The Weekly Orbit [7/22/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!


Hello anime fans. I’m going to keep things brief and without too many pictures this week. I’ve been under the weather, so I didn’t have as much time to put this together as I’d have liked. Hopefully I’ll be feeling better when next Monday rolls around.

Anime

Mayonaka Punch – Episode 2

Mayonaka Punch‘s second episode gives us a pretty good notion of the show’s strengths and weaknesses. On the plus side, it’s still very funny, there are a lot of good gags here (mayo-garlic turning out to be a hallucinogen for vampires is probably my favorite of these), and the character dynamics work well when the show isn’t trying to overexplain itself. The art and animation are also top notch, which is good, because it’s always difficult to forecast ahead of time whether or not there will be a fall-off after the first episode.

On a lesser note, though, what the show isn’t as good at is the broad-strokes plot points. This entire episode sort of feels like a weird detour; Masaki, Live, Ichiko, and Fu start a channel called the Chu Chu Girls, find some surprisingly early success, but are then forced to delete it via the intervention of a red-haired vampire named Yuki [Kayano Ai], who Live has some prior history with, and who threatens to rat them out to a figure identified only as “Mother.” This is all well and good, but our girls end up making a second channel—this time without using their vampire abilities—at the end of the episode, so this episode essentially ends in the same place as the last. It feels a bit like we’re skipping ahead and resetting to avoid having to depict these characters getting to actually know each other. There’s a lack of specifics here that I find frustrating, especially when Masaki flashes back to meeting the other two Hyped-Up Girls, and they bond over liking the same kinds of Youtube videos. What those videos are and how they brought them together is left unstated (although I suppose this tracks with the show’s general depiction of Youtube as a thicket of content-for-content’s sake. Not an inaccurate depiction, but certainly not a complete one.)

Still, I’m optimistic. There are strong character moments here, too, like when Masaki returns to her now-empty house after the Hyped-Up Girls have moved out and spends yet another night egosurfing negative comments about her. Additionally, the next episode looks much more gag-focused, and I think if the series sticks to its guns in that way, it will serve it well.

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 3

Less comedic episode this time around. Mostly a flashback so we can learn how Alya and Kuze met. Pretty cute! I like that all Alya really wants is someone to recognize her hard work, that’s cute, and I think it works for the character. Again, this show is firmly still on my “just pretty good” list, but there are worse things to be.

Wistoria: Wand & Sword

Every minute I watch of this I have a nagging thought in the back of my head. Something like “this is fine, but I kind of wish this production team were working on something more innovative.” That’s unfair, because it’s not like if this show didn’t exist all of this polish would be magically going to Tower of God or something else airing right now, but it feels a bit hollow. You could probably get most of what’s genuinely worthwhile out of this show by watching gifs from it on sakugabooru.

I’m going to make a strange extended metaphor, please follow me down this path. Todd in the Shadows, noted Youtube Music Guy, once put forward the theory that there are two categories of pop stars, there are those who get the public interested in their personas and points of view and who will probably be at least somewhat famous forever, and there are those who will only remain in the public eye until their hits run out, and not a day longer.

Oomori Fujino, author of both the manga this is based on and more notably of the Danmachi series is, if we’re comparing creatives in this industry to pop stars—an admittedly dubious comparison, but bear with me here—the second one. His work has craft and fluidity and skill, and those are not by any means worthless things to have, but I am always at least a little cognizant of the fact that I’m seeing the sausage be made as he’s making it. More than just the fact that this series is a pretty direct riff on two other more popular IPs (Harry Potter and Black Clover), I just sort of can’t imagine someone caring all that much about this story on its own terms unless they have severe light novel poisoning. Even then, it mostly sticks out because it uses a number of basic storytelling techniques that actual narou-kei light novels tend to try to shortcut their way through. In other words, he is a consummate professional in a section of the industry presently dominated by amateurs.

