you. Let’s begin!
Magic Planet Anime
(REVIEW) Shadows on The Sun: The Forgotten Flames of DAY BREAK ILLUSION: I’ve been on something of a magical girl kick for the last month or so. (I go through those sometimes). One result was checking out this particular anti-classic, blew through the whole thing in less than 24 hours. It’s a really interesting anime to me because despite its reputation as “the first Madoka Clone” it strikes me as not having a ton in common with that series. The long and short is that I liked it a lot, despite its poor reputation nowadays. Give this one a read! I’m proud of it.
(REVIEW) DRACULA, SOVEREIGN OF THE DAMNED Is A Graveyard….Something: I must thank commissioner Myrdradek for getting me to watch something I almost certainly wouldn’t have otherwise and for inadvertently getting my blog into the Halloween spirit. I didn’t totally know what to make of this one, honestly, beyond finding it rather goofy. It does have some nice art though! Also: yes this is where that .gif of Dracula eating a hamburger is from. Important internet history right there.
The Manga Shelf: The Morbid Optimism of SUICIDE GIRL: Here’s another “edgy magical girl” property, a subgenre I’ve increasingly come to think might be kind of misunderstood. That broader topic aside, if you can get past the content warnings (they’re at the top of the article, though you can probably deduce them from the name of the work, honestly) and the controversial subject matter, this is a surprisingly idealistic series. One that I think will get even better as it goes on, but I suppose time will tell.
The Problem With Balgo Parks in BURN THE WITCH: This certainly not my favorite kind of article to write, but it’s by far one of the easiest. I really wanted to like the Burn The Witch OVA. Honestly I kind of did! Except for its male lead, who is all over it in the worst way possible all the time. Why!
Twitter “Live Watches”
ANOTHER (For #AniTwitWatches): This is another spooky series, this time with the #AniTwitWatches gang. I uh….knew basically nothing about this series going in other than that it was a mystery anime. Frankly I still don’t know much about it, but it’s interesting, I’ll say that much. Lots of ominously-charged dialogue and some Final Destination-style murder-by-circumstance. Cannot wait to get to this week’s episodes later today!
Sailor Moon (For #FightingEvilByGroupwatch): I think most of my thoughts on this week’s Sailor Moon episodes are covered in that first tweet. Fun pair of episodes though! Enjoyed ’em.
Other Thoughts N Such
I hope you’ll forgive me for keeping the “other thoughts” section brief this time around, I’ve got some thoughts on the new anime season but that’ll probably make it to another post soon. One minor note: Utena will be back before next week! You have my word! Unless something goes horribly wrong, of course. Another minor note: watch Assault Lily Bouquet.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This article contains spoilers for the covered material and assumes familiarity with it. This is your only warning.
I’m always hesitant to write this sort of thing. I don’t want to accrue a reputation as an Issue Critic or, indeed, as someone who thinks that Negativity = Good Important Critical Writing. Neither are true, and certainly there are plenty of people who work in the intersection of sociological study and arts study at a much higher level than I do and I think that work is very important. But it’s generally not what I aspire to do here on Magic Planet Anime.
So it is, truly, with a measure of reluctance that I am writing on Studio Colorido‘s adaption of Burn The Witch in this way. Not to praise the OVA’s many merits–its production, its soundtrack, the engaging fight scenes, the cool do-anything “Witch Kit” guns, or even its bevy of hilarious names*–but to talk about one of its problems. Even worse, Burn The Witch is an OVA that doesn’t actually have that many problems, but the few it does are notable, and one in particular is the worst of the lot by a good margin.
The problem with writing a bad character is that you practically hand dipshits like me ammo to make fun of him.
Balgo Parks.
Balgo Ywain Parks. Has there ever been a character who feels more interpolated from some other anime entirely? Probably, but the feeling definitely exists with Parks, who comes across as a character less deliberately written into the narrative and more one conjured up by some kind of noxious otaku sterotype and snuck in under author Tite Kubo‘s nose.
