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.

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What a ridiculous act of total, colossal, gutsy arrogance.

I am talking, of course, about the sheer length of Oshi no Ko‘s first episode. Nothing else, just its pure runtime in minutes. 90 of the suckers, basically a shortish movie or longish OVA. Things like that have never been super common, but anecdotally, I feel like they’re even less so these days. And it’s not like this is the Unlimited Blade Works anime here, while this is definitely a highly-anticipated manga adaptation, it doesn’t have the previous history of an existing franchise that something like that did, so the mere act of having a premiere clocking in at over an hour feels like some thrown gauntlet or line drawn in the sand. A statement that, really, this is Oshi no Ko‘s season; anything else that’s around just happens to be airing during it.

Were this almost any other series I’d not give the simple length of the first episode this much thought. (Honestly, I’d probably write it off as a pointless indulgence in most cases.) But Oshi no Ko gets to strive for blockbuster status like that. It is, after all, a story primarily about the vicious gnashing of the pop machine. It only makes sense that it would try to trump every competitor in its field at the moment. That’s how the business works; go hard or go home.

I’ve already spoken at length about the actual staff involved here, so I won’t rehash those points again. Most likely, the question you all have on your minds is more what Oshi no Ko actually is. After all, if you haven’t read the manga and are only keeping up with what I (and similar writers) are saying, you might be a little lost. Isn’t this just a dark take on the idol genre? Kind of like what 22/7 was trying to do? (But hopefully, you know, better than that?)

Well, yes and no. There are really two main stories in Oshi no Ko, and the entertainment industry stuff is definitely the main focus for most of it, but we actually start over on that other plotline instead. And while that one is certainly also caused by the dark underbelly of the entertainment industry, it’s a bit more extreme. Enough so that I’ve seen it written off as shock value, a point of view I don’t remotely agree with but which I do understand. A general word of warning: we’re going to get into some gnarly territory both over the course of today’s column and over the course of me covering Oshi no Ko in general.

But first, let’s lay out where all of this begins.

Here’s a thought experiment for you. Imagine you’re a countryside doctor named Goro Amemiya [Kento Itou]. That must be a pretty tense, high-stakes job, right? Imagine that, perhaps, as an escape from the stresses of your position, you get really into this one singer. You love her songs, her look, just her general charisma from head to toe. In modern internet pop parlance, we’d call you a stan. The person who got you into all this stuff was a chronically ill girl named Sarina [Tomoyo Takayanagi]. She’s gone now, and you admit that perhaps taking up her own obsession with that singer, Hoshino Ai, of BKomachi [Rie Takahashi], is you in some way conflating the two in your mind. With more of a reason than most, perhaps, given a conversation the two of you once had where she asked what you thought about the idea of being born into fame and status; maybe it was just idle fantasizing from a sick girl, but it’s stuck in your mind. And maybe, too, none of this is exactly healthy—despite being a doctor yourself, you aren’t really sure—but you aren’t hurting anyone, and you seem to be a decent doctor, so this is tolerated as an eccentricity of both you and your practice. Things are, broadly, going fine.

^{You’re this guy. (In the context of this rhetorical device.)}

Then, one day, your favorite idol walks into your practice. She is 20 weeks pregnant. You’re a professional, so you keep your emotions—the childish glee of seeing your favorite singer in person, the shock of this particular development—pretty much entirely out of the waiting room. You don’t want to make things worse for her, after all. She seems pretty chipper about the whole thing, and intent on keeping the twins(!) she’s carrying. Her manager and legal guardian is a lot less so, and seems to think that this would cause a scandal that’d end her career (and his own agency). Unfortunately, he is probably right.

I’ll kill the second-person narration here, because I want to make an important aside. To those of us in the US or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, the aspersions cast on an idol who gets married and has kids might seem kind of weird. But, this is how J-Idol culture operated for a very long time and to some extent continues to operate, and while we don’t have the time or space here to get into an entire digression about how deeply fucked up that entire system is, it is worth putting a pin in that fucked-upness, because illustrating that; turning this whole industry over and poking at it all the while, is essentially what Oshi no Ko is about. (Idol culture isn’t actually unique in this way, in any case, and the US has been puritanical about these sorts of things in a similar way far more recently than I think most realize, but we’re getting into asides-within-asides territory at this point, so that’s a discussion for another time.)