This might seem like a weird turnaround because I think my first post on Wistoria came off as much more positive, but this is kind of just a different (arguably more cynical) way to frame what I thought upon finishing the first episode. Whether I phrase it as “wow, this is way better than the other narou-kei fantasy stuff going around right now. The main character has an actual motivation, clearly laid-out obstacles to overcome, and there’s not a pop-up stat screen in sight” or “It’s pretty grim that this is so much better than the other narou-kei fantasy stuff going around right now just because the main character has an actual motivation, clearly laid-out obstacles to overcome, and there aren’t any pop-up stat screens in sight” is kind of a matter of semantics. We will see if I manage to actually develop a strong opinion on this show by the time it ends, assuming I finish it.

Code Geass: Rozé of The Recapture

I don’t have a ton to say here. I appreciated the further ties back to the original series and the ever-more-absurd mecha action.

I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the contrast drawn between Toumi’s [Chiba Shouya] successful sacrifice, framed as heroic and worthwhile and even met with a salute, vs. the (failed) sacrifice performed by the bigoted Britannian commander whose name I’ve already forgotten. Obviously, within the literal text of the narrative Toumi is completely in the right while the commander is completely in the wrong, but it does draw attention to Code Geass‘ nationalist overtones, which are as much a part of the work as the things I actually like about it (most other parts of it, honestly. I’ve gone on at length before how weak I am to campy bullshit) are.

Bye, Bye Earth – Episode 2

Two episodes in, in what I suspect is probably the more indicative of the two we’ve had so far. My main takeaway from this episode was how much it reminded me of, surprisingly enough, Kino’s Journey.

Here, Belle journeys to Park City on the first step of her quest to become a Nomad and find her people. The Kino comparison sprang to mind because there’s an odd morality play sort of setup here. The City is divided in two, the good Topdogs and evil Underdogs, who live in different sections of it, but something about the specific use of “good and evil” here is….funny. Especially since the Priestess-King Rawhide [Tsuda Kenjirou & Satou Setsuji], who Belle eventually meets and forms a contract with, seems to embody both of them, there’s a sort of duality thing going on here.

My overall impression is honestly just that this is a very particular series going for a very particular thing. This is probably down to the age of the work—the Kino’s Journey analogue is less ridiculous than it may seem given the vintage of the original novels—and where this genre, the traveler story, has gone since. I am interested to see what the next step in Belle’s journey looks like, since it seems she will have to duel a centaur next week.

SHOSHIMIN: How to Become Ordinary

If I could identify any coherent thesis behind SHOSHIMIN Series, it’s how the world is often unfair and cruel to those who don’t fit in. Implicitly, then, it is also about how the world is often unfair and cruel to neurodivergent people. In fact, if I can identify a commonality among the conversations here, it’s that none of these people are “normal,” and they are continuously striving for a normalcy that they don’t have. Often by trying to impose it on others. Such a thing is common among friend groups with a lot of neurodivergent people in them, unless care is taken to avoid it.

The extremely mundane “detective work” provides something of a hook (and while I haven’t seen it, I believe it also calls back to the author’s previous series), but these are only indirectly, I think, related to the show’s actual point. Who can say, though? It might have some other cards to play, SHOSHIMIN remains an intriguingly circumspect work, the kind to make you resort to two-word chestnuts like “intriguingly circumspect.”

My Deer Friend Nokotan – Episode 2

How do you raise the stakes when your character dynamic already consists of a complete weirdo and the comparative straight-man forced to bounce off of her? Why, you add another weirdo of course. Thus, we meet Koshi-tan’s little sister Anko [Tanabe Rui] here. Anko is a bit less fundamentally unknowable than Nokotan (who accordingly has her implicit eldritch-ness toned down a little here, since it doesn’t work with the structure of this episode so much), but she’s about as much a force of nature.

I like Anko. Siscon characters are way overdone by now, but having one fits with the show’s ’00s comedy vibe and Anko is significantly scarier than is the norm for her archetype. She spends the (weaker) first half of the episode swearing revenge on Nokotan because she has it in her head that the deer has somehow stolen her sister’s virginity, a misconception that Nokotan herself of course does nothing to dispel. I am sad to report that whatever else may be said about me, if you have an anime character accuse her sister of making a “love nest” for herself and a deer, I will still find it pretty funny.

