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 2005, Tokyo Mew Mew, under the localized title Mew Mew Power, became one of the very, very few non-Sailor Moon magical girl anime to ever make any real inroads in the United States. It wasn’t a runaway hit—in fact, it was one domino among many that eventually lead to downfall of infamous chopjob dub house 4Kids Entertainment—but it’s stuck around in a nebulous, cultural sense. As one of the tiny handful of magical girl anime that’s ever made any kind of dent stateside, it’s at least stuck in peoples’ memories. I was not one of the people who saw its US run, and in fact today marks the first time I’ve watched any Tokyo Mew Mew in any form, but the fact that it has that tiny little toehold in the minds of Anglophone magical girl fans matters, and it makes the series’ return in rebooted form as Tokyo Mew Mew New something of an event (if perhaps only a minor one). I imagine at least a few people will find their way to this article by looking up the new series.
New arrives nearly 20 years to the season that the original Tokyo Mew Mew premiered in its home country, and it returns like no time has passed at all. Almost every element of the series is relentlessly, unapologetically old school, for both good and ill, and it’s hard to imagine something like this being written nowadays were this not an old property for a lot of reasons.
At its core, the story is a simple one. Ordinary high school girl Ichigo Momomiya (Yuuki Tenma), has a crush on her school’s kendo star, Masaya Aoyama (Yuuma Uchida). She gets word from the mysterious Mint Aizawa (Mirai Hinata) that the guy loves his animals and, what a coincidence, she happens to have two tickets to an endangered animals exhibit at a local zoo that she’s willing to part with. Ichigo, being a pink-themed magical girl protagonist, does not think twice about how odd this is, and takes her up on the offer. At the zoo, Ichigo is hit with some kind of magic ray gun by a pair of handsome scientists(?!), which causes her to commune with some kind of cat spirit, and transforms her into a magical girl. Then, of course, she has to fight off a giant rat monster. You know, typical schoolgirl stuff.
You know, normally only Medicine Cats have visions of Star Clan.
Tokyo Mew Mew New arguably doesn’t really need to “separate itself from the pack” or anything of the sort. (There really isn’t much of a “pack” nowadays, with New‘s only direct competitor being the concurrent Delicious Party Precure.) But it does so regardless via two main things; the aforementioned old-school sensibility, which mostly comes through in its heavy focus in the first episode on an idealized sort of teen girl romance, and its concern for the environment.
The former is….a bit of a mixed thing. In a way, it’s charming to see something this straightforward and earnest in 2022. Ichigo’s brain seems to be stuffed with romantic notions of movie dates and love letters, and the show itself is absolutely flooded with classic shoujo tropes, many of which I imagine might be wholly unfamiliar to some younger viewers. Speaking personally, it’s been a long time since I last saw the whole “gaggle of girls fawning over a hot guy doing A School Sport” thing played completely straight. (Emphasis on the “straight”, perhaps.)
Some of this brushes up against uncomfortable implications, but it doesn’t cross that line yet, even as details like Ichigo’s magic power tattoo appearing on her thigh and an actual, honest-to-god, “whoops I fell on top of you and we accidentally kissed” scene make me raise my eyebrow a bit.
This happens. They even show the lip lock in the cut after this, a genuine rarity for any TV anime these days.
It’s too soon to call whether the environmental messaging will be put to good use or not. Certainly, it is a hell of a bit of tonal whiplash to go from Ichigo and Masaya enjoying their date to the latter gravely expositing about the Endangered Species List and how “humanity has committed sins” (that is a paraphrase, but he seriously does put it in roughly those terms). Certainly the climate crisis has not gotten any better since the original Tokyo Mew Mew aired, but there is a thin line between an actual effective thematic core and one that’s confusing, hysterical, or just bizarre. Time will tell which side of that line New falls on.
But in general, New‘s fuck-the-trends attitude helps it a lot more than it hurts. It’s honestly just invigorating to see something this classically magical warrior mahou shoujo, even as it also evokes, as well, sci-fi tropes that are much less common to the genre. (Remember Corrector Yui?) More than anything, I’m just happy to see another magical girl anime airing at all. The genre has seen healthier days, but maybe a bit of mew mew power and mew mew grace can breathe some new life into it.
The Takeaway: Keep a cat’s eye on this one if you’ve got any interest in the genre at all. If not, still check it out to see if the retro shoujo vibe catches your interest.
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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.
Entertain this particular dystopian thought for a moment; what if the world ran on Twitter likes? That, more or less, is the backbone of the society envisioned by YUREI DECO, a neon-block dystopia where the Metaverse has grown beyond its Silicon Valley bounds and swallowed the real world whole, such that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the two. (This isn’t me reaching, it’s literally called “The Hyperverse” in-show.) Social media tokens called “Love” equate one to one with the sum total of your personal value, and seemingly the whole world is overlaid with a second digital layer of reality that there is no meaningful escape from. Dual implants in each eye, the DECOs of one half of the title, ensure that everyone is plugged in at all times. Truly, Yurei Deco‘s world is one where we are all terminally online, and there is no logging off for anybody.
This is the setting we’re dropped into, handy explanation and all, at the start of this series’ first episode, as we sit in on our main character, Berry (Mira Kawakatsu) and the glorified Zoom class that she calls school. Immediately, we get the sense that Berry is someone who plays outside the rules, as she pulls off some minor computer wizardry to be able to talk to two of her classmates without their teacher noticing. Passing notes for the cyberpunk age, perhaps.
(Somewhere in his lecture, which also serves as our introduction to the setting, Berry’s professor calls the city they live in “the purest expression of liberalism ever to have existed.” Subtle!)
We soon learn that a mysterious person—or perhaps a force—called Phantom Zero has been hitting whole neighborhoods at a time and draining their Love accounts, a big deal in a city where Love is both money and social status. Berry is obsessed with Phantom Zero, and it’s through her eyes and ears that most of this first episode takes place. Including when one of her DECO implants starts glitching out, and she finds a strange origami flower stuck to a lamppost.
That flower, we eventually learn, is the doing of our other main character, a slang-tangling hacker-conman who initially seems like they might be behind the whole “Phantom Zero” thing, given that one of the first things we see her do is sucker a random influencer out of most of his Love. This character’s name, incidentally, is actually just is Hack (Anna Nagase), although you’d have to look at supplementary materials to know that at this point, since it’s not said outright in the first episode.