Someone who does not abide by this dichotomy; idol or parent, virgin or whore, is Ai herself. Ai gets her first spotlight scene about ten minutes into the episode—yes, we’re not even a half hour in yet—and she is stunning, a lodestar of cheery charisma, and so obviously the kind of person who can make you feel more important just by talking to you.

One of the hardest things to do when creating a story about any kind of entertainment is to sell the entertainers themselves as entertainers and performing artists. Real people can have natural charm, a character within a narrative must be given charm, and it generally serves some purpose. Ai spouts off a monologue about how idols are talented liars, how she loves her job because she gets to put on this façade for people, and how she isn’t going to go public with her kids. She’s going to be both; a good parent and a popular idol. We could never hear a single note from the young woman, and this scene alone would make it obvious how incredibly magnetic she must be. Even as, it must be noted somewhere, HiDIVE’s video for American viewers absolutely fuzzes the hell out of the nighttime backdrop here. It’s pretty unfortunate, but it can’t smother the dusky magic of the scene.

Goro takes his work very seriously. Doubly so, given the status of his patient, and works with her during the remaining 20 weeks of her pregnancy to ensure the best conditions possible. He even starts to think of this as the entire reason he became a doctor. Destiny, in a sense, leading him to help out his—and Sarina’s—favorite idol in her time of need. But if that is destiny at work, then destiny has a strange sense of humor indeed.

One night, after preparing Ai for her delivery, Goro steps out, only to be confronted by a strange man in a gray hoodie who angrily asks him if he’s Hoshino Ai’s doctor. This is alarming for several reasons; the guy’s angry tone, the fact that he’s appeared out of nowhere, and the fact that Ai’s surname has never been a matter of public record. (It’s a Madonna situation but to an even greater extreme, one supposes.) Goro and this man have a brief confrontation, and it ends with our apparent protagonist getting shoved off of a cliff. He doesn’t make it, but as he lays dying, something truly strange happens as his consciousness begins to slip away. His mind flashes back to that conversation with Sarina years ago, about what one would do if they were reborn as a celebrity’s child, and the series gets ambitious in depicting the moment of death-of-consciousness as the truly surreal thing it must actually be; stuttering video, rapid flash cuts to crows and ultrasounds, a hazy, bright filter all over everything.

And then, the moment of Oshi no Ko‘s first big swerve, as Goro dies, and the cycle of reincarnation works its magic. There is no delicate way to put it; yes, the man has been reborn as his oshii’s own son. Yes, it is absolutely a fucking wild way to start this story, a sort of brilliant-bizarre head check that’s given a moment to settle in by the title card drop. But we’re not done yet, not by a long shot.

For a while, after that particular reveal, it seems like Oshi no Ko might become a different anime entirely. Most of what immediately follows is pretty lighthearted, following the misadventures of Ai as she tries to get back on her feet career-wise while taking care of her kids and concealing them from the public at the same time. As Goro—now Aquamarine [Yumi Uchiyama] for the remainder of the show, alongside his twin sister Ruby [Yurie Igoma]—points out, she’s not really equipped to be a terribly effective mom. But rather than criticizing her, the series does paint her as sympathetic. (It also, interestingly, points out that she’s essentially faceblind, possibly the only anime character I can think of who canonically is so.) More generally; this section of the episode is a lot more lighthearted, and is more in line with some of studio Doga Kobo‘s other work. For a few minutes, you can kind of talk yourself into thinking we might have another Helpful Fox Senko-san or something on our hands. Basically, a story about a guy who gets pampered by a woman through contrived supernatural circumstances. Or, at the very least, a zany comedy that just happens to have a stunningly bizarre setup.

The antics that occur during this part of the episode won’t pop that notion, but the pretty gross talk that some of the staff engage in while BKomachi are staging their big comeback performance might. It really is nothing but a parade of denigration; one staff member insults their music, another makes plans aloud to try to hook one of the girls up with his manager, a third makes a leery comment about one of the other girls’ chests and wonders if he can get her to do pinup work. ETC. The intercut of this and baby Aquamarine back at home obsessing over how talented his mama is—and make no mistake, Ai is talented, if she’s charismatic off-stage she turns into a total fucking supernova while actually on stage—is intentional and instructional. These are two sides of the same coin. With a third, even darker aspect coming into focus when we briefly flash aside to the stalker, muttering to himself in a room papered over with Ai posters.