The second half of the episode is the real highlight here, though, as Anko and Nokotan compete in an absurd quiz show wherein Nokotan will have to be “deported” to a wildlife park if she loses. The subject of the show is, of course, Koshi-tan, and thus the episode once again gets most of its charge from humiliating its main character. Eventually, Anko, on the brink of losing, unleashes a flurry of kunai (where did she get those from? Who knows) on Nokotan, and while she dodges most of them with ease, she takes a bullet for Koshitan, and is promptly mourned by Koshi-tan and the rest of the cast with all the fanfare of Elmer Fudd weeping over Bugs Bunny. Meanwhile, she’s up in Deer Heaven, meeting with Deer God (not the subtitle group) and getting kicked back to Earth for unknowable reasons.

All told, a solid episode in a solid series, and I like the twist that Anko and Nokotan become friends at the end. My assumption is that life is not about to get any easier for Koshi-tan.

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! – Episode 2

This was fantastic! Much more of a straightforward harem comedy than the first episode (except for that scene near the end), but a very good one, so I can hardly complain. Lemon [Wakayama Shion] is a wonderful character and I think she might be my favorite of the main 3 girls, I suppose we’ll have to see how things shake out with Chika, the short girl from the literature club. Some people will be put off by the comparatively horny nature of the first half of this episode. I can’t really pretend I care, much, personally. I thought it was pretty damn funny. (“But Nukumizu, it’s just us girls here!” can only be the result of truly intense heat stroke. Or maybe it’s foreshadowing and this will somehow turn into the first harem anime to star a trans girl. Anything is possible!)

Also, the nurse! Casually mentions having fucked in what is now her own office back when she was a student (possibly with the other woman who’s now her coworker?)! Wiretaps her office! Has a shipping chart! Most of the meta stuff from this episode came from her and she seems like she’ll be a great supporting character going forward.

The scene at the end of the episode where Lemon deals with her heartbreak by running laps after sunset is phenomenal, and I think if the show can continue hitting those sorts of emotional beats it’ll easily make my personal Top 5 by the end of the year.

2.5 Dimensional Seduction – Episode 3

I thought this was….fine, I suppose. I remain undecided on if the few things this show does well are worth putting up with the parts where it’s obviously lacking.

In this episode Mikari [Kitou Akari], the obligate normie girl in the harem who we met last week, does a cospaly shoot with Masamune and Ririsa. There is a little kernel of real feeling in how Mikari relates to Miriella, the character she’s cosplaying, because the character could never tell Ashford how she felt, and Mikari herself can’t be straightforward with Masamune, so she relates to her in that way. That said, sitting with it for a minute made me just think about how the various in-universe anime in Dress-Up Darling aren’t a contrived bespoke metaphor for part of the main plot in that series, and how they thus feel much more like real anime that could exist in some alternate timeline than the fairly thin picture of Ashword Wars that the show’s given us so far. I can also imagine the target audience actually finding the stuff in Dress-Up Darling hot, which, just to be super blunt, is not the case here. The visual chops just aren’t there, so the show is failing even in its intended basic goals.

A small point in the show’s favor is that I think this whole mana infusion thing is a crack about Fate/stay Night, which, hey, that’s something. Even then, that’s also kind of a weirdly dated reference point for a show in 2024, even keeping in mind that the manga is 5 years old.

There remains something broadly structurally impressive about most of the show being set in a single room with only a few characters, but it also makes the series feel kind of claustrophobic. This is a cousin of the same problem the Giji Harem anime is having right now. It’s not as severe here, but one does get the distinct sense that this probably works better in print where there’s not as much of a sense of place as in an anime. It’s also extremely languid in pace, and compared to how well-structured the other romcoms airing this season are that’s a very notable weakness. Although at the end of the episode, our leads stay overnight at school to get work on a cosROM done, which is a nice interruption from what has quickly become this series’ norm.