.hack//Cool Visor, Kid
Berry of course becomes fixated on Hack, who she believes to be responsible for the Phantom Zero phenomenon. Without indulging in an overabundance of detail, she turns out to be wrong, and the real culprit is someone even more mysterious.
The show’s actual plot details aside, what do we make of YUREI DECO so far? Personally, I’m happy to have it around. It’s been a bit since we had a show with interesting visuals that tried to tackle Serious Subjects, or at least, one that didn’t flame out disappointingly. (Sorry, Tokyo 24th Ward.) The series definitely reminds me a fair bit of DECA-DENCE, another colorful cyberpunk series with an all-caps title. More distantly, it recalls Kaiba, and while I’ve not seen Dennou Coil I know enough about it for the multiple comparisons I’ve seen between the two on social media to make sense to me.
A lot of lofty expectations tend to get placed upon anime like this, and this one in particular also happens to be its director’s first TV anime (Tomohisa Shimoyama, though it’s worth noting that he has various credits on things going all the way back to some animation work on Chobits. There’s a show you probably haven’t thought about in a while). While this first episode is a pretty good indication that YUREI DECO is up to that challenge, I do hope folks won’t lose the forest for the trees. There’s a lot to love here already, regardless of where it ends up going.
The Takeaway: If you’ve been looking for the next visually interesting Big Ideas show to come along, you should absolutely be watching this. As for anyone else, I think it’s certainly at least worth checking out.
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.
Rarely do I feel the need to start an article with disclaimers, but this is one of those few cases. The RWBY phenomenon largely passed me by, in its original form as a 3DCG cartoon. I was dimly aware of the much-hyped color trailers, the fanbase the series eventually acquired and the eventual backlash to that fanbase. I was also aware, again in only a broad sense, of its status as Rooster Teeth‘s golden egg, of the deeply sad passing of original series creator Monty Oum, and in a general sense, of its history. I even personally know a number of people who are or were huge fans, including my three younger siblings (this is probably the first thing I’ve ever written that there is a non-zero chance they might stumble upon).
Nonetheless, in spite of all that, RWBY was very much something I just knew about. I never really engaged with it at all, beyond occasionally playing the fighting game BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, in which some of RWBY‘s characters appear. (My younger brother bought it for our then fairly new PlayStation 4.) So, when I write about Ice Queendom today, its curious spinoff / reboot / reinterpretation / something at the hands of Studio Shaft, I write about it as a more or less total outsider. I am judging it largely on its own merits as an action anime, not in terms of how faithful it is or isn’t to the original story, which I’m largely not familiar with, or how well it executes some abstract “vision” for the franchise. (Every long-running franchise has such a thing, an ideal, imaginary form that only exists in the minds of individual creators and fans. Rarely is discussing them productive for anyone.)
To me, Ice Queendom is primarily interesting because of that connection to Shaft. As a studio, it’s hard to argue that Shaft aren’t noticeably past their prime, with their biggest impact on the world of anime—the original Puella Magi Madoka Magica—over a decade in the rearview at this point. But that doesn’t mean they can’t still make good things, and they have recently, including both Madoka’s own spinoff Magia Record and another battle girl anime, Assault Lily Bouquet. There’s some pedigree here, and while I’m only broadly familiar with the man’s work, industry lifer Toshimasa Suzuki seems like a solid choice to direct such a thing, too.
But perhaps predictably, it’s more complicated than that. Through a morass of wonky art, confusing pacing, and at least one hackneyed political allegory, RWBY: Ice Queendom‘s first episode(s?) adds up to perhaps the year’s most confounding premiere. Given that 2022 has given us sheer WTF bombs like Estab-Life and Birdie Wing, that’s pretty impressive in its own way, and not all of the surprises here are bad. But suffice it to say, I think you’d have to be a fairly particular sort of person to want to watch this. Even its format is somewhat screwy; Crunchyroll lists the single-video premiere as “episodes 1-3.” God knows what’s going on there.
But upon starting the episode, what struck me first were the character designs. I’ve never seen the original RWBY, but I have seen screenshots and gifs of it—I had a tumblr in the early 2010s, it was practically omnipresent—and while it never struck me as a visual buffet or anything, it at least looked distinct. The same isn’t really true here, with all four of the main heroines being squashed into a frankly rather generic-looking visual mold that seems suited for an anime much less ambitious than this. Over the course of the hour-long premiere special, I got used to it, but it took a while, which is not a great sign. (Also, in an attempt to emphasize their lips, all of the female characters are given what ends up looking a lot like lip gloss. This is a visual trope that bugs the ever-loving fuck out of me.) Occasionally they’re drawn a bit differently (presumably the result of different boarders or even different animators) and look a bit better, but it’s still going to be an adjustment not just for returning fans but for anyone who even vaguely knows what the original series looked like.
Some characters take to it better than others. I like how Blake looks, in particular.
In general, there is a distinct feeling of visual cheapness throughout fairly large chunks of this premiere. The production bubble hasn’t been kind to anyone, and this would not be the first time a Shaft production took a noticeable hit because of it. But whereas Magia Record could get away with lacking polish to some extent by leaning into its abstractness, Ice Queendom mostly does not have that option. The fantasy world here is portrayed mostly in earthen tones, both literally and thematically, and it suffers noticeably from the lacking tactility and spatial definition.
This doesn’t mean there are no visual merits; this episode is pretty good at fun action sequences, definitely. There’s some good directorial work, too, with enough clever uses of manga-style paneling that it might eventually turn into something of a signature piece of visual work for the series. But really, if you’re just here for Sakuga™, there are a couple of real highlights. And in general, the issue is not the lack of quality, it’s the lack of consistency. Some scenes are excellent, and a few even achieve a somewhat surreal, spacey vibe that might dimly remind viewers of certain other Shaft shows, but others are just terrible (there is a very blatant instance of an unfinished animation being looped several times in a row in part 3, for a premiere, that’s a bad sign), and still others float somewhere in-between.
With its production a distinctly up and down affair, that leaves the story to carry the rest of the weight. But, even after having seen the entire premiere, a lot about the world of RWBY remains rather obscure to me. It’s possible this is on purpose, but it might also be semi-by-design, a case of trying to appeal to new arrivals and old fans simultaneously but falling between two stools in the process. (See also; that Pokémon movie I reviewed a few months ago.)