That aside, the show takes some time to add some levity here, sure, and it’s actually intermittently pretty funny in general, although prone to maybe crossing lines it shouldn’t. There is a whole digression here, in fact, between Aqua and an also-reincarnated-from-someone Ruby, about the ethics of babies that host reincarnated souls breastfeeding, that could probably have been cut and no one of note would really have missed it. On the other hand, the whole segment with Aqua and Ruby psyching out their babysitter when she starts plotting to expose Ai to the press is pretty amazing, with Ruby claiming to be an incarnation of Amaterasu and such. That particular scene is even better in anime form than in the manga, so maybe some of the less-great humor is worth it. But the important point here is that OnK does not become a fluffy comedy series. This is still Oshi no Ko we’re talking about, and all of that is followed up by a moment where Ai, namesearching herself on Twitter while already in a low mood about a lack of money (terrible idea, folks!) stumbles onto an account accusing her of being “strictly professional.” That is to say, a performer without any kind of soul or spark. When she performs in concert not long afterward, the tweet sticks to her vision like a filter, literally tinting her thoughts and preventing her from truly being in the moment.

And even the more lighthearted moments have a bit of bitterness to them. To wit; the twins’ babysitter takes them to that concert at their insistence. There, they pretty much wild out in their strollers and, understandably, the sight of two little kids doing idol fan dances catches eyes and someone records it, and it ends up going viral. So does Ai’s big, proud, broad smile when she catches sight of them, and the knock-on effects of the good publicity make her turn toward the rather cynical again; if the people want a specific smile, she can give them one. This is a pro we’re talking about, after all.

Mind you, Ai’s newfound success on stage does not necessarily translate to success elsewhere. She’s given a role in a TV drama, but it’s a bit part, and most of it ends up cut. More important in this scene is a director character [Yasuyuki Kase] who we’ll meet many more times before this series is over, who talks with the quite-precocious Aquamarine about the different kinds of actors and eventually hands him his business card. That becomes relevant when Aqua finds out that Ai’s been so heavily chopped out of the show; he actually calls the director to complain! Even more astoundingly, this actually works out for him. The director explains his side, but does offer Ai another job, this time on a film.

On the condition that Aquamarine be in the project too.

The film is one that calls for a pair of creepy child roles. And it’s here that we’re introduced to the arrogant, crimson-haired child actress Kana [Megumi Han], another character who will become important to this story as it plays out. Initially dismissive, Kana casually insults both Aqua and his mother, assuming that they’re a pair of non-talents that were only added to the film as a favor. When she has to actually act beside Aqua, she’s floored. Less because he’s a great actor for his age and more because he’s able to intuit that what the director wants him to do isn’t really act at all. It’s to just be himself. He imagines the director saying something like “you’re plenty creepy already”—honestly not an entirely unreasonable reaction to a two-year-old who’s this self-assured—and in the process he totally shows Kana up, and she blows up at him, crying for a reshoot because, well, she wants to be the center of attention.

This entire part of the episode is quite good, but it does feel rather like an aside, and it ends with a timeskip. Evidence that perhaps these were originally conceived as three separate episodes and then later reworked as one singular chunk? Who can say. Either way, the format works for what Oshi no Ko is trying to do, marketing ploy or no.

After this, Ruby gets some focus. She is, perhaps unsurprisingly, revealed to be the reincarnation of Sarina, the disabled girl who got Goro into Ai in the first place. We do get into some admittedly dicey territory here; Sarina, it’s clear, wanted to not just admire idols but to be one in her past life, and it was something her disability kept her from. As someone who, for various physical reasons, has also had to forego the performing arts, I do sympathize. I am not sure how others will feel, especially those with conditions that more closely mirror what Sarina actually had. If someone were to tell me they found this a little offensive, I wouldn’t tell them they were wrong to. These things strike different chords—good and bad—for different people.

For me personally, the sheer joy that Ruby explodes with when she discovers that now, finally, she can dance connects with me on a pretty deep level. The show gets very abstract for a little bit here to convey that joy, too, dissolving into ribbons of pure figure and color as Ruby hits idol steps in a mirror. If nothing else, it’s an impressively ambitious bit of visual work.