All this said, I think I am fairly close to dropping this. It doesn’t hold a candle to Makeine obviously, but it’s also not nearly as good as Roshidere, an equally low-stakes romcom with a horny streak that, despite its vastly different premise, is just handling itself with much more confidence and style than this has so far.

Wonderful Precure – Episode 25

This is a very fun and antics-heavy episode. I particularly like Mayu’s ongoing quest to play matchmaker with Satoru and Iroha (up to “narrating his inner thoughts” at one, hilarious point).

Mayu helping Yuki into the water is really cute until Komugi (intentionally) ruins the moment. I also quite liked their fight against the sea turtle garugaru and the nice “wonder of nature” moment with the normal sea turtle afterward toward the end of the episode.

Wonderful Precure has just kind of been quietly tossing off great episodes for a while now, and I’m a little sad that I haven’t always had the presence of mind to talk about them. This is not as hands-down excellent as the episode from a few weeks back where we finally get some hint as to who our main villain might be, but it was still very good, and next week’s episode promises to be so as well.


And that’s about all I’ve got for you, today. As today’s Bonus Thought, I’ll ask you to ponder this screencap, also from Wonderful Precure. I don’t know what it is, maybe lingering affection for that one OG Transformers episode? But something makes protagonists surfing inherently very funny to me. Maybe you agree.

“She will never be surfing.”
Spits out cereal.

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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 AnilistBlueSkyTumblr, or Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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: Otaku Hot Girl Summer in 2.5 DIMENSIONAL SEDUCTION

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.


Something’s in the air. Maybe Dress-Up Darling was the warning shot, but to hear Megan Thee Stallion tell it, the era of the Otaku Hot Girl is upon us. If we are not prepared, that’s probably on us.

Look upon your god and despair.

2.5 Dimensional Seduction, another entry in the “girl with a gimmick” subgenre of romcom, opens with insert narration. Here, our female lead, in voiceover, waxes rhapsodic about cosplay as the ultimate form of transformation and devotion. I don’t know about all that, but it’s certainly a very involved hobby. I don’t have the figure for it, myself, but I can imagine someone caring this much about it pretty easily. When we meet this person a few minutes later, we will find that she cares this much about basically every aspect of otakudom, so it’s certainly in character.

The first character we meet after the OP plays isn’t her, though. It’s Okumura Masamune [Enoki Junya], the president and sole member of his high school’s ‘Manga Research Club.’ Which is to say; he spends his free periods holed up in a club room watching OVAs by himself. In introducing himself to us, he tells us, charmingly, that he doesn’t like real women and only cares about anime girls. In telling us this, he recounts a remarkably quick series of mini-vignettes of romantic rejection and ostracization from his peers. This is as good a place as any to pause.

I already talked at length about the girl-with-a-gimmick setup on the 4th when I wrote about Roshidere, so I won’t repeat myself too much. But it’s worth briefly contrasting these shows to bring up a main difference between them. In Roshidere, the male lead seems to have a reasonable amount of self-esteem, despite being a huge nerd. In 2.5D, this is clearly not the case, or is only the case in that sort of weird sideways way that nerdy people tend to do where we convince ourselves we’re somehow better than everyone else for having slightly unusual interests. The geekboy persecution complex is a whole thing I don’t have the space or desire to get into here1, but there are two key things we should take away here. A. Given everything else we see in this episode, Masamune talking about how he only likes 2D chicks is clearly a coping method for managing rejection. B. Related to that, he is not a reliable narrator of his own feelings. This makes him a bit interesting, because it means, despite his misogynistic sentiments which they are clearly meant to be able to relate to, that he is not just a cipher for the audience to project onto. You’re not as much supposed to think that you are this guy, and more that you’re at least kind of like him. (Even if you’d handle the situation better. Maybe especially if so.) We’re led to both empathize with and look down on him, a perspective that bears some distant relation to the strange, schadenfreude-driven ethos of manga like Rent-a-Girlfriend. Thankfully, despite that, there’s nothing so heavy here. Our main boy is mostly just kind of a twit, and I’m pretty confident that we’re supposed to be laughing at him at least a little, even if the show does assume you’ll also root for him as a sympathetic (and presumably also nerdy, teenage, male) audience.