As far as I can tell, RWBY’s setting is defined by the presence of monsters called Grimms, which lack “Aura”—life force, basically—and turn into “Dust” when killed. Dust, as far as I can tell, can be broadly analogued to souls from Dark Souls. It has power of its own, and also seems to be used as a currency.
Grimms are fought by Hunters, which all four of our heroines want to become for various reasons. These are Ruby Rose (Saori Hayami), the bubbly title lead, her doting older sister Yang Xiao Long (Ami Koshimizu), the aloof, proud heiress Weiss Schnee (Youko Hikasa), and Blake Belladonna (Yuu Shimamura), who is a catgirl.
For the most part, they seem like rather simple characters with simple motivations, although Ruby is the only person we really get the full story of here, in that she wants to follow in her late mother’s footsteps as a huntress. Not for nothing is Ruby also the character who works best here, she’s cute as a button but also has a huge transforming scythe-gun thing. It’s hard to go wrong with that.
There are also many other characters introduced here. North of a dozen, if I had to take a guess. We learn rather little about most of them, this early on, although a small handful like honors student / cereal box model (really) Pyrrha Nikos (Megumi Toyoguchi) and the adorably terrifying Penny (Megumi Han) manage to make a decent impact in their relatively brief screentime regardless.
The actual plot? Our girls enroll at an academy for Hunters. I don’t want to say that “Harry Potter packing heat” is the general vibe here, but in spots it kind of is. Much of the specifics of this become the victim of the premiere’s downright bizarre pacing.
There is a pretty incredible moment where, because of a news story, three of our four heroines are discussing how corrupt one “Schnee Corporation” is, only for Weiss, who is the heiress of said company, to introduce herself to the group by overhearing it and taking offense. Was she just standing around eavesdropping? Is this bit of hilarious coincidence from the original show? I honestly have no idea. I’m not entirely sure it’s meant to be as funny as I found it.
It doesn’t really matter, because not long after that scene, our characters—plus a second team of hopefuls—are flung into a forest to take their life or death entrance exam. Here, the show comes to life with properly exciting action sequences and just enough forward plot motion to be compelling. Then, when our heroines pass their exam and are formally grouped together as “Team RWBY”—all of the teams have fun, pronounceable acronyms for names, I suppose—it immediately becomes boring again, focusing on the petty and uninteresting conflict between Weiss and Ruby or other similarly dull character interactions that just don’t mean much of anything because we haven’t gotten the proper time to know these girls, yet. Ice Queendom is frustrating in this way; at several points during the premiere, I was bored to tears, only for it to burst with exciting and fluid visuals or an interesting story tidbit once again, and then again promptly fall back asleep a few minutes later.
It’s actually Blake Belladonna who gets the shortest end of the writing stick, at least so far. Blake has the misfortune of being Team RWBY’s only Faunus—that is to say, a kemonomimi person—and consequently, she is the conduit for this episode’s utterly toothless gesturing toward political commentary. Over the course of the third part of the premiere, she and Weiss get into a big argument about the (pick one) terrorist group / brave freedom fighters / people just doing their best White Fang, who Weiss loathes because they’ve killed people she personally knows, and which Blake used to be a part of.
There is a frankly incredible scene where Blake pulls off her bow only to reveal that she has cat ears that look exactly the same as her bow underneath it. It is incredible in every sense of that word.
There are, I’m sure, ways to handle this that are not completely terrible, but you won’t find them here. Blake and Weiss are treated as simply having a misunderstanding, and Weiss eventually kinda-sorta reconciles with Blake after only a few real-world minutes of self-reflection. Nothing is actually resolved, and Weiss apparent actual bigotry toward Faunus (yes, an anime girl who hates catgirls. Unreal.) is simply brushed aside. (And of course, despite the weird racism angle here, it will not shock you that at no point during the series so far has an actual POC shown up in a noteworthy role, which is just inexcusable.)
On the whole, Ice Queendom is a mess, really. Which is a shame, because there is some good stuff in here. In addition to the visual highlights there’s a neat plot—unresolved here, presumably it’ll be concluded in the next proper episode—where a Grimm that can imitate humans and trap them in mental prisons based on their own insecurities shows up. It’s defeated temporarily by a mysterious character who calls herself a “nightmare hunter.” Her exorcism method involves tying people up with weird purple string.
Bondage Joke.
It’s weird, it’s cool, and it points a way forward for Ice Queendom in general. It’s not impossible that the series will eventually find its legs. And I hope it does, both because I will probably continue watching it somewhat in spite of my own good judgment (I will remind longtime readers that I’m one of the few Blue Reflection Ray apologists, bad production has never scared me off), and because the people who have been ride-or-die for RWBY for nearly ten years deserve a good show, not something haphazard and half-assed.
The Takeaway: If you can stomach the bizarre plotting and wonky production to get to the standout action sequences and some of the weirder stuff, this might be worth checking out. If you’re a lifelong RWBY fan, you’re probably already watching it. For anyone else? I think this is probably a skip, especially with more promising-looking battle girl anime (eg. Lycoris Recoil) on the immediate horizon.
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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.
Where does the time go? It feels like only yesterday that I was going over the relative merits of The Demon Girl Next Door—Machikado Mazoku to most, and throughout the rest of this article–over on GeekGirlAuthority. But it’s actually been nearly a full three years. Machikado Mazoku is a product of the pre-pandemic era. And perhaps it’s that knowledge, as much as anything else, that makes me consider the anime to have a throwback feel, for better and for worse.
If anyone’s definitely not feeling the passage of time, it’s the show’s characters. In-universe, only a few days have lapsed since season one’s finale, and the show wastes zero time with catching anyone up. Instead, it strolls on in like no time has passed at all. If you could prevent someone from looking the information up, you might be able to convince them the seasons aired back-to-back.
The core conceit here is simple. We follow Yuuko Yoshida (Konomi Kohara), rarely-used alias “Shadow Mistress” Yuuko, a demon girl, as she attempts to corrupt her ostensible rival, the magical girl Momo Chiyoda (Akari Kitou). In practice, they’re basically girlfriends-in-denial, and that dynamic only grew stronger over the course of the first season. It’s back in full force here, complete with the usual suite of miscommunications.