But, the happiness is short lived, because as the episode closes in on its end, so does something else.

Ai has one other person in her life aside from her family and her manager. We never see him directly, and only know he exists from Ai talking to him through a payphone. But it’s clear from these conversations alone that the person she’s talking to is her ex. Unfortunately, Ai seems to be a pretty terrible judge of character, and her ex also seems to be the person who gave that stalker her hospital address years ago.

How do we know that? Because here, he does it again. The stalker shows up to Ai’s brand new apartment, which he mysteriously knows the location of, and stabs her in the gut.

In the manga, Ai’s death is shocking. An exclamation point, a hurried page turn. Here, given the breadth and depth of this team’s full production weight in the anime, it becomes absolutely heartwrenching. Ai’s slow, pained monologue, wherein she wonders what kind of people Ruby and Aqua will grow up to be, imagining them as an idol and an actor respectively, as she’s literally bleeding out onto her apartment’s floor, is the kind of thing that one cannot really recapture in other words. It’s a tragic, mesmerizing thing, and voice actress Takahashi Rie, herself an idol, deserves every accolade she’ll get for this performance twice over, delivering Ai’s final words in a strained, teary yelp. Ai’s last words to her children are that she loves them—something she has struggled to say, because she’s so used to saying it and not meaning it. Then, content that she was at least able to sincerely tell someone, her kids, that she loves them, she passes on. The stars in her eyes literally black out and vanish. She’s gone. Just like that.

In the days that follow, a bleak, grey wind blows over the lives of those that Ai has touched. Most notably her kids of course, but also her many fans (one of whom, in a moment that for some reason really got to me, is waving a little heart-shaped paper fan that says “Ai Fan for Eternity” on it). The news cycle is less kind, and Ai’s tragic passing is exploited as a public interest story, with Twitterites—in a way that is frankly pretty on-point for that website—gossiping about how it’s not actually surprising that she was killed, given that she was an idol who started dating someone. (Ruby, completely correctly, reacts with a fiery rant about how people who say things like this are usually disaffected lonely people who take out their own lack of luck in love on women in general. Igoma Yurie expresses the character’s bitter anger to a perfect tee, another excellent vocal performance in an episode full of them.)

After only a few days, the public moves on, and a quiet snow blankets Tokyo.

We end on Aqua swearing vengeance; it occurs to him that someone must’ve tipped off the stalker about where exactly Ai could be found, and given Ai’s very narrow social circle, this person—again, probably her ex, and therefore Aqua’s own father—is directly responsible for not only Ai’s death but also that of Aqua’s previous self. Maybe it’s not so strange that the kid basically cracks. The art style changes to accommodate, going into full moving-painting mode as a black flame of revenge is born in his heart, and he asks the director who gave him his first role to raise him in Ai’s absence. Years later, as he and Ruby set out for their first day of high school in what will become the remainder of the series’ “present day”, Aqua [Takeo Ootsuka, in this last scene and for the remainder of the show] still has vengeance on the mind.

This—all of this; the bad jokes, the reincarnation shenanigans, the legit comedic chops, the extensive attention paid to the ins and outs of the entertainment industry, the spotlights so hot they burn holes in the stage, the tragedy, the heartbreak, the death—is Oshi no Ko, a bizarre blockbuster that resonates with everyone and no one. It is an army of one. I have never run into another series that’s truly like it, and I’m not sure I ever will. But in all of its wild mood-swinging glory, Oshi no Ko is also kind of transcendent. That’s not the same as flawless, but but this is the sort of drama you can let yourself get caught up in, if you’re the type. (And I very much am.) That’s why it can pull off things like an hour and a half-long first episode. The show itself has a star quality.

As for our real leads, it’s not really a spoiler to say that, in spite of everything that happens here, both Aqua and Ruby will pursue careers in the industry. Aqua with the hope of finding the man truly responsible for his mother’s death, Ruby to fulfill her and Ai’s dream of her becoming an idol. It’s a long, twisted road, one no one is guaranteed to get out of alive. And all told, we’re only at the start of it. The entertainment industry is a voracious beast that eats its own young, littered with the corpses of those who burned out at the top and those who never made it. Hoshino Ai is, here, in true tragedy, reduced to one of those skeletons. One answer to the question; what does it really mean to be famous?

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