That of course is not what happened. Someone is responsible for this, but whether it was Kubo himself, a misguided editor, or a mischievous sprite is impossible to know and not worth guessing about. However he got here, Balgo exists, and we must reckon with him. God help us all.
Balgo feels in a way like a new take on an old concept that permeates a lot of shonen; the pervy slapstick character. This is a trope with roots that predate the medium, and to becompletely fair it’s not like English-language media is devoid of gross lunkheads. The specific issue with Balgo and the sort of character he represents is not merely one of sexism–though that is certainly a part of it–it’s that he actively leeches both goodwill and narrative coherency from the series he’s a part of.
Burn The Witch makes a fairly big show of denouncing “fairy tales”. The example given is Cinderella, which, this entire spiel in of itself has its own problems, but let’s take it on the level the OVA clearly wants us to. Waiting around for someone to bring excitement into your life or to solve your problems is pointless, because if someone else does that for you they can easily take it away. You should strive to seize your goals yourself. In as much as an OVA based on the first half dozen chapters of a manga can have a core thesis, this is Burn The Witch‘s.
For most of the characters that we get to know in the OVA, this plays out pretty logically. Ninny is a popstar in London proper but seeks to build her reputation as a dragonhunter in Reverse London so she can one day join the Sabres, Wing Bind’s actual dragon-hunting division. Noel meanwhile is simply trying to earn a living. So far, so coherent.
Let us for the moment set aside the sexist aspects of Balgo’s character. (We will, rest assured, come back to them.) From a simple coherence point of view, the main issue with Balgo’s character is that he has absolutely no agency. None at all. Zero. It is established early on that Balgo became a Dragonclad–and thus attracts dragons–by accident. He is thus in the care of Wing Bind, and more specifically our leads, by accident. Late in the OVA, he summons a sword from the Witch Kit he’s been given, by accident. Balgo does not do things, he is a straw dummy whom things happen to.
I have never related to a villain more in my life.
Effectively, he’s a reverse-maiden in distress. But the way to solve a problem caused by patriarchal norms is rarely to simply invert them. Balgo gains all the problems of that character archetype; a lack of agency, and a lack of any real depth, but inherits the benefits of being a male protagonist in a frankly poorly-written shonen series; being a wish fulfillment proxy for the intended audience (and perhaps the author, though that’s harder to say with authority) and facing no consequences for the one thing he does do of his own free will; ogle and harass the female characters.
And we must tackle that part of things, too. Because it’s easy to simply say that Balgo is a wish-fulfillment character and that that is the problem, but it’s not, it’s only a small part of it. Wish-fulfillment in narrative fiction is fine, and every audience under the sun is entitled to some amount of stories that simply exist to let them watch someone similar to them succeed and triumph over adversity. The problem specifically with Balgo is that he is a wish-fulfillment character who faces no adversity. And indeed, makes no choices. By simply existing, he actively cuts against Burn The Witch‘s own central theme. He is put into danger and taken out of it through no action of his own. Even the aforementioned summoned sword simply exists, he doesn’t use it.
Balgo, thus, does not seize anything. Violating the OVA’s whole thematic point. The closest idea of his we get to a goal is a desire to shack up with Noel. That, too, is simply handed to him, as the final few minutes of the OVA imply that Noel, for some reason, returns his feelings. (There’s a clear intended contrast between Noel as a “cold tsundere” and Ninny as a “hot tsundere” but it doesn’t really work. Noel and Baglo barely speak before this scene, contrast Ninny’s many heated interactions with Macy.) And then the whole thing ends on a panty shot, in what is presumably supposed to be a wink to the audience. Instead, it comes across, at least to yours truly, as a reminder to not be too generous when telling people about this thing’s flaws.
Yeah that’s about the face that I made, too.
Balgo does have one compatriot in Burn The Witch. Macy, who fulfills a similar role, is similarly lacking in any agency, and explicitly harbors feelings for Ninny. But despite both being problem characters, the difference in the magnitude of the problem is stark. Macy’s “clingy lesbian” characterization is certainly unflattering and would not be present in a better-written series, but her relationship with the dragon Elly gives her an extra dimension that Balgo–who mind you is billed as one of the protagonists–simply doesn’t have. And as mentioned, she gets far more interaction with Ninny than Balgo does with Noel.