Supporting characters include Yuuko’s ancestor, the demon Lilith (Minami Takahashi), who is stuck in a statue, and the cursed, citrus-themed magical girl Mikan Hinatsuki (Tomoyo Takayanagi), who plays a fairly major role in this first episode.
What does not play a major role is pacing. While this first episode is definitely funny–and there are a lot of individual great gags–it’s also very quick. Quicker than I remember the first season being, although, again, that could just be my memory failing me here. Most of it is fine, although combined with the haphazard subtitle work (a lot of effort went into it, maybe too much, since I’m not sure literally every tiny “gurgle gurgle” sound effect or what have you needs a translation) it can make the episode oddly hard to follow on a basic, visual moment to visual moment level.
Does this interfere that much with the actual plot of the episode, a boondoggle wherein Yuuko now finds herself living next door to both Momo and Mikan on opposite sides?
Not really, but it is a touch disappointing, and it makes one hope that the subsequent episodes will handle this aspect a little better. Beyond that, though, there’s really not a ton to say here.
The Takeaway: It’s more Shamiko. Most likely, you already know if you want that or not.
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.
“The Symphogear of Golf”
-Blurb for a now-deleted ‘review’ of the first episode by Anilist user SolidQuentin.
From the start, I suspected there was something strange about this one. Even by the standards of the “cute girls doing cute things” pseudogenre, golf is a reach. Pairing up a genre of anime that already gets criticized for being dull with what is unquestionably the most boring major sport in the world seems like a recipe for disaster, on the surface. Thankfully, Birdie Wing isn’t anything like that at all. Instead, it’s one of those shows where a random game or spectator sport–golf, naturally, this time around–is taken with a seriousness by absolutely everybody that, in the real world, is usually reserved for matters of religion and politics. Late in its first episode, someone in Birdie Wing calls golf a “sacred sport.” They are not being ironic.
That said, with apologies to SolidQuentin, Birdie Wing is not nearly visually dynamic enough to be “the Symphogear of golf.” At least not yet. (And really, that’s no knock, that’s a hard bar to clear.) But it does manage to make an honest run at the “most unhinged show of the season” title in a season that also includes ESTAB-LIFE. That’s worth something on its own.
The trick here is that our protagonist, the mononymic Eve (Akari Kitou), is not really a golfer. She’s more of a….golf mercenary. A golf secret agent. A golf hitman. The first thing we see her do is impersonate a pro golfer–complete with a latex disguise–and play a qualifier tournament to said pro’s specifications (fourth place, nothing showy.) After she’s paid for that job, we eventually learn that she, her friend / girlfriend / something Lily Lipman (Akira Sekine), and Lily’s older sister live and work out of a bar, where they also take care of three orphans. Yes, really.
Eve’s golfing habits are half moneymaking scheme and half personal obsession. Over the course of the first episode we see her take on a masked, harlequin-themed golfer in the middle of the night and handily win 6,000 Euros in a bet. (Which she later loses by buying off a crooked cop harassing Lily’s sister.) She trains by bullseye-ing golf balls into rusty paintbuckets from a distance. There’s a flashback, which is inexplicably presented like a sepia-toned music video, where someone (presumably either her father or a former coach) compares golfing to firing a gun, saying that one should mentally destroy their opponents and “pierce their hearts.” All this in greyscale while Eve’s hair glows a fiery orange and she’s surrounded by whiffed shots.
Oh! And Eve has a nickname; The Rainbow Bullet.
It makes a kind of sense.
Despite all this, Eve mostly plays for money, downplaying her shonen protagonist-level skills by dropping this particularly great line.
She’s akin to an absurdist extension of the classic “perfect swordsman” trope. And it’s off that absurdity that Birdie Wing mostly gets its charge, as of now. (I could not help but laugh when, in her second match of the episode, Eve deliberately aims for a tree branch and breaks it with her shot, completely bypassing the course’s main obstacle.)
If you want to reach for themes, you could maybe dig up something about rich, establishment folk being more preoccupied with appearances than actual accomplishment. (Note how Eve’s second opponent first denigrates her for her appearance. And then tries to bail on the aforementioned broken tree branch match because she doesn’t want to “throw off her game for [a later] tournament.”) But that does feel like a stretch, this early on. And really, something this wonderfully stupid doesn’t really need themes, it just needs to keep up the absurdity.
Eve does meet someone who seems like she might become a worthy opponent–a short Japanese girl named Aoi Amawashi (Asami Seto) who, despite her small stature, totes an utterly absurd four-foot golf club–but we don’t actually see their match here. That’s presumably for next week.
The fact of the matter is that Birdie Wing‘s first episode works because of the sheer friction between the subject matter–again, one of the most boring sports known to man–and the shonen-esque seriousness everyone applies to it, especially Eve. And this is to say nothing of the dialogue, which serves as ample evidence that the folks behind this show aren’t taking it any more seriously than we are.
Golfing!
That’s a trick that works fine for now, but the show can’t simply coast for twelve weeks. It’ll either have to continually top itself (a difficult prospect, but not an impossible one), or it will have to actually wring some meaning out of all this absurdity (likewise). But I’m at least interested in finding out if it manages to do either of these, and if a first episode hooks you in, then it’s largely served its purpose.
The Takeaway: Fans of the sublimely stupid and of ridiculous premises should put this one on the priority list. As for everyone else, it’ll take you about five minutes tops to find out if this is “your thing” or not. There’s no reason to not at least check out the premiere.
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.
I hate saying that something “isn’t my genre.” Partly, it feels like an excuse. Surely any reasonably well-rounded critic should have an at least workable command of all major genres within their chosen medium?
Well, maybe so. But I’m not going to lie to you all and pretend I understand the whole “death game” genre. This isn’t technically a death game, as I’m sure some would hasten to point out. Instead, it’s a “debt game.” Similar names, but one only kills you indirectly. (And if you don’t think so, trying being poor for a few years.) I disclose this upfront because the truth of the matter is that I have no real idea what to make of Tomodachi Game. I certainly wasn’t impressed, but maybe that’s just because I don’t really know what I’m looking for.
The setup isn’t complicated, at least. Our core cast consists of five friends. I could introduce them, but the show pops these nice little on-screen intros up basically as soon as it starts, and since the effort was taken to subtitle them, why not just use those?
(Voiced by Tomohiro Oono, Satomi Amano, Daiki Hamano, and Yume Miyamoto, respectively, top to bottom.)