This becomes more obvious when our female lead, and in many senses our actual main character, Amano Ririsa [Maeda Kaori], barges into the clubroom and into Masamune’s life. They quickly bond, to Masamune’s own frustration, over a shared love of the character Lilliel, a magical girl from a series called Ashword Wars. From Masamune’s own point of view, this is a perfectly Shakespearean tragedy. Here he is, having proudly sworn off real women, only for one that he can’t ignore to crash into his life. Even without that other element that I’m deliberately dancing around this far up the page, this would already be a perfectly serviceable romantic fantasy for this show’s target demo. The two talk about minutiae in the Ashword Wars OVAs. Ririsa compliments Masamune’s frighteningly extensive collection of Lilliel figures, including the one with an exploding outfit. They play a fighting game together. What’s not to love?

In fact, if Masamune were more confident and well-adjusted there almost wouldn’t be a story here at all. There’s a real “Man vs. The Self” element to his inner monologue, which runs throughout much of the episode, in which he denies any attraction to this girl. He acknowledges that she’s attractive, and can even bring himself to say that “despite her gender” (goodness), she’s a true otaku. Were it not, he thinks, for the fact that she just has one too many dimensions, she’d be perfect.

Thus enters the cosplay angle.

I might describe the overall plot of the first episode as “guy gets incredibly freaked out upon learning a girl is way, way more of an otaku than he is.” Ririsa, you see, loves the same sexy heroines that Masamune does, claiming she projects herself onto them. This is—I hope I’m not shocking anyone by saying this—a real thing. Tons and tons and tons of girls, the world over, love and adore female characters who are, in some sense, made to cater to some kind of male fantasy. The world we live in is, unfortunately, patriarchal, and thus dominated by male fantasy. One plays the hand they’re dealt, and active reappropriation of these characters is a thing that any woman engaging with a male-led fandom2 learns to do. It’s second nature at a certain point. I found myself vibing pretty hard with Ririsa here, essentially proving the show’s own point! We’re not otherwise particularly similar people, but I love magical girls a lot, too! If I looked good doing it, I would probably cosplay at least occasionally. All of this is taking the long way around of saying; it is not actually surprising or unrealistic that Ririsa is who she is and loves to cosplay. Her sheer boldness in undressing in front of a male classmate is surprising and unrealistic—as is her taking him at his word when he says he’s not attracted to actual girls—but we can excuse that, as you please, as either naivete on her part or just a necessary narrative greasing of the wheels to make this setup work at all.

Ririsa explains that she truly fell in love with cosplay when a nascent fascination with the idea led her to attend an in-person event. Seeing all the other beautiful girls there dressed up in sexy outfits awakened something in her (I have rarely so quickly decided a character is bisexual), even after she was gently shooed off for being too young to attend. (To give you an idea, one of the cosplayers describes it as a “softcore” event. These girls are selling photoCDs filled with suggestive pictures of themselves, and that’s not something the show avoids talking about.)

Driven by the, ahem, beauty and passion on display she saw that day, she’s determined to eventually sell a photo CD of her own. Honestly, despite the ostensibly saucy subject matter, her attitude toward the whole thing is mostly just cute, but her passion for the hobby is clearly genuine. She ropes Masamune into taking pics of her in not one but several Lilliel outfits, and predictably he gets really into it. Enough so that he conks out from Ririsa calling him “Ashford-sama” (another character in the manga, you understand). Some further developments aside, the episode ends with Ririsa wondering why her heart is pounding so fast when remembering the photoshoot later that day, thus setting us up for future romantic adventures that will presumably involve a lot more photos of Ririsa in kinky outfits.