Not that there isn’t improvement you could make here too of course, but at least they like, acknowledge each other.
And really, the biggest issue with Balgo is not any of this. It’s that he’s unignorable. These problems were and are all present in the manga. But in animated form, mugging all over the screen, with VA Shimba Tsuchiya turning in a performance that is perfect to the character by dint of being ludicrously obnoxious, he goes from an irritation to a defacement.
It is, of course, possible, technically, that the manga will rectify this at some point. It’s not like there aren’t ways out. One could give Balgo something to actually do. One could write him out of the series entirely. One could simply make his comedic relief revolve around anything else but talking about sexual harassment. But as long as he remains that way, he is an inescapable black mark on an otherwise solid series. It is cheap to say this, but a version of Burn The Witch that replaces Balgo with almost anyone or anything else is an infinitely better version of Burn The Witch.
And that sucks, because other than this one glaring problem, Burn The Witch is actually quite fun. But when that one glaring problem sucks all of that fun out of the room any time he’s on screen, it’s a serious issue. And Balgo, sadly, all on his own, is that issue.
*Seriously. Ninny Spangcole? Bruno Bangnyfe? Genuinely incredible.
If you like my work, consider following me here on WordPress or on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilistor for The Geek Girl Authority.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Myrdradek. Many thanks, as always.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
“Count Dracula fled to the United States of America, seeking to hide himself in the city of Boston.”
Happy Halloween.
You know what’s truly scary? Not ghosts, ghouls, goblins, monsters, demons, and certainly not vampires. It’s the inexorable march of time, and its effect on popular culture. Today’s big-budget blockbuster is tomorrow’s piece of trivia, and we have quite the piece of Did You Know? fodder today.
Everyone’s favorite sitcom family.
The result of a partnership between Marvel and Toei, Dracula: Sovereign of The Damned (Yami no Teiō: Kyūketsuki Dorakyura in Japan) is loosely based on Marvel’s own The Tomb of Dracula comics. The same that would give rise to the character Blade. (Who, incidentally, has a mostly-forgotten anime series of his own at this point.) Originally released in Japan, it was, as far as I can tell, dubbed into English by the infamous Harmony Gold a few years later, and enjoyed limited screenings on cable TV and possibly some sort of VHS release. A DVD remaster also exists, though information on any of this is rather sparse.
Sovereign of The Damned is not anyone’s idea of a lost classic. It’s campy, corny, and about five different kinds of a mess. I’m not allergic to any of those traits, as I’ve well established elsewhere on this blog, but Sovereign of The Damned is a special kind of Very 80s so-bad-it’s-good, that one has to be of a particular mindset to enjoy.
Do you like Sinister Pointing? Dracula: Sovereign of The Damned might just be the film for you!
There’s a lot of up and downs here, starting with the production. Visually, the film’s quality is a mixed bag. The realities of footage degradation over the years have rendered some parts of even the remaster rather hard to parse, as once-present color detail is smooshed into what is essentially different shades of black or dark blue. Even at the time, I imagine it was a bit of a struggle.
The animation quality is also spotty. While it’s hardly the worst thing this era of cartooning produced (not by a longshot) it rarely looks particularly fluid or pleasing, further hampered by the semi-realistic style that was the norm for this sort of thing at the time. In particularly bad moments, characters sometimes seem to more morph into new poses rather than move per se.
On the other hand, it does admittedly have its visual highlights, too. There’s a particularly nice cut in the film’s first half when we see Satan raise Dracula from the grave, the bizarre but visually striking “resurrection scene” of Dracula’s son Janus, the looming gothic air of its depiction of Dracula’s tenure as Vlad III of Wallachia, and some cool flame and beam effects elsewhere.