The only one not displayed here is Yuuichi Katagiri (Chiaki Kobayashi), our protagonist, who is portrayed as a hardworking but poor lad but who is probably hiding some skeletons in his closet. I base that guess on the fact that he shows up in the OP grinning like a maniac with money literally hanging out of his mouth.
In his guest verse on Nelly’s classic 2005 bling-rap track “Grillz,” rapper Big Gipp says he “has a bill in [his] mouth like [he’s] Hillary Rodham.” It’s such a viscerally unpleasant mental image that it’s bothered me for years, despite the fact that I love the song otherwise. And now I’m passing it on to you via an overlong image caption because the above picture kinda reminded me of it. Aren’t you glad you read this blog?
Our leads all attend the same high school, and the plot is kicked off when a collective funding pool for a class trip–two million Yen, all told, about $16,000 USD–goes missing, evidently stolen from Shiho’s locker. (You may ask why it was kept there to begin with and not, y’know, some kind of safe. I say just roll with it.)
Inevitably, there’s suspicion within the class, especially toward Shiho herself–she was the one holding on to it, after all–and Yuuichi, given his general poverty.
Eventually, a round of mysterious letters beckons our friend group to meet outside the school gates at 11PM. Inevitably, they are then knocked out, kidnapped, and hauled off to partake in some bizarre game for god-knows-what reason. No explanations are forthcoming this early on, which is fine. But it is kind of hilarious how abrupt all this feels. We’ve just met these characters, only just learned that they’re all friends, and now suddenly it’s time to do the thriller anime dance already. The extremely abrupt directing does the show no favors here. In general, there are tons of repeated cuts to the show’s “intermission card”, which is just the name of the series on a white background. You will get sick of this image fairly quickly, even with the couple variants the episode trots out.
When our heroes come to, they’re in an all-white, tiled room. I like to imagine this is somehow the same building that Cube 2: Hypercube takes place in. (Side note here; fuck that movie.) There, they’re introduced to the host of this “debt game,” one Manabu-kun (Minami Takayama), who takes the form of a small boy from an old children’s cartoon. He likes to, for instance, taunt Yuuichi about not trusting his friends. Sure, why not.
Manabu lays out the rules pretty plain; somebody among them owes a 2 million Yen debt. When they entered the game–which they allegedly all agreed to, even though none of them remember doing so–this debt was split up into 5 shares distributed equally to each of them. If they can win the game, their debt will be forgiven. If not, they’ll have to pay back whatever price of their share remains. (It will not shock you that we’re almost immediately introduced to rules that can change the amount of debt an individual person owes. Also; you’re allowed to tell people your debt, but not actually show them the electronic tag you’re forced to carry around which displays it numerically. Hmm.)
The first game–likely, one of many–that our cast have to play is a simple quiz involving a Kokkuri board. This scene forms the entire center of the episode. Thankfully; the core game as explained here is very straightforward. Our heroes need to answer some very basic yes/no questions by pushing a giant coin to one side or the other of the board (labeled Yes and No respectively.) But! The questions need to be answered with total consensus. If even one person disagrees with the others, the coin will favor the minority answer.
Even so, these are some seriously basic questions. We start with Japanese geography so simple even I knew the answers, and then move on to such brain-busters as “is one plus one two?” and “are there seven days in a week?” They only have to actually get one of these questions unanimously right to win the whole “debt game” outright, so this really seems like it should be easy.
Of course, Tomodachi Game would be totally pointless if our heroes just won outright this early. Thus, there’s the mandatory twist; someone pushes the coin toward “No” each time. Whether it’s the same person each time or not is left ambiguous, as is the question of why they’d want to do this in the first place. We get a hint, though; the fact that someone is clearly sabotaging things is enough to make Yuuichi consider doing the same. He doesn’t go through with it, but someone else pulls the coin toward “No” anyway. A pair of girls observing the game note that literally no team has ever gotten past this stage.
Thus betrayed, Yuuichi ends the episode on this note, before (presumably) sabotaging the last question himself. I must confess, this is one of the rare times an anime has ever put me at a total loss for words so early on.
Yes, that non-sequitur, delivered with total dead-seriousness, is how the episode ends. The closing shot is that ugly closeup of Yuuichi’s teeth.
I said this already, but death games–and their adjacent, related setups–are not my genre. I may simply be missing something here, but, if so, what? For all its bluster about how humans can’t endure hardship alone and the dichotomy between “money” versus “friends” being the most important thing in life. (Represented by flashbacks on Yuuichi’s part to conversations with people that appear to be his father and mother respectively.) The series feels much like any other adaption of a manga in this genre. Too edgy by half and ill-suited to the TV anime format.
I’m not comfortable simply writing the show off, mind you. Even the examples of this genre generally held up as all-time greats don’t make a ton of sense to me, and there are way too many things yet to be established for me to firmly claim this is just A Bad Show. But it’s definitely a series only for those of pretty specific tastes, and I don’t think I fall into that category this time.
The Takeaway: Genre fans should give it a look, but unless that describes you, you can safely skip this one.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter 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.
Before we even talk about Healer Girl, Studio 3Hz‘ new original anime project, let’s briefly discuss its trailer.
Released inconspicuously back in December, this PV is absolutely spellbinding. As recently as a few days ago, I’ve previously called Healer Girl an idol series, and it does have an associated idol group. But the actual Healer Girls are more Wilson Philips than AKB48, and as the soft, light pop music flows out of your speakers you’ll eventually notice the visuals, too. Our girls fly in the air, their songs extend literal beams of music outward, raising stone pillars from the ground and healing all who hear them. They’re dressed in all white, like they were angels. It’s one of the most singular PVs in recent memory, and Healer Girl the actual show has a lot to live up to.
Let this much be said: it must know that, because it puts a strong foot forward. It is exactly three and a half seconds into Healer Girl before we get our first piece of music. Before the opening credits even drop, Kana Fujii (Carin Isobe), our lead, sings a soft little song to a group of schoolchildren who were roughhousing. The scrape on a little boy’s knee disappears in the blink of an eye. One boy points out to another that this isn’t “magic,” it’s healing. This is a pretty bold first step for your show to take, and it speaks to a lot of confidence on the part of the writers.