The fairly straightforward resolution may make one wonder. All of this subtext, the stuff about reappropriation and whatnot, that I’m reading onto the show, is any of it actually intentional? Without a direct line to the mangaka, it’s hard to say, but it also only half matters. A funny side effect of the show’s focus Ririsa is that, despite everything I said earlier about Masamune not being a simple audience stand-in, and despite not being the one with a running inner monologue, she actually comes off as having more interiority than he does, especially given that the interiority he does have is not particularly flattering! Ririsa is certainly the more sympathetic of the two, and I would not be at all shocked if this series picks up a decent-sized periphery of female fans who relate to Ririsa in some loose sense, even as the show, going by various promotional materials, gears up to get racier. This wouldn’t even be the first time such a thing has happened in recent memory.

My Dress-Up Darling, the other hot 2020s property about a guy and his hot cosplayer gf, is the obvious point of comparison here. But what’s striking to me is how different the shows feel. Dress-Up Darling has a lot of delicate character work, but it’s also actually more salacious than 2.5D has been so far. (In terms of the respective anime at least. I’ve read neither manga.) The two halves of that show can, in fact, feel like they fit together uncomfortably, when it’s doing closeups of lovingly-animated boob sweat in one episode and melancholic-romantic train rides home in the next. I can only speak for myself, but when watching that anime I often wished it would settle down a little. It really sings in its more character-driven moments, so the ecchi elements can feel like a distraction except in the rare occasion that they gel just so with everything else that show is doing. Even so, Dress-Up Darling is pretty straightforwardly the better series, and not just because Gojou is a much more likable male lead. I would be very surprised to see 2.5D even attempt to access some of the more complex emotional currents that MDUD consistently manages to, even in its weaker episodes.

2.5D is a series of much more limited ambitions, in general. The goals here, as of now, are to gently push Masamune and Ririsa together and have them engage in Convoluted Horny Situations, goofy antics, or both—in alteration or combination—the entire long way. There’s still a character arc visible from the start here, but Masamune is a much simpler character than Gojou from MDUD, and because he is also an otaku, he and Ririsa are instantly much more on the same page than Gojou and Marin are. Masamune denying his attraction to Ririsa, and then justifying it by claiming she’s a “2.5D girl”, is a bit. Something to make You, The Horny Teenage Boy Watching This Show, think he’s a lucky bastard but laugh at the same time.

A less cut-and-dry way it’s less ambitious lay in its visuals. 2.5D’s first episode has essentially one standout moment—the “headshot” when Masamune sees Ririsa in costume for the first time—against a general temperature of looking pretty good. But it’s not quite as striking as Dress-Up Darling or even Roshidere, so that does count against it a little. Even then, it’s hard to care too much when even “not as good as those other two shows” still looks pretty good. It also doesn’t seem nearly as interested in the finer details of cosplay and costuming as MDUD is, so I could see that being a negative for folks who want an authentic depiction of the experience. Certainly, I found myself missing it.

Overall, though, while I don’t know if I’d call 2.5D a particularly great show, I’m forced to respect its craftsmanship, as an honest critic. I can appreciate that, on some level, it is doing everything in its power to get these two dating. I will also admit to just having a weak spot for shameless audacity, and because 2.5D’s audacity isn’t tying a romance narrative I like a lot more down (so far, anyway), I am more charitable toward it than I might be if it were trying to do more things at once. Is that unfair? Yes! But that’s just how these things go sometimes. I think this show is alright; long may the Otaku Hot Girls reign.


1: For one thing, it’s not unique to otaku, at least not in the loanword sense of that term. When I was in high school, people were just as willing to get this kind of defensive over liking comic books, D&D, fantasy literature, alternative music, even video games well past the point where those had gone firmly mainstream. I imagine the boys at the younger end of Gen Z are fighting this particular fight even still, as we speak.

2: Which is most fandoms. Because the patriarchy privileges men in any given hierarchical system, you see.


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 AnilistBlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.