The backgrounds are quite good as well. Generally, they consist of nicely-painted pieces that set the mood effectively. The city backgrounds in particular have a peculiar unreality to them that was common to backgrounds depicting such settings at the time.
Broadly speaking, it’s the weirder and more abstract parts of the film that look the best. It’s hard to say if that’s simple circumstance or the result of the artists being given more room to experiment with the more out-there sequences. It’s a real treat though, and it saves Sovereign of The Damned from being visually boring.
On the audio end, the experience is similar. The soundtrack is weird and bloopy but it’s effective at mood-building when it’s actually present. But decently long stretches of Sovereign of the Damned simply do not have BGM, leading the generally poor FX work to struggle to pick up the slack. The voice acting is similarly lackluster. Other than the amusingly hammy performances of Tom Wyner in the lead as Dracula, and Richard Epcar as Satan, none of the voicework is particularly memorable. Even these performances seem to be more the result of actors simply realizing they may as well go all-in on a film this corny. They’re fun, but hardly genuinely serious or dramatic.
But of course if anyone knows Sovereign of The Damned it’s not for its production values. The film’s script has the unenviable task of trying to condense 70 issues of full-length comics into just 90 minutes. It’s untenable, and as a result Sovereign of The Damned blows through some six or seven only very loosely-related plotlines in its hour and a half runtime. Elements are brought up, used once or twice, and then dropped. Satan, for example, is set up as a major antagonist, but disappears two-thirds of the way through the film, swearing a revenge that he never comes to collect.
There’s also a notably bad “telling over showing” problem. Decent tracts of reel estate are eaten up by long spools of narration. Without fail they’re flat, dull, and serve only to shuttle the characters along from one plotline to another. The entire B-plot about the vampire hunter team seems superfluous until Sovereign‘s closing minutes, where bearded brains-of-the-operation Hans Harper* is unexpectedly able to overpower and impale a newly-re-vampirized Dracula on a silver wheel spoke before taking out both the vampire prince and himself with a self-destruct button in his wheelchair. It’s as silly as it sounds.
A stone-cold killer, apparently.
Which is honestly not a huge issue. Sovereign of The Damned is at its best when it’s silly, whether it’s the high school play melodrama of Dracula’s bride’s backstory, the comically bitchy essentially-a-cameo by Layla**, the random aside where Dracula must hide from a bunch of bats in a cabin with three small children near the film’s end, or even Dracula mugging a man to get money for a burger at one point. (And yes, it is this film that that particular piece of internet ephemera comes from, if you’ve been getting deja vu from the image embeds.)
There are a few moments that approach genuine pathos. Such as Dracula’s rage at the accidental murder of his infant son, but they’re rendered absurd by the voice acting. I can’t help but wonder if the film “works” a bit more as a serious piece in Japanese, but the English subtitled version of the film is not easily available, so a mystery it will remain for the foreseeable future.
In the end, Dracula: Sovereign of The Damned is not actually unusual in any of these regards. Most animation, and indeed, most media, falls in this same collective cultural memory hole. Too weird to be completely forgotten, but certainly not remarkable enough to have lingered in any serious capacity. So it is reduced down to a few clips, and passes into the great pop-cultural beyond, with all the elegance of Dr. Harper’s exploding wheelchair. So it goes.
*, **: In the comics, their names are Quincy Harper and Lilith respectively. Why they were changed here is a riddle for the ages.
If you like my work, consider following me here on WordPress or on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilistor for The Geek Girl Authority.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Content Warning: This article contains art that depicts, and frank discussion of, suicide and self-harm. Reader discretion is advised.
The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad.
“Monsters of the dark mind–Disappear!”
One of my original goals in starting the “Manga Shelf” sub-column was to shine a spotlight on stuff where my opinion may not’ve been totally settled, but I did definitely think it was at least interesting enough to be paying attention to. And today, we have something that fits the bill perfectly, and with one hell of a high concept. Suicide Girl, to not bury the lede, is a manga about a depressed magical girl who is conscripted by the owner of a mysterious café to combat and hopefully rid the world of “suicide demons” called Phobias, which cause people to kill themselves.