After the OP finishes, we get some explanations for what exactly is going on. Healer Girl takes place in a world where “Song Medicine” is an accepted, scientific form of treatment. (Here referred to as the “third major branch” of medicine. My brief time working at a pharmacy does not qualify me to speak on how real either of the other two are, I have no idea.) The few pieces of terminology we get throughout the episode are–obviously–audiomedical technobabble, but that’s fine. The point is made; these girls are less like idols and more like doctors. Or med students, since our three leads are apprentices. They mostly train rather than do anything more involved at this stage in their careers. There are pushups.
The first half of the episode plays out like a reasonably typical work or school life comedy, albeit one set in a world with key differences from our own. Healer Girl is certainly not short on the merits that the better examples of these shows have; there’s a lot of colorful animation, some interesting directorial decisions (the series has a fixation on rotating the POV of a shot), and the coveted Good FacesTM that seal the deal on any character comedy. Kana’s co-stars are fun, too, with simple personalities that avoid being one-note. Reimi Itsushiro (Marina Horiuchi) is the straightlaced one, but she has a fixation on the apprentices’ collective teacher, Ria Karasuma (Ayahi Takagaki). The crush she harbors on Ria is hilariously unsubtle. I might use the word “thirsty.”
Hibiki Morishima (Akane Kumada) is soft-spoken and eccentric, at various points in the episode she professes to be scared of manju(?) and white rice(??) and tries to freak out her fellow apprentices by claiming there are ghosts in her bedroom.
On top of all this, Healer Girl is also kind of a musical! There are, by my count, two proper songs and a medley in this first episode. Which, combined with those aforementioned strengths, would make Healer Girl recommendable on its own.
Before we get to the last thing about the show, though, we should back up slightly. It’s established that that little stunt that Kana pulled in the opening minutes isn’t something mere apprentices are actually allowed to do. For reasons left ambiguous to us, healing music is strictly regulated. Apprentices doing so much as singing away a knee-scrape is very much not okay.
Which leads us to the closing act of the episode. A little girl named Yui pounds on the front door of the clinic while Ria and the other in-house doctor happen to be out giving a conference. Her grandmother is in trouble, and she doesn’t know what to do. Our apprentices, accordingly, spring into action; dialing an ambulance, trying to get ahold of Ria, and heading to Yui’s house to comfort the patient, respectively.
It’s Kana who takes that last job, and good lord does she ace it. She knows–and we know, from earlier–that she shouldn’t try to heal this old woman, so she improvises, instead singing simply to stabilize her and calm her down while the ambulance arrives, and it is as she’s doing this that Healer Girl goes from having a good first episode to having an amazing one.
The central connection that Healer Girl makes, even this early on, is between music and medicine. One heals the soul, the other heals the body. Healer Girl‘s main trick is to make that connection literal with music that can soothe both. Other anime in and around the idol genre have occasionally flirted with spiritual, magical, or religious imagery, but, speaking personally, I’ve often been frustrated by how hesitant they are to commit. If you’re going to draw up grandiose metaphors, go hard on those metaphors! Restraint is for suckers, and it makes most popular art worse! Go fully unhinged! Have your idols literally heal the sick! Do it! Madonna wasn’t afraid to compare herself to Jesus and you shouldn’t be either!
Healer Girl seems to agree; when Kana sings to this poor old woman, a flower blooms beneath her feet, she levitates in the air and tiny poppets in her own image materialize from the ether to calm her patient down.
It is a beautiful thing to watch, and the show damn well knows it, because when Ria does arrive, she excuses her apprentice’s kinda-sorta rule break, and is as impressed with her display as any of us are. This is not the face of a woman who’s unhappy.
There’s some more exposition here–apparently this transcendentally luminous phenomenon we just witnessed is called an “Image”, and the fact that Kana’s changes while she sings is somehow notable–but mostly everyone is just happy that the old woman is okay. Kana, deservedly, takes some time in the episodes final moments to bask in a job well done.
If you’re a certain kind of person I could see finding Healer Girl‘s whole thing offputting or even creepy. There is no denying that the little worldbuilding we get here also raises some odd questions about the setting. (What is the role of non-healing music, for example? Does it even exist? Does all of it sound like early 90s light pop?) But I can’t pretend to be part of that group, I’m all in on Healer Girl. I have tried to refrain from making predictions about a show’s success (doing so last season ended, I would say, embarrassingly), but I certainly want this one to keep up this level of quality.
Speaking personally, I had a very bad morning before I sat down to watch Healer Girl. A morning filled with medical anxiety, even, complete with missing prescription refills and an agonizing wait in a doctor’s office. Healer Girl made me feel better, too, and I cannot give the series a stronger endorsement than that. Early in the episode, Reimi compares recorded healing music to OTC drugs. But what can I say? Sometimes the over-the-counter stuff works.
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 its own way, the daylit parallel present-day of Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is a utopia. In the show’s first season, from back in 2020, there were few if any conflicts that could not be solved with a song. It was a fairly far cry from the franchise’s stereotypical portrayal as being obsessed with school-in-danger plots and melodrama. Its highlights, uniformly, were livewire “music videos” that disregarded any pretense of realism for pure visual splendor. What it may have lacked in minute detail–although it could do that too, at times–it more than made up for in a truly rare dedication to pure spectacle.
Nijigasaki High School Idol Club‘s second season continues that devotion; opening as it does with a delightfully bonkers promotional video shot by the titular Idol Club. We get reacquainted with most of the first season’s highlight characters here, although the actual narrative, in as much as there is one, stays firmly centered on club behind-the-scenes-er / sort-of manager Yuu Takasaki (Hinaki Yano), and new girl Lanzhu Zhong (Akina Homoto).
Before we discuss what that narrative actually is, though, we should take the broad view for a moment. Nijigasaki is in an interesting place in 2022. The first season’s only real competitors in the idol anime format were Hypnosis Mic, which targets a different audience and has vastly different aims, the already-forgotten Dropout Idol Fruit Tart and Lapis Re:LiGHTS, and the utter train-crash that was 22/7. In the present day, though, Nijigasaki is no longer the only smart kid in the class, and there are other, equally-bright pupils of the genre present. Mostly in the form of the admittedly yet-to-premiere wildcards Healer Girl and next season’s SHINE POST, but even this season has Ya Boy Kongming!, which despite its absurd premise and smaller focus on just one singer, is very much in at least a broadly similar tonal space. There’s even a fellow Love Live season, also premiering in Summer; the followup to last year’s Love Live! Superstar. In other words; there is an actual level playing field for the first time in a while. Nijigasaki‘s status as Idol Anime of The Year is no longer a given.
In a way, the increased competition is mirrored in the first episode’s own story. What we have here is pretty simple, Lanzhu near-literally steals the show during the Idol Club’s promotional time at a school event. Her songwriter Mia Taylor (Shuu Uchida) makes a bit of an impression earlier on in the episode, but Nijigasaki is Lanzhu’s show, this week. And tellingly, it’s she, not any of our returning characters from season one, who gets the premiere’s music video. It’s a thing of beauty, and also as pompous and grandiose as any real pop diva’s videos, which, as we soon find out, fits her character pretty damn well.
The music video, it must be said, carries on the tradition of total showstoppers from season one very well. These are the episode’s centerpieces and need to convey important information in addition to being visually compelling, and Lanzhu’s knocks it out of the park on both counts. The scene transitions have her doing all kinds of random but awesome-looking nonsense like posing in a bubblebath, standing on top of a bunch of aquariums, and dancing in an elevator while wearing what looks like a borrowed Revue Starlight costume.
By this, do I mean “it has epaulettes”? Yes.
Shot made and sunk; Lanzhu is immensely talented and also hugely egotistical.
That latter point is followed up on at the end of the episode in what is the only real development of conflict here. Lanzhu basically calls the Idol Club a bunch of posers and announces her intent to enter the Idol Festival by herself and to upstage all of them. She does, admittedly, come across as astoundingly bitchy here, but it says a lot that this is what passes for villainy in the Love Live universe.
This does raise the possibility that the second season of Nijigasaki might possibly be more in-line with the melodramatic Love Live baseline than season one was, which would, admittedly, bum me out ever so slightly. But on the other hand, the Idol Club end the episode resolute that their new rival simply means they all have to work harder, and that “where dreams come true” tagline rears its head again in the premiere’s closing moments. That in mind, even if Nijigasaki High School Idol Club isn’t the shoe-in for its genre’s nebulous AOTY award that its predecessor was, it’s hard to imagine the girls won’t be alright. These are school idols we’re talking about, after all, and if my decade-plus of anime watching has taught me anything, it’s that high school girls can do anything.
The Takeaway: Obviously, you should watch season one first, but unless you just hate pop music, you should, of course, check this out.
Special Thanks: Additional Idol Research for this article was provided by Josh the Setsuna Fan, thanks Josh.
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.
Friends, I may have met my match today.
I pride myself on being able to find something, if not necessarily substantial, at least evocative to say about every anime I cover. That streak, which has in my own opinion continued uninterrupted for the two years I’ve piloted this blog, may well come to an end today. Writing about Aharen-san wa Hakarenai, an absolutely narcotic new offering from Felix Film, feels like trying to draw blood from a stone. (The title means something like “Aharen-san is Unfathomable”, but in a rarity for a modern TV anime, it has no official English title, and is being released in the EN market under a romanization of its Japanese name. This may be the most interesting thing about it.)
The premise could not be simpler. Two new high school students, the tall boy Raidou Matsuboshi (Takuma Terashima), and the diminutive girl Reina Aharen (Inori Minase), are chronically shy, and end up seated next to each other in their classroom.
At one point, Reina drops an eraser and Raidou picks it up. The two bond over this simple act of kindness and become fast friends.
Premises this simple can lead to great things. Last year, Komi Can’t Communicate did a lot with a similar idea (down to the fact that both Aharen and Komi are difficult for other people to hear). Nearly a decade ago, Tonari no Seki-kun took the same “desk neighbors” premise and ran it into a totally absurd direction, creating one of the more memorable surreal shortform comedy anime ever made. In the case of Aharen-san, though, I could not only tell you that it doesn’t do anything great with its premise, it doesn’t really do anything with its premise at all. Calling a slice of life anime “boring” is a little like calling ambient music such, but even for iyashikei–that subgenre sometimes known as Ambient TV–this is utterly torpid. Almost nothing of note happens over the course of the first episode’s 22 minutes. There are a few slow-rolled gags dolloped throughout the whole thing, but very little else. Visually, it seems to adapt the look of the manga basically 1 to 1. Contributing to the soft-focus ambiance, everything feels very placid and understated, even the gags. There is plenty of softness here, but only occasionally any actual warmth. This is the Pure Moods of school life anime. (And honestly, I like Pure Moods a lot more.)
Lest it seem like I’m trying to trash the series, I can at least understand the appeal. Aharen-san fills a role akin to lo-fi beats to relax to. It presents an all-consuming nonspecific fuzziness that, if you allowed it to, could conceivably, provide an escape from the cares of the real world. For me, I mostly found it vaguely grating. I will concede that I did chuckle at two of the episode’s few true jokes; Aharen misinterpreting something Raidou said in the form of repeatedly headbutting into him from a distance, and whatever Raidou is doing here.
Other than that, I really can’t find much to say–to praise or to criticize–about this series at all. The post-credits sequence does tease a new character for next week, so maybe that’ll shake the show up somewhat. Until then, though, the most interesting things about Aharen-san are its OP and ED. This one is just not for me.
The Takeaway: If you’re looking for something to put you to sleep, this might help. Otherwise? Unless you have a monstrously high tolerance for pure, uncut cotton, I would probably give this one a skip.
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.
Try to count them and their numbers are endless. Their visages form a parade of baby faces and expressions of bitter smarm; Kazuto “Kirito” Kirigaya, Naofumi Iwatani, Rudeus Greyrat, Takuma “Diablo” Sakamoto. They are ordinary until they aren’t. They are you, dear viewer, and all the strengths and flaws they think you have. They are everyone and no one. For a while, starting up The Executioner and Her Way of Life, it seemed as though we might be able to add a new face to that list.