As far as elevator pitches go, it’s both wild and initially quite offputting. I’ve never been shy about being a skeptic of the whole “dark magical girl” movement. Even if in recent months (and hell, days) I’ve come around somewhat. Add to that the understandably extremely touchy issue of suicide and the manga’s irreverent, sometimes jokey tone, and Suicide Girl really feels like it should be a complete disaster.
However, while it’s too early to definitively say that Suicide Girl is a total success or anything like that (only five chapters are available in English at the time of this writing), it does feel, strangely enough, like it actually does have its heart in the right place.
To explain, first some brief recapping: our lead is Kirari Aokigahara (named after the suicide forest, yes). She meets the aforementioned mysterious café-owner while attempting to kill herself. The man foils her attempt (it’s complicated), and senses within her the power to fight the Phobia. She has a vision of, and is sent to, the site of a suicide-to-be. There, she seemingly talks the would-be victim out of her mistake, only for her to suddenly fling herself onto the tracks anyway. So far, so edgy.
It’s in the second chapter, where we get a bit of Kirari’s backstory, that Suicide Girl started to pick at the heavy coat of skepticism I’d built up from reading too many seinen manga in my day. And where, I suspect, it’ll do the same for others. The gist is simple: Kirari had a fiancé once. She doesn’t anymore. Adding to the weight of her retelling is the art; Suicide Girl‘s panel composition is something to behold.
The image of the looming silhouette of a building physically shunting Kirari’s flashbacks off to the side of the page, as though dominating her memories of the event, struck me. My initial (admittedly unfair) assumption had been that Suicide Girl was essentially a deliberately way-over-the-line gag manga. And while there is an element of that, this was the page that convinced me that it was trying to tell a meaningful story, too.
I don’t mean to sidetrack into my personal history too much. But while I’ve (thankfully) not struggled with physical self-harm in many years, suicidal thoughts have never entirely been gone from my mind. And I struggle with my self-worth every day. The externalization of suicidal ideation present in Suicide Girl–that is to say, the Phobias–initially struck me as crass. I generally hate it when stories try to pin real problems on supernatural causes. But ruminating on it, I had a different thought.
The chemical imbalances and societal factors that cause depression do have real scientific or sociological explanations. However, to those suffering from them, suicidal thoughts can certainly feel as arbitrary and loathsome as being possessed by a demon. It’s a thought I myself have had before, if not in so many words. In that light, what followed in that first story arc struck me as less frivolous and more, perhaps, as cathartic.
First: Kirari learns that she has not actually failed her mission quite yet. The death of a Phobia victim comes with a timer. If the Phobia itself can be defeated in time, time resets, and their victim returns to life unscathed.
So off she goes. In fighting the monster, she transforms for the first time. Again the art plays a big role in bolstering the manga on the whole. Her henshin sequence is striking, morbid, horrifying, and incredible.
Yes, she hangs herself to transform. What I might’ve otherwise considered to be a gross parody of a traditional transformation sequence strikes me as a lot more nuanced in the broader context of Suicide Girl. Kirari, finally understanding that her boyfriend’s suicide was not her fault (nor, indeed, his) rejects literal death as an escape and substitutes it with a metaphorical and transformative death of the old self.
It is also partly a parody of traditional magical girl-isms, of course. A nod to the famous “Precure leap” gag occurs just pages later.
It is worth noting that Kirari does not immediately and instantly turn her entire life outlook around. She still misses her departed boyfriend, and when she tries to go out and act like everything’s fine, she can’t. What a later chapter proposes is that if one can’t find happiness within the self, they can find it by helping others. An idea that is, for something as ostensibly edgy as Suicide Girl, an emotional thesis that is perhaps surprisingly mature, even optimistic. Add this to the catharsis mentioned earlier that just comes from seeing Kirari beat the living daylights out of physical manifestations of the worst parts of the human mind, and Suicide Girl seems less like it’s making fun of those with Brain Issues, or using us for storytelling fodder, and more like it’s actively rooting for us.