But looks can be deceiving, and those paying attention will note there is no mention of a “His” anywhere the title. If our little friend there is the main character of some story, it isn’t this one. The show’s opening episode takes just enough time to lead anyone going in blind (like say, yours truly) on that I imagine not everyone will get through it. The ingredients of a deeply generic series are here; That Guy is summoned to another world, ends up in a rough situation, and is pitied and taken care of by an attractive female lead who seems destined to play second-fiddle to him.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, a general thought. It is perhaps no surprise that there are few genres of modern anime–few genres of mainstream television period–more maligned than the isekai series. And while any genre so large is bound to produce works that strike outside of the established mold, we have been living in the middle of our own Isekai World for a solid decade now. It’s not just that people are tired of the genre–although that certainly is part of it–it is that they are tired of what the genre represents. The all-shortcuts worldbuilding, the ambient misogyny, the imperialistic undertone of an average Japanese teenager being teleported to an unsullied world only to inevitably dominate it through (depending on the series) some combination of “modern knowledge” and sheer Main Character Status. The problem is far worse the lower the barrier to entry, but plenty of these have seeped into the anime mainstream for years now. Speaking personally, I ignore the vast majority of them unless I’m given good reason to not. Because of that, I’m content to generally not speak on them at all.
But I sort of have to here, because while I myself am pretty down on the genre, I don’t think I hate it nearly as much as whoever wrote Executioner does.
Credit should be given here. Having a bone to pick with something does not mean you understand it, necessarily. But in Executioner‘s opening minutes we get some expository worldbuilding that is displays an intuitive understanding with all the unfortunate implications built into your ISO Standard Isekai Story. The world of the series is frequently visited by “Lost Ones”, people who come from a mysterious otherworld called–you may have heard of it–Japan. Lost Ones are summoned via various means (a scheming king is how our Potato-kun friend ends up here), and inevitably end up bringing knowledge to the world. Our nominal protagonist assumes he can contribute to this tradition, mentioning the wonders of mayonnaise (seriously), to which his tour guide, the aforementioned female co-protagonist Menou (Iori Saeki), replies that it’s “pretty tasty.” Banter of this nature continues; he naturally assumes he will be given free shelter and money since Menou is a priestess (he’s right on the first count, wrong on the second), he idly remarks that another Lost One he saw be summoned “had big boobs”, etc.
Can’t you just feel her enthusiasm?
All the while, Menou patiently explains to him that the world is divided into three classes–Commons (ordinary people), Noblesse (nobles and kings), and Fausts (the clergy, the only one with a slightly odd name) –and it becomes rather difficult for the viewer to not notice that whatever language(s) may have once been spoken in this world, they’ve all been supplanted by Japanese.
So, you have an arrogant asshole of a protagonist who thinks he’s god’s blessing upon this wonderful world despite all evidence to the contrary, and the broad implication that at some point at least some former Lost Ones may have Done An Imperialism with the help of their powers. (Of course they gain magic powers upon being summoned to the new world. This is still an isekai we’re talking about.) But if Executioner stopped there we’d merely be in vaguely ReZero-ish territory. Instead, when Menou helps this guy figure out that his magical power is “Null,” the ability to straight-up erase anything he’d like from existence, she does this.
Again, no “His” in the title.
The lead-on is a touch obvious, maybe. I could tell even from the first few scenes that this wasn’t going to be a straightforward isekai power fantasy, but I was legitimately surprised to see our heroine–our actual protagonist, mind you–straight-up stab someone in the damn head. Really, I shouldn’t have been. It’s right there in the name; she’s an executioner.
If all Executioner had up its sleeve was this single twist, though, I wouldn’t be writing about it at this much length. The fact of the matter is that the series immediately tosses a wrench into its own assumptions as soon as she does the deed. She spares a prayer for him, proving the priestess thing as no ruse, and says that in truth, at least by her own reckoning, he did nothing wrong.
Over the remaining half of the episode, we get a good amount of insight into Menou’s character. She has dreams that imply that she herself might be from another world; a world where she’s an ordinary high school girl and has a best friend who she misses dearly. Her religious devoutness is sincere, and she chastises her clingy lesbian cohort Momo (Hisako Kanemoto) for casual blasphemy. And she has a casual, friendly relationship with one of said religion’s archbishops. (In general, this religion seems awfully Christianity-ish. But whether that’s foreshadowing or just a straight use of a pretty typical fantasy trope is hard to say at this early juncture.) All this works to establish her as someone who grits her teeth and plays this role because she thinks it’s the right thing to do, not necessarily because she finds it pleasant.
In flashback, we learn how she was brought into the fold of “the church”‘s executioners; by being the only survivor of a Lost One accidentally destroying a whole town.
There is some pretty wild imagery in here; the Lost One in question transforming into a huge giant made of white ash after being killed by a different executioner. That’d be the vindictive Flare (Yuuko Kaida), who at the conclusion of the flashback becomes Menou’s mentor.
By now, you get the idea. This is a series that wants to very seriously examine the underlying assumptions of the isekai power fantasy. But the question naturally becomes; once it breaks the genre down, what does it intend to rebuild it into? And in the answer to that question we will find Executioner’s long-term success or failure.
There is always a temptation to refer to things like this as “deconstructions” of the genres they, at least in part, are built to criticize the foundations of. I do not use that word in my writing–not without heavy couching, at the very least–but to me this series does seem to aspire to a certain casual definition of the term. I said before that Executioner feels like it was written by someone who hates isekai, but it’s totally possible that the very opposite is true. Rarely is it easier to see the faults within a genre than when you’re a huge fan of it, and lest we forget, it absolutely is possible to still use this story format for interesting, compelling ends. (Not for nothing was Princess Connect! Re:Dive my favorite anime of last season.)
At the very least, Executioner seems allergic to easy outs. In addition to our protagonist’s own judgment of her morality, the task she’s sent upon at episode’s end involves seeking out another Lost One, who seems suspiciously evocative of the girl from her dreams. (And who herself dreamed of the other world before arriving there.) The question then becomes, obviously, how hardline she’s willing to be, and what Executioner can do with whatever the result is. The episode ends on this cold confrontation, questions hanging in the air with answers far off and out of sight.
Personally, I’m absolutely fascinated by this series. (Its devastatingly kickass OP helps, too.) But I will admit that I’m something of a genre outsider. So for any true isekai fans who happen to read this, I’d be interested to see what such might think of it.
As for everyone else? It’s been a strong season already, but there’s something special about this one, I can feel it.
The Takeaway: Unless you’re simply averse to the very premise, I’d give Executioner at least a few episodes. For some of you, the mere fact of seeing Cute Anime Girls go all stone-cold killer might be enough of a draw. And hey, if that’s so, no judgment from me.
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