There’s another, even simpler, layer to all of this. Which is that Kirari also has another of my favorite traits in a magical girl; she’s kind of a huge badass. An almost dorkily-grimdark one? Yes, but tell me you don’t think dialogue like this is cool on at least some level.
The manga’s wild facial expressions could honestly fill an article of their own.
In general, Suicide Girl manages to pull-off an impressive tight-rope-walk between being grim almost but not quite to the point of corniness, genuinely pretty cool, and surprisingly sincere when and where it really counts.
Now, Kirari and the café owner’s stated goal of eliminating suicide from the world may be a little ambitious. (The café owner himself points out that Kirari was not possessed by a Phobia when they first met.) So time will tell how the manga handles that plot point. There are other wrinkles on the page, too. A second Suicide Girl (a burned-out idol named Manten) debuted in the current arc, and her philosophy is almost perfectly counter to Kirari’s, adding an interesting twist to things.
It’s hard to say if Suicide Girl will prove if it’s “earned” the right to its doubtlessly controversial subject matter or not. It is, of course, entirely possible I’m simply wildly misreading the whole thing and it actually just is supposed to take the piss, but there’s worse sins one can commit as a commentator than giving something too much credit.
And, of course, as much as I’ve found watching Kirari pummel literal emotional demons to be cathartic and even oddly liberating, not everyone is going to take it that way. It must be emphasized that that’s perfectly fine; people deal with things in different ways.
But for me at least, many of my favorite magical girl stories are, ultimately, feminine power fantasies. Stories where empathy, love, and hope do always win out over evil in the end. Time will tell if Suicide Girl follows suit, but at the moment, it certainly seems to be headed down that road. It’s just taking a darker side-path than most.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Welp! It’s the middle of the night after another light week, but here we are. I hope you’re all doing okay out there. I don’t have much else to lead off with, so let’s get into things.
The Geek Girl Authority
THE GOD OF HIGH SCHOOL Recap (S1E12): FOX/GOD – I have actually completely finished the show (screeners!) as of the time of this writing. It’s still not really what I’d call a great anime, but the last two episodes are fun in how whole-hog they go on being As Shonen As Possible.
DECA-DENCE Recap (S1E11-12): “Engine” / “Decadence”– While Deca-Dence is not my anime of the year or anything like that (it’s been a pretty strong year, anime-wise, if nothing else) I’m really glad I watched it. It didn’t do everything perfectly and there are some changes I’d have made in an ideal world, but overall this is a really good little show and I hope people remember it.
Magic Planet Anime
(REVIEW): The Cat’s Out of The Bag: MAO MAO: HEROES OF PURE HEART – Here’s something rather rare, a review of an American cartoon! This was a commission so I wouldn’t expect it to become the norm (it kind of goes against this blog’s name, although I guess you could argue I’m using “anime” in the original Japanese sense, but that’s silly.) That said: I liked the series, it has a couple major problems preventing me from loving it, but it’s solid and I hope the forthcoming second season expands on its slightly more serious elements a little more.
Twitter “Live Watches”
Sailor Moon – We met Rei this week! Not sure how I felt about the Ikuhara episode, interestingly enough, but I loved her introductory ep.
Also, yes, Revolutionary Girl Utena will hopefully be returning within a week or two. I’ve just been busy with various things recently and haven’t had the energy. (Plus that last arc was enough of a drainer that I kinda needed some recovery time).
Other Thoughts N Such
I’ve actually been watching quite a lot of anime in my “off time” this past week. Chiefly, a Puella Magi Madoka Magica groupwatch with some friends, which has now finished the series proper and will be watching The Rebellion Story sometime in the next few days. Hoo boy.
I’ve also started Day Break Illusion, generally derided as one of the first “Madoklones”. I don’t want to get too far into my thoughts on it here, but it strikes me rather differently than that. I’ll probably end up reviewing it, so if you want more detailed thoughts, just stay tuned.
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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Magic Planet 